The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

“Farther back it was the Semaphore Building.”

  “They’re something to do with ships. Flags, like?”

  “That’s it. The place was built to watch for Boney. Same as the Martello towers.”

  “Boney. You mean Napoleon?”

  “None other. Our wouldbe liberator.”

  “Interesting,” said Malone, meaning it wasn’t. He braked and drew closer to the footpath for a delivery lorry.

  “So Larkin kept coming here because of stuff like that, lookout stuff?” “Maybe.”

  Minogue imagined Larkin up on the Hill, braced Moses-style against the wind, with robes flapping about him. His hand would be over his brow, surveying the sea’s horizon. A ship would appear, and his eyes could burn with resolve. Grabbing his flags, he’d begin the stiff, slashing motions to telegraph the alarm. The French? Maybe he should be picturing Larkin going further back, with the Vikings. It’d be the same stern vigilance on this headland, but lighting a bonfire instead, and scanning the hilltops down the coast for answering fires. Saving his country.

  “It’s like he had a time machine or something,” said Malone. “He had his own take on history anyway, didn’t he?”

  Minogue found refuge in vagueness.

  “Who knows? Who knows what he was thinking?”

  “But he’d have to be making it up. Dalkey’s no big deal, right?”

  “Actually it was. It was the port of Dublin for a long time.”

  “Dublin? Dublin city? No way.”

  “The Liffey was useless until they built the Bull Wall.”

  “All the stuff coming in off the boats came here first? People even, armies?” “So it is written.”

  Malone scratched the crown of his head with his baby finger.

  “So maybe Larkin really knew his onions then, like this really was the place to be then for all his imaginary friends and stuff.”

  The words irked Minogue.

  “So do you like the diesel?” he asked Malone.

  “This isn’t a diesel. Why would you think that?”

  “Smells like one. You’re burning something you’re not supposed to burn.” “Like what?”

  “Bridges, maybe. Oil actually, it smells like. Seals, gaskets. Who knows?”

  Malone’s change into third gear was sloppy.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” he muttered. “We’re going away from the Hill here.”

  “The road turns. You’ll be making a left up into the car park.” Malone made low murmured comments as he piloted up the curving cement road to the car park: “Weird… Bit of a jungle here… Are we still in Dublin here, or what?”

  Minogue eyed the yellowing expanses of wild grass difting by the car. The woods approached closer and soon filled the windscreen. Three parked cars – no, four, one well back. Straggling lines of leaves led to the edges of the woods

  Malone had trouble getting his door fully closed. Minogue was content to wait and take in the deeper woods that waited ahead. More than the resinous scent in the air, the quiet here had caught his notice right away, as though it had come out to meet him and to relieve him of his thoughts.

  They made their way toward the path that led through the woods, passing an ashtray dump and the inevitable McDonalds’ bag, already sodden and separating. Minogue spotted moss in the shelter of the low concrete curbs. Underfoot, the gum-speckled tarmacadam had a greasy feel to it. “Beech,” he said to Malone.

  “Where? Up here? Sure we’re hundreds of feet up, aren’t we?”

  “Beech tree. And that one there is oak – and there. A lot of pine too.”

  The woods here sheltered them from the seaboard side of the hill. Their upper branches barely stirred. Soon, Minogue stopped and opened the copy he’d made of the map, turning it to match the short section of the path ahead. Drifts of spotted, fraying leaves lay everywhere now.

  “I’m going to buy that SatNav and just get it over with,” Malone said. “Bite the bullet. I mean, how long was Tetra in the works? Can’t be waiting forever.”

  Minogue couldn’t remember any exact number of years since the Tetra announcement, that finally, the glories of digital radio were coming to the Guards. There’d be no more black spots, no more eavesdropping, no more Guards having to use their personal mobiles. Heaven entirely.

  “Seven hundred years,” he said. He angled his map again to match the path ahead. “I might be off by a few years though.”

  He folded the paper, slid it into the inside pocket of his coat and gestured toward the path. Malone stepped aside to let him take the lead.

  “Never knew about this place,” Malone said. “It’s like, all of a sudden you’re somewhere else. The jungle, I don’t know. But it’s too quiet here.”

  “Two bends,” Minogue said. “Then a stone bench, and we get off the path.”

  Between stretches of pathway that alternated between gravel and clay, they met concrete steps. Minogue took his time, wary of their greasy sheen and the wet, spongy leaves that clung to them. He slowed and stopped by pieces of broken glass. Turning a bigger piece over with the toe of his shoe, he found it was still held together by a label. “Vodka,” said Malone. “Classy.”

  Minogue took in the wrappers from bars of chocolate, the barely legible ones from ice cream and bags of crisps, the ubiquitous pieces of tin foil and cigarette butts. When he reached the seat, he took out his camera.

  “Somebody made that,” Malone said. “Put rocks together like that. Right?” “Looks like it.”

  He put the flash on Fill and moving around the stones, he took a halfdozen shots. Crouching on his hunkers, he took a closeup of the marks.

  “Seeing if they match the ones they took back in June?”

  “That’s it, yes.”

  “‘Marto.’ ‘Marto loves Sarah.’ ‘Emma is a slapper’? Any Emma I know?”

  They moved on, slower. Patches of grass were rare here under the canopy. There had been nothing carved into the tree trunks so far anyway. Ecologically minded vandals, Minogue mused. Malone was first to spot where to turn off. “Them three bushes,” he said. “Close together?” Minogue took out his map again. He held a finger on the contour line, and looked at the branches, and listened. He couldn’t decide if the soughing was the wind, or the sea.

  “Are we close to a cliff?” Malone asked. “Be sort of nice to know.”

  “We’re right on this line here.” He pivoted to look across at a small clearing.

  “According to this,” he went on, “there’s a drop-off behind those scruffy-looking bushes there. We go right here though. It’s a couple of hundred yards yet.”

  The air was definitely cooler here, and more damp, and the dank, biotic smell of decay had lifted. Minogue’s shoes gleamed from his passage through the scutch grass. Any moment now, he was sure, the wet would make itself known through the leather.

  “It’s a big rock we’re on,” Malone said.

  “Keep right, or we’ll be walking off the side of it.” The ground began to tilt. After a length of smooth, exposed granite, a soft humus of needles took over underfoot. The two men moved awkwardly now, planting their steps on the edges of their soles.

  “No track that I see,” he heard Malone say ahead. “You see one?”

  Minogue paused, and listening to the thrum in his ears, looked up at a patch of sky above the pines. It seemed closer than back in the town. He could see no contours, no movement in the cloud clover.

  “It is the sea I’m hearing,” Malone said.

  “It’s not just the wind, or the trees. Yeah, I can hear it for sure.”

  “We’re looking for a few small conifers. Larkin’s place is – was – twenty feet to the side of them.”

  Malone shifted his stance and looked around. Minogue took his time with his own survey, sorting through the tangle. Gorse bushes, their withered spines clogged with tiny droplets, edged in just beyond the branches. Some clumps of heather held out there too, scouts for the heather and gorse that had taken over the seaboard side of the hill.
>
  “I think I see it,” Malone said. “Well I see clay and stuff anyway. Something that’s been dug up, or turned over.”

  Minogue backed carefully into the thinly needled branches of the pines. Taking up a spot beside Malone, he let his gaze wander the site – the former site. The earth here was a different colour, and already hard-packed. No bits of torn-off tape, no stakes. No footprints, no litter. None of the pieces of timber that Larkin had brought here to build his cave. No sign in the wide world that Padraig Larkin had ever been here.

  He still couldn’t get back far enough to get the picture he wanted. Tripod or not then, maybe he’d try one of those panorama stitches later at home.

  The flashes put a dull, moist shine on the clay. He switched it off and tried again, but the contrast went murky on him. Back to the flash.

  “Just like they said.”

  Malone’s solemn tone told him that maybe he too had fallen under the spell of the place. He cupped his hand as best he could over the display for Playback.

  “Said what.”

  “They filled it in, collapsed it. Their ‘safety hazard.’” Minogue leaned back more against the branches to get another shot.

  “He picked his spot well enough,” Malone went on. “It’s rocky everywhere else. So he knew the place, didn’t he.”

  With that, he scratched his head and turned to take in the place again.

  Minogue tried to recall from the file photos more of what the place had looked like before. That makeshift door, the one that held the sods and bits of foliage that Larkin could pull closed behind him, was probably what had drawn Donegan’s comparison with Vietnam.

  “I can see it being a not-bad hideout all right,” said Malone. “In the summer anyway. With all this stuff growing in?”

  Yet the place was saying nothing to Minogue, nothing beyond an ominous feeling that something or somebody had been swallowed up here. Had vanished. As close as they might be map-wise to the Vico Road’s millionaire homes hundreds of feet below, it felt hemmed in here, remote. Hovering somewhere in his thoughts was a feeling that this place here was like a grave. He pocketed his camera and took out the map again. “We’ll go on a bit more. He hardly came and went by the same path every time.”

  They had a choice of taking a steep, almost vertical scramble up through the gorse, or stumbling over the sharply curving ledges hereabouts, and breaking their necks.

  Malone led. He soon needed to use his hands at times.

  “Watch yourself there,” he said to Minogue, bracing himself after a slide, and trying to wipe his hands on an outcropping.

  “How can there be a place like this, what a few miles from the city centre? Jaysus, they could make a Survivor thing up here.”

  “Larkin picked the place for a reason.”

  Malone wasn’t sure even when he gained the path that it was the path at all. He tried picking mud from the knee of his trousers. Minogue was breathing hard when he made it up at last to the pathway. There he stood, listening to his blood thumping in his head, waiting for the spasms in his chest to slow.

  “What’s the word, boss?”

  Even Malone was breathing heavily. The difference was, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

  “Well I’m not much wiser so far,” Minogue said and paused.

  “We heading over to the actual site now?”

  Minogue eschewed talk for a nod, and a gesture of his arm up the pathway. He focused on breathing deeper, and looked at his shoes. Pretty saturated-looking, but he hadn’t felt any wet coming in yet. He took out the camera and scrolled through what he had taken so far. Malone sidled over.

  “Eight out of ten for weirdness back there,” Malone said. “A fella living – actually living – in a hole in the ground here, in a park that doesn’t look like a park but a bit of mountains or something, all a few miles from the middle of Dublin. Now that’s got be major weirdness. Wait, forget that eight – give it a nine. You think?”

  “I was shooting for eleven myself.”

  Chapter 23

  Minogue wiggled his toes again. A heater wouldn’t make much headway through wet shoes to even wetter socks. “What’s the story here in this part of the world,” Malone said. “This Sallynoggin place. A bit rough, is it?” “Well there’s Sallynoggin…and then there’s Sallynoggin.” Malone leaned forward again over the steering wheel, weaving his head from side to side to see around the driver’s side pillar.

  “Whatever that means,” he said.

  “It’s quietened down a lot from the way it was.” Malone was watching the divagations of the van ahead. They passed the church, one that Minogue had passed a hundred times before, and ignored. Our Lady of Victories? Why hadn’t he known its name before?

  There were abundant signs of the Tiger years on the houses and terraces here. The usual PVC windows and glass porches went by the car, driveways newly cemented, curly ironwork gates. Satellite dishes perched on most.

  Malone turned onto Connolly Close at last, the road where was to be found JJ McCarthy’s aged and probably long-suffering mother. A recently waxed car sitting behind elaborate gates caught Minogue’s eye.

  “That Audi is new,” he couldn’t help saying.

  “What, new Audis aren’t allowed on a Council estate? Oh, I get it now. You think it has to be a robbed one.”

  Minogue began to spot house numbers, and he looked ahead to guess which might be the McCarthy’s. Malone had already touched the brakes. “That one,” he said.

  McCarthy’s house was the only one on this road that had no signs of a makeover. With its pebbledash weathered a half century now, it looked almost organic. High up by the gutters Minogue saw telltale signs of damp. The garden was long grass beaten down, dying back in ragged clumps in front of a gapped escallonia hedge that rose to the height of the windowsills. There were faded curtains drawn upstairs and down on the old metal window frames, the putty had long ago rebelled against a greenish paint.

  Minogue stepped out, and he waited for Malone to negotiate with his door. If cursing worked, he reflected, then the door would have worked flawlessly.

  “You talk,” he said when Malone joined him by the gate.

  “She’s old, remember. So give her something nice to talk about.”

  “What, we’re not coppers here?”

  “We are, but we’re more his friends. He’s helping us out. And because he’s such a very helpful fella, and so smart, we need his help.”

  “Okay. But what if she has all her marbles, and susses our game here?” “Work around it.”

  Minogue heard no sound from the doorbell. He lifted the knocker over the letterbox and let it drop several times. Malone gestured toward the last of high grass still lining the block wall with the neighbours where a motorbike, wheel-less, saddle-less and tank-less, had shed the better part of the builder’s poly sheet that had been tied over it.

  A face appeared then in the window of the neighbouring home. Through the reflection, Minogue could make out that it was an old man. Looking more irritated than curious, he shook his head and he withdrew from the window. Minogue was lifting the knocker again when the same neighbour’s porch door opened.

  The old man was short and wide, with a full head of wiry hair. For a moment, Minogue thought that the clear plastic tubes leading from his nostrils was a runny nose. An age-enlarged nose and matching ears were not enough of a draw to keep his eye from straying to the wattles galore that flowered under the chin. The old man wheezed before he spoke.

  “They’ve been and gone already.”

  “Who has?”

  “Who do you think?” He paused to attend to the tubing. “Your crowd, in uniform. Proper Guards.”

  “Here?”

  “Yeah, here. And that was only the start of it.”

  A look of pained exasperation came to him and again he paused.

  “Well we’re looking for Mrs. McCarthy,” Minogue said.

  “Is that a fact now.”

  “Who should we be looking for
then?” Malone said. “According to you?”

  It might have been a snort Minogue heard from the old man. The wattles rearranged themselves.

  “Who do you think you’re codding there, head-the-ball?”

  “Clearly not you,” Minogue said, and smiled. A rusty laugh erupted from the old man.

  “You don’t talk to one another, your crowd. Detectives and normal Guards?”

  “So we’re detectives,” Malone said. “Are we.”

  “Well he is. You, I’m not so sure. Maybe you’re a sidekick of Joey’s.” “Joey?”