‘Do you think he’ll be smaller than he looks on the TV? They say they usually look smaller. Do you watch it? My dad thinks he’s AMAZING, he’s always going on about him. My mum hates him, she goes to bed rather than watch him, but my dad is always coming out with Eamonn Teevan said this that and the other. God, he’d go mad if he thought I was going to meet him.’
Good Lord. Philip Flynn indicated left and wondered if Garda Siobhan O’Doheny came with a volume button. He didn’t need her to shut up entirely. Just tone it down a bit.
Following the signs for the quays, he glanced down at the speed and brought the car back down to the edge of the limit. They were travelling in an unmarked car and there was no need to draw undue attention to themselves. Not that he’d speed anyway, even if they were in a squad car. He hated that, seeing lads driving along the hard shoulder or with their mobile phones sewn to their ears just because there was no one out there to stop them. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair on other drivers who were doing the right thing. Philip Flynn was a great believer in fairness.
In the passenger seat, O’Doheny was still yammering away.
‘Unless we end up picking him up, of course. Imagine! That’d be huge, if he had something to do with it. But that’s hardly likely, is it? Remind me again why we’re going out to talk to him? Because he, like, knew her or something?’
It was a good question and Flynn used a particularly difficult junction as an excuse not to answer it. The fact of the matter was, the idea to call out to Ireland 24 and interview Eamonn Teevan had been Boyle’s, and Boyle’s alone. It had been in Flynn’s diary for days and had remained there when she was taken off active duty. Technically, he should have run it past Byrne now that he was the lead officer on the case. But Byrne hadn’t asked and Flynn had decided not to tell him.
The night she disappeared, Miriam Twohy had told her parents she was meeting up with old school friends. It now looked likely that she had been lying. Miriam Twohy hadn’t kept in touch with friends from school, and didn’t seem to have made any in the workplace either. Her time in UCD seemed to have been the busiest of her life, and Boyle had a bit of a bee in her bonnet about the people Miriam had known there. Flynn didn’t totally understand it, but he respected the sergeant and it wasn’t like they were falling down with people to interview anyway. In fact, since the whole apartment fiasco, they were back in the square behind one and at a loss where to go next. So if Boyle wanted him to take a day trip to visit Ireland’s newest and biggest television star, then he was willing to give it a go.
O’Doheny was still talking.
‘… used to listen to him on the radio all the time, but he’s way better on television. Like yer man Jeremy Kyle, only better. More intelligent. He’s very good-looking as well …’
Flynn sighed. Most of the lads in the station would give a day’s pay to be stuck in a traffic jam with O’Doheny, whom he’d once heard described as a blonde Angelina Jolie with a bit more meat on her bones. But she wasn’t his type and her chatter was, not to put too fine a point on it, starting to drive him insane. At last, the turn off. She’d have to stop talking now.
‘It doesn’t look like a television station, does it? I was expecting something way bigger. There’s no cameras or anything. Didn’t you think there’d be cameras?’
Or possibly not. O’Doheny was still babbling as they drove into an industrial estate in the city’s docklands. They followed a sign marked Ireland 24, waved on by a bored-looking security man in his dusty booth to a sign saying ‘Visitor Parking’. She was still talking as Flynn lined the car up neatly between two white lines and displayed his visitor’s badge prominently on the windscreen. He had to admit, though, she had a point. The place could have been any old office really. The only thing that distinguished it was a van parked outside the main reception door, which had a dish on top that looked like a bigger version of ones you’d stick on your house at home. But the lad standing outside it, with the fag stuck between his thumb and forefinger, didn’t look glamorous at all.
O’Doheny finally fell silent as they walked through the double doors that led to the reception area. And almost immediately, the atmosphere changed. The place felt like an upmarket lawyers’ office, or a doctor’s waiting area. A consultant, not a GP. The space was large and airy, a couple of grey couches arranged around a water fountain at one end and a large leather reception desk at the other. Photographs lined the walls, most of them featuring Eamonn Teevan smiling broadly beside politicians, artists and TV stars. Flynn could sense O’Doheny’s eagerness to walk over and take a closer look, but she restrained herself, remaining silent and straight-backed as they walked towards the desk, which was presided over by a glamorous brunette who looked like she should be on television herself.
The gatekeeper’s rings jangled as she tapped on her computer keyboard, making a big show of not noticing them until they were right beside her. Then she leafed through a large appointments book while murmuring darkly about ‘squeezing them in’. Squeeze, me arse. Flynn knew he could flash his card at any moment and insist on an immediate meeting. But just as he was about to yield to temptation, she sighed and pressed a button under her desk. A door to the left slid open.
‘Go on through,’ she ordered, in an accent that owed more to LA than Dublin.
‘Mary will meet you on the other side.’
‘This is more like it.’
Flynn ignored O’Doheny’s whisper but admitted to himself that, again, she had a point. The far side of the doors led them to yet another world, this time far closer to the atmosphere he’d been expecting. A large overhead sign proclaimed they were in the ‘newsroom’, but he’d have guessed that anyway given the noise blaring from five competing television screens, the number of people, all of whom seemed to be talking at full volume and the frantic clatter of fingers on computer keyboards.
A small, bleached-blonde woman approached them and smiled vaguely at Flynn.
‘You wanted a word with Eamonn?’
Within seconds, they were being ushered to a glass cubicle at the other end of the room. The young woman, Mary, Flynn assumed, closed the door and nodded at the man sitting behind a brown laminate desk which was overflowing with newspapers, coffee cups, two mobile phones, several chargers and any number of pens.
Eamonn Teevan was smaller than he looked on TV. And harder, somehow. He’d been on the phone when they arrived and looked like he was trying very hard not to argue with someone, the words ‘with respect’ forming most of his end of the conversation. He gestured to them to sit down and Mary brushed a pile of newspapers from the nearest chairs onto the floor.
But as the phone conversation drew to a close, Flynn could see the man on the other side of the desk swallow his irritation. Within seconds, he had morphed into Eamonn Teevan the TV star, drawing his hands through his short, perfectly cut hair and unleashing a full hundred-watt smile.
‘Detectives! Good to meet you both! How may I help you?’
Fair play to O’Doheny, she didn’t flinch, didn’t give any indication that she was in the presence of anyone other than the usual muppets they got to interview. If anything, it was Flynn himself who was slightly thrown by the dramatic change in tone and it took him a moment to get his thoughts together and explain the reason for their visit.
Teevan linked his hands behind his head, flopped back in his chair and balanced his feet on the edge of the desk in one smooth movement. Flynn suppressed the urge to give him a swift shove in the solar plexus and instead rearranged his features into as stern a look as possible before tuning into Teevan’s fluid, accentless drawl.
‘Look, I remember the name, but that’s all. Black hair, hadn’t she? I think she dated a guy I knew, O’Doherty. Well, when I say I knew him, we were all in the same drama society. It’s not like we hung out all the time. I don’t know if I ever had a conversation with her. I mean, I saw the news story when she died, obviously, but it took me a while to make the connection.’
‘You didn’t go to the funeral?’
O’Doheny’s cool stare was a match for Teevan’s and the presenter stared at her in surprise.
‘Christ, no!’
‘Can I ask why not?’
O’Doheny began to take neat notes in the notebook she’d balanced on her knee.
Teevan raised his eyebrows.
‘I just didn’t know her well enough, that’s the truth of it! And I figured, well the last thing her family would have wanted was … Well, you know yourself.’
He glanced at Flynn in a manner clearly designed to be matey, or to convey the awkwardness of being a celebrity at an Irish funeral Mass. Flynn cleared his throat.
‘So, what can you remember about her? Anything at all would be helpful.’
Teevan removed his feet from the table, bringing them back down onto the floor with a bang. Flynn jumped, but didn’t say anything. The journalist’s voice remained smooth, but there was a hard edge to it this time and he punctuated his observations with frequent glances at his watch.
‘Sweet feck all, if you excuse the French. I probably saw her a few times in the student bar. She was dating O’Doherty who was a bit of a knob, as far as I can remember, and I’m not even sure if we ever had a conversation. Pretty young one, as far as I can remember. But that’s about the size of it. And now, unless you have anything else …?’
He raised his eyebrows.
Flynn hated being dismissed, but couldn’t think of anything else to say. Boyle was so sure that the victim’s college life was central to her murder. He missed her and wished she were there. He fell back on an old reliable.
‘If there’s anything you remember, anything at all …’
He reached into his pocket and put his card down on the table, then picked it up again and scribbled his mobile number on the back.
‘Sure.’
Teevan threw it on the desk without looking at it.
‘I’ll get Mary to show you out, yeah?’
Meeting over, he stood up and unleashed the full TV-star grin again.
‘Great to meet you, anyway!’ He shook Flynn’s hand and then grasped O’Doheny’s, holding it for a full seven seconds, staring into her eyes before letting go. She held his gaze coolly.
Flynn felt himself relax for the first time that day. The visit had been feck all use to them. But she wasn’t a bad cop, O’Doheny. Not bad at all.