by Catie Murphy
He watched them with amusement and pulled Megan into a hug. “You okay?” His American accent had softened in the decades he’d been in Ireland, but to Megan it still had a touch of home.
“Orla tried leaving me a letter saying I’d been fired instead of actually facing me, so I decided I hadn’t seen it and went home. The nerve on her! Oh, is that the new book?” Megan elbowed her way past him and went to pick up a beautiful slim hardback volume sitting on top of a box in the hallway. “It’s gorgeous. Lynda E. Rucker. I met her, didn’t I? Another one of us expats.”
“Yeah, but she lives on the continent now. It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Brian, tall and black-haired, with green eyes and an affectation for tweed, smiled. “I like to think the team’s outdone itself.”
“You always do.” Brian’s small press specialized in Irish Gothic and horror fiction, and Megan thought herself rather fancy, having a publisher friend. She put the book down, smiling and sighing all at once, and suddenly realized the house smelled great. “Dinner got here before I did?”
“Benefits of being a loyal customer close enough for them to walk a takeaway order down to you. All right. Come on in, we’re going to sort this out. I think leaving the letter where you found it was a good idea.”
“Yeah, me too.” Several minutes later, sitting at the blue-topped table in Brian’s galley kitchen with her mouth stuffed full of samosas and lamb koftas, Megan groaned and mumbled, “Maybe I just needed food. Nothing seems quite so awful now.”
“Good. That’s a better place to start figuring things out from.”
Megan’s phone buzzed as Brian spoke. She raised a finger, digging it out of her pocket to find it ringing with a call from Paul Bourke instead of just notifying her of a text. Eyebrows elevated, she answered with a muffled, “What’s the story?”
“Megan.” Bourke sounded incredibly grim. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but the coroner found a puncture wound in Cherise Williams’s upper arm, and my supervisor is on the warpath about your involvement in her death.”
CHAPTER 5
“But I wasn’t involved in her death!” Megan’s appetite evaporated and she pushed the takeaway cartons across the table toward Brian. He set the lids back on them and, with a tilt of his head, asked if he should leave Megan alone with her phone call. She shook her head no and put the phone down, speaker turned on, in order to save herself the time of repeating it all back to Brian in five minutes’ time.
“I know that,” Bourke was saying wearily. “My supe does too, for that matter, but she’s still madder than hell and wants to know how you keep getting into these messes.”
“I don’t know, Paul, just call me Miss Marple. Besides,” Megan said with a bit of asperity, “I did say I wouldn’t promise not to get involved in any more murders. Wait. It is a murder, then? What’s the story with the puncture wound? Was she poisoned? Who would do that?”
“Who’s listening in?” At Megan’s startled silence, Bourke made an exasperated sound. “I can hear the speaker echo and you never put the phone on speaker unless you’re either with somebody or cooking. I don’t hear any fans, pans, or boiling, so you’re not cooking.”
“It’s as if he’s a detective,” Brian said to Megan, and—as if Bourke hadn’t heard that—added, “It’s Brian, Paul.”
“Brilliant. They’ll have my badge for letting multiple civilians in on the workings of an ongoing investigation.”
“I can leave,” Brian offered.
“Megan would only tell you anyway. To answer your question, Megan, there were no signs of poison in her system. People don’t understand how hard it is to poison somebody without it being pretty bloody obvious. It’s not the nineteenth century, when people just had kilos of arsenic lying around to kill rats with, anymore. You can’t just pop down to the chemist to buy a load of cyanide.”
“I take it Cherise didn’t have a false tooth loaded with it, either,” Megan said, hoping to head off what she thought could turn into a lengthy lecture on modern poisons. Another time she’d be fascinated to hear it, but not when a police superintendent was mad at her for being in the vicinity of a suspected murder.
“What? Oh.” Bourke gave a reluctant chuckle. “No, not that the coroner mentioned. The only evidence of a suspicious death is the bruise. He suspects an air embolism.”
“Like . . .” Megan sat in bewildered silence for a second or two. “Like somebody shot a syringe full of air into her arm and gave her a heart attack? Wouldn’t there be some kind of evidence of that?”
“Not if an autopsy is performed,” Bourke said with another sigh. “The evidence disappears when the body is opened up.”
“That sounds like a really good way to get away with murder. How come everybody doesn’t do it?”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that, but the easiest kind of syringe to buy is for insulin, and they don’t hold enough air to kill somebody with, generally speaking. And it works best if you—” Bourke broke off. “You don’t need to know this. Especially under the circumstances.”
Megan curled her lip at the phone, but didn’t argue. “It can’t take very long to kill somebody with an air embolism, though, right? Just however long it takes for the air to circulate to the heart or brain? That’s only a minute or two, isn’t it? So if I’d killed her she’d have died at the vital statistics office.”
“Central Statistics,” Paul said half under his breath, as if he recognized it wasn’t important but still couldn’t keep from correcting her. “Yes, probably so.”
“Great! So it was probably somebody at her hotel. That lets me off the hook.” Megan hesitated. “That kind of came out wrong.”
“You think? Captain Long knows that, but she still feels like there’s something fishy going on.”
“Oh, crap,” Megan said brightly. “I bet it’s my new perfume. Eau de Murder. I’ll get rid of that right away.”
Brian clapped a hand over his mouth, muffling a laugh, while Bourke choked one off and said, not very convincingly, “This isn’t a laughing matter, Ms. Malone.”
“I think we’re into laugh-so-I-don’t-cry territory.” As Megan spoke, Ms. Kettle hopped up on the table and put her face in the closed food cartons, then turned a look of disgust on the humans before sitting with her back to them and her fluffy tail lashing in scolding commentary. Megan rubbed the big cat’s head just in front of her ears and she settled down, ears flattening with pleasure. “Look, would it help if I came in and talked to Captain Long?”
“I’m torn between thinking it would sort everything out and that it would precipitate the heat death of the universe.”
“Wow, that good, huh? Okay. Tell me what I can do, then.”
“Stay away from the Williamses.”
“Since I seem to still be fired, that seems easy enough, so okay.”
“Megan, I’ve met you.”
Megan, offended, said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” and Brian, helpfully, said, “Orla tried to take you off the last two clients that things went badly with and somehow you stayed right there in the thick of it. You could have restraining orders and you’d still find a way into the heart of the mystery.”
“I would not! Restraining orders are serious business!”
“Very well,” Bourke said dryly. “Anything short of a restraining order, though.”
Megan squinted between the phone and Brian. “Are you two ganging up on me?”
“No, just calling it like we see it,” Brian said.
“Just please do me a favor and stay away from Raquel Williams,” Bourke said.
“Okay, okay.” Megan paused. “I did kind of promise I’d check up on her.”
Bourke exploded, “This is exactly what I mean!” and Brian began to laugh again. Megan threw her hands in the air and rose from her chair, sending it backward sharply enough that it scraped the floor, startling Ms. Kettle. The cat lurched forward, back paws scrambling for purchase on the tile-topped table, and kicked the loosely lidded food carto
ns over. Rice and sauce-laden vegetables splattered all over the table, all over Brian, and all over Megan’s phone. Both humans yelped in surprise and Brian lurched to his feet, arms and hands spread wide as hot lamb saag dripped from his chest and lap toward the floor. Ms. Kettle landed neatly on the counter and started licking herself as if nothing untoward had happened. Bourke, on the phone, said, “What the hell?” as the dogs, awakened by the ruckus, burst into the kitchen to see what they were missing. Thong sniffed the saag and made a delicate face of revulsion while Dip, less picky, began lapping it up eagerly.
“Oh, god, no, the spices in that will give you the runs.” Megan picked up both the puppies, who weighed less than ten pounds between them, and wrangled them while they first tried to squirm back to the floor, then gave that up as a bad job and squirmed the other direction to try licking Megan’s face. She lowered her head toward them, happy until Dip accidentally caught the edge of her nostril with the tip of a sharp tooth. Megan wailed, narrowly avoided dropping the dogs, and instead dropped to the floor herself, scraping her back on the front edge of the chair she’d forgotten about. Tears rushed down her cheeks to be washed away by two worried puppies.
Bourke’s concerned voice rang out in the comparative silence of the aftermath. “Megan? Brian? What happened? Is everyone all right?”
“That,” Brian said with a degree of awe, “was worthy of Laurel and Hardy. Someone should have been filming that.”
“No.” Megan sniffled and wiped her nose. A smear of blood came away on the back of her wrist and she wiped it again. “If it had been Laurel-and-Hardy-worthy it would have involved a broomstick and a hat.”
“Fair point.”
“What happened?” Bourke asked again.
“Chaos theory in action.” Megan looked over the edge of the table at the sauce slowly separating on her phone’s tempered glass screen protector and put the dogs down to clean it off. “It’s not worth explaining.”
“It is worth explaining,” Brian disagreed. “Later, over drinks, at enough distance for it to be funny.”
Bourke, tentatively, said, “Is anyone hurt?”
“Not enough to worry about.” Megan prodded her nostril gingerly, then lifted her eyebrows at Brian to see if he agreed. He examined her with a glance and shrugged.
“Probably no permanent disfigurement. That’s going to hurt like hell while it heals, though.”
“Thank you for giving me that to look forward to while the rest of my life is falling apart.”
“I’m going to hang up,” Bourke announced cautiously. “Megan, just . . . try to stay away from the Williamses, okay?”
“I guess.”
Bourke made a sound like he wanted to argue the worthiness of that promise, but hung up instead. Megan spent a couple of minutes helping Brian clean up, surprised to find that, despite the extensive mess, they’d lost very little food to the pandemonium. Ms. Kettle wandered away, satisfied with the disaster she’d sown, and the dogs, concluding they weren’t getting anything nice to eat out of it, went back to the hall to sleep on the entryway rug. As they sat down again to eat, Brian said, “I’d ask what else could possibly go wrong, but . . .”
Megan pointed her fork at him. “Do not tempt fate.”
“Exactly. All right,” he said between bites of food, “I called a friend who’s a tenancy expert, and she knows somebody who works in employment law, so you’re going to have a meeting with both of them tomorrow to find out how much trouble Orla is in. Unless she decides to pretend the whole thing never happened, anyway, in which case what do you want to do?”
“Find another job and somewhere else to live ASAP? Not that anybody is going to hire me when they realize I’m the driver that murders follow around. People I don’t know still stop me sometimes because they saw me on the news after the last one. ‘Oh my god, you’re the one who was on the news with Aibhilín Ní Gallachóir, did you really find a body, was it scary,’ yadda yadda yadda. And actually I like driving for this company. Orla’s the only real pain in the ass.”
“Too bad she’s the owner,” Brian said dryly. “Okay, well, I think a new place to live is a good idea, anyway. Living somewhere your boss owns is just a recipe for nineteenth-century slumlord treatment.”
“Dublin’s just so frickin’ expensive, though. Did you know that before I decided on Dublin I was looking around Cork and with the exchange rate, the prices down there for a commuter town were about equal to what you’d pay for the same amount of house and land in a San Francisco commuter town? Except you’re only living outside of Cork here, not San-Fran-freaking-cisco. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Cork a lot, but if you’re gonna pay three quarters of a million dollars for a postage-stamp house and land . . . !”
“But it’s okay,” Brian said, straight-faced. “It’s gotten worse since then.”
“Right.” Megan squinted at him. “How exactly is that ‘okay’?” They rolled their eyes at the entire situation and ate their way through most of the food before Brian said, “So are you still just looking for a one-bedroom place in Rathmines?”
“Being across the street from the only gym in Dublin that opens at six am is amazing, so yeah, if I can stay in the area that’d be great.”
Brian laughed. “I think more than one gym opens at six.”
“I’ve had a hell of a day, Bri. Leave me my hyperbole.”
He waved a hand graciously. “Hyper-bowl granted. And you want a place of your own?”
“Ideally, although rent being what it is . . .” Megan shook her head. “No, I want a place of my own. I might have to move to Spain to get one, but yeah.”
“How’s your Spanish?”
“Muy bueno, actualmente. No crecer en Texas con un mejor amigo quien hables espanol a casa sin aprendizaje una a dos cosas.”
“The only word of that I understood was Texas.”
“I said my Spanish is actually very good because you don’t grow up in Texas with a best friend who speaks it at home without learning a thing or two. More or less.”
Brian eyed her. “A ‘yes’ would have been sufficient. Anyway, I’ll ask around to see if anybody I know is renting. Did you check your lease to see if you had a tenancies board number on it, or a letter from them? Because if your place isn’t listed with them you’ll have all the power. The tenancies board loves finding landlords who are renting illegally.”
“I didn’t look. I was only home for a few minutes before I headed over here. But she’s so tight with money I assume she wouldn’t risk having to pay extra for getting caught with her hand in the cookie jar.” Megan shoved a piece of naan laden with leftover saag into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Unless she figures she’d never get caught. I’ll check when I get back.”
“All right, so we have a plan of attack. It’s gonna be okay, Meg. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.” Megan pushed the food away and pressed her fingertips into the corners of her eyes. “Yeah, you know the legal stuff here and are helping me; and my friend Raf back at home, his wife says I can sleep on their couch until the end of time if necessary, and Nee and Fionn and Paul will have my back and I’ve barely even talked to Jelena yet—”
“Paul, huh?”
Megan glanced up to see Brian’s eyes sparkling, and looked around the kitchen like she’d find a reason for the sparkle in it. “Sure? We’re friends? We hang out and he calls and tells me I’m in trouble with the cops, of whom he is one, so I think we’re friends?”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
Megan balled up a paper napkin and threw it half-heartedly at Brian. He batted it away and Ms. Kettle appeared out of nowhere and jumped at it, crashing into the kitchen door with her enthusiasm. She shook herself, sending fur everywhere, and trotted out the door as if her dignity remained intact.
Both Brian and Megan blinked after her for a moment, then burst out laughing as she came rushing back in to throw herself on the napkin, flip it into the air, catch it, and eviscerate it into a blizzard of paper shreds. The pup
pies, awakened once more by the noise, came tearing in after her. She jumped to the table and sat there, tail lashing with disapproval as they finished shredding her napkin and then attacked Brian and Megan’s feet with the same reckless abandon.
Brian tried moving his feet out of the way, but the puppies carried on savaging them with whines and yelps of excitement. “I guess they showed that napkin.”
“Apparently so. Okay. What time am I meeting the lawyer and tenancy person?”
“Ten and eleven, respectively. I assume that’s not too early.”
“Not for me, but if they’re Irish you may be applying cruel and unusual punishment.”
“I’m not sure that’s constitutionally against the law here.”
“Brian! Ow.” She pushed a puppy away with her foot, which only made the dog think she wanted to play more. The attacks resumed, until a sudden contented sigh rose from beneath the table and when she looked, both puppies were napping.
Brian chortled as she peered under the table. “No, they’re both Irish-born but also only had morning appointments left for tomorrow. Ruth, the employment expert, is roving and wanted to know if there’s a city center café you wanted to meet at. I’ll text you her details.”
“Oh good, I’ll ask her to meet me at Accents so I can see my café boyfriend.”
Brian’s eyebrows shot up. “Your who?”
Megan laughed. “There’s a cute guy who works there. I recognized his geeky T-shirt a while ago and now we smile every time we see each other, so I call him my café boyfriend. Shh, he doesn’t know.”
“Were you like this when you were fifteen?”
“Pretty much, yeah. All right, look, I—” Megan’s phone rang, the Leprechaun Limos number coming up on it. Hairs rose on her arms and a pit opened in her stomach. “Wow. I really don’t want to answer that.”
“You could let it go to voice mail.”
“Who checks voice mail?” Megan took a deep breath and slid the call bar to answer as she lifted the phone to her ear. It still smelled faintly of onions and mustard from the saag. “This is Megan.”