O'Toole's jaw dropped. “I wouldn't think of it for a moment, dear boy. Why would you imagine...?
“Where money's concerned, there's always people what want to stick—sorry, was that a knock on yer door?
“It's the ventilation system. It makes that noise sometimes. What were you saying?”
“There's greedy people what always wants to stick their fingers into someone else's pie. Right now, I kyanny make me mind up if ye're one of them arseholes or not. I hope ye're being honest with me now.”
“Absolutely!” And indeed, a wave of relief seemed to have passed over Mr. O'Toole's face. He seemed his correct age again, 35 or so, Rory guessed.
“I must be careful, ye understand. So, I'm asking ye, please, never ask for a DNA test. No matter how much you might want me mother's millions.”
O'Toole spread out his arms to include everything in his office.
“I'm set, as you see, young man. I'll never do it.”
“Thank you. Ye've given me peace of mind. I'm so grateful. Me thoughts was all over the place, me brain felt ready to explode any minute before I spoke to ye.”
“And now I've made my promise, I hope you'll make and keep one for me and all. I hope you don't go shooting your mouth off about my indiscretion with your filthy wife. We've both loads to lose, as we've discussed. Your wife and I had ten brief minutes together, and now it's all over, at least to me. I think a gentleman's agreement between us, a vow of silence between us, will suit us both in the long run. You've no idea how much grief it would cost us as a family if Gerda, that's my wife, were to find out.”
“That's no problem. As far as I'm concerned, it's all done and dusted. In the past.”
O'Toole sighed and rolled his eyes. “A cautionary tale, this has been. What I did in my past, and you'd shudder if you knew, I'm sure,” Rory nodded, “what I did, I thought I was enjoying, but it was nothing but senseless shagging. Pardon my French. Marriage has changed me.”
Rory shrugged. “I can imagine loads of people do foolish things in their youth that come back to haunt them.”
“Would you mind if I asked you for something in return for my promise and my honesty?”
“Ask away.”
“When you invite the past into the present, strange things can happen. I can't stress how much my wife can't hear anything of this. Things have been strained between us. We've recently hired a marriage counselor, pay her to watch us argue, really. I'm dreading what next week's session might be like if Gerda were to hear... She'd be out of my life, and the wanes and all. We've three. So, please never mention to Dymphna you've spoken to me. Never. Never, ever. Who knows what the girl might say and where this might end up.”
“Right ye are,” Rory said. “I think that's best for the both of us. Shall we shake on it now?”
“Aye. And I'm sorry to say, I hope to never see you again. Never would be too soon.”
O'Toole got up and extended his hand over the computer and files and pens on his desk. As Rory shook the soft, firm hand and avoided a glance at the bunched up, fandango bulge in the crotch of the suit trousers that were two sizes too small, he had no idea that his meeting with O'Toole had done a wonderful job of killing one particular rumor, at least in his mind. Shame about the new one that had just blossomed in the minds of many others.
As he walked back through the aisles, he was greeted with slack jaws and dropped shopping baskets, even a mother clutching her children close to her breasts, hands clamped upon their ears, eyes circled with horror. The girls at the meat and cheese counter were nowhere to be seen. A path cleared the aisles as the shoppers scattered and pressed themselves against the shelves as he approached.
“What the bloody hell...?” he thought as he pushed though the revolving door and into the grayness of the day.
Thanks to the faulty PA system, this is what had been broadcast throughout every aisle in the Top-Yer-Trolley:
O'Toole: ...were that dreary...report for the strawberries...problems with...
Rory: ...see, I'm Rory Riddell. I am. What's wrong...voice? It's...times.
O'Toole: ...all over the shop. You...echoey bits.
Rory: I'm here on a personal matter.
O'Toole: Close the door, silly boy! What can I do for you?
Rory: Something odd's...digging around in..me arse! Could I...just bend...over...for a wee moment and...have ye...drag it out of...me?
O'Toole: You're...a randy wee...bugger...are you not? I'm a professional in these matters. Let me...position...myself...correctly. I'm...in...there...now.
Rory: Could ye...twist...me...thing a bit...while we're at it?
O'Toole: Dear boy!
Rory: Stick...yer...fingers...up...me now. Careful...please. Thank you. I'm...ready to explode any minute.
O'Toole: Don't go shooting your...filthy...load...all over...me...suit. You've no idea how much...it...cost.
Rory: That's...it...done.
O'Toole: Did...you...enjoy...it?
Rory: Loads.
O'Toole: Would you mind if I...invite...my wife...to watch us...next week? And the wanes and all?
Rory: Right ye are. Shall we shake on it?
O'Toole: Aye. See you again...soon.
CHAPTER FIVE
Detective Chief Inspector McLaughlin maneuvered the bulk of his beer gut under the fluttering police tape, feeling as if it were a limbo pole, and plodded into the crime scene at Final Spinz. He reeled as he stepped through the door. It reeked like a massacre. The blood quickened in his veins, and his eyes watered at the stench. At the sight of the three bodies, one splayed across the chairs, one stiff on the floor, and one propped against the counter, he was shocked. Then thrilled. A triple murder! They almost never happened in Derry nowadays! And this was no political IRA versus RUC carnage as back then, but an honest to goodness set-your-brain-cells-trundling Agatha Christie-style whodunnit!
He was rubbing his hands with delight, press conferences, flashing lights and headlines, commendations and promotions dancing in his mind. Then Detective Sergeant D'Arcy hurried to his side. A no-nonsense, bright young thing. Her brown hair, as usual, was pulled into a severe ponytail which made her look Asian, and now those eyes were tearing as well. She informed him in a voice between a whisper and a gag that the corpse on the chair was just drunk and the one on the floor had fainted, and the old woman seemed to have died of natural causes. McLaughlin was disappointed, then ashamed.
“Ta for the brief, Nancy,” he said, gulping down his own revulsion at the smell. “If that's the case, but, where's that mingin stench coming from?” Mingin, filthy
Face burning, he wondered from what unknown, devilish depth the excitement had risen from. It was highly uncharacteristic of him. He must be getting old and desperate for infamy, he thought, hating himself even more.
“Old laundry,” she motioned to a mysterious bag on the counter. “Apparently the victim's. Her grand nephew's overalls. He works in the sewers.”
He nodded to his colleague and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Then he pressed the handkerchief to his nose to mask the rank odor.
So only the old woman was dead. There was a paramedic hovering over the girl on the chairs, one over the woman on the floor, and two on either side of the pensioner, and the medical examiner as well. DCI McLaughlin grappled the edge of the counter and lowered himself, panting, to get a better look at her through the shoulders of the emergency crew. But there was nothing to see except a dead old woman. Then he realized with another shock that he recognized the face under the pinky-gray wisps of hair. It was Mrs. Ming. His mother's karaoke partner! They had a knees-up at the Craiglooner every Friday evening. Had had.
Wondering who his mother might sing “Islands In The Stream” along with now (his mother had always sung the Dolly Parton parts, Mrs. Ming the Kenny Rogers ones, and they had alternated this, especially when they had had too much to drink, with Engelbert Humperdink's “The Last Waltz,” and everyone in the pub had swayed and sung along), McLaughlin felt a
sadness envelop him. Mrs. Ming's left hand lay on the dirty linoleum. Her fingers were like twigs, her palm like a drought-ravaged riverbed. McLaughlin touched the hand. A little caress. Different tears, these of sadness, threatened to well in his eyes.
“This aul one perished from natural causes, I've heard?” he said in a voice that threatened to crack.
“As far as I can make out,” the medical examiner said. “The autopsy will tell us for sure.”
Pull yerself together, man, McLaughlin chastised himself. He sought to compartmentalized his grief as he hauled his body up from the floor. D'Arcy was next to him, snapping her phone shut. McLaughlin was surprised she still had a flip phone. Perhaps they should pay their junior officers more.
“SOCO will be here soon,” she said. The Scene Of Crime Operatives. With their plastic shoe covers and tape measures and camera flashes and spotlights and screens and little metal stages and standing cards with numbers on them.
“What happened here? Who are the witnesses? Where are the witnesses? Who called it in?”
D'Arcy had no need to look in her notebook.
“Fionnuala Flood,” she said. She arched her eyebrow. McLaughlin felt a chill up his spine. “That...woman apparently works here.”
Their eyes exchanged volumes between them, and their crime-detecting antennae were twitching like mad.
Long and winding was the list of crimes the mother of seven had been accused of by the local constabulary, the Police Service of Northern Ireland. And perhaps it was no wonder. Fionnuala Flood was the only sister in the infamous Heggarty clan; her brothers had wreaked havoc in Derry during the 80s and 90s. She was herself now the matriarch of a brood of criminals. Her oldest son, Lorcan, had been banged up for years for grievous bodily harm, and then her second oldest son, Eoin, a drug dealer, had joined him in an adjacent cell. Both had been released the year before and were now spending their 20s in the States, Florida, as far as the PSNI could fathom. Inspector McLaughlin pitied the police force in Florida. How the Flood brothers had been able to move there he couldn't imagine, as the ads on the buses and at the bus stops made it plain that if you were convicted of a criminal offense, you couldn't get a green card to emigrate to America. But Lorcan and Eoin were gone.
There were the younger Flood children, of course. Padraig, aged about 14, McLaughlin would hazard a guess, had been in the past suspected of firebombing and flinging rocks at pensioners. Seamus was 5 and couldn't commit crimes yet. And then there was 12-year-old Siofra, who had gone to school with his daughter Catherine and as far as McLaughlin could gather had once been his daughter's mate. At the beginning of September the year before, McLaughlin had sent his daughter to a boarding school in Dublin. A Catholic one still run by nuns. To shield his little girl from the breeding ground of casual crime and vice that was apparently Our Lady Of Perpetual Sorrow elementary school.
With the older, more deeply crime-infested brothers gone, the PSNI was free to focus on Fionnuala herself. Was she a criminal mastermind? McLaughlin couldn't imagine how, as the woman seemed dim-witted. Prickly, yes, defensive, yes, with a tongue like a whip, a voice like a foghorn and eyes that pulsated hatred for the police like laser beams, but dim-witted. And crime stuck to her like lice.
McLaughlin made a quick review in his mind of all the crimes Fionnuala Flood had been suspected of in the recent past. The year before, American tourists had called from the Amelia Earhart center where Fionnuala had worked to say she had scammed them and stolen the mother's handbag, and Fionnuala had instigated a bomb scare at the Mountains of Mourne illegal market. McLaughlin supposed in response to the complaint. The year before that, she and her entire family had been arrested aboard the ferry to Liverpool with a case of canned vegetables that contained Semtex, a bomb component beloved by some fading branches of the IRA which still seemed to be floundering on.
As much as the woman was like Ma Baker, her husband Paddy seemed like Pa Walton. Respectable, a worker for years at the Filets-O-Fish packing plant. Now, Inspector McLaughlin gathered, Paddy Flood was employed as a security guard. He wondered who had vetted him for such a position. He would have never given him such a job, guilt by association. Though word on the street was that he was separated from Fionnuala. She had been banished to the caravan park on the edge of town. Why? McLaughlin suspected there was some crime there, something heinous the woman had done that had shocked even her hardened nuclear family. but there had never been a complaint brought against her, and McLaughlin had enough real crime to deal with without wasting his energy conjuring up imaginary crimes the woman may or may not have committed. But now here Mrs. Flood was again: smack dab in the middle of another crime scene.
“Where is she now? And where are the other witnesses? Or should I now say—”
“Suspects?”
“Aye.”
“In the break room beyond the partition there. I herded them in there to secure the scene. And so the rescue team could do their job in peace.”
Which they were now doing, stretchers carrying chair girl and floor woman out to their respective ambulances.
“I've taken photos of those two,” D'Arcy said as McLaughlin's eyes followed the bodies on the stretchers to get a good look at them. “Best to get them to the hospital, as SOCO might take a while to arrive. There's a pile up on the Strand, and it'll be difficult for them to make their way through.”
“Good job,” McLaughlin said with a nod, though he wondered how useful photos from that cheap phone might be. “Do we know who they are? Isn't that wee girl the one what had...the visitation?”
“Visitation, sir?”
“That saw the Virgin Mary?
“I don't know about that,” D'Arcy said, eyebrow raised again. McLaughlin felt the blood rush to his face. No, he thought as his colleague consulted her notebook. D'Arcy wouldn't know about that. She was a Protestant. They had their own gossip on the other side of the River Foyle. And would tend to be more skeptical of a Marian apparition. “But they've told me she's one...Bridie McFee.”
“Aye, that's her. Passed out drunk, ye say?”
“Absolutely paladic, by all accounts. Needs to get her stomach pumped before alcohol poisoning sets in, it seems. And the other...”
She consulted her notebook.
“Zoë—”
“Riddell?! Don't ye know the woman's the owner of this here place?”
“I—”
“One of the richest women in Derry. Have ye not heard of her? She's one of yer own, sure.” Protestant, he meant.
“I never follow the business section of the newspaper, sir. I'm more interested in women's sports.”
Now McLaughlin raised an eyebrow.
“So we have the owner, passed out on the floor. What went on here? Let's get werselves to that break room and see if we can make any sense of just what happened. What crime was actually committed.”
They walked beyond the partition, past the sloshing machines and made their way down a dingy hallway to the break room.
CHAPTER SIX
A dart pounced through a fug of cigarette smoke. Bulls-eye! Given the low visibility, remarkable. Paddy Flood, tipsy, punched the air with his fist and imagined uproarious cheers around him. But there was only the tinny Eurodisco blaring from the radio on the table; some black woman wailing about 'spreading it like peanut butter and jelly.' He took a swig of no-brand beer and aimed again. Paddy had black hair turning gray as he swiftly approached 50, and a paunch that seemed to increase every week. He nevertheless looked jaunty in the somewhat over-designed Pence-A-Day security uniform, with its gold-stitched epaulets, black stripes running down the sides of the pants, and brass buttons glinting on his chest against a field of navy. He usually never bothered to wear the peaked cap with the eagle on the front, though he liked the look of it when he put it on and checked himself out in the mirror at home on the occasional night.
Other than the dartboard, the transistor (!) radio, and some well-thumbed magazines that were more historical artifacts of lif
e in the 2000s than reading material, there was nothing for Fionnuala's estranged husband to do in the security hut of the Pence-A-Day storage units except watch his buttons glint and feel the passage of time on his face and body. And drink. If Paddy had had one of those phones with the internet in them, he might have spent that passing time checking the soccer scores and the winners of the horse and dog races, scroll through the fishing websites, and some saucy ones as well. But he had never had the funds to upgrade his flip phone. He still considered his five-year-old cell phone a luxury, even though the photos it took had so few pixels every shot looked like abstract art. So drink and throw darts he did.
He stubbed out his cigarette. The ashtray was overflowing.
Paddy had worked since graduation at the Fillets-O-Fish packing plant, but it had closed down a few months before. He was grateful to have been given this job, but suspected it had more to do with his daughter Dymphna marrying Zoë's son Rory than any aspect of his work ethic. Here Paddy did himself a disservice. He was a worker. Dependable. Handsome. Even-tempered. Perhaps he drank a bit too much, but then who didn't? If temperance was something you needed in an employee from the Moorside, you'd be hard pressed to find any applicants over the age of twelve. Zoë had clapped her hands when he had showed up for the interview, and had eagerly given the job to him.
But what was his function in this tiny hut with its corrugated iron walls? Officially, it was to open the gate for, vet and sign up the very occasional new renter and help them unload their boxes and whatnot, and to, again, open the gate for and check the identification of people who drove into the compound to either remove or add to their secret hoards.
Static Cling (The Irish Lottery Series Book 5) Page 8
