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June 05, 2005

Mystery Inc.

It was last Thursday. I was on the 12.05pm train to Heuston. A near empty train by any standards. Apart from me, there were only two other people in the carriage. One was a middle-aged man. Slightly on the plump side. He had a neatly trimmed greyish beard and was reading what appeared to be the dictionary. The second, closer to me, was a twenty-something girl. She wore a long tweed overcoat with a number of creases. White woollen gloves adorned her hands and on her head was a white woollen hat. A brown leather briefcase lay beside her on the seat. Not one of those harsh square businessman briefcases but a slender one fixed together by two metal buckles. She sat staring out the window as the scenery rolled by outside as if she were in an old black and white film.

Every once and a while she would turn her head ever so slightly away from the window and look in my direction. Not in an obvious way though. Her eyes were so subtle in movement. Like two turtles slowly moving. I pretended not to notice. I looked straight ahead, down at the man with the beard. I noticed now that every so often he would grab a pen and then circle a word, or at least that’s what it looked like. The train eventually came to a halt in Heuston Station. The girl was first to get up, followed by the man and then myself. One by one we stepped out onto platform number one. The man limped slightly on his left leg but he was still walking faster than me. The girl was walking just ahead of him, quite briskly as if she was trying to get away from someone. When we reached the main hall of Heuston, the girl went to the Jus Juice bar and ordered a drink. Seconds later the man took a seat on one of the Jus Juice stools and opened up his dictionary once more. What happened next though would inadvertently catapult me into a Dublin filled with espionage. As the girl took her drink, she looked at her watch and was obviously late for something as she broke into a sprint towards the exit. On the floor where she had been standing was a slim brown envelope. She obviously had dropped it so in I rushed over, picked it up and began running towards the exit in order to return it to her. Outside I could see her stepping onto the LUAS. I ran as fast as possible but just as I got to the tram, the doors closed and the LUAS pulled away. I turned around and jumped onto the number 90 bus, hoping that if this girl was on the LUAS there was quite a good chance she’d be getting off in Abbey Street. As the driver pulled off, through the window I could see that bearded man running towards us. He looked stern. As we pulled off onto the main road it seemed he gave up. I then turned my attention to the envelope. I began wondering whether or not to open it. After all it wasn’t sealed so know one would know I had looked. Perhaps it would just turn out to be a shopping list and then I could give up my chase. Just a quick peek I thought. Inside was a piece of paper with a couple of words scribbled on it. “Taxidermy. Mammal. Murmurs. Brahms. Feline.” This was no ordinary shopping list.

As the bus approached O’Connell Bridge in a moment of surprise, I seen the girl in her tweed overcoat rushing across the bridge, obviously still a quite a bit of a hurry. Slightly alarmed at the thought of not returning this unusual slip of paper back to its owner, I ran with haste down the bus stairs, off the bus, (dangerously) across the road, over the bridge and up towards Trinity. It felt like I was racing for eons. She just kept up her hurried pace through Grafton Street, dodging in and out of the crowd with me not so skilful and not so fit but doing my best to keep up. This continued for another good ten minutes until finally the girl turned into the gate at the National History Museum, ran up the path and into the building. Wheezing like a dog pulling at his leash, I stood at the gates and that’s when I made sense of it all. It had to be the National History Museum. The piece of paper was a code of some sort. “Taxidermy” would indicate the Museum with all its dead stuffed animals. I thought “mammal” and “feline” were also two words that could be associated with the Museum, as they would have dead mammals and cats. As for “murmurs” maybe that was code for a hushed meeting, like a whisper and as for “Brahms”? Well I couldn’t see how he fitted into the puzzle. Confident I was about to unravel something terribly, terribly secret I took a deep breath. But the moment I was about to walk in a taxi came to a screeching halt up on the kerb beside me. I heard the man inside say “that’s him all right!” as the back door to the taxi flung open and out stepped the bearded man. So astounded, I barely moved a muscle as he walked towards me, snatched the envelope from my hand, gave me a frightfully dirty look and got back into the taxi which I watched driving off into the distance.

At a complete and utter loss to what had just happened I ambled into the History Museum only to be greeted by the mysterious girl upon my entrance. “Hi! Welcome to the National History Museum. Would you like a tour?” she said. My mouth may have been hanging open at this stage but I just shook my head and wandered back outside where I collapsed myself onto a bench beside a gentlemen reading a newspaper. On the back page was the bearded man! I strained to read the headline. It read “Russian cross-word champion on national tour.” And then, turning my head to the front and staring out ahead I felt the strange sensation of the dawning realisation consume me. And then I passed out.

Trains, Buses & Automobiles by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist (page 6)

Posted by LiamG at June 5, 2005 10:06 PM