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March 21 - March 31, 2021
“Heart attack in the bath,” she continued. “I think it’s all these new bath salts they have. Sure you wouldn’t know what they’re putting in them.”
Aren’t corpses supposed to be freezing? When they were kids Barry Dodds had told him that when he’d knocked his granda’s body over at the wake, it was like being buried under a dozen frozen turkeys. Mind you, he had also told Paul that groping a woman’s breast felt like squeezing a roast chicken. Come to think of it, that kid had a weird obsession with poultry.
Are babies really warm? Do you start life as a tiny boiling inferno of energy, and you just get colder and colder until you eventually reach corpse temperature?
He was halfway through miming it when he was interrupted by a throat being pointedly cleared behind him. Bloody typical – 45 minutes of nodding and ‘ah hum’ing along, and Nurse Brigit comes back just in time for the beheading.
He smiled up at Brigit from his seat beside the bed, her ample bosom framing her pissed-off expression perfectly. She was not a bad looking woman, truth be told; a couple of years older than himself, short brown bobbed hair, decent figure – she wouldn’t be launching a thousand ships any time soon but she’d undoubtedly create a fair bit of interest in a chip shop queue.
“Isn’t it weird to think that not that long ago, you used to be allowed to smoke inside a hospital?” “Yeah,” she sighed. “Those were the good old days, back when people just died.”
“Oh no, Sherlock, you’re dead right. I was going to say exactly that. You can’t just have ‘one of those faces’ – everybody’s got a face. Yours is nothing special. No offence.” “You do realise that just saying ‘no offence’ does not magically make whatever you say inoffensive?”
Paul glanced across the road. The fox was now sniffing at the sandwich it had retrieved. Rather than eating it, it elected to urinate on it instead. As reviews went, it was pretty damning.
“Have you been listening to me?” “Of course I’ve been listening to you.” He hadn’t been listening to her.
He would’ve expected to see a lot of unusual stuff in casualty in the wee small hours, but enthusiasm from a medical professional was still unnerving.
“Just so I know, where is a good place to get shot?” He’d not yet realised that Dr Sinha was not at home to sarcasm. “Gluteus maximus – most definitely. Gunshot, stab wound – if you get the option, go ass every time.”
“So, I’ll just put down here ‘patient has no family’?” “Yep.” “What about a partner?” “No.” “OK, great. So you are totally alone,” said Dr Sinha. “I mean, other than this Mickey?” “Yes.” “Super.” “You’re certainly making it feel that way.”
“Sorry about what? Getting me stabbed? Oh don’t give it another thought. I’d nothing else planned for the evening, and they’ve given me a shed-load of free drugs, so I’m making out like a bandit here.”
“Thanks to you, I could be dead! So you stand there, not crying – and take the damn good tongue lashing you’ve got coming.” He’d never used that phrase before in his life and, even as it came out of his mouth, the little internal editor in the back of his brain looked up from his newspaper and sneered. Where the hell had that come from?
Apparently, a patient having a coronary in the midst of an attempted homicide results in a real paperwork tsunami.
was the kind of dull dreary Friday morning that Dublin did so well. The sky was the colour of wet newspaper, and it seemed to be bleeding into the day, making everything look like a bad photocopy of itself.
Paul said nothing, in a way that left nothing unsaid.
“The French may be a shower of goat-bothering cheese-sniffers, but they can do bread.”
Wilson was an idiot of the worst kind: a highly educated one.
“He’s a big fan of those Scandinavian crime dramas,” said Stewart. “They are excellent,” added Wilson. “Yeah,” said Brigit, “as long as you don’t mind people staring wistfully at fjords for an hour when they’re supposed to be solving a crime.”
What was it they said? Living is the best revenge. It certainly was for Paul. He was aware that he’d got himself into a staring match with a dead woman and he was unwilling to blink first.
“That’s the rich for you,” said Wilson. “They think up more ways to mess up their kids by breakfast than the rest of us could come up with in a lifetime.”
Paul had had very limited experience of pregnant women but he was discovering that he found them incredibly intimidating. The whole conversation felt like a game of verbal Buckaroo. As if him saying the wrong thing at the wrong time might result in her giving birth right there and then, just to spite him.
He still had 98 cans of peas that he’d managed to get for 5 cents a throw thanks to a printing error on the label. They were absolutely fine once you got by the ‘pees’ thing.
Last Sunday had been entirely filled up with a Steven Seagal marathon. Watched in chronological order, the man’s career was a damning indictment of punching as a cardiovascular exercise to aid weight loss.
The Irish public loved to see anything about one of them being in charge of anything on the international stage. The Six O’Clock News would cover an international symposium on tortoise haemorrhoids if you could show an Irish person banging a gavel in a big conference hall.
This was Wilson’s first trip through Dublin in an unmarked car with the siren on. If it proved anything, it was that the only way to get through the rush hour traffic quickly enough to prevent a murder was to commit several yourself.
She scrunched her face up like it was in the midst of eating itself.
She didn’t know what to make of his belief that someone was trying to kill him. On the one hand, he did seem a tad paranoid and secretive. On the other hand, last night someone had actually tried to kill him. She figured that she of all people had to cut the guy some slack on that front.
Brigit just felt that an ordinary life wasn’t good enough for anybody. It felt like she’d been born in the safest and most boring time in human history. Everywhere in the world had been discovered. Even outer space, it seemed, was full of, well, just boring old space. There had to be more. There had to be some adventure, some magic, left in the world.
Every time somebody wound her up, she liked to imagine the unhappy future life they’d have thanks to their crappy attitude. Enjoy your three marriages and your highly-strung nightmare children, ye stuck-up cow.
Brigit pushed a green jumper towards him. He spread it out on his knees to look at the design on the front. It featured the grinning face of a reindeer. Paul guessed the designer had been going for joyful for the creature’s expression and just over-shot horribly. A ‘here’s Johnny’ demented grin sat beneath wild eyes. It would have made a tremendous warning poster for the dangers of cocaine. This reindeer looked like he wanted to tell you about the incredible screenplay he was going to write and the amazing dude he’d just met in the toilets.
It was important in this kind of stressful situation that people knew who was in charge, especially as it was him.
“I’m telling ye, it’s a bomb. Do you think I’d have evacuated my gaff for an unexploded Bono?”
There was no way he could have competed with them. “I defuse bombs” – those three words had to make panties drop. Lucky sods.
The large man cut across him, mimicking Wilson with an effeminate high-pitched voice. “We, the Garda Síochána, cannot, at this present moment in time, find our arse with the application of both hands, but we are phoning for additional resources to assist in this matter. Please hold, your call is important to us.”
As he got closer, Wilson could see the ice cream was a 99. The man had positioned the flake bang in the centre and he was systematically licking around it, like a dog avoiding medication.
“Well, I’ll be the one-eyed son of a cock-eyed Suzie.”
“I need to see some ID.” “You could whip yours out and look at it again if you’d like?”
“Well, look at the big balls on the new lad. I’m not going to lie, your sheer fecking manliness has got me a teeny bit aroused.”
“We’re currently having an engaging conversation about the importance of manners,” said Bunny. “Manners, and cooperation between departments.” “I can see that. I can also see you’ve got quite a firm grip on his bollocks there.”
“As far as I’m concerned, there is a need for panic. In fact, it was for situations exactly like this, that panic was invented!”
“I’ve got money, a car, I know a lot about… the case.” She’d actually been going to say crime in general, but chickened out when she realised how stupid citing an addiction to American detective shows and crime novels would sound.
Earlier, Brigit had found this fun – now it seemed all too real. It was only enjoyable checking for homicidal maniacs tailing you when you didn’t really believe deep down that they’d be there.
A shiny plaque indicated they were standing on the doorstep of the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus. She briefly had the thought everybody else probably had when they first saw it. How many Irish people get drunk and do something silly on holidays to justify that?
Jesus boy – they’ve already killed some poor girl and they put enough C4 under your car to make you the first Mick in space.
“I’m saying something here stinks worse than a wino’s arse on Sunday.”
What bothers me is, I take pride in the job, I always have, and some arsehole somewhere is playing me for a fool. If this is my last go round, I’d like to leave without any more bodies in the ground.”
They passed a woman who was studiously ignoring the fact that her terrier was taking a dump by cooing ‘C’mon sweetie, finish your wee wee.’ A homeless bloke sitting on a bench looked on in disgust. He caught Brigit’s eye as they passed and shook his head. “Some people!”
Duncan spoke in the kind of accent that came from a whole different Dublin to the one Paul had grown up in. His was a Dublin of leafy suburbs and private schools. The Dublin where drinking a bottle of vodka and then chundering in the back seat of a taxi made you a ‘legend’. Paul came from the other Dublin. The same one as the poor bastard who had to clean the taxi.
