by Jo Spain
Detective Sergeant Ray Lennon closed his eyes and raised his face to the hot shower, letting the spray wash away the stress of the evening. The warmth surged through his stiff joints, chilled on the walk home in the fine autumn rain.
He lathered soap onto his chest and stomach, conscious of his changing body. He’d lost weight recently. He was exercising too much and eating too little but the physical activity served as a distraction from the anxiety he’d carried for the last year.
Ray hadn’t wanted to go on the date in the first place but Michael Geoghegan had forced his hand. Motivated by his own domestic bliss, his detective colleague was on some sort of mission to rid the world of singletons. Ray was his latest victim. Michael and his wife Anne were meant to have made up a foursome with Ray and a single friend of Anne’s, but at the last minute they had begged off.
Emotional blackmail and a sense of duty saw Ray standing alone outside the restaurant at 7.55 p.m., waiting for his ‘blind’ date.
She had offered little apology for arriving a full half-hour late, was rude to the waitress taking their coats (unforgivable), and then clicked her fingers for the wine list before ordering the most expensive bottle on the menu. Ray wasn’t usually a food snob, but by the time she’d demanded that her thirty-five euro prime fillet steak be ‘cremated if possible, I don’t want it mooing at me’, he was ready to join forces with the beleagured waiting staff, should they decide to turf her out. She was an attractive woman, but brought nothing, literally, to the table – not manners, not humour, not even an offer to share the bill.
He’d give Michael an earful in the morning. Regardless of Ray’s lonely heart status, that girl was single for a reason. And no, he was not too fussy. Or still hung up on . . . well, he didn’t want to go there.
Fair enough, he knew he was struggling to get back on the dating scene. But he just hadn’t met a woman recently who appealed to him, on any level.
An unbidden image of DS Laura Brennan, one of his colleagues, surfaced. She always made him smile and he could relax in her company.
But, no. She was a workmate. He wouldn’t be going there again.
Not after what had happened last year.
He reached for the shampoo. Pointless, really. It slid off his dark buzz cut as soon as it was applied. As he shook water from his ears he realised the phone was ringing in his bedroom.
Ray felt his heart sink. It was nearly midnight. That shrill repetition could only mean one thing. Work.
He flicked off the shower and grabbed a towel.
Everything had been relatively quiet for the past couple of days and the team had been grateful for it. Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds, Ray’s boss, was on a well-earned and much-needed break with his wife and had told them, under pain of death, not to contact him for the long weekend. They were only twenty-four hours in.
Ray entered the bedroom, acknowledging mournfully the lonely, unruffled double bed. He didn’t want to think about how long it had been since anybody had shared it with him.
His night was about to get worse. Flashing on the screen was the personal mobile number of Detective Chief Superintendent Sean McGuinness, head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. The Bureau contained numerous specialist teams dedicated to investigating serious crime, among them the murder squad, led by Tom Reynolds.
Ray composed himself before greeting the chief in a tone that made it sound like he was still at his desk, a busy Friday-night martyr, as opposed to standing in his bedroom, dripping wet and naked bar a towel.
‘Ah. There you are. I suspected when you didn’t answer immediately that you might have a lady friend with you. It being the weekend.’
McGuinness’s thick County Kerry accent voice boomed down the phone.
‘Well, eh, I’m actually just . . .’ Ray started.
‘Don’t try to convince me you’ve company, son – I’ve a car sitting outside your apartment the last ten minutes. You should consider getting drapes. Willie Callaghan can see right in.’
Ray’s jaw dropped as he peered through the Venetian blinds of his ground-floor apartment, blinds he’d neglected to close. On the other side of the green patch that faced the apartment block, he could see the car. He tightened the towel at the waist, blushing furiously. Bloody perverts.
‘What can I do you for, sir?’
‘Right, all joking aside. This is serious, lad. I need you to get hold of Tom for me.’
‘But he’s . . .’
‘I know. And his phone is off. I want you to go to the hotel he’s staying in and fetch him. I’d go myself, but I’m afraid of his wife.’
‘Can I not deal with whatever it is myself?’ he pleaded, in vain hope.
McGuinness paused before answering, his voice low and grave.
‘No. Get Tom, then both of you go to Leinster House. I’m on my way there now. Pick two presentable members of your team and send them over to meet me.’
Ray drew a sharp breath.
Leinster House was the seat of the national parliament, Dáil Éireann.
‘Couldn’t we just ring the hotel?’
‘I tried that, Detective. They wouldn’t put me through. Even after I used the “do you know who I am” line. I don’t know what this country is coming to. You need to go there and flash your badge.’
‘Okay. Can I ask . . .?’
‘Best wait until you get to Leinster House. Tell Tom I’m sorry, but this is unprecedented. He has to come in.’
McGuinness hung up.
Ray still had the phone to his ear, his head spinning.
Had somebody just been murdered in the Irish parliament?
Chapter 2
Saturday, 12.30 a.m., Wicklow
This is the life.
Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds was sitting on his hotel room balcony, admiring the stunning Wicklow landscape. Bathed only in moonlight, the rolling woods and fields were still delivering beautifully on their county’s moniker – ‘The Garden of Ireland’.
He zipped his fleece jacket up to the neck to ward off the cold nip of the breeze and took another pull on his cigar. He wouldn’t stay out much longer. It had been an unusually mild autumn so far, but the temperature was starting to dip as the evenings drew in and it had rained most of today. At forty-nine, Tom was still relatively hale and hearty, but in recent years he’d noticed a sneaking creak in his joints, the hint of weakness in his knees. He had become more susceptible to colds and bugs and hated leaving his warm bed in the morning more than ever.
It wasn’t lost on him that his body had begun to betray him at precisely the same time his jet-black hair had turned salt and pepper. Maybe it was nature’s way of telling him everything reverted to dust and ash in the end. Even the green in his eyes seemed duller with each birthday. Given how far away he had to hold a newspaper in order to peruse it these days, no doubt he’d soon be wearing reading glasses as well.
Tom hadn’t wanted to come to Wicklow to begin with. He had suggested to his wife that they go abroad for their long weekend: Paris, maybe, or Rome. Louise, however, was determined to be within driving distance of their daughter, Maria, and their infant grandchild, Cáit.
Tom hadn’t fought her, biting his tongue when she suggested a neighbouring county for their break. Really, it didn’t matter where they went as long as they were together and he could get a full night’s sleep.
Cáit was five months old now but still woke several times a night. Maria, just turned twenty, still lived with them. While Tom relished being a grandfather, he was not enjoying the pseudo-parental role Louise kept inflicting on them both. Of course he agreed they should help Maria. The baby’s father, a fellow college student, had so far proved to be an utter disappointment and their daughter was, to all intents and purposes, a single parent. He suspected, though, that Louise was doing a bit too much of the heavy lifting. She’d even taken a sabbatical from her English literature PhD, which she had resumed before Maria became pregnant.
He shook his head. He wou
ldn’t let negativity creep in. They’d had a terrific day, starting with a stroll through the captivating gardens of the old aristocratic Powerscourt Estate in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. As the afternoon drew to a close, they’d checked into their hotel in the Glen of the Downs and retired to the residents’ restaurant for a delicious five-course dinner.
Tom smiled. Paris or Rome! Sure, they couldn’t hold a candle to the Irish countryside, when you thought about it.
He placed his cigar in the ashtray to burn out and stood up, inhaling the night air, infused with the smell of wet October foliage. Heavenly. But now it was time to warm up with his wife.
He shut the sliding door gently and crept over to the suite’s king-size bed. Louise had left the lamp on and fallen asleep with her book in her hands. It was a rip-roaring American thriller, full of action and sweeping generalisations about world politics, which she seemed to be reading just so she could give out about it. Her long brown hair fanned out on the pillow behind her, her dark lashes resting on soft, creamy cheeks. The Sleeping Beauty image was only slightly tarnished by her trumpeting snores, caused by the half-sitting position she’d been in when she dropped off, her chin resting awkwardly on her chest.
Tom was carefully extricating the book when the bedside phone trilled angrily.
He jumped, as did she, and the novel clattered to the floor.
‘Bloody hell, Tom!’ she barked, before realising what had disturbed her slumber.
Tom hesitated. The phone was still ringing.
‘It could be Maria?’ Louise suggested.
‘She’d try your mobile first.’
They both knew what the call meant. Unless it was reception ringing to tell them there was some emergency in the hotel (and Tom fervently hoped one of the floors was ablaze), the call meant work.
He wasn’t happy. He’d specifically asked the reception clerk to ensure no external calls were put through to the room and his mobile was switched off.
He lifted the receiver.
‘I apologise sincerely for disturbing you, sir, but there’s a gentleman down here who is quite insistent. He says he’s a colleague of yours. He threatened to arrest me if I didn’t ring your room.’
Tom sighed wearily.
‘That’s all right. Put him on.’
He gave Louise an apologetic look. She frowned in return.
‘Boss, it’s Ray. I’m really sorry about this.’
‘Ray, unless you are about to tell me the Taoiseach has been murdered, I suggest you get back on the road to Dublin,’ the inspector snapped.
There was a brief pause.
‘Well, that’s the thing . . .’
‘What?’ Tom’s heart skipped a beat. ‘You’re joking . . .’
‘I don’t know the ID of the victim, but I’m under strict instructions to pick you up and bring you to Leinster House. The chief sends his heartfelt apologies to Louise.’
Tom covered the mouthpiece with his hand.
‘Leinster House,’ he whispered.
His wife’s eyebrows shot up.
‘Give me ten minutes,’ Tom said into the receiver.
‘Who’s dead?’ Louise asked immediately.
‘No idea. But the national parliament . . . McGuinness wouldn’t have sent for me for anything less. I’m so sorry about this, love.’
She sighed, exasperated.
‘And there I was thinking you’d woken me because you wanted to ravish me.’
‘I did. I do. I’m starting to think there’s an alarm bell that goes off somewhere whenever I’m feeling amorous.’
He cupped her face, still warm from sleep, in his cold hands.
‘Our lovely weekend . . .’
‘Your lovely weekend. I’m staying. There’s a spa downstairs.’
He smiled ruefully. ‘I’ll call you in the morning. You never know, I might get back out tomorrow evening.’
She snorted. ‘Do me a favour? Call by the house and check on the girls. If you get a chance.’
He swallowed.
‘What?’ She squinted. It was a challenge.
There was nothing to lose. The weekend was already ruined.
‘Maria has a team of people helping her this weekend, Louise. She’s the child’s mother; she has to learn to cope on her own.’
He moved to retrieve his clothes from the chair where they’d been discarded. Mentally, he ducked.
‘She’s twenty years of age and a single mother trying to manage full-time education,’ Louise growled. ‘She needs all the help she can get.’
He never would have dared rolling his eyes if he’d been facing her. He grunted, concentrating on dressing. She began to say something else, then stopped. Maybe she had taken his silence as a sign of agreement. He turned round.
Nope. That was not the face of a woman satisfied she had won the point.
‘You’re right,’ he said, in a last-ditch attempt to keep the peace. He never learned.
She pursed her lips.
‘I suppose I’ll have to drive your dodgy Citroën on my own this weekend. Why did you replace one crap car with another?’
He sighed. He thought he’d defused the situation, but she’d just paused to reload. It never ceased to amaze Tom how his wife – no, scratch that, every woman he knew – could skip from one subject to another in an argument without pausing for breath. He’d known for months the new Citroën, with its insistent, inexplicable flashing warning lights, was driving Louise nuts, but she’d been biding her time to throw it at him in the midst of a spat about something else. She stored nuggets like that.
He also knew it wasn’t the car she was unhappy with. Louise’s patience with Tom’s job was almost bottomless, but they’d been away so rarely over the last couple of years it was no wonder she was feeling irritable.
‘I’ll get my mechanic to have a look.’
Tom made to plant a kiss on her lips, but got a cheek instead.
‘Hmm,’ she said, her expression firmly set in long-suffering mode.
From talk of ravishing to rejection. The holiday was over.
Chapter 3
‘If you had your own wife, Ray, you might appreciate what a man means when he says he and the missus aren’t to be disturbed. Three days. That’s all I asked. Three bloody days.’
Willie Callaghan, Tom’s garda driver, chortled from the front of the car.
‘Leave the poor lad alone. While he’s single, we can live vicariously through him. Why should he sign up for a marital life sentence just because we were duped?’
Tom grunted and gazed out the window, watching regretfully as the thick Wicklow woods disappeared, to be replaced with civilisation in the form of housing estates on either side of the main road back to Dublin. The aftermath of the couple of glasses of wine with dinner had manifested as a headache, the cherry on top of his bad mood.
‘Don’t mind the boss,’ Willie said to Ray, who was seated beside him, pointedly ignoring Tom. ‘He was probably on a promise. It’s rare for us married folk to strike it lucky like that. You wouldn’t understand that sort of drought.’
Willie, a tall, thin man in his late fifties, was one of life’s gentlemen. A prim and proper appearance belied his easy-come, easy-go attitude. His uniform was always starched, the corporal-like moustache neatly trimmed, his thin hair groomed tight and Old Spice judiciously applied. He was one of Tom’s favourite people in the world, as much for his relaxed demeanour as for his dry wit and extensive collection of useful (and often useless) facts.
Ray, pondering his romantic failings as a single man, took his turn to stare glumly out the window.
It was almost 1 a.m. and the roads were deserted. It took them just half an hour to reach their destination.
Dublin city centre was still busy. The country had been in the grip of a nasty recession for the past couple of years, so bad that the Troika of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank had descended on the government’s financial institutions
. A strict programme of cutbacks and tax hikes had been imposed but it was a Friday night and Dubliners – those who had a few quid to spare – were trying to be their usual sociable selves. Most of the pubs, clubs and restaurants, the ones that had so far survived austerity’s depredations, had adapted to their customers’ demands for more competitively priced bills of fare.
Ray observed the last of the night’s revellers being expelled from the city’s drinking joints. Beautiful girls tottered past the car in ridiculously high heels and short skirts, their scanty clothes the last vestiges of a long-passed summer. One young woman blew a kiss at the car window, then shrieked with laughter at her bravery.
‘We’re going in the Merrion Street gate,’ Willie said. ‘An attempt to keep things quiet. For now.’
Merrion Street was the rear entrance to the Leinster House and Government Buildings complex, but the inspector didn’t imagine for one moment they’d be able to keep tonight’s events hushed up for any length of time.
Two uniformed guards met them at the gate. The barrier was raised and the car rolled onto the tarmac that provided parking along Merrion Lawn, the green area behind Leinster House.
Tom had been in the complex several times and it never ceased to amaze him how this collection of buildings, in the heart of a crowded city centre, could be at such a remove – physically and metaphorically.
A former ducal palace, Leinster House had been built in the mid-eighteenth century by the Fitzgeralds, Earls of Kildare and Dukes of Leinster. It had become home to the Irish parliament in 1922 after the War of Independence and the departure of the British administration.
The complex consisted of more than just the main House. The adjacent Government Buildings housed the Taoiseach and his ministers.
As they progressed along the driveway they could see the side profiles of the Natural History Museum and the National Gallery through railings to either side of the lawn.
‘The cavalry,’ Ray said, pointing up ahead.
Tom saw the two canvas-covered trucks. Army vehicles. The complex had a permanent military and garda presence. But if somebody had been murdered in the precinct, a protocol for a security threat of the highest order would have been triggered.