The Day That Never comes (The Dublin Trilogy Book 2)

by Caimh McDonnell

  "Is this the money belonging to the poor saps who invested in Skylark, by any chance?" asked Brigit.

  "Shut up, Miss Conroy, or I'll allow Mr Coetzee to play with you."

  Megan stepped forward and indicated the silver case. "Can I?"

  Maloney handed it to her. She moved over to the laptop on the table and began working.

  "Mr Coetzee has proven to be quite a find," continued Maloney. "His skill set and – let's call it… moral flexibility – are really very rare."

  "Also, he's a great kisser," said Bunny.

  Maloney pressed the barrel of his gun to Bunny's forehead.

  "Shush now," said Maloney, "So tell me, what big bad secret did you have on Baylor?"

  Bunny leaned forward, pushing into the gun. "He once had red wine with fish, the scuttering gobshite."

  Annoyance flared again across Maloney's face. He shoved his gun into Bunny's mouth. "You really are quite tedious. By the way, I decided to drag your little protégé Mulchrone into this too. I wanted you to know, with certainty, that his life has been destroyed just by being associated with yours. Megan, are we ready yet?"

  Megan didn’t look up. “Almost.”

  Bunny tried to say something but it came out as a garbled mumble around the gun.

  Maloney withdrew it. Bunny spat the taste of it out and then tried to stretch his neck. "I remember you now," said Bunny in a hoarse whisper.

  "I thought you might."

  "Yeah." Bunny drew a deep breath, "You're that fella we arrested for fondling himself in that kiddie's ball pit at Funderland."

  "Shut up!"

  "To be fair," continued Bunny, "You were only touching yourself. I said at the time, ‘I think it's the balls that are doing it for him lads, not the kids,’ but— "

  "STOP MOCKING ME!" Maloney's face was a mask of pure rage as he screamed into Bunny's face.

  "Paschal," Megan started looking up from the laptop, "just—"

  Maloney stepped away, took aim and shot Bunny in the foot. Bunny screamed in agony.

  Maloney dropped the gun, as if shocked by the reality of his own actions.

  "You…" Brigit started, but she couldn't find words as Bunny howled beside her.

  "For God’s sake, Paschal—"

  He turned to Megan and pointed at her. "Just do your job! Why does nobody take me seriously?"

  Brigit looked across at Bunny, who was swaying back and forth, almost falling off his chair. His right shoe was now soaked through with blood. His howls descended into high-pitched, gasping breaths.

  Maloney took a step back, banging into Coetzee standing behind him. He glanced backwards and then, seemingly reassured by Coetzee's presence, took a step forward and snatched his gun up from the ground.

  "The reason you're still alive, McGarry, is because I wanted you here for this moment. To see my victory. So you would know, you would know, that you didn't beat me. You didn't beat me. You did not BEAT ME!"

  Maloney turned and paced back and forth.

  Bunny's yowls of pain decreased and then transformed into high-pitched, breathy laughter. "Oh Paschal, Paschal, Paschal, Paschal." Bunny's voice moved to a mocking sing-song, "I know something you don't know."

  Maloney turned back to him, slowly regaining control of himself. "I doubt that."

  Bunny, drawing panting breaths, looked unseeing in Brigit's direction, his head sagging down slightly, even as a peculiar smile played across his lips. "Everybody, Paschal, is the hero of their own story."

  "Oh, how deep," said Maloney, waving his hands in a mocking curtsey.

  Bunny nodded in Megan’s approximate direction. "When she's done doing whatever she is doing, you'll have seventy-eight million untraceable dollars, is that right?"

  "Yes."

  Bunny started laughing again.

  "I'm glad that amuses you," said Maloney.

  "Oh it does," said Bunny. "It's a regular fecking laugh riot. Would you like to know a secret, Paschal?"

  "I'm bored of your pointless games, McGarry."

  "But this is a doozy, I promise ye. You see; there's a thing about people who'll kill for money…"

  Maloney folded his arms. "And what's that?"

  "They. Will. Kill. For. Money."

  Brigit watched Maloney's face. She saw the exact moment he got Bunny's point. "Mr C—"

  His head exploded. Brigit squeezed her eyes shut and felt blood and brain matter splatter onto her face. She opened them again, to see Maloney's body crumpled on the floor in front of her. His glasses, inexplicably still in one piece, sat on her lap.

  Above the fallen body of his extremely-former employer, Coetzee stood with his gun held aloft, looking very calm.

  Megan screamed but it died in her throat as Coetzee turned the gun to point at her.

  "You people talk too much."

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  At the first gunshot, Paul called the police. He and Maggie had been standing outside the metal gates of the compound, looking at the flashing red dot on his phone.

  "My name is Paul Mulchrone. Bunny McGarry is at the old cement factory on the Coast Road near Howth. Send everything, shots have been fired."

  He'd hung up before they could ask further questions.

  As soon as the car had reached Glasnevin, they'd managed to escape the area around the city centre where the phone network had been turned off and Paul had got a signal on his phone. He’d downloaded the Sniffer app, texted the word “Simone” to the number, and waited. Within fifteen minutes it had shown him the location in Howth. He put his foot down and drove Bunny's car like a man possessed. Weaving in and out of honking traffic, running red lights, and at one point mounting a pavement to get around a line of traffic. He didn't care. Brigit was still not picking up and he was starting to fear the worst. Besides, it was pretty clear that every available Garda within fifty miles was in the city centre dealing with the riot.

  Paul looked down at Maggie.

  "The police will be here soon. They've armed response units and everything. We'll wait for them. That makes the most sense, right? Charging in there… I might get someone killed."

  Maggie looked silently back up at him.

  Then they heard the second shot.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Megan was working away at the laptop. Coetzee stood behind her, rubbing the barrel of his gun through her hair. Her gun was stuck into the belt of his trousers.

  "I can't work with you distracting me."

  "Yes, you can," he replied. His accent was entirely unplaceable to Brigit's ear. He pulled a piece of paper out of his trouser pocket and put it on the table.

  "Split the money between these six accounts."

  "You… had this planned?"

  He leaned in close and smelt her hair. "Yes, the monkey had a plan of his own."

  "OK I'll do this, and… then, you'll let me go?"

  He moved in close behind her and whispered. "We'll see."

  Tears rolled down her face. "I'm… look, I… I'm not going to do this if you're going to kill me."

  He started running his hand up and down Megan's body. "There are a lot of worse things that could happen."

  "You're scum," said Brigit.

  Coetzee looked at her as he stroked Megan's hair. "You can be next, if you like?"

  "Anything you put near me, don't expect to get it back."

  Coetzee just smiled at her. Brigit looked away, trying not to notice the slickness beneath her feet that was Maloney's blood spreading out across the floor.

  "You're not touching anybody," said Bunny, his unseeing eyes turned towards the noise, "Not until you go through me!"

  He tried to stand and stumbled backwards, nearly missing his chair on the way back down.

  Coetzee grinned at him. "I guess you won't be able to watch, but I'll let you listen."

  "You arsehole. Why don't you—"

  Brigit stopped talking as Bunny put his hand out for silence.

  "Can you hear it?"

  Brigit liste
ned. She heard nothing at first but then… an engine. Revving.

  A smile spread across Bunny's bruised and battered face. "She purrs like a kitty cat."

  There was a clang of metal from outside and then the engine grew louder and louder until…

  The wooden front doors exploded in a shower of splintered debris as Bunny's car came hurtling through, travelling at high speed. There was a screech of tortured brakes, and then it smashed into the back of Brigit's car with a loud, unpleasant crunch.

  "Christ!" said Brigit.

  "What's happening?" asked Bunny.

  Megan used the opportunity to attempt to escape. She got four feet before Coetzee grabbed her hair with one hand and slammed the butt of his gun into the back of her head with the other. Her unconscious body flopped to the ground.

  With a screech of outraged metal, the door of Bunny's car opened and Paul stumbled out. Blood was pumping from a wound in his forehead.

  "Nobody… nobody move," said Paul, and Brigit saw the gun in his hand. While he held it out, it wasn't pointing in the right direction and his hand was weaving about. "No airbags. Stupid car."

  Coetzee shot, and Paul ducked before shooting back. Or at least he tried to. The gun dry clicked in his hands and again and again.

  Coetzee laughed, a brief giggle at first that grew and grew until he was roaring, bent double, hands on his knees. He looked between Paul and Brigit with tears in his eyes. "Honestly, you people are hilarious!" He moved towards Paul, his steps a mocking dance as he closed the twenty or so feet that lay between them. Paul’s gun continued to click out a useless staccato rhythm. With his free hand Coetzee mimed a gun shooting back at him. "You forgot the fucking bullets, didn't you? You absolute moron. What kind of a fucking idiot doesn't know if he has bullets?"

  "Actually" said Paul, "I knew there were no bullets. I just wanted to give her time."

  Coetzee looked back towards Brigit. "Time," he said, "is something none of you have."

  "Not her," said Paul.

  As Coetzee raised his gun, Maggie jumped up and sunk her teeth into his arm. He screamed in rage.

  Paul rushed towards him, getting there just as Coetzee managed to fire a powerful kick into Maggie. She gave out a sickening yelp as she flew through the air before landing with a thud against a rusted husk of machinery. She remained absolutely still.

  "That's my dog!" screamed Paul.

  He crashed into Coetzee, and they stumbled messily to the ground. They were a mass of flailing limbs – Paul countering the other man's superior strength and size with a sheer desperate fury. He latched onto his gun arm and didn't let go, despite a flurry of blows from Coetzee's other hand.

  Brigit sensed Bunny dropping to the ground beside her.

  She turned to see him scrabbling around Maloney's body with his one good hand.

  Brigit looked back at Paul and Coetzee, just in time to see Coetzee send a knee into Paul's face with a sickening crunch.

  "Where?" said Bunny.

  He was holding Maloney's gun out; it rotated back and forth in a semicircle, pointing nowhere near the two men.

  They were locked in a clench. Coetzee rammed an elbow down repeatedly into Paul's arm.

  "Right, right, right," shouted Brigit.

  Bunny turned left.

  "No, other way."

  Paul was on his feet again now, his face covered in blood, swinging wildly-inaccurate haymakers at the air. "C'mon ye… fight me!"

  Coetzee danced around him, like a cat toying with a mouse.

  Brigit looked again at Bunny, his gun now pointing directly at her.

  "Left, forty-five degrees from the sound of my voice."

  The gun veered in the approximate direction, but—

  "Wait! You'll hit Paul."

  "MULCHRONE!" bellowed Bunny, "GIVE ME TWENTY!"

  It hung in the air for a moment, while the whole world seemed to slow.

  Bunny, bruised and broken, kneeling in a pool of his own and Maloney's blood, swollen eyes blindly searching behind the barrel of a gun.

  Coetzee, the sneer having dropped from his face, to be replaced by a look of curiosity, if not concern.

  Paul, bloodied face, mouth open; a picture of concussed confusion.

  Then – she would argue with her own memory of this for the rest of her days – but Brigit swore she saw a tiny smile spread across his face, as a long-forgotten memory of a training pitch years ago returned to him.

  He dived for the ground.

  Bunny fired six shots in an arc before collapsing backwards onto the ground.

  "Did I get him? Did I get him?"

  Epilogue 1

  Two days later

  DSI Susan Burns placed her feet up on her desk, and began reading through the transcript of the interview with suspect Megan Wilde for the third time. It was copious in length and fulsome in detail. What made her nervous was quite how much of it was clearly bullshit. Miss Wilde, the statuesque blonde mistress of Paschal Maloney, was in many ways a great witness. She had laid out in detail the intricate deception that Maloney had engineered. It had set in motion a chain of events that had led to several deaths and a riot with – admittedly – an assist from some over-eager policing on that score. All of that meant there would be a lot of questions being asked, most probably for years to come, and Burns was conscious that the document she held in her hands would be the first port of call for most of the answers.

  Miss Wilde was no dummy. As soon as anyone would listen, she’d started building her case for the Patty Hearst defence. She was a poor, innocent ingénue, fallen under the spell of the charismatic Maloney, who had dragged her into his web of deceit. Once trapped inside it she couldn’t get out, as she lived in fear for her very life, Your Honour. It was crap, of course, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. The press were going to eat Wilde up. She was easy on the eye, good with a lie and Burns would bet the farm she could cry on demand. It also helped that Maloney was dead, and that the man they were calling Coetzee wasn’t. He was a barrister’s manna from heaven when it came to proving anyone being in fear for their life. He’d taken three bullets, apparently fired by the temporarily-blind Bunny McGarry, but the doctors said he was going to pull through. It was early days, and already he’d been identified as an individual known as Marcus Barkley who was wanted for war crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and also as Draco Mistaran who was of great interest to the Ukranian authorities. They’d already doubled the armed guards on his hospital room twice; once when they’d realised quite what an international man of butchery he was, and secondly when Interpol had tipped them off that a Russian oligarch, who was minus a brother and two fingers, was very keen to get reacquainted with the man who had cost him both.

  While Wilde had done a frankly masterful job laying the groundwork beneath them for a possible legal defence, these were the facts from her statement that Burns did believe.

  Paschal Maloney, along with Jerome Hartigan and Craig Blake, aka the Skylark Three, had embezzled seventy-eight million dollars that by all rights belonged in the Skylark Project. It would appear that Councillor John Baylor had been their silent partner in all this, greasing the wheels of government wherever needed. It was currently unclear when their plans for the project had tipped into being an out-and-out scam. Had they always planned to siphon off a large wad of cash, or had they only hit on the idea after it looked like things were about to get tricky? Regardless, the method they’d found for squirreling away these fraudulently acquired funds was certainly innovative. It was something called a digital chest. A rather peculiar Asian guy from the Technical Bureau had explained it to Burns. As far as she could understand it, it worked on a similar principle to Bitcoins. Four digital keys were required to access the funds. As long as each man held one, nobody could screw over anybody else. That assumed, of course, that you weren’t Paschal Maloney.

  Burns stopped and added a note to the list on the pad in front of her. Given all the recently acquired new evidence, she might well ha
ve to request the reopening of the inquest into the apparent suicide of the financial controller for the Skylark project. It seemed odds-on that his death may well have been Coetzee’s first intervention into proceedings.

  Certainly, Wilde’s testimony made it clear that Craig Blake had been Coetzee’s work. He’d been tortured until he had given up the code for his personal safe, and so Maloney then had two of the four keys he needed. Baylor had apparently been easier, meeting with Maloney’s representative to hand over his key in exchange for a supposed 8.6 million euros in cash and bonds. His own greed had walked the venerable councillor to his death, and the third key into Maloney’s possession. That had left Hartigan, who by now had seventy eight million reasons to not trust his one remaining partner. Maloney supposedly convinced Hartigan that he’d found a way to access the funds with only two keys, Baylor and Blake’s having been ‘lost’ as far as Hartigan knew. Burns had no idea if, by this point, Hartigan had begun to suspect that the Púca wasn’t what it seemed, but regardless, he had been smart enough to seek an assurance before handing over his key. He’d only agreed to do so when Maloney had signed a confession owning up to, and taking sole responsibility for, the embezzlement of the Skylark money. If Maloney did a bunk, Hartigan could burn him to the ground. Maloney had signed the paperwork in front of Hartigan and his lawyer, then the trio had stepped outside to announce to the world that Bunny McGarry was the big bad wolf behind the Púca. Once Maloney had departed Hartigan’s house with the fourth and final key, Coetzee had activated a bomb he’d hidden there several days before. Kaboom. Four keys and no witnesses.

  Burns had to admit there was a certain kind of twisted genius to it; inventing a terrorist organisation that tapped into a nation’s anger at you and your ilk to act as a cover for your actions. It reminded her of the two words her Criminology lecturer in Templemore had engraved on a plaque on his wall: ‘Cui Bono?’ a Latin phrase meaning ‘to whose benefit?’. When you stripped it all away, it was about cash. A big pile of grubby money.