“Woah!”
“Oh God, sorry!”
Agent Dove looked around on the floor. “I think I lost a screw there.”
“Ehm, I can pull over if you like. See if we can find it?”
“It’s a sweet offer but I never pull over for a screw while I’m working.”
In a part of Wilson’s brain, he was aware that she had probably just made a joke. Unfortunately, she made it at the same time as she did one of those weird slow blinks, which freaked him out. The correct human response required of him in this situation was at least a courtesy laugh. Instead, he just gave her an open-mouthed look. Someone behind them honked their horn and, cheeks burning, Wilson turned his attention back to the road.
A BMW pulled around them, its driver unable to waste another valuable second in his incredibly important day waiting for Wilson to start moving. The red-faced man behind the wheel was so busy that he held the phone he was talking into in one hand while flipping them the bird with the other. Wilson watched him drive off and hit the speed bump slightly too fast, resulting in the satisfying scraping of expensive suspension coming off the worse with karma.
“You want to pull that a-hole over?” asked Dove.
“Nah, we’ve got somewhere to be.”
“Back home, we’d be shooting his tyres out.”
Wilson laughed too hard at this. He was only sixty per cent certain it was a joke, but he was overcompensating having let the last one sail by without taking a whack at it.
He pulled out past the cement truck and continued driving.
“So, what are you packing?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Hardware-wise?”
“Oh right,” said Wilson. “We don’t actually carry weapons most of the time.”
“You are kidding me? What do you do when you need to shoot somebody?”
Wilson shifted in his seat. He was aware that he was obliged to defend the honour of the Gardaí, but he wasn’t sure from what.
“I mean, we have access to guns. We can carry them if we’re apprehending a suspect, or if we’re dealing with gangs, terrorism, that kind of thing.”
He could feel Dove shaking her head. Then he heard a clicking noise as she reattached her arm.
“That dude in the Beemer that just went by – what’d you do if he pulled a gun on you?”
“Well, duck, for a start.”
“And then?”
That had been Wilson’s attempt at a joke. Clearly the humour barrier went both ways.
“I can put in a call, get an armed response.”
“So you ring somebody, and they send you a gun?” Her tone was incredulous.
“No. They send out a team of people, all with guns.”
“To what? Protect our dead bodies? I mean, no offense, but you guys are insane.”
“Well, we feel the same about the American attitude to guns.”
“Yeah, I bet. Everybody hates a gun until they need a gun. I’m glad I’m packing.”
Wilson glanced over at her. “You don’t mean now?”
There was a second of a delay. “No.”
Wilson took the third exit on the roundabout and then looked over at her again. “Seriously, I mean, you’re in Ireland. You’ve got no right to carry a firearm here.”
“Sure.”
“So you aren’t?”
“I said no, didn’t I?”
Wilson pulled the car into a parking space in front of the offices of Sláinte Ferries. He put on the handbrake and turned to look properly at Dove. “Seriously like, my boss would freak out if she found out you had a gun.”
“Are you saying you want to frisk me, Detective?”
As she said it, she gave him the biggest of her smiles and her left eye winked. He wasn’t sure it was a movement that had been entirely intentional. The eye may have been going solo. Was it a nervous tic, or was she hitting on him? His brain froze in terror and he gawped at her open-mouthed, unable to think of a single thing to say.
After a moment, she grabbed her handbag from the footwell and exited the car.
This was going really well.
Chapter Twenty
Brigit checked, double-checked and triple-checked the door of the office to make sure it was locked.
She could still remember her excitement when MCM Investigations had first moved here. Their first office, a single room over the Oriental Garden restaurant, had only lasted for four months. They had outgrown it in many ways, not to mention the fact that the torture of smelling Chinese food for twelve hours a day had meant she’d put on half a stone. She’d heard that story about employees in a chocolate factory being allowed to eat as much as they liked in the first month, but it had never made much sense to her. The theory was they would soon get sick of chocolate. That had not been her experience with food. She would have been dead within a fortnight, being rolled out by Oompa Loompas singing a valuable lesson.
This office was decidedly fancier. She’d had to talk Paul into it, back in the days when they were still talking. It was just off Christchurch, which, while not exactly Grafton Street, was a pretty serious real estate neighbourhood all the same. To be fair, it had been a sound business decision at the time. The increase in their workload had more than justified the higher rent. After the Skylark Affair, as the press had dubbed it, the phone at MCM Investigations had been ringing off the hook. They had needed somewhere to meet clients, because they actually had clients – lots of them. In fact, they had the weird problem of having too many. Brigit had perhaps been overly keen to start, accepting anyone who required their services and was willing to pay. She learned her lesson after the infamous “Mrs Geoghan’s Cat” incident, which had resulted in Phil being accused of catnapping twice, not to mention having to get rescued from a tree by the fire brigade. It had finally emerged after a chat with a neighbour that the reason the cat was so hard to find was that Mrs Geoghan had reversed over it in her car and nobody had the heart to tell her. After that, MCM had tried to stick to finding humans or, at least, finding out what certain humans were doing, which invariably turned out to be other humans they weren’t married to.
Brigit stood back and quickly scanned the windows. They were locked, for all the good that would do in the “war of the eejits”, as she had taken to calling the on-going situation with the Kellehers. The meeting with Paul had not gone well. She had hoped that a kick up the arse might have made him cop himself on, but if anything, it had had the opposite effect. The meeting with the Kellehers had gone even worse, and MCM Investigations was now staring down the barrel of oblivion via litigation. Despite it essentially being his fault, she was having a hard time getting angry at Bunny. He hadn’t been himself over the last few months, although, to be fair, dangling someone off a balcony – that had been very Bunny.
She turned and walked around to the back, where the only vehicle present was her own car. It looked rather pathetic, battered and scraped as it was, sitting in a puddle that reflected neon flashes from the taxi company and takeaways on Thomas Street. She’d been meaning to get a new one, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. This car had great sentimental value, and it was also free of that guilty feeling from picking up the monthly scrapes, scratches and prangs that came from driving in Dublin. She wouldn’t be able to relax driving a new car; she had no idea how everyone else kept them looking so neat.
Since the incident last year, one of the few things Brigit had made time for was self-defence classes. Every Monday night without fail she was down at the dojang on Harcourt Street. She had taken to taekwondo like a duck to water. They’d had to move her up two ranks. Most women were nervous of hurting someone, but not Brigit. As a nurse, she’d seen plenty of pain and, thanks to her less than stellar career in romance, there were more than a few people she didn’t mind the idea of inflicting it on.
As she neared her car, she heard sudden footsteps behind her and an unexpected voice.
“Brigit?”
Her instructor, Sh
aron, would have been proud. She reacted fast. The leg sweep took her assailant clean off his feet before he knew what hit him. It felt different when it wasn’t somebody slapping down onto a crash mat. A satisfying woof of wind came out of him as he hit the tarmac.
She stood over him, gripping her keys between her knuckles, ready to permanently ruin his enjoyment of 3D movies.
Anto Kelleher lay there with his hands out. “I surrender! I surrender!”
Brigit let out the breath she realised she had been holding in. “Jesus, Anto. What the hell are you doing sneaking up behind a woman in a car park?”
“I wasn’t sneaking. I saw you coming out and I ran up to try and catch you. You’re not answering my calls.”
“Yeah, because you tricked me into coming to a meeting where I got served with a summons.”
“I swear I didn’t know about that. I know how it looks, but honestly, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure my lawyer would suggest not talking to someone who is currently suing me.”
“Good news on that front, I’m not suing you. I have left the employ of Kelleher Brothers Investigations. Permanently.”
Now that her heart rate was slowing from the high-speed techno beat it had been keeping, she was able to take a better look at him. He had a split on the left side of his bottom lip and bruising around his right eye. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I’ve just come from a family meeting. Put it this way: my brothers weren’t wild about my decision to leave the company. The family Christmas is going to be fun this year. If I promise not to do anything as aggressive as saying your name again, can I get up?”
Brigit nodded and Anto pulled himself to his feet.
“Let me have a look at you.” She put her hands gently on the side of his face and then turned it so it could catch the light. “Jesus, they did a bit of a number on you.”
“Ah, you should see the other guy.”
“Got a few good shots in yourself, did you?”
“Actually, no. And the one I did get in might have actually improved Vinny’s ugly mug. It’d be hard not to.”
Brigit had never been a fan of beards, but his did feel very nice in her hands. It was very soft. She wondered if he used some kind of conditioner on it.
She quickly pulled her hands away. “You need to put something on that lip.”
“What did you have in mind?” He said it with a twinkle in his eye.
“Behave yourself. I know three other moves I’ve not used yet.”
“I’m sure all your moves are impressive.”
“Shut up and come inside.”
She started to walk back towards the office with Anto following behind her.
Chapter Twenty-One
Brigit cradled the phone against her shoulder as she rummaged through her bag. She had definitely had tissues earlier. She was pretty sure she was coming down with the cold she seemed to get every Christmas.
“So,” continued Nora Stokes, “I had a chat with Siobhan Doherty, Harrison’s barrister.”
“Right,” said Brigit, “and how was that?”
“As expected, is probably the best way of putting it.”
“What’s the second-best way of putting it?”
“She wants everything. She reckons they’ve got a bulletproof case and that if this goes to court, they’ll win.”
Brigit didn’t find tissues but she did find the two Christmas cards she’d been carrying around for a week that she still hadn’t managed to put a stamp on and send. “Is she right about that?”
“This thing is a process and we need to see things through. It’s important that we stay calm.”
“Oh fuck.”
“What?”
Brigit dumped her bag on the floor. “You don’t sugarcoat anything, Nora, and you’re sugarcoating this. That’s a really bad sign. How screwed are we?”
“As things stand? Totally. Look – they’ve made a proposal. It’s a terrible proposal. I don’t want you to take this deal but I’m legally obliged to at least explain it to you.”
“OK.”
“They’ve said that they’ll take the whole company – lock, stock and barrel. Name. Client list. Everything.”
“Harrison wants to own the company? Why the hell would he want to own the company?”
“I don’t know, but he seems serious about it. Maybe he figures that he’s already a dick, so he might as well be a private one. You would also not be allowed to set up in business against it for ten years. All that, plus eighty grand.”
“Christ.”
“I told you, they’re just trying to scare you.”
“It’s working.”
“How are things going with trying to get evidence on this creep?”
Brigit pushed a few strands of her hair back out of her eyes. She was going to need a haircut soon, if she could ever find the time. “I’ve got Phil exclusively doing surveillance on Harrison, while I’m trying to cover the rest of the cases we have single-handed.”
“Any luck?”
“Nah. Last I heard from Phil, there was nothing new to report.”
“I see.”
“Ehm…” Brigit hesitated. She knew she was going to have to give this update, but she had been kind of dreading it. “Now, I don’t want you to overreact, but Anto Kelleher came to see me last night.”
“The big hairy bastard. How did that go?”
“Well, I sort of leg-swept him.”
“Oh my God, you mad bitch. I think I might be in love with you.”
“Stop it. He surprised me and I…”
“Kicked his arse!”
“It wasn’t like that. He’d come to apologise. He said he’d had no idea his brother was going to pull that stunt at the meeting. He has left the company – in fact, they literally came to blows. He had a black eye and stuff.”
“Ohhhhhh, interesting.”
“I’m only telling you this because he doesn’t agree with all that’s going on. He wants to help us.”
“He wants to help you.”
“Would you stop. I’m telling you this as my lawyer.”
“And as your lawyer, I am telling you to slap a saddle on that bronco and ride him off into the sunset.”
“Seriously, Nora, stop it! You’re being unprofessional.”
“Says you. Your detective agency throws people off balconies. I wouldn’t go casting stones. So where did all this happen?”
“In the car park out back.” Nora gave a dirty laugh so loud, Brigit had to pull the phone away from her ear for a second. “It wasn’t like that. We went back into the office.”
“Oh, did you?”
“Just so I could put some ice on his swelling.” Brigit instantly regretted her choice of words. She had to shout over the “awooga” siren noise Nora was making down the line. “On his eye. On. His. Eye!”
“Sure,” said Nora. “You swept him off his feet and then you did a bit of Florence Nightingale while you tended to his wounds.”
“I was a nurse, you know.”
“I do. Did you keep the uniform? Some men go mad for that.”
“You’ve got a one-track mind, d’ye know that?”
“I don’t, actually. I am just tragically fascinated by your love life because, anaemic though it is, it is still infinitely more interesting than my own – which currently consists of the thirty-four minutes I get on the bus into the office every morning with whatever steamy e-book I have on the go. By the way, side note – have your bosoms ever heaved?”
“What?”
“In all these books, there’s a crap-ton of heaving bosoms. Do they just mean breathing, d’ye think? I mean, I’ve occasionally had to heave one of them out of the way while I’m sorting the washing, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what they’ve meant. Anyway, sorry, back to you.”
“It’s alright, I am finished.”
“Oh no you’re not.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Tell y
our extremely young and attractive Auntie Nora the other bit.”
“What other bit?”
“You are a dreadful liar, Conroy. You know what other bit.”
Brigit went silent for a minute. “Alright, well, just so we can, y’know, work out our next move and all that, I am meeting him for lunch on Thursday.”
After about thirty seconds of sound effects intermixed with frankly shocking language from the very best legal representation she could afford, Brigit hung up the phone. She guessed it might well be several minutes before Nora noticed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Bunny opened the door and stepped inside, kicking a couple of pieces of post on the carpet to the side as he did so. He threw his keys down on the side table, on top of a neat pile of unopened correspondence. He didn’t remember doing that. It wasn’t the fact the letters were unopened that was strange – he generally only opened the post when someone banged on the door or the lights went out – but since when had he started to pile anything up neatly?
He moved down the hall into the front room, the plastic bag containing milk, a Pot Noodle and a packet of chocolate Hobnobs bouncing against his thigh as he did so. Everything looked much the same as it always did. Not for the first time, he thought about getting himself another cleaner. Ever since Mrs Byrne’s back had started to act up, he’d been without one. Initially, it’d felt rude to go looking for somebody else. She had assured him she’d be right as rain in a week. Always in a week. That was a good six months ago now, and the place could do with a serious dusting. He could do that himself, of course. But he wouldn’t.
He stopped in the middle of the room and looked around. Something was off. Nothing was missing or anything, but still… The place felt strange, like everything had been shifted a millimetre. He wasn’t one for any of that feng shui bollocks, but the air felt different.
He had only been gone a few hours. He’d gone up to the Liberties to deal with that thing, then he’d dropped into O’Hagan’s for a couple, then he’d walked back out to Cabra. It was a fairly long walk – a couple of hours with his gammy foot – but he still liked to do it. He liked to feel the city around him. After all these years, there was a comfort in that. Plus, he needed the exercise. Those were the two reasons he’d give if anyone asked, but there was another one too. He had nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. That was the truth of it. Private detective work didn’t interest him; he’d no stomach for following randy little shites about while they were trying to get their holes, or proving somebody was actually able to walk fine since falling off a ladder. He was a copper, same as he’d always been. When they’d taken the badge away from him, they’d taken his purpose too. He still handled things that needed to be handled, like the thing with Horse, but it wasn’t the same.
Last Orders (The Dublin Trilogy Book 4) Page 13
