Having completed the sweep of the house, she went downstairs and looked at the post. Everything looked like bills. She passed them back and forth through her hands. It felt like a step too far, messing with somebody else's post. Wasn't that technically treason or something? Maybe that was only in Britain. Apparently people messing with the post and swans were the two things Big Lizzy Windsor took very seriously. Ah, screw her and whoever else minded. If Brigit was doing this, she was doing it all the way. She started opening.
Bunny was paying too much for his electricity. He'd donated money to Africa, but apparently that hadn't sorted the problem and they needed a bit more. His bank wanted to lend him money; presumably seeing him as a safer bet than Africa had proven to be. Somebody else wanted to give him a new credit card and the GAA were having a couple of meetings that Brigit guessed, deep down, they didn't really want Bunny to attend. She’d bet good money that he could raise the mother of all points of order and batter your agenda sideways.
She opened the last letter and punched the air with delight. It was Bunny's mobile phone bill, and itemised no less. Thank God for him resisting the pleas to go online. He didn't strike her as the online sort. He also had no concept of how mobile phones worked, as he was on a shocking tariff. Still, she now had a list of every call he'd made and text he'd sent up until last Friday. The feeling of triumph was tempered by the last entry on the list. His last call before he'd disappeared off the face of the Earth had been to her.
Chapter Nine
Friday 4 February 2000 – Afternoon
Councillor James Kennedy stretched out on the massage table, popped his earphones in and squeezed his head into the hole that allowed him a view of the beige shag carpet below. He'd been doing this for months now. One of the lads down the golf club had recommended it; said it had changed his life. Nothing better for stress, or so the man said. He'd been sceptical. Initially it had been weird, lying there while a stranger had put their hands on him, covering him in oil and kneading him like dough. Soon though, he got used to it. The headphones were a stroke of genius; they meant he neither had to listen to their new age plinky plonk music, nor feel obliged to try and chat with some butch bird whose name had too many syllables in it. He'd found the chatting excruciating. Kennedy didn't care what anyone said, there was no such thing as small talk when one of you is naked and paying the other one to be there.
He now did this religiously every Friday afternoon. It was his reward for getting through the morning clinic with his hapless constituents. Three hours of it felt like a month. Missing cats, whining about bills, the bins – not being picked up, being picked up too early, too late, being dropped back too loudly. And oh God, the speed bumps. Always with the speed bumps. As far as he could see, it had been a spectacular mistake to ever build a flat bit of road anywhere in Dublin. Here was the thing – not every little ankle biter was supposed to make it. When he was a lad, if you ran out into traffic, you learnt a valuable lesson – or else you became a valuable lesson for all the other kids on the street. It was natural selection in action. Nowadays people just wanted to wrap kids in cotton wool and it was producing a generation of soft-arsed cry-babies. Of course, he couldn't say that. He had his eyes on bigger prizes than his current seat on Dublin City Council, and you didn't get there by telling people the truth. Uncle Brendan, the revered political warhorse, would eventually die or retire from the Dáil and then he could step up to the big show – name recognition, healthy majority, junior minister gig – yes, please.
Kennedy heard the door behind him open, and pressed play on his minidisc player. The Corrs filled his ears. He spoke over the music. "I've got a lot of tension around the shoulders, so you can focus there… and don't be afraid to go deep."
With that, he closed his eyes and let his mind wander.
He felt hands on his back. Jesus, this one would want to get herself a serious manicure or something. Felt like she had big farmer's mitts on her.
Then the air was expelled from his lungs in one heave as a heavy weight landed on his lower back. His hands scrabbled around and he could feel thick, trousered legs either side of the table. Someone was straddling him; some man. He tried to turn around, but a large, meaty hand pushed his head back into the face hole. Breathe, he couldn't breathe! He struggled to get air into his lungs as a hand pulled his earphones out.
"Afternoon, Councillor," said the voice. Male, from Cork, and sounding like its owner was really enjoying himself.
"What the f—" Kennedy gasped, with what little air he could spare.
"Now now, relax, Jimmy. You’re tenser than a cow that's not had her tits squeezed for a fortnight."
It wasn’t the most – literally – pressing concern right now, but Kennedy hated being referred to as Jimmy. "Get off me!" He tried to pull a big breath in, to shout for help.
He felt the man shift his weight, and what little air he'd managed to inhale was once again expelled from his lungs. Then the voice, stinking of booze and onions, whispered disconcertingly close to his ear. "It's story time, Jimmy boy, so you just relax. Once upon a time, there was a Garda HQ… and in that Garda HQ there was a room that doesn't exist, with a filling cabinet that wasn't there, full of things that never happened."
Kennedy heard a rustle behind him, and then a creased sheet of paper appeared in his field of vision. He couldn't see it clearly, but he could make out the Garda crest and his own name.
"Like in 1997, Jimmy, when you were a naughty boy. Hit a parked car and blew a high enough score on the breathalyser that your breath was basically flammable. It's funny though – the whole thing went away, didn't it? Swept under the rug."
Kennedy's brain was trying to catch up, his adrenalin pumping. What was this?
"Well, I've had a look under that rug. Yourself, Councillor Burke, Councillors Walsh and West. We've enough of you to hold a drunken Dinky Derby, in fact. Councillor Marsh, meanwhile, she was stone cold sober when she attempted to break the land speed record in her BMW on the M50 last year. To be fair to you, I get why you and the lads are so keen on driving yourselves home, after Councillor Munroe got into that altercation with the taxi driver a couple of years ago. Nasty stuff, that. All of it hushed up. Even you-know-who from Clontarf has had his troubles, what with his daughter being a little too enterprising in the supply of a smidgeon of Class A to her uni friends. My point is, sure – we all make mistakes don't we?"
Kennedy said nothing. He could faintly hear the tinny noise from his headphones as The Corrs explained how they had never loved him anyway.
"Like, for example," continued the voice, "voting for the only playing field available to a bunch of scrappy inner-city youths to be gift-wrapped for some developer buddies of yours. Luckily, you've got a chance to correct that mistake. If you – and all your six bosom buddies here named – have a dramatic change of heart, then the things that never happened, stay that way. Otherwise…"
Kennedy felt the man's weight shift, and he was once again able to draw breath. "It won't work."
He felt the weight increase on his back and the air begin to be squeezed from him once again.
"Just… even without us, they've got the votes. We're a drop in the ocean, there's sixty-three members of the council. They've got Snow White. He'll never—"
"Ah, bless. You let me worry about that councillor. You just worry about voting with your conscience, then all these unfortunate incidents might just get swept back under that rug, understood?"
The weight shifted and then lifted entirely off his back, but the large hand remained in place, pushing his head down.
The voice reappeared at his right ear.
"Are we clear?"
Kennedy tried to nod but was unable to do so. "Yes. Yes. We're clear."
"Ah, tremendous. I don't know about you, but seeing democracy in action like this, it gets me harder than trigonometry, so it does. Hopefully this whole affair will have itself a happy ending." The voice drew even closer to Kennedy's ear, so much so that he thought he
could feel lips brush against it. "Speaking of which, I'm going to toddle off now, and you're going to stay staring at that nice bit of carpet, as if I see you move, I'm going to come back here and give you the kind of happy ending that you won't ever forget."
Kennedy didn't move.
He stayed not moving for a long time.
Eventually, he felt female hands touch his back. Only then did he scream.
Chapter Ten
Thursday 7 July 2016
"Have you got any books on how to follow somebody?"
The woman behind the counter pulled a face like Paul had just shat in her hand and asked her to clap. She had a couple of facial piercings, and her dyed red hair looked like three different hairdressers had fought it out to an unhappy stalemate on her head.
"Who wants to know?" she said.
"Ehm, I do," said Paul. He would have thought that was obvious.
"Did Maureen send you? She accuses me of harassment and then she sends someone to my work? That is fucking typical!"
"No, no I—"
The girl leaned forward on her high stool, and jabbed at the wooden counter-top with her finger.
"You tell Maureen that I’ve as much right to go to an exhibition on the depiction of the female form in African culture as she does. It's not my fault that her and that… thing, were there."
"Right. I've not been sent by anybody, I promise. I just really need a book on how to follow somebody."
"Really?" she eyed him suspiciously.
"This is a book shop, isn't it?"
She looked around, as if confirming that his story was indeed correct. Paul looked around too, just to double-check that he really had walked into a three-storey building filled with books that were available for purchase. The assistant's level of aggression would have been nearly justifiable if he'd mistakenly gone into a delicatessen. Perhaps she didn't work there at all. Maybe she'd just wandered in and thought the stool behind the register was a good place to read her graphic novel.
"Is everything OK, Lianne?"
The question had come from a tall, bespectacled man that had been rearranging a stack of Dan Brown books in the large display window with the enthusiasm of a vegetarian working in an abattoir. His facial expression carried clearly legible overtones of 'what now?' Lianne waved back nervously. "Yeah, fine, Gerald. I'm just helping this gentleman with something." She lowered her voice. "C'mon."
She led Paul around the corner into the children's section.
"And you're sure you're not here about Maureen?"
"I don't know anything about your ex-girlfriend."
"Woah, how did you know Maureen was my ex-girlfriend?"
"I'm a private detective," said Paul, feeling slightly smug about it.
"And you don't know how to follow somebody?"
"It's my first day."
It wasn't. It was now his fourth day, although on each of the last three mornings, he had convinced himself that today was a fresh start, and this time he would get it right. To be fair, this morning had gone slightly better, after a dreadful beginning.
Paul hadn't been able to catch up with the green Rolls Royce after it had driven by him and out of the cul-de-sac, so he'd lost Hartigan yet again. He'd pulled over, swallowed his pride and phoned Phil. After some begging and the promise of a pay-rise to one hundred euros a day, Paul was now back to being the second worst detective on the payroll. He was aware that all of this was eating into the initial grand he’d got from the Devil in the Red Dress, but something about Hartigan convinced Paul that betting on him being a philandering scumbag was a risk worth taking. Then, following on from advice he'd received from his own subconscious in a dream, Paul started using the things he was good at. In particular, he'd always had a gift for ‘social engineering’, which was a phrase people who were good at lying had invented, to make it sound like a skill and not a character flaw. A Google later and he'd found numbers for six firms that provided chauffeur-driven cars in Dublin. A quick scan soon found the only one with a distinctive green Rolls Royce in their fleet.
"Hello, Prestige Cars, how may I help you?" The woman at the other end of the line had spoken in one of those posh voices that only existed for working class people to use when answering the phone.
"One of your drivers nearly killed me!"
"I'm sorry, what?"
"A green Rolls Royce. He's driving like a maniac on the Naas dual carriageway. I'm on to the Gardaí. I've got a dashboard camera. I'm suing, you see if I don't!"
"Sorry I… Tony is a very good driver, I'm sure there's some—"
"Good driver? Good driver?! This is going viral, love, I've over seventy-eight followers on Twitter!"
"But he's… could you hold on for just a moment please?"
Paul had sat there listening to some famous classical tune. It was either from an ad for aftershave or one for beer; he couldn't remember which. When the woman returned, there was an unmistakable tinge of vindication in her voice.
"I've checked, sir, and Tony is currently parked up on Stephen’s Green, so whoever you—"
Paul had hung up and started driving immediately. Twenty minutes later he had eyes on the Roller, parked illegally on the south side of Stephen's Green. Hartigan wasn't there, but at least they had a lead. Paul wasn't sure, but he assumed that you hired chauffeur-driven rides by the day. Clearly Hartigan hadn't fancied the hassle of city centre parking. Paul could sympathise. With no other option that had allowed him to keep the Roller in view, he had parked in one of two free disabled spaces with the Porsche's hazard lights on. He doubted the 'Maggie is a guide dog' explanation would work in this situation. Forty-five minutes later he'd been joined by Phil. As it happened, he'd come into town on the bus first thing that morning. He'd been attempting to sell his collection of old 2000AD comics in an effort to raise money to bring his bride-to-be over from China. Paul couldn't decide which was sadder; Phil falling so completely for the con that he would give up his most prized possession, or his depression at realising that, judging by the price he'd been quoted, those comic books meant a lot more to him than they did to anybody else.
“Ye don’t know any bus drivers, do you?” asked Phil.
“No,” replied Paul. “Why?”
“Twenty of the lucky sods won the lottery last night. They’d be able to lend me a few bob.”
Luckily, Paul had been rescued from another doomed attempt to make Phil see sense and the inevitable argument that would follow, by the Roller pulling out. They'd managed to follow it around the Green's confusing counter-clockwise contraflow system and there had been Hartigan, shopping bags in hand, just up from the Stephen's Green Shopping Centre. He'd caught them off-guard when he'd just dumped his bags in the car and headed off down Grafton Street. Paul had opened the car door and run across the street to follow, leaving a protesting Phil and honking traffic in his wake.
He'd managed to follow Hartigan down Grafton Street and left onto Wicklow Street, onto Exchequer Street before pulling another left onto Drury Street. Luckily, town had been busy so remaining unnoticed had been easy; the only trick was making sure he'd not lost sight of the target. At one point, Paul caught his own reflection in a window and realised how ludicrously excited he looked. He needed to calm down and hang back, or he risked blowing the whole thing. Hartigan had walked into an expensive-looking tailors. A quick fly-by had been enough to assure Paul that there was nobody inside that could be giving his target an unconventional, if thorough, inside-leg measurement. Then, he'd finally answered one of the calls from Phil. It'd been the fifteenth one in six minutes. He calmed Phil down, promised him that he had been added to the insurance on Bunny's car earlier that morning (which he definitely hadn't) and instructed him to just park up anywhere that allowed him to keep an eye on the Roller.
Thirty minutes later, Hartigan had walked over to Dawson Street for an early lunch. The restaurant was so posh it didn't have a name; there was just a funny-looking symbol over the door. It no doubt had some deep meaning, but to
Paul, it looked like somebody was trying to crucify the letter P. He'd nipped in and asked about making a reservation, giving him just enough time to see Hartigan sit down with a man in his sixties. Ideally he'd have been playing tonsil hockey with his estranged wife or indeed anyone else but, while Paul's luck had improved, it hadn't improved that much. The maître d' had taken one look at Paul and informed him that they weren't taking bookings right now, his tone implying he'd be best to drop back when hell froze over.
In lieu of standing about outside looking dodgy, Paul had decided to nip up the road to Hodges Figgis. He reckoned he could use however long a posh lunch takes to find some kind of manual to aid his on-the-job training. In a bookshop of this size, there must be something.
Lianne stopped at the top of the stairs on the third floor and looked back at him.
"There's a section over there on mental health. We've got some very good books on coping with a broken heart."
"For the last time," said Paul, "I'm a private investigator. I am not romantically involved with the person I'm following. I've never even met him."
The Day That Never comes (The Dublin Trilogy Book 2) Page 8
