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

by Caimh McDonnell

  “Alright, enough of this bullshit, Jimmy.” The interjection came from the man sitting to Veronica Doyle’s right, irritation now etched across his face. A notable face it was too – Assistant Commissioner in Charge of Operations – Fintan O’Rourke no less. Beloved of the guard on the street and everyone’s sure-fire certainty for the big job one day, especially as herself had been having a rough time of it since taking it on 18 months ago. O’Rourke was maybe seven years younger than Stewart but the gap looked more like twenty. He’d been a long distance runner back in the day. He might not be knocking out the marathons like he used to anymore, but he’d certainly kept himself in trim. There was an almost suspicious lack of grey anywhere on the man’s well-groomed head of dark-brown hair.

  They’d crossed paths a few times over the years. Stewart had in fact given O’Rourke a tour of the station on his first day up in Clondalkin as a newly minted detective officer. Up from the country, a wet-behind-the-ears Waterford lad, possessed of that mix of nervousness and arrogance that all young bucks have when they first get that detective’s badge. Stewart had found him amusing. When he’d met him again a couple of years later, the difference had been stark. He may’ve been thrown in at the deep end, but O’Rourke had learned to swim with the ease of a newborn shark. His subsequent rise up the ranks had been fairly close to meteoric. His belief in intelligence-lead policing had taken down some big game along the way, and made him a hero to the rank-and-file. He was maybe better at politics than detective work, but that was a skillset that had its uses too.

  “Why don’t you just spit it out, Jimmy?” said O’Rourke. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, Assistant Commissioner O’Rourke, sir, what’s on my mind is this: as you well know, in any murder investigation the first 24 hours is crucial and, for the last three, myself and my colleague have been told to sit on our hands and do nothing while we wait for your good self to get here, from officiating at a passing out ceremony in Templemore I believe. Then, we get dragged into a meeting – sorry ‘unofficial un-minuted chat’ – where I’ve been spoken to like an idiot by someone who, unless I’m very much mistaken, isn’t even a member of the Garda Siochana.” Doyle glared daggers at him. “Furthermore, I’d guess that said person is about to question the integrity of some of my fellow officers. That is mainly what is on my mind, sir.”

  “I resent those remarks,” said Doyle.

  “Good,” responded Stewart. “If you didn’t, it’d mean you had not understood them correctly.”

  “Alright, enough,” said Assistant Commissioner O’Rourke. “Jimmy, you’ve made your point, as always, with the barest minimum of tact, but you’ve made it.”

  O’Rourke looked down at the peaked cap of his dress uniform, sitting on the polished table of the meeting room attached to his office, and sighed. Then he glanced around, as if to confirm for the third or fourth time that the blinds were closed and nobody was watching.

  “First off, Jimmy, from what you’ve said, it sounds like the cause of death was a combination of natural causes and self-inflicted stress, so this is hardly a murder investigation.”

  “It is one until it isn’t.” Stewart said it with more force than he’d meant. O’Rourke shot him a warning glance. Stewart could feel Wilson shifting slightly further away from him in his seat. By this point, thought Stewart, he must have nearly a whole arsecheek dangling in mid-air.

  “Fair enough,” continued O’Rourke. “But you know what this is Jimmy. Like it or not, this thing is a PR disaster in the offing and we want to manage that side of things as best we can for the sake of all concerned.”

  Stewart resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He knew what O’Rourke was saying was true. He more resented that they felt he needed to be told.

  “Perhaps DI Stewart would like to step aside if he…” O’Rourke raised his hand to cut Doyle off, while simultaneously stopping Stewart’s response dead.

  “That is not your call, Veronica, and I would appreciate you remembering that.” O’Rourke kept his eyes fixed on Stewart, so he didn’t see Doyle’s face snap around to look at him like she’d just been slapped in it. “DI Stewart is a superb officer and I have every confidence in his abilities.”

  Doyle’s mouth flapped open and shut wordlessly.

  Clever boy, thought Stewart. Old Rigger O’Rourke, always knew how to get somebody back onside when he needed too.

  “Now, Jimmy, if we’re done with the pissing contest. Who knows about Mr Brown’s real identity?”

  “As far as I know, Samantha from the coroner’s office, Gerry from tech who ran the fingerprints and DS Moira Clarke who handled the results.”

  “And are they…?”

  “I had a word as soon as. Everybody knows to keep shtum.”

  “Good.”

  “I checked the records and, as far as we can tell, Grinner McNair has one surviving relative, a daughter. We think we’ve located her living out in Tallaght. I asked for a patrol from the local station to do a knock and confirm. They’ve no idea why they’re doing it. I told them it was just to update a record.”

  “Alright,” said O’Rourke.

  “And as I mentioned, we also had Nurse Brigit Conroy in earlier, giving a voluntary statement. She was made aware of Mr Brown’s true identity, in order for us to ascertain whether she or Mr Mulchrone had had any idea who Mr Brown really was at the time of the incident.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Gone home I’d imagine.” Doyle threw her hands up in the air theatrically. Stewart didn’t fail to notice the irritated sideways look this elicited from O’Rourke. Doyle didn’t know it yet, but she’d just lost the support of the most important person in the room. “I told Nurse Conroy that, as part of our on-going investigation, we required her not to share the information with anyone at this time. She agreed not to.”

  “Oh great,” said Doyle, not trying to hide her sarcasm.

  Stewart turned calmly to her. “What would you have had me do? In this country, we don’t lock up people who we believe have committed no crime.”

  Doyle folded her arms huffily.

  “Jimmy?” said O’Rourke.

  “Look, she’s solid enough. You know as well as I do, Fintan, this thing is getting out at some point regardless.”

  O’Rourke sighed. “I know, Jimmy, I know. Lord knows how many senior coppers heard about it before it got to me. Somebody somewhere will see a chance to get in a jorno’s good books. Herself is shitting a brick on this.”

  Stewart raised his eyebrows. ‘Herself’ here meant the commissioner, Jane Horsham.

  “I thought she was in Brazil?” It’d been on the news, global conference on something or other. She was co-chair. The Irish public loved to see anything about one of them being in charge of anything on the international stage. The Six O’Clock News would cover an international symposium on tortoise haemorrhoids if you could show an Irish person banging a gavel in a big conference hall.

  “Oh she’s in Brazil all right, but she still had to be informed. This chat was her idea in fact,” said O’Rourke, shifting uncomfortably. “Look you know as well as I do, we’ve had a disastrous couple of years in terms of PR. First there was that thing down in Limerick and then that gobshite in Galway thinking he was Elliot Ness and making us all look bad.” Stewart was aware of the force’s current perception issue, he’d heard the jokes just like everybody else. “The last thing we need is this old mess being dredged back up again. So we need to make sure it’s a one-day thing and not…”

  There was a knock on the door. O’Rourke’s eyes flashed annoyance.

  “Come in.”

  His secretary, a serious looking woman in her 40s, entered.

  “I said not to be disturbed, Janet.”

  “I know, Assistant Commissioner, but I have a Sergeant Moira Clark outside, sir. She says it is urgent.” O’Rourke and Stewart shared a look.

  “Show her in.”

  Janet waved Moira Clark into the room and then departed, clo
sing the door behind her.

  “Sorry, sir, but…”

  “Alright, Moira, what is it?”

  Moira looked at Doyle nervously. O’Rourke followed her eyes.

  “You can speak freely.”

  “Right, sir. The patrol from Tallaght went to knock on Pauline McNair, the daughter of Jackie McNair. No answer but they heard water running. They checked the back and then booted the door in on suspicion of a member of the public being in harm’s way.” Clark drew in a breath and looked nervous. “She was dead in her hallway, sir.”

  “Christ!” said Stewart.

  “With her baby in the front room fast asleep.”

  “Does this…” Doyle’s words were left hanging in the air, silenced by a look from O’Rourke.

  Stewart asked the question that nobody wanted an answer to. “Out with it, Moira. Cause of death?”

  “She had taken two shots in the chest and one in the head.”

  Nobody spoke… everybody moved.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Paul stared into the cold calm eyes of a killer…

  17 minutes ago, he’d put the phone down on the call telling him to run. Within 30 seconds, he’d had his hand on the front door and he was prepared to do just that. Then he realised that he didn’t know what he was running from and how far he might have to go. He’d need a few things.

  He’d spent the next 15 minutes packing and unpacking everything he owned into a batter old suitcase he’d inherited from Great-aunt Fidelma.

  2 minutes ago, the doorbell had rang. The doorbell never rang. He’d run through the possibilities. Mickey always did the ‘shave-and-a-haircut’ knock, plus even the best restaurants didn’t deliver food you hadn’t ordered yet. There wasn’t an election for another couple of years. Was a door-to-door salesman still even a thing? The Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t knock on doors anymore. They’d started hanging around on street corners instead. He’d read an article – apparently conversion rates were up by 400%.

  Paul had crouched at the top of the stairs and peeked out. Through the warped glass around the front door, he could see a bulky figure in a leather jacket. It was either the world’s keenest politician, the last door-to-door salesman on earth, or a Jehovah’s Witness who’d not got the memo. He’d known deep down it wasn’t any of those things. It was the thing he was supposed to run from.

  1 minute ago, he’d removed two framed pictures, a vinyl album and two packs of itchy underpants from the suitcase and placed them in a plastic shopping bag. The itchy pants had been a disastrous bargain purchase. Three packs of three for five euros, it turned out, really was too good to be true. They had an asbestos-like itchy quality that seemed to be heightened by the presence of any form of perspiration. Paul’s future seemed unlikely to be sweat free. He took a pack of them anyway, for the same reason he’d been unable to throw them out. It was like a low-level form of self-harm.

  Then he’d closed the suitcase and opened the angled window that lead onto the roof. It was less of a house and more of a two-room bungalow with an attic conversion. Standing on the suitcase had given him just enough height to drag himself awkwardly out the window with his one good arm, while his slinged hand hung onto the plastic bag.

  Which brought him to now.

  17 minutes after the phone had rung, when a voice from his past had given him a warning. In short, ‘run’. And he hadn’t, at least not fast enough.

  Now Paul found himself just about balanced on the three-inch wide line of concrete between where the slate tiles of the roof stopped and the plastic leaf-filled guttering started. The cold wind whipped at the bright yellow t-shirt he still wore with the slogan “I Beat Cancer” emblazoned across it. The smell of the Grand Canal drifted up from beneath him. Its scent was a heady mixture of stagnant vegetation and whatever cocktail of figurative and literal crap a waterway picks up as it meanders its way through a modern city, one where it had long since outlasted its usefulness. A couple of miles away the canal was gentrified, for people to stroll alongside in the fading light of happy days with significant others and thoroughbred dogs, but not here. Next stop from here was the Irish Sea. This was the flushing point.

  Paul couldn’t head to his right towards the top of the street. His house was three from the top, which meant it wouldn’t put him far enough away from whoever was ringing his doorbell. Also, there was no possible way down at that end, bar a two-storey drop to the pavement. No, going right was out.

  Then left…

  That way lay the cold calm eyes of a killer.

  She’d sauntered down the roof in front of him, a mouse lying casually dead in her mouth. Chairman Meow had dropped her most recent victim and then stretched out about six feet in front of him, like she was considering a mid-afternoon snooze. She was the cat belonging to Old Man Maguire over the road and she was, even by feline standards, an absolute bastard. Every time Paul had seen her over the last three years, she had been carrying some poor dead creature in her jaws.

  She looked at Paul, then pointedly down at the Grand Canal below.

  A couple of summers ago, Derek Carr, the previously dull civil engineer from two doors down, had cranked up the Doors greatest hits and tried LSD for the first time. Amidst all the psychedelic furniture dancing around him, and the deep and meaningful conversation he’d been having with his own feet, he’d decided he’d love a swim. He’d opened his bedroom window, climbed out onto the roof, and dived into the canal. Lucky for Derek, there’d been a lot of flooding that summer. The water had been at about the five-foot deep level. Despite the thirty-foot drop, he’d only broken both legs.

  In the one glance directly down at the waterway that Paul had allowed himself, he’d seen a shopping trolley buried in the mud at the deepest point. Its handlebars were sticking a foot out of the water. He reckoned it was maybe 3 feet deep at best – just enough water for Paul to kill himself or to wish he had.

  Paul took a deep breath and tried to gather himself. He couldn’t go right, he couldn’t go down and, assuming that Death had really rung his doorbell, he definitely couldn’t go back either. No, his only choice was with going left, a 50-feet precarious walk along a 3-inch wide strip of concrete to the other end of the row of terraced houses. It would have been a doable escape but for the psychotic feline that was currently blocking his path.

  You learn a lot about yourself in a crisis. Paul learned he could definitely bring himself to kick a cat. He tried to build himself up to do just that, but then he played it through in his head. He could see his swinging foot failing to connect, followed quickly by the inevitable stumble to his watery doom. The last thing he’d see would be The Chairman’s little white face peering down at him.

  He could just step over the cat. Then, of course, she’d want to rub against his legs, playfully – just enough to trip him up and…

  “Shoo!”

  Paul hadn’t expected it to work. He’d been right.

  “Piss off — Please go away? — Din-dins!”

  The Chairman showed a level of stillness that a moving statue would have found admirable.

  Paul wafted his bag forward, in a motion too gentle to be threatening. The cat yawned.

  “BOO!”

  It hadn’t surprised the cat at all but it had been enough to knock Paul’s balance slightly. He felt himself tip alarmingly towards the water. He threw his arms out, awkwardly trying to right himself. He got a stab of pain from his injured shoulder for his trouble, but after a briefly sickening moment of wobble, he’d regained himself. Chairman Meow licked her lips.

  Paul felt the mobile phone in his back pocket vibrate. He considered not answering it, then it occurred to him that maybe it was the voice from the past – giving him an update on the whole ‘run’ situation. Or… he had the unnerving image that perhaps whoever had been at the front door, was looking at him right now, possibly through a sniper rifle’s sights. He looked around nervously but he couldn’t see anybody. He fished it out. Unrecognised mobile phone number. For want o
f any clue what else to do, he answered the phone.

  “Hello?”

  Chairman Meow gave him an annoyed look, the kind you’d give your steak if it had stopped to take a call.

  “Paul, it’s Brigit.”

  “Oh ehm… Brigit?”

  “You know, the nurse who drove you home and then you slammed a door in her face. I got your number off your hospital admittance files.”

  “To be honest, now isn’t a great time.”

  “Charming! I’ve been trying to ring you for nearly two hours.”

  “Yeah I’ve been…”

  “Whatever. Look, there’s been a development. That Brown fella – not really called Brown. He’s…”

  A thought struck Paul and he interrupted her. “Do you know anything about cats?”

  “Oh yeah, because obviously any single woman in her thirties has a dozen cats!”

  Paul wasn’t certain what, but he knew he’d said the wrong thing.

  “ I wasn’t implying…” Paul stopped, as he realised he wasn’t entirely sure what he was not implying.

  “Listen, will ye?” said Brigit. “This is serious – you might be in trouble!”

  “I definitely am in trouble. Do you know how to get rid of a cat?”

  “Are you high?”

  Paul looked around him.

  “In a manner of speaking. Look, I’m sorry about before but please – I think somebody is trying to kill me. I’m trapped and – I’ve no time to explain but seriously, it’s life and death. Now, for the love of God, please tell me how you can really annoy a cat!”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Well, my cat hates when I whistle.”

  “Right. I can’t whistle.”

  “What kind of a person can’t whistle?”

  “Me. That’s who.”

  Chairman Meow stretched her legs and casually started walking towards Paul. She seemed annoyed to have lost her prey’s undivided attention and had decided to retake the initiative.