Last Goodbye_An absolutely gripping murder mystery thriller

by Arlene Hunt

  ‘No.’

  ‘She was very beautiful, in a showy way. Determined, very ambitious.’

  ‘You make her sound almost predatory,’ Roxy said. Under the table, Quinn pressed his foot against hers until she moved it out of range.

  ‘What does he do, your brother?’

  ‘He’s an artist; he’s very talented.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Quinn grinned. ‘I always wanted to draw.’ He raised his hands. ‘Unfortunately these are the hand version of two left feet.’

  ‘We never knew where he got it from,’ Caroline said. ‘No one in the family is particularly artistic. I can barely draw a straight line.’

  ‘Does he do shows and the like?’

  She nodded. ‘Small ones, but he’s developing quite a following. That’s how he met Andrea, you know, at an art show. She was doing the PR for Nathan Fila; do you know him?’

  They both shook their heads.

  ‘Sculptor, works with metals and precious stones.’

  ‘Is that all Noel does? Art?’ Roxy asked, getting a scowl from Quinn for her trouble.

  ‘Well obviously he does other work as well. Art is … It takes time to develop it into a business.’

  ‘What does he do to make ends meet?’

  ‘He works at a tattoo parlour in the city centre.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The Black Cat.’

  ‘In Temple Bar?’

  Caroline was growing defensive. ‘Yes, he’s very much in demand, actually.’

  ‘It’s another kind of art really, if you think about it,’ Quinn said. ‘On a different canvas.’

  ‘That’s what Noel says. And actually it is very creative. I was surprised when I saw some of his design work; it’s very intricate.’

  Roxy couldn’t bear it, not another second longer.

  ‘Was he here last night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All night?’

  ‘Until I went to bed.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘Nine, nine thirty?’

  ‘That’s pretty early. He could have gone out after that.’

  ‘He could have, but I don’t think he did.’

  ‘Was he here when you got up?’

  She hesitated before she answered. ‘No.’

  ‘So you can’t really vouch for him after nine or nine thirty?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’ Caroline got to her feet. ‘It’s been a long day, Detectives. If you don’t mind, I’d like you both to leave now.’

  Outside, on the way to the car, Quinn told Roxy he’d join her in a minute. He went back, knocked on the door and spoke briefly to Caroline. Roxy saw him put something in her hand and squeeze her shoulder before he walked back.

  ‘What was that about?’ she asked when he drew alongside.

  ‘I gave her my card in case he gets in contact.’

  Roxy snorted. ‘Good luck with that.’

  Quinn stopped short and glared at her.

  ‘When was the last time you hugged someone, Malloy?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Hug, it’s a verb; it means when one human puts their arms around another human to offer comfort or solace. People do it all the time; hell, even monkeys do it.’

  ‘Monkeys?’

  ‘Answer the question. When was the last time you hugged someone?’

  ‘I’m not answering it; it’s irrelevant to anything.’

  ‘That woman,’ Quinn pointed in the direction of the house, ‘has had her life torn asunder today. Two seconds of talking to her, you can tell she’s a minder, a carer. Noel Furlong is nearly fifteen years her junior, so he’s like a son to her rather than a brother.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you don’t go barking questions at her like that. Look at it from her point of view. She got up this morning and went to work and it was a normal boring Monday. Since then she’s been threatened, frightened and insulted. We need her to trust us, to think we’re her best option if Noel Furlong contacts her. We need her cooperation.’

  ‘We are her only option,’ Roxy said. ‘Noel Furlong has no alibi and he was seen fleeing the scene. Why does it matter if he can paint or not? Who gives a damn about that?’

  Quinn stared at her, his hands on his hips.

  ‘How the hell did you make it to sergeant with that attitude? Whose toast did you butter?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Gussy’s right, you have a lot to learn.’

  Roxy blinked, offended.

  ‘I am doing the best I can,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘I was afraid you were going to say that,’ Quinn said, and walked away.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A different taxi brought Dominic Travers home to the grand Regency house he owned on Dalkey’s exclusive Nerano Road. It was a huge double-fronted mansion, surrounded by almost half an acre of sculpted lawns, set back from the road behind electronic gates and high walls. The previous owner, a well-known musician, had been particularly proud of the Tuscan fountain installed in the front garden. Dominic, when he won the place in a high-stakes game of poker, now enjoyed it in his stead.

  His earlier anger had given way to exhaustion and then to a vague sense of helplessness, an emotion he had not felt for so long he’d almost forgotten how poisonous it was.

  He had spent the day calling in favours and searching the city, anything to distract himself from his pain, but still his mind had other ideas, sending memory after memory to the surface, some he hadn’t even realised he’d kept. Andrea running to find him when she lost her first tooth, full of excitement, determined to stay awake and see the tooth fairy for herself. Her face when he brought home a small tabby kitten for her ninth birthday, trying not to laugh at her staggeringly solemn promises to feed it and care for it by ‘my own self’. Andrea as a teen, crying because a boy she liked preferred another girl in school. As a young woman, beautiful and confident, kissing him on the cheek, going out for the night with her friends, complaining about how scratchy his beard was.

  Andrea lying on the stainless-steel table in the morgue, her hair stiff with blood, her face almost unrecognisable.

  The nearer he got to the house, the more he wanted to tell the taxi driver to keep going, drive forever, drive to a place where Andrea was not dead. Don’t stop here, he wanted to shout, don’t stop.

  His housekeeper, Frederick, was waiting for him out on the front steps, his neat little face tense and fretful. His eyes were red.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, when Travers climbed out. ‘My deepest and sincerest condolences.’

  Travers patted him on the shoulder.

  ‘Andrea’s mother is waiting for you inside.’ Frederick waited a beat. ‘She is not alone. Her friend Justine is with her.’

  Dominic swore under his breath. He removed his coat and handed it to Frederick, smoothed his hair down with his hands.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Upset, as you can imagine.’

  Dominic grimaced.

  His relationship with Lillian was complicated. It was hard to reconcile his feelings for her. He’d loved her once and cared for her deeply. In return, she had all but destroyed him.

  For the longest time she had been his rock, his lighthouse in the storm. Intelligent, beautiful, she’d helped him found the empire he presided over now. There was nothing he wouldn’t have done for her; he would have slain dragons to see her smile.

  He was never able to pinpoint the exact moment he knew something was wrong. She was such a consummate liar, such an incredible actress that he ignored the quiet warning voice in his head.

  They’d always enjoyed an active social life: money was no object; the economy was booming. Lillian liked to dress up and go out; she liked new restaurants, trendy bars, gigs, plays, anything and everything. On rare nights in she prowled the house like a cat on a hot tin roof, always carrying a glass of white wine in her hand, unable to settle down or read a book. She slept late in the day, never truly coming alive until the second cocktail o
f the evening.

  He thought it would be different when Andrea was born, and for a while it had been, but then she began to find fault with stupid things; she was irritated and bored stuck at home with a kid while he ‘gallivanted’ around town. Nothing he said or did seemed to make her happy, and so the rift between them grew.

  Then, disaster.

  Dominic had been working in the UK when he got the call. Lillian and Andrea had been involved in a car accident; it was serious, could he come right away?

  Could he come?

  Sometimes even now he woke up in the middle of the night, sweat-soaked and trembling, remembering that call.

  Could he come?

  Seeing Andrea, tiny and frightened, hooked up to machines and wires almost broke him. Lillian out in the hall, screaming blue murder, crying, broken collar bone, yelling at the staff to get away from her: it was an accident, she cried, calling his name over and over, an accident.

  Her blood alcohol reading said otherwise.

  She tried to get shared custody, and cried very prettily in the family courts. But her tears were for nothing. Dominic fought her tooth and nail, using a high-priced law firm and every dirty trick in the book to win. And win he did, even if it was a bitter victory overall.

  In the early days, he struggled to cope under the yoke of parenting, even after hiring Frederick to run the household. He had always been a man who had straddled two worlds, law-abiding and lawless. He spent long hours working, organising, threatening, greasing the right palms, making sure nobody from one side felt slighted by someone from the other. Now, suddenly, he was expected to come home at a reasonable hour and read stories to a sleepy child, ask about hobbies and things he had no interest in and no real desire to understand. Weekends went by in a blur of noise and shouting, of visiting local parks and feeding overweight ducks, glowering at unruly dogs and being forced to tolerate people who stopped to smile and ask after the beautiful shy child by his side.

  Unthinkable.

  But gradually, over time, Dominic found his footing. He would never be able to pinpoint exactly the day or the week or even the month it happened. One day he was plotting and scheming behind the scenes; the next he was anxiously awaiting news of how his girl had got on at school, enquiring after her happiness with all the eagerness of a doting granny.

  If any of his associates noticed a softening to his centre, they wisely chose not to remark on it; after all, one didn’t stick a fork into a socket to see if there was electricity. But privately, very privately indeed, it was agreed that the silver-edged reality of fatherhood had humanised a man long thought to be beyond reach.

  And now Andrea was dead.

  Dominic pushed open the door of the study.

  Lillian offered no hello, of course, no greeting of any kind. Her eyes – grey like his, but darker; storm eyes, he used to call them – stared balefully from her once beautiful face. She was dressed head to toe in black. It didn’t suit her; the colour washed her out.

  ‘Did you have anything to do with what happened?’

  Her eyes, he could not help notice, were bone dry, and he knew that whatever emotional snap she had suffered earlier had since evaporated. He knew that within her chest her heart was now a block of ice. He knew because she was once his soulmate; he knew because he felt the exact same way.

  ‘Well?’ She snapped the question at him.

  ‘No.’

  He made no move to go to her, knowing she would not appreciate or accept any kind of physical connection. Justine, Lillian’s partner, an older woman, defiantly grey-haired and make-up-free, wearing her usual selection of cheap silver jewellery over clashing patterns, got up and tried to offer her some comfort. Lillian shoved her unceremoniously away.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Lillian demanded.

  Dominic went to the sideboard and poured a drink, noting that she had already done a number on his bourbon, his best bourbon. In all the time he’d known her, she had never picked the cheap option in anything.

  He took a long swallow, went to his desk and sat down.

  ‘You have people, you can find out who did this. You can make them pay, I know you can.’

  ‘Oh dearest,’ Justine said. ‘You mustn’t talk like that.’

  Dearest. The word grated on his nerves. It was so fake, so affected, like Justine herself. He’d always had her pegged as a tireless champion of the underdog and a liberal twat who thought she was smarter than everyone in the room.

  ‘Did he do it?’ Lillian demanded.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who do you think? Noel Furlong.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You with all your resources and you don’t know.’ She raised her chin. ‘Bullshit.’

  Travers looked at her, this creature, this near stranger he’d once adored. Her anger he could take, he was used to it by now, but her sorrow he found hard to contend with.

  ‘Andrea was seeing a shrink, did you know that?’

  He looked at her coldly.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Simon Fitzpatrick she said his name was.’

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘I do not.’ Lillian’s eyes burned in her face. ‘She wasn’t perfect, Dominic, none of us are.’

  ‘Why was she seeing a shrink?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He looked sceptical.

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I am her mother.’

  He snorted. ‘Only when it suited you.’

  Lillian’s expression changed to one of pure venom.

  ‘All you’ve ever done is try to shut me out of that child’s life. Maybe if you’d allowed me to have a better relationship with her she wouldn’t be—’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Dominic warned her. ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’

  Lillian looked away, swallowed, and regained her composure. ‘Something was troubling her, Dominic. Any fool could see it.’

  Dominic reached for his glass, caught the side of it by accident and tipped it over.

  ‘Bollocks.’

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and tried to blot the worst of it up.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I will get to the bottom of this, I promise you.’

  ‘Promise me?’ Lillian barked a high-pitched laugh. ‘You promised me you’d look after her. I don’t give a shit about your promises, Dominic.’

  Justine squeezed her bicep. ‘Don’t, dearest, you’ll upset yourself.’

  ‘Will you stop telling me how to feel,’ Lillian snapped, and yanked her arm away with such savagery the older woman recoiled. ‘I am fucking upset. I’m entitled to be upset, Justine!’

  ‘I’ll get to the bottom of this,’ Travers repeated. ‘I will find who killed her and—’

  ‘You’ll what? Have them sent to a cushy prison where they can get three square meals a day and learn another language while they wait for early release for good behaviour? Isn’t that what we do now in our glorious new society? Rehabilitate.’ She put her empty glass down on a side table and looked at him with naked contempt. ‘There’s no rehabilitation that will bring our girl back.’

  She got to her feet and, weaving slightly, grabbed a dark green coat, which she swung over her shoulders like a cape before storming out of the study.

  Moments later he heard the front door bang.

  Justine stood too.

  ‘For what it’s worth, Dominic,’ she said in her weird raspy voice, ‘I am very sorry for your loss. I know you loved Andrea a great deal. I hope whoever did this is brought swiftly to justice.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Travers said.

  Justine went after Lillian.

  Travers nodded to Frederick, who had soundlessly appeared in the door of the study.

  ‘You got him?’

  ‘Line one, sir.’

  He picked up the phone, cleared his throat, listened for a moment. ‘Yes, thank you. Take a name down. Furlong, Noel Furlong. Hold on …’ He opened
his mobile and scrolled through it with his thumb. ‘Yeah, sending it and his address to you. Got it? Good, off the books, Lennox, that’s right. I want this man for myself.’

  He hung up, reached for a photo on his desk. He had taken it when Andrea was ten, maybe eleven, leaning backwards on an old swing with her blonde hair almost hanging to the grass. If he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could still hear her laugh, still here her call, ‘Higher, Daddy, higher, higher!’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  By the time she got home, Roxy was almost sick with exhaustion and the knot between her shoulders felt like it had grown to the size of a baby’s fist. All she wanted to do was lie face down on her bed and pass out.

  It was a surprise to enter the apartment and find her flatmate Boy standing in the kitchen wearing an apron, though she wasn’t sure if the surprise was a pleasant one or not. After the day she’d endured, the last thing she wanted was any kind of company.

  ‘You’re home,’ she said.

  Boy paused what he was doing and turned, holding a spatula mid air.

  ‘Well it’s lovely to see you too, Roxanne. Want me to go throw myself off the balcony?’

  ‘I’m sorry, hello.’

  ‘That’s a little better.’

  He pointed to an open bottle of red wine on the counter. ‘Pour me one of those and then pour yourself a bigger one. You look like you could do with it.’

  ‘I will in a second. I’ll be right back.’

  She went down the hall to her bedroom, put her weapons in the safe, stripped, hung her uniform up and changed into grey tracksuit bottoms and a white vest. By the time she got back to the kitchen, Boy was tipping the contents of the pan onto two plates.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Indian chickpeas with spicy courgette.’

  ‘It smells incredible.’

  ‘Grab the wine before you sit down.’

  She did as she was told. Boy poured two very generous glasses, set the bottle aside and ground black pepper over both their dishes.

  ‘Bon appétit!’

  He sat down and began to eat. Roxy took a mouthful. It was delicious; she hadn’t eaten since breakfast and was ravenous.

  ‘So,’ he said, after a few mouthfuls. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’