“Look,” said Martyn, “I can’t help you here. It was eighteen years ago. If that piece of paper says he was on the ship, he was on the ship. If you need anything else, you’re going to have to take it up with the company’s lawyers.”
Wilson put his hand into his inside pocket and pulled out one of his business cards. “OK, well, if you think of anything, anything at all—”
“You have a lovely family, Mr Martyn.”
Wilson and Martyn both turned to look at Agent Dove. It was an odd non-sequitur. The small-talk section of the interview had been about five minutes ago; Wilson had been all set to leave. Agent Dove had a broad smile on her face again. She pointed at the picture sitting on the shelf behind Martyn’s desk. In it, Martyn stood with his tiny wife and three obese children. They collectively looked like they could make an all-you-can-eat buffet’s owner break into tears just by walking in.
Martyn turned to look at it, as if his family being considered lovely was news to him. The chair made a different, if equally pained squeal as he did so. “Well, yes, of course. I mean, thanks. That’s a couple of years old now. John is off to university this year and Sharon is doing the Leaving Cert.”
“Really? Wow.”
Wilson was fairly certain Dove didn’t even know what the Leaving Cert was, but she still acted massively impressed. “You have a sister too, don’t you?”
Martyn turned to look at Dove again, suspicion now writ large across his face. “I… yes, I… how do you know that?”
Dove blew right by the question. “She lives in Sunriver, Oregon, doesn’t she? An absolutely beautiful part of the world. Have you visited? I hear the fishing is to die for.”
Martyn held his mouth open for a second, his large tongue washing around his teeth. “No,” he said. “Kathy comes home every few years but we’ve not been over yet.”
“Right. Well, I guess her and Pete are kept pretty busy with the landscaping business and all. She does the books for him, I saw on their website. Their son Fiachra helps out at the weekends too – a real family business.”
Martyn looked at Wilson, who shrugged. He was none the wiser on where this was heading.
The smile remained fixed on Dove’s face as she reached down and pulled a can of Diet Coke from her bag with her prosthetic arm. “Do you mind if I have a drink before we go? I’m parched.”
“Sure.” Martyn sounded like he hadn’t been less sure of anything in his life. He was looking at the metallic hand now; you couldn’t not. It just drew your basic human curiosity. Agent Dove cracked the can open, produced a straw from inside her jacket and placed it in.
“I knew a guy once. He had a landscaping business, a lot like the one Kathy and Paul have. It was going great until one day – BAM – the IRS took an interest.” Dove carefully took a sip of her drink. “Full audit. Sorry, do you know who the IRS are? They’re our tax people in the States – mean SOBs.” She said it with a smile and then took another sip and blinked one of those slow blinks. “Caught him doing a couple of jobs cash in hand, fucked him royally in the ass. I mean hard. He ended up going to prison.”
Martyn looked at Wilson again, his eyes wide. “Is she trying to intimidate me?”
“Oh heavens, no,” said Dove, the smile still unmoving on her face. “Just a little chit chat. His wife got deported – back to, y’know, wherever. Daughter ended up turning tricks on street corners, last I heard. Real shame, she was a sweet kid.”
Martyn stood up. “I’d like you to leave.”
“And I’d like you to sit down and tell us the truth right fucking now.” Dove’s tone didn’t change; it was the same as when she had asked about his family.
Marty rubbed his hand across his chest again. “I can’t be dealing with this. You can call our lawyers if you want to—”
“Oh, I won’t call anyone’s lawyers. But I will walk out that door and make a phone call. One phone call. That’s all it’ll take. Hey, don’t worry about it. Maybe your brother-in-law is the only landscape gardener on the planet to put everything through the books. He probably doesn’t have a team of dirt-cheap Mexicans working for him illegally. Maybe it is just him, with little Fiachra at the weekends. ICE will find out. You know the ICE, right? Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They make the IRS look like the fucking Smurfs. They skull-fuck people just for fun.”
Dove was the most unnerving swearer Wilson had ever seen. It was like hearing Mary Poppins threatening to stab some toerag.
Martyn leaned heavily against the desk, rubbing his hand up and down his sweaty face. He looked like he was about to be sick.
“Your sister, her husband, little Fiachra, they could all go to prison. Fiachra probably wouldn’t get much time, but it depends where they put him. One call and he’s in with some of the worst scum on earth. I mean real trash. Imagine how sweet little Fiachra will be when he comes out of there? Assuming he does.”
Dove turned to Wilson. “Am I saying that right? Fee-ca-ra?”
Wilson nodded.
“Such a beautiful language you have. It has a wonderful lilting quality, doesn’t it?” She looked back to Martyn. “I want to know who asked you to put a dead man on your manifest. I also want to know if they asked you to help sneak a woman out of the country. She’d have been thirty-one at the time, African American, about five-foot-three. Her name was Simone Delamere but I’m sure she would have been travelling under something else. I want to know all of this, and I want to know it now – or else I go out that door and make the one and only phone call it’ll take. So, Mr Martyn, I want you to think long and hard about the next words that come out of your mouth, as they will have a significant effect on lots of people’s lives.”
Martyn said nothing. His face appeared to have gone even redder and his lips were clenched together so tightly that the skin around his mouth was turning white. He leaned on the desk and looked across at Dove like he was building up to saying something momentous.
As it turned out, the momentous thing could best be described as “Annnggghhh”.
He clutched at his chest and fell backwards, causing his long-suffering office chair to collapse under him, sending him sprawling onto the floor.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Here, mister. Excuse me, mister.”
“Phil, don’t!”
Paul and Phil had been watching Jacob Harrison for four days. Four uneventful, extremely dull days. They had split shifts to keep an eye on him pretty much around the clock, Paul taking 6pm to 6am and Phil the early shift. That afternoon, Paul had shown up a few hours early, mainly because all he had in the flat for company was the dog, and Maggie wasn’t much of a talker. The heating was also rubbish and, combined with the need to keep windows open due to Maggie’s vicious canine farts, it meant it was permanently freezing. To be fair, her presence meant that the MCM Investigations surveillance truck was now also freezing, but on the upside, the smell wafting out of the back window did put people off trying to buy an ice cream. It turns out a big sign saying “Go away, we do not sell ice cream” was utterly ineffectual, if not actually counterproductive in stopping people asking, but nobody wanted to buy an ice cream off a truck that smelled like a bad case of the trots.
“Here, mister,” repeated Phil.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
Phil, between his permanent state of pre-fatherhood stress and his comedown from going cold turkey from energy drinks from a country that hadn’t existed for thirty years, wasn’t sleeping much. Instead, he was watching an awful lot of late-night TV. He’d seen one programme where a supposedly smart professor fella from Oxford or some such had talked about how we might all see colours entirely differently. It was called Is My Blue Your Blue? Phil had been outraged – blue was blue. Paul had made the mistake of trying to explain what the professor had presumably meant, namely that each individual’s perception of the colour spectrum could be entirely different.
The man walking by the van pulled out his earphones. “What?”
“What colour
is that postbox?”
“What?”
“What colour is that postbox?”
“What does it look like? It’s green, ye dozy prick!”
Phil turned triumphantly to Paul. “See, it’s green. You and your ‘It might look blue to that fella.’”
“I was speaking hypothetically.”
“Well, I was just speaking to the actual bloke, and he said it was green. That’s because it is green. Green is green. My great-grandad didn’t fight in the War of Independence so that a hundred years later, some Open University spanner from Oxford could start telling us that green isn’t green.”
Luckily for the state of Paul’s mental health, Jacob Harrison chose this moment to emerge from the doors of his apartment building.
“Hello,” said Paul. “Old ‘Shagger’ Harrison is on the move!”
“Yeah. That’s a nice, definitely green blazer he’s got on there too.”
It was. For the past few days, on those rare occasions when Harrison had put in an appearance at all, he’d been wearing sweatpants and a hoodie. They’d observed him answering the door to a pizza delivery, two Chinese deliveries and an Indian. He had disappointingly failed to even attempt to have sex with any of those people. He’d been unshaven and, on at least one occasion, his clothing had shown evidence of the last takeaway while he had been paying for the next one. So it was with some excitement that Paul noted that he was now freshly shaved, smartly dressed and walking with a sense of purpose. In other words…
“He’s looking like a man looking to get laid!”
Normally, following a suspect who was on foot while you were in a vehicle would be a problem, but luckily the traffic was just warming up for rush hour so it rarely moved much faster than walking pace. They followed him down the Adelaide Road until he eventually took a right into a pedestrianised shopping area. Wordlessly, Phil hopped out of the van and continued the follow on foot, while Paul turned the corner and, after a frustrating ten minutes of circling, managed to nab a space just as a Tesco delivery van was pulling out.
He was about to text Phil his location when the passenger door opened and Phil got back in.
“Well?”
Phil shook his head. “Nah, he’s not up to anything.”
“Shit.”
“He’s just gone for a massage.”
Paul’s head snapped around. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Grab the camera bag. Which building is it? If we’re lucky there might be a window we can get an angle on.”
“What are ye talking about?”
“Phil, it might be a ‘massage’ massage.”
Phil gave Paul a blank expression, a look he had entirely mastered.
“Y’know, it might have ‘a happy ending’.”
“What? Like when the boy gets the girl?”
“Yeah, something like that. Let’s go.”
“What about Maggie?”
Paul looked into the back of the van. Maggie was fast asleep, doing that weird twitching thing she did. In normal circumstances, people say it looks like a dog is chasing cars in their sleep. In Maggie’s case, it could be anything. From what little Paul knew of her past, Maggie had been a police drugs dog until she had somehow consumed some LSD. Her behaviour since, if one was being really diplomatic, could be described as ‘erratic’. Paul had made the mistake of buying a lava lamp for his new apartment; she had stared at it for three days solid and growled every time he tried to turn it off. Then she’d smashed it and drank the contents.
“Probably best to leave her,” Paul said. “She doesn’t like being woken up.” This was true, it being one of the many things that could put Maggie in one of her moods. One of these moods could often result in nightmares, mostly for whoever was unlucky enough to have put her in the mood in the first place.
Paul and Phil weaved through cars to get to the far side of the street. Paul could feel the adrenaline surging through him. “This could be it, Phil, we might finally have the bastard. We catch him at it, the case collapses, the Kelleher brothers are vanquished and Brigit will see that I was right.”
“Don’t get excited, Paulie.”
“Why not?”
“Well, things just never work out that well for us.”
“You’re such a pessimist. I’m telling you, after wading through all this shit, I think we’ve finally got to the gold!”
“Ah, but what if what you think is gold is actually only your perception of the colour gold and it’s actually an entirely different colour?”
“Shut up, Phil.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-four minutes later…
Paul limped as quickly down the alleyway as he could, with Phil walking alongside, keeping an eagle eye out behind them for any signs of pursuit.
“All, I was saying was…”
“Phil, I don’t want to talk about it.” Paul winced. His hip was bloody killing him.
“I’m just saying…”
“What did I just say?”
“Where we went wrong…”
“Didn’t I just say I don’t want to talk about it?”
“You stink, by the way.”
“Likewise.” Paul looked at his watch. The last twenty-four minutes had not gone well…
Manny’s Massage was on the second floor of a building, above a shop called Eclectica, part of a relatively small shopping complex. There was also a convenience store, a chemist, a couple of clothing stores, a German restaurant, an interior designer and a chandelier shop. Beside the chandelier shop was a unit to rent. Paul wondered what had been there that had proven less popular than chandeliers, German cuisine and whatever it was Eclectica sold.
They scouted around but quickly determined that the only entrance to Manny’s Massage appeared to be through the shop.
They huddled quickly.
“Right,” said Paul, “leave this to me. We need to get up there, and then I can bust in and get a picture of Harrison in the act.”
“What act?”
Paul ignored the question. He didn’t have time to explain to Phil the different interpretations of what a massage could consist of, particularly pertaining to which body parts were being “relaxed”.
The bell above the door of Eclectica tinkled as Paul entered. After a moment, he heard it tinkle again. He winced internally. He hadn’t told Phil specifically not to come in with him, which meant he had.
As he walked towards the counter, Paul noticed a beaded curtain to the right, behind which was a flight of stairs. This meant that the woman behind the counter, who had long white hair and an unnerving, spacey grin, must be some kind of receptionist. Her facial expression put Paul in mind of someone who had been constipated for a week and for whom the levee had just blissfully broken. She gave off a vibe of exhausted ecstasy. Eclectica was unlike any shop Paul had ever been in, mainly because it seemed to specialise in selling stuff that no other shop would sell. It had a lot of things made out of beads or bamboo, and some pottery that had that authentic, not-quite-able-to-sit-flat-on-a-table look to it. It was an artisan shop, according to the sign on the wall, although that sign appeared to also be for sale, so it was hard to trust. They also sold incense, pebbles and wind chimes. As far as Paul could figure out, the wind chime had been invented specifically for deaf people who really hated their neighbours. In that regard, it was also the most useful thing in the shop. What do you get the person who has everything? Pebbles, apparently.
“Hello,” said Paul.
“Greetings,” said the woman, with hands placed together and a bow. She was speaking in that sort of posh, stoned voice that only exists in films for women who appear out of nowhere to pass on expository information.
“Lovely place you have here.”
“Blessings on you.”
“Yeah. Likewise. I was wondering, can I get up to the massage place through here?”
“You may, yes. If you have an appointment.”
“Ah, I don’t. Could I go up a
nd make one?”
The woman shook her head. “No. You have to ring to get one.”
“I see. Have you got the number?”
The woman took a card from beside the register and, with her head bowed, held it out to him in both palms.
Paul took it, throwing in a bow in return, as he felt it was expected. “And is it, y’know, full service?”
“Oh yes.”
Paul looked at the woman closely. It was hard to judge much from her face. He guessed she might maintain the same contented expression if she was on fire.
Behind him, Paul could hear Phil colliding with something. If he broke it, Paul was not paying for it.
“OK, so I’ll ring up and make an appointment then,” said Paul.
“Namaste.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Paul then went outside, closely followed by Phil.
“Do you reckon it’s money laundering?”
“It must be,” said Paul. “Nothing else makes sense.”
“They’ve got a bottle of water in there that contains essence of rocks. Is that not just sand?”
“I dunno,” said Paul, who had fished out his mobile and was dialling the number on the card.
On the third ring, someone answered. “Greetings, Manny’s Massage.”
He recognised the voice and turned to look in the window of the shop. The white-haired woman behind the counter was now on the phone.
“Hi, I’m the guy who was just in your shop.”
“Oh. Hello.”
She gave him a happy wave through the window.
“Yes. Hi. I was wondering if it would be possible to book myself in for a massage?”
“I’m afraid we’re very booked up. The only gaps in the diary are for emergency massages.”
Last Orders (The Dublin Trilogy Book 4) Page 15
