Dead Man's Sins

by Caimh McDonnell

  “The tapes are a big loss,” admitted Marshall, “although we do have to acknowledge that somebody destroying them may not have had anything to do with the murder itself. It might have been elements within the organised crime community covering their own backsides.” He eyeballed O’Rourke. “Personally, I would question how such sensitive information as their existence could have come to be leaked?”

  O’Rourke turned to face him. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  Marshall stuck out his chin defiantly. “The information got out there somehow. We have to examine the possibility that there’s a leak in your team.”

  “Based on what? We weren’t the only people who knew about Coop Hannity’s little bunker. We have no idea how many people in his own organisation were aware of it. It’s interesting that when you’re desperate to cover up your own screw-up, your go-to move is to try to throw other gardaí under the bus.”

  Marshall turned to face him. “I resent that remark.”

  “Sorry,” said O’Rourke. “Maybe I should have put it in some handover notes – that way you wouldn’t have seen it.”

  The two men were squaring up to each other now.

  “Gentlemen,” barked Ferguson, looking up and down the range and noticing that their little group was drawing quite a lot of attention, “need I remind you that we are in public. As the senior-ranking officer here, let me assure you that if anyone is going to resort to the use of violence, it will be me.” He stepped forward, not exactly putting himself between the two detectives, so much as reminding everybody involved about his considerable presence.

  “DI Marshall, you shall continue with the murder investigation and, for your sake, in twenty-four hours’ time, I would make sure to have considerably more to offer up than platitudes and well wishes. DI O’Rourke, you shall find out what you can about who might have wanted the tapes to be destroyed and, assuming it may not have been related to the murder, who would stand to benefit from Mrs Hannity’s death. Speaking of whom, where is Mrs Hannity now?”

  “The hospital kept her in overnight for observation,” said Marshall. “I’ve already arranged for her to be under twenty-four-hour armed Garda protection when she’s discharged. Incidentally, Bernard McGarry managed to get by the garda assigned to her hospital room yesterday and spoke with her.”

  “What the hell?” said Ferguson, looking back and forth between the two detectives. “If the man pulls another stunt like that, do make clear to him that I will arrest him myself.”

  “He has also, so far, declined to come in for an interview.”

  “A serving member of the Garda Síochána has declined to be interviewed?” asked Ferguson, sounding incredulous.

  “Actually,” said O’Rourke, “that’s not technically correct. It’s my understanding that Mr McGarry said he was happy to be interviewed, but his brief was unwell yesterday.”

  “And for some inexplicable reason,” offered Marshall, “he was unwilling to use another lawyer.”

  O’Rourke shrugged. “It’s his right to use his own lawyer. We can’t ping him for that.”

  Ferguson eyeballed the two men. “Nevertheless, I would like him interviewed today. Make it crystal clear to him that failure to comply – for whatever reason – shall be looked on very dimly indeed. Have I made myself understood?”

  Both men nodded.

  “Good,” said Ferguson. “Now, unless there have been any other spectacular fuck-ups that you’ve not yet told me about, then you may consider yourselves dismissed.”

  “Sir.”

  “Sir.”

  The two DIs headed back towards the car park.

  “Oh, and boys …” Ferguson shouted after them, causing them both to turn round. He pointed at Kevin. “His nibs here is going to the vet tomorrow to have his nuts removed – in the hope it will improve his behaviour. Any more screw-ups and you both shall be joining him.”

  Finders Weepers

  Sod’s law.

  Sod’s bloody law.

  Butch had had a bad feeling all morning. To be fair, everybody present had some form of bad feeling. When you found yourself in a sweaty, hermetically-sealed hazmat suit, digging your way through rubbish, nobody with any sense had a good feeling. Butch’s had been more specific than most people’s. Hers had been more of a premonition.

  In contrast to yesterday, there was now a team of twenty-six people working the dig, and it was considerably more organised. The potential area had been mapped and broken down into a grid, with each searcher being assigned a square. Despite hers being one of only twenty-four such squares, Butch had had a feeling.

  And now, with terrible inevitability, that feeling had been realised.

  Amidst the rubble, the rotten wood, the insulation material, the junk-food wrappers, the plastic bottles that really should have been recycled, and the mountain of other crap, she had dug down and found the thing she did not want to find.

  There was no question about it. The large carving knife lying in front of her was definitely the murder weapon in the Hannity case. There was still dried blood on it. The only problem was that she’d bet every last penny she owned that it also had Bunny McGarry’s fingerprints on it.

  This would be all Marshall needed. She would be as good as handing over one of her best mates for a crime he did not commit. And yet, what other choice did she have? She was a guard. A member of law enforcement. If she took the knife and shoved it down to the bottom of the rubbish pile, what would she be then? Some lines you can’t uncross. She would have wilfully tampered with evidence. Interfered with an investigation. Used her position to protect her friend.

  If she were to do it, she could justify her actions in lots of ways. Bunny was a good man and she believed one hundred percent that he was being set up. Still, wasn’t the whole point of this thing that if they gathered all the evidence and did their jobs right, the real guilty parties would be brought to justice? If not, what the hell were they doing here?

  Either she was a copper or she wasn’t. And coppers, regardless of their personal instincts, don’t ignore evidence.

  Butch ripped off the mask of the suit and took a series of shallow breaths. She thought she was going to be sick, and it had nothing to do with the foul stench or the rank unpleasantness of the filth that surrounded her.

  She closed her eyes and gave a silent prayer. Fuck’s sake, Bunny, whatever rabbit you’re gonna pull out of a hat, you’d better get to the reveal pretty damn quickly.

  She reopened her eyes and spoke softly and only to herself. “Sorry.”

  Then, she put up her hand and raised her voice. “Here. Over here. I’ve got something.”

  Worse Things Happen at Sea

  For the second time in a week Bunny found himself at the seaside. In fact, technically speaking, he was no longer at the seaside, because he was now on the actual sea.

  He’d paid a brief but highly informative visit to the offices of Muldoon Investigations before heading to Dun Laoghaire Marina. He was putting a lot of faith in a tip, but he was running out of other options. It had taken him a while, but eventually he’d found somebody willing to take him out. March wasn’t peak tourism season, so anybody already at the marina had a good reason for being there and wasn’t interested in unusual propositions from wonky-eyed strangers. Then, he’d met Margot.

  A short woman in ragged overalls, she’d been sitting in her boat – a small, unremarkable fibreglass fishing boat – reading Sense and Sensibility.

  “Are you available for hire?”

  “That depends,” she said, turning the page without looking up. “Have you got the urn with you?”

  “What? What urn?”

  She glanced up from her book. “Normally at this time of year, it’s mostly people trying to scatter ashes. I’ve decided to stop doing those. They’re a bit depressing. Plus, a lot of people spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find the right bit of water to do the scattering over. You try to explain it to them – that it’s all the same
sea at the end of the day – but they don’t listen. To be honest, it feels like people are expecting a lot more from the experience than it can offer. As far as I’m concerned, the best you can hope for is not to get any of it in your eye.”

  “No,” said Bunny, “I’m not trying to scatter ashes.”

  She looked up at him properly now. “Well, you’ve not got fishing gear.” She rolled her eyes. “This isn’t a suicide, is it?”

  “What?”

  “You’d be surprised. I’ve had emails. A lot of people can’t face jumping off stuff or swallowing stuff or, I don’t know, dropping a toaster in the bath. I’ve had a couple of people ask if I could just drop them off at the middle of the sea and leave them there. The answer is no by the way. I mean, do what you want, but I’m not getting involved. It’s the kind of thing the coastguard will get very arsey about.”

  “I’m not trying to do anything like that either.”

  “OK,” she relented. “I’ll bite. What’s the story?”

  “I’m hoping to surprise a friend.”

  She considered this then shook her head. “Nah. I don’t believe you.” She opened her book and went back to reading.

  “Alright. You got me. Cards on the table. Right now, somewhere out there, is a piece-of-shit private investigator called Andy Muldoon. He’s sitting in a boat with one of those telephoto zoom lens cameras, trying to get compromising pictures of a couple of people shagging who shouldn’t be.”

  “And what?” said the woman. “Are you a friend of the shaggers?”

  “No. I couldn’t give a shit either way. But I think this gobshite might be able to help me stop an innocent man from getting arrested for murder.”

  The woman tilted her head. “Ohhhh, interesting. Who’s the man?”

  “That’d be me.”

  “Well, beats dumping Grandad’s ashes. It’s three hundred quid for the day.”

  “We shouldn’t need—”

  “It’s three hundred quid for the day,” she repeated.

  “Done.”

  She put down her book. “Hop aboard. I’m Margot.”

  The problem with the sea, as Bunny had come to realise, was that the whole thing was really, unnecessarily big. There was, frankly, tons of it. The information he’d received was that Andy Muldoon had his telephoto lens trained somewhere along the Seapoint area of the coast. It was only when he got out there that he realised that was a pretty vague location.

  Still, after an hour, and a couple of false alarms, he and Margot found their man. He was seated in an inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor, doing a pretty poor impression of a fisherman. The clue that he wasn’t really a fisherman was that his rod wasn’t actually in the water. The giveaway that he was Andy Muldoon was the sight of his comb-over wafting majestically in the breeze.

  The man himself was staring into his camera while listening to the horseracing from Leopardstown on his headphones, and the first he knew about his vessel being boarded was when it rocked alarmingly. He turned around to find Bunny McGarry standing unsteadily on the bow. It was fair to say he was surprised – much more on the “unexpected snake” end of the scale than the “oh my God, you guys, I said not to make a fuss of my birthday”.

  He pulled off his headphones and dropped the camera, which, luckily, fell in the boat. “Jesus. What’re ye … How’d ye … Who’ve ye …”

  “These are all excellent questions, Muldoon, but to be honest with you, I came here with a few of my own.”

  Muldoon looked back and forth rapidly between Bunny and Margot, who was still sitting in her boat. “You can’t be here.”

  “And yet I am,” said Bunny. “Isn’t life full of little miracles?”

  “How did you even find me?”

  “Funny story that: I dropped by your offices. Your assistant was only delighted to tell me where you were.”

  “That bitch.”

  “Now,” said Bunny in a warning tone, “I’m not a big fan of people using derogatory terms towards women. Although it has to be said, I don’t think it would be possible to lower that particular woman’s opinion of you.”

  “You’re not wrong. She hired me because she thought her rich husband was having an affair, and she was hoping for a massive divorce settlement if he was found screwing around. Turns out what he’d been doing was playing cards – really badly. To the point where he was no longer rich. They couldn’t afford to pay my bill, so she offered to work it off managing the office for me. It hasn’t worked out to be the best of arrangements.”

  “Still,” said Bunny, “worse things happen at sea. As you’re about to find out.”

  “I’ve not done anything wrong.”

  Bunny sat down. “Nobody said you had, Andy. Although now that you mention it, you definitely have. Incidentally, seeing as you saw me at Hannity’s house on Monday night, I’m a little hurt you didn’t honk your horn or wave hello.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Bunny didn’t say anything, he just gave Muldoon the wonky-eyed stare that had proved to be an invaluable asset throughout his career.

  “You can’t just come on my boat. I have rights.”

  “As it happens,” said Bunny, “I was made an honorary Sea Scout a couple of years ago. I believe that gives me the right to board and inspect all vessels within three miles of the Irish coast.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Well, you’ll have to take that up with Admiral Nelson or whoever the fuck is in charge of the Sea Scouts. In the meantime, I’m on a bit of a clock here, so let’s assume I’ve already firmly established in your mind the strong possibility of violence if you don’t play ball.”

  “You’re a guard, and there’s a witness here,” Muldoon protested, pointing at Margot.

  Margot shrugged and picked up her book. “I’ve a good book on the go. A bit of Jane Austen. And I’m notoriously focused while I’m reading.”

  “And I,” said Bunny, “am currently on sabbatical. So, we’ve cleared all that up. Speaking of employment – until recently, you were in the employ of one James ‘Coop’ Hannity.”

  “I refuse to answer.”

  “It wasn’t a question. He had you following his poor wife everywhere she went.” Bunny grabbed Muldoon’s camera from the deck.

  “Put that down!” yelped the PI.

  Bunny pulled away as Muldoon tried to snatch back his equipment before whimpering as he grabbed on to both sides of the boat.

  “Are you OK there, Andy? You seem a little tense.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” said Muldoon.

  “Really? So Coop didn’t have you following the poor girl around every hour of the day because he was convinced she was having an affair?”

  “Well … There’s nothing illegal about that.”

  “You’re right,” said Bunny, nodding his head in agreement. “But I’m going to guess that Hannity, a man who was never known for his patience, started getting a little antsy when you weren’t getting results. I’m guessing that’s why you gave him the name of Marcus Phillips, the personal trainer?”

  “They could have been at it. You don’t know.”

  “Another excellent point, Andy. The only problem with that train of thought is that Mr Phillips isn’t a ladies man. By which I mean he has no interest in the ladies. And yet a couple of Coop’s boys went around and kicked the crap out of him anyway. Broke his leg.”

  Margot didn’t look up from her book but some audible tutting came from her direction.

  “Alright. Look, I was desperate. The woman hardly ever left the house, for Christ’s sake. I was on her for a couple of months and the only places she went was the gym, to see her dad, and then, on the way back, she’d call up to see her friend and they’d go for a drink.”

  “So,” said Bunny, “she clearly wasn’t having an affair, but you told a jealous husband she was, because that’s what he wanted to hear.” Bunny noticed a look cross Muldoon’s face. “What?”

  “Noth
ing.”

  Bunny spoke while keeping his eyes fixed on the investigator. “Did I ever tell you, Margot – I’m an awful clumsy man.”

  “I met you little over an hour ago. Surprisingly, it hasn’t come up.”

  “Well, I am.” Bunny jerked his hands holding the expensive-looking camera towards the edge of the boat.

  “Don’t!” pleaded Muldoon.

  “Again, Andy, maybe you should reconsider the path of least resistance here? Coop Hannity is dead and soon to be in the ground, whereas I am alive, in your boat and getting increasingly pissed off. Why don’t you tell me what you’re not telling me?”

  “Alright, alright. Hannity came to me. He was convinced his wife was having an affair. Like I said, I followed her everywhere. I had a team of three on it. We covered every angle, night and day. Hannity even told us he has a tunnel out of his place that leads to a house he owns in the next street along. We watched that too. Nothing.”

  “So,” said Margot, still not looking up from her book, “like the man said, she was clearly not having an affair.”

  “Yeah,” said Muldoon, “that’s what I thought too. But then I paid off her doctor’s receptionist. For a woman who isn’t screwing anybody, she’s awful pregnant.”

  “Bullshit!” said Bunny.

  “She is,” said Muldoon. “I only found out a few days ago myself. I was supposed to have a meeting with Hannity and then, well … Given the circumstances, I’m kind of keen to forget the whole thing.”

  Margot cleared her throat. “Call me old-fashioned, but isn’t it possible the father was her husband?”

  “As it happens,” answered Bunny, “no.”

  Margot raised an eyebrow. “Twist.”

  “Indeed. None of this makes sense.”

  “I’m not lying to you,” said Muldoon. “Why would I? I’ve got all the proof in a file in the boot of my car.”

  “Where’s your car?”