To cod his new missus, was Kilmartin’s theory. Not so. Aine Finnucane, not Aine Hoey, had brought Hoey to the inner-city school where she taught remedial. A lot of hard cases, Hoey had reported: broken homes, some already into drugs, families in and out of jail. So Hoey had prepped himself with sleight-of-hand tricks to get the kids’ interest. He’d ended up more or less hypnotizing them, Hoey reported, but wasn’t sure if he’d gotten through to them about anything else. That didn’t seem to matter to Hoey. He kept returning on a regular basis to “put on shows” at other inner-city schools. Aine, a woman Minogue liked a great deal indeed because of how she laughed as much as what she had done teaching and building in Africa, had told Minogue that a lot of the kids in her school now called Hoey the Magic Cop.

Malone dropped some coins on the counter.

“All right,” he said to Hoey “Show us the married man trick. You know, where you make the money disappear?”

Airport Police and Fire Officer Derek Mitchell, twenty, and six weeks into his new job, checked his walkie-talkie and headed out toward Dublin Airport’s long-term car park. The breezes which had played around him by the doors to the freight depot were gusts out here.

He waved at the Guards sitting in the squad car by the ramp. One of them managed a nod. “Don’t strain yourself,” Mitchell murmured. The news that the Guards were going to make a new Garda station at the airport was only a rumor anyway. This squad car sitting by the ramp up to the terminal was for show now. That mob of fans had been turfed out and four of them had been arrested. Even Fogarty hadn’t seen anything like it. It was the van with the tinted windows showing up that’d torn the arse out of the situation. No wonder those Saudi Arabians would be thinking we were all bloody barbarians. Well, they should talk: the women in masks, veils, or whatever, hiding their faces. And for what? Like furniture covered up. Chattels, that was the word.