Last Orders (The Dublin Trilogy Book 4) Read online

  “Still, I think we’ll stay away from using the term ‘mass grave’ anywhere near the press.”

  “Well, if people will overreact to the use of the correct terminology.” Phillips pulled the sheet back on one of the tables to reveal skeletal remains. “Subject number one, male, middle-aged. Cause of death is yet to be officially determined but there is evidence of a stab wound to the chest, judging by the blood found on the clothing.”

  “Clothing?” asked Burns.

  Phillips indicated a clear plastic bag at the bottom of the table, containing what looked like not much more than dirty rags. “Yes, most of the clothing survived. This is a moorland burial site with a highly acidic nature to the soil, meaning there is far less microbial activity related to decomposition. The flesh has all been eaten away but the clothing is remarkably intact.”

  “I don’t suppose any ID survived?”

  “No.”

  Burns nodded. “It didn’t feel like that lucky a day. How long have these bodies been down there do we think?”

  “Well, to determine that, you’d need an expert in the field of taphonomy.”

  “The science of how bodies decompose,” interjected Wilson. He did this on a semi-regular basis, invariably just before the point that Burns was about to start actually liking him. It was an ego-based form of Tourette’s, stemming from a deep-seated need for people to know he was clever. Burns guessed he’d been hugged either too much or not enough as a child – she didn’t really care to find out which.

  “Yes,” said Burns, “well done, Wilson. Ten points to Gryffindor.” She turned back to Phillips. “By any chance, would you happen to be such an expert?”

  “Oh, I dabble.”

  “And?”

  “Well,” said Phillips, giving the bodies the same look she’d got the last time she’d brought her car into the garage for a service, “it’s very tricky to say. There are a lot of factors to consider and tests to be run – now, don’t hold me to this – but I’d say they’ve been in the ground for between fifteen and twenty-five years.”

  “And cause of death on the second one?”

  “Ah,” said Phillips, excited that his audience had finally asked the right question, “now that’s where it becomes interesting.”

  He waved them over towards the second body and pulled the sheet away with a flourish. “Victim number two, male, between thirty-five and fifty, with non-standard dental work.” Burns had noticed the two gold-capped teeth. The first thing anyone notices about a skull is the smile, especially when it contains a bit of bling.

  “If you look here, you’ll notice a nice round hole in the bone at the back of the eye socket, with some evidence of radiating fractures through the frontal bone as well.”

  “I see,” said Burns. “Stabbed in the eye?”

  Phillips shook his head. “No, there’s internal beveling, which would indicate a gunshot.”

  Burns moved around to look at the back of the skull to confirm her suspicions. “But there’s no exit wound.”

  “Exactly,” confirmed Phillips, nodding his head. “We’ll have to take it back to the lab for tests, but the wound appears to have been inflicted by a non-standard weapon. There is something wedged in the rear of the skull but we can’t dissect it here. Most interesting though.”

  Burns looked down at the body again. “Not for this guy.”

  Phillips picked up the tweezers from beside the table. “Oh, excuse me a moment.”

  He looked into the eye socket of the skull. “We seem to have picked up a passenger.” He nabbed something with the tweezers and slowly drew out a long, fat earthworm. “Out you come, little fella.”

  It was at this point that Wilson cracked, sprinting for the tent’s exit with his hand over his mouth.

  One of the techs held up his watch triumphantly. “YES! Under five minutes, everyone owes me a fiver!” His beaming smile froze when it met DSI Burns’s glare.

  “Really?” She pointed in the direction of the door. “Detective Wilson is a highly decorated officer, who has put his life on the line in the service of justice in this country, and you idiots are taking bets on how long before you can make him feel unwell?”

  Phillips looked uncomfortable. “Well, no. I, we—”

  Burns put her hand up. “Save it. You can all explain this ghoulish and unprofessional behaviour to Dr Devane when she returns. Believe me, it will get mentioned. In the meantime, for future reference, I expect all of my officers to be treated with respect and dignity in the workplace.”

  She didn’t bother waiting for an answer, turning on her heel and departing the tent with a pleasing sense of drama. Once outside, she saw Wilson hunched over, leaning with one hand on the back of a JCB digger while spitting in an effort to remove the nasty aftertaste from his mouth.

  Burns rolled out her lesser-used softer tone. “Donnacha, are you OK?”

  He didn’t look up, just waved her away furiously with his free hand.

  She turned and walked back towards the car, fishing her phone out of her jacket pocket. She speed-dialled the incident room, where Sergeant Moira Clarke picked up on the second ring.

  “Moira, it’s Burns. Looks like these two bodies up in Wicklow are going to be ours.”

  “Yes, boss. And about the other thing?”

  Burns glanced back to make sure she was unobserved and then lowered her voice. “He made it to four minutes thirty-seven by my count.”

  She could hear Moira open her drawer and consult a sheet of paper.

  “Congratulations, boss, you won the sweepstake.”

  Burns allowed herself a mini fist pump. At least something had gone her way today.

  Chapter Two

  Brigit stared up at the ceiling. There was a picture of a kitten stuck to it that she found irrationally irritating, quite possibly because she associated it with the voice of Dr Megan Wright, and she found that intensely irritating.

  “Would you like to discuss your hands?” Her voice sounded nice the first time you heard it, but that’s because you hadn’t yet noticed the little nasal whine that sat just below the surface.

  “No, I absolutely would not.” Brigit’s hands were stuck inside her hoodie and that was where they were staying.

  “I really think we should.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Why don’t you want to discuss your hands?”

  Brigit looked back from the couch at Dr Wright, sitting behind her, fingers steepled together in a contemplative pose. Brigit bet she practiced that in the mirror, trying to look as psychiatristy as possible. “Oh no you don’t. If we’re discussing why I’m not discussing it, then we’re actually discussing it and I don’t want to discuss it.”

  Dr Wright sighed in that annoying way she had, like Brigit had somehow disappointed her.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you have a very angry energy, Brigit?”

  “Not in those words, no, but then, I don’t know anyone who is American enough to carry that kind of bullshitty language off.”

  “I’m actually Canadian.”

  Brigit knew that. She also knew that getting it wrong really irritated Dr Wright, which was why she did it.

  Brigit considered herself in most ways to be a people person. She liked to get on well with everyone; she tried to find something in everyone to like. Dr Wright was a notable exception. Brigit hadn’t even tried to like her. That, in fact, was Dr Wright’s value – she was someone in her life who Brigit could properly dislike without feeling any sense of guilt.

  “I have to be honest, Brigit, I worry that our sessions aren’t proving of benefit to you.”

  “Don’t even think about it. I’ve got twenty sessions, that’s the deal. Every Tuesday at 3pm, come hell or high water, I’m going to be here.”

  “But why are you here?”

  “I’m here because, as part of your divorce settlement, you agreed to give me twenty therapy sessions to cover the bill your now ex-husband owed MCM Investigations.”

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sp; “Yes, I know that. I meant—”

  “Because,” continued Brigit, “we caught you having an affair with the last investigator he hired to follow you.”

  “There’s no need to—”

  “Not to mention the personal trainer you were also banging, and that TV producer—”

  “Yes, OK.”

  “And your ex-husband before the current ex-husband, who you were also stumping.”

  “Stumping? Really?”

  “I’m trying to not use the F-word so much in conversation. I’m worried it is stunting my vocabulary. I mean though, who has an affair with their ex-husband?”

  “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Dr Wright sounded really irritated now.

  “Judge away. To be honest, you were having that many affairs, it is frankly massively impressive just from a time management point of view. How did you fit them all in? No pun intended.”

  “Oh!” Dr Wright’s clipboard hit the opposite wall, taking down a framed picture of a kitten in the process. For a medical professional, she really had an unnerving belief in the healing power of a cat picture. “Fine. Fuck you. Don’t tell me about your hands. See if I give a crap.”

  Brigit turned to look at Dr Megan Wright, serial philanderer and former TV advice-giver, sitting with her arms folded, having properly taken whatever Canadians called the hump.

  “Well, that’s not very professional.”

  Dr Wright threw her leg over the side of her chair and took out an e-cigarette. “Screw this, I’m having a vape. I’m done pretending this is a normal doctor-patient thing. This is the most dysfunctional relationship I’ve ever been in.”

  “And coming from a two-timing two-time divorcée, that is really saying something.”

  “Amen, sister.”

  Brigit put her hand into her bag and took out her own e-cigarette. It was supposed to be her stepping stone to giving up the fags entirely, but so far that plan was proving less than successful. As she placed it to her lips, she could sense Dr Wright’s eyes on her, specifically on her hands. To be fair, they were rather eye-catching, seeing as they were more or less entirely covered in yellow paint.

  “C’mon, tell me!” She said it in a distinctly whiny tone that Brigit guessed they didn’t teach you in whatever the psychiatrist version of medical school was.

  “Fine.” To be honest she had actually wanted to talk about the morning’s latest incident, but she didn’t want Dr Wright thinking she was setting the agenda. “So, Paul—”

  “Which one is he?”

  “Really? Paul? I’ve talked about him in every session.”

  “Sorry, but I see a lot of people and your notes are now on the far side of the room because you’re so goddamn irritating.”

  “Are you supposed to say that?”

  “I’m trying something new. Anyway, Paul – is he the one you were engaged to who cheated on you?”

  “No. He’s the one after that prince.”

  “I’ve got it!” said Dr Wright, clapping her hands together. “He’s the one you thought screwed around on you, but he didn’t – your ex, that first guy, set him up. Drugged him and took a bunch of compromising pictures of him with a hooker. See, I remember stuff.”

  “Like that would be hard to forget.” Brigit blew out a long curl of artificially flavoured smoke. “How did you ever get on telly doing this?”

  Dr Wright shrugged. “Teeth and tits, sweetheart. And these baby blues really pop on screen.”

  “You’re a terrible human being, you know that?”

  “Yeah, well, that may be, but good people give terrible advice. So Paul is the guy you still work with in your marriage-wrecking business.”

  Brigit laughed. “Oh please, we did you a favour. You go through men so fast, eventually you’d have banged your own husband by accident.”

  “I’ve got a lock-up full of furniture I can’t fit into my tiny rented flat that says otherwise.” Dr Wright didn’t say it in a particularly angry way, more as a statement of fact. “So, the guy you wrongly accused, who you still work with – that’s Paul?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’ve got this will they, won’t they, Ross and Rachel thing going on.”

  “Since the whole big thing last year it’s just been… complicated.”

  “What big thing?”

  Brigit looked back at Dr Wright in honest surprise. “Really? The Skylark Affair?”

  Wright gave her a blank expression.

  “Somebody started killing property developers, claiming they were doing it as revenge on behalf of the Irish people. Turned out it was just a particularly psycho developer trying to cover his tracks and pin it on my friend Bunny McGarry. We solved the whole thing. It made the papers?”

  It had actually made the papers worldwide, and they’d had their full fifteen minutes of fame. That was sixteen months ago now, but it was the reason that the fledgling MCM Investigations had developed such a large client list. It was also the reason Bunny now walked with a limp, as well as God knows whatever else was going on there.

  Dr Wright shrugged. “I’m not much of a reader. So what’s that got to do with your ex not screwing around on you?”

  “It’s all… it’s complicated.”

  Dr Wright blew out some more artificial smoke, this time forming it into an impressive smoke ring. “So you keep saying. Anyway, long story short, you and this Paul guy had your moment where it could’ve been a big, romantic, back-together type thing and you blew it.”

  “That’s a rather harsh assessment coming from you.”

  “Well, yeah, but say what you want about my car crash of a private life, nobody can accuse me of turning down opportunities.”

  “True enough. Well, anyway, about three months ago, Paul is on this private investigator training course and this guy, another investigator called Kevin Kelleher, just comes right out and says it was him and his brothers that my ex hired to do it – to drug Paul and help with taking the compromising pictures. Just comes right out and tells him, like it’s a funny thing.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Ah.” Brigit shrugged. “Men.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So now Paul is on the warpath, wanting to bring the Kellehers up on charges. He’s gone to the Gardaí about it, only Duncan—”

  “The ex?”

  “Yeah, him. He’s left the country and the ‘lady’ involved is nowhere to be found either, so Paul can’t press charges.”

  “Bummer.”

  “So, instead, we’re basically at war with another detective agency now.”

  “I see.”

  “And it is a nightmare. I mean…” Brigit held her hands up.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “So, Paul, to get his own back on the Kelleher brothers, sent them a package laced with itching powder in the post.”

  “And they covered your hands in yellow paint?”

  “No, they broke into our offices and stuck a dead fish in the air vent.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. So Paul set their offices up as a brothel. He put cards all over Dublin. They got a lot of callers and then they were raided by the Gardaí.”

  “And then they—”

  “Then they smashed in the windows of Paul’s car.”

  “That’s not exactly imaginative.”

  “I thought that too. Credit to Paul, he then built a wall in front of their offices. Now that was at least a bit more imaginative.”

  “How…?”

  “He hired a couple of brickies. Did it at night.”

  “I see. So, after that with the yellow paint?”

  “No. Then they had us listed as giving out free winter flu jabs.”

  “How did...?”

  “Four hundred angry pensioners. It was almost a very slow riot. So after that…” Brigit paused to make sure she had things in the right order. “Yeah, after that, Paul superglued their office.”

  Dr Wright paused. “Like the locks?”

>   “No.” Brigit sighed. “Everything. He broke in and glued everything in there to everything else. You could turn the entire office upside down and it’d all stay perfectly in place. He got hold of some Chinese glue that’s banned in this county for being too powerful. This was two days ago.”

  “So today…”

  Brigit nodded. “I made the mistake of opening the post…” She held her bright yellow hands up. “Ruined my pantsuit too, not to mention the whole office looking like – well, like a yellow paint bomb hit it.” Brigit didn’t want to say, but she had deliberately worn her best suit into work today, as Dr Wright always made her feel underdressed. The doctor dressed like a runway fashion show might break out at any time. This was yet another reason why Brigit found her so deeply annoying.

  “Can you not wash the paint off?”

  “Obviously not!” She had spent an hour trying to do so. She’d had to go way over the top on the perfume just to get rid of the stench of turpentine. She was now wearing a pair of raggedy jeans and a hoodie she had stashed in a cupboard from when they’d painted the office, which, come to think of it, they’d have to do again now.

  “So, let me get this straight. You’re in this messed-up Dennis the Menace-style nasty prank war with another detective agency…”

  Brigit nodded again. “And because the incident that started the whole thing was the start of me not believing Paul, which led to us breaking up…”

  Dr Wright mirrored Brigit’s nod. “You can’t stop the damn thing.”

  Brigit flopped back onto the couch and sighed. “Exactly. It feels like because I didn’t believe him then, I can’t not support him now, even though it is seriously screwing up our business.”

  “That is messed up.”

  “Thank you for that brilliant insight, doc.”

  “What do you want from me? You’re my patient and – I’m going to say what I don’t think I’ve ever said before – I think you’re the sane one and everyone else is friggin’ crazy.”

  “I know. That’s why I have so much pent-up anger.”

  “And why you are so aggressive towards me?”

  “Well, you are also intensely annoying.”

  “Right backatcha, sister. Y’know, this could be a whole new branch of therapy – rage therapy! Catchy title. I might write a book about this.” Dr Wright stood up, walked over to her desk and wrote down the name.