The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

  “How would I know?”

  A minute passed. A drain was gurgling, but Malone couldn’t see where it was. The hush of traffic on the M-50 hung in the air, but over it he still heard the gentle, whimsical patter the rain, one that could not be trusted. He tested his lapel mike, turning it until it hissed and then dialing it back.

  “Heard the one about the Chinese fella visiting Dublin? They interview him, right? ‘So what do you make of these Irish people?’”

  “That’s an old one,” Malone said. Keaveney turned to Buckley instead.

  “How long is Kelly out on parole? A month even? He’s a goner here then: right back in, five to seven years. You think he knows that?”

  It was Buckley who answered.

  “I imagine he’s aware of it. In some dim and dark recess of his mind.”

  “What’s left of it,” said Keaveney, with a snort. “What do you say, Tommy?”

  “I say, let’s talk about the weather. That’s what I say.” The rain that was working its way down in tickling lines over Malone’s forehead had gathered in his eyebrows. Malone would long remember that minute or so that he had kept his eye on the laneway. He would recall feeling Keaveney’s mocking eyes on him, but also feeling a little pleased with himself that he was able to ignore Keaveney.

  More than one Ombudsman investigator would ask Garda Malone his thoughts as the operation proceeded then, his feelings too. Malone would ascribe this line of questioning to Keaveney’s testimony.

  Did you experience anger that morning, Garda Malone? You had a history with Mr. Kelly for some time? Concerning your deceased brother? You were aware that Mr. Kelly had become heavily involved in heroin trafficking?

  It was Doyle on the radio again. Kelly and Chan were approaching the junction. That was the only kiss-off point where the runner car would have to go by. Kelly and Chan would be out of sight for five seconds or more.

  While he waited, Buckley waved the handset around in slow, small arcs. The glance from Keaveney made Malone wonder if Keaveney actually wanted the situation to blow up on Buckley. But then Keaveney’s expression changed. Malone had heard it too: car wheels crashing through a puddle. Doyle radioed that they had put the block on.

  Buckley looked relieved. He almost smiled. He began to tap his fingers on his vest. It was that accordion-playing gesture that had become so common amongst the Guards that it was a staple of wry humour. Then he stopped abruptly, stepped smartly to the car, and dropped the handset in to Flynn. He backed in to the doorway next to Malone, rattling the shutters a little as he did. “Let’s do what we’re good at, lads. Right?” Reflections of the low and formless clouds that had covered Dublin for days now slid along the Audi’s windscreen. Chan was the passenger; he was on a mobile. He seemed to be having a lively enough conversation, one that had him gesturing still as he stepped out of the Audi. He stood still then for several moments, and stared at the laneway ahead. The light rain didn’t seem to be registering with him.

  Kelly lit a cigarette from the end of his old one, cleared his throat and spat across the laneway. He was blinking a lot. The goatee and the rings in his ears reminded Malone of a pirate in his niece’s school Christmas pantomime.

  “Come on,” Buckley whispered. “Produce the goods here, one of youse.”

  Chan slid closed his phone and pocketed it. He held out a key to Kelly.

  “Well well,” said Buckley. “So Paddy the Irishman is just the go-for here.”

  Kelly palmed the key and moved it around in his hand. Then he stared at it, as though it held a secret.

  “Just do it, gobshite. It’s a key in your hand. Doesn’t take a miracle to use it.”

  Buckley had his lapel mike pushed up close. His frown deepened. It seemed to cause him to slump a little. Then Kelly’s hand flipped over, and he was on the move.

  “Christ,” said Buckley, darting upright. “He made us! Tommy, he’s yours!”

  Malone would later recount wanting to yell something at Buckley at this point. Something like he wasn’t a moron, for Christ’s sake. Like, he had actually been awake at the briefing. Like, drop this control-freak new Sergeant’s thing, the one that made him think that nothing happened without him, that no-one knew anything unless he said so. Like, would he just frigging cool it, Buckley, and stop giving Keaveney any excuse to get more sour, more sarcastic, more bitter by the minute here.

  Keaveney had come out fast too. He was ahead of Malone, and with his pistol displayed he was headed straight for Chan, roaring. Chan stayed frozen, his eyes locked on Keaveney. The detective slid to a stop ten feet from him, in firing stance.

  But Kelly was sprinting around the bigger puddles now. Surprise collided with anger in Malone as he watched Kelly actually speed up. With every step, the new armour bit at his armpit again. Where was Doyle or the other fellas from the runner car?

  A figure, then another, appeared at the head of the laneway. Kelly came to a shuddering stop, hopping and sliding over the wet cement, his arms churning the air. He glanced back at Malone, at the shuttered doorways. He seemed to see something he liked, and he bounded toward it.

  Malone began swearing aloud then: somehow, Kelly was managing to rise up the wall there. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Buckley had sussed the place the other day, hadn’t he?

  Doyle too was disbelieving. He too slowed his dash. Wild-eyed, he looked at Malone. Overhead, and just out of reach were Kelly’s running shoes, the zigzag patterns of the soles flecked and glistening. It was a galvanized pipe, some kind of conduit, he was using. Bits of the brackets that held them to the wall had given way.

  “Come down,” Doyle growled more than shouted. Kelly ignored him.

  “You stupid bastard. Get real here, yeah? There’s nowhere to go.”

  Wheezing, whimpering, Kelly now pulled the barbed wire back from where it had caught his jacket. With a pained grunt, he got a knee onto the lip of the roof. He pulled himself up on his elbows over a parapet.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Doyle. “How the hell did he do that?” Malone saw bright spots of blood now, the track of Kelly’s desperate flight up. He had to be high, to go like a monkey at that wire. Anaesthetized. Buckley’s voice in his earpiece was driving him mad. He yanked it out, and began searching for a handhold on the pipe.

  “Doyler, gimme a hoosh up there.”

  “Are you cracked? It’s not worth it.”

  “Come on. Don’t be a bollocks.”

  “Are you mad? Leave him, I’m telling you. He’s not going anywhere.”

  “You don’t know that, do you? So come on – give me a bunt!”

  “Christ’s sake, Tommy! Where can he go? Get a grip there!”

  “Says you – like ‘No worries, man, we have the place sussed out’?”

  Doyle sighed and looked around.

  “Just get me a start and I can get up. If I make a bollocks of it, it’s on me. Okay?”

  Doyle slowly cupped his hands, and braced his back against the wall. He grunted as he took Malone’s weight.

  “Tommy. This is retarded. Wait for him? He has to come down, man. Jaysus!”

  Malone would remember Doyle’s expression very clearly, his face twisted with the strain of holding him up. It would be the same Doyle who would be there when things would fall apart.

  Malone pulled himself up, felt Doyle try to steady himself better beneath. Carefully he settled his feet on Doyle’s shoulders, and he wedged his back against the bricks. Squinting against the rain-drops, he searched the five or six feet between him and the barbed wire. There was a gap, a small one, with a long filament torn from Kelly’s nylon jacket. He looked at the bricks next to his hands. Kelly had shredded some part of himself here. His knuckles probably.

  Malone reached up and eased his fingers around the pipe. It was greasy with the rain. It gave out a scratchy protest when he pulled on it. He pulled harder and it began to shriek. But it held. He got what he could of the side of his shoe on the gouged face of the bricks. Then he stopped.


  When did you form this intent to scale the wall there, Detective Malone?

  It was the one from the London Met, the retired Super from their CID, the one with the shut-up face and the Cockney accent. Mr. Sell-you-down-the-river-while-he-smiled-at-you. Did you hear others trying to dissuade you from this?

  It had to be from Doyle’s statement, for sure.

  He looked up. The sky was barely overhead. The rain was more of a drizzle really. It was actually refreshing.

  “Bastard’s not worth it,” Doyle was saying to him. “Hear me up there?”

  “I’m going up. Go around the end of the lane there yourself.”

  Later, Garda Malone would depose that he had actually enjoyed the effort of getting himself to the rooftop. Yes, enjoyed. Why ‘enjoyed’? He had always had a competitive temperament, he told them. When told he couldn’t do something, that got him wanting to. He didn’t care that his interviewers were almost uniformly skeptical of this. Called to expand on this, he had told them that it was more than just the satisfaction of getting Kelly. Climbing up there was hard, yes, even a bit dodgy. Kelly had left enough signs of that in his panicked clawing up on the roof himself. But if Kelly had done it… And it was more even than the kick of doing what another copper – Doyle, say – would balk at. It was the actual exertion he enjoyed, plain and simple, that burst of energy that freed him from the sour thoughts that he couldn’t shake off earlier.

  Malone would have plenty of time – too much in fact – in the next four months to wonder why he had uttered those words that he now did. The words, the phrases, kept coming up over and over again in the interviews.

  “I’ll take care of the bastard,” he said. “I’ll sort him out.” And then, all too easily it seemed to him, and still believing that it was Kelly’s tortuous climb before him that had eased his own, Malone had his elbows on the edge of the roof himself. Kelly wasn’t thirty feet away. He was bent over, holding one hand in the other. There was blood, a lot of it, on one sleeve of his jacket. His jeans were torn too. He didn’t straighten up, but watched Malone sideways, his chest heaving while he grimaced, revealing crowded, greying teeth.

  “You’re under arrest, you fecker.”

  Kelly didn’t seem to have heard him. Malone tugged his windbreaker open now.

  “Give it up, gobshite. You know the drill. Hands on the back of your neck, nice and slow there. And knit them fingers tight.”

  Malone kept up his stare. He stepped around the clumps of pitch and the messy leftovers of roof repairs over the years, the odd shaped pieces of tin and metal, and pieces of bottles and faded beer and soft drink cans thrown up here. Kelly eyed him all the while, but seemed unwilling to focus on him. Kelly’s arms were trembling. There were blotches and spots of blood on his neck.

  He began to pace, and to retrace his steps. To Malone it looked like a dance.

  “You want resisting arrest too?” Kelly grimaced.

  “You listening there at all?” he called out again to Kelly.

  “Get serious. Hands together, the back of your neck.”

  Kelly came to a stop. His eyes focused on Malone now, and he frowned. “You,” he said.

  Just ‘you,’ Garda Malone? Mr. Kelly didn’t address you by name? No name, Malone would reply. It was sufficient, because he knew you, he remembered you? Remembered you well, would you say? Hard to say, was the best Malone would offer on that. Likely. How likely?He feared you, and had reason to remember you very clearly. Because of an association with your deceased brother, correct? Because you believed Mr. Kelly played a part in his overdose? Lanigan, the Association barrister, had warned him this would come up early: ‘the Ombudsman crowd goes straight for the nuts.’

  But Malone had wanted his say. He replied that he had no insight into Kelly’s mental processes. Kelly feared what you might do, would you not agree? He feared going back to jail, Malone countered. Lanigan had given him an earful after that session. If nothing else, Lanigan told him later, Malone had damaged his own career with the combative replies.

  Malone heard the wet sizzle of tires in the lane below. It was Doyle’s car braking to round the corner. Kelly began to blink now.

  It seemed to Malone that he couldn’t stop blinking.

  “Kelly. Are you deaf, or what? Listen to me. Play ball here and we’ll see what we can do for you. All right?”

  Kelly’s chest was heaving less now, but he had nothing to say.

  “Help us out,” said Malone. “We’ll get you into Coolmine. Help you kick it, see? It’s never too late. You hear?”

  He stopped when he heard the noise. The low moaning that he was hearing could only be Kelly. He looked down at the man’s hands. The bloodied left was dangling by his side and dripping darkly. But Kelly’s right was slipping into the pocket of his jeans.

  “Don’t,” Malone said. “Don’t!”

  He had already stepped down and dipped into his stance, his left arm completing its sweep up to steady the pistol.

  “Take your hand out of your pocket. Slow. Where I can see it. Now!”

  Kelly slowly began to withdraw his hand.

  “All the way,” Malone yelled. “Show me! Open your hand!” Asked what he had observed that had caused him to take out his firearm, Malone could only say that the hair had stood up on the back of his neck. Had he concluded that Kelly had a firearm? It was a feeling, Malone explained. A feeling, a hunch, that’s all.

  Kelly’s eyes had slipped back out of focus. He was licking his lips.

  “Open your hand, and show me, where I can see it’s empty.” Kelly had flinched at the shout.

  “Stop bollocking around there, I’m telling you!” Something tripped in Malone’s mind. “Now!” was all he could think to shout.

  What Malone would later call a grin – a word he stuck with through every session of interviews, adding a few qualifiers like ‘weird’ and ‘freaked-out’ and ‘odd’ – was settling on Kelly’s face. Malone sank further into his stance, feeling his forefinger pushing too hard against the guard. He wondered if Kelly had heard him release the safety.

  He didn’t shout now.

  “Whatever you have there, don’t. Don’t do it.” Kelly took a small step to his side.

  “Stop,” Malone said. “You’re high, man. You’re not thinking straight.”

  Kelly’s eyes snapped back into focus. His smile faded. He eyed Malone as though seeing him for the first time. For several moments Malone almost believed that there were only the two of them here on this rooftop, that the city about them was deserted, that the clouds were so close and dense that you could reach up and grab a lump of them.

  Detective Garda Mick Doyle was the one who first saw the figure, arms out and churning like an Olympic swimmer, plunging toward him through the air above.

  Chapter 2

  The evening of that same Tuesday, Rhiannon Brophy had had it. She had been here on Killiney Hill for over a half hour now. Here she was, waiting for the light to be ‘right’ for these last stupid photos. This project had turned into a nightmare, an absolute mess. At least it had stopped raining.

  Miss Conway was a bitch. How had Rhiannon ever thought otherwise, for one second? Jesus! Miss Conway had told her to actually go out in the rain, and destroy her father’s expensive camera equipment! Like, this crappy weather was Rhiannon Brophy’s fault? She was being punished for the weather, or something? Bitch. Art teacher tyrant two-faced total loser Miss Helen Conway: colossal bitch. Smiley liar bitch. Frustrated, permanent PMS, no boyfriend. Old maid thirty five-ish jealous over-the-hill stupid bitch.

  She scrolled down her calls, her thumb hovering over several. Then she snapped her mobile shut. Why should she always be the one to call Maeve, or Kate, first?

  She studied the scratches and the dings on her phone. In a way, she was almost proud of them. The more scratches, the easier it’d be to justify a new one. It was a year old already. The battery was acting up, or the charger, or something. She had thought about losing it on purpose. Kate had been
doing it for years. It wasn’t just to get a new model, it was to piss off her father. Kate had a nasty streak to her. Everyone slagged their parents, fair enough. But was it actually possible that Katie hated hers?

  The sea had gone from muddy brown to grey. A bit of weird blue too? She’d better start to write them down now before she forgot. She turned inland and began to key them in. Beyond the lights of the south Dublin suburbs, the hills were fading. A bit of colour lingered behind Two Rock Mountain. She keyed in ‘lemon,’ and ‘mustard,’ and then ‘a bit orangey.’ Miss Conway wouldn’t go for ‘orangey.’ That’s why she’d put it in, then.

  A breeze had come up in the past few minutes, carrying with it a coolness from the sea. If Miss Conway were a real teacher, and not a bitch, she’d have told her that the whole project had been too much to take on in the first place. Maybe, in some twisted way, she wanted her to screw up. She had so wanted to impress Miss Conway with this project. And it hadn’t been fake either! She had storyboarded the presentation on the projector, with Coldplay and Sloan, and the transitions and timing perfect and—