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

by John Brady

  A Bit of Chaos

  Minogue left Niamh Kenny’s water colours on top and he laid the sheaf back on the seat. Anderson was resting against the door, one arm over the wheel, his left arm along the top of the driver’s seat. What kind of a gobshite takes off the headrests on a car, Minogue had wondered. Smoke from a Gauloise curled to the roof, flattened, and eddied toward the window.

  Hairy arms like an ape, Minogue was thinking. He’d decided that Mr. Anderson must go to some trouble each day to arrange his hair so that his widow’s peak was minimal.

  There’s a lot in there, Anderson said. Bold with colour there—the bit of the mountain or hill there—not confidence, or real skill now. But look at what she did with the textures.

  All of which meant nothing to Minogue. He remembered the time he used to smoke Gauloises himself.

  “You were going to bring those over to her parents?”

  “I was thinking of it but I probably would have waited a few days at least.”

  “Why didn’t you just hand these into the office and let them take care of it?”

  Anderson’s jaw set and then his face gave way with a thin smile.

  “Well? Why didn’t you?”

  “I’ll tell you why. It’s because of Niamh’s imagination, and her vision, and the things she loved. I didn’t want them processed through the office.”

  “Processed,” said Minogue.

  Anderson raised his eyebrows.

  “They call me Picasso, did you know?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “And the studio is Guernica. Clever, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t have an agenda in that regard.”

  “Maybe you should try.”

  Minogue searched his face. The smile had changed to a sour grin.

  “I feel a speech coming on.”

  Anderson turned to him.

  “You probably know that Niamh wasn’t exactly the prize student here. But she sure liked art. I’m not saying she was good at it, or would be. But this is what she did best here.”

  “You liked Niamh.”

  “Yeah, I liked Niamh.”

  “Did she know that?”

  “She did. I think she did. It showed in her work. I hope.”

  Minogue watched him roll the cigarette around between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Did you meet with her much,” he murmured.

  Anderson stopped rolling the cigarette.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he said.

  Minogue weighed, wondered, waited, watched.

  There was the usual, of course, the emotional jackals who wanted in on someone’s calamity to rubber neck, to dip their toes a bit and then to scurry back to safety of their world. Schadenfreude, a cliché by now.

  He watched Anderson smoke, and wondered if he could be that rare one. The one who wanted the icing after the crime, the one who wanted, or was even driven to, tease, to dare. Mind games. The one who showed up for the funeral; the one anxious to help, the one who sought out the cops to chat to and get in on the game.

  “Why did you wait here to talk to me?”

  Anderson shrugged.

  “How’d you know I’d be here?”

  “Well, herself mentioned it. Sandra.”

  He nodded in the direction of the main building. Mrs. Tovey, Minogue realized.

  “It takes me a few days to clean up at the end of term.”

  He turned back to Minogue and fixed him with a glance.

  “You know,” he said. “I should have expected that from you. You get to hear it all eventually. But you forget.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “What a non-teacher would think. Especially a cop.”

  Minogue studied the receding hair, the wrinkles.

  “You must have enjoyed the sixties a lot, did you.”

  “You’re thinking crushes, admit it.”

  “Tell me it doesn’t happen, so.”

  “You think I teach here for all this while and not know that?”

  “Look,” Minogue said. “I got the idea. You’re not so keen on administration. You’re a rebel. How far does that go?”

  Anderson’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Ask around,” he said. “Check me out.”

  Minogue gave a slow nod.

  “They do care here,” Anderson said. “Really they do. But they miss things.”

  “Who,” Minogue said. “Teachers, is it? Miss what?”

  Anderson moved a cheap digital watch off his wrist bone.

  “Adults,” he said. “In general. Not noticing. They’re numb, don’t you find.”

  He looked away again. Minogue waited until the quiet registered with Anderson.

  “Sounds to me that you knew her very well.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Do you take the same interest in all of your students?”

  “Since I started here, just after the Ice Age, I have taught over 4,000 students.”

  Minogue let him believe his point had been made.

  “You didn’t get around to telling me what keeps you in it.”

  “Well, it’s none of your business, actually.”

  “I say it is,” Minogue said. “I’m trying to find out how and why a schoolgirl is dead. And one of her teachers is talking to me, and seems to know the girl quite well. That’d definitely be my business.”

  Anderson cleared something Minogue didn’t want to see from the tip of his tongue, looked at it, and flicked it out onto the tarmacadam.

  “Is there something that you’re forgetting to tell me here, about Niamh? Her friends?”

  Anderson looked up at the spreading branches nearby.

  “But I think that she might have had something. And I won’t forget her. Her boldness, I suppose. Limits, edges. Frontiers. Boundaries being explored.”

  Impulsive, Minogue translated within. Niamh Kenny, risk-taker. Was than a turn-on for this superannuated hippie?

  “She didn’t turn away,” Anderson went on. “When there were mistakes, or stuff broken, she kept at it. I think she knew that it’s the broken stuff, the false starts, all that messy starting over, that’s the way important stuff gets done—and that it ain’t pretty.”

  Artsy talk – like becoming an art teacher - a sure flag of surrender. It was Iseult who had told him this. Well, someone had to teach Art, didn’t they. Maybe it was the glibness, or Minogue’s growing certainty that Anderson had delivered the likes of these weighty insights into artistic creativity many a time before, and would again. But his antennae were no longer humming on this fella.

  “How can I reach you?”

  “Pardon?”

  Minogue looked in at the leather upholstery in the Lancia again. A crap car after the first few years, he remembered. Temperamental, dear crap.

  “I’m a Garda, Mr. Anderson. I’m investigating the death of a young woman, a schoolgirl, maybe I should say. I might call on you to help in our inquiries.”

  He thought he heard a soft sigh of disbelief. Maybe it was anger, he thought as he drove away. Contempt, probably.

  Mood Changes, That Sort of Thing?

  A bout of listlessness, along with the too-familiar strangeness he got, or that got him, in the late afternoons, had Minogue by the window gawking at nothing. Clouds ran low over the south city, in patches and torn fleece and shovelled-up clumps. They were impossible to turn to any shape or figure. Still he tried.

  He listened to the noises below him in the Garda station. He felt more than heard the low hum of the place, and wondered if it was talk or electricity or computer fans or water or gutters still draining rain off the roof. Noticing things, was Anderson’s gig then.

  He had the place to himself. Once, a boisterous Guard had barged in after a cannonading bellow of harsh laughter mixed with curses and taunts, had rung out in the hallway. The Guard hadn’t seemed overly embarrassed to find Minogue looking up from his perch by the window. He told him the obvious: Tunney was out. Could he pass on a
message then, the Guard asked: bring in the goddamned tools he had loaned him, because ‘the wife’ wanted the kitchen finished this weekend beJaysus or there’d be blood and snots flying around the house if it wasn’t done.

  A sly but lively chat followed when this Guard, a Dan Moynihan, agreed with Minogue that Mayo were dreaming when they thought they could come home with a win in Limerick on Sunday. Up Cork, was Moynihan’s approach. Still, he hated Mayo for the concussion they’d handed the Tipperary captain a fortnight ago. The bastards would rue the day they sank to that….

  And back to thinking. But Moynihan’s savage cheer had energized him. He pulled the big water colour up to the top again. “Well, okay then,” he murmured. Why couldn’t that be Bray Head. Maybe that was supposed to be the seafront and the lights. “Wonderland,” she’d called it.

  Anderson: his notions. The colossal arrogance. The one-eyed king. Easy to be top dog with impressionable kids around. How could he verify what Anderson had told him? No how.

  Niamh had told him it wasn’t the Alice in Wonderland idea. Well, what? The assignment was to think up the place where you are happy, that place you go to in your imagination. It could be anywhere. When you were bored out of your skull in class and you took your mind off somewhere. Your escape from the normal, a magic place.

  Anderson hadn’t pressed her on it, he’d said. To talk about too much would ruin it, or block it, fair enough. Plus, he had a class to run, other kids to help. He remembered trying her again afterwards too, when she was finished, where it was. Niamh didn’t like what she had done but had to leave it—she’d be getting marked on it. He’d told her not to worry, that it was more than acceptable. That she had tried hard, that it could be a theme, a motif she could return to again and again to work out in later life.

  Minogue looked up from the paper.

  Is that the way teachers talked to kids these days?

  He had to talk to the Kennys tonight about what Anderson had told him. And, what’s more, he wouldn’t be waiting for Mrs. Tovey anymore. He dialled her office number. She answered it herself.

  “It’s Inspector Minogue again,” he said.

  “I was getting ready to phone you. I had to double-check.”

  He waited. She turned a page, moved the phone around.

  “A total of six school days,” she said. “The last was a day in the first week of June.”

  “Explanations?”

  “Two don’t have any notation. We put an N or a P, note from parent or phone call. We expect a note.”

  “The June one.”

  “That’s one of them, and the one the last week of May. So, they’re only a week apart, when you look at them like that.”

  “No ideas then, where she was? At home, or sick?”

  “No,” she said. “I’d need time to follow up on that, yes. There would have been some communication with parents.”

  “Who does that?”

  “I do some. Then we have a vice-principal, Mrs. McCutcheon, who’s away in Germany, unfortunately. I don’t recall dealing with this . . . so should I be getting in touch with Mrs. McCutcheon about it? Will that be necessary?”

  Minogue turned the picture sideways. Why would there be a dragon wrapped around a peace sign? Maybe connected to the yin-yang thing she did.

  “Well,” he said. “I’d be grand if you’d locate her, have a phone number for her in case we need to get a hold of her.”

  “Done.”

  Magritte, he thought. Had Niamh seen any of his? Was that the effect she was after with this picture?

  “I’m obliged to you. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Before you go,” she said. “Excuse me now. I have a sense that you are following something a bit more definite in regards to Niamh’s school life.”

  “Now, Mrs. Tovey. I’m trying to fill in more of a picture of Niamh. To get a sense of what she was like.”

  “Mr. Anderson, then, was a help. I told him he should talk to you.”

  “He seems to pick up on a lot,” Minogue said. “Mr. Picasso.”

  She smiled.

  “We do value Stephen here, yes we do. He’s an institution among us.”

  He stopped marshalling the paperclips he’d been deploying around the desktop without knowing it.

  “Have you ever had cause to worry about him?”

  There was a pause before she spoke.

  “If I said to you this was a matter of professional confidentiality, I think you’d get the wrong idea.”

  “Well, how wrong?”

  “He’s a dedicated teacher. The very best. There’s never been the slightest trace of, well, what can I say. You know what I mean, now, don’t you?”

  He pushed one paperclip to get the stray wire end back in line.

  “I know I asked you this already. It’s about drugs. You might have remembered something more, now?”

  “I have been thinking, and I’d still go by what I said this morning. Did I mention that our teachers are inserviced about symptoms and behaviours to look for?”

  “Mood changes, that sort of thing?”

  He didn’t mistake the hint of drollery in her voice.

  “We could have a long, long conversation about that,” she said. “But I’m not sure you’d be any the wiser. I’m not sure I’d be any the wiser either.”

  It’s About Trust

  It had been months since Quinn had been in Drogheda. The town had caught plenty of the good times, and the new estates on the Dublin side were still being built. He’d never really found out for sure whether it was true that the real go-boys stayed in Dundalk still up on the border. There had been an accident near the new by-pass, but RTE didn’t tell anyone on the radio until the jam was good and thick. The tail backs went half a mile anyway that he could see.

  Two Garda cars had gone by him, heading for the accident, then an ambulance. He wondered, as the second squad car went by him on the inside, if it was only about ten feet from where that Guard sat, to the gun he had put under the passenger seat. Things you think about.

  He thought about phoning Grogan after a few minutes of complete standstill. He decided not to bother. If it was important, Grogan could wait. The car was on its roof in a field, down a gradual embankment, the other, with its driver side torn to shit all down to the back bumper—a nice new Jag too—was in the ditch across the road. The rain, Quinn thought, the gusts of wind. There was a crew of men from the County Council it looked like, putting up a new sign in the ditch “Welcome to the Land of Legends.”

  It was ten after when he saw Grogan’s Fiat parked at a meter along Shop Street. He went by the car, turned the corner, and found a spot by the café: Bridie’s Traditional Irish Food. No, it wasn’t a joke. The blustery wind and on-and-off rain had emptied the footpaths. He felt for the grip of the pistol under the piece of carpeting and drew it over the hump by the seat front. He checked the street up and down again and he picked up the pistol. He thumbed the safety again and slid it into his pocket.

  The pub had a new coat of paint, striped awnings, and a sign flapping and cracking in the wind. The umbrellas were tied and beads shuddered and slid on the iron tables no one was using.

  He headed straight through toward the toilets. Grogan had found a spot along the wall and was reading a paper. Quinn stopped at the door to the toilets and looked back. He hadn’t missed anyone in his walk through. The white-haired oul fella up near the window was sitting across from a chair with a woman’s coat draped over the back.

  He washed his hands and headed back. The woman, as old as her husband, was back. The waitress, cashier, and general bottle washer for a slow day said hello to him.

  Grogan put down the paper when he sat across from him.

  Poxy weather was all Quinn could think of to say.

  The waitress was over already. Grogan didn’t order more tea for himself. He watched the waitress head back to the counter, the old couple begin to get ready to head out into the weather.

  “Okay, Robert,” Grogan s
aid. Quinn watched him do his twist thing to adjust something so he could put his elbows on the table.

  “You remember back when we got started, do you? When you started your sentence.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “How we used to talk about things, in the groups? The future?”

  “I remember.”

  “You know then what we’re dealing with here now.”

  Grogan winced as he moved in his seat.

  “It’s the trust thing again,” he murmured, and breathed out.

  “Not politics then,” Quinn said.

  Grogan shook his head.

  “Well, that’s a relief then, sort of.”

  “I can tell you’re annoyed,” Grogan said. “You don’t have to advertise it.”

  Quinn returned the look for a few moments.

  “There’s been a lot happening,” he said. “Anybody would be a little touchy, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you think?”

  Grogan pursed his lips and pushed his thumbs together.

  “Okay,” Quinn said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Grogan concentrated on his thumbs as the colour drained from them.

  “Is this about the job, the other day?”

  “Partly. Where’s your mate at the moment? Canning.”

  “I didn’t bring him. Like you told me not to.”

  Grogan ignored the tone.

  “Would you have? If I hadn’t told you.”

  “I don’t know. I’m used to him. Anything comes up, he can handle it.”

  Grogan breathed out as he relaxed his hands.

  “He goes out with you, on business? And I don’t mean driving boxes of plastic Chinese toys up and down the country to those pound shops.”

  “He does that too. Sometimes a driver won’t show up. They’re only paid by the run. That’s why he’s handy.”

  “How much does Canning know, then?”

  Quinn pushed his shoulders back and found a spot against the rim of the chair back.

  “Only what he needs to know. Like I’m always saying, when this comes up.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “He gets a fair cut.”

  “Too bloody right he does.”