The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

  “People can be sensitive,” he managed to say.

  Tynan looked toward the window, then to something on the wall, but then his focus returned and he bore down on Minogue again.

  “When you clear a case,” he said. “Credit will include – must be seen to include – officers who worked on it. The whole team, local and specialist. Especially the local.” Carney had pushed back with demands of his own, then. “Understood,” Minogue was glad to respond. “And I will—” The phone ringing was a welcome jarring. Tynan looked at his watch and then, with his hand signaling Minogue to stay put, he lifted the receiver.

  Minogue put some effort into pretending that he wasn’t listening. Tynan gave little away, anyway. How many? he asked, and after some reply: how long? Whatever he heard seemed to sat-isfy him. His changing posture signaled to Minogue that the call would be over in momentarily. But before it was, he had a glimpse of impatience, or more. Proof he was right came in Tynan’s tone, his last before he replaced the receiver.

  “That’s right,” he said. “It’s Section 30. A search of a car is a search of a car. And yes, you can tell them that at the mosque.”

  Chapter 7

  “Well,” said Tynan. “Which cases are at the top of your list?”

  Minogue had to yank back his wandering thoughts about what he’d heard.

  “First is Mary Slattery, Coolock. Murdered on Hallowe’en, two years ago.”

  “Slattery. One of the crew from the van robberies? Any connection?”

  “The self-same, and he has his alibi. He’s halfway through a seven-year sentence. There’s no give in him. He appears content to do his time.”

  “But you think you’ll make headway with him now? What’s changed?”

  “We have a plea-bargaining feeler from one Christy Sugrue. Long a thorn in our sides, Sugrue. He says that Slattery told a mate of his how he’d set it up. And that he paid five thousand to have the missus killed. ‘The missus was playing the field on me.’”

  “‘His mate.’ Out of the goodness of his heart, no doubt. Playing us, is he?”

  Minogue didn’t recall such cynicism from Tynan before. “Sugrue’s up on a murder charge,” he said. “And it’ll stick. He’s headed for fifteen years, easy.” Tynan seemed to weigh the matter.

  “So there’s leverage now,” Minogue felt he had to add.

  “Sugrue’s an addict. There’s treatment, sentence mitigation. Parole dates, maybe. Money. He has three kids. And apparently he has discovered his conscience now.”

  Tynan examined his thumbnail and then laid his hands flat on the desktop, one over the other.

  “Good,” he said. “Thanks for that. I wanted to speak with you before you got into the thick of things. You’ve heard the much overused ‘A perfect storm,’ I take it?”

  “I have.”

  “I’m not a great believer in coincidences,” said Tynan. “But some matters have come to my attention very recently. As late as an hour ago, actually.”

  He shifted hands, placed the left on top this time. “A case in Dalkey earlier this year. You know the one I’m referring to?”

  “A homeless man there, up on the Hill? That Park there?”

  “That’s the one. One Padraig Larkin. June, I believe.”

  Tynan moved his pencil to a horizontal position above his daytimer.

  “So the case has devolved back to the local Gardai,” he went on. “After the fine kick-start and sterling work of the NBCI, of course.”

  Minogue was too aware that he was being passed an easy ball. His unease grew.

  “As we well know,” Tynan continued, pausing to give Minogue a quizzical look, “there was pressure on resources at that time. And this pressure won’t be lessening.”

  This lob just over the net was a classic Tynan serve. A hint about the Guards’ protest marches over pay cuts? Rumours of a strike plan, or another blue flu?

  “The gang feuds flared up again around then,” Minogue offered. “Right.”

  “And the retirements, of course.”

  Tynan picked up his pencil. The gesture reminded Minogue of a doctor preparing for surgery.

  “The average citizen might be wondering if resources weren’t brought to bear on that case in a timely manner.”

  He seemed to want a comment.

  “If I knew more exact details there,” Minogue said, feebly. Tynan leaned forward, and folded his arms on the desktop. “More than enough personnel were on it. All well driven, sound procedures. Regular case reviews locally, reboots, staff switches. All ongoing.”

  He could have said ‘textbook,’ Minogue thought. “And now the case has passed the six-month mark.” Minogue hedged.

  “There are no guarantees,” he said.

  “Well you know that, and I know that. But there are things particular to this case that are showing up now.”

  Minogue waited.

  “We could start with Facebook.”

  “Facebook. The Facebook?”

  “That’s the one,” Tynan replied. “Yes, there’s a Facebook group for Mr. Larkin. Parts of it are quite, what’ll I say, quite lyrical. Mr. Larkin wandered the coast road there, and Killiney Hill, the woods, apparently. His kingdom, one could call it, his domain. I believe he had names, ‘The High King’ and such?” “‘The King of Ireland’ I heard, I think.”

  “Well I had a look this morning. There are other titles being bestowed there: ‘The Green Man,’ ‘The Fisher King.’ Quite something.”

  Minogue struggled to say something pertinent, but nothing came to mind.

  “Well people like their stories, I suppose,” he said. “Their myths.”

  “Myths, yes. ‘A national weakness,’ I heard the other day. A bit harsh, maybe?”

  “It sounds a bit, I don’t know – bitter. But I don’t know the context.”

  “It was a chat about the governing of our fair country,” said Tynan. “One of about a million such conversations going on in Ireland at the moment, I suppose.”

  “You might be underestimating that million.”

  “Well now,” Tynan said. “Back to this High King. As you might imagine, there’s plenty of slagging the Guards on this Facebook effort.”

  He took a single, folded sheet from under his daytimer. “Somebody took the trouble to put this item together, and shove it under the door of the public office there in Dalkey Garda station.”

  There was a piece of a poem and quotes about justice. Rhetorical questions followed, well-spaced and in italics. Was the life of a homeless man worth nothing? Was justice only for the rich, the insiders? ‘Marginalized,’ a word that still set Kilmartin ablaze with scorn, occurred twice in the paragraph below the poem.

  “They might know their legends,” Tynan said. “But their notion of how a murder investigation is run, well that’s mythology of a different order entirely.”

  He paused then, his expression changing slightly as though he had remembered something more pressing.

  “So Mr. Larkin was a fixture in the area,” he went on. “Wandering the roads there, the coast road. Much preoccupied with his role there up on the hill, apparently. That is where he kept an eye on the sea, for arrivals. He took it as his duty to patrol the coast there. Guarding it, so to speak.”

  “Like I was saying, I wish I had reviewed this before coming.”

  “Guarding against the Vikings,” said Tynan easily. “The Normans, the English. A keen interest in Strongbow, apparently. Not the cider, the real McCoy, the Norman.”

  “Interesting” was all that Minogue could come up with.

  “You might wonder why I’m telling this to you this morning?” Memory of Kilmartin’s disdain then flared in Minogue’s thoughts: it’s all about PR these days, bucko. “A professional courtesy, I’m thinking.”

  “Nicely put,” said Tynan. “That goes without saying. But tell me something now. Does it strike you as a bit odd that I know these details about this case? As much, you might wonder, say, as a front-line Garda investigating it?
”

  “I’ll hold off saying, if you don’t mind.”

  “I see. Now do you think I asked you here to hear you hold off saying things?”

  It wasn’t sarcasm, Minogue knew, but the tone was tinged with something stronger than irony.

  Tynan had folded his arms. He was waiting.

  “Clare men will tell you to your face, I was told,” he said.

  “East Clare only, I’m afraid. Tulla and points east, to the Shannon.”

  “It’s not a fox-hunt here. So can you read between the lines here? Why are we here talking about this particular murder? Interrupting your preparations, and setup?” Minogue struggled to hide his surprise.

  “Maybe because the case has been kicked into the long grass?”

  This audacity caught Minogue off-guard. Tynan’s expression didn’t change.

  “What I’ll be telling you is in confidence,” he said. “Understood?

  He waited until Minogue nodded a second time.

  “I received a phone call yesterday afternoon. A woman the name of Mary O’Dowd. She’s a friend of ours – of mine. You may know her as Sister Mary Immaculata?”

  “It has a familiar sound. Something to do with the homeless?”

  “Right. She helps at a drop-in centre. Now I know Mary since the Flood. Mary – Immaculata – started up Disciples when she came back from Africa, a few years ago. But she’s getting on, so she took a subordinate role a while back.”

  Minogue vaguely recalled a photo in the papers from a while back. It was the surprise of seeing a nun washing someone’s feet that stood out.

  “Was there something to do with washing feet involved?” Tynan hesitated before answering. Minogue knew better than to expect a smile.

  “Have you heard the expression ‘he’ – or she – was ‘out on the missions’?”

  “I have. I wondered if there was something more to it than just the words.”

  “Well there is,” said Tynan. “A mission priest would come home to Ireland, and he’d bring back what he had learned over there on the missions – gotten used to, I should say. It wasn’t always good either. He’d be expecting to be deferred to, or to step back in time here, to when he left. The re-entry here doesn’t always go smoothly. You see?”

  Minogue had little trouble resisting an urge to say ‘gone native.’

  “Such eccentricities get the hard eye these days, I’m thinking,” he said.

  “You said it. Returning to Immaculata: she used to come by our house. We’d have a chat and so forth. More than once she told me that for me to be holding the office of Garda Commissioner, that would be proof that God had a sense of humour.”

  Minogue realized that he was being given a moment to catch the connection, those years Tynan had spent as a seminarian.

  “Don’t be fooled by the nun thing now,” Tynan continued. “Immaculata is a tough nut. The original model of an Irish nun: cast iron, tempered steel. She used to be about a ten on the Nun Richter Scale. Do you know nuns?”

  “I do, a bit. I used to think they glided. That they didn’t need to use their feet.”

  “That’s only the Holy Faith nuns. But we can’t be sure of that though, can we?”

  Not a hint of a smile now either, Minogue noted, uselessly. “It took me a while to get over the fear, to admire them – well, some of them.”

  “You’re hardly alone,” Tynan said. “But the issue here is, Mary knew this man Larkin for some time. And this is what she told me. She told me that she was interviewed by a Guard. ‘Cursory’ is the word she used. She waited for more follow-up, more in-depth. But since then, apparently no one has gotten back to her. And it’s the same with the crew at that drop-in, Disciples. Once-off statements, and bye-bye.”

  Minogue studied the faded green felt edging out from under the base of Tynan’s pen-holder.

  “You might imagine there’s room for improvement in the matter?”

  Minogue squirmed a little.

  “A more robust scrutiny then maybe,” Tynan went on. “So that the man in the street can see that this murder investigation has not been kicked into the long grass?”

  Minogue felt it was safe enough to nod. Tynan drew out another sheet of paper, unfolded it, and slid it across his desk.

  “Immaculata’s phone number. I said you’d be in touch, shortly.”

  He watched Minogue glance at it, and place it in his jacket pocket.

  “Next item on the agenda here,” he said then. “There is a man named JJ Mac. John Joseph McCarthy. That’s the other phone number there on the bottom. He calls himself a journalist. Heard of him?”

  Minogue shook his head.

  “Well I thought not. He works for one of those free papers, the ones they dump on the doorstep. Community newspapers. South County Scene.”

  “Is he in the picture as regards this case?”

  “He is and he isn’t. He has tried to insert himself into it apparently, starting a month or so ago. Whatever his credentials, or his intentions, here, he seems to like to emote. Are we in need of more emoting in the media these days?”

  “Saints preserve us,” Minogue said. He wondered if Tynan too had taken to slapping the radio off, or hitting the channel changer on the remote.

  Tynan drew in his legs, and moved some papers on his desktop.

  “This McCarthy button-holed me last month, at a resident’s association meeting in Dun Laoghaire. It was in the nature of an ambush. He claimed to be reporting on it for his paper. Well that turned out to be bogus. But in any event, he was all over the map. He had a considerable amount of things on his mind, or on his radar.

  ‘Isn’t it time the Guards laid criminal charges against the people running the banks?’”

  “He’d probably get my vote,” said Minogue.

  “‘Shouldn’t the directors of Shell be in the dock for what they’re doing out in Galway, destroying the environment with that gas pipeline?’”

  “That’s free speech for you, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps,” said Tynan. “But then he moved to other matters. ‘Are you prepared to drag those bishops into court?’ ‘Will ye lay charges against the Pope?’”

  “The Pope?”

  “That’s right. And if the Guards won’t handle this, well... someone else has to.”

  “Has he got Clint Eastwood maneuvers in mind?”

  “We haven’t heard the word ‘lynch’ yet, have we,” was Tynan’s reply. “But after that ritual of pelting me with rhetorical questions, he then took to inquiring on another matter. It was the matter of Mr. Larkin.”

  “The same Larkin matter we are talking about here?”

  “The very one. I remember his expression actually: ‘Will the Guards get to the root of this, the real root of this?’” “The root,” Minogue said. “What root?”

  “Well I didn’t ask him. But he wanted me to know that the leafy lanes and the Mercedes out there didn’t fool him one bit. ‘Things go on out there.’”

  “‘Things,’” Minogue said. “Bank directors living there? Bishops maybe?”

  Tynan gave him a quick look.

  “I couldn’t let that one go, so I asked. Long story short, when pressed, McCarthy had nothing to offer.”

  “Nothing? Boring nothing, may I ask, or interesting nothing?”

  “The boring one, I’d have to say. And then he was off on another track. I didn’t keep track of all that he went on about. Planning permissions, pubs serving up contraband drink, illegal au pairs… But the main point is, he’s set on the notion that certain people – the well-to-do, who else could it be – are used to getting what they want.”

  “Friends in the right places, he’s saying?”

  “Let me see if I remember his preferred terms. Yes, he used the current favourite, the ‘insiders.’ ‘Bypass’ was one. ‘Untouchables’ – not the Indian caste either. ‘The old days never left. They still have the gardener, and the maid, and the messenger boy.’”

  “I’m not sure I get the gard
ener analogy.”

  “Did you ever read Hugh Leonard? Home Before Dark?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “His father was a gardener, his stepfather I should say. The gardeners would be the ones taking care of things, weeds and so forth…”

  “Has he any specifics,” Minogue said. “Incidents? Examples? Names?” Tynan shook his head.