The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

  “The language,” he said. “Aren’t you, you know, concerned that she’ll hear you?”

  “Are you trying to be funny or something? Get the hell out of here this instant. Out.”

  “Why do you pray with her here every day if she can’t understand you, or she can’t even hear you?” Twomey’s voice came from low in his throat.

  “She can’t pray in words,” he said. “But God hears her anyway.”

  “So you do believe in miracles then.” Twomey didn’t speak for several moments.

  “Miracles are one thing,” he said. “Medicine’s another. This is faith, plain and simple.”

  “Sister Immaculata phoned you last night with the news, didn’t she?”

  “She’s worse than I thought.”

  “But still you came here, didn’t you?”

  “I’m here most every day. Not that I care for you or anyone else to know that. Especially that mad bitch outside.”

  “You’re not concerned that she’ll tell Immaculata what you called her?”

  Twomey gave him a withering look. He shook his head, and looked away.

  “I’ve heard enough of this,” he said. “More than enough. You’ve been hoodwinked, and you don’t even know it. Me, I was on to that Immaculata one from day one. Yes, even back then, before anyone was talking about things like that. You don’t have to be a genius.” “On to what?”

  “Figure it out yourself. I’ll leave it at ‘crush.’ Just remember it was one-sided. Bertie did not feel the same way about her.” Minogue struggled to keep his look neutral. “Never married yourself, did you, Sergeant?” Instead of a reply, Twomey gave him a sullen smile. Shaking his head then, he looked away.

  “Kind of ironic though, you have to admit,” said Minogue. “You and your sister are so close, but she’s still so afraid of you, that she won’t say a word to you.”

  “You need a spell in a mental home, just like she does. A long spell.”

  Minogue’s thoughts came in a clear, quiet voice: This is it. It could go either way.

  “You know, and I know, that your sister doesn’t suffer for no reason,” he said.

  Twomey’s arm shot up. Behind the finger pointed steadily into his face, Minogue caught a glimpse of a younger man’s vigour.

  “Not another word,” Twomey said. “Or I won’t be responsible for what happens.”

  Five steps separated them, Minogue guessed. He made sure his back foot was firmly planted, and ready.

  “But you know I’m right,” he went on. “You said it yourself:

  God listens to her. God hears her prayers. She can talk to God for you, can’t she. On your behalf.”

  Twomey slowly lowered his arm, and his eyes slid out of focus.

  “And you need that,” Minogue went on. “That’s why you talk to her. Why you confide. Because you know she’ll intercede for you. God knows her suffering, her faith. All the good that she has done. If that’s not believing a miracle, nothing is.”

  Twomey let out a long, measured breath through his nostrils. Minogue strained for any sound from the hallway outside.

  “So who will she tell, your sister, after what she’s been hearing from you here?”

  “Be on your way, Guard.”

  “Inspector. It’s on the card.”

  “I don’t care what you call yourself. And you’re no doctor either, no neurologist. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve read the reports.”

  “Some people would call it a miracle. I’ve read about things like this happening. Haven’t you? People waking up, and then talking, and—” “—Nothing happened!”

  Twomey’s words had come out in a hoarse, rushed whisper.

  “Nothing will happen. It’s irreversible. That’s reality.”

  “But your faith says different. And what’s more, I think that you know why this has happened too, don’t you? You know it’s not just ‘medicine’ or ‘science.’”

  “She’s made you as cracked as she is,” Twomey said.

  “My question stands. Who would your sister tell about what you’ve talked to her about over the years here? All those evenings when you are finished reading, or you’re tired of reading, and all you want is to have a chat with your own sister, your family? Who do you think she’d tell?”

  Minogue saw no reaction beyond a slight narrowing of the eyes.

  “Not you, she wouldn’t,” Minogue added. “And you know that. You know why too.”

  “You’re only digging yourself in deeper,” Twomey said.

  “This’ll earn you a lot more than a disciplinary review, I tell you. You won’t know what hit you.”

  “How many times have you tried to explain yourself to her, to justify to her, what you’ve done? A hundred times? A thousand?”

  “Justify what?”

  “Everything, is what. All the way back to why you got her sent over the far side of the world. Your own sister. Your own flesh and blood.”

  “That’s one thing you have right.” A tone of satisfaction crept into Twomey’s voice.

  “She isn’t just some ‘sister’ in an order of nuns. She’s my sister – a real, actual sister. And I’m her guardian what’s more. Guardian, as in Garda Síochána, ‘Guardians of the Peace.’ Have you forgotten what that means?”

  “Her guardian, is it? Is that why you took her out to the Larkins that day?”

  Minogue let the pause linger.

  “You’re the one brought them together,” he said finally.

  “You’re the one responsible for what happened. And that’s why you need to come here, and to talk to her. And to keep on telling her, to try to explain things.” Twomey’s eyes found the window.

  “You want something that she can’t give,” Minogue went on.

  “Something you can only hope she’ll get for you. Because if anyone deserves to be listened to, it’s her.”

  Twomey inspected the books along the windowsill.

  “You want what everyone else wants eventually. Understanding. To be able to roll back the clock, to undo things. To explain you did everything for the right reasons.”

  Twomey began to rub his thumbs and forefingers together. Minogue felt prickling at the back of his neck.

  “You’re a man of faith,” he went on. “You always knew your duty, and you did it. You say there are no miracles here, but a miracle is what you’ve been looking for.”

  Twomey reached for the door handle, and let his hand rest there. After a quick, baffled glance toward the window, he pulled hard at the door. It swung easily, hissing.

  For a few moments, Minogue believed that Twomey would have a go at Malone. He watched Twomey’s fingers twitching faster, Malone’s slow pivot and his empty stare fixed on Twomey from across the hallway.

  “I’m here to listen to you,” Minogue said. “To hear your side. The truth.”

  Twomey’s face had turned slack. He looked around the room.

  “You always knew the right thing to do,” Minogue said. “I think you still do.”

  Chapter 36

  Twomey was staring at the photo nearest the window. It was one that Minogue had been drawn to right away, of a uniformed and much younger Twomey and his sister standing to either side of a small woman by a farm gate, their arms around her shoulder.

  Minogue placed his pencil on the notebook, and he flexed his fingers. He had been trying to stop his eye drifting over to Albertina, to see the faint rising and falling of the bedspread. “Mam, we called her,” Twomey said. “If you’re wondering.” The old woman had the same sharp eye of the younger Fergal Twomey. It wouldn’t have surprised Minogue to see her face looking back at him from the first photographs of a shawled woman of the roads, her creel of turf heavy on her shoulder, her short-stemmed dudeen pipe clenched defiantly between her gums.

  “She never went beyond the Primary. Nor did many of them, back in the wilds of Bruff. But she knew right from wrong. And she led a better life than the likes of him I can tell you, with all his holy orders and his ye
ars of theology and God-knows-what. A far better life entirely.”

  He let the snapshot he had been holding back onto the bed, and he turned to Minogue,

  “Murphy I’m talking about,” he said. “That excuse for a man. How he ever got to the priesthood, I’ll never know. Never. Nobody will, I suppose.”

  He took another quick look aslant at the snapshot. “He never even wanted to be a priest, I found out. Or so he said to me, and him bawling his eyes out in a chair not two feet from me. Thinking I’d feel sorry for him. I thought I knew human nature, I tell you, but I learned things that day.”

  “You didn’t know any of this at the time, did you?”

  “Do you think I would have let it happen if I did?”

  He began massaging his chin and neck, slowly and thoughtfully.

  “Bertie was home on leave,” he went on. “She phoned me. She wanted me to come along that day, to the island there. Something about this saint. What would I know about saints? I thought she was just looking for a chaperone sort of, to keep things right. Or showing me off a bit, her brother, the new sergeant. But I often wondered later on, if some part of her was trying to stop the whole thing. At any rate I went along. I’m her brother after all, amn’t I?” “Maybe they were in love.”

  Twomey kept up his slow stroking of his Adam’s apple.

  “I see you’re not disagreeing,” Minogue said then.

  “Tell me, what else did she tell you, and we’ll compare.”

  “That after your sister was sent away, Murphy was sent out on the missions.”

  “Nobody is ‘sent’ on the missions. It’s not a punishment. It’s a calling. You think that the monks who left Ireland were being punished? Not a bit of it. An honour is what it is.”

  “Murphy went voluntarily then, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No. He was persuaded.”

  “What does ‘persuaded’ mean?” Twomey resumed his slow massage of his neck. “Well who did this ‘persuading’ then?”

  “His brother-in-law is who. Justice Larkin. He’d had enough of him.”

  “And why did he do that? Why would he be the one, I mean?”

  Twomey patted smooth a small fold in the bedspread.

  “So she kept things back,” he said. “The most important things. I wondered about that.”

  “You’ve lost me. You’re saying that it was Justice Larkin that got Murphy sent away?” Twomey didn’t reply right away.

  “Now I see it,” he murmured then. “If I don’t tell you, then she will, herself. It’s like she’s given me a job. Like a child she’d pick to keep the blackboards clean.”

  “You ran Dalkey station for a long time. And you knew Sallynoggin too, up the road. Didn’t you help out with the football clubs there? You’d have known plenty of people.”

  “It was my job to.”

  “So you knew Father Murphy too?” Twomey took a long slow breath.

  “I knew ofhim. I knew he was Peggy Larkin’s brother. That he was new, and young. That he did youth club stuff, and the choir. That he was The Second Coming entirely, the cool priest, the one who’d get through to the young. They were already dropping off then. This is when things were going haywire over in the States, remember. Did you ever hear of a place back then called the Dandelion Market?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “That’s where you went if you wanted to pretend you were a hippie, or a drop-out, or whatever they called themselves. The young lad found his way there. Like a homing pigeon.”

  “Padraig.”

  “Yes. That was bad enough, but along came his uncle, the trendy new priest, the one who was so good with the youth. The one who hung out with the young people.” He paused and eyed Minogue.

  “Can you guess where this is going to end up?” Minogue shook his head.

  “Come on now. You know a lot more than you let on. Give it a try, go on.”

  “Some out-of-the-way place some day, or one evening.”

  “See? I knew it. Now where might such a place be?”

  “An old church, the ruin at Killiney. Over there near the coast road.”

  Twomey’s face turned solemn. He seemed to be examining his sister’s face.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

  “What happened there?”

  “You’re trying to let on you don’t know already. Don’t bother.”

  “I know that you took your duty seriously,” Minogue said. “That’s clear to me.”

  “My duty. There’s a word you don’t hear much these days.” The irony in Twomey’s voice had crossed into scorn.

  “It wasn’t just the law though,” Minogue added. “You thought about more than laws, I’m thinking. More than the drugs or vandalism. More at the root of things—”

  “—Sacrilege. Desecrate. They’re the words you’re looking for. But you don’t even know that.”

  “Something far more important,” Minogue went on. “Their souls, you were thinking about. Their immortal souls.” Twomey stared at him with narrow, glittering eyes. “Wrong, Guard. You’re wrong on that score. I was concerned for one only, the boy’s. The other one? No. That one was already gone. Long gone.”

  “Gone.”

  “That’s right – gone. You don’t get it, do you?” Twomey sat forward in the chair. Minogue watched his hands for signs he was going to push off from it.

  “You’re right,” he replied. “I probably don’t.”

  “You’re not the only one. Nobody does anymore in this country. You think that all that’s happened is bad luck or something? No. It was something else at work. And I knew right away what it was when I got into that room with Murphy. I knew it instinctively. I felt it in every fibre of my being. I was in the presence of something there, and I have never had one iota of doubt about it since. You know what it was?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure. Are you not now.”

  The disdain was a glaze over Twomey’s eyes. “You should be in politics, the way the words roll out of you. What

  I’m talking about is nothing less than evil. Pure, unadulterated evil.”

  With that, he settled back in the chair. Minogue let the quiet last.

  “Aren’t you going to write that down?” Twomey asked finally. “What I said?”

  “Later.”

  Something close to a smile came to Twomey’s face then. “For the history books at least,” he said. “Right? Along with all the rest of it. Honesty. Responsibility. Sin. Even the church itself, it looks like. And people themselves too of course, Irish people. They’re already gone. We don’t have people here any more. We just have what everyone else has. Shoppers. Complainers. Liars. Thieves. Anything goes, these days.”

  Minogue shifted in his chair. Twomey closed his eyes and rubbed at them. His nostrils contracted and flared several times, and then he opened his eyes again.

  “‘Long gone,’ you said. About Father Murphy.”

  “I knew right away. He tried everything on me that day, when I got to him. Lying came as natural to him as drawing a breath. He says to me, all he wanted to see was what the young people were going through with their experimenting. ‘The drug experience,’ he called it. It’d make him a better priest. He’d reach them better. That’s the way his mind worked. And he kept piling it on. What would this do to the family if this came out? It’d be destroyed. People like the Larkins were the heart and soul of the parish. Charities, sodality members. Legion of Mary, Knights of Columbanus – you name it, they did it. On he went. ‘What’d happen to Justice Larkin, all the good he does for the law?’ He knew Tony had earned our respect, of course.”

  “The Guards’ respect?”

  “Who else? We steered cases to his court for many a year. Any decent state solicitor knew the job would get done right when Tony Larkin sat.”

  “You had met the Larkins, then, socialized with them.”

  “I wouldn’t call it socializing. It was other things.”

&
nbsp; “Were you in The Knights?”

  “I was. And I still am.”

  Minogue studied the beadwork on the band around Albertina’s wrist.

  “I thought I knew human nature,” said Twomey then. “And of course, there was the respect bred into us for the clergy. But here was no end to how low he was willing to go to save his skin. He tried to put the blame on the young lad. His own nephew, I thought, a fifteen-year-old boy. Telling me that the young lad must be hallucinating, or he was having a breakdown.”