Last Goodbye_An absolutely gripping murder mystery thriller

by Arlene Hunt

  ‘I don’t.’

  Miranda smiled, and it was as bleak a smile as Roxy had ever seen on another living human.

  ‘Dominic Travers has him.’

  ‘Andrea Colgan’s father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go get him.’

  ‘You need to let Quinn handle this.’

  ‘Bullshit. Gant was my responsibility.’

  Miranda grabbed Roxy by the shoulders. ‘Malloy, listen to me. You’re on thin ice as it is; let Quinn handle this.’

  ‘What the hell is this about? What kind of black hold does Dominic Travers have over this department?’

  ‘That’s enough.’ Miranda looked around in case anybody had overheard. ‘Let it drop.’

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Roxy said. ‘First his records are redacted, and now this? Is he … like, is he some kind of informant or something?’

  ‘I told you to drop it.’

  Roxy was so overwhelmed by anger she could barely think, let alone formulate a coherent answer.

  ‘This is outrageous. What those men did is … it’s against the law.’

  ‘Goddammit, Malloy, don’t you get it yet?’ Miranda said, exasperated. ‘Dominic Travers has friends in very high places, okay? He doesn’t care about the law. Look, Quinn’s no fool, he’ll know how to handle this. If you want to stay working in this squad, learn to take advice, learn to take an order.’

  ‘This isn’t advice.’ Roxy spat the word out as though it was poisonous. ‘I’m being hamstrung.’

  ‘You’re smart, Malloy, and you have potential, but you’re so bloody stupid sometimes it hurts. This is Dublin: there are layers upon layers upon layers. Dominic Travers is … let’s just say he’s an untouchable.’

  ‘But why—’

  Miranda shoved her back against the wall and held a threatening finger in front of her face. ‘I’m telling you, but you’re not listening. Travers has connections, connections that extend to people way above our station. Top brass already know this, which means top brass sanction this. Now they don’t care about you; they don’t care about any of us. But whether you believe me or not, Eli Quinn is a good man, and he does care, so let him handle this. Okay?’

  ‘Is that where we stand?’

  ‘That’s where we stand.’

  Roxy pushed her away. ‘Then we’re no better than the scum we’re supposed to fight.’

  ‘Oh dear, Malloy,’ Miranda said. ‘Whatever gave you the idea that we were in the first place?’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Noel Furlong woke up and immediately felt worse.

  It took him a few seconds of groaning and squinting before he worked out he was alive and being held in a garage or shed or something similar. A single light bulb hung from a beam over his head, throwing most of the room into shadow, which was terrifying, but not as terrifying as discovering he was strapped to a gurney of some kind.

  He lifted his head as far as he could manage and looked down. His ankles and thighs were bound with duct tape, as were his hands, his feet and his chest; only his head was free to move.

  ‘Hello?’ he whimpered.

  He heard movement from somewhere behind him and groaned as Dominic Travers emerged from the shadows.

  ‘No no no no!’

  He began to struggle, desperately trying to free himself, but he was held fast.

  ‘Please, whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t do it, man, please don’t hurt me, please.’

  He felt a small jolt and his body was tilted and began moving backwards.

  Another bump and he was still. He heard Dominic clattering around behind him, and the sound of running water.

  ‘Dom, what are you doing?’

  Another jolt, then to the unmistakable hiss of hydraulics he rose slightly and stopped. The gurney tilted backwards until his head was slightly below horizontal. From this angle he could see Dominic perfectly. He was standing with a remote control in his hand.

  ‘Please, please listen to me, I didn’t do anything to your daughter, I swear.’

  Dominic didn’t answer. He put the remote down on a workbench, picked up a towel, shook it out, folded it twice and placed it over Furlong’s face. Plunged into complete darkness, Furlong began to hyperventilate.

  ‘If you struggle,’ Dominic’s voice was calm, measured, ice cold, ‘you’ll find it harder to breathe. My advice is not to struggle.’

  The gurney began to move again. The first splash of freezing water to hit his forehead was such a shock, Furlong screamed. He continued screaming until his entire face was under the flow, then screaming became gurgling and in terror he pressed his lips tightly shut, vowing to hold his breath.

  Within seconds he was gasping for air. The sodden towel was sucked into his mouth, and water ran down the back of his throat. He gagged and coughed, tried to breathe and gulped more water down. Terrified, he thrashed his head from side to side, but there was no escape, he couldn’t breathe.

  He was drowning.

  Miraculously the water stopped and the towel was removed from his face. The relief was so intense, he burst into tears even as he retched violently.

  Dominic watched him impassively.

  ‘I’m going to ask you some questions,’ he said. ‘You’re going to answer me.’

  Furlong began babbling. Dominic slapped him across the face; not hard, but hard enough to get his attention.

  ‘Look at me.’

  Furlong stared into his silver eyes.

  ‘I want you to listen to what I’m telling you. If you lie to me, or I think you’re lying to me, I’m going to put you back under. I’ve seen men a lot tougher than you think they could hold out; they couldn’t. I’m telling you this in case you think you’re different.’

  Furlong shook his head. Between sobs he tried to speak, until Dominic told him to shut his mouth and the questions began.

  The interrogation took over an hour, and twice Dominic used the water to be sure what he was hearing was true. It might have gone on longer, but a light on the wall over the workbench began to blink, a signal from the house. He dried his hands and left Furlong strapped to the gurney, blubbering and exhausted.

  * * *

  Dominic exited the garage. The moon was high in a cloudless sky as he crossed the manicured lawn to the main house; he could see his breath with every step.

  Frederick waited by the conservatory door.

  ‘Detective Eli Quinn is here to see you. He said you’d know what it is about.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I put him in the front room.’

  Quinn was leafing through a leather-bound encyclopaedia when Dominic opened the door.

  ‘Nice collection you have,’ he said, holding the book aloft. ‘Don’t see this kind of thing any more.’

  Dominic grunted, looked around. The front room was cold, rather formal, and smelled of furnish polish. He rarely set foot in it. Frederick kept it spick and span regardless.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Quinn put the book back on the shelf with care and walked around the room, stopping by the ornate mantelpiece to study the various photos on it. After a while he turned.

  ‘I’m sorry about Andrea, Dominic. I didn’t realise she was your daughter.’

  Dominic leaned against the wall, his face revealing nothing.

  ‘How’s Lillian doing?’

  ‘How do you think?’

  ‘I think she’s hurting, same as you. I think she wants answers. But what you’re doing won’t solve anything.’

  ‘Who says I want to solve anything?’ Dominic folded his arms. ‘That’s your job, isn’t it, Detective?’

  ‘I can’t do my job if you keep snatching witnesses out from under my nose.’

  ‘Witnesses.’ Dominic’s lips twitched.

  ‘That officer Lennox struck – his name is Gant, by the way – suffered a mild concussion.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Was that really necessar
y?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Lennox when you see him? I’m sure he’ll oblige you with a run-down of his thinking.’

  ‘Is Furlong still alive?’

  Dominic wouldn’t insult Quinn’s intelligence by pretending he had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘He’s alive.’

  ‘Is he here?’

  Dominic shrugged.

  ‘Look, nobody knows you took him apart from Miranda Lynn and a new kid, Malloy. I’m trying to keep it off the books.’ Quinn spread his hands. ‘So unless you’re starting to enjoy attention in your old age, why don’t you let me handle this?’

  ‘Are you handling Andrea’s case?’

  ‘My squad is.’

  ‘You got any leads?’

  ‘Not so far, but Jesus, Dominic, it’s been less than twenty-four hours. I can’t rule anything out, but what I can do is eliminate people from our lines of enquiry, assuming I can get to talk to them.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll get you a confession.’

  Quinn looked down at the empty grate.

  ‘Yeah, I bet you could. I bet you could get Furlong to say anything you wanted him to say.’ He looked up again. ‘But you and I both know I couldn’t use it in court. It would kill any credibility we had.’

  ‘You think I care about courts, about credibility?’

  ‘I think you care about catching Andrea’s killer, and so do I. I’ll catch him, Dominic. You’ve got to let me do my job.’

  ‘Furlong doesn’t know shit.’

  ‘That’s not up to you to decide.’

  Dominic thought it over for a minute.

  ‘Get your car and meet me in the access lane out back.’

  * * *

  Dominic went back through the house and across the lawn. When he entered the garage, Furlong, still on the gurney, was rattling and shivering from cold and shock. Even his lips had turned blue.

  Dominic walked to the rear of the garage, unlocked the door and rolled it up halfway. He waited until he heard the crunch of tyres before he went back to Furlong and cut through his ties with a knife. When he sliced the chest strap, Furlong half fell, half fainted onto the floor and lay on the concrete heaving and juddering.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Dominic said as Quinn slid under the door. ‘You’re going to go with …’

  Furlong rolled onto his hands and knees and began to crawl away, sobbing hysterically.

  ‘What are you doing to him?’ Quinn asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Dominic said, genuinely baffled.

  Quinn hurried over and tried to grab Furlong, who pitched forward onto his side, shaking so badly Quinn could hardly hear him over the sound of his teeth rattling in his head.

  ‘He’s hypothermic; what did you do?’ He looked around, saw the gurney and figured it out. ‘You fucking waterboarded him?’

  ‘I wanted answers.’

  ‘Mr Furlong, listen to me, my name is Inspector Eli Quinn. I’m taking you into custody, you’re safe, okay?’ He glared over his shoulder. ‘Go get a blanket out of my car, and where the hell are his shoes?’

  ‘He didn’t have any.’

  ‘Get the blanket.’

  With a sour face, Dominic fetched a blanket and flung it towards Quinn. He watched the inspector help Furlong out of the garage and load him into his car.

  ‘This is bullshit,’ Quinn said when he’d slammed the door. ‘How the hell am I supposed to explain his condition?’

  ‘Not my problem.’ Dominic Travers put his hands in his pockets and tilted his head so he could see the stars and admire the constellations overhead. ‘Get him out of here,’ he said in a low, quiet voice. ‘And if anyone asks what happened, tell them what you like.’

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Nobody dared say a word to Quinn when he entered the station house with Furlong limping and shivering by his side. Keaton was called to examine Furlong and a fresh set of dry clothing was hastily found.

  The interview was bizarre and broken up by bouts of intermittent sobbing. Furlong admitted being at Andrea Colgan’s apartment but said he was there to take his paintings back. He said he was broke; he admitted he had substance abuse issues and that Andrea had broken it off with him after a physical fight in which there had been blows traded, and that he was, in his own words, ‘a complete fucking mess’.

  ‘I loved her,’ he told Quinn. ‘I fucking loved her so much, but she didn’t want me any more, you know?’

  ‘Let me see if I have this right: you were at the apartment to steal paintings?’

  ‘They were my paintings!’

  ‘So why didn’t you take them with you when you broke up?’

  Furlong looked down at his hands.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I was going to let her keep them, okay, but then … I had a buyer lined up, you know.’

  ‘You needed the money,’ Quinn said.

  ‘But I never hurt her. I didn’t even know she was there until I saw blood on the floor. I went down to our room and …’ He put his hands over his eyes. ‘Oh God, she was lying there with her face all smashed in.’

  After the interview, Quinn took him down to be processed. While he waited, he called Adam Johnson in Forensics and asked him to take swabs and photos of Furlong’s hands, looking for any sign of bruising. But as much as he disliked the young man, he sensed Furlong was telling the truth. He even waived his right to legal counsel. If anything, he seemed relieved at the idea that he would have to spend the night behind bars, safely out of harm’s way.

  When Quinn came back upstairs, he tossed Roxy the USB key with his recording of the interview and told her he wanted it transcribed and copied.

  Roxy, still quietly steaming from earlier, took it without complaint.

  ‘So now what?’ Miranda wanted to know, walking with him to the canteen. ‘Do you believe him?’

  Quinn rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘Yes, I believe him. I think he’d tell us everything he’d ever done in his life if it kept him out of Travers’ hands.’

  ‘He looked pretty shook up.’

  ‘He’ll live.’

  ‘This is a really bad business, Inspector. Tampering with witnesses, assaulting an officer. Where does it end? How much more of this shit are we supposed to turn a blind eye to?’

  ‘What would you have me do? It’s fucked up, but you know the situation with Travers.’ Quinn lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘He turned state’s evidence on the last pinch. He’s got immunity; the powers-that-be want him loose.’

  ‘If you ask me, it’s like releasing a virus into the community.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that? Jesus, Patrick would turn in his grave if he knew this was how we operated.’

  Something in his voice made Miranda glance at him. She was alarmed at how tired he looked, how drained. He kept walking with his head down, but she saw the muscles bunching in his jaw.

  Patrick Lynch had been Quinn’s boss when Quinn was starting out. Miranda had heard a lot about him. He was a big tough bastard from Cork, not much on small talk and straight as an arrow. He was a good cop too, hard but fair. Quinn had respected him a lot. Unfortunately he hadn’t a lick of political sense; he was the kind of man who’d arrest a minister’s son for driving under the influence as quickly as he’d arrest a cyclist for running a red light.

  ‘The law’s the law, for pauper or prince,’ he’d say.

  Then came what the papers nicknamed the Samsonite Case. Two little boys netting for baitfish found a battered suitcase washed up on the rocks near the harbour in the fishing village of Howth. When they dragged it onto the beach and broke open the locks, the badly decomposing parts of one Mati Prya spilled out onto the sand, sending the boys screaming down the beach in horror.

  It hadn’t taken long to trace Mati’s place of employment. She was one of two maids working for the then Attorney General, Elliot Joyce. When interviewed, Joyce had been arrogant and dismissive. He also had multiple alibis: powerful figures who would all swear on their sainted mothe
r’s mortal soul that Joyce had nothing to do with the unfortunate woman’s demise.

  Patrick Lynch thought differently.

  Patrick Lynch kept digging, and before long found evidence that Mati Prya had on more than one occasion complained about Joyce’s intimidating sexual behaviour. Lynch also had evidence that the previous summer, a Samsonite case had been purchased by the state – no less – as part of a junket to Central Asia for Elliot Joyce. A case Joyce declared had been stolen from his home in a burglary he had curiously not reported to the Rank.

  Despite repeated warnings from the Commissioner, Lynch could not be persuaded to let the matter drop. Not even when a suspect conveniently turned up dead in a shitty flat on the North Circular Road, with a suicide note in his handwriting confessing to the murder of Mati Prya left on a table. Still Lynch refused to accept Joyce’s innocence. In the end his inflexibility became a hindrance and ultimately led to his downfall.

  A trumped-up charge of brutality was brought against him, witnesses were quickly found, and with very little fanfare, Lynch was found guilty, stripped of his badge and sacked from the Rank without his pension, a fine how-do-you-do for twenty-five years of service.

  Within six months, he was dead; according to the coroner, the victim of a colossal heart attack. Lynch had always been a big man. Everyone knew his heart wasn’t good, everyone agreed he didn’t look after his health: he had high blood pressure, he ate greasy foods, drank too much.

  It was sad, but unremarkable.

  His demise served as a stark reminder to anyone else who might consider themselves more than mere cogs in the wheels of justice.

  When you’re ordered to stand down, stand down.

  It was a lesson Quinn had taken to heart.

  The canteen staff had long gone home. Lynn got two coffees from the machine, handed him one and sat down opposite him. She said nothing; she could see the storm brewing.

  Quinn sipped the bitter brew and thought about Roxy bashing away at her keys with undisguised fury. He thought about Furlong, crying and shivering in the car all the way in, the younger man’s almost hysterical relief when he saw the lights of the station. He thought about Gant’s face, how stoical he had been as he listened to Quinn suggest it might be best if he let the assault go.