You'll Get Yours, page 10
“That we’re not at liberty to disclose,” D’Arcy said.
DC Lyons had flipped open his PNB also. His pen hovered over it.
“I’m sure you’re aware, sir, in cases like this—”
“Aye,” Minogue scowled. “The partner’s always suspect number one. I tell you, but, there’s no way...no way in hell...” he now said weakly, wiping the tears from his cheeks. “I love my Regina. My lovely, lovely Regina. She was a very kind and loving person. A bit private, aye, that I’ll admit. She kept herself to herself, right enough. Never wanted to socialize. No trips to the pub or what have you. Said all she needed was one person in her life, and she’d found him. Me, I’m on about.” They nodded. “It was always me and her lounging around here with a lager for me and a gin for her. She loved her drink, but then again, so do I. Don’t we all?”
Lyons grinned. D’Arcy sat stiffly.
“I had to drag her out to my art openings, and she was always reluctant to mingle. I couldn’t understand why. Sure, everyone who met her loved her. Not that she met many people.”
Lyons looked skeptical. “Everyone?”
Minogue sucked in through his teeth. “I admit, she had a bit of a temper. It flared up on occasion. She said to me many times no matter how she tried to change who she was, she couldn’t. At times she was an opinionated, gobby mare. When the rage welled in her, it seemed to hell with keeping her head down then.” Minogue shifted in his seat, seeming to regret what he’d just said. “Christ almighty, what am I on about? Speaking ill of the dead like that, my beloved Regina. Out of my mind, I must be...”
D’Arcy was delighted they were finally learning who this Regina Steps actually was. Her PNB was filling up.
“Could you tell us where you were last night?” she asked.
“Me?” Kyle asked, pointing at himself. “I was here, alone. All night.”
D’Arcy grimaced. “Not the best, as far as alibis are concerned.”
“I was working on my sculpture. And, oh, dear Lord...” he bent forward, elbows on his knees, head cradled in his hands, then wailed, “It’s a sculpture of her! Of my Regina!”
He lunged for another cigarette and lit up. They were sitting in a cloud of smoke. Although Minogue was exposing D’Arcy to secondhand smoke and she was finding it difficult to breathe, she had ditched the coughs and she felt for the man. If indeed he was not just putting on a show. Maybe he had dabbled in amateur dramatics as well as art.
“I’m afraid I must ask,” she said gently, “can anyone vouch for your whereabouts between the hours of nine two nights ago and three the following morning?”
“Are you saying...is that when she was...?”
“Aye,” Lyons confirmed.
Minogue wailed in despair anew.
“No, I live alone.” His eyes were red, his hands were shaking. “Can we not put this off until later? My head’s banging. I can’t think straight. I...I...”
They shrank back as he stood up and paced the few spots of the floor that were uncluttered, his hands balled into fists, his jaw tight.
“I’m afraid not, sir,” D’Arcy said. “The first 72 hours of a homicide investigation are the most important. We’ve to gather as much information as quickly as we can. Would a cup of tea help? My colleague Lyons will make you one if...” She looked around, suddenly unsure. “...if you’ve indeed got a kitchen in the back there?”
“Tea?” Minogue shouted, spittle shooting out of his lips. “I don’t need flimmin tea! I need a whiskey!”
They let him stew for a few moments, then Lyons said, his voice stern, “Why don’t you sit down, sir? You’ll feel more comfortable.”
Minogue collapsed back into the armchair, a man defeated. He ran his hands through his hair and looked at them through red-rimmed eyes.
“We need to know, sir,” Lyons continued. “When was the last time you saw Regina?”
“You said you’d just been speaking to her yesterday,” D’Arcy said. “But as you must realize, yesterday she was already...gone.”
Minogue waved the suspicion away as if it was of no importance. “Och, sure, I’ve just got the dates wrong,” he said with a touch of anger. “Time means nothing to me. Not when I’m in the middle of a project. All the days blend together. I’m living in my mind, not in the world, if you know what I mean.”
They didn’t, not quite.
“So...can you tell us exactly when you last saw her?”
Minogue thought, his eyes darting from one of them to the other. “It must have been the day before yesterday, then. The day of her... her...” He gave a high-pitched keen that seemed incongruous to his mass. “Is it true what I’ve heard about the woman on the wall, then? Was my Regina found...found...naked and straddling one of them cannons?”
“It’s an ongoing investi—”
He cut D’Arcy off. “Have you no heart?” he wailed.
D’Arcy made a quick executive decision.
“Not quite naked,” she admitted with a gentleness rare for her. She could turn it on at moments like this; she’d been trained well.
“He’d left her knickers on,” Lyons added to D’Arcy’s annoyance.
“Perhaps that’s a comfort to you,” she said soothingly. “Only a small one, I’d imagine, but there you have it.”
“The ignominy of it all!” Kyle Minogue keened a bit and crossed himself. “The poor soul. What did she do to deserve that? She was a God-fearing member of His flock. Some nutter high on drugs, was it, hi? Some effin scrote hell-bent on attacking a good Christian woman?”
“That remains to be seen,” D'Arcy said, a bit taken aback at the reference to religion.
Lyons nudged her, then got up and was peering under the dust wraps. D’Arcy suspected he was looking for art of a violent or sexual nature mixed with religious imagery. A lot of art seemed like that.
“Cards on the table here now,” Minogue suddenly decided, his shoulders slumped. “I may as well spit it all out. To help with your investigation. We’d had a row, you see. The last time I saw her. The day before yesterday. Round here. Sure,” he jerked his thumb at the wall, “that lot next door would be sure to fill you in, must have heard it all, so I may as well beat them to the punch.”
Their ears perked.
“Och, I know what you’re thinking,” Minogue sighed. “A row leads to anger leads to murder. But, no, you’re on the wrong track there.”
“Tell us more about this row, Mr. Minogue,” Lyons prompted.
Minogue chewed on his lower lips, thinking. Then he finally said, “Och, Regina wasn’t herself, so she wasn’t. Hadn’t been for weeks, truth be told. Something to do with that effin Top-Yer-Trolley. Her colleagues giving her grief over something. I don’t know what it was, but it must have been something big. They wouldn’t lay off her. Abuse of all sorts, they were flinging at her. She dreaded going in for her shift every morning. On and on she went about it, but how could I help her if I didn’t know what she’d done? The row was about that. After weeks of it, I was sick of it. We’d both had a few drinks, I have to admit. She’d been gulping down the gin. Legless, so she was by the end of the night. I demanded to know what she’d done. She just said she shouldn’t have done it, but couldn’t help it. Her temper, you see. It had something to do with what she’d done in a fit of anger. She was sobbing, said she’d thrown it all away, all the careful plans she’d made, she’d put herself at risk of being exposed. Exposed for what? The worst I could think of...pardon...was...was she worked undercover for you lot. An informer for the effin peelers.” D’Arcy put on a show of being unaffected, but it irked her. Minogue looked apologetically at them. “Sorry, but sure you know yourself, the worst thing anyone could be accused of is working for the PSNI. She was raging at me that I’d think something like that. Almost took a knife to that piece of mine over there.” He nodded at a painting on the wall. “I had to wrestle the knife out of her hand. She still wouldn’t tell me, but. She collapsed there on the sofa where you are sitting and the tears were streaming down her face. Said she couldn’t understand why I wanted to be with her. She wasn’t worthy. She wasn’t worthy of anyone’s love. I tried to get it out of her, but she was having none of it. She shut down totally. Just stopped speaking. And she just turned on her heels and legged it. And that’s the last I saw of her. Didn’t even say cheerio. Just walked out without a look at me.”
Minogue lit another cigarette.
He said slowly, “And I mind now. I kept ringing her mobile yesterday, but there was never any answer. You’ll check my phone records, so you’ll know I’m telling you the God’s honest truth.”
D’Arcy cleared her throat. “We have evidence Regina might have gone to the cinema the night before last. Do you know anything about that?”
“The pictures?” Minogue seemed shocked. “I wouldn’t have thought that was her thing. Never wanting to be out in public, like.”
“Was there anything in particular she perhaps mentioned she was interested in seeing?”
“Not to me in any event. But then she knows I don’t like going to the pictures, the cinema. I don’t even have a telly. I’m against all of that Hollywood shite. I have a different way of seeing the world, and it doesn’t involve the worlds of Marvel or Leonardo DiCaprio. None of that commercial shite.”
“So we see,” Lyons said, eyeing his art, shite of a different type.
“If we could go back,” D’Arcy said. “How long exactly had you been together?”
“Six months or so. We met...at the Top-Yer-Trolley. I couldn’t find the exact shade of paint I needed, and I grabbed her as she was coming out of the stockroom. On her dinner break, so she was. But she went into the back and got me the paint I wanted. And I asked if I could go with her on her break. There was a spark there from the beginning, you see. So we went across the street to the Kebabalicious, and it went on from there. She kept refusing to take my number, but finally she did. And the rest is history. Until now...”
“Did Regina have any enemies that you know of?” D’Arcy asked.
“Only that lot at the Top-Yer-Trolley. Sure, like I said, she wasn’t one for meeting people to make enemies of them. Kept her head down.”
“Had she mentioned threatening emails to you?”
Minogue looked up. “What are you on about?”
“Please, just answer the question, sir.”
“I don’t know what you’re on about.”
Lyons shifted on the sofa. “An odd question, I agree, but we need to know, did Regina speak with a Derry accent?”
Minogue scoffed. “What are you on about, man? Of course she did. What a question to ask! Why are you asking?”
“Do you know where in Derry she was from?” Lyons asked. “Who her family was? Her family must be notified.”
Kyle shook his head.
“She never said. And when I tried to bring it up, she shut me down. I gather they’d fallen out over something.” He shrugged, then a thought seemed to come to him. “Now that you mention it, but...there was something that made me think that maybe she was hiding from her family.”
They bent toward him.
“She wouldn’t let me post any photos of us on Facebook. At my openings, every photo I took of her, she was always hiding her face, or turning it the wrong way. And we had a grand time at Buncrana two months ago. She won fifty quid at the arcade and we splurged on a big pub lunch. Some lovely photos I took, but she flat-out refused. Didn’t want her face out there, she said. Made me swear I’d never post a photo of her anywhere online. And then, when we had that row and I thought she might be one of you undercover, I brought that up. She just laughed at me.”
“If it’s any consolation, sir,” D’Arcy said. “I can categorically state she was not working undercover for us.”
Relief swept over Minogue’s face.
“That’s a small mercy.”
“One more thing—”
D’Arcy looked down at her phone. McLaughlin was calling her.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve to answer this. It’s the gaffer.” To McLaughlin, she said, “Are you right, sir? Yes. Yes. Right away, sir.”
Lyons and Minogue were taken aback as she snapped shut her PNB, ran her hand down her trousers and stood up.
“That’ll be it for now, sir. Thank you so much for your assistance.”
Lyons scrabbled to stand up also, no doubt wondering what had happened at the station for McLaughlin to call them in on such short notice.
Minogue followed them to the door.
“I suppose I shouldn’t leave town as you perform your investigation?”
“That would be advisable, sir,” D’Arcy said. “And I’m sorry to say, we’ll need DNA from you. For purposes of elimination, you understand. Could you come down to the station today or tomorrow?”
Minogue scowled.
“If I must.”
The moment the door closed behind them, Lyons asked, “What did the boss want? Och, before that, but...Poncy D’Arcy?”
D’Arcy bowed her head in shame as they headed to Lyons’ Porsche, shining brightly in this neighborhood.
“As if! Och, I’m pure scundered, so I am. I had to think quick on my feet, but. Best I could come up with. I was just keeping him on our side, Lyons. Keeping them on our side, you should learn how to do it.”
CHAPTER 13
THE PERIMETER WALL of the station was the first line of defense, and right now it was protecting the hardworking officers of the Twilight Road branch of the PSNI from the press.
A rabble of journalists had amassed outside the station with camp chairs, some wrapped in blankets and even sleeping bags, styrofoam containers of sustenance, flasks of tea and coffee and maybe something stronger. There were vans from BBC Radio Foyle, U105 FM, Downtown Radio, Q Radio, Derry Journal, Belfast Telegraph, the News Letter, Sunday Life and the Irish Times, ITV, Channel 4, RTE and Sky News.
Lyons’ Porsche inched through the crowd. The hordes descended on all four sides of the car. D’Arcy shifted uncomfortably as if she were slightly mortified to be seen in the car of a subordinate in front of the press.
The security guard waved the Porsche through, and as Lyons and D’Arcy waited for the barrier gate to rise so he could drive through, eager, earnest faces popped up from all angles, mouthing things at them, mini recorders waving, microphones pressing against the windows of the car.
Lyons sucked air in between his teeth as he drove past them.
“God help them if they’ve done any harm to my auto,” he muttered. “There’ll be another homicide to investigate.”
“Those mics have foam bits around them, Lyons,” D’Arcy said. “I’m sure your baby’s fine. Good thing you didn’t have the top down, but. They might’ve climbed in and demanded an interview.”
He glanced at her and scowled.
“How Nix revels in all that, I haven’t a clue,” D’Arcy said, motioning to the rabble beyond the gates. She shuddered.
“Och, sure, your man’s no longer a copper, so he’s not. More head of advertising for the force nowadays. Sure, prancing about before the telly cameras isn’t what policing’s about. Who would want to do a job like that, hi?”
Remembering who was sitting in his passenger seat, Miss Fast Track herself, he said quietly to himself, “Oh.”
LANYARDS SWINGING, Lyons and D’Arcy made their way to McLaughlin’s office.
He looked up from a pile of forms and files and smiled. Lyons was surprised to see no evidence of food.
“Grand!” McLaughlin said, standing up and ushering them out of his office. “Off to DC Hawkins. The girl’s struck gold again. Debrief on the boyfriend interview?”
As they wound their way through the manned desks, Lyons and D’Arcy filled their superior in on what they’d learned from Kyle Minogue.
“What do you think?” McLaughlin wanted to know. “Could he be our man?”
“I want him to be,” Lyons admitted. “Artist and all that. But I don’t know.”
“I’m undecided as well,” D’Arcy said. “His grief seemed genuine.”
Their boss grunted, and they were at DC Hawkins’ desk. They gathered around her computer screens.
Hawkins turned around and greeted them. She was wearing a low-cut frock with daffodils on it, Lyons noted.
“Show D’Arcy and Lyons that footage from the cinema, Fern,” McLaughlin instructed.
“A pleasure.” Hawkins jabbed a few keys, and the lobby of the Omniplex cinema appeared on her center screen. The feed was crisp and clear, the colors bright. There was no jerky movement from the moviegoers milling around, lounging in the few comfortable seating areas, queuing at the concession stand, or making their way to the cinema they’d bought tickets for. And the time stamp was white. The carpet was a deep maroon, the walls soft beige and adorned with framed posters of movies past.
“Those lads from Strand Road collected this from the cinema’s security system last night,” Hawkins explained. “I’ve spent the day going through it. The constables spoke to the concession stand attendant who was working that night, and, after they showed her the vic’s photo, she revealed there had been an altercation between Regina and three, er, youths on the night she died.”
Lyons inhaled sharply.
“So...do we think...?”
“Let’s watch the footage first, Lyons,” D’Arcy suggested.
Hawkins continued, “The concessionist knew about what time the altercation happened, so it was easy for me to find. Thankfully, there’s one camera that was facing the queue at the concession stand. The cameras are in the ceiling, but if we zoom in...”
Lyons leaned in, his face almost touching Hawkins’. His quiff flopped over his forehead. D’Arcy stood stiffly at his side.
Hawkins fast-forwarded a bit, then slowed down. She zoomed in on the people standing in the long queue.
“There,” she said, pointing. “There’s our Regina Steps.”
They all bent forward. They’d seen Regina’s corpse and photo, even an unfinished sculpture, but this was the first glimpse of their victim as she’d been in real life.
