Dead Man's Sins

by Caimh McDonnell

  A figure clad in identical black camouflage gear stepped out of the darkness and stood in front of them. The source of the voice.

  “As long as you’re both sensible, this doesn’t need to get messy.” He nodded at the two men still standing behind Maguire and Finlay. “You are going to get down on your knees very carefully, then lie on the ground. Try anything stupid, and all that will happen is my colleagues will add to the extensive list of people they’ve already killed. Don’t be a hero.”

  The man noticed Maguire staring at him and nodded.

  “Yes, they are brown – the same eye colour as between fifty-five and seventy-nine percent of the world’s population, depending on who you ask. Still, you’ve got that for the debrief.”

  As the pair lowered themselves to the ground, Maguire had an excellent view as the man silently dropped his kitbag and withdrew some kind of welding kit.

  Ten seconds later, he heard the bunker door creak open. By this point, his hands had been cuffed behind his back. The man put the welding kit back into the bag then withdrew a large, heavy-looking object.

  He stepped through the door, flicking on a torch as he did so. Two minutes later, he returned, put the device, whatever it was, back in the bag and picked it up. While he’d been gone, Maguire and Finlay had been gagged too, which honestly relieved Maguire. Bad as this was, at least he wasn’t going to have to listen to Finlay talk while they waited for the humiliation of being found.

  Five minutes after their arrival, the three men disappeared back into the night.

  Four hours later, Finlay and Maguire were indeed found by the next shift. As soon as Finlay’s gag was removed, he blurted out the words, “Brown eyes. The guy had brown eyes.”

  Such an arsehole.

  Under Surveillance

  Bunny closed the front door behind him and threw out his arms in a world-encompassing stretch. He’d heard something somewhere about people who do yoga “greeting the sun”, or something like that. That wasn’t what he was doing. Last night, for the first time in a while, he’d slept reasonably well. God knows, it wasn’t through a lack of worries in his life – quite the opposite. There were a lot of ways today could go badly, and maybe it was a survival instinct on the part of his own body, but something somewhere must have reasoned that, today of all days, he really did need to be at his best.

  He’d had eight hours of quality sleep. The world really was your oyster with a decent night’s kip in the bank. He could feel his brain firing on all cylinders, which was definitely what was needed. For the show of the thing, he decided to lean against the wall and throw in a few hamstring stretches. And it was a show because, as expected, he was being watched.

  You have to understand the politics of parking. In this day and age most people, even from a working-class background, have a car. Or rather, to be more exact, most households have a car. This means that on a road of terraced houses that don’t have driveways, the space outside of your house is yours. Not by law – at least not by any law written down – but rather by a collective understanding of how things should work. Once you know that and you know the area, reading the street becomes easy.

  In the past, Bunny may have been lax in the area of home security, but not with parking. Parking he had always paid attention to. Last year, for example, when a couple of commuters had the bright idea to park on his street and cycle the rest of the way in to avoid the extortionate parking rates in central Dublin. Bunny, being a guard, had gone to great lengths to not notice how, after a couple of weeks and a couple of polite notes had been ignored, one of those commuters had returned to find all of his car was still there, but that it had been neatly disassembled into its constituent parts. After that, the parking situation quickly returned to residents only.

  As he stretched, Bunny had taken in the road in both directions. Mr McCall’s, Mrs Clark’s, the Killfoyles’s, Nancy Jacobs’s, Jerry Marks’s, Mr Ranganesh’s, Tony Baker’s, young Vivian Clark’s (who got herself a job in a bank last year and parked her car outside of the widow Reed’s house, who she drove to the hospital when she had an appointment), Johnny Rogers’s, Mr Danaher’s, Mr Byrne’s, Bunny’s spot currently occupied by the rental car, Mrs Doyle’s, Carl Mullins’s, John McCullough’s, and finally, on the end as always, Dave Tiernan’s Ford Cortina. Once you knew the familiar topography, seeing what was out of place was as easy as noticing if you’d woken up with extra teeth in your mouth. There was not one, but two interlopers parked in the street. Bunny didn’t look directly at them, he just hopped in the rental car, sent a quick text and pulled away.

  As expected, one of the vehicles followed him and the other stayed put. Ironically, they were both watching him, but he guessed neither was aware of the other.

  The thing about being followed by the Gardaí is that fleeing really does make you look guilty. Unfortunately, while Bunny wasn’t guilty, he needed to go about his day without the tail DI Marshall had assigned to him cramping his style. On the upside, at least Marshall had had the common sense not to use anybody that Bunny knew.

  Bunny glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the man and woman in the innocuous-looking Opel Astra behind him. They were, of course, being careful to leave plenty of room in order to avoid arousing his suspicions. He couldn’t help but smile. At a guess, they were a couple of detectives from Limerick and Marshall had seconded them to Dublin for the duration of the investigation, on the grounds that he didn’t know who he could trust up here. Bunny couldn’t blame him. In fact, he was thankful for it.

  He pulled up at the junction at the end of Carnlough Road and was waiting to turn left on to Cabra Road, towards the city centre. It was just after nine, so the traffic was starting to flow more easily after its rush-hour peak, but it was still relatively slow-moving. Bunny reached the front of the queue, indicated and waited for a clear gap in the traffic.

  On the pavement to his left, a woman who looked more granny than mother-aged was cooing at the unseen bundle of joy in the pram before her. Just as Bunny turned left, she pushed the pram in front of the Opel Astra two cars back, as if to cross the road, temporarily preventing it from moving forward. There was no traffic coming in the other direction, but the woman still looked both ways conscientiously.

  As she was about to move on, she dropped the baby’s rattle. With an apologetic wave, she bent down to pick it up. At this point, with both of the cars in front of them having driven off, the two guards in the Opel Astra were growing understandably irritated. Then, the clumsy grandmother dropped the rattle again.

  DS Richard Tiernan, who normally worked out of Limerick, leaped out of the vehicle in desperation to assist the woman. He glanced into the pram. “What the fuck?”

  “Oh God,” said the clumsy grandmother in a cheerful voice, “would you look at that? I forgot to bring the baby with me again. Well,” she added, giving Tiernan a wide smile, “that’s the menopause for you, love. Makes the old brain go screwy.”

  With that, Margaret Byrne, next-door neighbour of Bunny McGarry, returned to the pavement, and pushed the empty pram back towards her home and a well-earned breakfast.

  DS Tiernan returned to his car, where he and his partner spent the next fifteen minutes driving around in an increasingly futile attempt to relocate Bunny McGarry, before ringing the office for a bollocking.

  In the Rough

  Commissioner Gareth Ferguson was distracted from his club selection by what was becoming his least favourite sound in the world.

  “Damn it, Kevin. Could you stop with the incessant yapping for—”

  The Commissioner noticed the direction in which the Labradoodle was barking and looked up to see Detective Inspectors Marshall and O’Rourke approaching.

  “Ah, gentlemen, what an unexpected surprise.”

  Marshall glanced at O’Rourke before speaking. “I was told you demanded to see us, sir.”

  “Yes, Marshall. I was being facetious.”

  The Commissioner withdrew the driver from his golf bag, selected
a ball from the bucket beside him and placed it on the tee. All around them, other golfers were similarly working on their game, smashing golf ball after golf ball into the distance. Given that it was half-nine in the morning, the place was maybe one-third full.

  “I didn’t know you’re a golfer, Commissioner,” said O’Rourke.

  Ferguson didn’t respond verbally. Instead, he took a hack at the ball, which sent it shooting off at a forty-five degree angle from the hoped-for trajectory. Kevin whined and placed his paws over his face.

  “Ah,” said O’Rourke.

  “Yes,” replied Ferguson. “Can’t stand the bloody game. I do enjoy the clubs, though. They’re one of the few acceptable cudgelling implements that a gentleman may possess without questions being asked. I do feel they should have stopped there, however, rather than adding the unnecessary difficulties involving the ball.”

  He slammed the driver back into the bag. “The reason I am here is that in a couple weeks I have to go on a championship-standard golf course with my opposite numbers from England, Scotland and Wales, and embarrass myself in order to build bridges. I should add that I have no need for such bridges. My bridges are perfectly fine, thank you very much. However, at a recent UN convention on policing, the Junior Minister for Justice shared a hilarious joke with an individual he thought was his opposite number from France, but who, incredibly, turned out to be from the UK. You have to ask yourself, what kind of incompetent buffoon can’t tell a Frenchman from an Englishman, yet somehow feels qualified to tell a joke involving an Englishman, a Welshman and a Scotsman, not to mention the Pope’s penis.”

  “Is that the one—” started O’Rourke.

  “Yes, it is,” snapped Ferguson.

  O’Rourke noticed that the Commissioner’s face seemed redder than normal as he selected the three wood from his bag.

  Marshall cleared his throat. “Have you lost weight, sir?”

  The Commissioner raised his eyebrows and looked at Marshall. “Do you mean since I saw you yesterday, DI Marshall? What an embarrassing attempt at toadying. Do fuck off, there’s a good chap.”

  O’Rourke managed to remain stony-faced, internalising his delight at Marshall’s embarrassment.

  “So, we know why I am here,” said Ferguson. “Would either of you like to guess why you are here?”

  You could tell Marshall was new to the hand-grenade juggling act that was dealing with the moods of the Commissioner. One of the first things you learned was that his questions were really more oratorical devices. The trick was resisting the urge to answer them, unless absolutely necessary.

  “Is this about the tapes?” Marshall asked.

  Ferguson took the three wood by the grip and held it out in front of him. “Is this about the tapes? Is this about the tapes?” he mocked. “What tapes would these be? Oh, the Hannity tapes. The ones that were not only evidence in Mr Hannity’s own murder case, but also, potentially, a spectacular intelligence windfall, the likes of which this service has never seen. Those tapes? Do we think I mean those tapes?”

  Marshall looked at O’Rourke nervously. “Yes,” he ventured.

  “Ding, ding, ding, ding!” roared the Commissioner, earning a look from a golfer a couple of bays down. “Correct,” he continued. “I do indeed mean those tapes. The ones that I thought were under armed guard, although it seems I was mistaken in that belief, seeing as they were destroyed through the application of an industrial-strength magnet by a person or persons unknown while a couple of my officers watched on.”

  “It was persons, sir,” said Marshall. “Team of three. Highly trained, apparently.”

  “Yes,” said Ferguson through gritted teeth. “I know that. I was being facetious.”

  “The security arrangements for the bunker preceded my taking over of the investigation.”

  “Did they indeed? Service, Marshall. DI O’Rourke, would you like to return serve?”

  “As everyone here knows, the assignment of armed gardaí to such a role requires sign-off from a more senior rank than detective inspector. I highlighted this to DI Marshall as an action point requiring urgent attention.”

  “No, you didn’t,” protested Marshall in an outraged whine.

  O’Rourke put his hand inside his coat and withdrew the document he had brought with him in anticipation of this becoming an issue. “I have here a copy of the handover notes I left for DI Marshall, which back up my point.” O’Rourke kept his eyes fixed firmly on the Commissioner, so didn’t get to enjoy the look on Marshall’s face as he realised he was Wile E. Coyote and had just ran out of cliff. “Given how the detective inspector has made no secret of his disdain for how things are done up here in Dublin, perhaps he didn’t feel the need to read these notes. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that.”

  Marshall’s mouth opened and closed repeatedly without producing any words. It happened enough times that you could have stuck a light in there and used him to send Morse code messages to passing ships.

  Ferguson nodded at O’Rourke, perhaps the slightest hint of appreciation at a hand well played. “Well, there we have it. Shall we chalk this up to a spectacular administrative error by a senior officer and move along?”

  Perhaps Marshall was getting the hang of it – he made no effort to answer the question.

  O’Rourke held out the copy of the handover notes to Marshall, the originals of which he’d gone to great lengths to be witnessed leaving on the DI’s assigned desk. He’d also emailed them. “Would you like this copy of them, Tom? Make sure there’s nothing else you’ve missed?”

  Marshall snatched the three sheets from his hand while Ferguson tutted at O’Rourke. “Fintan, Fintan, Fintan – have you never heard of the punch Ali didn’t throw? The one when Foreman was already on his way down? It does ruin the aesthetic of the moment by piling on.”

  O’Rourke knew the Commissioner was right, but something about Marshall irritated him more than he could possibly understand. Or maybe he was overcompensating in some messed up-redirection of guilt. “Sorry, sir.”

  “However, that does bring me on to the other matter. I should inform you that Detective John Carlson, who suffers with musophobia, has decided to leave the force with immediate effect. You see, musopobia is the fear of vermin and not musicians, although a certain reprobate who, until recently, was engaged to my beloved goddaughter, would fit both interpretations.

  “The reason his departure has been brought to my attention is that, despite making clear his phobia to a senior officer, Detective Carlson was sent to Dunsink. Dunsink, as we all know, is famous for two things: the observatory and the dump. Seeing as Detective Carlson – or, rather, formerly Detective Carlson – is now suing the Garda Síochána for mental distress, I think we can all guess where he ended up. Apparently, on his way home last night, he pulled over his car in the fast lane of the M50 and was found in the central reservation, semi-naked and screaming about rats. Bearing in mind I’m holding a metal three wood in my hands, would the senior officer in question like to explain himself and risk being bludgeoned to death if I do not like said explanation, or would he rather take the sensible option and just say sorry?”

  It didn’t speak well of Marshall’s survival instincts that he clearly deliberated before giving an answer. “Sorry.”

  “Excellent choice,” growled Ferguson before looking at O’Rourke. “Can you make this go away, Fintan?”

  He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well. Also, Detective Inspector Marshall, do I want to know why I’ve had a complaint from the carpool about one of the cars being used in your investigation being flooded?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Understand,” continued Ferguson, “that I don’t mean the engine has been flooded. I believe the entire car has been mysteriously filled with water.”

  “We’re trying to eliminate all of the Marsh brothers from our enquiries, but the fire service is being unhelpful. I sent a couple of uniforms to check rotas at stations where the brothers wo
rk. At the Dolphin’s Barn station the officers’ car was broken into and filled with water. I was going to ask you to register a complaint with the head of the Dublin Fire Brigade.”

  “Your wish is my command, Detective Inspector. What I definitely need right now is a turf war with the people we pay to put out fires, especially as you seem so determined to start them. I’m going to hazard a guess that they have the hump with you for treating roughly one percent of their entire workforce as murder suspects. Maybe try to pare down your fishing expedition to two or three brothers and see how you get on. They seem a little touchy on the subject of the Marsh boys. Can’t think why – maybe it was the whole ‘locking up their mammy’ thing? And do I want to ask for an update on the Hannity murder investigation, and the attempted murder I believe has now been rolled into it? I mean, we’re not just looking at firemen, I presume?”

  Marshall shook his head. “No, sir. Right now a much larger team is completing the search for the possible murder weapon at Dunsink.” He noticed Ferguson’s expression and correctly anticipated the question on the Commissioner’s tongue. “I have made sure that everyone involved is happy to be there.”

  “I think you might be being over-ambitious reaching for happy,” commented Ferguson. “Let’s just aim for ‘not willing to participate in a class-action lawsuit’, shall we?”

  “The release of the image of the man in the balaclava has led to a lot of calls to the tip line, which we’re processing,” Marshall added.

  O’Rourke was well aware of the Commissioner’s dim view on the value of tip lines, which was why he knew that his loud passing of wind at that moment was entirely deliberate.

  “And,” continued Marshall, undeterred, “we’re pursuing numerous other promising avenues of investigation and assembling a wealth of intelligence that I am confident will lead to a positive conclusion very soon.”

  Ferguson stretched out his back. “You do realise who you’re speaking to? I invented half of the bullshit language you just used to try to sound optimistic about an investigation that is going nowhere.”