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

by John Brady

  “Yes, of course. Yes.”

  “So, does what I said change anything your end?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s out there now, you can be sure.”

  He meant the rumour mill, Minogue realized.

  “But the story will come out,” Tynan added. “Especially her being so open about it.”

  Words skittered around again in Minogue’s mind. Open. Share with you. Dialogue. Clearly. Maybe he was going mad.

  “Yes,” he managed. “I suppose there’s that, isn’t there.”

  “There’s your training course to consider now,” Tynan said.

  “Hardly now.”

  “Oh?”

  “I need time to sort things out a bit.”

  “A few days,” Tynan said. “It’ll come around, it will.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Are you maybe thinking you might be less than welcome in the sections where you’re supposed to go?”

  “I’d expect that, yes.”

  “Let me think on that then,” Tynan said.

  Minogue watched a young fella hurtle around the corner on his bike, reckless, gleeful that school was over no doubt, and the summer ahead of him. It came to Minogue then how stupid this was to be here, looking out the window of a house now empty of kids, half-pretending that he was seriously mulling over a job he didn’t want, courtesy of Jim Kilmartin. Kathleen and her apartment brochures; the lunches they now had together in restaurants; the money he could spend on a new car now; the long trip to the States. All these possibilities had crept up on him. They didn’t feel like freedom at all.

  “How’s herself?” Tynan asked. “I meant to ask.”

  “Kathleen? She’s going full tilt. Leaves the likes of me in the ha’penny place with the wheeling and dealing she does be at.”

  “Rachel said she saw her there in Vincent’s.”

  Minogue wanted and didn’t want to ask Tynan how the chemo was working.

  “Oh right. Yes. Kathleen has an aunt in there after a fall, yes she has.”

  Minogue thought he heard papers being moved around.

  “Before I go. You mentioned a letter there in our last conversation.”

  The boy on the bike had disappeared now. The hedge needed doing again. His Citroën looked like it had collapsed on the driveway and wouldn’t get up again.

  “Well, I still think it’s time,” he said. “Now more than ever.”

  “You know where you’re heading if you stay the course, don’t you?”

  “Who’d have me in their section after what happened the other day?”

  “Didn’t I just tell you that Garda Hegarty said you were right?”

  “Being right didn’t have much effect.”

  “You did your best.”

  “I didn’t. I should have had my say earlier on. Or stayed the hell out of it entirely. Maybe it was me gave her the chance to do what she did.”

  “Haven’t we had this conversation before? Look: you’d no way of knowing.”

  Kilmartin’s mocking murmur, half-heartedly carrying the air badly between his teeth:

  ’Tis true that the women are worse than the men

  Right fol tight fol ditty eye day . . .

  “Then again, maybe I should have kept me nose out of Fraud in the first place.”

  Tynan was letting it replay, he knew, waiting. He fingered the terra cotta thing that Iseult had made years ago, the thing that looked like a frog but wasn’t. Burren, she’d called it, then Carranooska. He thought back to when he had first met Tynan, over the Fine murder. Tynan then, the Deputy Comm, the cool, even aloof, operator with the surprise wit.

  “I hope it strikes you how peculiar this conversation is,” Tynan said.

  “It’s getting on for odd, to be sure.”

  The Commissioner of the Gárdaí telephoning an Inspector to see if he can humour him into not resigning?

  “Retiring. I have the time in.”

  “Well, maybe you do. But after said Commissioner has hand-built a career path because he sees that the state and its citizens badly need the co-operation of police across the continent to help with our problems here?”

  “I told you, you should be rooting around for an MBA type, John—”

  “—I asked you if you could help me make a dent in what’s come to our door, remember? Such as what happened yesterday in a Dublin street. Are you with me?”

  “Serious Crime turf.”

  “Is this going to be like Palermo or something, people are asking. There is a street war started since last year, and it’s going to intensify.”

  And you want to drop me in the middle of all that, Minogue wanted to say.

  “Do you really want a cushy number then where you can put your feet up while you wait for the big day, the watch and the retirement cake?”

  “It’s like you said—we had this conversation before.”

  “We did indeed, when you signed on.”

  “I said thank you very much, I’d be honoured to assist in the establishment of this department.”

  Tynan moved papers around.

  “Look,” he said. “What are you aiming for, really?”

  “As a matter of fact I want a house, with a goat and an ass. Maybe a bike to go in and out of the village for a pint every night.”

  “Every night?”

  “Every night, John.”

  “You wouldn’t stand a chance. You’re a Dub now, and you know it.”

  Minogue picked up Carranooska and felt the weight of it. Lucky Iseult didn’t feck it at Pat during a row.

  “Listen,” said Tynan. “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to move sideways for a short little while. Take a pause to reconsider. Are you listening?”

  “I am, a bit.”

  “What do you know about raves or rave drugs?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing.”

  “Did that daughter of yours ever give you reason to worry about the likes?”

  “I’ll take the Fifth on that. Thanks for asking, though.”

  “Well, there’s a girl dead. It was out your way.”

  The low wall, the entry to the park by the Dodder, Minogue remembered. How much the trees had grown there by the river over the years.

  “Heard about it?”

  “A bit, I think.”

  “Donnybrook’s handling it. I’ll give you a name.”

  Behind the lines operation, he could only think after he hung up. Tynan’s specialty. He hadn’t even had a chance, no doubt falling in line with Tynan’s plan. He looked at the phone, imagined calling the Commissioner back.

  Kenny was the girl’s name. They thought it might have been a suicide at first. Tynan had surely chosen his words before he’d landed it too, Minogue knew. Of course he had spoken to Moriarty, of course an ex-Jesuit seminarian would understand how to lever guilt.

  “The poor girl,” Tynan had said.

  Minogue folded the piece of paper, slapped the counter, and swore very loudly, once.

  Eight Hundred Years and More

  Grogan spent most of the drive back to Belfast thinking about Bobby Quinn, about Gerry Adams on television last week, about why he didn’t care much about phoning the doctor to be told about the operation.

  The traffic slowed coming into Banbridge, but it was only for gawking. He saw soldiers in the ditch as he drove by two RUC Land Rovers. Beyond them was a car on its side, but no ambulances. He decided to take the M1into the city from Lisburn then, stay off the Lisburn Road itself, the route he preferred.

  Quinn. What more could they want of Quinn after yesterday?

  Your friend in Dublin, was how Gallagher still referred to Quinn. Their man in “that crowd.” As though to remind everyone to keep that crowd at a distance, because they might contaminate them, infect them. Not even “The Free State” or “The South” anymore: just “that crowd.”

  Quinn had never given him pause to think. You couldn’t fool someone that easily when you did time together.
Quinn had said nothing at the meeting, when he told him what had to be done. But the next day, Quinn had phoned and asked him if they’d give it a rethink. That showed that he had thought about it himself, but that he hadn’t just reacted.

  Doing for the two men would put heat on everyone down here, Quinn had reasoned. Would it be worth that? Why not just put them in hospital a few weeks? Grogan listened and, as he had guessed, Quinn picked up from his lack of comment that there was no going back. It had been decided and it was final. You couldn’t say no to the job. If anything less than was planned happened, that would only make them more suspicious here.

  There were smudges to the clouds coming in from over the Glens now. A helicopter passed over the fields far to his left. A few of the observation posts had been taken down after the Agreement, he knew, but the sensors and the cameras had only increased. It was useless to keep thinking how much had changed, or how fast. In the early days it had always been him trying to see signs that they were getting somewhere, that they were going to win. Then it was the steady course, the long view, the politicals.

  They weren’t lost years, those eleven years. Four bullets he’d taken, and twice in jail, the first in the Maze, and the second in the South, in Portlaoise. None of it had been worse than the night they’d sent in the chaplain to tell him about Kieran. He’d been told later that it had been planned for months, that the army was actually hoping it’d be a shoot-out. Target practice, you might say. PR.

  He got behind an articulated truck getting onto the M1. The traffic into Belfast was heavy now, and there was no quarter given for a car waiting to get a break from behind a truck that would take miles to get up to any decent speed.

  It had been Gallagher who came to him just after that Christmas, when the Peace Process thing was really gathering steam. There were seven of them around that table that morning. He remembered thinking something about seven being a lucky number, and if Gallagher had planned it like that. The prisoner release had every one of them out by Easter. By the end of that year they had every dealer in West Belfast sorted out, and he had brought Quinn in.

  That first visit to Dublin had been a real eye-opener for the others. The new money, the building going on, the crowds in the streets.

  Gallagher had summed it up that time all right: what had the men in this room served time for? So these Southern bastards down here can forget about everything that’s gone on here in this country for eight hundred years, and more? The sacrifices made? Living under siege these decades? Watching their families be arrested, worse...?

  Grogan caught his first sight of Black Hill high over the city. Seeing it somehow dispelled the thoughts that seemed to have come with him in the car since Newry. He got out at Grosvenor Road, passed the hospital and made it through the lights up on to the Springfield Road. They were meeting in The Pipers tonight. It was getting closer to the big decisions now. Tonight Gallagher wanted a decision as to whether they’d put out offers to some of the Dublin mobs right away, the ones who were smart enough to read the writing on the wall after yesterday.

  Clonard Gardens then, the church, the mural for the prisoners. Oglach Anthony Murphy, 22, Long Kesh July 3 1974. A nephew of Tony Murphy had played with Kieran. Grogan did some subtraction as he made the final turn into Waterbrook Street. Twenty-eight, four months and two and a half weeks.

  Diversions Commence

  Minogue heard the first drops on the roof just before he started the Citroën. He left the wipers off until the car ahead had pretty well dissolved. It was only a shower, he decided, it wasn’t down for the day.

  Kathleen was waiting for him just inside the doorway. She had two bags now, where she had only had the one leaving home this morning.

  “Homework, they give you?”

  “Just some stuff I didn’t get a chance to finish. God, we were busy. Run off me feet, so I was.”

  Minogue decided on Northumberland Road: he’d go up Trimelston and be flying up Fosters Avenue in no time.

  “Me too,” he said to her.

  “Me eye, you were. The cut of you. But I’m glad to see you relaxing. Were you digging all day?”

  “A bit. I was given homework of my own.”

  “You’re back in the swing of things already?”

  He told her about Tynan’s call, how he’d pulled it on him.

  “Wasn’t that decent of him to phone you,” she said.

  Minogue let that go. Ahead he saw the police van and a squad car. There were two Guards on the footpath by the tape. The rain hadn’t pooled yet in the gutters.

  “That’s where it happened,” Kathleen murmured. “Those two men.”

  The traffic slowed by the Asylum office. A tall man slipped in the door. Ethiopia, he thought.

  “What?” Kathleen asked. He had said it aloud, then.

  “I was making a guess.”

  “Ethiopia, did you say? It was from Albania they were. They said they were.”

  “Yes.”

  She turned in the seat as they passed, and she blessed herself. Minogue began to remember how Jennifer Halloran had gone quiet. They were at the American embassy in Ballsbridge before Kathleen spoke again.

  “That poor woman’s solicitor was in the paper today, you know.”

  “I saw.”

  “She says the system let her down.”

  “Abused her,” she said, “I read.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to say that.”

  “You won’t be upsetting me,” Minogue said. “I think she’s right.”

  He knew she was eyeing him as he accelerated through the lights by the RDS.

  “So you’re back tomorrow,” she said. “It’s not too soon for you?”

  “It’ll be different.”

  “What will?”

  “It’s a temporary thing John Tynan cooked up to keep me out of trouble.”

  She waited for him to get around a taxi.

  “But you’re still going back to the whatever you call the other thing?”

  “I told him I had to think about that.”

  Her voice took on a different one now.

  “I hope he gave you some pointers then,” she said. “To keep things going.”

  “Actually, Kathleen, I told him I’d had enough. That I wanted out.”

  She was staring at him now, he knew.

  “I got a bit of a chastising, so I did.”

  “Well, I’m bloody glad somebody got through to you.”

  “And new duties.”

  “What are they, then.”

  “You remember when we go by that place at the top of Beaver Row there, the Ranelagh Road?”

  “That pub there, what, are you going back behind the bar and pull pints?”

  “Where they found the girl.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That’s what I’m about for the next little while. Until things get a bit clearer.”

  She shifted in her seat and she looked away. Bristling, he supposed, but she wouldn’t say much until later on. He got into the outside lane after Merrion Gates. Dublin Bay was magenta, getting darker yet, and Howth sulked, blurred behind the rain. Maybe she’d seen herself going with him on meetings to Brussels or something. Maybe she had found his List. He reached over and squeezed her knee. She kept her gaze on the passing traffic.

  “That rain won’t be down for the evening,” he said. “I’m telling you.”

  “What in the name of God goes on inside that head of yours,” she said.

  “I moved half the rocks. I’ll move them back, if you want.”

  Oh diversions commence.

  “And I made a sort of a stew. I have it in the oven ready.”

  “A stew,” she said, and shifted in her seat. She stared out her window at the bus shelter across the road. He hoped she wouldn’t ask if he had been in touch with Pat, had plans to meet his supposedly troubled son-in-law.

  “A glash of wayne,” he said. “Two, if you’d like.”

  “It’s your life, I suppose,
” she said.

  Céad Mile Fáilte

  Minogue hadn’t been expecting Kilmartin this early.

  He had dropped Kathleen off, the city grey and humid still with the leftovers of the rain. The rain had kept them indoors last night. He had watched her from the couch while he read, her making notes and muttering to herself until finally she got up from the table and came over. She had fallen asleep against him. That’s how tiring, how absorbing, property management, etc., was then. Iseult hadn’t phoned.

  Minogue had woken up surprised that he had slept. The traffic out on Leeson Street was light. He changed the phone to his other hand as he slowed for the bend by Dwyer’s Pub.

  “Dimitri is a Greek name,” Kilmartin said. “Anyone could tell you that. As for the surnames, sure who could say them?”

  “Idrizi is one,” said Minogue. “A first name Bekim.”

  “Well, listen to you. Suddenly you’re an expert?”

  “It was on the news last night. It stuck in my head, I don’t know why.”

  “No wonder you’re headed for the Brussels patch soon.”

  “It’s not a sure thing, Jim.”

  “Pull the other one. Listen, those two fellas spoke some dialect. That’s what I heard from a fella knows a girl working down at the Asylum place. They had their doubts down there, you know. A wake-up call, I’m telling you. This place is a soft touch.”

  Minogue had heard two people arguing on Morning Ireland about the crime committed, that it was just the tip of the iceberg about racism. One of them, a woman sociologist he’d head a fair bit about recently, said “heinous” and, later, “national shame.”

  “The know-it-alls are already loading up on you-know-what,” Kilmartin snorted. “We’re bigots. Racists. We don’t care. We’re not Christians at all, at all. Etcetera. I mean, the place is gone mad.”

  Donnybrook station had a tiny parking yard under the wall to the cemetery behind. The worst traffic bottleneck in the country, Minogue had heard, where the N11 was wrung and choked down to a street. He pulled in next to a wine shop and looked across at the station. Kilmartin was in full spate.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if we’re not on every frigging runner’s list of places to head for.”