The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

  “Sorry about that. It was sort of important.”

  Minogue kept his eyes on his file, and turned a page unread.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said.

  He listened as Malone’s chair took his weight, heard his small, exhaled oof. What had gone on in his mind these few minutes alone must be written all over his face. He had even taken out his mobile, and hovered over Kilmatrtin’s number. It had been twenty minutes since Kilmartin’s phone call. Twenty minutes only, and already Malone had gotten an alert?

  “I sometimes think I should do what you do, ‘forget’ to switch it on.”

  Malone’s face was flushed. From running up stairs, Minogue wanted to believe.

  “But if I don’t answer, things go their own way. Pressure from her Da. He wants her to walk. Not up to the altar, away from it.”

  Minogue half-believed that his own thudding heart could be plainly heard outside his body by now. He took a deep breath, and tried to smile.

  “You mind me asking,” he said. “That ring-tone on your mobile?”

  Malone’s face showed his bewilderment.

  “My mobile?”

  “Kathleen has the same phone, but she can’t figure something. I’m no help. Can you…?”

  It was harder than Minogue expected to pretend he was paying attention to Malone’s instructions. He kicked in a few own-goals about his techie ineptitude: the wrong age, not wanting to be chained to his desk by mobile phone.

  “Thanks,” he said after the run-through. “I’ll be the hero when I show her – another thing while you’re at it? How do you dump the call records? She gets caught up in trying to delete stuff.”

  “Here,” said Malone, and held his mobile close again. “Calls are here, right?”

  There was no number, just a name: YouKnowWho.

  “YouKnowWho? Sorry, I couldn’t help noticing.”

  “Sonia’s,” said Malone. “Sounds Chinese, yeah? Our little joke. Lame, right?”

  “Sonia’s parents,” Minogue began. He had to clear his throat again. “How’s business with them? The restaurant, I mean, with the recession and all?”

  “Dunno. It’s still open. You mean are the portions getting smaller?”

  “No, no. I just wondered, that’s all.”

  Malone’s steady look was an audit of something. His eyebrow slid up.

  “Looking for another job, are you?”

  “But I don’t speak Chinese.”

  “Really,” Malone said. “I always wondered about that. But now I know.”

  “Not like your Chinese though, I’d say. You have to be an expert by now?” Malone uncrossed his legs.

  “Hate to break it to you, boss but I have about ten and half words of Cantonese.”

  “That’s all?”

  Minogue shrugged.

  “You don’t find it’s a barrier though, do you?” Minogue asked.

  Malone narrowed his eyes.

  “Barrier? You mean me and Sonia? No, she doesn’t care. The parents are another matter. The Ma came around. But the Da? You know the story already.” “A bit, I suppose.”

  “Come on, I told you. There’ll be no rings on any fingers without his say-so.”

  “In this day and age? What would it take to persuade him?”

  “Me not being a copper. Me being a dentist, or a doctor, or something.”

  “Tall order. No give in him? He’s gotten to know you a bit by now.”

  Malone let out a breath before replying.

  “Sonia’s always doing the soft diplomacy bit. Maybe he’ll come around if the rest of the family, the uncles and that, get more onside. They have a soft spot for Sonia.”

  “Big family, the Changs?”

  Malone angled his head and let his eyes settle on the maps behind Minogue. His expression slowly shed its frown and gave way to bemusement.

  “Now there’s a funny question.”

  “Funny ha-ha?”

  Malone’s eyes darted back to Minogue. “No. Funny peculiar.”

  “Have I put my foot in something?”

  “No. But here’s what’s weird. They asked me that. A few times, actually.” “Who asked you?”

  Disguise or not, Malone’s sardonic self had returned. “Come on, boss. You can guess that one easy enough. The Ombudsman crew.”

  Minogue let the pause last. The quiet settling in the room now made the ticks from the radiator and the muffled voices from downstairs part of the quiet too. He took a discreet, open-mouth breath. Malone began moving his elbows around, and twisting off some stiffness from his shoulders. When he was finished, he looked at the folders.

  “Well so much for that,” he said, “Where were we anyway before this? Larkin seeing things he shouldn’t have…?”

  “Tell me something, before we get too keen on that. Who’s to say that whatever Larkin might have witnessed was against the law?”

  Malone levelled a glazed-eye look at him.

  “‘Ride on the side’?” he said. “Someone else’s hubbie, someone else’s wife?”

  “People tell me that this sort of thing happens.”

  “Maybe it was one of them priests,” Malone said. “A bishop, even.”

  Minogue gave him the eye. Malone gave him a mischievous look in return.

  “What can I tell you? It’s all over the papers, the telly. It stays in the brain somewhere.”

  Malone’s insouciance faded, and his voice took on a reflective tone.

  “Okay so maybe it’s not funny,” he said. “Actually, that stuff’s been on my mind this past while. The child abuse report that’s coming out? Wondering about Terry, back then.”

  Minogue watched Malone’s hands tighten to fists, then open and flex. It was four years now since Terry Malone had over-dosed, five in February.

  “Did your young fella do the altar boy thing at all? Minogue shook his head.

  “I didn’t either. But Terry did. It was Ma’s idea, to settle him down a bit. He was always a bit wild. Reading things wrong, touchy about everything. Picking fights. But he never said anything happened to him when he was an altar boy. Thinking back though, I wondered. The way his life went…? Maybe I should’ve asked him, kept asking, until he told me.”

  Sliding back in his chair, his words trailed off. He drew in a breath then, and looked up from his study of his hands.

  “But we just don’t talk about it. Not a word. I’m not going to push it, I couldn’t do it to Ma. She still goes to Mass every single day, even now. But I know she knows, and she knows that I know, that she knows….Anyway.”

  “‘Whatever you say, say nothing.’” A grim smile came to Malone.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, maybe. But you know, we even heard stuff growing up, rumours like. We actually used to laugh about it. Isn’t that something? Jesus, if we knew then what we know now…?”

  ***

  Minogue’s biro was running out, but he soldiered on, hoping that he had just hit a bad patch on the paper. He had gone back to February in the station’s daily log already. He had made notes for only two items so far.

  A woman had phoned in several times. She had been ‘extremely annoyed’ about broken glass, broken bottles actually, on the roadway near Killiney village by the steps into to the park. Her second phone call reported a puncture that had cost her over 40 euro to repair. Could nothing be done about this?

  A Mr. Sean Ryan, concerned citizen, had complained of unknown persons – ‘young pups’ had been his term – puking in the shrubs by his gate. Ryan had saved several tell-tale Rizla packages emptied of their rolling papers. Would the Guards be wanting them as evidence?

  Malone shifted a little in his chair, and quietly popped another bubble, regaining the gum without once looking up from his orderly, multi-page piles of pages. He had started in on the mobile carrier records an hour ago, but it had taken him a while to come up with a system. Minogue had watched him subdivide the piles by mast location, and by the smaller zones, the micro-cells. O2 and Vodaphone s
eemed to have the most traffic. Malone leaned back over his chair.

  “Any give in those phone records yet?” Minogue asked. “Mobiles, I mean?”

  “Nah, not so far. But I’m only about halfway. A non-resident out there that showed up in the cell log for a week back then – the mobile was only registering in the cell, like. Some young one girl from Booterstown. She lost her phone out there around that time. The battery died on it eventually, so it’s still lying out there somewhere, waiting for the Martians to find it. This young one’s a bit of a spacer, according to her Ma. On her fifth mobile. Is that a record out here in Marin County?” “I have no idea. But I doubt it.”

  “Are you up on the mobile tracking stuff, by the way?”

  “I have the layman’s knowledge, plus what I heard around the place, at work.”

  “So you know this ‘Register paging’ stuff…?”

  “That’s the mobile just telling some mast that it’s in the area? No actual call?”

  “That’s it. Anyway. There were four other mobiles with call records that took ages to track. Only one of them was living local to the cell mast out there. They were all belonging to kids who went away over the summer.” “Holidays, work…?”

  “Yep. Well them people came up clean eventually, that’s my point. It’s just that it’s interesting to see how they got them. One fella went to the States, he came home in September and they talked to him. Bit of a go-er, this guy, a bit of a disorderly type, but he seems to have turned out okay for the Larkin situation. The fourth one, they got hold of him out there in Oz. They actually got the local coppers to take his statement. He’s on a student work thing for six months. But he came through proper too, cleared.”

  Malone yawned, and readied himself for another stretch. “Yeah, they done a good job there, I have to say,” he said. “Maybe we should send them a fan letter?”

  “That might be a first for an NBCI team. They’d frame it, no doubt.”

  Minogue returned to his reading. Just after his biro seemed to have regained its power, it dried up completely. He eyed his mobile next to his keys on the desk. Kilmartin had laid his egg, and he would wait. He knew well enough to give him time to digest what he had heard.

  Malone was forming a new bubble, he noticed. This was Jim Kilmartin’s rogue copper? Somebody was playing an elaborate joke on Jim Kilmartin, someone with an agenda to make an iijit of him. All those toes Kilmartin had stepped on over the years, all those eyes he had poked? But spreading rumours about Malone was below the belt: there was malice in it. It wasn’t just Kilmartin going to come out of it looking like a thicko, it was Malone’s career in the balance. Who would nurse a grudge like that against Kilmartin, or Malone?

  He placed the useless biro on the pad, and stared at it. “Tommy.”

  Malone turned to him.

  “The situation there in Ryan’s the other evening.”

  “What about it?”

  “The fella you thumped, well the two fellas. Special Branch, were they?” Malone hesitated.

  “That’s what I’m thinking, yeah.”

  He waited for a follow-up question but Minogue had none. He looked at the window instead, pale and grey now in the afternoon light. It was a month yet to the solstice, and then the slow climb back up to any decent stretch in the evenings.

  “It’s just the way they are,” Malone said. “That crowd. Nobody can breathe without their say-so. You know? They think they run the show. Everything, like.”

  “Everything?”

  Malone scratched at the back of his head.

  “Well it goes back to the business with Kelly. Some fellas were saying that we should have had the Branch along with us, or given them notice at least. You know why, right?”

  “Because Kelly was grassing on their payroll – as I understand it anyhow.”

  “Right,” said Malone. “But if Kelly was the best they could get, well…”

  There was indignation in Malone’s voice now.

  “Look, boss,” he went on. “It’s on your mind, I can tell. But believe me, those two bastards were in the pub before I got there. They didn’t just happen to be there either. That’s all I’m saying. But I just want to move on. You know?”

  A moment of chill clarity clutched at Minogue then. Had Kilmartin actually gone off the rails? His mind rebelled immediately: it couldn’t be. Kilmartin was holding down his job, he was managing. He seemed to be getting on with things. Yes, he had turned career into a verb, and had skidded into his life-crisis like a juggernaut jackknifing on the motorway. But he was still trying. Still trying to reconcile with Maura, still cracking bad jokes, still pontificating. But surely to God that shrink that Kilmartin was still going to every week would glom onto any signs his patient might be losing it?

  Well maybe not. That’s what stress did, that’s what trauma was, and there were no guarantees, no immunities. Hadn’t he seen it at work himself? And it didn’t take much to sense that behind the mask, Kilmartin was still full of anger. Anger at his wife, at himself too, for having been fooled. Anger at people he supposed were smirking behind his back. Anger at Garda admin too probably. Anger at life. It was a reflex to want to get back at somebody, or something. Revenge for what though? The mind under stress fled to black and white, angels and devils. It could also transmute anger into envy, shifting to others. Envy toward a Matt Minogue, a man who had a good marriage, one who had moved on? Undermining Malone would be a piece of cake.

  “Something bite you there, boss?” Minogue read suspicion in Malone’s stare.

  “The place must be getting to me,” he managed. “I need a bit of air.”

  “Musty all right, isn’t it. You can sorta feel it too, as well as smell it.”

  “I tell you,” he added, and glanced at his watch. “I’m hitting the sack early tonight. I’m barely able to keep me eyes open here.”

  Minogue rose and began sliding the file folders together. “I have an item I’d like to chalk off the to-do list,” he said. “Before we go much further here with the paperwork.”

  Malone watched him place the folders on their edges in the cabinet.

  “Up on the Hill,” Minogue went on. “The site.”

  Malone gave a look of mild aversion to the stacks of pages on his desk.

  “You think there’s anything up there for us still?”

  “It’s the culchie in me,” Monogue replied. “I’d like to see the lie of the land.”

  “Is it on the way to Sallynoggin?”

  “It’s not. What has you thinking about Sallynoggin?” Malone had already begun to gather the folders.

  “Oh I just thought maybe we could drop by McCarthy’s, or his mother’s place, I should say. See if there’s anything there that’ll tell us more than that he’s away in Amsterdam?”

  Chapter 22

  A short burst of sign language conducted with thumbs and shrugs ended with the decision to take Malone’s car. Minogue soon found that he didn’t have a clear idea of how to get out of Dalkey and up toward the Park at all. He got them to the bridge over the DART line however, and once by the station and the handful of passengers waiting on the platform behind the fence there, he guessed right about Cunningham Road.

  “Will this car of yours get us there and back?”

  “What are you saying?” replied Malone. “Nothing the matter with this car. Don’t judge it by its looks.”

  The road climbed quickly. The urge to get Kilmartin out of his head only grew in Minogue. Ludicrous, yes – that was the word he had been scrambling for – but with it came pangs of anger and pity for James Kilmartin. Lost his bearings? So anxious to believe he was still in the loop that he let himself become a target for cruel pranks. Lost his reason? Either way, a dwindling of the man who used to be Jim Kilmartin.

  A level section of road soon presented itself, and after a sharp turn, the climb resumed. Minogue forced himself to take note of the hedges and the leaves along the footpaths, the cars in their driveways, the landscaping. Glimpses of
Dalkey Hill soon claimed Minogue’s attention, sharp in silhouette now against the sky. “That castlely looking thing up there on the Hill…” Malone paused and tilted his head to listen to the engine’s drone.

  “What’s it called again?”

  “It has different names, depending on how far back you go.”

  “How about today?”

  “Fair enough. The Telegraph Building.”

  “Telegraph? They’re ancient.”