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

by John Brady

  “Your duty is to uphold the law. That includes fraud.”

  “Talk to me about tax cheats or money launderers. The offshore moneymen swarming about Foxrock in their Mercedes, laughing at us.”

  “That’s fraud too,” Tynan said.

  “But those fellas aren’t under the wheels of a train, are they.”

  He watched Kathleen walk to the window and look out.

  “Listen,” Tynan said. “Take time to go over it. Have you anyone to talk to?”

  Minogue thought about Herlighy again. A fuss high up in the beech tree behind drew his eyes up. Two or three birds scattered, complaining, into the dark. He heard something, leaves brushing together in the long grass by the compost.

  “Don’t try hiding,” Tynan went on. “You’re going to move on sooner than was planned. How’s your foreign language quotient lately?”

  Minogue registered the feint. It was the best Tynan could do for consoling. It was then that Minogue remembered: that’s right, Tynan’s wife had gone back in for tests. The radiation wasn’t enough, apparently. Remorse flooded through him.

  “Look, John—”

  “—We’ll work up something then. Think Vienna. Think Brussels. Think Interpol and international effort. Think joint operations. Now more than ever. Keep your eye on the ball, is what I’m saying.”

  Minogue watched Kathleen press her face closer to the window.

  “Look,” he said. “I might as well tell you. I’m thinking of walking.”

  Tynan said nothing.

  “It wasn’t just today.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I won’t go on. I have no speech ready.”

  “You’ve thought about it then for a while.”

  “I have.”

  “Take a few days to think about it again.”

  Kathleen drew back, walked toward the hall. Minogue hesitated.

  “What do you actually want to do?” Tynan asked.

  “I don’t know. I heard there might be something in security.”

  “Something in security.”

  “That’s about it, yes.”

  “I hear there’s not bad money in it. Company car too. Cushy number, yes.”

  Minogue didn’t return the sarcasm.

  “You want to go around protecting some multinational’s assets eight hours a day.”

  Minogue tried to see what was moving in behind the rhubarb now. There had been cat shit there for a while in the spring.

  “All right,” Tynan said. “But if you decide to walk, tell me first.”

  The sky was still brown to the west. He couldn’t hear the rustling anymore.

  “You were due to head over to, where was it, after Fraud?”

  “Drugs Central was the plan from October first on.”

  “Well, it’ll be earlier then,” Tynan said. “There’s work waiting.”

  It was Tynan who hung up first.

  A dog started barking furiously in a garden up the road. Minogue made his way down to the kitchen door. He’d leave the windows open tonight for sure.

  Kathleen had the telly on already.

  “Well,” she said. “You’re important tonight.”

  He watched the main character in the series, an overweight British actor whose name he could never remember, interview a suspect. Stupid, he decided, not for the first time. Kilmartin would have eaten him alive by now.

  “I’m taking tomorrow off,” he said. “Friday too.”

  She looked up at him.

  “Do you want to run away with me for a few days?”

  She muted the volume.

  “What’s after happening? What did he say to you?”

  Should Have Known

  Minogue woke up with a start at ten after three. It wasn’t a dog chasing him in a dream anymore. There were two of them howling now, real dogs.

  “I’ll go down and strangle that fecker, so I will,” Kathleen groaned.

  He didn’t want to shake clear of the foggy head, the dull ache from the whiskey. He lay still, listening.

  “Close the windows, can’t you,” she muttered. She turned back to her side.

  He rolled out and closed the bedroom windows. He perched on the edge of the bed. Kathleen pushed up on her elbows.

  “Do you want to talk, love?”

  “I don’t.”

  “A cup of something then?”

  “Go back to sleep yourself. I have a book below.”

  He left the lights off downstairs for a few minutes. The dogs’ howling had died down. The foliage had kept most of the street light from coming over the garage roof into the garden. He thought about going out, just mooching about.

  He picked up the short stories from where he had left them near the couch and he pushed up some cushions before he put on the reading lamp. There’d be no sleep for a while. But he’d gotten almost three hours.

  He thought about the bottle he’d put back under the sink, the duty-free Jamesons that Kathleen pretended she’d hidden. If there were a shop open he’d have gone out for a packet of fags. Maybe that was all going to happen again.

  He found his page but the words evaporated on him. He kept seeing Jennifer Halloran, kneeling pretty well, her head on the table. What else could it have been except praying. He should have known. That had to be when she decided.

  He fell asleep at six, right after he concluded he wouldn’t.

  Que Sera Sera, and All That

  Bobby Quinn wasn’t sure if he’d actually had forty winks. He reached for his watch on the bedside table. Catherine’s breathing changed. He must have slept, then. There were the beginnings of light behind the curtains. Thank God it was the summer at least. He thought about the nights in jail, the early morning hours. A lot of fellas couldn’t sleep. There were the junkies, of course, but even ordinary inmates didn’t sleep right. The ones who topped themselves usually did it early in the morning.

  He’d thought about that very early in his sentence. It happened when Catherine had stuck with what she’d said about not wanting Brittney to see him there. A routine had set in of course, and it had deadened him to a lot of things. It was a way of shutting things down so you got through doing your time. Grogan and his crowd knew it all. It was like they used the place as a school, or a business.

  The sound of that gun in the garage yesterday—just a thump. He’d realized how tight he was wound up when he got in the door, finally, last night. Catherine trying to let on she wasn’t suspicious, annoyed at him, and him trying to be level, but his mind going like mad. Barely able to sit down, to even have a conversation, for God’s sake.

  They’d sat through the news together, with Brittney playing that boy band crap on her Walkman. Why did it irritate him so much, Catherine wanted to know. Just another thing, a setback of sorts. For a while he thought Catherine wanted to say something when they showed the place with the cop cars everywhere on the news. Like what? Like: Do you know anything about that, Bobby?

  Still he felt her keeping her distance. The nightie he’d bought for her at that lacy place there in Duke Street had stayed away in a drawer somewhere. She was back to those long T-shirt things he hated. She hadn’t talked about more kids in a long while now. That was her mother behind that, he knew. She’d always have it in for him.

  He stared at the lampshade, wondered what time Cafolla’s opened. He remembered thinking - just before he fell asleep - that he could simply let it drop. Malone he could probably figure, but the other fella, the veteran, had serious background.

  He couldn’t decide.

  He squeezed his eyes shut tight. The lampshade was still there when he opened his eyes again. So was the thought and he might as well say it to himself at least: nothing good was going to come out of this. But still, what was done was done, que sera sera and all that. There was no use in speculating.

  He slid out of bed and found his way on the parts of the floor that didn’t creak. He looked back toward Catherine. She was faking being asleep. He might never be able to
avoid seeing it in her eyes, the holding back. Fear, he should call it, to be honest. He didn’t blame her. She was waiting, the way anyone would, for it all to come back, to go wrong. Eight months now. It’d take a lot longer than that to persuade her.

  He had oiled the door hinges. He made it down to the hall with only one creak. He put on the jacket and found his cigarettes by the telly. A shaft of yellow light lit up the roof opposite. He studied it, tried to notice it creep down the chimney breast with the movement of the sun. Everything was so fresh in the morning, only for people to wake up and mess everything up and wreck things.

  He finished his cigarette, lit another. His stomach made one of those grinding kind of moves, like it was shrinking or turning over or something. He hadn’t been able to manage anything beyond some crisps and a few biscuits last night. Roe was a meat cutter, Jesus, how much sicker could it get than that.

  Quinn studied the burning edge of the paper, the twin trails of smoke curling up from the tip. He held up his arm and watched. The shake was gone for sure. He drew on the cigarette, and in the steady volley of smoke he breathed into the sunlit kitchen he realized that he had to know what Doyle had said to the cop at the chipper last night.

  And now that the daylight was here, he didn’t need to try to keep that feeling at bay anymore, that feeling that something had started, and that it had nothing to do with plans or being smart or even timing. It was chance or luck, or something like that, probably they had a name for it in India or someplace. Like something was waiting for him out there. The thing was to just get on with it.

  He looked at his reflection in the kettle. A cup of tea, a shower, he thought, and then get things going. There was no harm going over to Irene today. It’d give him confidence, settle him. Things would click into place.

  Cards on the Table, You Contrary Hoor

  Minogue left the breakfast stuff until the middle of the day. He had felt more than peculiar driving home from town, after dropping Kathleen off. Managing Kilmartin during the phone call had taken a lot.

  “Now, is it?” Kilmartin had wanted to know. “This very minute, like?”

  “Soon.”

  “Why now?”

  “Soon, I said.”

  Kilmartin wasn’t going to waste a chance to needle his friend.

  Why would anyone who’s got a brain want to consider walking away from the easiest stroke to come along in the history of the Garda Síochána? The Glamour Job of the Century? Didn’t Minogue know a single Guard who wouldn’t give his or her right ball for what was lined up for him? What, exactly, was his problem?

  “Jim, give me the contact or I’ll come over to the Park and tell the nabobs there you’re so pally with how you fart at work.”

  But Kilmartin wasn’t about to let go.

  “This is some mental thing with you, is my guess. Lost the head a bit?”

  “Just take it as a what-if then, is all I’m asking.”

  “A contrary hoor is what you are. Come on, lay your cards on the table.”

  No cards were laid. For a few moments Minogue had been ready to tell Kilmartin how he had woken up with a start, terrified of something: trains, shouts, people running in his dreams.

  Kilmartin would look around and get back to him tomorrow, then. The talk got on to old times. Minogue couldn’t bring himself to tell Kilmartin to give over. He looked out at the garden, at the stones he had planned to move around to a new rockery site. He studied the garden for the full ten minutes it took Kilmartin to tell what had actually happened in the dead doctor’s case back fifteen years ago, and a steady silence from Minogue, to get the idea.

  “Look,” Kilmartin had said then in a tone Minogue hadn’t expected. “Don’t cod yourself, Matt.”

  “Cod meself how?”

  “You’re bored out of your mind in Fraud. You can’t work with the likes of whoever they put you with. Right? But I’m going to tell you something now, about what can happen. Are you listening to me at all there?”

  Five Acres came back into Minogue’s mind, the goat, the donkey. How hard would it be to go down to his brother’s farm, to sit by him at the window where he sat most of the day now that the arthritis had stopped him even walking the fields, and to tell him to find a spot he could build. Lots of huge boulders desired, pile them in, high ground against the damp; a look down at the sea, and not to worry about the road in.

  “My lovely wife,” Kilmartin went on, “God be good to her, is going around like a gámóg—don’t even whisper to her I ever talked to you, do you hear? With the very best of intentions I hasten to add, perfectly convinced that her hub is as happy as Larry here in the Park. Have you heard the like already?”

  “A bit, I think.”

  “Oh right. ‘Kathleen says that Maura says that Jim is in great form since he got out of the murder business.’ Am I right or am I right?”

  Minogue began to listen now. He had forgotten how he missed working around the Mayo man, like a loose boulder in a field. It had taken him years to understand that behind the slagging and the fierceness and the bullying schoolboy in Kilmartin was something of the disappointed child.

  “The nail on the head, James. You have the makings of a detective, I’m thinking.”

  “Shut up a minute, and listen. If you’re wondering how I got this Oscar style of carrying on, with the missus and that, think for a minute. I learned all this letting-on, this what you might call disguise, domestic play-acting, from, well, guess who?”

  Minogue wouldn’t answer.

  “I’m onto you, you whore,” Kilmartin said, his voice still gentle. “You can’t cod me one bit. So keep the flag flying there. No let up. Are you with me, are you?”

  Minogue allowed that for now he was - sort of.

  No Big Thing

  Canning had waited outside Irene’s for Quinn. It had been three-quarters of an hour.

  “You wait in the car when I go into Cafolla’s,” Quinn said to him.

  “Wait outside? What, am I a waiter this morning?”

  “I want to talk to the young fella on me own. Tony.”

  “What, two of us would frighten him?”

  “That’s about it.”

  Canning drove. Quinn felt the resentment hanging in the air. He thought about what Irene had told him about entering a new phase. New conjunctions were becoming closer, that was how she put it, something to do with Saturn and Venus. That was supposed to make you pay attention to your love life or something?

  “There’s no sign of Doyle at his place,” Canning said then. “He knows we’re looking for him, I’m telling you.”

  Quinn kept his eye on the slowing traffic in Fairview. The Star had turned up in the cards the last time at Irene’s, he remembered, and she’d made a big thing out of it. He wanted to tell her to just shut up basically, and not make a performance out of it, trying to make it sound so rosy—just to give him the basics. But she had tried to work around the one that had turned up last week. He hadn’t been fooled. The Tower had lightning on it for God’s sake, it was more than just “unexpected.”

  “I phoned his place four times last night,” Canning said. “Then I got a hold of the owner, the landlord or whatever you call him, this morning, did I tell you?”

  “No.”

  “The landlord says he’s getting Doyle evicted. He has the place destroyed, says he—Doyle does. And what’s more, he’s going to get the cops to look the place over for drugs. That’s what he told me. So there.”

  Quinn’s eyes still burned from lack of sleep. He watched an old man walk crookedly by some shops. The middle of summer, and he was wearing a cap and a jumper and a jacket. He thought about Roe again, dressed in that schoolteacher gear. The perfect disguise, or was it some kind of a creepy thing he had going on in the back of his mind?

  “That’s how it has to be, Bobby. You know?”

  “What?”

  “Doyle. He’ll go off the deep end on something. Then where are we? Get the law nosing around . . .?”

&nb
sp; “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I can do for him, you know. Take him out behind the docks there, give him a good hiding, and then—”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  Canning opened his hands over the wheel. He didn’t look over at Quinn.

  “I’m only saying, Bobby.”

  “Keep an eye out for your allies today,” Irene had said. Well, what the hell use was that to him? All those glass things hanging in the windows, incense as per usual. Still, though. Maybe he should have taken the crystals thing more seriously. No, no, it was rubbish plain and simple. The cards, the Tarot, were the main thing.

  “Living like an animal, Doyle was,” Canning said. “Says the landlord.”

  Quinn realized he’d have to make a bigger effort. He looked over.

  “Really.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if he, you know, had business coming through.”

  Know who to trust, was Irene’s other bit of advice today. Whatever that could mean. Twenty quid a session, that’s all it meant maybe.

  “So,” said Canning. “Are we going to get a drop of rain or not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah, come on.”

  “I don’t listen to the weather forecast, do I.”

  “I meant the other thing. The Availing thing.”

  Quinn drew in his breath.

  “It’s Avalon. And it’s none of your business.”

  “Well, what did she tell you today?”

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Oh, so that’s what she said, is it.”

  “Park down by the shop there.”

  Quinn looked through the glare on the window of the chipper.

  “That’s the da in there,” Canning said. “Will you look, the state of him, Jesus.”

  “We’ll wait a while here.”

  Canning lit a cigarette. He began talking about electronics, how you could watch a DVD on a thing that you could put in your pocket. Then he got onto computers, how someone told him that you could listen in on credit card numbers going by if you had the right equipment, and did he know that?