Wonderland: An Inspector Matt Minogue Mystery (The Matt Minogue Series Book 7)

by John Brady

  Look to the girls, nurses. The boys will turn up in their own good time.

  Eileen stopped and looked up and down the path. There was only herself and the birds. The look on the little lad’s face came back to her again, his bafflement, the unknowing that he couldn’t help himself passing on to someone else. God Almighty, it wasn’t her place to be telling girls how to conduct themselves, like parish priests beating the bushes years ago.

  She stepped off the path and she laid her bags under a shrub.

  “Hello. Hello in there?”

  The rustling she half-expected didn’t happen. More birds she heard, the river, and still the soft hum of the city. She pulled a branch aside.

  “Is anyone there?”

  There were briars at her ankle. Faded, half-crushed cans lay in the undergrowth. Nothing much romantic about this place, was there.

  Well, they were gone. At least no one was around to see her making an iijit of herself.

  Someone had dumped bags of rubbish or grass cuttings near the foot of a fir tree. Tinkers, she thought—Travellers, she should say—that was it. So that was how they valued what was given to them. They’d be given a bag of clothes when they’d come begging, then they’d sort out what they wanted and pitch everything else. By God, it was hard to be charitable to people who did that sort of thing.

  Sunlight flared in small patches. Her eyes were giving out on her here in the gloom. She rubbed at them and looked again. These bags were still bundled up, maybe even unopened. Her eyes ran along the bag half hidden by the bottom of the tree.

  Something didn’t fit. There was a shape to this bag, or bundle.

  The stillness in here felt like a weight on her now. She heard herself swallow.

  Something moved in the bushes. Eileen started, felt the jolt work its way down from her scalp. There was a blond or red tint between some leaves and it moved. She took a step back and it moved again. She saw the face then, if that’s what it was, the snout more like it, and the eyes watching her.

  It was a dog, but not really a dog. There was interest, but then indifference, in those amber eyes. Did a fox really have such a pointed nose? Its eyes flickered over to some place near. Then it was gone. She didn’t even see the tail, the brush.

  Her legs had gone rubbery. Eileen felt the pounding, and she put her hand under her arm. She tried to ignore the pops of light in front of her. Her mouth had gone dry.

  She stared at the bundle again. If only she had something, a stick or a cane.

  She didn’t want to go over. She’d have to go over.

  “Hello?”

  It was a head of hair she’d been looking at. People didn’t, shouldn’t, lie like that. She took three steps and stopped. Those were fingers. At least the girl was dressed. She still couldn’t see a face.

  Her next step broke a twig.

  There were spots moving along the fingers.

  “Oh,” she heard herself say. Now she couldn’t move. She wondered if she’d fall. The chatter in her head had stopped. The river had a tinkling sound. She stared at the ants on the fingers, the jeans, the hair tossed over the head.

  Eileen was talking to herself now.

  “I know what to do,” she said. “I’m a nurse, so I am, and I can do this. I can go over and I can look and I can walk back to the path too.”

  She tiptoed to the dead girl, thinking all the while of her own heart, of Sister Brophy, of the two boys, of the bus driver and the city and the fine summer’s day, of buying one of those mobile phones, of God, of the Guards, and many other things.

  Mutiny

  Things had started to fall apart for Minogue early in the week. He’d sensed it, like a listing or a yaw, but he couldn’t put his finger on one thing. There’d been that look from Kathleen when he’d snorted about house prices or something. It was the way things went quiet when he came into the Fraud office each morning too. Everyone polite, but a brittleness. He had a feeling early on that this descent would pick up speed.

  Today wasn’t a great start, even at home. He was thick-headed from staying late at a session in the Garda Club last night. He was more annoyed than embarrassed that he hadn’t left before the rounds of drinks started coming in fast. It had turned into pretty well industrial drinking by closing time.

  A ten-minute shower hadn’t helped much. He plugged in the kettle and brooded. There were more brochures for new apartments under yesterday’s paper. These ones were in Bray: two bedrooms, generous balcony, unparalleled view of the sea. They had started calling these new apartment places by names. Bountiful. Make the change to Bountiful. Bray, he wondered, sourly, a town he’d never liked. An apartment that’d cost only sixteen times what they had paid for their house. Bray: full of tinkers, years back, bottle fights at closing time. Hadn’t there been tons of banks robbed there?

  He stuffed the brochures into the bin too hard, slicing open the plastic bag. He did nothing about that but stared at the kettle instead. Kathleen’s footsteps moved from room to room upstairs. Humming, she was too. “I will survive,” it sounded like.

  The coffee didn’t make much headway against the dull, familiar resentment that was settling on him.

  Kathleen arrived downstairs in top gear. She moved through the kitchen at speed. He eyed her over the rim of his cup.

  “Will you think about phoning Pat then?”

  “I will,” he said.

  “He needs to talk to someone. And you used to have great chats, the pair of you.”

  Minogue didn’t want to phone his son-in-law. He liked Pat well enough, but he had no advice to offer him. He didn’t want to tell Kathleen to stop pretending she wasn’t worried sick about their daughter’s marriage falling apart either.

  “Always walked to his own drummer, Pat. Have you his work number?”

  “I do. ‘Marched,’ by the way.”

  She stopped pushing something into the cupboard.

  “‘To the beat of a different drummer,’” he added.

  “A bit of a session last night, was it?”

  A bit unexpected.

  “The usual suspects, I take it.”

  He nodded. She made to say something but turned away instead. He edged into the table and looked through yesterday’s paper. His eyes were hurting even more.

  “I was on the phone to Maura Kilmartin the other day, you know.”

  “Were you,” he said.

  “I was. Says she . . . you wouldn’t know Jimmy these days. Since the move, like.”

  He remembered standing outside the Garda Club about midnight, Kilmartin trying to light a cigar all the while rabbitting on about helicopter costs, the percentage of staff attending court, money laundering, the disgrace of not having up-to-date surveillance gizmos for Serious Crimes, his son in the US who didn’t phone much.

  “The best thing ever happened to Jim,” says she to me. “From a personal point of view, of course. He loves it.”

  It was seven months since the Murder Squad had been folded up. Jim Kilmartin had been parachuted to Support Services up in the Park. Meetings, travel, conferences.

  “Sleeps properly,” says she. “And he’s cut down on the gargle.”

  Not last night he hadn’t, Minogue thought. Along with half-remembered bits of dreams, he still had some of Kilmartin’s antics and soliloquies replaying still. But still, for all the nine to five, the desk and the office and the suits, Kilmartin wasn’t ready to admit that Garda Commissioner Tynan had done them all a favour with the shuffle.

  Minogue waited for her to look over.

  “Will you come up to Glencree with me this afternoon?”

  She closed the dishwasher with her heel.

  “Glencree? Glencree way up the mountains?”

  “Is it that far?”

  “It is that far.”

  “Well, that Glencree, yes.”

  “This afternoon?”

  “I can pick you up handy enough.”

  She made a smile that he hoped he was wrong about.

  �
�I’ll be at work,” she said. “So will you.”

  Behind her, the pear and the apple trees, planted one for Daithi and one for Iseult, were in full leaf. He remembered the showers of blossoms, the most in years.

  “Let’s get going,” she said. “It’s just that I have to be there.”

  He had been planning his second cup of coffee.

  She stopped him in the doorway, settled his tie, pushed strands of hair behind his ears. He studied the job she had done on her hair. The fruity perfume with the herbal afterthought he had sworn he’d say nothing about.

  “Cheer up,” she said. “It might never happen.”

  He got into his jacket in the hall, took the phone out of the charger. His briefcase was by the stairs. A truce was in order. He winked at her. She smiled, and she grabbed him. He held her tight.

  “It takes time,” she said. “I know. But change is good.”

  Phrases like that seemed to be cropping up a lot lately, he thought. He held her tighter. Yes, there was spray something in her hair.

  “You’ve still got the moves,” he said to her.

  “Play your cards right and you never know.”

  “Do you think you’ll have the time?”

  That was as far as he got. She pushed him to arms’ length, but held his shoulders.

  “Aren’t we gone beyond that? I mean to say, haven’t we?”

  She was right. He knew now was a good time, a very good time, to say nothing.

  “I have a career,” she said. “Just like you do. I’m in property appraisal, which you give speeches about every now and then, as being a shady effort, of huckstering.”

  “I only said hooks. I think.”

  “It’s your whole approach.”

  “We could talk about it up in Glencree.”

  “Is it my fault that the property market keeps going through the roof? Or that I took courses so’s I could get back into the working world?”

  He looked through the front window to the cars lining the road outside. There’d been no more than a few cars parked there when he’d walked Daithi down to the shops years ago. Now there were a dozen, and pricey motors they were, a lot of them. Some of them were owned by grown-up kids who hadn’t left home.

  “It’s like you’d prefer all this never happened, is it? Poverty is good for you?”

  “I’m not exactly hankering after the Famine.”

  “You’re not, are you? Wake up, then. Look where we are, the both of us. I’m lucky to be able to work again, so I am, and not be sitting at home in this empty house. And you, you’re on the up and up. But it’s like you don’t want to do well at all.”

  The hangover came to him as a muffled ache now, bone tiredness.

  “You’ve moved on,” she went on. “Moved up. They’re grooming you for something. Cop on, can’t you. I mean to say, you’re supposed to be the detective here.”

  She went to the mirror, moved her head around, patted the tips of her hair.

  “‘International Liaison,’” she added. “Ask yourself, would they give the job to any gom in there? No they wouldn’t, and well you know it.”

  He watched her tug on the hems of her jacket. Now wasn’t the time to tell her he knew plenty of goms in the Gardaí. Some he liked a lot.

  “What I think is,” she said while she paused to clamp her lips together and study the coverage of the lipstick, “. . . is that you need to work on something.”

  “I am working. I’m learning all about Fraud.”

  “Not work work. The other thing.”

  “Give me a clue.”

  “Your goals, is what I mean.”

  “Goals.”

  For a moment all he could think of was evening by the ruins at Tully, the birds calling out from the darkness in the hedges. Or by the sea at Killiney, the waves running, drawing back, and pebbles whispering. Were these goals?

  She turned from the mirror.

  “This is July,” she said. “It’s been seven months. Count them.”

  “All right, I get it. All right.”

  “But do you? The phone ringing two in the morning, falling out of bed? Prowling around in ditches and alleys? Working thirty hours straight? Who in their right mind would miss that?”

  “You’re right.”

  He hoped she wouldn’t say something like the self-sabotage thing she had said to him one-night last week.

  “Will you check the front window upstairs,” she said. “I’m always forgetting.”

  He checked Daithi’s bedroom last. The model aircraft were still there, the bits of computer parts, the photos. He stood by the window and looked out over the driveway. Kathleen was rummaging in a briefcase that she held on the bonnet of the car. There were clouds building up toward the east.

  He turned back to the window. The Nissan was still there by the laburnum at the Costigans’. There was a proper antenna on the roof. It was an unmarked car for sure.

  He went down the stairs one at a time. He set the alarm in the hall and pulled the door shut.

  “That blue is nice on you,” Kathleen said. “It says something.”

  He cooked up a smile. He started the Citroën. The Oul French Tart, Kilmartin still called it. The brakes needed doing and the sunroof was leaking again. He let it roll out onto the road and put on the handbrake. He slipped out and pulled the gate shut.

  The window on the Nissan was half-open. The driver’s head rested low against the headrest. Minogue wondered about the trouble the Costigans’ oldest son had gotten into last year, the drugs. Maybe they were keeping an eye out for something here again.

  “The poor parents,” Kathleen was saying. “God, can you imagine!”

  “Whose parents?”

  She tapped at the newspaper.

  “That poor girl. The one they found in the park there Monday. The Dodder?”

  He looked down at the paper.

  “Sixteen, she was,” Kathleen said.

  He shook his head. He steered around the neighbour’s new four-wheeler.

  “An end of the year thing it was,” she said. “A rave or something.”

  The driver of the Nissan stirred and sat up. Minogue forgot about his lurchy stomach, the spacey feeling he had when he turned his head, his suddenly alien wife.

  He let the Citroën coast in second. He looked at the driver’s profile, the slowly turning head framed by the window. There was that nose that had changed direction, all right, the right ear that had been squashed too often, the military cut.

  Kathleen had spotted him now.

  “Is that who I think it is,” she said.

  He pulled in, in front of the Nissan. Kathleen looked around the headrest.

  “What in the name of God is he doing here?”

  The fact that Garda Thomas Malone wasn’t getting out of his car told Minogue something. He turned off the ignition and studied Malone in the wing mirror. Then he opened the door. Kathleen grabbed his arm.

  “No,” he said to her. “I mean, I don’t know why he’s here.”

  Waiting

  The fella in the back seat seemed to be dozing. But Doyle wasn’t fooled: not one bit.

  He stole another glance at the cap. It was like a cap you’d see on a farmer or something, and it was definitely a wig of some sort under it. This was a disguise? It had taken a while for him to realize that the guy had no actual eyebrows either. Like a fish or something, he was, maybe a lizard. Lizard-man, that’d do.

  He didn’t know the man’s name. All he knew was that he had a Northern accent, that he was a weirdo, and that he was going to blow the kneecaps off two Albanians.

  The thin liquid line where the eyelids met glittered for a moment. You’re not codding anyone with that move, Doyle wanted to tell him. He himself had played that one before since he was a child, pretending to have dozed off, but seeing plenty, all he needed to see, between his eyelashes.

  He touched the swelling on his cheekbone by his eye. It felt watery under it now, but it wasn’t as sore. He hadn’t
expected the belt from the left. Lucky he had a few drinks in him, then. Malone would be feeling the pain soon enough after this, and he knew it too. Right after he’d taken the first dig off Malone, he remembered seeing it dawn on his face: end up in court, lose the job over this. And if he couldn’t remember what he’d dug himself into, that Chinese-looking girlfriend of his would remind him soon enough. She was none too impressed, was she.

  The eye would go black, but that didn’t matter. His eye was a bit bloodshot.

  What was a cop like Malone with a girlfriend like that anyway? There was plenty out there; you could have it off any night of the week you wanted to. With anyone, basically. All you had to do was have your eyes open. Even the snotty ones in the clubs wanted a bit of danger, the glamour, well, what they thought they knew from their music and their magazines and films and that. Hooligans were in, yes, thug love. Who’d have guessed that years ago. Schoolgirls, even. What a joke.

  The man in the back stirred and settled himself in the seat. Yeah, it was getting hot in the car already. Doyle wondered what he was getting paid, what he’d use on the two Albanians. He hadn’t seen any gun. They used .22s in the punishment jobs up in the North he’d heard. If it was going to be Six Packs, shots behind the kneecaps, they were out to keep the guy in a chair for life. Savages, up there.

  Well, it was all relative, wasn’t it. After all, here he was, driving this maniac for a job here in Dublin. With his gym bag there beside him, the fancy Adidas bag. Like he was an athlete or something. Right.

  He’d been leery about this from the first time Bobby Quinn had asked him. All it was was driving, sure. Bobby looking at him, waiting, like he knew what he was thinking, what he was going to say. He remembered stumbling and fumbling his way through. “Well, Bobby, I’d like to help out, you know, and prove I can do stuff and all, but kneecapping people out in the street was kind of the deep end, wasn’t it? Even though he appreciated how much it meant to be asked in on this, and all?” Quinn had just nodded, said he understood. Said he appreciated him telling him straight out.

  Later, when Bobby Quinn put ten fifties on the counter right there in front of him that afternoon, Doyle’s biggest job right then became pretending that he still needed to think about it. The other five hundred after. A chance to get steady work, Bobby told him then. He needed someone to rely on, to help out every now and then. But were there going to be other lads on this job, like wouldn’t it take a few to get hold of these two Albanian fellas . . .? No, no, Quinn told him. It wouldn’t be a problem. The fella they were sending had lots of experience. He’d take care of things.