The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

  “Joey McCarthy. Are you forgetting already?”

  “We’re both Guards,” Minogue said. “What’s after happening here?”

  “Guards, you say. And you’re asking me?”

  Minogue latched a resolutely dull stare on the old man’s forehead.

  “Well what’s after happening is that Catherine had to be taken to the hospital.”

  Minogue watched the old man take another deep, considered breath.

  “You said Guards though.”

  “You’d think in this day and age that Guards would have some cop-on coming out here with that kind of news to an old woman on her own. Bring a doctor or somebody?”

  The old man’s face had gone from pink to a shade closer to maroon.

  “Look, this isn’t the best for me, standing out here. I’m going to sit down.”

  “Here,” Malone said. “Let me give you a hand.” The old man threw him a glare. His chest rose and fell in slow, shallow tremors.

  “Me? A hand? Youse think that I’m the one needs help here?”

  ***

  “Now I have to say, in the interests of accuracy, he was a burden on his mother. A real burden. Mightn’t be nice to say it, but it wouldn’t be right that people might not know that. No beating around the bush with me. You see?”

  Minogue looked up from where his mobile phone lay on the table. Larry Higgins – ‘Higgsy in the old days’ – shifted in his chair and pointed toward Malone’s notebook. “Aren’t you going to write that down?”

  “Write what down.”

  “‘Burden on his mother.’ That should be noted – no disrespect to anyone.”

  “Time enough,” said Minogue. “We’re just chatting.” This didn’t seem to satisfy the retired forty-one-year employee of Brennan’s Bread. Forty one years and seven months and just under two weeks, in actual fact. Numbers were Higgins’ pride. He and his deceased wife Mary had been the eighteenth family into this estate when it had been built. April 27th, 1956. Minogue couldn’t decide if it was the trademark Dublin smugness he was hearing, or the more general vanity of the aged.

  He took his opening anyway.

  “You have a powerful memory there. Massive entirely.”

  “Well so people tell me.” Higgins leaned forward a little.

  “And you notice there’s no talk from me about search warrants or the like,” he said. “And me sitting here in me own kitchen with two detectives? I know my rights, but I don’t hold with obstructing the Guards. No, I’m not one of those types of people.”

  “Very helpful,” Minogue felt he should say. “Very refreshing too.”

  “Not too helpful,” said Higgins. “I’m no friend of the Guards, now. I seen stuff.” “Next door you mean?”

  “Aren’t you the cute one, slipping in questions like that?” Higgins was enjoying himself. Minogue masked his quick survey of the kitchen with a rub at his forehead. Spick and span, everything lined up square, the tang of cleaner in the air. A man of firm, even rigid habits. A man short of company too.

  “So, like I was saying there, er. In the interests of poor old Catherine next door, she deserves better, that’s my point. Much better.”

  “Is she there on her own?”

  “Joey does be there, I can’t tell when though. In and out of the place.”

  “Husband, I was wondering.” Higgins shook his head.

  “Gone these years, Bobby. And I have to tell you, that husband of hers wasn’t what he let on to be when they started out here. The drink, you see.”

  Minogue looked down at his mobile again, willing it to ring. “The drink is a curse. Ruined more families than – Anyway: back to Joey. Listen to me, I never heard of this ‘JJ’ thing at all. It was always Joey, and Joey was the one and only. After the sister died, that is. You know what are genetics?” “I have a layman’s grasp. Very lay.”

  “Anyway. The father, Bobby, Bobby Mac. They came in ’64, the McCarthys. They’re not Dun Laoghaire or any of that, they were country people. A family the name of Nolan had to leave, there was trouble, and they went to England, so Catherine and Bobby were next in line. Little Aileen too, she only had a few years here before it took her. I remember her to this day. Didn’t I hold her in my arms a few times? A head of hair so fair it was white. But thin, very very thin, yes. The cystic fibrosis back then, they didn’t have much going for that…”

  Higgins’ breathing had grown raspy. Minogue exchanged a glance with Malone.

  “Larry,” he said in the lull. “We don’t want you to be straining yourself now.”

  “…I knew from day one, I says to Mary, I says ‘Mary, that Joey lad is going to be a handful.’ I said that, I did. And wasn’t I right in the end?”

  “Sounds like you kept track of him,” Malone said.

  “Who, me?” Higgins’ surprise was bogus.

  “Well did you?”

  “The answer to that is, ‘Why are there two Guards sitting here?’”

  “There were comings and goings, I suppose,” Minogue tried.

  “That says it all right – ‘comings and goings.’ Bobby, the poor divil he was run over by a bus on account of…well I’m not going to say it, am I.”

  Higgins inclined a little toward Minogue, and fixed a gimlet eye on him.

  “Fact is, poor Bobby had no hold on the young fella, on Joey. We used to hear Joey and Bobby going at it years ago. Bobby used to do odd jobs, for the parish and that.” “The church back the road there?”

  “That’s the one. They gave him things to do, handyman stuff. But sure he’d go on a tear, wouldn’t show up, and this and that. This is before there was any help for families, well like these days. The parish did a lot in them days. People don’t know that now, do they. They just hear things and they want to string them up. Don’t they?”

  “Not me,” Minogue said. My wife might though, he added within.

  “Well now. The only one Joey’d listen to was his mother, Catherine. And even then, it wasn’t the best. But I’ll tell you one thing, it was because of her that he never ended up in jail. That always amazed me. Always. The things he would get up to?”

  “What things?”

  “Joey was never into the aggro. You know aggro? I suppose you do. Joey didn’t have it in him really. Bit of a softie, tell you the truth. So he went for the other stuff.”

  “The…?”

  “Ah you know. The marry-you-anna. That sort of thing, and worse. The hash. And then, didn’t Joey get done. Caught. Catherine told me one day, God she was very upset. You see, she tried her best to get Joey out of the situation. It was easy enough to walk out your front door here and do the gang thing back then – and this is before the real gang thing got started at all. Can you imagine? All we were worried about back then, with our young lads especially, was they’d be with a crowd who was robbing houses, or cars, or getting into fights and that. But now?”

  Minogue offered a sage nod. Higgins stared at the tabletop, took several breaths.

  “You’d be shot dead for looking at someone the wrong way nowadays,” he went on. “Am I right, or am I right?”

  “It can happen. If you’re involved in that kind of life.”

  “Sure the Guards have to carry guns now, isn’t that right?”

  “Some do. You were saying that Joey was not much for the fighting and that.”

  “His mother, that’s what I’m telling you. Catherine. She used to be signing him up for this and that. Always going to the teachers, and the parish priest and the youth club – everything. She knew what she was up against. Never interested in the sports or anything, Joey. Liked to fiddle with things, motorbikes like, or a bit of stuff with cars. God, sure the place was full of bits of things. The coal shed out the back there? Full of old scrap, and wheels and bits of bikes. But he’d never stay long at the one thing.” “Was he always living there next door?”

  “Are you joking me? You know how old Joey is, or was, I should be saying? Sure he was gone for years. Even went to England and w
orked a bit there. He liked someplace, what do you call it in Holland – Amsterdam, yes. But as I understand it, that was Joey’s ‘job,’ like. Where you could get hold of drugs and that. Then I seem to remember him doing odd jobs as a sign painter, then bits to do with the computers. A few years ago, didn’t he get hold of himself a bit. Matured, I suppose. Or maybe he got a fright? Next thing you know is, Catherine lets drop that he’s studying. ‘Joey’s going to college,’ she says one day. Very proud of him she was. Well I could have dropped there and then.”

  “‘College’?”

  “Well that’s the thing, you see. You went along with what Catherine said. I mean to say, knowing all she’d been through? Losing her little girl like that, that hubby of hers…? You’d be inclined to let her think what she liked. That’s my point. You go along with them old people, let them boss you a bit. Sure what harm can it do?”

  Minogue thought of Immaculata, and his mood soured a little.

  “Not saying you’d believe her now,” Higgins qualified. “But you did the right thing by Catherine. Very proud. Came from good stock I believe, fairly well-to-do somewhere. Out in the West of Ireland, yes. Fell for Bobby, she did, but her family wasn’t keen on him at all, at all. So after Bobby died, what did she have? Nothing. So she had to do things she’d never expected. Worked in Freddy’s there on the seafront, selling ice cream. Worked in a newsagent for years – and then I found out she worked as a maid. A maid, in this day and age? That was when Joey was still a young fella. Housecleaning she did too, up in one of the big houses. She never let on she did it.” “People have their pride, I suppose.”

  “Too true there, er. Too true. She did it all for Joey too. It wasn’t just the money. It was she was trying to show him another way of life I suppose. To introduce him to something outside of where his mates around the place here were heading.”

  He paused then and looked blankly at the windowsill. Maybe the souvenir salt-and-pepper set from Tenerife there had information he needed.

  “Anyway,” he said then, vaguely. “This ‘college’ thing Joey done there a few years ago, it was really more of kind of job-training thing. When the money came to Ireland, the Tiger and all that, there was money for stuff like that. The whole ‘make work’ thing. Training, he did, with computers. He came back to live with the mother, you see, and that settled him enough to go to school every day.” “How far back was that?”

  Higgins looked over at the souvenir salt-and-pepper shakers.

  “Three, fours years back, or so. I heard he got a job out of it, graphic something-or-other. But then he had something to do with a newspaper thing. But I don’t know if he ever got clear of the old carry-on he was into, like I said to you, the shady stuff.”

  A look of distaste began to spread over his face.

  “Are you all right?” Minogue asked.

  “Bloody good question. Maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m talking too much.”

  “No harm done, I say.” Higgins gave him a baleful look. “Says you,” he said.

  Minogue’s mobile whirred and began a skittering rotation on the table. It was numbers only, a Dublin number. He got up. “I’ll be out the side of the house,” he said.

  Higgins shrugged and turned to Malone, giving him a long, frowning appraisal. Malone was the next candidate for Larry Higgins to set to rights. Sure enough, pulling the door behind him, Minogue heard Higgins open a new front with a question, a question that was not a question, about CrimeCall.

  Chapter 24

  The pebbledash wall came through Minogue’s coat sharper than he had expected. He pushed off from it, and tried again to ignore his wet socks. He had been switched to one Garda Byrne. A slow-talking passive-aggressive, Byrne was doing a fine job of ladling out just enough of his irritation at having to respond to questions for which he had no answers. Yes, Clontarf Garda station had called them first thing this morning and asked them do that next-of-kin call at that address. The identification of the remains had been made yesterday. The body had been found the day before.

  “What’s the estimate again?”

  “‘Several weeks,’ it says here…hold on a sec. No, that’s all he told us.” “That’s it?”

  “Well it’s not on the system here,” Byrne said, with a suspicious ease. “It’s just a note I made to give the basics to the lads who went out on the next of kin.”

  “And there’s nothing there on cause of death?”

  “‘Suspicious circumstances’ is all he gave me.” Minogue let a few seconds pass.

  “You want the number for Clontarf station?”

  “Please. But where did ‘appears to be trauma to the head’ come from?”

  “Ah…well: that was just him saying it looked like that on the report. There are injuries, he said.”

  Minogue pushed his notebook onto the wall with the heel of his hand as he wrote down the phone number. The contact at Clontarf Garda station gloried in the name of Garda Sergeant Malachy Muldowney. He’d phone Muldowney from the road.

  Larry Higgins seemed to have become re-energized. He had moved on from a cross-examination of Malone on Garda patrolling – ‘we never see a patrol car here, did you know that?’ – and on to social revolution.

  “It’s true,” he said as Minogue took his seat again and signaled Malone his desire to be gone from here. “It goes in a circle. Lookit, when was the General Strike?”

  “What General Strike?” Malone asked.

  “1913,” Minogue said.

  A mistake, he knew. Higgins’ eyes grew big. The warning voice within was loud and clear to Minogue: just what they needed, this geezer having some kind of collapse.

  “A hundred years since that, and look at us. The same thing over again – you’re on the inside or you’re on the outside. You have everything, or you have nothing. The law only protects the rich – the church too, of course. All in cahoots, you know?”

  Higgins’ chest rose and fell steadily as he levered himself upright.

  “But you know all this too,” he said then. “You Guards, right? The thing is, you can’t say it, can you. It’s time to do something, I say, something serious. Where’s our Jim Larkin nowadays? Time for people to stand up. Something’s got to give here.”

  “You sound like a man with a plan,” said Malone, rising from the table.

  Higgins eyed Malone and then Minogue, and made a thin, mirthless smile.

  “I’d only tell that in confession, wouldn’t I. Just me and the priest.”

  “Divine intervention you’re looking for too, are you?”

  “Like hell, I would. And if you believe that, you’d believe anything. I haven’t put a foot inside a church door in fifty year – only for weddings and funerals, I have to say. Baptisms too, of course. I was on to them years ago. A lot of people were. But nobody listened, did they? And nobody did anything.”

  He paused to swallow, or to breathe. Minogue gave Malone the nod to get moving.

  “Nobody did what needed doing,” Higgins said. “You know what I mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” Minogue managed. “Whatever that might be, now.”

  “Really? Well if you, the Guards, if you have to ask, then what does that say?”

  Minogue was more than willing to allow Larry Higgins his victory. It was familiar ground this, the old Dublin story, the old Irish story probably: the man-who-isn’t-codded had shown up the man-who-had-been-codded, a.k.a. the man-who-thought-he-knew-better-than-the-ordinary-man-in-the-street.

  He was willing to bet that Higgins wanted to slow them down on their way through the hall so they could take in the photos en route. A wedding day, complete with teddy-boy looks: the freshly minted Mr. and Mrs. Larry Higgins. She was all too easy a match for the photo of the middle-aged woman in the next picture, happy-looking, red faced, proud. The poem beneath was memorial card verse. Still, he read it.

  I am so happy here in Heaven, dear ones,

  Oh, so happy and so bright.

  There is perfect joy and beauty,
/>   In this everlasting light.

  “That’s her, all right,” he heard Higgins say. “You are detectives after all.”

  Minogue glanced at him. There was no smirk.

  “Mass every day,” said Higgins. “Yes, that was Mary. And we got on great, every day – every day. I went my way, she went hers. That church business was never an issue. I was reared on Jim Larkin, he was my bishop. Mary was more old style. Never a cross word between us all the same. Can you believe that?” “I’m glad to hear it” was all Minogue could offer.

  That’s how they left Higgins, well-pleased that he had demonstrated that he was nobody’s fool, and lonesome. He called to them from the doorway.