The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

  “Ah,” he said. “The good old days again. A nice wholesome pilgrimage up Croagh Patrick there, in the pissings of rain. In bare feet too, for our many sins.” “My God but you’re crooked tonight.” He turned to her, gave her the eye.

  “There has to be tons of austerity,” he murmured. “Doesn’t there? And bucket-loads of repentance and guilt and the rest of it – every kind of squashing we can dream up to inflict on ourselves. But only for certain classes of people of course. That’s an Irish fundamental there, isn’t it?” She looked away. He lay back on the pillow.

  “Really,” she said. “Going on like that…? Where that comes from, I have no idea. That anger – I just don’t get it. You’d say it’s humour, but I can see through it.”

  The lampshade had cobwebs that he had not noticed before. “This country needs to wake up,” she added. “And well you know it too.”

  “Overrated,” he said, reaching for the beer. “This wake-up business.”

  He eyed her while he drank. Leaning over to park the can back on the cabinet Seán Brophy rose unbidden to his mind. It was not Brophy himself, it was someone else, someone he’d never seen, or even met: the Brophys’ daughter, curled up, staring at a wall.

  “What?” Kathleen was asking. “What’s on your mind now?” It wouldn’t make much sense to her. He wanted to scrub off whatever damned thing that Seán Brophy had left all over his thoughts.

  Kathleen elbowed him, tenderly this time.

  “You’re cold, are you?” she said. “Is that what it is?”

  Chapter 6

  Minogue felt floaty when he woke, a little stupid even. It had been a busy night, with lurid dreams piling up mercilessly on one another. To his dismay, one of them even featured Kilmartin. Dressed in a black funeral suit, Kilmartin stood in a very august hall – parliament? concert hall? – and delivered a sombre, stirring sermon on the Irish soul. But during the wild applause that followed, he’d flown away, and in no time, he was gliding between rooftops in some strange city at the edge of an even stranger sea.

  It got worse. Malone too had shown up in this crackpot world. He had been sitting in what seemed to be a circus audience, and clapping at Kilmartin’s antics overhead. But then the sea was suddenly pouring in the windows of Minogue’s new car, filling it to the roof. Sheer madness.

  He had enough time over breakfast to ponder any deep meanings, but came up with none. The Costigan’s half-wild cat made its ritual breakfast visit to the windowsill. He eyed its fur stirring and parting in the breeze, the flicking tail, the I-don’t-care eyes. The Paris getaway ad came on: Freedom of the City of Light. He finished his egg and went to the sink. That was enough for the cat to take off. He watched it thread its way through the flowerbeds and by the pear tree. Had there been a touch of frost? He heard Kathleen’s heels on the stairs.

  He dropped her by St. Stephen’s Green, and began threading his way down Kevin Street. It was a bit too easy, really. By and by, he was coasting by St. Patrick’s Cathedral and up the hill toward Christchurch. A string of green lights let him make the turn onto Usher’s Quay in short order. This pleased him, but it made him a little uneasy too. These streets used to be a big, stuttering traffic jam. So, was there a traffic crisis too? All too soon, he was closing in on Garda HQ, and he was glad of the red light by Infirmary Road. He spent the idle time watching the few dry leaves stirring and sometimes escaping from the damp drifts along the foot-paths, only to be snagged in another farther on.

  There was more suspicious ease with a too-handy parking spot. He lifted his work laptop from the boot. He had deleted all of the work files last night, clicking through all the security software warnings with a pleasant carelessness. Was that why it felt lighter?

  Things were quiet enough. He made it to his desk unaccosted, and began by backing up the Europol Lyons correspondence on the stolen cargos. Machine tools, dies, and high-quality steel had been plucked from no less than five countries, each robbery from roadside stops. The thieves had no trouble starting the vehicles, and driving them off. Three of these lorries had been contracted to Irish hauliers, and all three had baggage of their own in tow: serial convictions going back twenty years. The hauls would have totalled several millions worth – early last year, when they were nailed. Today, who knew.

  It was Áine Lawless, the detective who had torn open the au pair racket last year, who spotted him first. She had a half-pound of Kenyan coffee for him, and a reminder at the bottom of the card that she’d be expecting him at her wedding in the New Year. Ger Sheeran, Sergeant Ger Sheeran, a hyperactive fitness zealot with a genuine year-round tan, heard the talk. Over he came. Sheehan had just begun a joke about Paddy the Irishman on holiday in Spain when Minogue spotted Galloping Hogan making his way over. Hogan, starting out as Patrick Hogan from the baptismal fount in Colooney, County Sligo, some thirty-eight years before, was as fearsomely dynamic a copper as Minogue had met, a man surely headed for the senior Garda firmament any day now. With Hogan standing there, Sheehan rushed the joke, taking all the air out of it, and then he made off. Minogue feigned interest in Hogan’s opener, shop talk about next week’s planned bust on the livestock smuggling out of County Louth: postponed. There had been a tipoff from across the Border. Then came the infamous Hogan Pause. Minogue picked a spot on the wall, and let his eyes out of focus, and he waited.

  “So, Matt,” said Hogan eventually. “Ready for the big time, are you.”

  “Just about. Yes. ‘Change is good.’ All that.”

  “It’ll be nice to be running the show yourself though, I imagine.”

  Minogue fetched around for an innocuous answer. For too long now, he had wondered if Hogan had formed some resentment against him. He had put the awkwardness between them down to an age thing. Or had Hogan always felt that he had been overruled when Minogue was appointed, more than hired, to the unit?

  “Six months, Paddy. We’ll see what comes of it. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Hogan gave a couple of slow, thoughtful nods. Another Hogan Pause.

  “You’ve been very decent about this leave, Paddy,” Minogue said. “In case I forget to tell you.”

  Hogan dismissed the compliment with a quick flexing of his eyebrows. His eye still unwilling to stop its slow roaming around Minogue’s desktop.

  “You know we don’t blow our horn here,” he said, and then looked up sharply. “But there’s a lot of lads would give their eye teeth to be at your desk here.”

  Minogue had never learned to tell when Hogan was angry.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “But you know what you’re getting into. A man of your experience?”

  Minogue decided it might now be worth a try at some distraction.

  “I’ll phone every day, Paddy. Check you’re able to manage without me.”

  Hogan gave no sign that he appreciated the wit.

  “I have a message for you,” he said instead. “Two, actually. Maybe you got one?”

  Minogue could do nothing but wait out another measured delay.

  “Nobody phoned you?” Hogan asked. “Last night even, lateish?”

  “Me and mobiles, Paddy, we’re not a great match. I do forget sometimes.”

  “Something about last night,” Hogan said. “Below in Parkgate Street.”

  “I know Parkgate Street.”

  “A certain premises on Parkgate Street. Bit of a shindig there, was there?”

  “There was. Tame enough, though. I left early.”

  “Well you missed the highjinks then.”

  Minogue stuck to the only strategy he knew, grimly waiting Hogan out.

  “Bit of a barney there, is what I was told. One Garda Malone, and somebody. Two somebodies in actual fact. Two other Guards. A nice how-do-you-do.”

  Those two dark eminences, the hard-chaw looking bastards with their stares.

  “But maybe it’s been sorted out already,” Hogan said. Hushed up, as only Guards could do well, Minogue wanted to add.

  “You mi
ght want to know who told me,” Hogan said then. He didn’t wait for Minogue to ask. “One Sergeant O’Leary.”

  “Brendan O’Leary?”

  “That’s the one,” Hogan replied. There was no attempt to tone down the irony. “Commissioner’s office, yes. He said to pass that info on to you before the meeting.”

  “A meeting.”

  Hogan gave him a quick, knowing look. He was enjoying himself. Minogue couldn’t blame him.

  “Well that’s the other message. Commissioner Tynan wants a chat, this morning.”

  “This morning, you are saying. The Commissioner.”

  “This very morning, yes.”

  “Was there a time mentioned?”

  “The term used was ASAP. That sound about right to you?”

  ***

  Brendan O’Leary, the Garda Commissioner’s driver and aide-de-camp, was half-pretending not to have seen Minogue first.

  “Brendan, how do. Fresh and well you’re looking.”

  “Nothing on you, Matt. Very suave. Are you en route to the Left Bank?”

  Minogue didn’t mind the dig. O’Leary’s wife had dragged him to Paris over the summer. He had phoned Minogue for survival tips. O’Leary had liked Paris a lot more than he had expected. Minogue ended up with a bottle of Marie Brizard for his troubles.

  “New job, new suit,” he said. “A one-day wonder only though.”

  “Thanks be to God. You’d only be showing us up if it went longer.”

  Minogue sat.

  “Do I take a number?”

  O’Leary shook his head, and returned to his keyboard. Minogue was soon half-lulled by the delicate, arrhythmic clacking. He let himself imagine that O’Leary was making his umpteenth application to go back to Africa. But wasn’t he married now, with a baby on the way? He’d married late enough. She was a Wexford belle, and well-got, weathering the crash in some high-up job in the Financial Services Centre.

  Footsteps sounded behind the door, and nervousness fell on Minogue again like a chill. He had not seen the Commissioner since Rachel Tynan’s funeral. He caught O’Leary’s eye again. “Same as ever, is he?”

  From O’Leary, a shrug: what could he say about his boss being a widower now?

  The door swept open. It was not Tynan, but Carney, Deputy Comm for the Dublin Metropolitan Region. Was this the ‘sorted out’ that Hogan had meant?

  “Ah, Matt,” he said. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.” The smell of old-school shaving soap from Carney reminded Minogue of severe teachers. He didn’t squeeze back hard on Carney’s handshake.

  “Ready for action there, Matt?”

  He imagined telling Carney to stop spinning his hat between his fingers.

  “Sufficient to the task, I’m hoping,” he managed.

  Tynan was on the phone, his long legs straight out, heels dug into a mat. Minogue surveyed the office. Everything seemed the same, but this made things only stranger. That ugly bog-oak crucifix had always been on the wall over the chairs. Rachel Tynan’s watercolours of the Shannon lakes were still aligned to the very millimetre above the cabinet.

  “Almost like old times, isn’t it?”

  Carney’s genial tone unsettled him. He was holding out his card. Minogue made sure that Carney saw him file the card with care in his wallet.

  “Good luck in your new position,” Carney said. “And phone me directly if you need something? Directly. We’re open door, you know. The whole transparency bit.”

  Tynan told someone that he had to go. He ended the call with a few sentences of fluent Munster Irish. It must be that ancient aunt of Rachel’s, Minogue guessed, that relic of old decency, a Macroom Prod, the one who’d read poems at Rachel Tynan’s funeral.

  Tynan put down his biro, and slid his daytimer to a corner of his desk. Though he couldn’t pin it down, Minogue was sure that there was something changed about Tynan.

  “I know better than to be offering you any ordinary coffee.”

  “A weakness I struggle with, to be sure.”

  “A hard man to please, more like it. You’re gone Viennese now, I suppose.”

  That Europol conference, he meant. Tynan had never been able to do humour.

  “It’s a fine city for a walk-about, and that’s a fact.”

  “You paid your respects at the shrine there in Berggasse, I hope?”

  “I had to, sure. Kathleen put it in the prenup.”

  Tynan let the pause drag a little.

  “All right,” he said then. “You have your case list. Staffing and resources sorted? That office in Harcourt Terrace?”

  “They are indeed.”

  “And you’re ready for your baptism of fire with the media?” Minogue nodded. His morning’s coaching in the Garda Press Office last Friday had been funny as well as instructive.

  “That’s good,” Tynan said, looking down at his daytimer.

  “The Press Release is out today. The CSI Effect says you’ll be expected to fix everything right away.”

  “I’m getting guff about ‘cold cases’ already – from people who know better too. But it’s good practice for when the media come sniffing around.” Tynan glanced up again.

  “There’ll be other matters to distract them, I imagine. The

  Murphy Report?” “I almost forgot.”

  “It won’t be just reformatories or borstals this time. It’s parish stuff now.”

  Minogue was stumped for something to say, something not trite or stupid, that is. This musing-out-loud Tynan was not a Tynan that he recognized. Like the rest of the country, maybe he too was looking back to see where signs had been missed. It was more likely that Tynan’s own background had him pondering things more than others. Walking away from a Jesuit seminary back then, Tynan mightn’t have heard ‘spoiled priest’ said aloud. But marrying so soon afterwards? To a Prod? Later came the innuendo that the Tynans’ marriage had been childless for a reason. So was his wife’s death ‘a sign’ too?

  Rubbish – peasant holdover: it was a totally different Ireland back then. But wasn’t everyone back to looking for signs these days? The country would never run short of crackpots. The religious ones had already been seeing plenty of their signs lately: the shape of the Blessed Virgin on a wall in Sligo. The same Lady on a holy tree stump. A sun sign at the Knock shrine. Signs of what? That their kids might not have to emigrate?

  “‘Hard to believe,’” Tynan said. His tone turned meditative. “That’s the phrase we’ll be hearing a lot.”

  “You’re right, I’d say,” said Minogue, relieved that he had something to say now.

  Tynan frowned then and studied something on his desktop.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start. Item A: one Detective Garda Thomas Malone.”

  Minogue wondered if Tynan heard his intake of breath. “Garda Malone had a set-to last night,” Tynan said. “You knew that?”

  “I just heard something in passing. No details.”

  “Fortunately, the matter was settled by the time a squad car arrived.”

  Minogue tried to form his most alert-but-benign expression.

  “As I recall,” Tynan went on, “your request for Garda Malone was firm.” “It was, yes.”

  “Any second thoughts there?” Tynan asked after a calibrated pause.

  “I haven’t really, no.”

  “Would Garda Malone benefit from some counselling, in your opinion?”

  Minogue half-admired the brazen approach. “I can suggest it to him, I suppose.”

  “Does Garda Malone understand what’s expected of him in this posting?”

  “I believe that he does. And he will be reminded too.”

  “Especially as nearly all of the list are cases here in Dublin?”

  Hence Carney’s visit, Minogue decided. A Carney damage-control maneuver because of lousy clearance rates in his bailiwick. Maybe a shot across the bows too.

  “So if you ever get any foot-dragging from staff, the expectation is that you’ll work it out yourself. People skills
to the fore, I need hardly say. Tact.”

  Minogue could do little but dare the odd glance back into Tynan’s stare.

  “It would be a problem if, say, in the course of revisiting an open murder case,” Tynan added. He paused to let it sink in. “If a Guard was led to feel his work, his opinion, was being slighted. Morale is what keeps things right side up, and working.”

  Minogue had no trouble translating: Malone was on unofficial notice.