The Going Rate Read online

  Praise for John Brady’s MATT MINOGUE series:

  Islandbridge GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100

  SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2006 DASHIEL HAMMETT PRIZE A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

  “Particularly powerful stuff...genius.” – TORONTO STAR

  Wonderland GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100

  “IF THERE ARE AUTHORS BETTER THAN JOHN BRADY at chronicling the events of modern Ireland, I HAVEN’T YET READ THEM . . . Brady’s best so far.” – GLOBE AND MAIL

  “ANOTHER SUPERB NOVEL BY A WRITER OF INTERNATIONAL STATURE.” – TORONTO STAR

  “BRADY’S BEST: informed, subtle and intelligent, with Minogue revealing a hitherto unseen depth of soul, humour and emotion.”

  – THE TIMES UK

  A Carra King GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100

  “DENSE AND MULTILAYERED . . . a treasure of a crime novel.”

  – TORONTO STAR

  “Brady has a great eye for the telling detail . . . and a lovely slow pace of storytelling. There’s much talk and thought about events and you can’t read this book at warp speed. Instead, save it to savour.”

  – GLOBE AND MAIL

  All Souls

  “As lyrical and elegantly styled as the last three . . . A FIRST-RATE STORY WITH MARVELLOUS CHARACTERS . . . Another masterful tale from a superior author.” – GLOBE AND MAIL

  “Nothing gets in the way of pace, narrative thrust or intricate story-telling.” – IRISH TIMES

  “A KNOCKOUT.” – KIRKUS REVIEWS

  Kaddish in Dublin

  “MATT MINOGUE, THE MAGNETIC CENTRE OF THIS SUPERB SERIES . . . and Brady’s tone of battered lyricism are the music which keep drawing us back to this haunting series.” – NEW YORK TIMES

  “Culchie Colombo with a liberal and urbane heart . . . like all the best detective stories it casts its net widely over its setting . . .

  [Minogue is] a character who should run and run.” – IRISH TIMES

  Unholy Ground

  “RIVETING . . . The suspense builds to barely bearable intensity . . . crackles with pungent Irish idiom and its vignettes of the country’s everyday life.” – TORONTO STAR

  “Excellent Sergeant Matt Minogue . . . MARVELLOUS DIALOGUE, as nearly surreal as a Magritte postcard the sergeant likes, and a twisting treacherous tale.” – SUNDAY TIMES

  A Stone of the Heart

  “Towers above the mystery category as AN ELOQUENT, COMPELLING NOVEL . . . a tragic drama involving many characters, each so skillfully realized that one virtually sees and hears them in this extraordinary novel . . .” – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “A MASTERFULLY CRAFTED WORK of plot, atmosphere and especially characterization . . . Minogue, thoughtful, clear-eyed and perhaps too sensitive . . . is a full-blooded character built for the long haul of a series . . .” – MACLEAN’S

  The Good Life

  “Brilliant Craftsmanship.” – LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Brady's dead-on ear for dialogue and his knack for creating instantly engaging characters keep the pages flipping...one line of prose leads inexorably, compulsively to the next...” – QUILL & QUIRE

  “Brady, like Chandler, has a poet's eye for place...(he) is emerging as one of the supreme storytellers of Canadian crime fictions.” – GLOBE AND MAIL

  JOHN BRADY

  The Going Rate

  A MATT MINOGUE MYSTERY

  McArthur & Company

  Toronto

  First published in Canada in 2008 by

  McArthur & Company

  322 King Street West, Suite 402

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5V 1J2

  www.mcarthur-co.com

  This ebook edition published in 2011 by McArthur & Company

  Copyright © 2008 John Brady

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Brady, John, 1955-

  The going rate : a Matt Minogue mystery / John Brady.

  ISBN 978-1-55278-786-1

  I. Title.

  PS8553.R245G59 2009 C813'.54 C2009-904696-2

  eISBN 978-1-77087-095-6

  Cover, Image & Composition by Mad Dog Design

  The publisher would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council for our publishing activities. The publisher further wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council and the OMDC for our publishing program.

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la via diritta era smarrita

  – DANTE

  For Hanna, Strength and love; trust and patience.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 1

  Darren Mulhall’s last day would be short.

  THE DAYLIGHT PART BEGAN with his awakening to the sound of a door chime. Pieces soon began to fall into place. He was in Martin’s house, in Martin’s bed. Martin’s wife Bernie was no longer beside him, however.

  He remembered vodka, and lager, and a bit of hash that Bernie had found in one of Martin’s toolboxes after his arrest. It was gone three o’clock when he had finished with Bernie. They had done pretty well everything. He remembered her complaining she didn’t want to do it anymore. Well, that only egged him on, and sore or not, she looked happy enough with the proceedings. Of course she could have been faking it. Big surprise, there. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it, and she was a bit afraid of him, after all. He didn’t mind that one bit.

  His mouth was cracked and furry, and his eyes felt like they had been shoved back hard into his head. He rubbed the hardened goop from the edges of his eyes, and he tried to swallow. There was light on the curtains. He found the alarm: nearly ten o’clock? Jesus. He lay still, listening. There were footsteps coming up the stairs now. He kicked away the sheet and the eiderdown. The chill air washed over him, and he rolled sideways to reach under the bed for the pistol. He was on his feet when Bernadette came in the door. She was breathing hard. She wasn’t even trying to hold her dressing gown closed. Her mouth hung open and for several moments she stood still, her chest heaving so much the shadow between her breasts seemed to have a life of its own.

  “I do
n’t know,” she whispered. “Gas company? On a Good Friday?”

  He kept up his stare, waiting for a giveaway sign.

  “What’re you looking at me like that for? I didn’t call them, did I.”

  The redness around her mouth and neck from last night seemed to be getting even deeper.

  The doorbell’s ring was ten times louder this time.

  “Gas company,” came a Dublin accent. “Anybody home here?”

  Mulhall picked up his underpants and jeans on his way to the window. He got his second leg in as he inched the curtain away from the wall. The white van out on the road was open, and there were tools and pipes on the bed of it. An average looking joe in overalls was setting up a workmate by the curb.

  “I don’t know anything about this, Darren–”

  “Shut up a minute, will you.”

  He realized that he was shaking, and that she could see it.

  “They look okay,” she said. “Don’t they?”

  “I’ll decide that,” he said.

  He put the pistol on the bed, and leaned his back against the wall while he pulled on his jeans. A cool head, and a dry pants, he thought. Overreacting was the worst thing to do.

  “Give me me Nikes there. No – no socks.”

  His T-shirt was on the chest of drawers.

  “Me phone,” he said. “Were you using it?”

  She shook her head, but her eyes stayed on the pistol.

  “No, no. I don’t think I did.”

  “Go back downstairs. Tell him you’re coming.”

  She seemed paralyzed. Her eyes moved from the pistol and back to him. He swore and shoved her toward the door. He tried to keep in step with her as she descended the stairs, whispering.

  “Tell him you’re coming, I said.”

  She pulled at the belt of her dressing gown, losing one end. He laid his arm on her shoulder, with the pistol pointed at the hall door. He felt her start when she saw it.

  “Jesus, Darren, what’s the need of that?”

  Her voice was strained with the panic.

  “Just keep going, will you.”

  He looked down the hallway. Martin had set up an escape route when they moved in here three or four years ago, and one night last summer he had shown Mulhall the setup, his master plan of getting out in a hurry. Three steps out the door to the garage – Martin had never used it as a garage but as a workshop, where he kept all his tools in perfect nick – and a couple of steps to the workbench. Then, up to the window he had put in three-quarters the way up the wall and Bob’s your uncle: you were in the neighbour’s. He had even timed himself taking a few gos at it, he had told Mulhall with pride.

  Mulhall had been careful not to scoff at Martin’s meticulousness. Martin was such an iijit. His whole Mission Impossible type of approach made the others slag him mercilessly. Even Murph, who took the gold for being the most complete iijit in the known world, knew that Martin was an iijit. But everyone had still depended on Martin for the welding and the lock-smithing.

  Even if Martin was no mastermind, he’d had a good run. He was always careful and modest in his work. It was only bad luck that a cop car was passing that petrol station that night. Though Martin would never admit it, Mulhall was certain that he had only started into his own line of robbing because of Bernie, with her shopping and her holidays and her decorating shite.

  Mulhall’s tact had earned him Martin’s trust. It was to Mulhall that the same Martin had turned after his sentencing. Could Mulhall look in on things while he was inside, could he keep an eye on things? Murph could barely look after himself, not to mind someone else. Bernie needed minding sometimes, Martin told him. She wasn’t always on the ball: she didn’t have much confidence. He should make himself at home, naturally. Did that include drinking Martin’s vodka, Mulhall had wondered daily since he had come here last week to lay low. And did the make-yourself-at-home bit cover riding Bernadette twice a day until they were pouring sweat and aching?

  Mulhall tiptoed around her as she took the last step down, and he turned toward the kitchen. He heard the man at the door whistling softly to himself, his blue overalls visible even through the frosted glass of the hall door. He kept Bernadette in front of him, ignoring the shudders that had begun to seize at her.

  “Stand there,” he whispered. “Right there, where he can see you’re there.”

  “Why are you doing this? Christ, stop pushing me, will you.”

  He tugged on her shoulder.

  “Here,” he hissed. “Count up to ten– No! In your head!”

  He pulled the collapsed back of his Air Max up over his heel, swore at the sharp pain as his finger was squeezed, and then he opened the door out to the garage. His nostrils filled with the comforting smell of oil and old grass from the lawnmower. The door swung shut silently behind him: Martin’s work again, he was sure.

  Sure enough, in three steps, Mulhall was on the bench, stooped, and pulling the bar release from the window. The neighbours’ garden wasn’t a garden at all: it was more of a dump. Maybe it had started as storage, all the lengths of warped timber and the pieces of ruined particleboard, the cement blocks, and three or four disemboweled lawnmowers. But like Martin had pointed out, the neighbours had let the fence fall apart just like everything else of theirs, and there was a clear run to the lane. Lifting the window, he rolled into the opening. He dropped onto a soggy patch of last year’s leaves that were already almost covered by new grass.

  He stayed in a crouch, staring at a deflated soccer ball, and listened. There was nothing out of the ordinary. A face appeared at the kitchen window, an unshaven man, drawing on a cigarette. It was Martin’s neighbour, Mr. Depressed, Mr. Alco. Mulhall gave him the nod, and then he skipped toward the stack of cement blocks. He threw his leg over the wall, gasping as he felt it tear through the denim at his skin. He straddled the wall carefully for several moments before swinging the other leg behind it.

  The laneway was graffiti world of course, with all the usual half-arsed, jerry-built cement block sheds and old corrugated iron, and plenty of barbed wire. Dear Old Dublin. Again he listened. The scrapes on his thighs began to burn. The cold morning air had made his hangover vanish. Movement to his right broke his gaze from the glints of light from the broken glass in the laneway. A pudgy man was stepping away from the wall of the laneway ahead, his green safety vest and yellow hard hat almost glowing now in the spring light.

  Mulhall teetered between annoyance and relief: so it was the gas company, after all.

  “Howiya,” he called out, warily. He was frowning now, his eyes straying to the pistol in Mulhall’s hand.

  A bit late to be trying to hide it now, Mulhall decided. He waited for fleeting eye contact, and then the man quickly looked down at his feet.

  “Howiya yourself,” Mulhall said. “Get to work, why don’t you, you fat gobshite. And not be annoying people this early in the day.”

  Well that was settled, then. More relieved than he was sore, or even angry, Mulhall strode down the lane, mapping out in his mind the entry of the laneway onto Ossory Road. He’d cross there, and head somewhere where he could lie low. The dumpsters behind the shops there would do for a short while, or even an old garden shed in one of the houses there. Then, back to Bernie, get some stuff and clear off. Mr. Gas Man down the lane was hardly going to keep his trap shut about seeing a fella with a gun, was he. Mulhall could hardly blame him.

  The weight of the pistol dragging on his arm with each stride came to his attention. The laneway was covered in damp patches, with clumps of mashed cardboard every now and then. It felt greasy underfoot. God, but he must look totally stupid, he thought, like a schoolkid holding his mickey and going up to the teacher to get permission to go to the toilet.

  He thought for a moment of Bernie, and suspicion flashed across his mind. It didn’t last. Bernie, if it were possible, was even thicker than Martin. He slowed, and the anger returned. This was what he was reduced to, hanging with the likes of Murph, and Martin, an
d Martin’s retarded missus? Something had to give here, he murmured. Maybe it was time to do the thing, make his move.

  He had saved the copper’s number in his mobile under the name “Paddy,” and he had added two digits to each number in case anyone ever snooped through his numbers there. Molloy – no: Tommy Malone. It was Murph told him about Malone, warned him about him. Malone was a Dub, and he was smart. He knew the score in Dublin nowadays, with everyone paranoid and jumpy, and looking for a place to hide, or an escape hatch from this dump of a city. Malone was doing what coppers always did, putting out feelers, trying to get fellas to grass on the higher-ups.

  But according to Murph, Malone talked serious money. He hinted that he could even deliver the whole package, even a new identity. According to Murph anyway: as far as that went. He didn’t believe Murph on the last part, but money could sort a lot of issues.

  This was the end of the lane ahead. He slowed, his chest pumping in the cold air and his own hot, rank breath coming back over his face. It was definitely the lie-low-and-wait option.

  There was a car up ahead, not moving. Green, older Jap car: a Corolla? Someone was standing behind its half-opened driver’s door, a man in a leather jacket. He had noticed Mulhall too. He did not seem in the least bit put-out to be seeing a man in a T-shirt on a cold spring morning, holding something the shape of a gun.

  Mulhall stopped, undecided. There was a faint smell of aftershave, or cologne or something expensive. In this laneway, here in this kip, on a lousy damp cold Dublin morning? Hallucinating, that’s what it must be surely.

  But it was too quiet here. It’d have to be back the other way, he decided, over the walls and off through the gardens. He picked a cement block wall a half-dozen houses away and headed for it at a jog.

  Then there was a door opening into the alley to his right, a figure emerging as he ran by. He did not slow, but he took the pistol out, and broke into a sprint instead, weaving from side to side. There were other footsteps running behind him now, almost matching his own. Turning to cast a quick glance over his shoulder he saw flashes, and he felt himself being punched over against a wall.