Wonderland: An Inspector Matt Minogue Mystery (The Matt Minogue Series Book 7)

by John Brady

  “I’m only saying, Bobby. Okay, the fella told me, he’s in the life himself. But it wouldn’t surprise me. Not one bit. What about what happened this morning, those two refugee fellas, as if that’s all they were . . .?”

  Quinn frowned.

  “Ah come on, the racket. It’s all over town! The place went mad with cops and everything. The two fellas shot down there in Mount Street?”

  “I heard, yes. They said they were Albanians.”

  “That’s it—Albanians. That crowd. Oh Jesus, a right mess I heard. Shotguns, everything. Just what we need, isn’t it, for them fellas to be fighting it out here.”

  Canning shook his head and spat again.

  “In Dublin,” Quinn said.

  “Yeah in Dublin. Get with it baby. We’re in the ha’penny place compared to some of them. We need to wake up. Soon they’ll be in on our end of the game here, doing whatever they want. In our country, can you imagine that?”

  Canning lit another cigarette from the butt of the one he was finishing. Quinn turned down another.

  “Fancy a pint, do you, Bobby?”

  Quinn looked up at the clouds again. The ones coming in from behind the hills were the colour of sand now. He’d had to stop the car near Christchurch with the woozy feeling that just hit him. It was like he couldn’t breathe or something.

  “My twist,” Canning said.

  Quinn eyed him. Always wondering where he stood, Beans, and still saying and doing stupid stuff to annoy you. Like a child, he was.

  That was it, Quinn thought then, and for a moment he felt he was coming back to something familiar and manageable. Beans had learned this when he was a kid, to annoy people so’s they’d pay attention to him. And the later trying to undo the damage.

  “No,” he said to Canning. “Just go over what they said about Doyle though again.”

  Save Changes?

  It was gone four when Minogue opened the file and typed in today’s date. Now his fingers weren’t working properly. He fixed the date and read it over on the screen once. Then he saved it and he opened the print menu.

  Pages were dropping into the printer tray already. He’d have to wait.

  Work, he decided. Try anything. He had another go at the Bala Mineral Water file but he lost it after a few words. Wasn’t all that mineral water the biggest con already anyway? He should phone Kilmartin, get him to warm up his contacts in the security firms. The new microchip plants were always looking for people in security.

  He pushed the keyboard away. He was completely addled. Maybe Jennifer Halloran might have been on some kind of medication, that was it. But she would have said so, wouldn’t she? Not if she had her mind made up, she wouldn’t.

  He saw Moriarty coming his way. There was the solemn face and adolescent gait, the well-trimmed silver hair that stayed so neat all day, the wire-rims he let hang on those string things on his chest. A banker, a bookkeeper, more than a Guard.

  “You know, Matt, you needn’t hang around.”

  Minogue couldn’t tell. Still he gave Moriarty the benefit of the doubt. God love her, he’d said, didn’t he.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll head out so.”

  Moriarty nodded and studied the pages issuing slowly out of the printer.

  “Fiona’s very upset. Very. We had a long chat. I don’t know if it helped.”

  He paused as though waiting for Minogue to offer something. The quiet hung around them, even over the lisping of pages settling in the tray.

  “So there we have it,” Moriarty said then. “Leave any loose ends to me.”

  Minogue wanted, didn’t want, to argue.

  Moriarty cleared his throat.

  “I heard you were sound, Matt,” he said. “But that you weren’t a fella to put the boot in. Hard to imagine in that job you were holding down, the Squad.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Minogue managed. “We got the job done. Most times.”

  Moriarty sighed.

  “I’m telling you now what I told Fiona. There’s no way of knowing what would have happened. Hold her for bail, even overnight. That was not on the cards, no. We took into account the home situation and all. She wasn’t a flight risk. No.”

  Minogue had found out that Jennifer Halloran hadn’t phoned her mother. He thought of her swooning, sliding to the floor. He couldn’t get the picture of some saint in an ecstasy of torment, supplicating eyes on the sky or wherever heaven was back then, as a soldier or someone prepared to finish the martyrdom thing.

  “She had her own thoughts,” Moriarty said. “We had our job to do. That’s all we know. That’s all we have to work with.”

  He held out a hand. The heave-ho, Minogue realized. He banged his knee on the desk as he stood up.

  “Good luck now, Matt.”

  Minogue watched him go. The ache still gripped him somewhere in the hollow below his chest. It wasn’t eight hours since he had sat across from Jennifer Halloran.

  The pages had stopped falling into the tray. He sat down again and went to the print menu. He clicked an okay button and then the x in the top corner of the file. Save changes, it asked him? Her mother would go to bits. He should have said something earlier, God damn it to hell. She would have had a chance then.

  Yes, save the changes, okay, whatever.

  He stared at the desktop and the icons for a while and he thought about refugees who had come to Ireland only to be murdered. He thought about the heather in Sallygap, how the clouds met the endless horizons all about the boggy plateau. The staring and the wondering did not stop the image of Jennifer Halloran’s fall, her first fall, maybe. Minogue winced and swore and uttered something that was prayer and threat together to a deity he did not recognize.

  Then he ejected the diskette and slid it into his pocket. He took his letter of resignation and let it drop into his very official-looking briefcase that he hated.

  There’s No Chance . . .?

  Grogan said little, as per usual, but Quinn knew he was taking it all in. He tried to form a picture of Grogan sitting in a pokey room in his terraced house in Belfast. Grogan had been refusing to leave for years.

  “Tell me the place this happened again?”

  Hop-penned: the way he said it. Quinn looked down the road from where he’d pulled in. They were building new apartments behind the SPAR.

  “In a fish and chip shop,” he said. “It’s been there for years.”

  He still was leery about mobiles, even after all the persuading Canning had tried that having them in other people’s names was all it took. Grogan talked freely on his.

  “The name of the place?”

  “Cafolla’s.”

  “Well, do you go there at all, Bobby?”

  “No. Before I used to, years ago, the odd time.”

  “Your name would be known there.”

  “I suppose. Yes, it’s Tony the son running it now.”

  Quinn was impatient to be home, to be in the kitchen having a cup of tea with Catherine. Anything: just to be normal for a while. To see Brittney combing the hair on a doll or one of those million ponies, even. Watch a bit of telly with her, buy her an ice cream. Imagine that, he thought again: it had only been just lately that he’d been able to get his own daughter to relax a bit around him. Maybe she wasn’t old enough to remember some of the things that happened before, but growing up visiting your oul lad in jail, could a kid get over that?

  “Look,” he said to Grogan. “Maybe I’ll talk to that cop, Malone.”

  “You’re sure you should do that?”

  “They’d be expecting some reaction, the Guards.”

  Grogan said nothing.

  “Let them know I’m pissed off. That I haven’t a clue what they’re on about.”

  “Right, right.”

  “I’m going to tell them that he was an addict. Out of his tree, that kind of thing.”

  “There’s always that.”

  Without warning, a shudder ran up Quinn’s chest. He must be reacting now, he though
t. Doyle, as he pulled him out of the Renault, the small hole that told you nothing about what the bullet did when it came out his face. But it was Roe he’d been thinking about, he realized, and trying not to think about. Whatever they did to one another up there, either in jail or in those kippy little terraces where they cooked up their spite and their hatred.

  “Well,” Grogan said. “We should know what he said, Bobby.”

  Quinn wasn’t sure what Grogan wanted now.

  “But you knew him, didn’t you,” Grogan said. “There’s no chance . . .?”

  “Wait a minute,” Quinn said. “I only knew him on account he was always asking for jobs, trying to get on.”

  “You’d know who he could have talked to, what he knew about the job?”

  “I told him what I told him, nothing more. What I told you before. That it’d be just a small thing, just a contract I was passing on to him from other people. Take it or leave it type of thing.”

  Quinn jammed his eyes shut tight and rubbed hard at them. Layer upon layer, he thought: Beans Canning because he was none too smart, and he had to have some front for the law. Doyle brought in with a yarn about a subcontract that even Quinn himself knew nothing about.

  “Case closed, you’re saying then?”

  “I’m telling you.”

  “Okay. There are people here who are, well, their comfort level is low. Concerning what goes on down there at your end. You know what I mean, now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They like reassurance.”

  “I’ll find out what I can.”

  Grogan would have registered the tone.

  “You did rightly phoning,” he said.

  Quinn pushed the End button hard and he held it. Then he powered off the phone and put it on the floor. He started the engine before he realized that he didn’t know what to do. He watched his knuckles go white on the steering wheel. At least it was better than watching your hands shaking. He looked at the cement lorry pouring a load down the chute. Where was he again? So much had changed here even in the three years. Phibsboro, right, the Cross Guns. The Finglas Road, home.

  Reynardine

  Minogue almost made it through the hard part of the drive home, the first ten minutes when he was sure he’d blurt out something to Kathleen. It was the traffic that did it in the end, probably. Kathleen had run out of newspaper. She’d folded it and thrown it in the back. They had talked—she had talked—about where Albania really was, how would this look abroad, was this the start of something. She had caught his mood however, the tiredness, and didn’t expect answers. She went back to talking about the article on the foxes that had been spotted near the canal.

  “Well, I don’t know what I’d do if I saw one in the garden,” she said.

  The Citroën coasted to the end of a long line snaking into Ranelagh. The brake pads are definitely worn down, he decided.

  “They’re mostly shy,” he said. “As I remember them.”

  “’Shy?’ They’re scavengers. I mean, all the stories.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Wouldn’t they bite? What about rabies?”

  He shrugged.

  “Oh, the moving statue crowd will get in on the act,” she said. “Wait’ll you see.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Sure I read it already. They say it’s a sign, you know. Yes, ‘a sign.’”

  He didn’t ask. He thought about Jennifer Halloran’s hands clasping, opening, clasping again on the table between them. Was that her way of praying maybe. The subconscious and all that, again.

  The traffic moved on another fifty feet. Minogue retreated to his imaginary smallholding, his Five Acres. A goat definitely, for all the trouble they could be. Call it Jim, of course. A donkey, like they had growing up. Kathleen would go mad, probably. For a while, anyway.

  “Come on, Matt. Your crowd would know. All the country stuff?”

  Two cyclists raced by inches from his door handle. He was taking tomorrow off and shag them. And Friday. As long as it took.

  “Oh yes,” Kathleen said. “‘The foxes are telling us something.’ I heard this oul fella saying that on the radio yesterday, that’s right.”

  Minogue watched the blue smoke from his car’s exhaust diffuse behind.

  “Would foxes attack a child?”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “But if it was a very bold child…?”

  “They’ll eat from bins, won’t they? I blame it all on the fast-food thing. Sure there’s bits of burgers and things lying around the road every day. Fellas in cars get the take-outs and then they fire the bags out the window. That’s the half of it right there.”

  An ambulance came up behind them on the wrong side of the road. Minogue switched off the engine.

  Kathleen looked over at him.

  “You’re not the best, love, are you.”

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “You look, well, I don’t know.”

  He studied her eyebrows. He put a hand over hers.

  “Trouble?”

  “Later on,” he said. “Later on, I’ll tell you.”

  Duke of Yorks, Idaho Reds

  Minogue had half-expected the call. He’d held off as long as he could out in the garden. He’d tied up the berry fence and moved half the stones to the side of the wall where Kathleen said she wanted the fountain. Twenty minutes weeding even.

  The dark was in under the trees now. Some yellow held on, he saw, by the hedge, but things had lost their edges now. There was no more than a quarter of an hour left really. Once he had found himself staring into the hedge for minutes. The midges had left him alone. Kathleen had left him alone, but he knew she’d be waiting.

  He’d heard it ringing and guessed. Kathleen opened the window, her hand over the phone. She mouthed something to him before she’d let him have the phone.

  Minogue headed up the garden with the phone. It wasn’t Malone.

  Garda Commissioner Tynan sounded tired. Was it Moriarty had phoned him, Minogue wondered.

  “I’m down the garden here feeling my way around,” he said.

  “Hiding out, are you.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What from?”

  Minogue had nothing to lose really.

  “Phone calls, for one.”

  “I’d phone you on your mobile if you’d only turn the damned thing on.”

  Minogue turned to face the house. Not for the first time he remembered he shouldn’t be using an old wireless for job calls. He didn’t care.

  “The way it works is that I have to be phoned in such a situation,” Tynan said. “Remember I set that up? So’s we wouldn’t be tried and convicted in the papers again?”

  Minogue stared into the gloom where the pear trees were supposed to be. He wanted to ask how Tynan’s wife was. Maybe you weren’t supposed to ask. It was one of the more curable ones, wasn’t it?

  “I thought I’d hear things from your end,” Tynan said.

  “All right so. We screwed up in the worst way.”

  Tynan spoke after a pause.

  “Miss Halloran wasn’t in custody when she did it.”

  “I should have come in earlier. A mess.”

  “It wasn’t your case. You were just shadowing her.”

  For a moment Minogue did not understand. The job, he realized then, the learning on the job, that’s what they called it now.

  “I’m a big boy. I know what’s fair and what’s not. I let it go by.”

  “You know that Hegarty is taking it all on? That she’s in bits?”

  “I’d heard she was upset.”

  “‘Upset’? I’d say PTSD.”

  “Is that to do with kids who can’t sit still or something?”

  “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As if you didn’t know.”

  Minogue said nothing. Tynan would know he wasn’t for humouring.

  “You didn’t exactly hit it off with her, did you,” Tynan said.

  “Do I have to answer
that one?”

  “She told Moriarty about the woman fainting or something. That you called off the interview. So stop beating yourself up.”

  “I don’t know what her family’s going to do. But I can’t stop thinking about them. I was thinking of getting in touch with them, with the mother—”

  “—Don’t. Any contact will play into the hands of a nest of barristers swarming around this. They’ll take it for a tell.”

  Why and how did we ever start using gambling words, Minogue wondered. The “tells” that any cop looked for, the way a poker player would: a tic, too much eye-to-eye contact, the dependable wet palms, the casual remarks that weren’t casual. There had been no tell that involved a fainting, praying thing in his career before. Or in any Garda’s career either, he’d bet. So why, then, could he not believe that himself when it mattered?

  His thumb was on the button. He thought about the letter, signed and sealed, waiting on the hall table. The anger gathered around his chest.

  “Am I in line for a talking-to? What, guilt, maybe?”

  “Don’t play that one,” said Tynan. “This is something you’re getting guidance on right now. In a little while you’ll get a reminder of the oath you signed a thousand years ago when you lined up on the parade ground in Templemore. If you can’t listen to guidance here, then you’d better hear it as an order.”

  Cabbages, Minogue started thinking. That’s the only answer to this apartment thing. Curly kale. Brussels sprouts. Cauliflower. Spuds, more of them. Take over the whole garden with them next year.

  “Are you there?”

  Minogue let it hang a few moments.

  “I am.”

  “Kathleen might have forgotten to mention my name there a minute ago. It’s Garda Commissioner Tynan.”

  For spuds he’d go the Kerr’s Pinks, of course.

  “I had phoned to tell you that you could never have known.”

  “That’s what Moriarty said. I half-believed him.”

  “I’m going to repeat myself: You did right, letting her go.”

  “What good did it do her? She’s after killing herself. Over a few lousy thousand quid. The one mistake she made in her life, the one.”