Dead in Dublin

by Catie Murphy

  Megan squinted at the actress. “I think you’d be a better criminal than I would be.”

  “Of course I would be. Surely part of being a good criminal is being able to act. Therefore, I’m better equipped for crime than a—what were you? Field medic?”

  “And driver.”

  “Not,” Niamh said, “a combination routinely expected to lie and hide facts, as both actors and criminals are encouraged to do. And you’d better not go ask Simon if he’s been selling drugs, because if he has been, I bet he’ll be on the next flight out of Ireland and then Detective Bourke will have a word or two for you indeed.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I should—” Megan looked for a clock, though she knew it couldn’t be much past half five. She caught one of the lads who’d come in earlier, now at a table on the other side of the room, looking intently their way, trying to figure out if Niamh was who he thought she was. Caught, he blushed and looked away. Megan murmured, “You’ve been recognized,” and Niamh nodded without looking toward the group. “Anyway, maybe I should call Bourke again, though. I’d think he would see this as kind of urgent. But I guess he’d have called me back, if it was. All right, okay so, never mind Simon anymore. What’s the story on Rafferty?”

  “Nobody liked the man,” Niamh said promptly. “Fionnuala did, maybe, but no one else. It wasn’t that he cheated anyone, though his fist is as tight as me grandmother’s ar—” She cleared her throat suddenly and finished with “. . . armpit . . . ,” making Megan laugh out loud. The lads looked over and one of them smiled, but Megan turned her attention back to Niamh as she continued. “And he never paid anybody a penny beyond what they were agreed upon. It’s that he treated people badly, though. High and mighty, like, as if they were below him, and him only a boy from Bray. He must have been good at charming people, though, because he got the capital to start half a dozen businesses, including Canan’s.”

  “Orla’s like that,” Megan said thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t say anybody likes her after they’ve met her more than twice, but the first couple of times she’s wonderful. She makes you laugh, and makes you feel important, and like she’s trustworthy.”

  “Is she not trustworthy?”

  “I guess she is. She’s a skinflint, though. Not one red cent goes missing under her watch and she could squeeze blood from a stone.”

  “Like himself.” Niamh nodded. “It doesn’t help narrow down enemies, though, when no one liked your man.”

  “Well, it probably narrows it down to Canan’s employees, doesn’t it? It was somebody who could get into the premises. I didn’t have the impression the place had been broken in to.”

  Niamh grinned. “And you know so much about breaking in to places?”

  “Well—”

  Niamh’s grin turned to a laugh. “We’re only a few steps away. Shall we go have a look?”

  “Sure, because that won’t be suspicious at all.” Megan finished her lemonade in a few teeth-achingly cold swallows. “Let’s go.”

  They rose together, Megan making some effort to keep herself between Niamh and the lads across the room so they wouldn’t get a good look at her, but the actress stood three inches taller and wore heels besides, which left her pretty well towering over Megan. A burst of noise came from the lads, indicating they’d seen her clearly, and though Niamh didn’t look their way, from the activity behind them as they left, it was clear they would be followed down to the hotel lobby beneath the Library Bar. Megan ducked her head toward Niamh, breathing, “Do we make a break for it?”

  “Not without interference, or it just makes it worse. I can—” She stopped at the front desk, pulling off her hat, and the young woman behind the desk went electric with excitement. Niamh gave her a disarming smile and leaned across the desk. “There’s a load of lads about to come down and make a fuss. Could you ring security and ask them to be a bit in the way of the door for two minutes, just so I’ve a way out?”

  The girl nodded, fumbling the phone in her nervous delight. Niamh winked broadly at her, put her cloche back on, caught Megan’s hand, and scurried out the door as a couple of large, black-suited men and one large, black-suited woman appeared in the lobby. The desk attendant communicated to them in what sounded like dolphin squeals, and all three of the security people rubber-necked to get a glimpse of Niamh O’Sullivan as she waved and hurried around the nearest corner. Megan would have collapsed breathlessly against the wall, but Niamh pulled her along. “We can’t stop where they might see us if they come out. Come on, we’ll go the long way around to Canan’s.”

  She dragged Megan down past a pub called the Stag’s Head, with a placard, now a few years old, proudly proclaiming it the best pub in Ireland, and around the corner onto Dame Lane, not to be confused with Dame Street, the Dame Tavern, or the general Dame District.

  “There.” Niamh let go of Megan’s hand and shook herself, like a cat tidying itself after an unexpected fall. “We ought to be quick, but we can get to Canan’s without crossing into their line of sight now. Acht, look at those ones. Ah, to be young, single, and prepared to get utterly car parked.” She nodded down the street at a crowd of young women, one of whom, Megan thought, was the heavily eyebrowed girl from Thursday evening. She probably lived in the area, and although she appeared to have misplaced her eager young men, none of the gaggle were lacking for other admirers.

  “You are young and single,” Megan pointed out, “and the only thing keeping you from being utterly car parked is your self-restraint. And the fact that you have a show in ninety minutes.”

  “I am the very model of a modern major . . . teetotaler, except I’m never that.” They rounded the far corner, having gone around the block, and went past a gourmet doughnut shop that made Megan miss boring, old, American-style grocery store doughnuts every time she saw one. Niamh saw her longing look and laughed. “Do I need to buy you a banoffee doughnut, Megan?”

  Megan shuddered. “All I want is a regular, normal apple fritter that costs a buck forty-nine, not one of these giant messes that costs four dollars.”

  “I thought all you ex-pats would be happy there were finally doughnut shops here.”

  “Those aren’t doughnuts,” Megan said sadly. “They’re frostings and candy piled on bread. The dough isn’t even right.”

  “It’s hard to be you,” Niamh said in the same tone Megan had used earlier, and Megan, equally somberly, said, “It is,” before saying, “There’s police tape all around Canan’s, Niamh, how are we supposed to go peek and see if it looks broken-in-to? Oh, God, it’s worse than that, they’ve got gardaí watching the place!”

  Niamh took off her hat and fluffed her hair. “I’ll distract them. You go around to the back and see if it looks jimmied.”

  Megan whispered, “I am a terrible criminal” at her but broke away and crossed the street before the guards had time to notice they were together. Niamh pulled out her phone, tapping idly at it as she approached Suffolk Street, and as Megan scooted out of sight, she heard somebody say, “Isn’t that—?!” in a carrying stage whisper. By the time she reached the back gate of St Andrew’s Church, she could hear that a small crowd had grown in front, near Molly Malone, and how Niamh’s warm, welcoming laugh bounced around the square as she flirted and chatted.

  Good thing, too. Megan glanced around half-heartedly to see if there were any obvious security cameras, then, gracelessly, climbed up the black, cast-iron gate and wedged her foot between its narrow spikes to give herself enough lift to clear them. She landed in a crouch, feeling somewhere between superheroic and super-idiotic, and snuck over to examine the church’s back door.

  It had three visible locks. One looked as old as the church itself, rusty but still formidable, and the other two were increasingly newer—one had probably been there decades and the third had likely been added sometime after the now-closed tourist office had moved into the church premises. At 6:30 p.m. on a bright June evening, there was plenty of light to see the locks by. Megan concluded immediately that she’d never k
now if the oldest lock had been tampered with or not; it had scratches that obviously went back nearly two centuries, just as the church did itself. None of them looked particularly new, but she didn’t even know if that lock was still in use, so the age of them struck her as irrelevant.

  Scrapes along the door next to the second-oldest lock, though, did look new, like they hadn’t really had time to weather. The third, newest, lock, was unblemished. Megan reached for the door handle, just to try it, had a momentary skip of her heart, and, feeling like a seasoned criminal, wrapped her shirt around her hand before testing the handle, so she wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.

  Unsurprisingly, it didn’t shift. Megan guiltily slipped back out under the police tape, went around to the front of the church, and extracted Niamh from her crowd of admirers. The actress said, “Well?” breathlessly as they made their way up Suffolk Street toward Grafton.

  A little smile curved across Megan’s lips. “Know what? I’d better ask Fionn how many of those locks are in use, because I think somebody did break in to Canan’s recently.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Fionn replied a few minutes later, managing to sound baffled even through the medium of phone texts. We use two locks, she said. Why?

  Megan started texting back an answer, then remembered that phones had the astonishing ability to allow people to communicate with their voices and called Fionn, who picked up saying, “What madness is this, calling when you could text?” She sounded tired and unhappy, but at least a thread of teasing made it through the question.

  “I talk faster than I type. I was just wondering how many keys you would absolutely have to have to get into the restaurant without obviously breaking anything.” Megan tapped the speaker button so she and Niamh, leaning under the awning of one of the Grafton Street banks, could both hear Fionn’s answer.

  “Oh, God. One, maybe. We use the two newest locks. The old one still works, but the key is so awkward, we’re always after forgetting to bring it, so we stopped using it. The new one is the best of the lot, but we use the other one just the same. It’s one of those you could break through with a credit card, except it’s stiff as a corpse and I’ve never met a credit card up to the task. Why?” she asked again, voice suddenly thin with worry. “Is it about Martin’s killer?”

  “Yeah. We—Niamh and I—” Niamh waved, like Fionnuala could see her—”were thinking it had to be somebody who worked there. Who all has keys?”

  “Me, Martin, Syzmon, Daisy—” Fionn named two of the other lead chefs, one of whom was Irish-born and one who wasn’t, but not the ones suggested by their names—“Syzmon locks up most nights. And Noel, who manages the club. But only he and Martin and I had keys to the back door. Everyone else uses the kitchen door, which has the same key as the new lock, plus a couple of others, and it’d be—I guess nothing’s impossible to break through, but it’s a massive, new steel door and you’d have to really want to go through it.”

  “Did any of them really hate Martin?”

  “The detective asked me that already,” Fionn said wearily. “He and Noel didn’t get on well because, Noel said, Martin was always sticking his fingers in how the club should be managed, when it was Noel who had the experience. I must have told him a hundred times to just let it roll off. That’s what I did when Martin had an opinion about how the restaurant should be run. But Noel had a harder time of it, maybe because he’s a man and—” She broke off, but Niamh snickered.

  “And not as accustomed to ignoring men who don’t know as much about something as he does?”

  “I didn’t say it.” Fionn’s voice turned regretful. “Are you two ladies out having fun without me?”

  “If you call trying to solve a murder fun, I guess so,” Megan replied. “Should we come over?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I know it’s only half six, but Alex gave me one of his sleeping pills. He probably shouldn’t have, but I’ve slept for shite the past couple nights and I’m utterly wrecked. Shattered. I’d be asleep if I weren’t talking to you.”

  “Suggesting we should get off the phone and let you sleep,” Megan said. “I’ll call you tomorrow if we’ve learned anything, all right?”

  “Grand so.” Fionn hung up. Meg tucked her phone back into her pocket and leaned her head against the grey stone wall behind her.

  “So Noel didn’t like Martin but had a key to both locks, which means he wouldn’t have to break in, and nobody else didn’t like him enough to mention.” Wherever Meg was going with that, the thought got interrupted by her phone ringing again. She pulled it back out, eyebrows lifted, and mouthed, “It’s Bourke” to Niamh, as if Niamh couldn’t see the screen for herself, and as if Bourke could hear Meg even though she hadn’t answered the phone yet.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Niamh declared. “If you get caught having snuck under the police barrier, I was nowhere to be found.”

  Megan grinned, waved at Niamh, and watched the actress saunter off toward the Abbey Theatre as she answered the phone with a “Good evening, Detective.”

  “Ms. Malone.” Bourke sounded like a man who hadn’t slept. “I only just had time to listen to your message. It sounded important.”

  “I found—well, one of my coworkers found—a USB drive in the car I drove the Darrs in on Thursday. It belonged to Liz Darr, and I think it might be useful to you. Can I—is there somewhere I could drop it off safely?”

  Bourke’s tone sharpened. “Did you look at it?”

  “Of course I looked at it. How else would I have known it was Liz’s?”

  A momentary silence met that irrefutable response before Bourke said, “Where are you right now?”

  “On Grafton Street. I was about to head home.”

  “Could you stop by the station first? I’ll meet you there.”

  “I could, but the USB is at home.” She heard Bourke make a faintly impatient sound and snorted. “Well, I hadn’t heard from you and I didn’t want to lose it somewhere.”

  “No, that’s fair enough. Would you mind me coming by?”

  “Not as long as you’re willing to take my dog for a walk.”

  “Dog, really? I’d have thought you a cat person.”

  “This may come as a surprise, Detective, but cats and dogs are not actually opposites. One can like them both. And also, it’s not really my dog, but it’s complicated.” Megan paused. “So you’re a cat person, then.”

  Bourke chuckled. “I am so. All right, Ms. Malone, if you’ll give me your address, I’ll see you in about half an hour.”

  * * *

  Somewhat to Megan’s surprise, Paul Bourke arrived at her apartment just after she did, barely twenty-five minutes later. He took in her expression, said, “Oye of little faith,” and Megan, caught, shrugged as she unlocked the street-side door.

  “You can’t blame me. That mañana joke is real. I’ve learned to ask which Thursday if somebody says they’ll be by on Thursday to install something.”

  “Mañana joke?” Bourke looked curiously at her, though she had the sense he was also aware of the entire street scene around them, from gym jockeys across the road to a young couple arguing about their relationship a few doors down. Megan wouldn’t really have paid attention to them without his presence and wondered if being a cop tired a person out, noticing everything all the time. Bourke didn’t look tired; in fact, he looked fit and interested in the warm afternoon sunlight, waiting on her to explain her comment.

  “I’m starting to think only Americans tell that joke,” she said under her breath. Bourke gestured, inviting it, and she sighed, inviting him up the stairs in turn, as she told the joke over her shoulder and unlocked her apartment door. “An American comes to visit Europe. He’s just been to Spain and now he’s come to Ireland, and he says to this Irishman he meets, ‘One of the fascinating things I’ve learned about Spanish culture is that there’s a sense of ‘mañana’, of tomorrow, things can be put off until tomorrow. We really don’t have that in the States. Does Ireland have any
thing like it?’ And the Irishman thinks about it carefully and finally says—” Megan put on her best Irish accent— “ ‘There is so, but . . . without that terrible sense of urgency.’ ”

  Bourke laughed, surprising her again. “There’s more truth to that than I might like to admit. They say there are two kinds of cultures: event-oriented and time-oriented. Ireland’s event-oriented, meaning the meeting is scheduled for seven, so people start getting ready for it at seven, but America’s time-oriented, which means the meeting is scheduled for seven and you’re late if you show up after that. It’s a culture clash that neither side deals with well.”

  “Huh. I wonder if remembering that will help.”

  The detective’s smile flashed. “Probably not.”

  “Probably not. Welcome to my humble abode. Hey, Mama.” Megan went to rub Mama Dog’s ears, bemused as the little terrier’s eyes narrowed when Bourke entered the room. “Nah, he’s all right, girl. He won’t eat your puppies or anything. You ready to go for a walk?”

  Mama hunched lower in the bed and tucked the puppies closer to her, making a circular nest of her belly and paws while she glared at the detective. The puppies, visibly better at raising their heads than they had been that morning, lifted their little snoots into the air, sniffing and making interested, squeaking noises.

  Bourke, his eyebrows elevated, glanced at Megan, then moved past her to hitch up his trouser legs, allowing him to crouch and offer Mama the back of his hand to sniff. “Hello, lovely girl. What’s her name?”

  “She doesn’t have one. She’s a stray. She had her puppies in Canan’s the other night and I’ve taken them until a rescue home opens up. Fionn obviously can’t have dogs in the restaurant.”

  “And you haven’t named her yet? You’re a hard soul, Megan Malone. Aww, there’s a good girl,” he said as Mama moved her head forward a fraction of an inch to give his hand a long-distance sniff. Then she retreated, hunkered low again. Bourke draped his hands between his knees, gazing at the protective dog. “She doesn’t like men?”