The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

  “Matt,” he said, drawing a breath between his teeth. “Do you think that he would have come out of it like he did after a go-round with two Guards?”

  “Tommy’s no pushover. He trains in the ring. When he gets going, he gets going.”

  “Those two actually volunteered,” said Carney, and he winked.

  “As long as they were given their anesthetic first.”

  “So the bruises are real,” said Minogue.

  “It’ll go down in the annals,” said Carney.

  Minogue felt in his pocket for his cigarettes. He noticed O’Leary’s eyes on him again in the mirror. They drifted away when he returned the look. Carney’s face turned grave.

  “So what’s the take-away from this, Matt? It’s off, Malone’s part – off. We can’t do this. We just can’t. This was never on the cards, what happened here.” Minogue’s hand settled around the packet.

  “Whoever did this – and we’ll find them…whoever did this, had Malone as a big, big issue. It wasn’t just revenge. They wouldn’t go after a Garda for someone like Kelly. They have Malone as a big liability. Whatever Kelly had on this Chinese fella – and we’ll never know how much now – the thinking is with them that Kelly must have spilled it to Malone. And they see Malone getting this information and using it on them.”

  “‘They.’”

  Carney shook his head, and then glanced at Tynan again. Tynan nodded.

  “They’re sending a message,” Carney said. “They’ve put down their marker, and it’s a first for us: they’re willing to murder a Garda officer in broad daylight. This is business on a global scale. All the others back along the chain can see this, all the way back to Shanghai or Macau or wherever, that this is how they respond to threats. Okay?” Minogue considered saying it wasn’t okay.

  “And to those people,” Carney went on, “not knowing something is a threat. They had doubts about Malone. Did he know, didn’t he know; was he, wasn’t he. So somebody made a decision, and that’s what we see here today.”

  Minogue knew that he was being given time to absorb this. To come around, even. To calm him. But it was only making him angrier.

  A mobile went off, muffled in a pocket. O’Leary thumbed his earpiece.

  “No,” he said, almost right away. “Maybe. I’m not sure.” His eyes sought Tynan’s in the mirror.

  “Can’t hold them back?” Tynan asked. O’Leary’s expression didn’t change.

  “All right,” said Tynan then. “No desk, no podium. No studio. It’ll have to be here now in a few minutes, or else they’ll wait until this afternoon back at the media room. And absolutely no names.”

  O’Leary looked away.

  “Did you get that?” he asked. “A few minutes, he’ll be over. Who’s doing it?”

  O’Leary repeated the name of the station’s Crime Correspondent. A faint hint of exasperation showed on Tynan’s face. Minogue rubbed the fogged window. There was still only one Outside Broadcast Unit van in sight.

  “Okay,” O’Leary said, and ended the call. He turned in the seat.

  “Live to air.”

  Tynan ran a finger across and then down a sheet of paper with handwritten notes, closed his eyes and then closed the folder cover over it. He turned to Minogue.

  “How is that case coming along anyway?”

  “We seem to have a move,” Minogue said. “In a direction we hadn’t anticipated.”

  Tynan began adjusting his tie, and then grasped his lapels and tugged at them.

  “That person you referred me to,” Minogue went on. “Moved up the list sharply.”

  Tynan fixed him with his trademark laboratory examination stare.

  “You’re serious, I take it. Walk over with me then.” O’Leary was first out of the car, and was scanning the faces around the cordon by the time Minogue stood upright. Tynan threw his coat back on the seat and pushed the door closed.

  “Thanks, Dan,” he said. “As always.”

  Tynan was in no hurry. He seemed to be trying to memorize what lay around the roadway here. Then he stopped, and waited for Minogue to turn.

  “You were referring to Immaculata when you made that remark back there?” “I was, yes.”

  “So have you got her figured out now?”

  “I don’t know about that, but I think I have her connected to Padraig Larkin – the victim – from a long time ago.”

  “But how long has that drop-in place been open – that Disciples place – four years?” “I mean forty-something years ago.” Tynan frowned.

  “You know she only helps out there? The ‘Director’ bit is more honorary than anything else. And do you know why?”

  “Well I wondered, at her age.”

  “It’s not her age. There are issues. Issues with memory and so forth.”

  For a moment, Minogue believed that Tynan was daring him to come up with a sharp comment.

  “I have a fair number of questions to ask her,” he said. Tynan eyed the pack beginning to deploy themselves near the van. One of them was hoisting a camera.

  “So is she proving helpful?”

  “When it suits her.”

  Tynan seemed to be measuring distances on the pavement around him. His voice was toneless when he spoke.

  “I see. So what’s your next step?”

  “I’m considering taking her in for questioning.”

  “Taking her in. Do you mean bringing her to the Garda station?”

  “I do. It’ll help, I think.”

  “How? Is it necessary?”

  “I think it’s important she know that she doesn’t get to pick.”

  “Pick what?”

  “What she’ll tell us and what she won’t.”

  “Do you mean ‘won’t’ or ‘can’t’?”

  “I don’t know. But I wish I had known what you just told me about her earlier.”

  “So what have you got on her?”

  “She’s in snapshots with a relative of Padraig Larkin, pictures from way back.”

  Tynan’s nostrils were showing signs of the chill air. Minogue pulled his own coat a little tighter. He wasn’t sure whether it was skepticism he was seeing in Tynan’s expression, or annoyance.

  A flap on the nylon tarp over Malone’s car stirred. One of the journos had had enough, and was calling out the Commissioner’s name.

  “Brendan,” said Tynan, tugging on his cuffs again to settle his tunic better. “Remind me in an hour to resume this chat here by phone. It’s a must-do.”

  He settled his laboratory specimen look on Minogue again.

  “Immaculata is a very, very loyal person,” he murmured.

  “You recall me trying to get that across to you? She’d go to the wall for people. That woman had carried I don’t know how many people, for decades. The poorest people you can imagine. She’s owed.”

  “But does she think she runs the Gardai?” He was surprised at how little he felt when the words came out. Tynan merely shrugged.

  “She may well know something,” he said. “She may not even know that she knows it though. Remember the ‘known knowns’ and all that?” “I never got that, I have to tell you.”

  Tynan looked from the lights over the cameras, and then at the tarp again. In those few moments Minogue glimpsed something he wouldn’t easily forget, a look of pained helplessness. Tynan didn’t look at him when he spoke now.

  “We’ll be talking. Give us an hour or so. Brendan?”

  O’Leary hung back as Tynan began to make his way toward the cameras.

  “Your number, Inspector,” he murmured. “But more your firm commitment to keep the device turned on as well.”

  Chapter 34

  It wasn’t just surprise at seeing Immaculata in a nun’s coif that made her look so different to Minogue. There was something distant, even listless, in her expression. He didn’t ask her why she had chosen to wait on the footpath here for him. He eyed her coif, and tried to see how it was pinned back behind her ear.

  “Yes I kno
w,” she said, as though hearing his unspoken question. “But this is a day for it.”

  She carried a small cloth bag with tassels across the bottom.

  “You’re not in some squad car, are you?”

  “I’m not.”

  “I should tell you right now, that I was expecting that phone call,” she said. “From your Commissioner. It was only a matter of time, I think.”

  Minogue unlocked the car doors with his remote. “But I knew he’d find the right people, and we’d put things to rights….”

  She was examining the car’s interior, with no sign she was about to get in.

  “Find who killed Padraig you mean, Sister.”

  “Yes. Mary, call me.” Minogue opened her door a bit wider. “I’m going with Sister for now,” he said.

  An opening door behind made him turn. It was McArdle.

  “You’re coming back, aren’t you, Sister?”

  “Of course I am – go back inside, Davey.”

  “When? For dinner time?”

  “Davey – inside. I’ve work to do. Close the door and don’t be letting in the cold.” “Why are you dressed up?”

  “Nuns don’t dress up, Davey. I’m just paying a visit on an old friend.”

  McArdle squinted at Minogue.

  “But he’s Guard, you know, that fella with you. He’s a Guard.”

  Minogue waited by the driver’s side until she got in. Something about the sound of the car door closing, or the seat belt rolling up into its housing, or maybe just the leaden sky here again today, brought him back to yesterday’s chaos. He closed his eyes a moment. He knew that he needed to think himself through it, or rather out of it, if he were to be able to get anything done here.

  It had been after one o’clock when he had left the round-about, and he and Malone had stopped at a dismal-enough pub in Cornelscourt. Fitz and Ledwidge had appeared at the roundabout while he had been working through the full statement with that McEvoy detective from Dun Laoghaire. They had spotted the van soon enough, and had stared coldly through the window at him until he looked away.

  Stepping out of the van later, a sergeant had been waiting for him. He was told to give Dalkey a miss. They would receive instructions about when their files would be delivered to Harcourt Terrace. The sergeant’s slow, toneless delivery of this message told Minogue that there was nothing to discuss. Nothing to ask, nothing to clarify.

  “Are we waiting for someone?” Immaculata asked. He turned the ignition and plotted the first part of the trip. To Monkstown, he figured, and then take the line of least resistance through Blackrock and to the N11. The nursing home was next door to the UCD campus in Belfield. He waited for his break in the traffic.

  “You’re angry,” she murmured. “I can tell. Like yesterday, on the phone.”

  He let the wipers cycle once. Did nobody here let you into traffic either?

  “Yesterday was a long day. I wasn’t the only one in bad humour, I can tell you.” He took his chance after a bike.

  “Those photos you mentioned,” she said. “Do you have them here with you?” “I have copies with me.”

  He waited for her request then, the one he’d get considerable satisfaction in refusing. It did not come.

  “Have you ever known Sister Albertina to communicate? Since she had her stroke, I mean? I was told that she opens her eyes sometimes.” Immaculata shook her head.

  “I thought he told you about Albertina,” she said. “John – your boss, I mean. He said he’d tell you.”

  “He told me she has been in a coma since, as far as he knew. Did he tell me right?”

  “He did. Six years now, and I still can’t believe it. As strong as an ox she was, Bertie – a farmer’s daughter. It was a clot that went to her brain.”

  “So you haven’t seen any sign she’s trying to communicate, at all?”

  “Not to us, at any rate,” she replied.

  “You lost me there.”

  “God has no trouble understanding her.”

  “Hasn’t she been tested, or assessed recently?”

  “Nobody can be sure what Bertie understands, or what she doesn’t.”

  Her sudden testiness surprised him. He looked over.

  “I feel that she hears me,” Immaculata said then. “It’s a strong feeling….”

  He nodded. He didn’t care much if she thought he was agreeing with her.

  “Who are we to think we’ll ever understand what God can do?” she added. “Or predict what He’ll do for us? What we call miracles, that’s just God working His own way.”

  “Miracles, Sister.”

  The flat skepticism in his tone didn’t seem to register with her. Her face relaxed into a smile of deep contentment.

  “That’s right. And they happen every day. Every moment of every day.”

  Minogue felt none of the annoyance that he expected, and watching her gaze slip out of focus, he imagined her for a moment sitting by a lamp out in Africa, waiting out some dire, impossible situation with nothing but her faith.

  “Every moment of every day,” she repeated.

  “And that’s how you presented it to him when you phoned him last night,” he said. “Albertina’s brother, that he could expect a miracle today at the nursing home.”

  A look of pained uncertainty replaced her smile. She looked out the window.

  “Yes I did,” she replied. “Like you wanted, yes. But I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I didn’t actually say that Albertina was able to talk now. I couldn’t. That’d be a barefaced lie. But I told him the other stuff, the way you had it phrased. All that, what can I call it, all that ambiguity. It’s the only polite word I can find to describe it.” “‘Albertina has things to tell us.’ Right?” She nodded.

  “‘We seem to have a miracle on our hands’?”

  “That too. I said I would, and I did. I can’t blame you, you’re only doing what you’re trained to do.” Minogue let a few moments pass.

  “I take it then you still regret telling me about how he talks to her all the time. Sergeant Twomey, I mean, talking to her every time he visits.”

  She seemed to consider his remark.

  “I said it to you in all innocence,” she said then. “That’s what I realized after thinking about it. The nurses hear him, and they tell me. They see how devoted he is to her. He has someone come in and do her hair for her, her nails even. A nun, and a manicure!”

  “But nodody has ever heard what he says to her, right?” She shifted a little in the seat.

  “He says prayers for her, he reads to her.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “You asked me that, I don’t know, ten times last night.”

  “Reminiscing, and that sort of thing, you said.”

  She closed her eyes for several seconds. Summoning patience, or strength, he guessed.

  “You have no idea the questions he started firing at me then when he heard that.”

  “But you were ready for him, right? You were able to head them off.”

  She took in a long breath, and soon let it out with a sigh. “This is what spies do,” she said. “In the films…” She threw him a quick, anxious look.

  “But he was a Guard all his life,” she said. “Bertie’s brother.”

  “He was – but so what?”

  “I mean he’d be able to see through things quick enough.”

  “But he has a strong faith still, doesn’t he? That hasn’t changed.”

  She returned her gaze to the passing traffic.

  He let her words replay in his head. ‘Bertie’s brother’: she wouldn’t even say the man’s name. Maybe it was indeed fear, or something very close to it at least, that he sensed in her. For a long time after their phone conversation last night, he had believed it was resentment he had heard in her voice then, and doubt. Had she known how close he had been to putting the hard word on her then, as he paced the garage, his ear aching from pressing the phone
so hard to his head?