by Catie Murphy
Dead in Dublin
CATIE MURPHY
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Pronunciation Guide
Molly Malone Lyrics
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Teaser chapter
Author’s Note
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2020 by C.E. Murphy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2418-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2419-9 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-4967-2419-4 (ebook)
For Rachel Caine, in thanks for all your friendship and support. You’re an amazing lady and I’m so glad I know you.
Acknowledgments
There is never a situation where an author doesn’t have a list of people as long as their arm to thank for getting a book out into the world. (Well, maybe not never, but rarely!) This one owes two particular epic debts: one to my husband, Ted, who thought a series about a limo driver who kept driving in and out of murder mysteries would be a lot of fun. He was right. :)
The other is to Mary-Theresa Hussey, my editor for about fifteen novels written under my other byline, C. E. Murphy, who asked one day if I had any ideas for cozy murder mysteries. I said, “Boy howdy do I!” and she got me pointed in the right direction to get this series out to the world. I’m completely indebted to both of them, and equally delighted to have those conversations pay off in these books.
I’d also like to tip my hat to my editor, Tara Gavin, who thought the idea was fun enough to let me dip my toe into writing a genre I’ve loved reading my whole life. Also, OMG, all the props to the Kensington art department, art director, Lou Mal-cangi and cover illustrator, Anne Wertheim, for the most wonderful, charming cover a writer could want for her first cozy mystery.
I literally could not have gotten this book written without my dad helping out by keeping an eye on my son while I worked. (Said child kept kicking me out the door to get work done. “I’m only thinking of you, Mommy!” Uh-huh. Right. It’s definitely not that you’re waiting to get screen time from Grandpa, kiddo . . . :))
I’d like to thank the War Room—my online writing group whose sole purpose is to get words on the page—for always being there to make me write. A thousand blessings are to be heaped upon Ruth Long, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Susan Connolly for helping me get the idioms right in this book. You’re all stars.
Pronunciation Guide
Irish names will often trip up English-speaking readers because we try to map English letter sounds and combinations onto a language never intended to use them. The trickier names in Dead in Dublin are pronounced as followed:
Ciara = Keera
Cillian = Kill-ee-an
Fionnuala / Fionn = Finn-OO-luh / Finn
Micheál = Mee-hall
Niamh = Neev
Ní Shuilleabháin = Nee Sullivan
Molly Malone Lyrics
In Dublin’s fair city,
Where the girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone,
As she wheeled her wheel-barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”
“Alive, alive, oh,
Alive, alive, oh,”
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh.”
She was a fishmonger,
But sure ‘twas no wonder,
For so were her father and mother before her,
And they each wheel’d their barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”
(chorus)
She died of a fever,
And sure no one could save her,
So that was the end of sweet Molly Malone.
Now her ghost wheels her barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”
CHAPTER ONE
Elizabeth Darr died at Molly Malone’s feet. Molly—bronze, buxom, her fixed gaze distant and serene—gave no notice to cries of concern that became screams of alarm echoing off centuries-old stone walls.
Megan, a few meters away, lurched from her car toward the fallen woman. Toward her client: toward Liz Darr, renowned restaurant critic, food blogger, and explorer of international cuisines. She’d been visiting and blogging in Ireland for months, and Megan had been her driver whenever she was in Dublin.
Megan had been a lot of people’s driver since she’d moved to Ireland. None of them had ever died before, much less died spectacularly, in public, at the feet of Dublin’s most famous fishmonger.
People crowded around the Molly statue, trying to see Elizabeth more clearly. Megan lifted her voice, roaring, “Move it! Let me through!” in her broadest Texan accent.
Like the Red Sea, the crowd parted, and Megan scrambled through to collapse on her knees at Liz’s side. Her husband, Simon, knelt beside her, his usually pale face red with fear and exertion as he administered CPR with professional expertise. Literally professional: he was a doctor, though Megan didn’t think he worked in resuscitation wards as a matter of course. She said, “Let me,” as he broke from breathing for Elizabeth to begin the chest thrusts again. He gave Megan a wild look that she answered with, “Combat medic.”
Understanding tightened the skin around his eyes and mouth. He nodded once and let Megan take over thrusting as he bent to breathe for his wife again. She centered her hands on Elizabeth’s breastbone, pushing, counting, holding her own breath with the hope that somehow the woman would be revived.
Elizabeth Darr’s temples were wet with sweat, the light hair there curling tightly. Her golden skin rapidly became sallow beneath a flush that looked hot even as death settled in place. Megan knew when Simon gave up: a helpless sound broke from him, almost inaudible beneath the sudden scream of ambulance sirens.
They’d been on approach for a few minutes, she realized; she just hadn’t heard them until they were there, on top of them. Someone shouted, “Get that car ou
t of the way.”
Paramedics arrived as unexpectedly as the ambulance, pushing Megan from Elizabeth. She caught the kerb under one foot and slipped to a knee as the paramedics brushed Simon Darr aside, too. Megan lifted her voice, repeating, “That’s her husband. That’s her husband!” until one of the paramedics registered it. They started handling Simon more gently. A distraught young woman with bushels of corkscrew blonde curls offered Megan a hand up. She took it, nodding her thanks, and finally heard what someone had been demanding.
Get the car out of the way. They meant her car. Well, her company’s car: Megan drove limousines and town cars for Leprechaun Limos, who catered mostly to tourists like the Darrs, and to Irish teens who thought the leprechaun-logo limos were gas for their debs—a term that loosely translated to funny for prom. She pushed her way back through the crowd toward the town car, which somebody was in, because she’d left the door open. Megan jerked her thumb at the kid. “Out! It’s mine, I’ll move it.”
The kid sullenly mumbled, “Says who?” but crawled out in a mess of high heels, short skirts, and heavy eyebrows, unwilling to argue with the crisp, black-and-white driving uniform that indicated Megan belonged with the car. A couple of other opportunistic youths looked disappointed, but they’d have had a hard time stealing the vehicle anyway, given the congregation mashed into the Suffolk Street pedestrian area.
Megan edged the car into a quasilegal parking space around the corner, where the ambulance would be able to pass it easily, and hoofed it back the forty or fifty feet to Elizabeth Darr.
The crowd had thinned in the two minutes it took her to move the car, though there were still plenty of onlookers. Mostly young white Irish, watching disaster with the same impunity white Americans did: as a spectacle, nothing to do with them except to say they were there. A tall man with the thick build of a weight lifter sniggered into his phone about the whole display.
Gardaí appeared, clad in shades of blue, several of them wearing high-vis safety jackets over their uniforms. Itinerants, sun-scarred and too thin from living on the street or from drug use, disappeared even before the guards formed a perimeter, pushing gawkers back from the body. Hordes of others wandered off then, no longer caring, or reckoning they’d get a better view of the proceedings on the next evening’s news.
A fair few stayed, though, dozens at least, including the bodybuilder. Megan elbowed her way past him, leaning on an insistent, “Excuse me, I know her,” delivered in her strongest American accent. Three years hadn’t done much to erase her stateside origins, and Americans got away with a lot in Ireland. She didn’t like using it to her advantage most of the time, but these were extraordinary circumstances.
Grim-faced paramedics loaded Elizabeth’s body onto a gurney as Megan made her way up to the yellow police line being stretched around sweet Molly Malone. A tall, slimly built detective garda with the pink-gold undertones to his pale skin that so many redheads had, and pale-blue eyes, had taken Simon Darr a few feet away from his wife to ask him questions, although Simon didn’t appear to be in any condition to answer them. The detective nodded at a uniformed guard approaching them, and the woman took Mr. Darr to the ambulance.
Megan’s phone rang, a quick, insistent buzz in her hip pocket. She took it out, saw the caller was her boss, and decided she hadn’t noticed it. It went back in her pocket, but the detective’s gaze lighted on her. A few long steps took him to the police cordon in front of her, which he lifted and gestured her under. “Megan Malone?”
Neither of them could help it: They both glanced at the bronze statue just behind them. Megan, mouth crooked wryly, said, “No relation,” and the detective, with an affable charm, said, “I expect you get that a lot. American?”
“Living here almost three years now.” Megan reached for identification, though the guard didn’t ask for it. She would probably never adapt to that: everyone in the US, especially everyone military-related, asked for identification, but one of the delightful—or weird, depending on her mood—things about Ireland was that ID was rarely requested.
“Detective Paul Bourke.” Bourke had sharp features beneath the sandy red hair and exceptionally pale eyebrows, blond against sun-flushed skin. A boy-next-door face, Megan decided: pleasant but forgettable. It probably stood him well as a cop. “Mr. Darr said you’re their driver?”
Megan nodded. “I work for Leprechaun Limos.”
“I’ve seen their cars around town. How long have you known the Darrs?”
“Three months, on and off. They’ve spent a lot of time out of the city, but when they’re in Dublin, I drive them.”
“Even though you’re American.”
“Ah, sure and I can turn on the accent if I need to, to make the clients happy. It’s all part of the authentic experience so.” Megan cringed halfway through her lilting reply, remembering that a woman had died and humor was uncalled for. A smile ghosted over Detective Bourke’s thin lips anyway.
“Not bad, for a Yank. I suppose you sing.”
“Mostly in the shower.” Megan knew, she knew, the detective was using small talk to make her comfortable for the other questions he had to ask her. It worked anyway, and she was half-piqued and half-admiring at his skill. “Some people, especially Americans, like having an American driver. They like the familiarity, and not having to wrestle with an unfamiliar accent.” As soon as she said it, it sounded xenophobic.
Bourke only nodded. “Were the Darrs like that?”
“No. Elizabeth—Mrs. Darr—loved the Irish accent, especially. Her grandmother was born here. But they’ve been traveling for over a year, and she said it was nice to hear a voice from home, too, so they requested me when they came back from the West.”
“They were in Galway?”
“Mayo, I think. Westport. I don’t know for sure. They’ve been all over.”
“So your relationship with them was merely professional?”
Megan’s eyebrows went up. “Friendly, but professional. I was waiting to pick them up from dinner.”
Paul Bourke looked toward the restaurant, housed impressively in the old church. Officially simply “Canan’s,” it was colloquially called “Canan’s at St. Andrew’s,” while the nightclub upstairs, wholly owned by Fionnuala’s business partner, was nominally “Club Heaven” and generally called “The Church.” Both establishments had done well since their grand opening just before Megan moved to Ireland, and Canan’s had established itself as a popular new Irish cuisine spot in the wake of the tourist office moving out of the church and leaving it up for lease. “It’s got a fine reputation.”
“It’s good. I eat there pretty regularly.”
Bourke, faintly surprised, turned his attention back to Megan. “Are limo drivers well paid, then? Maybe I should look into a career change.”
“The hours are not good,” she warned him. “No, a friend of mine owns the place.”
The detective flipped a notepad she was sure he didn’t need open, consulting it. “Martin Rafferty?”
“No. I mean, I know him, but Fionn’s my friend. Rafferty’s her partner.”
“Fionnuala Canan? What can you tell me about her?”
Megan made a face. “What do you mean? She’s a great chef and she bakes my birthday cakes for me as a present.”
“Not prone to food poisoning guests, then?”
“What? No!” Megan jerked a horrified look after the ambulance, long since gone with Simon Darr and his dead wife in it. “Oh, no, she couldn’t have had food poisoning, could she? It takes longer to set in. It doesn’t usually kill people, does it?”
“I suppose we’ll find out.” Bourke closed his notebook. “Do you have a card, Ms. Malone? I might like to talk to you more later, although I imagine we’ll find this to be an open-and-shut case, in so far as minor celebrity deaths can be.”
“Who uses cards in this modern age?” Megan had one, though, with her name and the car company’s contact information, tucked into a pewter carrying case embossed with Irish knotwork
. She offered it to Bourke, who gave her one in exchange. She put it in the back of her case without looking at it.
He glanced over hers, tucked it into his wallet, and nodded in the direction of her car. “You might want to drive over to St. James’s Hospital. That’s where Mr. Darr will be, and he’ll probably need a lift home sometime tonight.”
“God, he probably will, the poor guy. Yeah, I’ll do that.” Megan forbore to mention she’d known which hospital: it had been blazoned on the paramedics’ uniforms as well as the ambulance. Bourke waved her under the police barrier again, and she took several steps back toward the car before hesitating and glancing toward Canan’s.
If Elizabeth Darr had died of food poisoning, there would be inspectors and food safety and health officials crawling over the place soon, but for the moment, it hadn’t even been cordoned off. Meg slipped back through what remained of the crowd—the girl with the short skirt and heavy eyebrows hadn’t left yet, and neither had her cadre of hopeful young men. The corkscrew blonde who had helped Megan up earlier still hung around, her face furrowed with unhappy empathy as Megan entered the restaurant.
An open area with a handful of tables sat just inside the door, and behind it a narrow stretch with a bar before the back two-thirds of the restaurant spread out to hold most of the tables. Stained-glass windows lined the exterior wall, with a few modern windows inserted at the tops and open to encourage a little breeze.
The walls were done in creams and golden browns that caught the coloured light from the windows, and the inner wall had numerous well-placed mirrors that reflected light, making the place seem larger than it really was.
It smelled good enough to make Megan’s stomach rumble. A few diners still took up tables or places at the bar, but an awful lot of them had cleared out, with all the excitement outside. Meg hoped most of them had at least paid their bills before leaving, but caught a glimpse of Fionnuala, sitting dejectedly at the far end of the bar, and her hopes sank. “Fionn?”