by Catie Murphy
“All right, Ms. Malone.” Bourke smiled and stepped back, but she reached for his hand without imagining she would catch it. Nor did she, but he stopped, and she said, “What’s going to happen to Simon?”
“He’ll probably do time for drug running, unless you’re wrong about him being only tangentially involved with the laundering mess. If he knows anything, he might be able to make a deal. He wouldn’t be like our local lads, too afraid of the gangs to say what he knows. I’ll stop by the hotel and tell the Dempseys what’s happened,” Bourke promised. “Your friend Fionnuala already knows that Mr. Rafferty’s killer has been arrested.”
“Oh, deadly. That means Nee knows, too.” Megan hadn’t realized, until she spoke, that she’d been subconsciously trying to figure out how to explain everything to Niamh and Fionnuala and also get sleep that night. Learning she didn’t have to was an unexpected relief.
The paramedic touched her shoulder. “We should go now, Ms. Malone.”
“Right. Okay.” Megan, stiff with pain, climbed into the ambulance and waggled her fingers in adieu as the doors closed on Detective Bourke. The paramedic checked her reflexes and reactions while she phoned Cillian from work, and he promised to pick up the company’s car from Bray Head and collect her as soon as possible.
An X-ray at the local hospital proved her back was bruised and swollen but nothing was broken, and Megan was waiting at the door when Cillian arrived ninety minutes later. With his curling black hair and blue eyes, he looked the part of a superhero as he strode up to get her, and Megan, amused, told him so. He said, “Up, up, and away,” and instead of expecting her to tell him everything that had happened, he kept up a cheerful chatter about his new niece the entire drive back into Dublin. He even took Mama Dog for a walk when they got to Megan’s apartment, while Megan, rather mechanically, found herself a pint of ice cream to eat, because it was easier than anything else available in her flat.
Cillian dropped Mama off and told Megan to take care, although, she thought, he could just as easily have been talking to the dog. It seemed like good advice, though, so against all good sense, Megan gathered Mama and the two puppies up and put them onto her bed before crawling into it herself. Only after she was in it did she remember she hadn’t changed into pyjamas and that, in fact, she was still wearing Paul Bourke’s suit jacket.
Megan, smiling, whispered, “I’m definitely not keeping you” and fell asleep to the comfort of three warm bodies curled against hers.
Megan & the rest of her lot will return in more Dublin Driver Mysteries soon! Watch for DEATH ON THE GREEN by Catie Murphy coming your way in September 2020.
Please turn the page for a quick peek at DEATH ON THE GREEN!
CHAPTER ONE
Lou MacDonald lay facedown in the hazard pond, his pink shirt billowing and puffing with air as the water dragged him under.
A baffled silence rolled over the little group who crested the small hill to find him there. They were mostly fans, men and women who had braved a soft, not-quite-raining September morning for the chance to watch aging PGA champion Martin Walsh play a casual game across the green. The soft-voiced, good-natured murmuring that had come with watching a world-class golfer—even one past his prime—couldn’t stand up to the shock of a death on the green. The entire gathering stood rigid with shock, no one able to even imagine what they should do.
Goosebumps shivered over Megan Malone’s spine and arms. She didn’t even belong there really. She was just Martin Walsh’s employee, hired to drive him and his wife around for the ten days they were in Dublin. She knew almost nothing about golf, but Martin had invited her to walk along the course after dropping his wife, Heather, off at her golf course, farther north on the little flat island in Dublin Bay. Megan, always preferring to go for a walk than sit idly in the car for hours at a time, had come along willingly. She felt her black-and-white chauffeur’s uniform marked her as the help, but as far as Walsh’s fans were concerned, being in his employ meant she belonged to some secret league they couldn’t hope to aspire to and they kept a respectful distance.
His caddie, a man half again as large as Walsh himself, was pleasant, especially after Megan offered to help lug clubs. That got her into his good books, but he’d turned down the offer, and since his job was being at Walsh’s side, he didn’t have much else to say to her.
So Megan had trailed along with the group, watching them from the outside rather than being a part of it. Not that she minded. Getting a glimpse of people’s lives from the outside was part of why she loved her job as a driver.
Usually, though, those glimpses didn’t end with a dead man floating in the middle of one of Ireland’s trickiest water hazards.
Lou MacDonald, a big, friendly man, had been less impressed than the fans, and more open than the caddies. He’d chatted her up at the clubhouse, fascinated to hear how an American had come to be driving limousines and town cars in Ireland. The short version, Megan had told him, was that she had citizenship through her grandfather, so they couldn’t keep her out. He’d laughed and she’d offered to tell him the long version as they walked around the greens, but MacDonald waved her off with a promise that he might join the group on the last few holes, if the weather warmed up a little. Otherwise, he was more content to sit with a tumbler of whiskey than tromp across the damp greens on a misty Irish morning.
It seemed absolutely impossible that he could be drowned in a pond at the fifteenth, when they’d left him in the cozy clubhouse less than two hours earlier. And yet there he was, sinking lower into the pond while everyone stared in dismay.
Megan finally jolted toward the water, jumping over the low bank into the pond with her knees well bent, to keep from landing hard in unexpected shallows. Freezing water splashed up as she landed deeper than she expected, soaking her all the way to her bra.
She straightened, gasping, and lurched forward, struggling through hip-deep reeds that were nearly invisible from the surface. She heard splashing behind her, as if she’d shaken the others into motion by acting herself. Someone was on a cell phone, calling for help, but Megan reached Lou’s prone form and turned him over, fearing it was too late.
His face was flaccid, his skin cold to the touch. She checked for a pulse anyway, finding none, and still lowered her ear to his chest, just in case she might catch some last, promising thump of his heart.
Martin sloshed to her side, his face a grimace of distress. “He’s—he can’t be—” Like Megan, he felt for a pulse, checking Lou’s wrist, though unlike Megan, he dropped the dead man’s hand almost instantly, looking queasy. He wasn’t a large man, was Martin Walsh, but neither was he so small that he couldn’t hit a golf ball what looked like miles to Megan’s untrained eyes. He was fit, dressed for casual warmth on the course, and trembling like a frightened animal. The whites of his eyes glared around their brown pupils, and his lips were already going blue. “It hasn’t been an hour since we left him! He can’t be this cold!”
“It’s the water.” Irish lakes might be nearly at their warmest in mid-September, but the pond still had a bone-chilling heaviness. It had already penetrated Megan’s thigh muscles and was draining the heat from within her. Standing waist-deep in numbing wetness, she felt the muck on the bottom of the pond seeping over her shoes and slowly offering a false sense of warmth.
She gnawed her lower lip, staring at Lou’s body, then made a decision and seized his arm, wading back toward the shore.
“Megan, what are you doing? What are you doing?” Martin splashed after her, wake from his movement rolling ahead of them both. “He’s dead! Shouldn’t we leave the body where it is for the police?”
“He might not be dead. Cold-water shock can slow the metabolism way down. I want to try CPR, but it’s a lot easier on shore. Get something warm. Take everybody’s coats. There’s a—” She got to shallower water and had to turn, grab Lou by the armpits, and drag him the rest of the way to land.
Lou MacDonald hadn’t been a small man in life. Now, weigh
ed down by pond water and the boneless relaxation of unconsciousness, Megan would have sworn he weighed about a quarter ton. Her foot slipped on the pond lip, sandy soil breaking off to splash into the water, and she nearly lost her grip on Lou’s body.
Teeth bared and breath short with concentration, Megan tried again, taking a large, awkward step back and straining to haul Lou up. She staggered, back aching, heart pounding so hard it blurred her vision, and shook her head a little in denial, although whether she was saying no, I can’t do it, or no, I won’t fail, even she didn’t know.
Martin, nearly green with horror, grabbed the dead man’s legs and heaved him upward as Megan scrambled backward with the bulk of his weight. A second heave got him all the way onto shore. Martin all but ran from the water as Megan fell onto her bum, then righted herself to hands and knees so she could turn Lou’s head to the side. She fished in his mouth with a finger, pulling his tongue straight so it wouldn’t choke him. Water dribbled from his mouth and Megan heard Martin throwing up on the grass a few feet away.
“Here.” One of the onlookers came forward with his coat. Other people came with him, offering help in increasingly loud, chaotic tones, until a matronly sounding woman snapped, “Put them on top of each other on the ground and smooth them out. You and you, help this woman move the body onto the coats.” Even in the midst of a crisis, a tiny spark of humor blossomed in Megan’s chest when everyone fell in to helping, unable to deny the Irish Mammy Voice.
A few seconds later, Lou had been moved to the pile of coats. Megan crawled on them, too, putting weight on his sternum in hopes of forcing water from his lungs. The coats were enough warmer than the damp ground that she became aware, very abruptly, of just how cold she was. Someone—a woman, from the scent and the glimpse of long, polished nails—touched Megan’s shoulder and spoke quietly. “Let me get this wet coat off you.”
Megan, still trying to force water from Lou’s lungs, nodded. Between one push and the next, the woman stripped Megan’s chauffeur’s jacket away, then dropped a warm, puffy winter coat over Megan’s shoulders. A violent shiver started in Megan’s gut and shuddered its way out. She shoved her arms through the coat’s sleeves, wishing she dared stop to strip her wet shirt from beneath the coat, but except for that first mouthful, no water had come out of Lou yet. Megan didn’t want to risk a hesitation that could cost the man his life.
It felt like forever, although it surely wasn’t really more than a minute or two before someone said, “There’s no water coming out.”
Megan snarled, “I know,” and only then, slowly, upon hearing someone else say it, began to realize what that actually meant.
Lou had only expelled a mouthful of water when she’d turned his head. She hadn’t been able to force any more water out of him since, although she was both strong and trained to do that sort of thing correctly.
Suddenly spent, she fell back from Lou’s body, only then seeing that blood had pooled beneath his head, staining the light-blue lining of someone’s coat.
Megan clenched her teeth and reached into her inner chest pocket for her phone. For a heartbeat she panicked: the phone wasn’t there. Neither was the pocket, for that matter, because she was wearing somebody else’s warm winter coat, not her black uniform jacket. She looked around, realizing there were a couple of dozen, maybe more, worried, frightened people looking down at her and the body. One of them was the nail-painted woman who’d taken her jacket and still held it, clutched against her chest.
Megan waved her hand at it and the woman, startled, hugged it closer as she looked around as if wondering what Megan wanted, then visibly realized she was holding what Megan wanted. She handed the jacket back, and even in the grey morning light, even with the fabric black and hiding water well, Megan could see that, despite her splashing entrance to the pond, it wasn’t wet much past the ribs. Her phone was probably safe. She still breathed a sigh of relief when the phone turned on without complaint. Megan closed her eyes as she touched the name she needed and put the phone to her ear.
“Detective Bourke? This is Megan Malone. I’ve just found a dead body.”
Author’s Note
I’ve taken as few liberties as possible with Dublin’s geography and sites for Dead in Dublin, but I’d like to confess to the few places where I’ve gone properly awry. I’m sure readers won’t be surprised to hear that there is not, in fact, a driving service garage of any sort on Rathmines Road, much less one called Leprechaun Limos. Most of the other sites, including the magnificent Stella Theatre, are real, and the copper-domed Church of Mary Immaculate really is a stunning landmark used by everyone in the area. On the other hand, the mortuary at St. James’s Hospital has been re-imagined to suit my needs.
Furthermore, with all due apologies to several nineteenth-century architects, I’ve rearranged the interior of St. Andrew’s Church on Suffolk Street to my liking. At the time of writing this, the 150 year old building is under redevelopment and by the time Dead in Dublin is published, it’s expected to hold a modern food hall, so readers of the Dublin Driver Mysteries will be able to stop by and imagine Fionnuala has cooked up a bit of a meal for them.
My most egregious departure from reality lies in Bray, where the site of the Sea & Sky Restaurant is actually a parking lot. The rest of the boardwalk, however, is very real, and a genuinely gorgeous way to spend an afternoon if you’re visiting the Dublin area.
Readers who would like to work their way through Dublin along with Megan can do so at mizkit.com/DublinDriverPhotography, where I’ll be posting a series of exploring-Dublin images to go along with each book in the series. I hope to see you there, and on my newsletter, tinyletter.com/ce_murphy!
Catie
