My phone leaped into hysterical life almost the instant we reached the incident room. O’Kelly, telling me to get into his office; MacSharry hadn’t wasted much time. I gave him the migraine story. The one joy of migraines is that they make a perfect excuse: they’re disabling, they’re not your fault, they can last as long as you need them to and nobody can prove you don’t have one. At least I really did look sick. O’Kelly made a few derisive comments about headaches being “womany shite,” but I regained a little of his respect by bravely insisting on staying in work.
I went back to the incident room. Sam was just getting in from somewhere, soaked through, his tweed overcoat smelling faintly of wet dog. “How’d it go?” he asked. His tone was casual, but his eyes slid to me, over Cassie’s shoulder, and then quickly away again: the grapevine had already been doing its thing.
“Fine. Migraine,” Cassie said, tilting her head at me. By this stage I was starting to feel as if I really did have a migraine. I blinked, trying to focus.
“The old migraine’s a terrible man,” Sam said. “My mammy gets them. Sometimes she has to lie in a dark room for days, with ice on her head. Are you all right to be working?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “What have you been up to?”
Sam glanced at Cassie. “He’s OK,” she said. “That trial would give anyone a headache. Where’ve you been?”
He peeled off his dripping coat, gave it a doubtful look and discarded it on a chair. “I went and had little chats with the Big Four.”
“O’Kelly’s going to love that,” I said. I sat down and pressed my temples between finger and thumb. “I should warn you, he’s not in the best of moods as it is.”
“No, it’s grand. I told them the protesters had been giving a few of the motorway brigade some hassle—I didn’t get specific, but I’ve a feeling they may think I meant vandalism—and I was just checking that they were all right.” Sam grinned, and I realized he was bursting with excitement about his day and was keeping it contained only because he knew about mine. “They all got fierce jumpy about how I knew they were involved with Knocknaree, but I acted like it was no big deal—had a little chat, made sure none of them had been targeted by the protesters, told them to mind themselves and left. Not one of them even thanked me, do you believe that? Right bunch of charmers, this lot.”
“So?” I inquired. “I think we all assumed that much.” I didn’t mean to be snotty, not really, but every time I closed my eyes I saw Philomena Kavanagh’s body, and every time I opened them I saw the crime scene shots of Katy all over the whiteboard behind Sam’s head, and I really wasn’t in the mood for him and his results and his tact.
“So,” Sam said, unfazed, “Ken McClintock—the boy behind Dynamo—was in Singapore all through April; that’s where all the cool property developers are hanging out this year, don’t you know. That’s one down: he wasn’t making any anonymous calls from Dublin phones. And remember what Devlin said about your man’s voice?”
“Nothing particularly useful, as I recall,” I said.
“Not very deep,” said Cassie, “country accent, but nothing distinctive. Probably middle-aged.” She was reared back in her chair, knees crossed, arms folded negligently behind her; in her elegant court getup she looked almost deliberately incongruous in the incident room, like something out of some clever avant-garde fashion shoot.
“Spot on. Now Conor Roche from Global, he’s a Corkman, accent you could cut with a knife—Devlin would have spotted it straight off. And his partner, Jeff Barnes, he’s English, and he’s got a voice like a bear besides. That leaves us with”—Sam circled the name on the whiteboard, with a deft, happy flourish—“Terence Andrews of Futura, fifty-three, from Westmeath, squeaky little tenor voice on him. And guess where he lives?”
“Town,” Cassie said, starting to smile.
“Penthouse apartment on the quays. He drinks in the Gresham—I told him to mind himself walking back, you never know with these left-wing types—and all three pay phones are directly on his route home. I’ve got my boy, lads.”