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

by John Brady

  “That’s murder, according to him, is it.”

  “He says that that would be the same person who gave her the pill in all likelihood. So either way, leaving her to die unattended, of giving her the pill, that’s it.”

  “What does he say about this murder thing then?”

  About fifty yards to the banks of the River Dodder, Minogue saw. Ten, twelve yards maybe in off the path through the park.

  “There’s a certain logic to what he says,” he said.

  “But bugger-all sense,” Tunney said. “When you think about it.”

  Minogue swapped a glance with him. Collins was back to his shoe study.

  “Kenny knows better than everyone,” Tunney added. “Already.”

  “Plenty of people go like that, Lar. In my experience.”

  “That a fact? And off they go right away, phoning the Garda Commissioner?”

  Minogue said nothing. Better the mask slip on Tunney now than later anyway. He watched Collins testing his other shoe for toe-room now. Collins would stay in Minogue’s quiet, shrewd, and reticent list. A very short list indeed. Maybe a shy kid still in hiding, he thought, and there was something of the adolescent too about Collins that made Minogue want to protect him, engage him. Hardly a pose. Promotion chances lousy.

  “Telling him what to do,” Tunney added. “And how he wants it done. Rent-a-cop.”

  Minogue saw only the eyebrows move as Collins shifted his feet. The joint trials and convictions of Mr. Kenny as a well-to-do-operator pain in the arse, and Inspector Minogue as the white-haired-boy pain in the arse parachuted in by Tynan had been conducted in his absence. And Tunney was going to keep lobbing them.

  Enough, Minogue decided. He offered Tunney a smile, but brought his stare by a few degrees down.

  “Lar? Kenny didn’t phone me. That I can tell you.”

  “Why would he need to,” Tunney said, a thin smile of displeased triumph around his mouth now. When Tynan did the phoning for him?

  Push Comes to Shove

  Quinn braked for the Shankill roundabout and accelerated out onto the N11 again. The shower had only started a minute ago but the wipers had to go full blast already. A BMW swept by with barely a sound.

  “Bastard,” said Canning. “Tax-dodger. Chancer. Child molester. Whatever your name is.”

  “You know him, do you.”

  “I know a lot like him, don’t I.”

  Quinn’s headache had been coming on for a while now. He hoped it wasn’t one of the killer ones. He might have to take a pill to sleep tonight.

  “Look,” said Canning. “They’re all the same. They’re called white-collar thieves. Playing the stock market and that sort of thing.”

  Quinn leaned in closer to the windscreen. The wiper on the passenger side was missing a piece of the flap near the bottom. Canning rubbed his hands.

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind a go of one all the same,” he said.

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Oh soon enough, I say.”

  “Don’t get ideas.”

  “What do you mean, don’t get ideas?”

  “You know what I’m saying. Keep away from stupid stuff that’ll get us attention. Like I said at the beginning.”

  “You never said we were going to run a charity, did you.”

  “Just get the idea of robbing cars out of your head, will you?”

  “I’m—”

  “Will you just shut up, for God’s’s sakes?”

  Again the hands up, like a priest at Mass or something, Quinn thought. Like, I don’t deserve this.

  “I’m only saying, Bobby.”

  “Well don’t.”

  Canning shifted in his seat, slumped against the door and looked out the window.

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” he murmured. “But listen.”

  “What.”

  “What do they drive up there, I’d like to know. It isn’t a shitbox like this.”

  “I don’t know what they drive.”

  “Didn’t you get driven around at all?”

  “Why is this car thing such a big thing for you today? Really, like what exactly is your problem anyway? Jaysus you’re like a big child or something.”

  Canning gave him a few moments.

  “No need to be jumping all over me there. What has you so touchy anyway?”

  “You’re getting on my nerves with these stupid questions, is what.”

  “Why is it stupid, when I see that we’re making a good stack here, that we have a good stroke going, but we’re driving around in this yoke, like knackers?”

  “Okay then,” Quinn said. “Go out and rob yourself one. Go ahead.”

  “Maybe I’ll buy one, so I will.”

  “With what?”

  “I manage. Or at least I will, according to what you keep telling me.”

  “Even if you did have the dough, I’d set me watch and give you about ten minutes before the Revenue shower are in the door on you wanting to see the bills.”

  “Okay, it’s back to Plan A, then, isn’t it?”

  “Spare me, will you?”

  The curve on the cut-off to Bray nearly had the Opel aquaplaning.

  “Christ,” said Canning, and took out his cigarettes. “It always rains in Bray. Nowhere else. I hate it.”

  “Everyone hates Bray.”

  “Except them what know what they want here and can get it,” said Canning. “Right?”

  Bray had always had the name, Quinn remembered. IRA and INLA fellas went to ground here too, back in the early days.

  “Right.”

  “Hey, Bobby.”

  “What.”

  “Are you sort of expecting something new today, maybe?”

  “How do you mean? Why are you asking me that?”

  “Is conversation illegal today or something? You’re like a bear with a sore head, aren’t you.”

  “Look. I just didn’t get a good night out of it, that’s all.”

  He steered down the hill by the old Wexford Road onto Main Street. The shower was dying out.

  “Okay, tell you something now, Bobby. You listening?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “If you’re worrying about them fellas up you know where. Well don’t be.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you? You woke up and dreamed you were a shrink or something? What do you know what I’m thinking about?”

  “Maybe I do. But I know what I know.”

  “You know damn-all then, about this in anyhow.”

  “What’s the good in biting my head off? I’m trying to tell you something and you don’t want to hear it.”

  “Well, what are you telling me then?”

  “I’m telling you that when the chips are down, down here in Dublin, which is where I’m from and you’re from, and where we’ve lived all our shagging lives—I’m telling you that those fellas don’t count.”

  Quinn turned before the Royal and headed down toward the seafront.

  “They’re different from us, Bobby. I’m telling you. Different.”

  Quinn pulled in before they got to the Harbour Bar. He rolled down his window for fresh air. Raindrops fell quivering onto his arm. He looked over at Canning.

  “What,” said Canning. Quinn kept up his stare.

  “They don’t impress me, Bobby. That’s all’s I’m saying. They look down their noses at us. Just ’because we haven’t been shooting one another for thirty years. Forget the politics, that’s all crap. Nobody cares. But I’ve been thinking. And I hope you have too, Bobby. I do.”

  The feeling of being trapped had left Quinn now. He felt his heartbeat slow. He watched the next part of Canning’s performance, the long drag on the cigarette.

  “Those two fellas getting shot there the other day, the two foreigners. That didn’t just happen out of the blue, did it?”

  “Like, how?”

  “Well, I asked around, didn’t I? And guess what: the word is that no one here did it. The Egans? Nothing. Nailer Keogh and them, the
Neilstown crowd? Nope.”

  “Is that a fact.”

  “Oh go ahead. Be sarcastic, if you want. What I’m telling you is what everyone else knows, Bobby. They might as well have been waving a flag when they did for those two . . .”

  Four in the morning, lying there in his own bed, thinking about Roe: how calm he was getting the body out of the way. The look he’d given him as he’d driven out the door of the garage.

  “. . . You have the flu,” Canning said. “That’s what it is.”

  He was really here in Bray. In the car, with Canning as usual yapping away. There was a gurgle from a drainpipe nearby. He could smell the sea.

  “What flu?”

  “Look at you shivering there. That’s what it is. Plus, you look like shite.”

  Quinn shook his head. The stunned feeling, like you’d hit your head and everything seemed to be far off out there. He could think of nothing to say.

  “But like I said, Bobby, if push comes to shove . . .You know?”

  “No. What?”

  Canning turned away from the window to face him.

  “You haven’t heard a word I said, have you?”

  The sun was coming out again now, so suddenly. It caught the drops still clinging to the top of his window. He stared at one, then another.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you,” Canning said. “I’d put them away long before they’d try something on me, Bobby. That’s what. I’m not afraid of a few headers with Northern accents.”

  Quinn looked over at him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He let the wipers run three times and he took the Opel down to the seafront. The sea was milky grey, but the sun blazed on the cross at the top of Bray head.

  “But business is business,” he heard Canning say. “Isn’t it.”

  Quinn didn’t like the crowd at Wonderland, the thick culchie accents off most of them that came by, up from Wexford and Kilkenny and even Waterford some of them. He couldn’t tell if they were slagging him for being a Dub off his turf. They probably were. They were jackals, and he had no illusions about that. Cocky too, too young really. Too much of the video gangster thing going on there somewhere in their brains. If they’d only think beyond the next ten minutes, stuffing twenties in their pockets, going on skites and making a nuisance of themselves. And one of them was bound to get it into his head to go his own way soon enough, already had maybe, and he’d have to deal with that. A visit with Canning and a baseball bat to get the message out.

  The seafront was sharp and drenched in colour, the grass almost glowing, the road black and clean from the rain.

  So he was coming out of it then. Maybe it had been one of those you’re-asleep-and-you-don’t-know-it things he’d seen on the telly last week. Narco something. Quinn thought over the numbers. This week there was twenty-eight and a bit thousand quid to pick up and to move. This time six months, there’d be ten times that, according to what Grogan had told him. He remembered that expression that annoyed him so much, about getting all your ducks lined up in a row. It put him in mind of the shooting galleries they used to have in Bray when he was a kid and came out with the parish group.

  Quinn gave him a nudge.

  “Know what’d make my day here today?”

  “A few pints and a game of snooker.”

  Canning chortled and gave him another nudge.

  “Ah, you’re on the ball there, Bobby. Jaysus I was a bit concerned there for a minute. Ah you were close! I wouldn’t mind that, but wouldn’t it be just grand now if we bumped into that gobshite here? And him thinking he’d be okay out here laying low for a while here in sunny bleeding Bray?”

  It took Quinn a few moments.

  “Be gas, wouldn’t it? Doyle walking around and suddenly he’s off his feet and in the back here, singing like a canary. I’d give him a good hiding, so I would. That little, bollocky troublemaker. A free ticket to Wonderland, for real, know what I’m saying?”

  Quinn found a spot next to a building site. New apartments, flats? What did Bountiful mean? Ahead of them the amusement arcades looked mostly empty. Even in the brilliant sunshine some of the arcade’s lights glowed and smeared on the road that stopped under the hill.

  Niamh

  Minogue half-listened to an expert on fox behaviour while he looked down through his notes. He had walked through the park twice now, and returned to the Citroën back on Whitebeam Road. An old woman was eyeing him, surreptitiously, she believed—until he winked at her—from the top window of a terraced house.

  According to Professor Dónal O Connor there was no rabies in Ireland, no need for concern. Foxes were very adaptable; they were not put off by busy streets and traffic. Minogue stopped reading and looked at the radio: this O Connor wildlife biologist fella sounds like a fan of the animal. No, there was no consensus on why they were showing up this year in the city. I suppose we’d have to ask the foxes themselves, said the host, a man whom Minogue had initially liked some years back, but now regarded as a gobshite. Put lids on your bins, said O Connor. Minogue went back to his notes.

  Bronagh, the “best friend,” had been in the dead girl’s class. Class in school, as well as social class, going by her address. Katie, another friend, had been the one who’d gone clubbing with her that night though. He tapped his notebook with his Biro hard and he looked out at the dripping hedges. Why was he having trouble remembering the dead girl’s name? Niamh, Niamh. Niamh. NEEVE. Not naïve?

  Irish names had come back in for a while now, even before parents had started trying to get their kids into all-Irish schools. He still didn’t quite understand it, but he had a shifting theory that it had something to do with people reacting to being full Europeans now. It wasn’t a relapse into the maw of a walled, Catholic Ireland though: there was no way that no-guilt sex, laptops, and BMWs were going to be renounced now.

  Bronagh—that surely couldn’t have the same root as brónach, the Irish for sorrow, though. The Bronaghs and the Niamhs and the Ciaras and the Maedhbhes didn’t walk primly down the halls cowed by watching thin-lipped nuns anymore. These girls went to Honora Park. That bastion of Irish Protestant families in bygone years was now the educational hothouse for well-to-do families from the leafier of the leafy suburbs. The speed of things more than the actual shifts had still not become real yet.

  He checked his timeline again. The parents had phoned the Guards first thing in the morning. The mother had gone into the girl’s—Niamh’s—room at three, saw she wasn’t there. Resolved to clip her wings severely, decided to wait until the morning. It had happened before but Niamh had phoned to say she was going to sleep in Bronagh’s to save the taxi fare and . . . The retired nurse, Eileen Magee, who’d found the girl. Steady, a tough bird, she was; details, times. Training never left you, of course.

  Will a fox attack a person, from the interviewer. A child, say? There was a pause and a considered answer from Professor O Connor.

  “Rare circumstances. They’re scavengers more than hunters in an urban setting.”

  He flipped to his notes from the preliminary. There were no bite marks. But creepy, to be sure, the sighting from the Magee woman.

  He turned off the radio and stepped out onto the footpath. He turned his head to see if the watcher was still there. The curtain flickered.

  Hedges seemed to be the rule on this street. He passed gates and driveways, under laburnums and chestnuts and heavy, dripping willows. The sun came through dappled and flaring in spots on the spores and the minute blossoms and seeds that the rain had dashed to the pavement. A lot of thought had gone into the landscaping here he believed, to make it look so normal. Big houses these were now at this end of the road, built before the war, and all within a few miles of the middle of Dublin city. A million easy, some of them these days.

  There were three cars in the Kennys’ driveway as well as two others parked tight to the gate outside. Minogue took in the Galway registrations on two almost identical Meganes; a Lexus with a Dublin plate, an older diesel Mercede
s, Galway registered, with a tow-bar that said rural use to him.

  There was a face in the small window by the door. Minogue nodded. The woman had her hair pulled back tight, and there were baggy shadows under her eyes. He continued around the boulders and the swelling shrubs to the door.

  A lemony smell went by him from the open door. Skylights, high ceilings, and a floor with huge earth-coloured terra cotta tiles were his first sight as he stepped in.

  “I phoned a while ago,” he said to her and held his photocard up higher.

  “I’m Colm’s sister, the woman said. Úna Fahy.”

  He smiled at her. He heard tones more than words from the voices behind a door to the left. Maybe South Galway he thought. He had relations in Gort himself.

  “You’re over from Donnybrook, is it?”

  “That’s it. I was asked in to assist.”

  She made no move to continue, but waited. He guessed solicitor. Those plain clothes that cost a damn sight more than you’d imagine.

  “So it’s Colm you’d be wanting then.”

  “If you please. Is he okay to . . .?”

  She looked at him. That’s what they mean, arrested by a gaze, he thought.

  “He is. But Nuala’s not. You may find it takes time to get used to Colm.”

  “Spoken as an older sister then, I take it?”

  She raised an eyebrow. He fended off his annoyance.

  “I have a ton of sisters myself,” he said instead. “They never give up.”

  She looked him up and down.

  “You’re not Galway yourself, by any chance?”

  “Near enough.”

  Her face gave way a little. She put her hands in her pockets.

  “Minogue,” she said. “Nothing to Minogue’s Pub there in Tulla?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “My crowd are up above Ballyvaughan.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Now there’s a spot.”

  He held back on telling her that the village didn’t always sell scampi or witness kayaks being deftly slid off the roofs of Saabs.

  “Safe from civilization yet,” he said instead.

  Her jaw moved around as she looked into a dining room.

  “Colm can’t sleep, is what I meant. He won’t take anything.”