by Catie Murphy
They were in the room beside Simon’s. Megan took one of their room keys and put away their luggage as they knocked on, and were admitted to, Simon’s room. On the way out, she slid their key under his door, but the door opened and he called after her as she headed for the stairs. She waited, and he almost stumbled approaching her, like he’d been coming in with a hug and thought better of it at the last moment. Instead, he opened and clasped his hands together several times, saying, “I don’t know what I would have done without you, Megan. Thank you.”
“I’m glad I could help,” Megan said again. “My boss is a complete jerk, by the way, and she plans to charge you for the hours last night. I’ll cover them.”
“What? No. No.” Simon’s hands opened and closed again until he noticed and frowned at them briefly, like they belonged to someone else. He folded them together firmly, in front of his stomach, and shook his head. “No, we can aff—” He blanched. “I. I can afford to pay the few extra hours. I don’t want you put out, not after what you’ve done for us.”
“It’d be fine, really. It’s—”
“No, I insist. Thank you for letting me know, but I wouldn’t have imagined otherwise.” A smile crept around the corners of his mouth. “Ms. Keegan seems like a stickler for the rules.”
Megan ducked her head. “Especially when it comes to her bottom line. All right, look, you have my number, right? Just . . . give me a call if you need anything, a lift around town, a semi-local guide . . .”
“I will. Thank you.” Simon went back to his room and Megan, taking the stairs down to the ground floor, sighed. She’d been gone from home a couple of hours. Mama dog probably needed to go out, and the car would be on Simon’s clock until Megan got it back to the garage, so, with an even more dramatic sigh—one which no one at all was around to appreciate—she headed back to Rathmines in 6 p.m. Dublin traffic. The three-kilometre drive took forty minutes, longer than it would have to walk, which was why they said cycling was the best way to get around Dublin, and that walking was often second-best.
Still, Megan didn’t mind creeping along, start-and-stop, watching pedestrians pass her, fall behind, and catch up again. The cyclists she rarely saw again, proving the conventional wisdom’s point, but there were familiar strangers whose faces she knew, sometimes whose dogs’ names she knew, although their own names were mysteries to her. She would lift a hand in greeting to those people, exchanging smiles, or roll down her window to listen to an argument as she drifted slowly by. Some people carried open umbrellas, keeping the sun off themselves without daring the panache of parasols, though, to be fair, Megan thought, it was a lot easier to find an umbrella than a parasol in Dublin.
She pulled into the garage just before seven and tossed her keys to Tymon, a round-faced blond who spoke Irish, English, and Polish so interchangeably that Megan had started to understand bits of the two languages she didn’t already speak.
He waved a handheld hoover and dove into the car, vacuuming it clean for the night. He was one of Orla’s two on-staff mechanics, an expense Megan was always surprised she laid out for. It meant someone on call in emergencies, though, without the exorbitant rates an unaffiliated garage would charge, and the lads otherwise mostly got to set their own schedules, satisfying everyone.
Ten minutes later, she discovered the puppies snuggled so deeply inside the old chef’s jacket that they wouldn’t even miss their mama being gone. She took Mama for a walk, then back to the apartment for a bath, an abuse she took with stoic misery, her ears and tail clamped down and a betrayed look in her eyes.
“Yeah,” Megan said, toweling her off, “but you smell a lot better, and you’re so pretty now!”
Mama, balefully, shook herself hard, spraying dog water over Megan, and then licked herself all over, just to show Megan who was boss. “You’re not getting any drier that way, Mama. You should let me use the hairdryer on you.” She doubted the little dog would let her but took it out anyway, and to her surprise found Mama more than willing to lean happily into the hot, noisy breeze of the dryer until she was no more than damp- and fresh-dog smelling. She gave herself another businesslike shake, and Megan unrolled the puppies from the stinky chef’s jacket, nestling them into the bed instead, before letting Mama back in. Everyone looked satisfied with the arrangement, especially Megan, especially after she’d thrown the jacket in the wash. She kind of doubted it could be salvaged, but at least it would smell better when she threw it out.
After that, by the time she’d eaten dinner, the clock read nearly 9 p.m. Hot young things would just be getting ready to go out for the night, but Megan, somewhat defensively, said, “I’m old and boring and have to get up in the morning,” to Mama Dog, who didn’t even bother to cock an ear at the sound of her voice. Megan harrumphed, muttered, “See, why would I keep dogs who don’t even care,” and went to bed.
* * *
Choosing to wake up at half five and go to the gym was one thing. Being awakened at two in the morning by a whiny mama dog and two wriggling puppies who had decided the middle of the night was an excellent time to spend some time awake was something else entirely. Meg, vowing to never own a dog in her life, took Mama for the shortest walk in dog-owning history and, to her relief, discovered that brand-new puppies apparently couldn’t stay awake more than twenty minutes at a time. As soon as Mama returned, they had a greedy go at her milk and fell asleep again.
Megan’s alarm went off at five thirty, as usual, and for once she shut it off instead of getting up for the gym. By half six she’d had almost a reasonable amount of sleep—”See,” she yawned at the dogs, “this is why it was smart to go to bed early”—and after bringing Mama for another walk, she got to the garage in good time to get the car and make it to her 7:30 a.m. pickup.
The clients were an American couple, good-looking, sporty men in their late twenties too involved with each other—or the fact that it was half seven in the morning—to talk much with Megan. She collected them in Drumcondra, another of the village-within-a-city centres that lay north of the river. Their B&B was a five-minute walk from the DART—Dublin Area Rapid Transit—station that connected north and south county Dublin, and Megan was tempted to tell them they could have taken the train out to Howth for an insignificant fraction of the cost of hiring her car. She didn’t, because first, Orla would kill her, and second, they had the power of the internet and had still clearly decided on a hired car. Besides, Megan loved the drive along the water out to the little peninsula and the fishing town that it supported.
They arrived well before nine, which meant absolutely nothing was open but the fishmongers. Her clients headed for the cliff walk, giving Meg at least a couple of hours to herself in the pretty seaside town. She parked the car and walked out along the north pier, distinguishable as the working pier from the sturdy, two-toned, and often rust-streaked fishing boats with their heavy equipment soldered on and their multicoloured plastic fish totes stacked on the decks. The southern pier, in contrast, bristled with masts stemming from lower, sleeker, white-hulled sailing vessels, and ne’er the twain shall meet, thought Megan.
Men and women—mostly men—in chest-high waders over sturdy, warm shirts with the sleeves rolled up to display powerful forearms brought the fishing boats in from early excursions, unloading their catch into totes and hauling them to the dock.
Half a dozen harbourside restaurants, a fish processing plant, wholesale fish marketers, and restaurateurs up from Dublin proper shouted and chatted back and forth at one another, exchanging stories and wares with equal ease. Megan worked her way through them, stopping to talk without really acknowledging to herself that she had a plan until she’d already chatted with one of the fishmongers and had stopped in to a second. By the third she couldn’t fool herself anymore, but fortunately for her, everybody wanted to talk about Elizabeth Darr’s shocking death, and most of them were eager to point fingers at one another.
“Nah,” said a big lad at the third shop, “we know Fionn, sure, but she didn’
t buy from us that day. Me da’s got the receipts, if you’re like that guard and want to have a look like.”
“Guard?” As if Megan had been unique in the impulse to talk to fishmongers. Of course the police would have been out here already.
“Sure, a tall, ginger fella, like me.” The lad gestured at his own short-cropped hair, which was brighter red and thicker than Detective Paul Bourke’s had ever thought of being. “I told him like I’ll tell you, I don’t think for two minutes that yer wan got food poisoning from anybody’s catch, no matter if it was ours or the Wrights or anybody’s. We don’t sell bad fish, and a chef like Fionnuala Canan’s too smart to buy it if we did. Now, if she’d gotten it down on Moore Street, I couldn’t say, but—”
“Oh, come on, that’s not fair, is it?” Megan loved Moore Street as much as Liz Darr had loved the Galway market. Around two hundred years of age, it laid claim to being Dublin’s oldest market, and still had green grocers, butchers, fishmongers, and people braying tobacco! along its cobbled length, as well as innumerable shops run by immigrants from Africa to China and everywhere in between. It lay on Dublin’s north side and had a problematic reputation, but the vendors took their jobs and their wares as seriously as any posher location in the city.
She could see the fisherman bump up against his own prejudices, consider his audience, and choose to back off with a noncommittal roll of his big shoulders. “I’d best get back to it.”
“Thanks for your time.” Megan left him loading fish for processing and meandered down the dock, watching people at work and early fishermen with their rods and reels out to climb the granite bulwark that held back the sea and made Howth’s harbour safe. A tour boat proprietor asked if she’d like to go out on the harbour and she took a pamphlet, having never done it and thinking she might wrangle Niamh or Fionn into joining her. A troop of scuba divers made their way from a scuba shop toward their boat, all fresh-faced and cheerful in the morning sun. Megan climbed the five steps up the bulwark and stood watching the sea for a few minutes, her cap keeping the wind from blowing her hair into her face.
After a while, someone came up to fish next to her, and in the name of not getting caught on a hook, Megan scooted back down to the wretchedly uneven cobblestones—flagstones, maybe; she thought they were too big to be cobbles—and headed back toward the main stretch of the pier. Up ahead, she caught a glimpse of familiar sandy red hair and waved as she came closer to Detective Bourke.
A complicated dance of emotions flickered over his face when he noticed her. “Ms. Malone.”
“Detective Bourke. Any luck with the case so far?”
He made a noncommittal sound and, with a twist of his lips, said, “You?”
Megan laughed. “Strangely enough, not much. The lads down there—” she pointed at the fishmongers she’d visited “—say they wouldn’t believe it for a moment that Fionnuala Canan bought and served unsafe fish, but I bet you got that out of them already. One of them said he’d talked to you, but then I annoyed him by being too egalitarian and he sent me packing.” Bourke’s fair eyebrows rose and she said, “I had the nerve to suggest the mongers on Moore Street cared as much about the quality of their product as they do on the pier here.”
Amusement brightened Bourke’s eyes to summer-sea blue. “Sure and how dare you, coming in here a foreigner and all, and still having opinions.”
“I know, right? What a lot of nerve I’ve got. Did you get ahold of Niamh?”
“She rang me—no, what did she call it? Voned. She voned me.” Bourke’s thin lips curved upward again as Megan spread a hand over her face and shook her head.
“She says she’s determined to make that word happen.”
“She might yet. She must practice holding the phone at the right angle to flatter. She looked—” He broke off, looking for the words, and Megan supplied them.
“Like Niamh O’Sullivan?”
“Yes, now that you mention it. And I looked like an orangutan.”
“You’re not nearly that hairy,” Megan offered consolingly. Somehow the detective failed to look consoled. “Did she say anything helpful?”
“Unsubstantiated rumour, though she was sure enough of herself. I’ll be looking into it. Rumors don’t usually start out of nowhere.”
“Anything on the autopsy yet?”
“Are you always this gruesome, Ms. Malone, or are these special circumstances?”
“Oh, definitely special circumstances. I met poor Cíara O’Donnell yesterday after I saw you. She’s in pieces. Fionn told me restaurants—the chef, in fact—is responsible if someone gets food poisoning here. That poor kid isn’t going to get blamed for anything, is she?”
They were gathering sea gulls around them, big ones that nearly came up to Megan’s knee and who sidled closer without a hint of fear. Megan said, “We don’t have any food” to them, and one hopped nearer, as if it thought she was trying to get it to leave by lying to it.
Bourke murmured, “Bold bird” but shook his head. “It seems unlikely she’s in any sort of trouble, but at this stage of an investigation, I’d be unwise to dismiss anything entirely.”
“How not reassuring of you.”
“If you want reassurance, Ms. Malone, go to a priest. If you want answers, stick with me.”
“Why, Detective Bourke, are you inviting me along on your investigation?”
“No.”
Megan laughed at the finality of the single word. “Fair enough, then. I’m—oh, God. . . .” Her phone, situated in her hip pocket, buzzed. She pulled it out, saying, “Please tell me nobody’s fallen off the side of the cliff into the Irish Sea. Orla will kill me if I get the company mixed up in another scandal.... Oh, no, it’s just Niamh. Never mind, then.”
“Would she come to you first with gossip?”
Megan tried to look affronted. “Do I look like someone who gossips?”
“You look like a human being, and in my experience, that generally means yes.”
“I can’t really argue with that.” Meg swiped the screen open, reading, then smiled at Niamh’s text, which she read aloud. “‘Your detective’s quite fit, isn’t he? I might consider a mutual admiration society with that one. Do ye’s know if he’s married?’” Megan, her gaze as open and innocent as she could make it, looked enquiringly at Bourke. “Are you?”
The detective’s fair skin flushed bright pink, a genuinely disastrous combination with his sandy red hair. “Em, no.”
“Gay?”
He blushed even more furiously. “Em, no again.”
“Brilliant. Any skeletons in the closet? Wives in the attic? Secret babies?” Megan squinted, first at the sun sparkling off the blue harbour waters, then at Bourke. “I think I’m getting close to romance novel tropes now. Any mysterious connections to sheiks or secretaries?”
She thought Detective Paul Bourke might never return to his natural colour again. Even when the worst of the blush faded, he still looked pinker than before, like the blush had reminded a sunburn that it could settle in. “No skeletons or relatives in either closets or attics, no secret babies, and if I’ve missed out on a sheik, my bank account is the sadder for it.”
Megan grinned, typing back to Niamh as she said, “Deadly. Are you busy a week Monday?” to Bourke.
“You’re never setting me up with Niamh O’Sullivan.” Bourke sounded somewhere between aghast and anticipatory.
“I’m certainly trying to.” Megan, chortling, sent the text and burst out laughing a few seconds later when her phone rang.
“You need a vone app, darling,” Niamh said chidingly. Megan put the phone on speaker and held it out so Bourke could hear the actress as well. “When did you interview our fit detective for dating suitability, and for whose benefit?”
“Well, I didn’t get his life history,” Meg said, grinning. “You can do that your own self.”
“I am available Monday week.” Niamh’s light teasing tone fell away into a note of hesitance. “Does he really want to go out with m
e? With me, you know. Not with Gilda.”
Meg lifted her eyebrows challengingly at Bourke, whose expression softened to a surprising, unexpected sympathy. He made a small motion that managed to coordinate every part of the body that could shrug: open hands, a tiny lift of his shoulders, an equally minute tilt of his head, an upward twitch of his eyebrows, and, most importantly, an oddly shy half-smile that brought the whole action together into agreement. “I’d say he does,” Megan said with confidence. “Will you ring him?”
“Well, I’m meant to anyway,” Niamh said. “I got a description of Liz Darr’s lover.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bourke’s affable, regular-guy charm fell away in a heartbeat and he took Megan’s phone without asking. “Miss O’Sullivan? This is Detective Bourke—”
Niamh O’Sullivan, award-winning stage and film actress, darling of the Irish media, known for her quips and clever one-liners, yelped, “Shite!” and howled, “Why weren’t you after telling me he was with you, Megan, you utter langer! Jaysus, you can’t trust anybody these days, what the absolute fuck, Meg, you manky wagon—”
Megan’s shoulders hunched with laughter as Bourke stared at the phone in horror. “Stop, stop, Nee, you’re giving Detective Bourke a heart attack.”
“Well, he didn’t want Gilda!” Niamh shrieked. “Jesus, Megan—”
“She’s not really mad, just surprised,” Megan informed Bourke beneath Niamh’s outraged rant. “Enjoy the performance.”
“How can you tell?”
“You remember a couple years ago when that reporter asked a couple of nasty questions on the red carpet?” Bourke nodded, and Megan, remembering, felt her cheeks turn red in angry solidarity with her friend. It hadn’t been the first time, and probably wouldn’t be the last, that Niamh, whose Afro-Caribbean heritage made her stand out in the pantheon of successful Irish film and stage stars, had been questioned about the authenticity of her Irish roots, but the tone had been particularly condescending. Niamh had eviscerated him with a smile, and while the embarrassed broadcast networks had cut away during her speech, more than one company—and several individuals—had caught it in full. She’d gone viral, upstaging the awards show, and her ascending star had suddenly risen in meteoric fire. Megan had been driving her that night; it was how they’d met.