A Man With One of Those Faces (The Dublin Trilogy Book 1)

by Caimh McDonnell

  Red-faced, Danaher turned and headed back towards his car.

  “I thought everybody knew you, Bunny?” Paul said.

  “What can I tell you? Ye just can’t get the staff these days.” He looked at his fingernails, as if dismissing the whole thing. “But enough about me – murder, that’s a bit of a step up for you, isn’t it Paulie?”

  “It wasn’t murder,” said Brigit.

  “Oh really, Missy?” He spoke to her but never took his eyes off Paul.

  “Maybe you should head off now, Brigit,” said Paul. It was like trying to hold back the tide.

  “It was self-defence,” she continued.

  “Was it?” said Bunny. “How I heard it was he walks into a room – five minutes later a terminally ill patient is trying to fend him off.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” said Brigit.

  “And how would you know, love?”

  “Well ‘love’,” she said, “the reason I know…”

  The world slowed down with a sickening judder. Paul could see the oncoming train heading straight for him, with an inevitable momentum.

  “Is that I was there.” Brigit finished with a flourish of unmistakable defiance. Paul couldn’t see her face, but he imagined her look of righteous fury must’ve stalled somewhat when she saw Bunny’s face light up.

  “You were there?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” she said, trying to sound more confident than she was. “I’m a nurse at Saint Kilda’s.”

  “And you let him into the victim’s room…”

  “Yes. No. It wasn’t like that.”

  Bunny finally took his eyes off Paul and looked directly at Brigit.

  “Paulie’s little girlfriend. Well this explains a lot.”

  “No, I…” she stammered. “I’m not and… you’ve got it all wrong.”

  “Have I now?” said Bunny. “Are you one of these angel of death types? Is that it? Was he helping you hold down the pillow?”

  “No, it…” Brigit actually stamped her foot in frustration. “You’re just being…”

  “Anyway,” Paul said, “you’ve had your fun, Bunny. I’m tired.”

  Bunny smiled. “Course you are. I’d imagine she keeps you on your toes. It was good to catch up, Paulie. I’ll be seeing you very soon.”

  He picked up his hurl and moved forward, looking Paul up and down. “Lovely t-shirt by the way.” Bunny shoved the brown paper bag with the remaining croissant into Paul’s sling and saluted. He winked at Brigit and walked off down the pavement, swinging his hurl jauntily by his side as he went. As he passed the mortified looking Officer Danaher in his squad car, he banged on the bonnet twice and waved.

  “How dare he? He can’t…” Brigit started.

  “He can do whatever he likes.” Paul failed to keep the anger out of his voice.

  “That’s police harassment,” she said.

  “That’s Bunny McGarry,’ he snapped. “You don’t understand anything but it sure as hell doesn’t stop you talking, does it?”

  Brigit took an indignant step back.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Paul tossed the brown bag onto the ground, and dug his good hand into his overcoat pocket, looking for his front door key.

  “Never mind. Thanks for the lift.”

  “Now hang on…”

  But he didn’t. He was in the door in one fluid motion and slamming it quickly behind him. Without looking up at the portrait about the mantelpiece, he could sense aunt Fidelma’s judgemental eyes following him across the room.

  After a moment, he heard the gate slam.

  Chapter Seven

  “How come there isn’t a mirror?” asked Brigit.

  Detective Inspector Jimmy Stewart was 59 years, 11 months, 3 weeks and 2 days old. It was old enough that, when he had started on the force, having the same name as a movie star from Hollywood’s golden age had been considered highly amusing. Old fellas had made jokes – not good ones, but they’d killed a bit of time and given people something to do around the station. They’d also done impressions, badly – but the name and the odd voice was usually enough for people to realise who it was supposed to be. He’d not really minded. All those old men were up on the big wooden plaque down the hall now, the one his name was going on in five days whether he liked it or not. Well, there was one way of avoiding it; he could get shot by next Monday. Then he’d end up on the marble one in the lobby instead.

  “Do you need a mirror, Nurse Conroy?” asked Detective Wilson. “Ehm… you look fine.”

  Stewart shook his head but didn’t look up. Wilson was an idiot of the worst kind: a highly educated one. Babysitting him was just one of the indignities he’d been lumbered with over the last six months as his role had been ‘wound down’. Almost every Garda does their 30, takes the pension and runs. Stewart was an exception; he’d clung on to the bitter end. They’d not known what to do with him. What was worse than being unwanted was that he’d have stayed longer if they’d let him. This was all he knew. He was institutionalised. Anyone who stayed on for the max was typically senior management. Stewart’s ascent, not fast-paced to begin with, had stalled at DI. Nobody ever said it of course, but his broad Finglas drawl had stood against him. Senior officers weren’t supposed to possess the same Dublin accent as the boys they were locking up. Stewart didn’t care. He knew where he came from and so would anyone with ears. Besides, he was a thief-taker at heart. If he’d gone any further up the food chain, he’d be spending his days in strategy meetings thinking outside the box. Screw that. He loved the job, even if it wasn’t reciprocated. And now his time was coming to an end. His only chance of being involved in a decent murder investigation from here on out was if he snapped and beat Wilson to death with the bottle of champagne they’d given him as an early retirement present. It didn’t speak well of the detective skills of his colleagues. Jimmy Stewart had only ever drank once in his life. He’d not liked it.

  “To be clear,” said Wilson, “when I said you looked fine I didn’t mean that in any form of sexual context.”

  Stewart was re-reading his notes, making absolutely sure, for the second time, that he’d covered everything. He let the tension that Wilson had just created hang in the air until he reached the bottom of the page.

  “She means a two-way mirror, like you see in the cop shows on the telly.” Stewart looked up and smiled at Nurse Conroy. “We don’t have them I’m afraid.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed.

  “So,” continued Stewart, “if you fancy throwing a headbutt into Detective Wilson, I’m not paying attention and nobody else can see you.”

  He turned the page and continued reading.

  Stewart was annoyed.

  There was the general background hum of annoyance at the fact he was retiring. He had no hobbies. Fishing bored him to tears, DIY brought him out in hives and golf would’ve been a good walk ruined, if he’d actually been a fan of walking in the first place. The only sport he liked was American football, thanks to a stint working nights as a desk sergeant back in the 90s when there was nothing else on. That was Sunday nights sorted for five months of the year. Even on a good week, that left him with six and a half days of fuck-all to look forward to.

  Then there was the specific annoyance he felt every time he saw Wilson’s big shiny ginger-headed face, or heard his whiny voice or, worse still, listened to him casually crowbar into conversation his degree in Criminology from Trinity fecking College. Stewart was supposed to be showing him the ropes but he was more concerned with the strings, like the ones that’d been pulled to get the wet-behind-the-ears grandson of a former Minister for Finance a detective’s badge. He’d been lumbered with Wilson for nearly three weeks now. During that time Stewart had quoted Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon exactly nine times, none of which the younger fella had spotted. Stewart really was getting too old for this shit.

  All of that was just responsible for his day-to-day level of annoyance, but not today’s excessivel
y high dosage. No, the cause of that was Nurse Brigit Conroy.

  During 36 years of marriage, the long-suffering Mrs Stewart had convinced her workaholic husband to go abroad on holiday exactly twice. DI Jimmy Stewart didn’t like abroad. He didn’t like the sea, the sun or foreigners. Not in a racist way, they just insisted on having their own languages and he had a copper’s pathological dislike of things he didn’t understand. The second time they went abroad, they’d gone to Crete. He’d not liked it but he’d kept that largely to himself. The woman had given birth to and raised four kids, all of whom he loved and three of whom he liked. Once he’d given in, he’d decided it was only fair to let her enjoy the holiday and not be a moany prick about it. He’d known on the second night that he was going to get food poisoning. The meal had tasted fine as they’d eaten it and he hadn’t felt ill after, yet he still quietly went to reception and acquired extra bog roll. Then he’d waited patiently, and been decent enough never to say ‘I told you so’ over the next few days. Not even on the rare occasions on which neither of them were in the bathroom. Nowadays, she went off on bus tours of Europe with the bridge club. The dog ate the frozen dinners the long-suffering Mrs Stewart had lovingly prepared for her husband while he scoffed takeaways he wasn’t allowed to have. Marriage, thought Stewart, was all about compromise. Compromise and lying. The right kind of lying. The point was, DI Jimmy Stewart had an uncanny sense for when unpleasant shit was coming. One look at Nurse Conroy’s beaming face and he wanted to go get extra bog roll.

  She’d turned up voluntarily to give her statement about the events that had taken place the night before at Saint Kilda’s Hospice. It’d been a mess but then death was messy. That didn’t bother him. He’d been at the scene first thing this morning and her version of events tallied with the evidence. By all accounts, this poor sod Brown had been hanging on to both life and sanity by a thread, and he’d not been able to keep a firm grip on either. He’d stabbed some do-gooder visitor in the shoulder, before his heart had given out in the melee. Thankfully all the patients had their valuables locked away on admittance, so there was no possible robbery angle. How Brown had come to be in possession of a flick knife was a rather awkward question that somebody somewhere was going to have to answer. To be fair, who thinks to frisk a dying man for weapons?

  Nurse Conroy had been very clear; Mulchrone had only gone in to see Brown as a favour to her. People did favours for people all the time. Favours for favours, it was the Irish way. The only reason Stewart found himself sitting beside the waste of space that was Detective Wilson was that somebody somewhere had done a favour for an old drinking buddy, and bumped his grandson up the tree. That Stewart was in that interview room in the first place was the result of another favour. This non-murder murder wasn’t something the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation would normally deal with but Chief Inspector Drake had asked. The Chief was, no doubt, doing somebody else a favour in turn. A discreet phone call had been made. Patients attacking random idiots could be embarrassing for the hospice etcetera etcetera, could it be handled ‘sensitively’, especially as the patient in question, although Irish, apparently held an American passport. In other words, Please Jimmy could you hold Wilson’ hand so he doesn’t royally fuck it up, and for the love of Christ keep it out of the papers. Favours for favours.

  What was annoying Stewart specifically about Nurse Conroy was this: most people giving a statement were either nervous or angry or just pissed off for being there. Conroy was none of those things. She was delighted. Not in a ‘psycho getting off on death way’, at least not unless Stewart’s detective senses had completely left him. No, she just had the kind of enthusiasm you normally only found in witnesses who’d found God, not a dead body. She appeared genuinely excited to be helping the police with their enquiries, and that, in Stewart’s experience, was unusual. DI Jimmy Stewart disliked unusual. Before you knew it, unusual became awkward, and then it was just a hop, skip and a dodgy chain of evidence to awkward becoming complicated. More than anything, Jimmy Stewart hated complicated. This was all instinct and he was fully aware it didn’t make sense, which was why he wasn’t sharing it with the criminology kid. That didn’t mean it wasn’t real. In the meantime, he was dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s, waiting for the S and the H to show up.

  Brigit, for her part, was fighting off a rather heavy dose of the anti-climaxes. All those Scottish crime novels, containing more dead bodies than Scotland actually had living people, had left her with high expectations of the criminal justice system. She felt bad that Brown was dead of course, but that had only really been the rescheduling of an event that was already on the cards. She also felt terrible about Paul getting stabbed, although less so after he’d slammed a door in her face. Still, though, she’d been an almost witness to a death while in the process of attempting murder – that was exciting stuff, wasn’t it? Apparently not. An old fella had laboriously taken notes for an hour, while his ginger partner attempted to make small talk, giving the whole affair the feel of a terrible blind date. A thought occurred to her.

  “Shouldn’t you be recording this?” she asked.

  “I am. I’m writing it down.”

  “But…”

  Stewart looked at her again. Unhelpfully, he realised that she reminded him of his youngest daughter. He put his pen down.

  “We record most interviews but, as this is just taking a straightforward statement, we don’t need to,” he said.

  “What’s the difference?” she asked.

  “You’re a witness, not a suspect,” Stewart said. “Unless you’d like to make a shocking confession?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Can’t blame a guy for asking.” Stewart went back to his notes. “And besides, the only interview room currently available with a working tape recorder is number three, and the heating is bust in there. I’m too old to go lugging the heater down from upstairs.”

  Brigit looked pointedly at the younger Wilson.

  Stewart glanced up and gave a short mirthless bark of laughter. “He’s got an ‘ology’. He doesn’t do heavy lifting.”

  Wilson pulled a face.

  “Fair enough,” said Brigit. “I just, well… I was expecting a bit more of a grilling. Like you’d do good cop, bad cop or something.”

  “Those are very out-dated techniques,” said the 2:2 in Criminology.

  “Yes,” said Stewart. “Good cop and bad cop have left for the day, I’m a different kind of cop.”

  Brigit’s eyes lit up. “Did you just…?”

  “What?”

  “Did you just quote Vic Mackey?”

  Stewart suppressed a grin. “I might have done.”

  “Who?” said Wilson.

  “The guy from The Shield,” said Brigit.

  “Oh – I’ve never seen it,” said Wilson.

  “He’s a big fan of those Scandinavian crime dramas,” said Stewart.

  “They are excellent,” added Wilson.

  “Yeah,” said Brigit, “as long as you don’t mind people staring wistfully at fjords for an hour when they’re supposed to be solving a crime.”

  Stewart grinned. He was really starting to like her despite himself.

  There was a brisk knock at the door, followed by it opening and desk sergeant Moira Clarke putting her head around.

  “Can I’ve a word please, DI Stewart?”

  Stewart stood and made his way to the door. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Nurse Conroy, before nodding in Wilson’s direction. “If he tries anything of a ‘sexual context’, scream.”

  “What about if I try something?” Brigit said.

  “Ah,” said Stewart, “trying to establish an insanity defense early doors, are you? Clever!”

  Wilson blushed as Brigit tried to hide her smile behind a nervous cough.

  Stewart joined Clarke in the hall, closing the door of the interview room behind him. “You will not believe what Wilson…”

  The words died in his throat as he saw the
expression on Moira’s face.

  “About your corpse…”

  A few minutes later, Stewart returned to his seat in interview room two, picked up his pen and looked across at Brigit.

  “Miss Conroy, have you ever heard of a gentleman called Jackie ‘Grinner’ McNair?”

  Stewart’s heart sank as her face lit up.

  “The guy from the Rapunzel case? Known associate of the infamous Fallons and…” She noticed DI Stewart’s facial expression and stopped talking.

  Stewart put his pen down, closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

  Complicated.

  He spoke without looking up.

  “Wilson, be a good lad and go and get the heater.”

  Chapter Eight

  Fidelma O’Brien 1935-2010

  God’s humble angel has been returned unto him.

  Paul looked down at the grave. It was always so annoyingly well maintained. He wondered if she’d paid someone to look after it. He preferred that to the idea that the sour-faced old biddy had friends. A wreath of purple flowers, only slightly withered around the edges, sat at the base of the headstone. Maybe there was a florist somewhere that was getting paid a monthly stipend just like he was? He hoped so. Anything that took money away from those bloody donkeys was alright by him.

  As tired as he’d been when he’d arrived home from the hospital, he’d not been able to sleep. He had to stick to schedule. Today was Friday. Getting stabbed by a demented corpse-in-waiting didn’t change that. If anything, it made sticking to schedule all the more important.

  Every Friday, without fail, he visited the offices of Greevy and Co. solicitors to deliver his slips, calling at the graveyard on the way, not that it was actually on the way. Although he refused to discuss it, Paul got the definite impression that Mr Greevy was due a percentage when Fidelma’s estate was finally liquidated. Certainly, Paul’s gaming of the system seemed to wind him up no end. Greevy had even hired private investigators to make sure Paul wasn’t doing anything to violate the terms of the will. Darren had followed him for a fortnight and they’d got on. Paul had brought him out the odd cup of tea and Darren had given him a lift to the shops that time. It’d been a shame when that investigation was over; Paul missed the company.