Cruel Deeds

by Catherine Kirwan

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

She had secrets. Who doesn't?

A successful lawyer is found murdered in a derelict house in Cork.

Finn Fitzpatrick barely knows Mandy Breslin from the law firm where they both work. Mandy moves in the privileged world of the senior partners. Finn keeps to herself.

But Mandy has secrets and, as Finn gets drawn deeper and deeper into her dead colleague's life, she finds out that Mandy isn't such a stranger after all.

And that Mandy's not the only one at the firm with something to hide.

Who can Finn turn to when there's no left to trust?

(P) 2022 Hachette Books Ireland

Release date: February 3, 2022

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 320

Sample

YOU WON’T SEE IT ON A STREET SIGN, BUT US locals know. You have to look down when you’re walking in Cork. Look down or fall victim to the traps this city lays for the unwary. The errant paving slab. The drain cover gone rogue. The vomit. And, sometimes, the blood, a vivid, ruby trail when freshly shed, fading as it dries, melding with the caked-in grime on Patrick Street’s pink footpaths, laid in a fit of long-vanished boom-time optimism and, by the look of them after three days without rain, never cleaned since.

I was waiting for Davy Keenan by the front door of Brown Thomas. Looking down. Trying to resist the urge to pace. Definitely not calling. Even though he was late. Ten minutes late. Then twelve minutes. Then fifteen. Then I raised my gaze and glimpsed him at last, all six foot two of him, sauntering in my direction. Sandy hair and beard. Powder-blue, soft-cotton T-shirt. Old jeans. Scuffed brown suede shoes. I felt like I often feel when I see him. Like the sun’s come out and I might burn.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. ‘But I’m here now, right? Half-looking forward to it in a weird way.’

I sensed something in him that hadn’t been there when he’d left my house that morning – a kind of nervousness, or it could have been excitement – and I badly wanted to ask why he was late. But I pride myself on not being needy. So I told myself that the why of it didn’t matter and flashed him my second-best smile.

‘You’re going to love her,’ I said.

He smiled too, a neat pretty one, and tucked a few strands of my long black hair behind my ears, and wrapped his right arm around my shoulders: I’m five foot eight, so we’re a snug fit. We walked on in silence, settling into a familiar rhythm as we cleared the city centre. Hugging the river most of the way, we kept walking; and I thought about how often it went like this between us – the raised heart rate, the nearly conflict, the unasked question, the almost resolution: the benign version of a destructive pattern I’d known long before we’d met that I was doing my best to change. Only it turned out my best wasn’t up to the job most of the time.

After a while Davy said, ‘It’s always farther than you think.’

DOLLY PARTON’S TWO PREVIOUS VISITS TO CORK hadn’t gone to plan. On the first, in a venue normally reserved for equestrian events, a lighting rig had collapsed during sound-checking and the gig had to be cancelled at the last minute. The second time, she’d made landfall in the middle of a deluge. And, as it was a Saturday, a lot of the audience had been drinking since lunchtime. Let’s just say that there was an edge.

Third time lucky? It looked like it. A good-humoured after-work crowd on the balmiest of Thursdays. Dolly emerged to the sound of the Marquee roar and the night took flight, the audience word-perfect on most of the songs; quiet for ‘Coat of Many Colours’, when she sat alone at the front of the stage and sang to the sweaty throng gathered at her feet like we were family round the fire in her Smoky Mountain cabin. Tears in my eyes, I looked up at Davy, standing right next to me. He pulled me closer.

‘You big eejit,’ he said. Then he kissed me.

Later, on the walk back to his place, we were doing that thing where we weren’t talking but communicating all the same. He was letting me know that I was okay and I was wondering how come he was so sure. And I didn’t know how it had happened but there I was – a woman with soap opera standard messy origins – in an actual relationship, with Davy.

Who used to be my client back when he was having recurring legal troubles related to his cocaine addiction: a couple of low-grade possession charges, a drunken and a careless driving, a bundle of unpaid parking fines. Later, after he’d got sober and retrained, I’d checked the lease on his gym for him and he became my personal trainer and my ‘just good friend’ for several years. Later still, this – something I hadn’t admitted to myself I’d wanted for a long time, until a night last November when he’d come round to my house for dinner and stayed till morning. More than seven months ago. Barely six if you counted the multiple breaks we went through, the short periods of adjustment – hissy fits, if you prefer – instigated by me, as I tried, and tried again to get used to having him share my life.

But there had been no breaks since way back in February – nearly five months that felt like longer – a magical time, apart from the occasional arguments and misunderstandings that I told myself were normal for any couple. I had to make a conscious effort not to link how we were with each other with our past, with his, and with mine.

Because otherwise, I’d find myself wondering how smart being with him was for me. How safe. Taken into care at the age of four on the grounds of neglect, I was fostered by the people who became my forever parents – my real ones, as far as I’m concerned – while my birth mother kept on drinking. She gave up often but was never able to stay sober, however much she wanted to. After her death Mam and Dad were able to adopt me. Birth father unknown so his consent wasn’t needed; no maternal relatives scrabbling to take me on either.

I was nine when my birth mother died. Old enough to be taken to her funeral. Young enough to think that it was all my fault. In the years that followed, I locked her – the memories and the pain and, I suppose, the love – in a strong box deep inside me.

Then, decades later, I ended up falling for Davy. I don’t know what that is, but don’t tell me it’s a coincidence. What goes around, comes around, as they say. And yet, in real life, he and I seemed to work. We didn’t swamp each other or cling on too tightly. We ebbed and flowed. We gave each other space.

Beside us, cars crawled towards the roundabout. It was easy to distinguish the blissed-out country fans who’d been to the gig from the unfortunates caught in the traffic. Up ahead, in the front seats of a Mark 1 silver Audi TT, a couple embraced passionately, a woman in the driving seat, the dark-haired passenger’s elbow around her neck, pulling her ever closer to him. I recognised the car, as belonging to Mandy Breslin, Finance and Trusts partner at MLC, the law firm where I work. There’d been a recall of those cars to have a rear spoiler fitted, after they’d been found to be unstable at high speeds on the autobahn. Most people had opted for the spoiler. She hadn’t. She’d said that she liked the TT the way it was.

I glanced at Davy but he was typing something on his phone. As we passed by, I waved, but Mandy didn’t reciprocate. And her face, when she saw me, was a picture.

Understandable. I didn’t know who the dark-haired man was.

But he wasn’t her husband.

THE MORNING AFTER THE CONCERT, COMING UP to 10.15, I was chewing on a biro in my cramped and pathologically untidy office, trying to work out the most diplomatic way of telling a client that he would be a fool to reject a defence offer of €21,000 in a case worth €15,000, and that hell would freeze over before any judge would give him the €50,000 he thought he deserved, when Mandy slid in and clicked the door shut behind her. Slim and athletic, she was in her mid-forties but looked younger usually. Today, the thick dark blonde hair and barely-there make-up were perfect as ever but no amount of concealer could disguise the black circles under her eyes. And I could have sworn she was wearing the same teal linen sleeveless shift she’d had on at work yesterday. Either that, or it was a duplicate and whoever did her ironing had gone too easy on the starch.

She hadn’t spoken since she came in and I was fighting the urge to fill the void with some inanity about how great Dolly had been, when it dawned on me that Mandy probably wasn’t at the gig.

She broke the silence. ‘Last night,’ she whispered.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘It’s your own business. I …’

Before I knew it, she was standing over me, my side of the desk.

‘As I was saying, before I was interrupted,’ she said. ‘Last night, whatever you think you saw, you saw nothing. Get that?’

‘Sure. Like I said …’

‘Say it.’

‘I … I saw nothing?’

‘Say it again.’

‘Hey, I saw absolutely nothing. Not a thing,’ I said. ‘Honestly, Mandy, I’m like the grave. I haven’t told a soul.’ Not even Davy, I might have added, except I don’t talk about him at the office.

Mandy stepped back from the desk, and there it was again – the same expression I’d seen on her face last night. Understandable, I’d thought at the time. Only now I didn’t understand at all. She turned and left without another word, and I sat back in my chair and puffed out a breath and tried to analyse what the fuck had just happened. Surely she believed me when I said I’d say nothing?

But, if she believed me, why did she look so scared?

SUMMER LINGERED UNTIL MID-SEPTEMBER. THE first wet Monday morning, it vanished. The college students were back and quite a few of the little treasures have cars so my previously serene walk to work was fuggy and loud. Add to that the chill that cut through my light mac, and that I’d forgotten my umbrella, and I was feeling distinctly autumnal by the time I got to 17–19 MacSwiney Street, the three restored Georgian townhouses occupied by McGrath Lynch Cleary, the mainly commercial law practice where I’ve worked for fifteen years or more. MLC has seven partners, sixteen solicitors, and don’t ask me how many trainees, legal execs and support staff in total, because I’m not sure anyone knows that from week to week, apart from Marian in Wages.

And Gabriel, obviously. That’s Gabriel McGrath, the firm’s founder and managing partner. He’s the person who, for reasons best known to himself, took me on back in the day. I had no legal contacts, applied to every firm in Cork for a traineeship. Didn’t even get an interview until the call came from MLC. I never understood why, but Gabriel must have seen something in me he liked. Out of the four trainees taken on that year, I was the least connected and the most grateful.

Which probably explains why I’m the only one of the four still working for the firm. I don’t do much of the corporate stuff. We found out fast that that wasn’t where my talents, or my interests, lay. Think legal dogsbody and you’re closer to the mark. Or general operative. Essentially, all the low-paying knobbly miscellaneous work that crops up in a big firm like ours that nobody else wants to do. As for me, I like problem-solving, I like variety and I really like being able to pay my bills, so the work I get to do suits me as well as anything would.

Except when Dermot Lyons starts complaining at partners’ meetings about my fee-earnings. Though even he was looking at me marginally more favourably after my recent investigatory work on a murder case led to the exposure of a serial sex offender and a slew of civil actions for damages, some of which had ended up coming the way of the firm.

But no matter how much money I brought in, I would never be quite right for MLC. I didn’t try to be. I slipped into the office, did my job, and slipped back out again, and binned the bowling night and the barbecue and the mulled wine and the mince pie invitations as fast as they hit my Inbox.

‘Whatever happens, Finn,’ my assistant Tina Daly was saying, between slurps of a giant caffeine and milk-based hot drink and bites of her regular morning Danish, ‘stay here. Gabriel’s back from his long weekend in Nice and he’s like a bear.’

She was standing in the open doorway and I was on my knees in front of my desk. With a groan, I shunted two tall stacks of files aside and reached along the wall for the main switch of the ancient electric storage heater. The public areas of MLC are luxurious and beautifully conserved. By the time you get to the attic where my office is, it’s the servants’ quarters. Even if I managed to turn it on successfully, it wouldn’t start to spit out heat until the next morning. I moved the dial first to a conservative three and then to a more realistic five and looked up at Tina. She was twenty-eight, nine years younger than me, and the most glamourous fat person – her words, not mine – in Cork. Her nails always polished and never chipped, her red curls styled and glossy, her skin springy and glowing a golden tan whatever the season. She worked downstairs in a shared office with some of the other secretaries but came up to me first thing every morning to plan the day ahead.

‘Any idea what’s up with him?’

‘No,’ Tina said.

I waited. If she didn’t know, she definitely had a theory. As well as being super-smart generally, she was better versed in the politics of this place than I could ever be.

‘Though it might have something to do with the fact that Mandy Breslin hasn’t come into work yet this morning and that there are two clients of hers that nobody knows anything about waiting for her in reception. And that she’s not answering her mobile.’

It was 9.45. Mandy was normally in by seven, eight if she was having a lie-in. Her husband Ed gave the kids their breakfast and took them to school. It was no secret that Mandy was the high-flyer in the family, that she was the one who paid for the school fees and the lavish holidays in California and Dubai. I hadn’t heard where they’d gone this year. I hadn’t been seeking out her company after ‘the incident’. No, it was more than that. The prickles of unease up the back of my neck told me that I’d been avoiding her in the three months since June.

And that I’d been wrong to.

•

My desk phone rang.

‘Uh-oh,’ Tina said. ‘Don’t answer it.’

I reached my hand up and grabbed the phone. Before I could put my ear to the receiver, I heard Gabriel’s voice.

‘Finola? Finola?’

He’s the only one who calls me by my full name.

‘Shit!’ I mouthed at Tina.

‘Told you,’ she mouthed back.

Gabriel was still talking.

‘Why Mandy arranges an appointment with clients and doesn’t put it in her diary or tell her secretary and doesn’t show up to meet them is beyond me. And why I’m supposed to deal with it, why everyone runs to me, that’s another mystery. Find out what they want, will you please? See if you can move the matter on in some way.’

I raced through the post, delegated as much as I could to Tina and made my way downstairs to the client waiting room off reception. A glass door led off the landing into a large rectangular room with a dozen burgundy studded leather armchairs, four small end-tables, one in each corner, a Ballygowan water dispenser and, in the middle, a low glass and chrome coffee table with the Irish Examiner, The Irish Times and the Financial Times and a stack of MLC promotional brochures. The Examiner looked like someone had leafed through it roughly and thrown it back down unread. I went next door to talk to Dervla, receptionist and fount of all knowledge, with the firm since its foundation by Gabriel. Instead, I found a slim blonde woman in a crisp white shirt.

‘May I help you?’ she asked.

In her early twenties, she spoke with a slight accent.

‘I’m looking for Dervla.’

‘Sorry, I don’t know who that is.’

‘The woman who usually works here?’

‘Ah. No. I don’t know her. I’m Katja Majewska. First day. Temping.’

I leaned across the desk and shook her hand.

‘How’s it going, Katja? I’m Finn Fitzpatrick, one of the solicitors. ‘I’m looking for two clients who came in to see Mandy Breslin, one of the partners.’

‘Yes, I asked them to wait in the other room.’

‘They’re gone.’

‘They didn’t tell me. I didn’t see them leave.’

‘Did you get their names?’

‘Only one, the older one. McInerney.’

‘First name?’

‘Sorry. The phone was going crazy and—’

‘Don’t worry about it. Can you remember what he looked like?’

‘Not really. He was old. Fifty, maybe sixty.’

‘And the other one?’

‘A lot younger. Twenty-two, twenty-three?’

‘Hair?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, what colour?’

‘Oh I see! It was black. Or dark brown. Cut short at the sides and longer on top. And he was tall, not too tall though. Really strong. Wearing a white T-shirt and a black Jack Wills hoodie. Black denim jeans and boots.’

She laughed.

‘You see now why I wasn’t looking at Mr McInerney. His friend was …’

‘Good-looking, by the sound of it.’

‘For sure.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘No, just the old guy talked. Gave his name, said that he was here to see Mandy Breslin and that she’d know what it was about. But Mandy wasn’t in and her secretary said she had no appointment in her diary. She didn’t know who McInerney was but she said she’d check. Then Gabriel rang down and told me to offer them a cup of coffee. But McInerney said he didn’t want coffee, he only wanted to see Mandy. He said he’d wait as long as it took.’

‘Was he from Cork?’

‘Let me think,’ Katja said. ‘Irish, definitely. Maybe from Cork. But he didn’t have a strong Cork accent.’

•

Behind me, the door to the reception area opened. Ed, Mandy’s husband, walked in. About Mandy’s age but baggier, he had on a navy Musto sailing jacket over an ancient sun- and salt-weathered pink polo shirt, rumpled chinos and docksider shoes. His face was the colour of parchment.

‘Where’s Dervla?’ he asked.

‘Off. Is Mandy with you?’

He shook his head slowly.

‘Ed, is everything okay?’

‘She didn’t come home last night.’

I kept my expression as neutral as I could in the circumstances.

‘I went to the garda station in Blackrock this morning,’ Ed went on. ‘But they said she’s not missing long enough for them to do anything. They said I had to give her time. That it was too soon to … I took the kids to school and I didn’t know what else to do, so I came here. I know she’s not in the office. I was talking to Kathleen earlier. I don’t know. I just thought …’

Katja came out from behind her desk and handed him a paper cup filled with water. He gulped it back in one swallow. Then his phone rang. He answered it.

‘Ed Wallace.’

He said a few terse ‘yeses’ and a ‘no’ and an ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can’.

‘That was the guards,’ he said. ‘They wanted to know where I was, if I was at home. When I said I wasn’t, they asked me if I could come to Coughlan’s Quay garda station straightaway. That’s not a good sign, is it?’

‘It probably means that they’re taking it seriously, that they want to get all the essential details from you. It’s nothing to worry about,’ I said.

But Ed was right. It wasn’t a good sign at all.

IF SOMETHING BAD HAD HAPPENED TO MANDY, whether she was still having an affair or not, the man standing in front of me was the default prime suspect. If he’d been a client of mine, I’d have told him to lose the pink top before he went to Coughlan’s Quay. But he wasn’t my client. Besides, it was ridiculously ghoulish of me to jump to conclusions – in this job, you’re always thinking ‘worst-case scenario’. I reminded myself that, wherever she was, there was no reason yet to think that Mandy was anything other than fine. Caught up in something. Unavoidably detained. Probably, and unfortunately for Ed, with the other man I’d seen her with in June. But fine.

Ed, on the other hand, looked anything but.

‘I’ll go along with you to the station if you want,’ I said.

‘There’s no need. I …’

He seemed to forget what he was about to say and stared at me, wide-eyed.

‘I’ll get my coat,’ I said.

•

I ran the five flights to my office, pausing on the way to let Tina know what was happening. On the way down, I rapped lightly on Gabriel’s door.

‘Come,’ he said.

Gabriel’s office was on the first floor, next to the boardroom and only marginally less palatial. He had a seating area in front of one of the sash windows (original glass and wood, fully working lead weights) with two high-backed wing chairs facing each other, chat-show style. His desk, at the far side of the room, was a heavy carved leather-topped partner’s desk never sullied by anything more than the single file Gabriel was working on at the time, a pen and a barrister’s notebook (unlined). A side table held a computer keyboard and two monitors. In one corner, two padded hangers – one for his exquisitely tailored suit jacket (always dark blue or dark grey pinstripe, the weight varying according to the season), the other for his coat – hung from a mahogany coat stand. Unusually, today both hangers were empty. Gabriel’s coat lay strewn across the back of his swivel chair and he, still in his suit jacket, was standing by the window. Though it was well after 10 a.m., his computer didn’t look like it had been switched on.

‘Em, Gabriel, Ed is downstairs. Mandy didn’t come home last night apparently. He got a call while he was here to go to Coughlan’s Quay immediately.’

‘Good God,’ Gabriel said. ‘Is he on his own?’

‘Yes.’

‘You should go with him. Mandy would like that. Unless …’

He’d had the same bad thought I’d had. He pushed it away, like I had.

‘You should definitely go with him,’ he said.

‘I will.’

‘And those two clients of Mandy’s?’

‘Gone. By the way, did you know there’s a temp on reception?’

‘Of course I did,’ he snapped.

Then he turned away from me and gazed out the window.

‘Please go,’ he said.

I backed out of the room. Tina had been right. Gabriel was like a bear.

ED FOLLOWED ME UP THE STEPS TO THE GARDA station. Boats haven’t docked at Coughlan’s Quay for a century or more. The river still flows here but it’s culverted, hidden and quiet, except when it isn’t. At ground level, where in times past cargo was loaded and unloaded, there’s a car park, the arches open but with cast-iron vertical bars blocking access from the street. The people who work here use the back gate. The front door, where we were headed, is used mainly by solicitors and members of the public, though there are fewer of those than in most garda stations. Coughlan’s Quay is the headquarters of the regional detective branch.

At the public office, I gave Ed’s name and my own, and we sat on two of the dusty plastic chairs. His right heel off the floor, he jiggled his knee up and down repeatedly. I tried to read the yellowed curling notices sellotaped to the wall but they might as well have been in Japanese. All I could think of was the children – teenagers – Ava and Ruth. I didn’t know them well but I’d met them several times with Mandy over the years, in the office and around town. They were at school now, Ed had said, oblivious to the storm that might be coming their way. Then I thought of the man I’d seen Mandy with, and whether I should say something about him to Ed, or to the guards. I’d promised her I’d tell no one. But promise or no promise, every minute would count in a missing persons investigation, wouldn’t it?

It would. If that was what we were still dealing with here.

•

As the minutes passed without anyone coming to get us, Ed grew more and more agitated.

‘This is not good,’ he said. ‘This is not good.’

‘I know someone who works here,’ I said. ‘I’ll send her a text.’

Detective Garda Sadie O’Riordan had been my best friend since our first week studying law together at UCC. She’d go through fire for me and I would return the favour. The fact that we hadn’t been getting on as well as usual over the last few months didn’t matter. I started typing a message but before I could press ‘Send’, the door to the left of the public office hatch opened and Sadie came out. She was pale and wiry with unbrushed hair cut in a bob. She was wearing her permanently tatty, jeans-based work outfit. She wasn’t surprised to see me – I’d given my name to the guard on the desk – but she didn’t look pleased.

‘Sorry for keeping you waiting, Ed. We’re ready for you now.’

‘Hi Finn,’ she added, without looking . . .