CHAPTER ELEVEN
Brian handed Megan the key to his bike lock without a word and she sped into city centre on his bike, whipping by traffic that seemed to crawl and, despite her hurry, noticing bits of architecture she never saw while on foot or driving. She needed to explore those alleys and colourful doorways, follow the plaques that told stories of Dublin’s history, now that she knew they were there—but that would wait. It took just over ten minutes to get from her flat to Molly Malone, where Megan locked up Brian’s bike and ran into the old church housing Fionnuala’s restaurant.
She stopped short just inside the door, quick breathing from her vigorous ride turning to a gasp of surprise. Gardaí swarmed the place, virulent yellow safety vests blinding under the house lights Megan had never seen fully on before. The fluorescent tones reflected painfully off the vests and washed out all the warmth and colour of the stained-glass windows. A young woman with a strong jaw and her hair in a severe twist beneath her blue cap stopped Megan at the door, her hand lifted. “I’m sorry, ma’am. You can’t come in here.”
“No, I—I mean, yes. I see that. I didn’t—” Megan took a deep breath, trying to steady both her racing heart and her thoughts. “Fionnuala Canan is a friend, and she called me a few minutes ago. May I see her?”
The cop made a dubious motion with her uplifted hand but went to check. Megan stood on the threshold, looking back and forth between the bustling, gardaí-laden restaurant and the growing crowd in Suffolk Street. Molly gazed out over the onlookers, taller than the biggest of them by a head and clearly in the way of some of the gawkers. There were a few faces Megan recognized, mostly itinerants whom she’d seen time and again on Dublin’s streets who had also been there when Liz died, but a couple of others were familiar, too—the big bodybuilder type wearing now, as he hadn’t been on Thursday, a white shirt and a thin black tie that said he probably worked at one of the other restaurants nearby, and a sharp-faced woman with frazzled hair whom Megan hadn’t exactly noticed on Thursday but knew now she’d seen then. The stroppy teen girl with the heavily made-up eyebrows and the hopeful boyfriend weren’t there, but then, Megan wouldn’t expect kids that age to roll out of bed before 2 p.m., given their druthers.
Detective Paul Bourke came out of the restaurant, looking vaguely resigned. “You do turn up like a bad penny, don’t you, Ms. Malone?”
“I guess. Is that even a thing Irish people say? Fionn called me. What happened?”
“This Irishman says it. Martin Rafferty was found dead here at half twelve this afternoon, which I presume you know.”
“Yes, but what happened?” Megan puffed her cheeks and lifted her hands, trying to draw back her tone. “Sorry. I just—is Fionn okay? She was pretty distraught when she called and I didn’t get much out of her. I just want to know if she’s all right.”
“What is your relationship with Ms. Canan, Ms. Malone?”
“My what? We’re friends; why?” Megan frowned at Bourke’s gaze, which seemed paler, like sunlight had drawn the blue from his eyes.
“Because as far as I can ascertain, she called you before she even called the gardaí.”
“Well, you know,” Megan said under her breath, “good friends will help you move. . . .”
Bourke’s white-blond eyebrows rose, digging deep wrinkles in his forehead. “ ‘But a great friend will help you move a body’? Ms. Malone, you may want to think about who you’re speaking to.”
Megan bared her teeth in an apologetic grimace. “Yeah. Sorry. It would have made Fionn laugh.”
“Did Ms. Canan call you here to ask you to help her move a body?” A faint note of incredulity coloured Bourke’s tone, as if he couldn’t decide whether she’d made a confession or if she was just an amadán, which is Irish for “idiot” and often used as code to reference fools who—like Megan—had no Irish.
“Detective,” Megan said somewhat wearily, “if she had, she wouldn’t have called the cops right away, too, would she have? So no, I’m pretty sure she didn’t call me to move a bo . . . wait, holy cheese, does that mean Martin was murdered? I mean, you don’t try to hide bodies that didn’t meet a foul end, do you? Not that we were going to hide him, but—”
The incredulity that had touched Bourke’s tone settled very lightly on his features as Megan leaped to conclusions and tried to cover her own tracks all at once. She finally just stopped talking, then, unable to help herself, added, “I’d make a terrible criminal, wouldn’t I?”
“It may not be in your blood,” Bourke said gently, and that time Megan heard the thinnest shard of amusement in his voice. She ducked her head, looked up again with a grin, and was met by Bourke’s own brief, gobsmacking grin. It disappeared as quickly as it had come, and he said, “Martin Rafferty was murdered, yes,” in the same gentle way.
“Jesus.” Megan thought she’d expected it, but hearing an authority say the words made her sway. She put a hand against the doorframe to steady herself, and Bourke finally took a step back, freeing the doorway.
“Go ahead. Your friend is just inside the door to the right.”
“Which one?” Megan asked, high-pitched. “Fionn or Martin?”
Surprise creased Bourke’s face. “Ms. Canan. There’s no reason for you to see the body.”
“Just checking.” Megan squeezed past him and barely got inside the door before Fionn cried out and fell upon her with an embrace so tight it left Megan breathless.
“Megan, thank God it’s you! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” Her knees collapsed and Megan, startled, caught her weight.
“I don’t know.” Megan supported Fionn—all but walked her backward—to the table she’d been at, a table blockaded by serious-faced gardaí.
Fionn had the pale skin tones of nearly every native-born Irish person up to the turn of the century, but what Megan would usually call “milky” on her was now chalky. Bruised-looking shadows stood out beneath feverishly glittering eyes, and stress gouged lines into crevasses around her mouth and nose. Megan got her into a chair and looked around, saying, “Could we get a—” before realizing she was surrounded by, and talking to, on-duty gardaí, who couldn’t be expected to run errands. “May I go into the kitchen and make her a coffee?”
The stern-faced young woman who’d stopped her at the door glanced at her compatriots, then shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“Bring me one, too,” someone else said, and the whole crew chuckled. Megan squeezed Fionn’s hands, said, “Don’t go anywhere,” as if she would, and went into the kitchen.
There was a pot—nearly a vat—of coffee already brewed, which Megan had thought there might be if Fionn had gotten as far as the kitchen before finding Martin’s body. Making the coffee was always her first task. The fact that Megan had been allowed in the kitchen indicated his body wasn’t found there.
Megan went back out to the bar, got a bottle of Jameson’s finest, and returned to make Fionn a stiff Irish coffee and to pour cups without the added whiskey, cream, and sugar, for the gardaí. She boiled a kettle while she was at it, putting together a big pot of tea, and brought a tray balanced with everything, from teacups to a carafe of coffee and cream, out to the table, where the guards visibly thawed at her efforts.
Fionn looked askance at the pile of teacups, and Megan, not so quietly she couldn’t be heard by the gardaí, said, “Nobody wants to deal with tragedy first thing on a Sunday morning. Tea isn’t going to solve anything, but it soothes the soul.”
Water filled Fionnuala’s eyes, but she nodded and wrapped her hands around the tall coffee mug Meg had made for her, bending her head over it as the police, relaxed a little bit now, poured tea and began murmuring amongst themselves instead of standing in stony silence. Megan waited until Fionn had taken the first sip of the whiskey-doctored coffee and a flush of colour come into her cheeks as her eyes widened. “This is brilliant. You used the good stuff.”
“I did, but I make a mean Irish coffee even with cheap whiskey. Drink up.” Megan didn’t expect Fionn to actually chug the thing, and she didn’t, but after a few more sips and a bit more colour in her face, Megan took a deep breath and asked the pressing question. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” The roughness in Fionn’s voice came from more than the whiskey. “I came in around eleven, and . . . I wanted to make the place feel welcome again, like. The past few days, it’s been as if my own restaurant was a stranger to me, if that makes any sense.” She darted a look at Megan, clearly expecting it wouldn’t make sense, but Megan nodded, and Fionn went on. “So I got coffee on and tidied up the kitchen—scrubbed down where the puppies were born—how are they?”
“Getting bigger, but not opening their eyes yet.”
Fionnuala smiled weakly, took a fortifying sip of the coffee—larger than before—then focused her gaze on it as she spoke. “I got the kitchen sorted and thought I’d do a walk-through. That’s when I found him, in the back. He was . . .” She stood suddenly, striding into the kitchen. Her feet, bizarrely, were bare, which had to be a health and safety violation, not that Megan thought she should bring that up just then.
Fionn returned a few seconds later with the whiskey bottle Megan had liberated from the bar. She poured a no-nonsense measure into her mug, added more sugar, and drained the lot in a few hard gulps. Only then could she say, “They’d cut his throat. I’d never seen the like. Blood was . . .” She gestured with the coffee cup, suggesting splatters everywhere, and turned a grim gaze into the emptiness of the mug. Megan took it and mixed up another Irish coffee, this one much lighter on the booze. Fionn made a face but didn’t add any more whiskey. “I called you and then I called himself.”
Himself, more formally known as Detective Bourke, approached as Fionnuala finished the tale. The sharp-jawed garda woman, whose jaw had unclenched a bit with the application of tea, gave him a nod so subtle, Megan imagined she hadn’t been supposed to see it. Bourke looked satisfied, not surprised, and made a questioning motion toward the tea. Fionn said, “Go ahead” and he poured himself a cup, which he drank straight, no milk or sugar.
“Why did you call Ms. Malone first, Ms. Canan?”
“For God’s sake, sit down,” Fionn snapped. “I can’t talk to you lording it over me like that, I’ll get a crick in my neck.” She didn’t talk either, until Bourke, his expression neutral, as if he was snarled at by civilians every day—and maybe he was, Megan thought—sat across from her and put his hot tea on the table in front of him. “Megan’s been rescuing me sorry arse for the past two days.” She paused, staring past Bourke’s shoulder, and Megan could all but see her trying to count the days.
“One and a long half,” Bourke agreed. “Since Thursday night.”
“Day and a half, then. She kept on top of finding out whether it’d been food poisoning that killed Elizabeth Darr and she took the puppies even though it meant trouble of her own—”
“Puppies?” Bourke’s voice flickered upward in surprise.
“A pregnant dog broke into the kitchen Thursday during all the chaos and had puppies under the counter,” Megan volunteered. “I took them home.”
An abbreviated sound, like the start of a swallowed laugh, escaped the back of Paul Bourke’s throat. “It’s been a mad few days, hasn’t it?”
“I thought it’d help to have her here, being American about it all.” Fionn splayed a frustrated hand as both Bourke and Megan’s eyebrows rose. “You know, level-headed in an emergency, all cool and collected like John Wayne.”
Megan couldn’t help glancing at all five foot three of herself, more than a foot shorter than John Wayne had been, and looked up with a smile.
“A wee John Wayne,” Fionn conceded. “With better hair.”
“Well, that part’s not hard. Is Fionn a suspect, Detective?”
Fionn flinched and went still at the question, like she’d been afraid to ask. Bourke shook his head almost imperceptibly, though he said, “No one can be ruled out just now. Can you prove your whereabouts this morning between six and nine, Ms. Canan?”
“I wasn’t at Mass for all the world to see, if that’s what you’re asking! I was at home, sleeping,” she added less defensively. “With my partner, who got up a couple times to use the loo, so he can say whether I was there or not, when he was awake to see it.”
A rush of people went by, collecting some of the listening guards on their way past. Two of them, carrying a stretcher, were in paramedic uniforms. Megan sat up straighter to watch them go into the back end of the restaurant.
“Is he actually back there? Inside?”
“He’s on the stairs,” Fionn whispered. “It looked like somebody came up behind him on his way down and just—” She shuddered and picked up her cooling coffee to drain it again. “I stepped in the blood before I understood what I was seeing.”
“Oh! That’s why you’re barefo—” Megan silenced herself, but Fionn gave her a weak, ill-looking smile.
“I didn’t want to be tracking blood all over the restaurant. My shoes are still in the . . .” She shuddered again. “Mess. Why would anybody murder poor Martin?” Her voice rose in bewilderment. “He was a bit of a prick, but he’d done well and he donated to the boxing clubs and the youth centres and bought equipment for the GAA all where he’d grown up.”
“And where was that?” Paul Bourke asked it like he knew the answer, which he probably did; even Megan knew Martin Rafferty had grown up in Bray, south of Dublin proper, because every article about him in the Times or the Independent mentioned it, making a fuss over a small-town boy done well.
Fionnuala said, “Bray” anyway, and the detective noted it down on a pad that he had, Megan realized, been taking notes on all along, even while he sipped his tea. She didn’t think of note-taking as a subtle activity, but Bourke had evidently mastered it. “He went to university in Canada and came home again with a business degree that he’s been turning to profit ever since.”
“Where in Canada?”
Fionn looked blank for a moment. “Ontario, I think.”
“Any enemies there?”
“Jesus, how would I know?” Fionn stared over Bourke’s shoulder, thinking, but shook her head. “I know he had a girlfriend while he was there and it ended when he asked her to come home with him, but she didn’t want to live in Ireland. He said she called it a God-plagued state and he couldn’t argue, even if the Church has lost a lot of power. But otherwise . . .” She shook her head again.
“Do you know who his beneficiaries are?”
“God, no. His mum and dad, maybe? They’re still out in Bray, I think, but I don’t know.” Tears stood in Fionnuala’s eyes again and she pushed her coffee cup aside so she could put her face in her hands. “I can’t even think what this will do to the restaurant,” she said into her palms. “We’d the capital to keep going through the health inspection and all, I think, but we’ll be closed again tonight and for how long after that, Detective?” She lifted her face. “It’s a crime scene now.”
“I’m afraid it’ll be up to a week. You’ll have insurance against this sort of thing, though. That will help ease you through.”
“If we can get patrons back in after two murders on our doorstep in less than a week.” Fionn thinned her lips. “ ‘We’. There’s no ‘we’ anymore. Ah, God, Martin . . . !” This time emotion overwhelmed her and she lowered her head on the table, hidden in her arms, to sob. Megan put a tentative hand on her shoulder, then scooted over to pull her into a hug as she cried. After a few minutes, Fionn pushed her away, not unkindly, and mumbled something about the loo.
Megan let her go, sighed, and turned to Bourke, who had watched the entire scene with an understated sympathy. Apparently, she had a question in her eyes, because he tilted his head slightly, inviting it. “I didn’t want to ask in front of her, Detective, but . . . do you think Liz and Martin’s deaths are related?”
Grim consideration slid across his sharp features like he’d been holding the thought at bay and now, faced with it, didn’t like the implications. “I’m afraid they almost certainly are.”