He held the phone in his hand and looked at the screen.
“When all that’s left is the fall, the fall is everything.”
Chapter Forty-One
“There’s no need to be nervous,” said Paul.
The three of them were standing awkwardly in the back of the ice cream van-cum-mobile surveillance unit of MCM Investigations. The three of them being Paul, Phil and Tina Phelan. Tina looked at Paul.
“I’m not bleedin’ nervous. You’re bleedin’ nervous. You’d want to calm the fuck down. And what the fuck is that smell?”
Tina was twenty-five, five-foot-six and had the kind of look you could easily see in a Hollywood film pretending to be improbably attracted to pensioner Tom Cruise. She was drop-dead gorgeous. She had the face of an angel, the physique of an athlete and the mouth of an offshore oil rig worker. Being trapped in close proximity with her would make any hot-blooded male nervous. Her being the niece of Jacinta Phelan, landlady of Phelan’s pub, would make any sensible male’s blood run cold again.
Tina’s outfit consisted of high heels, a tight pair of leather trousers, a red leather jacket and a cream blouse. It was, in short, designed to be very distracting. The fact that it wasn’t distracting Paul in the least was an indication of just how nervous he was.
“That smell,” said Paul, “is damp. This van was flooded a few days ago.” They had only just finished drying it out, or at least getting it as dry as it was going to get.
“Well it’s absolutely fecking manky. Smells like somebody shat the bed. And what is the deal with your dog?”
Maggie was sitting in the corner, her nose about a half an inch away from the wall. She seemed to be having a staring contest with it.
“We don’t have that kind of time. Right, Phil, have you got the mic?”
“Yep,” he replied, holding up a small microphone attached to a battery pack.
“As long as you’re wearing that, Tina, we can hear and record everything you say,” said Paul.
“And where am I supposed to bleedin’ shove that?”
Paul and Phil both looked at her, then hesitated, trying to find a way to suggest an answer to that question without appearing to be two men leering at a woman’s cleavage. It involved a lot of blinking.
Tina laughed. “I’m only joking. Youse two are priceless.” She took the mic from Phil and then stopped and looked at them both. “Well, turn around then.”
“Oh God.”
“Right, yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry.”
They turned around.
When they turned back thirty seconds later, the mic and battery pack had completely disappeared and there was no trace of them about Tina’s person. It was the closest thing Paul had seen to actual magic in real life.
“Right, let’s go over it again.”
“Ah Jaysus no, fuck that,” said Tina. “We’ve been over it all three times already. I’ve read through the chats you had with this knob-jockey on the website – ye little prick tease, Paulie.” Paul blushed. He had done what needed to be done to reel Harrison in. He had also felt like cleaning his eyes with a scouring pad afterwards. Tina gave him a playful slap on the cheek. “I’m supposed to woo him and get him talking about what he’d like to do to me and all that, so that you can prove he’s still a randy bollocks in court.”
“But don’t let him touch you.”
“No shit, Sherlock. My ma gave me that part of the talk about a decade ago, ye muppet. This arse-muncher aint getting his hands on the merchandise.”
“Right. OK. Good.”
This brought Paul to the tricky part. He had been unsuccessfully trying to find a way to say it for an hour now, and this was his last chance.
“Also, Tina, ehm – just a little note. This guy is from like Blackrock or somewhere equally posh so, y’know, you might need to – not that this is a criticism or anything – but if you could just, y’know, maybe tone down the, ehm, y’know…”
Tina took a step forward, so that she was inches from Paul’s face, and then she softly pressed her finger to his lips. The voice that then came out of her made Paul realise that he’d had no idea what the term “soft and sultry” had meant up to this point in his sheltered life.
“Shush, Paulie. If what you’re trying to say is that I need to personify a different approach, then I can do that.” She batted her eyelashes in a way that could undoubtedly cause car accidents. “Don’t you worry, I know how to make a man putty in my hands.”
There was a long moment of silence, eventually broken by Maggie farting.
Tina’s voice then reverted back to being Tina’s voice. She punched Paul playfully on the arm. “Or in other words, ye cock-trumpet, I’m an actress, I know how to bleedin’ act, don’t I? Now, if youse don’t mind, I’ve a date.”
With that, she turned smartly and exited the van.
Phil and Paul stared at the door she had just slammed.
“Bloody hell,” said Phil. “Did you ever wonder how women aren’t running the world?”
“Maybe they are and we’re too stupid to notice.”
“Do you think this’ll work?”
Paul sighed. “How do you rob a bank in broad daylight when they know you’re coming?”
“There’s no need to be nervous,” said Jacob Harrison. He was talking to his own reflection in the toilets of La Rochelle wine bar on Leeson Street. It being Christmas Eve, it was busy. The place was filled with people having a few scoops with the work crew prior to shooting off home to the relatives. It was so crowded, in fact, that he was currently using the disabled toilets, as it was the only place where he could get a bit of space. It was time to get his game face on. He checked his suit one last time, making sure everything was perfect. He pointed at himself in the mirror. “You’re a good-looking, charming guy and you deserve this. It’s been a shitty couple of weeks. It’s about time you got yourself a little Christmas present.”
He’d reserved a booth at the back for him and his hot date. Antoine, the manager, was an old friend. At least he was when the odd fifty-euro note was slipped his way.
Jacob gave himself one more appreciative look in the mirror and strode out of the disabled toilet.
He quickly turned his swagger into a limp as he saw the woman in a wheelchair waiting outside, giving him the evil eye.
“There’s no need to be nervous,” said Vincent Kelleher, “but…”
“But what? I don’t like ‘but’. You know how I feel about ‘but’.” Kevin was in one of his moods, Vinny could tell.
He took a deep breath. “Look, Harrison has disappeared.”
“What the hell do you mean? I gave you one job.”
“It was just…”
“Forget it, I’ll handle it. You are utterly useless. Seriously, what the fuck are you good for?”
The phone went dead. Vinny put it down and looked at the various scraps of notepaper strewn about on the passenger seat beside him. The first flakes of snow tumbling down had been inspirational, giving him the germ of the idea that would form the centrepiece of his new collection. He’d show Kevin. He’d show them all. They’d all be laughing on the other sides of their faces when he was a rich, successful poet.
“There’s no need to be nervous.” Brigit looked at the big red door. Warm light was spilling out from the windows and onto the street. “Christ,” she said. “When did I start talking to myself? Like we haven’t got enough people doing that.”
Brigit had been trying to ring Bunny for the last couple of days but she had got no response. She had even dropped over to his house on the way home yesterday but there had been nobody in. It was starting to really worry her. It probably should have been worrying her more, but she had so much else to worry about these days, it was hard to fit it all in.
Still, she was about to scratch one big itch that she had had for a very long time. By the end of tonight, a lot of things would be different, one way or another. She was all in.
She too
k a deep breath and reached up for the doorbell.
Before she could reach it, the door flew open to reveal Anto Kelleher, in a Santa hat and an honest-to-God apron with “Kiss the Cook” emblazoned across it.
Brigit smiled nervously. “Hey, good looking, what ye got cooking?”
Anto wiggled his eyebrows and bowed low, a tea towel draped over his arm. “Well, m’lady, come into my boudoir and discover that for yourself.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Nora Stokes pushed open the downstairs door to MCM Investigations.
“Hello?”
“Howerya.” A voice carried down the stairs. “C’mon up.”
Nora sighed. While she’d agreed to this, she had been half hoping he wouldn’t be here. She had better things to be doing on Christmas Eve, but work was work, and this had proven a difficult meeting to set up. She needed to get it done and dusted once and for all.
Nora trudged up the stairs, her large bag of last-minute shopping whacking awkwardly against her shins as she did so.
When she reached the top and pushed open the door, Bunny McGarry was sitting behind the desk in the reception area, his feet up on the table. His large black sheepskin coat was bunched around him against the chill.
As he saw Nora walk in, he quickly stood up. “Sorry, can I give you a hand with that?”
She waved him away and dumped the bag beside the door. “It’s fine. It’s nice to finally meet you, Mr McGarry. I’ve been trying to do it for quite some time.”
“Yeah, sorry about that, I’ve been very busy. And sorry it’s so cold. I’ve not been here much. Can’t figure out how to turn on the central heating – or, for that matter, why the walls are covered in yellow paint.”
“If you like, we could do this around the corner at my office?”
Bunny looked around him in a way Nora found peculiar. “No, it has to be here.”
“Fair enough.”
Bunny indicated the chair opposite. “Please, take a seat. And thanks again for coming in, I know it’s a bad night for it.”
Nora sat down. “Ah, don’t worry about it. My mother is taking care of my demon child for a few hours. We’re having to keep a special watch on him as he threatened to try and capture Santa. We are concerned about potential booby traps.”
“Right. Yeah. Of course.”
Nora could tell when someone wasn’t paying any attention to her. “OK then, let’s get down to it. I need to run you through the accusations and then you can give me your version of events.”
“What?!”
Nora looked across the table. She had only briefly met Bunny once before, but there was a worn-out look to the man that she didn’t remember. His eyes sagged and his beard looked unkempt. He looked tired in a way that no night’s sleep, however good, could fix.
“The accusations made by Jacob Harrison against you.”
Bunny waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Oh that? No, forget about that.”
“But, that’s why I’m here.”
“I actually need your help with another thing. Did you bring the doo-dah?”
Nora gave him an exasperated look and then dipped her hand into her handbag and came out with her Dictaphone. “The recorder? Yes, I did, but I don’t understand why you—”
Bunny cut across her. “Press record. Please.”
Nora looked from Bunny to the recorder and then back again. “Could you—”
“Just. Please.”
Nora shrugged and pressed the red button.
“Has it got enough tape?”
“It doesn’t use tape. It’s digital.”
“Oh, right.”
Bunny looked around again and then cleared his throat. “My name is Bernard McGarry. Last week, the Gardaí found two bodies in the Wicklow Mountains that had been killed and buried there eighteen years ago. I killed them.”
“Fuck.” Nora reached forward and stopped the recording. “Are you out of your tiny mind? What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m making a confession. I want to leave a record.”
“No. No. No. I’m going to assume this is a joke as, if it isn’t… Oh God, let’s just call it a joke and—”
“No, it is no joke. I know what I’m doing. I just want to lay it all out now.”
“Seriously, Mr McGarry, we can’t do it now, but after the Christmas break, I can put you in touch with an excellent criminal lawyer. If you voluntarily go to the Gardaí and there’s extenuating circumstances, that’ll all go in your favour. But you need to handle this in the right way. You need—”
Bunny raised his hand for her to stop. “Look. I know what I’m doing. Believe me, the chances of this ever making court are slim-to-feck all. I just need to set out the facts and I need you to be a witness for me.”
“But…”
“Please.”
Against her better judgement, Nora leaned forward and pressed record again.
As Bunny spoke, he splayed his fingers out on the tabletop in front of him and spoke in a calm tone.
“One of the men was, I believe, called Daniel Zayas – although he had previously told me to refer to him as Mr Lopez. His ID said he was an FBI agent but I didn’t know that until after. The other lad was hired muscle, an English guy. Zayas called him Mr Frock but feck knows if that was his real name.”
Bunny paused. Nora wasn’t sure what to do, but after he glanced up at her, she decided to fill the silence.
“Why did… why did you kill them?”
“Because they had kidnapped a lady called Simone. Ehm, I knew her as Simone Watson but I believe her real name was Simone Delamere.”
“Was this a Garda matter?”
Bunny shook his head. “No. No other Gardaí but myself were involved. Well, my then partner, Gringo – sorry, Tim Spain – helped me, after the fact, but it was me who did all of the… y’know.”
“If this woman was kidnapped, why didn’t you go to the Gardaí?”
Bunny didn’t look up as he spoke. “Because she was wanted for murder in New York. We couldn’t… I couldn’t… This was the only way I could protect her.”
Nora lowered her voice. “What was she to you?”
Bunny glanced up briefly, his eyes wet. “We were together.”
“I see. Where is she now?”
“I won’t answer that.”
“Alright then.”
Bunny sat back and raised his voice. “The man Simone killed, it was self-defence. She got caught up in a thing…”
“What kind of thing?”
“It’s best not to go into that. She got caught up, through no fault of her own, and she was forced to defend herself. Then she had to run and she ended up here. In Dublin.”
“How did she get here?”
“I won’t answer that either.”
“Mr McGarry, if you really want to do this, it is important you’re as honest as you can be, straight off the bat.”
Bunny cleared his throat again. “I arranged an exchange with Lopez or Zayas or whatever the feck you want to call him. Simone for the tape.”
“Wait, sorry – what tape?”
Bunny shifted around in the seat again. “There was a videotape that Simone gave me for safe keeping. If it fell into the wrong hands, it’d be bad news for some powerful arsehole.”
“I see.”
“But before we could do the exchange, Zayas tried to kill me.”
“And you defended yourself?”
Bunny nodded. “I did, with what the Yanks would call ‘extreme prejudice’. I shot Zayas in the eye and the other fella, Frock or whatever, I stabbed him in the chest.”
“Right. Were they armed?”
“Oh God, yeah. They’d both got handguns. All I had was a knife, and this…”
Bunny shoved his hand in his pocket and came out holding something. Nora pulled away when she saw that it was a gun. A small, rather dainty affair, but a gun nonetheless.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Sorry, sorry,” said Bunny, q
uickly shoving it back into his pocket. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just my derringer, a little one-shot thing.”
“And you held on to the murder weapon?”
Bunny shrugged. “Ah, it’s like a family heirloom.”
“Right.”
“I also still have the tape.” Bunny leaned back in the seat again and looked around. “Not here, like. I’ve stored it somewhere safe. Those two men were willing to kill for it, and I’m pretty sure others will be too. They’re coming for me. It’s a matter of time.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Call it a hunch. I’m going to go get it tonight, the tape. I think it’s about time that the whole truth came out. It’s time all the people standing in the shadows came into the light.”
Nora gave him a firm look. “Mister McGarry – Bunny. Are you sure you’re OK?”
Bunny gave her a sad little smile. “Define ‘OK’.”
“Maybe you should talk to someone about all this? I mean, y’know, like a…”
He stood up suddenly. “Anyway, thanks very much for your time.”
“Wait, where are you going?”
Bunny slapped his palm into his forehead. “Sorry, of course, I didn’t say. Eejit that I am. The tape is stored in a very safe location. Outside a town called Bandon in Sligo.”
“Right. Wait, hang on – isn’t that where?”
He nodded. “That’s right, yeah. That’s where all the stuff with the Fallons happened a couple of years ago. I moved it there.”
“Why on earth would you do that?”
“Ah, ’tis the arsehole of nowhere, nobody would go looking there. Besides, everything has to end somewhere, I figured it was as good a place as any.”
Nora stood. “Ok, can you just hang on for a few minutes? How about I call Brigit or Paul and we can talk all this through?”
“No, absolutely not. Whatever you do, don’t do that. They’re to be kept well out of this and they know nothing about it. I want to make that very clear.”
“OK, but look… Alright. Come on, sit down.”
Bunny opened the door. “I can’t, I’m afraid. I’ve to get going.”
Last Orders (The Dublin Trilogy Book 4) Page 23