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you?” Thereby establishing an alibi about where he was when the vehicle was let through the gate.
    “Later, he’d come back, erase it, and put in a regular ‘You’ve reached security headquarters at Trinity Co l lege. Please leave a message’... and so forth.
    “As well, there’s this.” Moving toward another m a chine, McKeon punched two other buttons. “It’s the voice recorder in the Old Library. It’s switched on whenever sensors detect movement in the gift shop and book Treasury rooms after hours. When I walked in, it was the fi?rst thing I noticed. This light?” His fi?nger swung to a red light the size of a 50P coin. “It was blinking.”
    “You don’t know what you’re doing,” said the same voice. Sloane’s voice. “If you take away what’s in this room, the police will hound you into your graves.”
    “Use your hand,” said a deep, gravelly, and obv i ously scrambled voice. “Kill the alarms and open it up.”
    There was a pause and then “Do it!”
    McKeon stopped the tape. “Scramblers like that are used on the teley for interviews with informants on news shows. You know, for anonymity.”
    McGarr nodded as McKeon began to fast-forward the tape.
    “I thought you said you were only going to take—”
    Again, McKeon stopped the tape. “There he’s so frightened he’s forgot they’re being taped.”
    “Open your fi?st!” the curious voice continued. “Open your bloody fi?st or I’ll stomp it to bits.”
    “You said you—”
    “I never said a thing.”
    “And me,” another scrambled but much higher voice put in, “I lied.”
    There followed noises of something or somebody falling, a groan, grunts, scraping.
    Then, a scrambled: “Give me a hand with him. Right enough—up he goes.”
    “No!” Sloane wailed.
    They heard a clump, then another and another, then: “Blood enough for you?” Even through the scra m bling, a kind of evil joy could be heard. “Enough to be taken seriously. Pity is—there’s not enough. A man like that deserves all this and more.”
    “Too-da-loo.”
    “Ta.”
    What they then heard, McGarr assumed, was a rus h ing of air, as the atmosphere within the case was eva c uated. And footsteps as the two left with their booty—the books of Kells, Armagh, and Durrow.
    “Any word on the guard, Tom Healey?”
    “Still unconscious.”
    “We’d best speak to Sloane’s family directly.”
    CHAPTER
    3
     
    RAYMOND SLOANE HAD LIVED IN A SECTION OF THE Liberties that had been gentrifi?ed, the former comme r cial buildings rehabbed into lofts.
    Others had been torn down with “Georgian-inspired condominiums,” McGarr had read, erected in their stead. Randomly, it seemed, unpaned arched windows studded the facades, and every doorway carried an e x aggerated fanlight.
    The Sloane residence was far different and the ge n uine article altogether, McGarr could see as the car rounded a narrow corner in the warren of ancient laneways that marked the area.
    It was a low two-storied affair with a sharply gabled slate roof and narrow windows. The front door opened directly on the footpath, where a uniformed Guard was standing, keeping the Fourth Estate at bay.
    “Would you look at this cock-up.”
    A clutch of television vans had gathered before a dusty attached row house.
    “All because of Sheard, who is a piece of work. He had to know how quickly the press would suss out who got whacked, once he said it was murder. There were only four guards’ families to ring up.
    “But him—he didn’t give a shit, not being the one having to deal with it.”
    McGarr raised a fi?nger to the windscreen. “Go down the block to the second alley. We’ll go in the back.” As a child, he had roamed the area with his mates; the buildings may have changed, but the ancient streets and laneways had not.
    But a large BMW with tinted windows blocked the laneway, and they had to walk.
    “How ya keeping on?” It was a question McKeon had been asking McGarr now and then since