The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

  Corcoran strained to reach in under the table. He drew a photo across the linoleum a foot or two before he was able to pick it up.

  “I have one just like it,” he said. “I’m looking for another one, but.”

  “Why?” Minogue almost retorted, but a hint of hopefulness in Corcoran’s face put that imp to flight.

  “Escort,” said Fitz. “Right, Corky. Let me ‘escort’ you to the scrap yard with it.”

  He turned from squeezing the tea bags over the sink. “Go Japanese, you’ll never look back.”

  “Fifteen hundred euro from the scrappage scheme won’t go very far toward new wheels,” said Corcoran, and returned to salvaging his lunch boxes. “I’d buy that red one for parts though.”

  Minogue saw that Fitz was busy again. He slid the photos into his pocket and headed out. The yard was flooded in yellow light. It had gone colder already.

  ***

  There was no answer at Disciples.

  “Where do they sleep?” he heard himself murmur. “Where do nuns sleep?” “Who says they sleep?”

  He turned and watched Malone sliding his finger down the side of a page, and then stop while he made a note.

  “They’re probably vampires. The type you can’t see, until it’s too late.”

  “How much more of that mobile traffic records needs a go-over?”

  Malone pressed down his finger on a page decisively, and he looked up.

  “Triple-check,” he said, not bothering to hide the irony in his voice. “Wasn’t that the plan? We get this stuff out of the way before we start up re-interviewing and that?”

  Minogue rearranged the photos on the desk. He placed the one with the priest last.

  “Should I be asking what those pictures are”

  “They’re pictures. Pictures of ancient Ireland.”

  “Are you in some kind of nun fan club now? How ancient are they anyway?”

  “Sixties, Seventies. I don’t know.”

  “Who’s the copper there?”

  “Twomey, a Sergeant Twomey – and thanks for reminding me. I meant to phone Pierce Condon, or his son I mean, and give him the name. He was trying to remember it.”

  “You lost me there. But I don’t think I’m going to lie awake over it.”

  “It came up in a chat. We were trying to remember the name of someone here. Years ago.”

  Malone released his finger from the page and he eased back into a slouch.

  “Nuns. You have an obsession or something. No offence.” Minogue placed his finger on one of the photos.

  “That nun there, the shorter one?”

  “What about her.”

  With his free hand, Minogue slid the photo with Twomey over.

  “I say that she…is related to him. To this Twomey character.”

  “She is? Who told you?”

  “I told myself. Look at the set of the eyes there, the chin. There’s something.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Malone slowly. “I suppose. Maybe.”

  “Actually it is interesting. But not as interesting as the other nun here. The one beside her, the one in the grey raincoat.” Malone scratched hard at the underside of his arm. “Oh, the rebel one there? Grey was a fashion statement back then, was it?” Malone’s scratching stopped.

  “Jay-zuzz,” he said. “How can you tell the difference between the two of them? Look at the head gear: the same. Look at the what you call ’ems, the scarfs— ” “Coifs, they’re called, I think.”

  “Quaffs then. Same again. So one has glasses, and one’s a bit taller, fair enough. But a nun is a nun.”

  Minogue said nothing

  “Don’t you think?” Malone asked, after a while.

  It was there all right, Minogue thought, the way the taller one seemed to be challenging the camera. He wondered again who was taking the pictures.

  “The tall one,” he said. “She’d be the one I’d be interested in.”

  “‘Interested in.’ I don’t like the way that sounds.” Minogue had a heavily ironic look of his own to match Malone’s.

  “That there nun,” he said, and paused. “That there nun is Sister Immaculata.”

  Chapter 27

  “Nice work,” Malone said. “Does it pay much, surfing the Internet?”

  He pushed home the cabinet drawer with a final grinding squeak. His thumb hesitated over the lock, while he waited for Minogue to look over. Minogue had a hesitation of his own to deal with: a suspicion that Malone was overdoing it. He had been trying a bit too hard to be agreeable, to be his dryly funny old self.

  “I’ll do it,” he said to Malone. “I’m heading home in a few minutes myself.”

  Malone stood next to him, looked at the screen. “A local history outfit?”

  “More a group of people reminiscing, so far as I can see. Talking about 99s and Golly Bars and Ford Prefects.” “What’s that there, ‘The Noggin’?”

  “Research, is what it is. ‘The means must, when the devil drives.’”

  “I’m going to have to take your word on that, whatever it means.”

  Minogue had copied and pasted bits into a text file. “Did you find what’s-her-name there, Sister Thing?”

  “I wasn’t looking for her.”

  “You’re still sure that’s her in that picture, are you, back in nineteen seventy nothing.” “Or someone very like her.”

  He saved the file again and went to his personal email. Slow. “I found mention of a Father Murphy though,” he said while he waited. “The priest in that newspaper article.”

  “The priest that oul Lar Higgins was talking about, the one that Mrs. McCarthy worked for?” “But no picture of him.”

  “Why do you, why do we, want one?” Minogue gave him a quick look.

  “Because I want to see if he looks like that guy there.”

  Malone’s skepticism came through loud and clear in his widening eyes.

  “The priest there with that prayer group, or whatever they called themselves going over to the Island. To that old church.”

  Malone made several slow nods and then he turned on his heel. Minogue heard him slip into his coat, and slide his keys from the desk.

  “Tomorrow, boss.”

  “Fair enough.”

  He listened to Malone’s footsteps as he took the stairs, and then he returned to the screen.

  Father Peter Murphy had been curate of Our Lady of Victories for two years. According to ProudNogginer, probably the most frequent contributor to this forum, Father Murphy had been ‘a breath of fresh air.’ It was too bad that he’d gone on the missions so soon really. TomTheBomb wrote that he reckoned that Father Peter probably went on the missions to get a holiday from the Noggin, ha ha. But seriously, he added in a reply to a question about what missions, Hardyman opined that Father Murphy had rubbed them the wrong way, that he was too ‘new’ for the parish priest there, or something.

  “Or something,” Minogue murmured. He was hardly the only man in Ireland these days, he hoped, the only man to know that it was rare for a diocesan priest to turn to the missions.

  He tried a few more searches, varying the order of the words each time, but nearly every link that came up was a repeat. He was catching the usual ADD and an unfamiliar kind of vertigo at the same time: too much data, not little information, zero knowledge. He signed in to his personal email, and somberly noted that he was not a recipient of any email from his son. A week now? Hardly a record, to be fair. He composed an email to himself and pasted in the contents of his file, and he hit Send. He closed his folders and slid them into the same drawer that Malone had closed. Then he thumbed the lock home and pocketed his key.

  He gathered the photos again, taking brief look at each before dropping them into his new fancy, almost empty attaché case. They looked a bit different now, he realized. Less useful? He pushed back against the eddy of discouragement trickling into his mind: Sergeant Twomey for sure, Father Peter Murphy, for sure. Some nun who might or might not look like Two
mey. But a young Sister Immaculata? A very big maybe.

  He had the door almost closed when the phone went.

  “I was lucky you were still there, I suppose.”

  Kathleen’s voice had an edge of annoyance in it.

  “I tried your mobile first, fool that I was.”

  He slid it out while he listened to detail what her friend was now facing.

  “I just found out that Brídín has nothing in reserve. Nothing. She’ll have to sell the apartment. She’ll lose all the money she put into it too. And who’s going to buy an apartment these days anyway?”

  Sure enough, he had switched his mobile off. He hadn’t remembered doing that. What did that mean? That his subconscious had taken over the task of shutting Kilmartin out?

  “She was always the life and soul of the place,” Kathleen went on. “Always one for enjoying herself. And now she’d right on the edge. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat – she told me everything. I was shocked.” “Terrible,” he said.

  “Maxed out her cards, and she hasn’t anything put aside. Did I say that already? I did. ‘Never one for planning,’ she told me. I knew that, but I thought it was just the whole spontaneous thing with her. You know, ‘Off to Prague this weekend, d’you want to go with us?’ Little did I know.”

  “True for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  There was a missed call, but he didn’t recognize the number.

  “Are you there? I said, What do you mean ‘true for you’?”

  “I only meant that we only think we know people. Maybe deep down we…?”

  Her tone reverted to a stoic, unsurprised Dublin inflection that he knew too well.

  “Well that’s a big help,” she said.

  “I only meant that there are limits, love.”

  “Limits.”

  “People don’t even know themselves half the time, when you think about it. That’s all.” “Do you think about it then?”

  He thumbed through the Receiveds. Six Kilmartins in two days. That was a record of sorts. His subconscious was acting fairly sensibly then. “Are you there?”

  “I only mean that you see it every day here in the job, how people do things and they can’t figure out why any more than we can. The subconscious and all that?”

  “Right,” she said, at her most leaden. “‘In the job.’ The new job. I almost forgot.”

  He closed his mobile with a sharp snap that he hoped she heard well.

  “So you’ll be late,” he said. “Will I pick you up maybe, at the Luas?”

  “I’ll phone you. On your mobile.”

  “I’ll staple it to my head.”

  “Switched on too?”

  He replaced the receiver and opened his mobile again. The voice answering was strained and even breathless, but it was familiar.

  “Mr. Higgins. You phoned earlier?”

  “That was ages ago. Do you know what time it is now?” Minogue listened then while Larry Higgins related his views on several matters. He returned to the views that he had expressed earlier on what could and should be done about training Guards how to deal with elderly people. Minogue was invited to imagine if poor Mrs. McCarthy had been his own mother and had been landed with a shock like that. Minogue forebore replying that he couldn’t because if that situation were replicated on his own family, he would have been pulled out of Dublin Bay as JJ Mac had been, and would scarcely be talking to anybody.

  No. There was nothing for it but to give way. Did he know that Mrs. McCarthy had nobody now? That she had more or less been out of touch with her own family back down the country for decades now, on account of marrying Bobby. It was very sad all right, he offered during one pause. And what was going to happen now, Higgins wanted to know.

  Minogue made the mistake of trying to be soothing. “The Guards will have started gathering information,” he began. “It takes time to get results.”

  “I know all that! What I’m saying is, what’s going to happen now, this evening? She’s after falling into some coma at the oss-pital!”

  He paused to catch a breath. “I didn’t know that.”

  “They think she’s after having a stroke or something. I phoned them and they told me nothing, so I got my daughter on it, and she went in, and that’s what she found out.”

  “That’s unfortunate—”

  “‘Unfortunate’? You’re telling me it is. She won’t be coming out of that hospital for a good long while, I’m telling you. You see? So who’s going to look after things here, next door I mean? Make sure the cooker is off and the gas is turned off and all the rest of it – and make sure the place is not broken into. Do you know there are people who look to see who’s in hospital or has passed away, or even at a funeral, and that’s when they come to rob the house? Did you know that?”

  “I had heard that it happened. Look, can’t you do it for the time being?”

  “Me? But then the Guards will be thinking, well I don’t know what they’ll be thinking. Can’t you see what I’m trying to get at here?”

  Minogue looked away from the map of the Hill that he had been staring at.

  “I’ll give you the number of Dun Laoghare Garda station,” he said. “they’re the ones for your area.”

  “I did that,” said Higgins in a quiet monotone that he surely reserved for dealing with the simple-minded. “And what did they tell you?”

  “They’d ‘pass it on.’ You know what that means, do you, ‘pass it on’?”

  The indignation was back in his voice now, something that Minogue had already concluded was giving Mr. Lawrence Higgins a fair bit of grim pleasure. He could hear Higgins breathing more clearly now.

  “Well they probably mean that they’ll notify the officers who are actually involved in the case with Joe, or Joey. The Garda station out in Clontarf, I believe.” “Notified,” said Higgins, in a half-whisper.

  Moments dragged by. Minogue let his thoughts slide toward McDonald’s on the way home. Nobody need know.

  “Would you like me to phone them for you?” he asked, finally. “I’ll tell them you’d appreciate some direction in the matter maybe?”

  “Tonight I’m talking about,” said Higgins. “It’s night time, almost. The house is dark – next door I’m talking about. I don’t even know if she left out food for that cat that visits, or if she had that old electric fire on and left it that way. Yes, three bars on it, sure the thing must be ancient, ready to go up in flames, and she hangs up the wet clothes in front of it…”

  Minogue rubbed at his eyes, and against those same eyelids he could almost see Higgins standing there in the hallway, his chest rising and falling, and his face changing colour. The eyes grown big with panic even. The prickly self-sufficiency he and Malone had been treated to this afternoon would be something else entirely now that the night had come.

  “Well do you know if the doors are locked?”

  “Of course they’re locked, back and front. Wasn’t it me who locked them?”

  “I meant next door, Mr. Higgins, at McCarthys’.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. I pulled them shut, I made sure. Were you listening to me at all?”

  “Funny you should ask. My present wife asked me the self-same question three minutes ago.”

  “Is this the time to be cracking jokes there, Sergeant Malone? Is it?”

  “Minogue. Malone was the other fella.”

  “If the house burns down, is that going to be funny?” There was a tremor in his voice now.

  “You’re right. Tell you what, can you go in and make sure it’s okay?” “Are you mad?”

  The retort seemed to reverberate in Minogue’s mind. He waited for a count of three.

  “Why is that mad?” he asked, quietly.

  “Tampering with evidence? Interfering like that, that’s obstruction. Or burglary, or accessory to the fact.”

  “What fact?”

  “Joey’s after being found dead, isn’t he? Nobody goes in for a swim in Dublin B
ay this time of the year – any time, for that matter.”

  A Big Mac was all Minogue could think about then. He’d surrender to the grease. Fries too. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat.

  “Look, Larry,” he said. “I doubt the Guards have your name as a suspect. Should they, maybe?” “Are you trying the comedy bit again?”