Last Orders (The Dublin Trilogy Book 4)

by Caimh McDonnell

  Burns, Devane and Wilson watched in awkward silence for the next minute as Dove failed to prise the metal fingers off the table. She even swung her leg over the metal arm and attempted to heave it off between her legs.

  Devane looked at Burns, who shrugged.

  She leaned forward and pressed the intercom again. “I have a screwdriver if that would be of assistance?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Brigit was looking straight into the face of terror. Wide-eyed, sweaty, breathless terror.

  “For God’s sake, Phil, would you relax.”

  Phil Nellis swallowed hard, as if trying to summon up words. “You said you needed me here for an important meeting?”

  Brigit nodded. “I do. Seeing as you and Paul decided to let Bunny loose on the Harrison job, this company is now getting sued, so I need to talk to Nora to find out quite how much shite we’re in.”

  “Am I being punished?”

  “No. I am fully aware who was the brains behind that particular disaster. I know you’d always do what I ask you to do if left to your own devices.”

  “So why are you making me do this?”

  “Jesus, Phil, I’m asking you to keep an eye on a two-year-old boy for an hour. Nora couldn’t sort a sitter on such short notice. You’d swear I was ordering you into a cage full of lions.”

  “Yeah boss, only…”

  “I’m not your boss right now, Phil. I’m just a friend asking another friend for a favour.”

  “Right. In that case, no.”

  “No?”

  “Kids terrify me.”

  “You’re about to become a dad, Phil.”

  “Yeah, I’m aware of that.”

  “This’ll be good training for you.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Brigit sighed. “OK, I am your boss now. Keep an eye on the damn kid. How hard can it be?”

  Phil looked up nervously from his desk. “Oh God.”

  “Now what?”

  “Just, in my experience, every time somebody says ‘How hard can it be?’ the answer always ends up being ‘Really, really hard’.”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you’re one of life’s great pessimists, Phil?”

  “Yeah. Usually right before something really bad happens.”

  The intercom buzzed and Brigit picked up the phone. “Hiya, c’mon up.” She hit the button and turned to look at Phil. How could one man sweat so much, so quickly? He looked like he had just been dragged ashore.

  “Will you relax? You’ll be absolutely fine. If you’re calm, he’ll be calm. Kids can smell fear.”

  Phil looked even more stressed out by this. “Oh Jesus, can they?”

  The reception area of MCM Investigations wasn’t exactly the biggest. It held a two-person sofa and Phil’s desk – not that Phil spent much time at it. They had never got around to hiring a receptionist and Phil had sort of become an unofficial permanent member of staff, even though he wasn’t strictly on the books. Brigit shared an office with Paul, and Bunny had his own office, which he’d only been in about half a dozen times, and even then only for a kip. They’d moved the printer in there a couple of months ago.

  Nora arrived with Dan in tow, looking like an adorable child straight out of a catalogue advert. Nora had two big bags of supplies with her. Maybe it was just Brigit’s nostalgic memory, but she had a sneaking suspicion that when you went somewhere when she was a kid, it hadn’t been quite such a logistical feat.

  Nora and Brigit exchanged hellos and then Brigit kneeled down so she was eye to eye with Dan. “Hello, Dan, thank you for coming to visit us.”

  “Hello, Auntie Bridge!” He said it with a heart-melting smile and a flash of those adorable dimples that could send any woman’s biological clock into overdrive.

  “This is Phil. He’s going to take care of you while Mummy and I have a little chat in my office.”

  Dan smiled up at Phil, who regarded him with the kind of look normally associated with the phrase ‘he doesn’t bite unless provoked, just don’t hold eye-contact for too long'.

  Nora took a colouring book and some crayons out of one of her bags and placed them on the coffee table in front of the sofa. “Now, angel, listen to Mummy. Here are some crayons and your book. Remember this book? You like this book.”

  Dan nodded excitedly.

  “Now I want you to sit here and do me a lovely picture, ok?”

  Dan nodded again.

  “And this is important, sweetie – no drawing on the walls or the table or the sofa, OK? Or else Auntie Brigit will be very cross with you. Alright?”

  This time Dan looked up at Brigit directly and beamed the kind of wholesome innocence that an ad agency would spend a fortune to acquire. “I’ll be good, Auntie Bridge.”

  “Ah, I’m sure you will be, sweetheart.”

  Brigit closed her office door softly behind them as Nora took a seat. “He seems absolutely lovely.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure the iceberg looked lovely out of the portholes of the Titanic too.”

  Brigit sat down at her side of the desk and then made to get back up again. “Sorry, where are my manners? Tea? Coffee?”

  Nora waved her away. “I’ve had so much coffee, I think it’s lost all effect on me. Let’s get down to business.”

  “OK.”

  Nora pulled a file out of her bag. “Do you want the good news or the bad news? Actually, forget that, I’m afraid it’s all bad.”

  “How bad?”

  Nora looked across and met Brigit’s eye. “Bad.”

  Brigit placed her head down onto the desk. “I can’t sodding believe this. We get things moving in the right direction and these idiots screw the whole thing up!”

  “Yep. Look, this Jacob Harrison guy, he’s laying it on thick, but he does have a case here. I mean, your associate did dangle him off a balcony.”

  Brigit started softly thumping her head against whatever IKEA used instead of wood. It felt unexpectedly satisfying.

  “He’s claiming that since the incident that he is suffering from vertigo, aquaphobia…”

  Brigit looked up and raised an eyebrow at Nora. “Is that…?”

  “Fear of water, yes. He’s also claiming genophobia.”

  Brigit sat upright. “Wait a second, I read about that in a magazine I found on the bus a couple of weeks ago. Fear of sex?”

  Nora nodded.

  “Fuck off!”

  “He says the incident, which took place immediately after he got his end away, has led to him being unable to perform sexually.”

  “This happened eight days ago, at which point his wife announced she was going to divorce him and the woman he was having an affair with literally assaulted him. I’d imagine both those facts put a rather big dent in his love life too.”

  “And we’ll make that case, but he’s also lost his job.”

  “His job? At the company owned by his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s daddy? Can he really pin that on us?”

  “He said the incident has left him so bereft of confidence that he is unable to contemplate applying for another position.”

  Brigit started thumping her head slightly harder against the table.

  “OK, stop that. We need to plan here. The first thing they’ll do is try and prove that Bunny has a history of violence. How can I phrase this…?”

  “He does,” said Brigit, “I mean, he’s not some nutter going around and starting fights in bars but he… well, I suppose you could say he is a tad old-school in his approach to problem-solving.”

  Nora scribbled something on her foolscap pad. “Yeah, I think dogs in the street may know that.”

  “To be fair, he only, y’know, does it when it’s deserved. He’s not a monster.”

  “That’s not how it’s going to look. I know the barrister that Harrison has hired. Her name is Siobhan Doherty and believe me when I tell you, he will be when she is done with him. She is going to try and prove a pattern of behaviour, and she’ll say that you, i.e. the company, knew about it.
”

  “Oh God.”

  “Yes. Now, first off, the incident a few years ago when he threw a senior Garda off his balcony.”

  “Allegedly!”

  “Excellent. Did he not do it?”

  “Oh. No. He did it alright.”

  The Garda in question was Assistant Commissioner Fintan O’Rourke. He and Bunny went back a long way, although Brigit, like almost everyone else, was sketchy on the details. To be fair, O’Rourke could and should have gone to jail once evidence of his corrupt partnership with the gangster Gerry Fallon had come to light. He was only saved by the fact that Fallon had been in a coma for two years and counting, meaning the state’s case had stalled. Instead, O’Rourke got to retire while pleading his innocence and lawyering up to the hilt. The papers had tried to get into an uproar about it but had been slapped down as, technically, a court case was still pending and they couldn’t taint the jury pool on the off-chance Gerry Fallon ever woke up and started talking.

  “Well,” said Nora, “this O’Rourke guy might be unwilling to testify due to his legal position, so it’ll make it tricky to bring it up. I suppose it depends on how much the guy wants to get his revenge on Bunny.”

  Brigit shrugged. She had never met O’Rourke and could only guess. Being dropped off a three-storey building and then disgraced in the eyes of a nation was probably the kind of thing people didn’t get over easily, but that was merely speculation on her part.

  “OK, look. I’m not going to lie, this is going to be tricky. What we have in our favour is that Harrison isn’t exactly the most likeable guy. With the right judge, who knows? There are a couple of things you need to do for me, though. These Kelleher guys…”

  “Arseholes.”

  “Yeah and, by the way, bit of a side question, but what is happening with you and the hairy hunky one?”

  “They’re trying to destroy us.”

  “It would make for some intense, angry sex alright.”

  “Nora!”

  Nora put her hands up. “I’m just saying… OK look, here’s what’s going to be happening. They’re going to be on Bunny, trying to get evidence of his violent nature.”

  Brigit flashed back to the meeting and Kevin Kelleher’s damaged fingers. “I think they might already have some.”

  Nora threw her hands up in exasperation. “Well, you need to make sure that they don’t get any more. You’ve got to warn Bunny to be on his best behaviour.”

  “That’s easier said than done. He hasn’t answered his phone in a few days. I’ve left about a dozen voicemails.”

  Nora pointed across the table with her pen. “You need to find him and get him to play nice. I also need to sit down with him ASAP. And finally… you need to suspend him from the company.”

  Brigit rubbed her temples. She could feel a doozy of a migraine building. “I can’t do that.”

  “You have to.”

  “Jesus, Nora, the man basically saved my life.”

  “And now you need to save his arse. This is for his own good. The Kelleher brothers are going to be on him and digging around into his past. It could get nasty. Step one is him being whiter than white, and step two is getting some dirt on Jacob Harrison. You are now your own most important client. You need to follow him and get me some evidence of him being full of shit that I can use in court.”

  “Won’t they expect us to try that?”

  “Yep, but you’ve got no choice. Fingers crossed, this idiot has even less self-control than we think he has.”

  “OK,” said Brigit. “You to me, unofficially, how good are our odds here?”

  Nora tossed her pad onto Brigit’s desk. “Honestly, hon, not great. I assume the Kellehers will have let the Private Security Authority know about this, so you might be in danger of losing your private investigation licence. Is there anything else you need to tell me on that score? Anything dodgy, now is the time – I can’t protect you from things I don’t know about.”

  “Oh crap,” said Brigit. “There’s Phil.”

  “As in?” Nora pointed back towards reception.

  “Yes, that Phil. He’s working for us but it’s not official. His criminal record means we can’t technically get him licensed for investigation work.”

  Brigit noticed the alarm on Nora’s face. “Oh, no, he’s just – he was a petty criminal is all. Nothing bad, honest. He’s just…”

  “Right,” said Nora. “Maybe next time, tell me that before I leave him in charge of my kid.”

  “Oh relax. He’s two weeks off becoming a dad himself.”

  Nora picked up her pad again. “Can you get rid of him?”

  “He’s our only decent employee. I need him to get the evidence on Harrison.”

  “I’m telling you, the PSA are going to come looking.”

  Brigit looked towards the door. “I can’t. I… I’ll give him a warning, how’s that?”

  Nora sighed and shook her head. “You’re way too soft for your own good, do you know that?”

  Brigit opened the door and she and Nora stepped out. She didn’t want to look at Phil, already dreading the chat they were about to have.

  “And how did you two…” Nora stopped talking.

  Dan was sitting in the exact same position he had been in when they’d left him, smiling up at them with full-on dimpled sweetness. Phil on the other hand, had a rather shell-shocked expression. It was hard to judge it below the pink, purple and red crayon that now covered much of his face, but it was definitely there.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” said Brigit.

  “Well,” said Nora, “I can see you two hit it off.” She gathered up Dan and all his stuff before heading for the stairs. “Bridge, I’ll ring you later.”

  “Right.”

  “Bye bye, Uncle Phil!” Dan waved enthusiastically as he went out the door. Phil flinched.

  When they’d gone, Phil turned to Brigit. “This day cannot get any worse.”

  Brigit took a deep breath and attempted a reassuring smile. “Can you step inside my office for a sec, please?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  If Paul were being honest, he would have to say that he had always had a bit of a thing for Phil’s Auntie Lynn. To be fair, it’s not like he was alone in that. Lynn Nellis had always been a highly desirable woman: flaming red hair, green eyes and a figure that in less enlightened times would have been called “bombshell-esque”. Out of respect for Phil, who had lived with Lynn and her now departed husband, Paddy, since the age of eleven, Paul had of course never expressed this opinion. He was aware Phil was very sensitive about it, not least because the other boys at school had not been very sensitive about it. Lynn Nellis’s regular trips into school to discuss Phil had meant that she was a hot topic of conversation. Phil got into fights for a lot of reasons as a kid, but defending Lynn was certainly one of the main ones. That said, calling them fights was a bit of a misnomer. Phil always knew he wasn’t going to win, but he would still feel duty bound to put himself in the way of a beating when somebody made what he deemed an inappropriate remark. Paul, for his part, got into a lot of fights while trying to get Phil out of them. It wasn’t that Lynn was in any way seeking attention, she was just a damn good-looking woman. She had never shown any interest in another man while her Paddy had still been around. A bloke in their local pub had once decided to show his appreciation for her arse by giving it an appreciative pat. The hand had been in a cast for six weeks after. Lynn was a charming woman, but woe betide the idiot who got on the wrong side of her, or indeed put his hands on any side of her.

  Still, as a young boy making the awkward leap into manhood, Paul had been aware of Lynn Nellis. Paul may have, in private moments, been very aware of Lynn Nellis.

  Now, as a man knocking on the door of thirty, he had, of course, grown out of any childish infatuation, but that wasn’t to say that deep down, in some dusty filing cabinet of memory, there wasn’t still an extensive collection of impure thoughts and confused feelings. That may have been a small part of t
he confusion when Paul had woken up to find Lynn Nellis on top of him in bed. What further added to this confusion was that she was slapping him around the head.

  “You. Stupid. Little. Bastard!”

  Paul wrapped his arms around his head to fend off the blows that punctuated each word. “What the fuck?”

  In the four days since he had been fired from the company he had set up, Paul had spent a lot of time moping in bed. He’d punctuated this with moping on the sofa and moping around the nearby park, because an existential crisis is an existential crisis but dogs still need to take a dump and Maggie had no interest in Paul’s resentment of the world.

  It wasn’t a very big flat but then he didn’t have an awful lot to compare it to. For most of his adult life he’d lived alone in the house owned by his not dear but definitely departed Great-Aunt Fidelma. He had then briefly lived in Brigit’s flat, with Brigit, which had been great, followed by a period sleeping in the old offices of MCM Investigations, which had not. He now rented a bedsit in Rathmines that gave him an excellent view of a lot of other bedsits in Rathmines. The fact that he shared it with a German Shepherd who had, at best, inconsistent standards of personal hygiene was unfortunate. The one upside of having Maggie there would surely have been security, but Lynn seemed to have broken in without any trouble.

  In between fending off blows from Lynn, Paul glanced to the side to see Maggie sitting there, watching proceedings with what appeared to be a keen interest and no intention of intervening. That was it; they were going back to store-brand dog food after this.

  “For fuck’s sake, Lynn, get off me!”

  “Get off me, he says, get off me! I’ll get off you alright. Anything you say, Your Highness.”

  But the fact that she continued to wallop Paul’s arms as he shielded his head rather undermined the sentiment. Even so, the little idiot in the back of Paul’s mind noted that she had changed her hair. The long red mane was gone, replaced by a short auburn bob. It worked for her.