The Going Rate Read Free Page A

did not tell her that it had been only a fortnight ago that he had spotted Rachel Tynan and her husband on Dunlaoghaire Pier. She had been pale and thin, and she moved haltingly along arm-in-arm beside him. Minogue had not wanted them to see him, and a gap in the sea wall let him escape. His excuses – it was dusk and they wouldn’t have spotted him, they needed no interruptions – had crumbled long before he had gotten home, but the shame of his evasion stayed with him.
    Wednesday was a long time coming, but by nine o’ clock that morning, Minogue was backing out of the garage in his new Peugeot, listening for squeaks from the chassis as it rolled down to the gate. He was trying not to be impatient, but he was losing. The collar on his new shirt chafed. He just couldn’t find a decent driving position in his new car, and he was bewildered as to how he had missed this on the test drive. And now, Kilmartin, the very one who had guilted him into taking him along to the funeral, was late.
    At least he had time for a re-read of the file he had been hurriedly handed yesterday afternoon.
    Tadeusz Klos, a twenty-three-year-old Polish national, had arrived in Ireland five days before the assault that ended in his death. Klos had been beaten and stomped into a coma a stone’s throw from the Custom House, in the centre of the city. The considerable amount of blood that he had left on the footpath behind him was quickly determined by the State Pathologist to have been cranial in origin. The report did not mention that it would have been thickly mixed with that night’s rain into something that Minogue knew would be as greasy as it would be acidic from the roadway to where it had flowed. Klos was resuscitated twice in the ambulance. He died about a mile short of the hospital entrance.
    The briefing file contained a copy of a passport photo and four photos taken in the hospital. Three of the four haunted Minogue much of the evening and early morning. It took a lot to crush a man’s skull with kicks.
    The matter was being handled by a crew from Fitzgibbon Street Garda station, and they were going full tilt at it. Already there were copies of emails in Polish, complete with literal, often clumsy, translations. The inventory of effects from Klos’ room at the hostel offered little. His wallet was missing, but no one had tried to use his bankcard since the assault.
    There were no arrests as of last night. Nor were there suspects.
    Mr. Klos had a mother, but no siblings. His parents had separated when he was a child. His father had minor convictions from a decade back. He had not had a close relationship with his son, or his former wife. There was a matter of alcohol abuse in the father’s history.
    Klos had what looked like a post-secondary certificate of some kind to do with tourism. He smoked roll-your-owns. There were no indications of drugs on his person or in his belongings. In his pockets were clippings from a Polish newspaper published in Dublin. Along with those items were scribbled notes including phone numbers of restaurants and hotels and an immigrant aid office on Church Street, and several Dublin City bus tickets. There were remnants of potato chips in his pockets, foil from bars of chocolate, matches. An optimist apparently, Mr. Klos also carried three condoms.
    An iPod type of thing was found at the scene, in several pieces. A note from the Technical Bureau declared that its flash memory could not be read, as it had been trodden on. Minogue surmised that this deed would have been close to the moments when Klos’ white earphone wire had been pulled up through his jacket and lodged in his zipper, peeling the plastic back to the bare wire.
    The file made no mention of friends and associates, Polish or otherwise, in Dublin. Klos’ mobile phone, an unlocked Nokia he’d brought with him from Poland, with an Irish SIM card, had not been found. There was one page to the mobile phone