The Coast Road (Matt Minogue Mysteries)

by John Brady

  Kilmartin studied the countertop, and then slowly rubbed at it with his thumb.

  “That said, you did use his faith on him. His beliefs.” Minogue should have known there was something rankling with Kilmartin over it.

  “But you got what you wanted,” Kilmartin added quickly. “Your own little miracle. Too bad you don’t believe in them.”

  Liam laid out the change carefully in front of Kilmartin, and he stood back.

  “No bail-outs?” Kilmartin barked. “Loyal, long-suffering customers like us?”

  “Your rewards await you in the hereafter, gentlemen. Like the rest of us.”

  With that, Liam lifted an evening paper and held it out. The huge front-page photo was the archbishop in front of a nest of microphones. He looked fit to vomit.

  Kilmartin made a face, and he looked away. Liam moved down the bar, wiping the counter and resettling beer mats.

  “Twomey must have known what youse were doing from earlier on though,” he said then. “The crack team landing there in his old haunt in Dalkey Station?” “How would he know?”

  Kilmartin’s response was an arched eyebrow, and a rub of his thumb down his nostril. “Go away out of that,” he said. “You take naiveté to a new height.”

  “How long is Twomey retired from the Guards?”

  “There’s that naiveté right there. A Guard never stops being a Guard. You know that. There’s always a connection, always a foot in the door. Wait and you’ll see, we’ll find out sooner or later that he was getting the low-down from somebody about what you were doing.”

  He watched Kilmartin roll his whiskey around the bottom of his glass.

  “Yes, Twomey knew something was up. And when that nun of yours phoned him the night before…? That put the tin hat on the situation for him, I reckon. Don’t you think?” “You’re right about everything.”

  “Oh the circus is in town again,” Kilmartin said, with the chill grin that Minogue had known for twenty and more years. “My point was, the psychology of the man. The way his mind worked. I have a word for it, are you ready?”

  “Starts with an F?”

  “I want my money back. No – it’s that he had a mediaeval mind. You get that, the mediaeval bit?”

  “Middle aged?”

  “Don’t make a fool of yourself. I’m saying that Twomey’s a relic of another age. So knowing that, I believe that there’s a man who actually wanted to get caught.”

  Minogue gave his friend the look of a farmer promised fine weather.

  “If he did, it wasn’t by the likes of me, I’m thinking.” Kilmartin screwed up his face. He spoke slowly then, as though to a child.

  “What the hell does that mean? Could you be any more, I don’t know – cryptic?”

  Minogue remembered the long minutes in the lounge with Twomey sitting between him and Malone, waiting for the squad car from Donnybrook. Stealing glances at Twomey every now and then, he began to wonder if somehow the man’s years had begun to show in his face. A Sergeant had shown up in the squad car along with the Garda driving, and it was to him that Twomey made the request to make a final visit to Albertina’s room. Minogue watched from the doorway. Twomey didn’t look at him as he made his way back with the Sergeant to the foyer, and to the waiting squad car.

  “I don’t understand people like him. That’s all I can say.”

  Kilmartin recoiled in disbelief.

  “And you’re the one talked with him, interviewed him?”

  “There’s some part of him that nobody can reach. Not even his family.”

  “What, are you telling me that he just ignored you?”

  “When it suited him, yes. I’d ask him to clarify something in his statement, to flesh it out a bit because we weren’t clear on it. Nothing. Or he’d just say, ‘read the statement.’”

  “Seventy-something years old, but he went and did McCarthy. Talk about tough…!” Minogue grasped his pint again. “Not my idea of tough,” he said.

  “And he’s not even trying any self-defence angle?” Minogue shook his head. Kilmartin sighed.

  “Well, whatever McCarthy said to him, it must have gotten his goat.”

  “That happens to be one of the few things he’d talk about. It was more than talk.” “Now you tell me. So? And?”

  “He said McCarthy was out to get him. That he wanted a row. That he had a go at him.”

  “That day they met, you mean, or right from the start?”

  “Both. McCarthy had a big chip on his shoulder, and it went back a long time. ‘His mind was twisted.’” Kilmartin scowled in mock confusion.

  “Whose mind was the twisted one again?”

  “You asked me what he said, and I’m telling you. ‘He was out to destroy people.’”

  “‘People’? People like Twomey, and that sister of his, you mean? Just a wild guess now.”

  Minogue hesitated. Telling Kilmartin some of the words that he remembered from Twomey would only add fuel to the fire here: jackals, hyenas, parasites, perverts, agents of darkness.

  “It was more than that,” he said instead. “It was about tearing people down, ruining their lives. Destroying the good they’d done.”

  “‘People’? What people?”

  “The clergy, missionaries. I remember him saying ‘desecrate.’”

  “‘Desecrate’? When’s the last time you heard that word used? Desecrate what?” “He didn’t elaborate.”

  “And you didn’t put him to the wall over it??” Minogue evaded Kilmartin’s challenging stare, and he counted to five.

  “He saw McCarthy tearing down the legal system too,” he said then. “The Guards, the judges. The courts. Society even, maybe.”

  Kilmartin whinnied softly and shook his head in pleased disbelief.

  “Some speech, it sounds like. But do you think it was for real?”

  Minogue remembered the sudden, raptor stares from Twomey. He nodded.

  “I can sort of see it,” said Kilmartin, the familiar cynical edge back in his voice. “Who better for slinging mud than a journo, right? Even a makey-uppey ‘reporter’ like McCarthy. Was he so addled that he woke up one fine day and said to himself, ‘I’m a journalist now!’– along with soaking up all the usual ‘social justice’ whinge, of course.”

  Minogue shrugged. He felt an obscure urge to defend McCarthy.

  “He’d been to Disciples before,” he said. “He had talked to some of the regulars too. How much, it’s hard to say. He was trying to do a piece on the drop-in for that newspaper. But it went nowhere. He didn’t realize that one of the people using the place was Padraig Larkin, the same Padraig Larkin he’d played with when they were kids.”

  “But wasn’t Larkin’s family well-got, and McCarthy’s ne’er do wells?”

  “‘Ne’er do wells’?”

  Kilmartin waved away Minogue’s rhetorical slap.

  “Spare me the speeches here,” he said. “I see what’s on your mind. I’m only pointing out the obvious. One family’s poor, the other one’s rich. Is that better?”

  “The parish helped the McCarthys a bit. They gave odd jobs to McCarthy’s father. They got McCarthy’s mother a bit of house-keeping work at the Larkins’ house too.” Kilmartin had turned thoughtful.

  “The Larkins sort of took young McCarthy under their wing a bit?”

  “That’s it, yes. But it was only for one summer though. They lost track of one another, after that. When McCarthy realized that it was Padraig Larkin who was murdered, he glommed on to it, and started digging up some stuff from the past.”

  A glint came to Kilmartin’s eye.

  “‘Obsessed’ is the word, pal. Like, aren’t you forgetting something here?”

  Minogue’s answer was a frown.

  “Come on. McCarthy was a junkie. What, you don’t like to hear it said out loud?” Minogue gave him a steady glare.

  “Extortion. So Twomey didn’t say it, but it doesn’t mean McCarthy didn’t try it.”

  Minogue turned to stare
at the television.

  “It’s all there under your nose – McCarthy’s work issues, getting the sack, going after Twomey. The aggression, the wild talk. Thinking he could run the frigging world. The mad ideas, and the delusions, trying to connect some of them poor divils out there at that drop-in place to it the big kerfuffle about the priests, and the abuse—” “Are they delusions?”

  Kilmartin waited for him to turn from the television, but before he could say something, the door opened. It wasn’t Malone.

  Kilmartin heaved a long sigh, his one of weary acceptance that he would always be misunderstood. His face slackened, and a thoughtful expression came over it. He looked reflectively at his glass.

  “‘Spin it and they’ll buy it,’” he said. “Isn’t that the way nowadays?” “Spin what?”

  Kilmartin gave him a quick, pitying smile.

  “McCarthy wanted his big story, any big story. His Watergate moment. Right?”

  Minogue elected a blank look for his response. Kilmartin gathered himself.

  “Well you wouldn’t want to be superstitious, would you?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “That there’s got to be some kind of mí-ádh, some curse, on that family? Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. Human nature, man.”

  Minogue’s reflexive decision to keep from Kilmartin parts of what Twomey had said in the interviews had proven itself to be sound. He’d never hear an end to it if he had let slip about Twomey’s terse comments about ‘evil.’ By times, it had been like a bizarre soliloquy from the childhood catechism that Minogue thought he had long forgotten.

  A florid-faced man with wet, baggy eyes made his way unsteadily by them. Minogue thought of Seán Brophy. So far, he had been able to avoid actually meeting him. The telephone conversations had been bad enough.

  Kilmartin grimaced as he made several efforts to pluck something off his lips. When he had finished, he gave Minogue a knowing glance.

  “I say Twomey knew his number was up, with you coming after him. You think?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Oh come on now. You would have gotten to him eventually, nailed him.”

  Minogue turned his glass on the counter. Liam tacked by, eyed their progress.

  “The word is,” Kilmartin said then. “No first-degree charge.

  Did I hear right?” “You did.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “Why ask me? Let the DPP worry about it. Or the Press Office.”

  Kilmartin climbed off his stool and reached into his pocket.

  “Well bucko,” he said. “This might be one of those rare occasions when I actually agree with you. So mark it down – I’m leaning your way on this. I know it’s going to go mad, how it looks, a Guard, even a retired one, killing a tramp. Okay, okay ‘homeless unfortunate.’ But whatever about Larkin, this McCarthy was no saint. That’s my point. And that word extortion is going to turn up, you can be sure. Forget any crusading journalist pain-in-the-arse stuff. Really.” He glanced over from his task of building up stacks of coins. “Do you think Twomey went out that day to kill someone? Either time, I mean?”

  “Well he told me that he didn’t.”

  “‘He told me’ – and you believe him?”

  “How would I know? He didn’t budge on it. Make what you like of it.”

  “It was the same thing that put him over the top both times? ‘Desecrating’ was it?”

  There wasn’t much point hedging. Kilmartin would make something up anyway.

  “More or less. They were very close, him and his sister.” Kilmartin reacted as though struck.

  “Christ, there’s the most sideways answer that’s come out of you yet.”

  “It’s all you’re getting. It’s all I’ve got.”

  Minogue began to study the nicks in edges of the countertop. “All right, all right,” Kilmartin said. “But I’ve got to say, Christ, this is too much, too much entirely. What century is this again? This is like some feud you’d read about in Sicily, or someplace. It’s like this bloody country never changed a bit in the past while – what am I talking about, the past hundred years. Are you with me on that, at least?”

  “Good for you. I hadn’t seen the link – Sicily is an island too, am I right?”

  Kilmartin groaned softly and he turned away, and drew out his mobile.

  “Always the dig with you. Always the dig. And the dodge, of course.”

  Minogue had already decided to say no more on the topic. He raised his glass, gave Kilmartin the eye. The Guinness had a tart edge to it.

  “All right,” he said. “Enough of your fine mind there, before you go too deep for us all. Look, I have the maps up. I’ll show you the route. They just call it ‘the Camino.’”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘no’?”

  “No I don’t want to know about some pilgrimage thing.”

  “It’s not ‘a pilgrimage.’ It’s a walk. You told me you were interested in doing it.” “Well I’ve gone off it.”

  “Christ, but you’re fickle. Well I started my training the night before last. Five mile I did. I’m as a stiff as a board yet. I’ll never be completely ready for it, but I don’t care. I think I can do it, blisters and all.”

  “The blisters only add to it. A bit of good old Irish Catholic suffering.”

  “God, you’re sour tonight. Too close to the subject of religion for you?”

  Minogue checked his watch again. It wasn’t like Malone to be late.

  “The nuns got to you,” Kilmartin goaded. “That must be it.” Minogue sized up the smirk. He doubted that he’d ever tell Kilmartin about the rest of his afternoon with Immaculata. They had driven back to her place in Merrion for a change into her ‘civvies.’ She emerged in wellies and an old coat, the farmer’s daughter she had been so long ago, he thought, more than ready then for rain and gusts that would be scouring Dalkey Island.

  It had taken them an hour and a half to raise a local who’d bring them over. He charged accordingly, and he had made them sign an indemnity that he then read aloud to them. Immaculata had been as limber getting in and out of the boat, and as handy too over the rocks, as he had been himself. She had said very little over there. He’d seen her lost in thought, making her way slowly over the sodden clumps of grass by the church.

  Afterwards, they had had tea and a bun in Dun Laoghaire, in sight of the darkening water. She had come back into her talkativeness. She had never stopped being a countrywoman, he decided again, even an ageless country girl. Later, on the way back to the car, she had stopped to speak with a black man selling newspapers. Minogue hadn’t asked her what language she had spoken, but he took away a lasting image of the astonishment that had lit up the man’s face.

  He took it easy going back along the coast road, and he slowed as he drove by Booterstown to catch a last glimpse of the bay. They said little in parting, but he was sure that she was about to cry. He felt unsettled, troubled even, when he got home. Later, after a mediocre pasta, he had fallen asleep in the chair reading, or trying to read, the book on the Caucasus that he’d gotten for his birthday. He had had that weird dream again before Kathleen’s key in the door woke him, the one about the sea. Kilmartin emitted a long, slow, plaintive fart. “‘Galway Bay’? Or was it ‘The Mountains of Mourne’?” Kilmartin made a wolfish smile, and raised his glass. A couple arrived. It was not Tommy Malone and Sonia Chang. Kilmartin’s eye lingered on the man’s shoes, as though he was tabulating results of a test.

  “I wonder,” he said then, turning back to Minogue. “I wonder if we’re going to hear more dirt now about the nuns, now that the priests are in the firing line.”

  “We did already. Magdalen laundries? Orphanages? Did you miss them?”

  “Don’t get het-up with me, mister. I’m an Irishman too, and I’m just as ashamed. It’s other stuff I’m referring to – shacking up with priests, having a bit on the side. Yes, S-E-X. They’re human, for God’s sake. You think
nuns are saints, or aliens or something?”

  Minogue kept his eye on the mirror. Jackals, Twomey had said. Hyenas, jackals.

  “There’s people would like to drag them down, no doubt,” he said.

  Kilmartin’s eyes opened wide, and he made a low, rumbling guffaw.

  “Listen to you. Did I ever in all my life expect to hear you cheerleading for nuns?”

  Minogue sought refuge in another sip from his stout. It was bitter enough. Immaculata had brought her own photos to the restaurant with her. She had been clearly pleased to trump his offer of copies of Twomey’s photos. She didn’t explain why she was declining his offer. She had carefully laid out her photos on the table between them, with an exacting order and position. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this was the first time she had shown them to someone in a long time. After his question about the new building behind her and Sister Albertina, he had sensed that she didn’t want questions, or even talk.