by Catie Murphy
She worked her way through the market, stopping at stalls to talk about food, asking about ingredients and traditions. Her phone camera swooped from selfies with the vendors to steady, well-framed shots of her interviewees talking about the family traditions that kept them running a stall at the market generation after generation, or imploring her to try something new they’d recently come up with. Indistinguishable music played in the background, mostly drowned beneath the general noise of the market and Liz’s New England accent narrating as she explored.
The video had come up on its own. Or not, obviously. Elizabeth had clearly set it in advance to post, and one of the website’s automatic refreshes had caught it going live. Simon had thrown himself past Meg, slapping his hands on the keyboard as if he’d prevent the world from seeing the video if he moved fast enough. Then he’d fallen back into his chair, tears streaming down his cheeks as Liz did her job like she’d returned from the dead to haunt him.
Comments were already piling up as the video ended. Meg, slowly, wrote a short blog saying that the announcement about Liz’s death hadn’t been a mistake or a joke, and that she had, unbeknownst to the family, prescheduled the last video for that morning. Simon, weeping, nodded his consent for her to post it, and after it went live, Megan pinned his original death notice to the top of Elizabeth’s page. There were other half-finished posts waiting, but nothing in the queue ready to go. Megan closed the computer and gazed helplessly at the grieving widower.
“You have a job to get to,” he finally said as his tears slowed. Megan stared at him blankly a moment, then remembered the lie she’d told.
“Right. Yeah. I almost forgot. I don’t know, I don’t know if you should be left alone . . .”
He gave her a miserable, watery smile. “Maybe not, but your life can’t be put on hold.” Pain streaked his face again. “Even mine can’t, it seems. Why doesn’t everything just . . . stop?”
“I don’t know. It never does.” Not as many people died in the American military as might be supposed—though injuries were a different story, and training fatalities something else again—but when those deaths happened, and it was someone Megan knew, she always had the same question. How could the world go on, how could she go on, when everything had changed? She always did; people usually did. Knowing that, experiencing it, didn’t help it make any more sense. “Stop all the clocks,” she whispered, and a sob, almost a bitter, broken laugh, burst from Simon.
“Did you know that was written as satire? But yes. Yes. Stop them all. The world can’t go on.” He put his face in his hands and Megan, quietly, left him to his grief.
* * *
A half-familiar voice said, “There’s a sombre face,” as she came down the stairs into the Shelbourne’s lobby. Megan, who’d been paying attention to not tripping on the steps if she’d been paying attention at all, looked up to find Detective Paul Bourke coming through the main doors, which were held open by a trim blonde woman in a Shelbourne uniform. Megan exhaled heavily, shaking off a little of her gloom, and found a half-hearted smile for him.
“I was just visiting Simon. They, um, there was a video, one of Liz’s blogs, that she’d set to post this morning, and he didn’t know. He’s a wreck.”
The detective stepped to the side, beckoning Megan with him to stand in front of the stone fireplace that fronted most of one wall and hid the hotel’s breakfast room, rather grandly called The Lord Mayor’s Lounge. “You don’t look well yourself.”
“Gee, thanks.” Megan shrugged. “Not enough sleep, and it’s no fun intruding on somebody’s grief. Otherwise I’m okay. What are you here for? Did the autopsy report come back? Was it food poisoning?”
“I have a few questions for Dr. Darr, that’s all. How’s your friend, Fionnuala, is it?”
The way he said it made Megan certain he knew perfectly well it was Fionn, and that he knew her last name and probably her shoe size as well. “Well, Simon said last night he’d eaten some of Liz’s dinner, so it didn’t seem likely she’d gotten food poisoning. I told Fionn, and I hope she at least got some sleep after that, although I don’t know, because apparently she was texting our friend Niamh at one in the morning. Or maybe that’s just when Niamh saw it after her show.” Niamh, who, like Orla, hadn’t wanted her name mentioned to the police. Megan smashed her mouth shut, too late.
“Niamh? O’Sullivan? The actress?”
“There are hundreds of Niamhs in Ireland,” Megan said testily. “Why would my friend be Niamh O’Sullivan?” Then, more sullenly, she muttered, “Yeah, Niamh O’Sullivan.”
“She’s deadly,” Bourke said in admiration. “A pain in the arse, but deadly. The woman’s all up in everybody’s business, politics and protests left, right, and centre, but I saw her at the Abbey last season and she walked away with the show. Mad props to her for coming back to do stage work when her film career is on the rise.” He said it the way so many Irish people did, fill-uhm.
“I’ll tell her you’re a fan.”
“You can give her my number,” Bourke said, sounding more cheerful than a man investigating a suspicious death should be.
Then again, Megan supposed he was always involved in that sort of business, and she, after all, wasn’t all that closely associated with the victim. He presumably wouldn’t ask Simon Darr to give someone his number, under the circumstances. “Even if I went around giving her fan phone numbers, I don’t have yours.”
Bourke’s nearly invisible eyebrows rose to make wrinkles in his forehead. “You threw away my card?”
“Oh!” Megan clapped her right hand to her chest, although her crop top certainly didn’t have an inside pocket like her chauffeur’s jacket did, and she supposed that she looked as though she’d been taken by the overwhelming urge to feel herself up. Curdling red, she dropped her hand. “I forgot.”
Paul Bourke turned out to have a movie star grin, a bright white flash that changed middling good looks to a breathtaking attractiveness. The spark lasted after the smile disappeared, a lingering charisma that made Meg suddenly suspect he closed a lot of cases that left the guilty parties not entirely sure why they’d confessed. Maybe she should give Niamh his number after all. Amused, she smiled back, but the expression fell away just as fast. “Did anybody you talked to mention Elizabeth might have been having an affair?”
The detective’s expression snapped straight back into pure professional. “No. Where’d you hear that?” Without giving her a chance to answer, he said, “Niamh O’Sullivan,” as if the connection had already been made clear. Maybe it had, since detecting things was his job. Megan nodded, guilt surging through her at betraying Niamh’s confidence. Bourke glanced upward, like he could see through three hotel floors into Simon Darr’s room. “Did you ask him about it?”
“No. I was going to, but then it just seemed like an awful thing to do.”
“Good. It’s better for me if he’s not prepared for it.” The corner of Bourke’s mouth twitched, a kind of shrug, as he acknowledged, “And you’re right. It is an awful thing to do.”
“Do you get used to it? In your line of work?”
His pale eyebrows drew down and he examined her for a moment, like the question was unexpected and she’d become more interesting for asking it. “It’s uncomfortable, pressing people, especially grieving people, for things they don’t want to talk about, but it’s necessary. I suppose I’m after getting used to it, but it’s easier sometimes than others.”
“Like if you’re sure somebody’s guilty?”
“Or if they’re just an unlikeable bastard.” Bourke’s grin flashed again, less intense than before. “Darr’s a nice enough lad. Don’t go asking him about affairs, though. That’s my job, not yours.”
Megan shook her head. “All I want is to make sure my friend doesn’t lose her restaurant. You can solve the mysteries.” She hesitated. “Is there a mystery?”
“There’s always a mystery when a healthy young person dies unexpectedly. Most of the time, it’s easily solved
. A heart defect or a brain aneurysm. Sometimes undetected cancer.”
“Those don’t usually kill somebody over dinner, though, do they?”
“Not unless there’s an impassioned argument going on, no.” Bourke gave her another smile, this one professional and without the startling effect of the grin. “Text me Niamh O’Sullivan’s number, will you? I’ll want to talk to her about what she saw. Nice to see you again, Miss Malone.”
He left her at the fireplace, taking the stairs up in long strides and showing the young man at their head his police identification, which, like Megan’s own chauffeur’s outfit, got him past the barrier the boy presented between the world and the Shelbourne’s guests.
Megan meandered to the middle of the lobby, watching Bourke disappear around the corner of the stairs, taking the same path she’d just come from, then took out her phone and called Fionn as she left the hotel. “Hey, babe. How are you doing?”
“Shattered.” Fionn sounded it, as if she hadn’t slept all night, or possibly all week. “Our social media has blown up. Half of them are calling for a boycott of the restaurant, another half are horrified and sympathetic, and the last half are the kind of gobshite trolls you get mixed in with any tragedy. That’s too many halves, isn’t it? How are you? Martin spent the whole night going over the books and muttering. He tried not to let me see it, but he’s scared, Meg. I know we’re doing all right, but I haven’t a head for numbers and I’m afraid we’re doing less well than I thought. But how are you?”
“I’m okay. I just ran into Detective Bourke. Were Simon and Liz fighting last night over dinner?” Meg crossed the street into St Stephen’s Green, where traffic sounds were replaced by birdsong and children shrieking happily in the distance.
“He asked me that, too. I don’t know, Meg, I was in the kitchen. Cíara was their waitress, and she said they were grand, all smiles and laughter. God, the poor girl is in bits. She’s only new and she spent the whole evening in tears, wondering if she’d done something wrong. Look, Meg, do you think it would be wrong for the restaurant to open up for a vigil tonight? You should see Molly. She’s knee deep in flowers and consolation notes and her cart’s full of them.”
“Oh really?” Megan turned north, looking in the direction of both the statue and Fionnuala’s restaurant. “I’m only a couple of blocks away. Maybe I could come see. And if you’re going to do a vigil, you, uh, you might not want to cater it. . . .”
Fionn gave a deep, bitter snort right in Megan’s ear. “I don’t think I’d even be allowed to. I just feel like I ought to do something. There are people out there weeping on Molly’s skirts.”
“It’s okay, she’s bronze. She can handle a little saltwater.”
“Megan!”
“All right, all right, sorry. Okay, look, are you at the restaurant? I’ll come over. Ten minutes or so.”
“Bring ice cream,” Fionn said miserably and hung up.
Meg tucked her phone in her pocket and left the park through the magnificent granite arch that led to Dublin’s main touristy shopping area, Grafton Street. It lay wide and open and packed full of pedestrians, giving it a completely different feel from the warren of medieval-to-Georgian streets and alleys that lay literally just beside it.
Meg stopped at one of the gelato shops—almost as ubiquitous as Starbucks—and got chocolate, honeycomb, and wild berry gelato in more-or-less pint-sized boxes. Around the corner, she cut through the excessively high-end Westbury shopping mall, holding her breath because she always had the sense that even the air there was too rarefied and expensive for her to breathe. The mall let out in what Megan thought of as Jewelers’ Row, an alley lined on one side by tiny jewelry shops and on the other by the high wall of one of Dublin’s many, many churches.
Across the street lay the Powerscourt shopping centre, which, two centuries earlier, had been somebody’s very fancy house and was now as high-end a shopping centre as the Westbury Mall. On the other hand, just inside its doors lay a jewelry shop called Gollum’s Precious, and Megan figured anywhere that allowed shops to make Tolkien references wasn’t so exclusive that she had to hold her breath to walk through it. Which was good, because it made the shortest route down to Suffolk Street and Molly Malone.
The buxom statue stood awash in flowers, photographs, and handwritten notes, just as Fionnuala had claimed. Someone had even braided a crown of blue-eyed grass flowers and put it on Molly’s head, although the delicate blooms were already wilting in the morning heat. Almost all the wreaths and bouquets had at least some native Irish flowers in them—purple thistles, bright pink wild roses, even sprigs of the heavy, gorgeously scented yellow gorse that grew in wild hedges all over the country.
Megan crouched, brushing her fingers over some of the tributes, and supposed that Liz Darr had mentioned being fond of local plants at some point. It seemed like such a little thing not to have known, and such a big one all at once.
Most of the notes had simple expressions of sympathy, but a handful spoke of how Elizabeth Darr had changed the writer’s life. One note, written in the fat, loopy handwriting of a teenage girl, told of how the writer had started her own food blog and planned to make a career of it. Others talked about how Liz had inspired them to travel and try new things, and one held a picture of a shy-looking, older woman with Liz, both of them smiling broadly. The woman had never met a celebrity before, and it had taken all her nerve to attend the book signing the picture was from, but since then, she had met dozens of writers and had begun writing herself. Megan wiped her eyes and ran a hand under her nose, not even trying to be surreptitious.
“Is that my ice cream you’re melting all over the ground?”
Megan, still sniffling, stood up and gave Fionnuala a watery smile before looking in to the carrying bag. “It’s not melted yet. It should be soft enough to eat, though.”
“Aw, chicken.” Fionn hugged her. “You all right?”
“Ah, sure, I’m grand so.” Megan sniffled again as she gave the common Irish answer, and Fionnuala looked at her suspiciously. “No, really, I’m okay. I just keep getting taken by surprise at feeling sad. I didn’t know her very well.”
“I cry over total strangers’ cats dying on the internet, so I can’t say that I blame you. Come, we’ll eat the ice cream and you’ll tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know much. What do you know?” Megan put her arm around Fionn’s waist as they went into the restaurant, strangely quiet and hollow with no patrons in it. Fionn got down bowls and spoons, making Meg sniff again, this time with disbelief. “Are we that fancy? I was going to eat out of the cartons.”
“I don’t want wild berry mixed in my cho . . . actually, that sounds really nice.” Fionn scooped ice cream into the bowls anyway, chocolate and wild berry together, and left the honeycomb to melt some more upon the unspoken agreement that it wouldn’t go well with the wild berry. “I texted Niamh last night to wail at her, but she must have been onstage. I know that Martin’s in absolute bits. The club is closed and he’s in a dead panic about finances. The restaurant is on fine financial footing, though.” She sounded determined, if not certain, as she handed Meg a bowl and dug into her own ice cream, eyelids drooping with bliss at the first bite. “So what’s the story?”
“Well,” Meg said around a spoonful of ice cream, “the good news is, I think you probably are off the hook for food poisoning.”
“Oh thank God. I mean, I thought so, but—how do you know?”
Meg put down the spoon and took a deep breath. “Because Niamh says Elizabeth was having an affair, which might mean she ended up with a bad case of murder.”
CHAPTER SIX
“Elizabeth Darr was having an affair? Jesus, and I thought she had everything. She was rich, she was smart, she was pretty—what hope have the rest of us if she couldn’t have a happy marriage? Who was sh—what the hell?” A metallic bang from the kitchen preceded a thunderous, teeth-jarring crash, like every pot in the building was crashing to the floor. A high-pi
tched yelp of fear rang through the other noise.
Both women shot to their feet, with Meg just a step behind Fionn as they ran into the kitchen.
A rack lay against the counters at an angle, all of its pots and pans scattered across the tile floor. A lid, still rattling, spun a few more times and clattered to a standstill. A torn paper bag spilled a sandwich over the counter, just in front of the fallen rack. The silence echoed and rang in Megan’s ears after the enormous noise. Fionnuala gripped the doorknob with one hand and a counter with the other, cords standing out in her neck and her whole body swaying slightly. “What the hell.”
“Did you leave the door open?” Megan ducked under her arm and edged forward into the chaos. At least the pans were all empty; there could have been food spilled everywhere as well as pots.
“Of course not! And I came in through the front this morning, because I wanted to see Mol . . .” Fionnuala trailed off uncertainly. “I didn’t lock up last night, though. Syzmon was the last one out. I suppose he could have . . . but he’s never not locked up before.”
“Last night wasn’t exactly your usual night at the shop,” Megan breathed. Something ahead of her squeaked and she froze, then crouched slowly to pick up a frying pan by the handle.
Fionn’s voice shot sky-high. “If that’s a rat, I’m dead.”
“If it’s a rat, I’ll tell you to look away until it’s dealt with so you’ll have plausible deniability.” Megan inched forward, transferring the frying pan to her left hand, and reached out to haul the kitchen rack aside in one tremendous heave.
