Fi winced. “I can’t imagine how anyone could be so sneaky.”
“Well, you might have a different attitude when you get to my age and see it happen with your own eyes. Never underestimate how much money can change a person.” She slowed and stared at the Miller house. “Oh look. There’s a fire going. They must have finally sold that place. That’s good to see after all the trouble they had.”
“Mmm,” was all Fiona could manage to say, because she was thinking of the new occupant and not the strangeness of her granny’s statement. She had never heard of any trouble at the Miller house.
Her response made Rose instantly suspicious.
“You’ve gone awful quiet. Do you know something?”
She shrugged. “I met the guy who’s renting it. It’s actually a friend of Colm’s. Angus. I’ve met him before.” She tried to sound as casual as she could, but she could hear the tension in her own voice.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.” Keep talking, Fiona told herself. She’ll get suspicious otherwise. “A friend of Colm’s.”
“So you’ve said.”
They walked on in silence with Fiona frantically trying to think of something to say to change the subject. The ideas should have been leaping off her tongue with everything that had happened recently, but she found herself completely at a loss for something to say.
“I take it he’s an attractive young man from the way you seem to have lost your ability to string two words together.”
“I was thinking about the case, Granny,” Fiona said in a pious voice despite the fact that she was lying through her teeth.
“You’re lying through your teeth.”
Fiona sighed. “Okay, maybe so. But only to get you to stop harassing me. Can we focus on solving this thing?”
Finally, Rose grunted. “Fine. But I’ll be expecting a full report as soon as we’ve solved this thing and our murderer is behind bars.”
“Deal,” Fiona said, wishing she felt as confident as her granny sounded. In her mind, they were as far from solving the case as they had been the moment she got that frantic call from Ben.
“AH FIONA,” Rose said a few minutes later when they’d snuck through the broken window at the back of Mrs Stanley’s house. Fiona had been alarmed to see it—she felt sure that the guards would have boarded it up or otherwise secured it. The crime scene tape fluttered limply nearby.
But the neglected window was the least of her worries, it appeared.
“I don’t understand. It was right here,” she said, pointing to the empty top of the desk. There were various trinkets and souvenirs from Fort Lauderdale around it Fiona saw now, but no computer.
“Really?”
“There’s no need to sound so sceptical. Look, there’s the keyboard and mouse. Why would she have those if she didn’t have a computer? And why would anyone take it? It was broken.”
“I don’t know,” Rose said with a long weary sigh. “Maybe for the same reason as you want it.”
Desperately, Fiona looked around. “Maybe the guards realised there might be something valuable on there and took it away since we were last here.”
Rose shook her head. “Hardly. We’d have seen it on the reports. And I was there this morning. They weren’t doing anything except for sitting on their cushioned behinds and ploughing into the coffee.”
“I don’t get it. It was here. I know it was.” She turned, waving her hands in excitement. “Unless somebody broke in.”
“We know somebody broke in. Two people. Remember? Alan Power was here after you.”
“No,” Fiona said. “No, somebody else. We saw him. He was on foot and he was carrying a box under his arm. No, someone must have broken in since then.”
Rose said nothing. The strange reproachful look on her face confused Fiona for a few moments, until she followed her grandmother’s gaze to the mantle.
“Oh,” she whispered.
“Oh, indeed.”
The flat-screen TV was still in its place, disproving Fiona’s theory in an instant. She walked over to it and carefully pulled it.
“What on earth are you doing girl?”
Fi turned back. “Seeing if it’s glued on there. That might explain the thieves leaving it behind. It’s not though.”
“It just doesn’t make sense.” Fiona slumped down in an overstuffed armchair that looked like it had been in service since the fifties, before leaping to her feet when she thought better of making herself at home in a dead woman’s house.
“It depends on how you look at it,” Rose sighed, looking around. “I wonder if she has any teabags. Knowing her, she probably has the own-brand kind and not the good stuff.”
“Granny,” Fi cried, wincing. “We’re not here to have a little tea party. There’s no way I’m making myself a cuppa here.”
“Speak for yourself. I’d kill for a lovely strong cup of tea.”
“The only one you’d kill is yourself—or do you not remember how Mrs Stanley met her end? For all we know, all the cups in the house have been laced with poison just in case she didn’t eat enough of her fry.”
Rose hastily stopped rummaging around in the kitchen.
“Right. What do we do now? It’s obvious we’re not going to find anything useful here.”
“Is it?” Rose asked with a twinkle in her eye.
“Well, yeah. The computer’s gone. That’s what we came here for.”
Rose smiled. “Think about it, Fiona. It was here the other day when you came and it’s not here now. We’ve already established that nobody’s broken in here looking for valuables, or else that big telly would be gone. So.” She pursed her lips. “Who’s been in here in the meantime?”
“Alan Power,” Fi said immediately. “But he…” She shook her head, trying to remember what she’d seen that night. It was possible that he’d had a computer under his arm: she hadn’t seen exactly what he was carrying. “Why would he take her computer? It was all smashed up. And he works in IT. I don’t see how it’s of any value to him.”
“So it’s not the computer itself,” Rose said, eyes sparkling. “But what’s on it.”
“But why?” Fiona cried, too frustrated to even think of keeping her voice down. “What could be on it? And how would he even know about it, even if she had had thousands of euro in Bitcoin or what have you.” Her eyes lit up. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s where her money was kept and how she’s been able to buy all this stuff.”
“I don’t know. I get the feeling that she came into money recently and she wasn’t keen to let anyone around here know it. I certainly can’t see her telling a young man who’s just recently moved to town. She can’t have had any dealings with him.”
“Unless,” Fi whispered. “Unless… He’s an IT expert, right? Maybe she was having trouble setting all this stuff up and she knew where he worked. You said she was sharp; that she knew how to approach you when she wanted something. He could have come over, seen the Bitcoin account or what have you, and decided he wanted it for himself.”
“Maybe. It sounds a little far-fetched, don’t you think?”
Fiona nodded. “It sounds a lot far-fetched. It doesn’t sound like him at all, does it? He’s always kept himself to himself and he’s never taken part in any of the community work events in the town or volunteered to help out at the pensioner’s party or anything like that. Can you see him taking the time to help her set up her computer?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Rose said, eyes twinkling. “I think I’ll give him a call later on and see if he’ll help out an old dear who’s having troubles with the aul interwebs.”
Fi rolled her eyes. Her granny was more IT literate than she was. Fi suspected she spent her evenings playing online poker, but she’d never been able to prove it and Granny Coyle wasn’t letting on.
“Hold off,” Fi said, shivering. “So we have a theory about Powers and what he was doing there. What about the murderer? We still don’t have any idea who poisoned her.�
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“Let’s solve one riddle at a time,” Rose said at last. “There’s no point in us standing here—we’re only running the risk of getting caught by the guards. We’ll go. You can make the tea and I’ll give Alan Power a call; test his patience for doing an old lady a kindness.”
19
FIONA GOT the kettle on as her granny settled back in the snug and called around to get hold of Alan Power’s mobile number. Fi expected they’d be calling around for quite a while, but by the time she arrived at the table with a tray of tea things, Rose was sitting back looking triumphant.
“I got it,” she announced.
“Already? How’d you do that?”
“Old Johnnie who used to be the postman. Has a real eye for numbers, that fella. Anyone who ever got a parcel delivered where the mobile was required, he’d take one glance at it and there you go, he’d remember the number from there on out. You should ask him—go and ask him your number and see what he tells you.”
“But I already know my number,” Fi said with a shrug.
Rose rolled her eyes. “That wasn’t my point. It’s a skill. Those are dying out these days with the internet and everyone stuck on their phones. Who needs to remember a number when it’s all kept in there for you?”
“It’s handy.”
“It is, but it’s ruining peoples’ memories. That’s all I’m saying. Anyway. He gave me Alan Power’s number and I have it written down here.” She held up one of Fi’s matchbooks with a neatly-written line of digits jotted down on the inside. “I also asked him about delivering parcels to Mrs Stanley.”
“You did? What did he tell you?”
“Not much, I’m afraid. He’d deliver the odd letter here and there, mostly from America. He retired three years ago now, though, so well before her current shopping spree.”
Fiona sighed. She’d expected there to be something else; something significant that might point them in the right direction.
As Rose made the call to Power, Fiona stood again and moved back to the bar, thinking she might as well do something useful and get ready for that evening’s trade.
Guilt welled up in her again at the thought that she was letting her business fall by the wayside as she focused all her time and energy on the murder case. She shook her head and busied herself cleaning down the bar counter. After all, it wasn’t like murders were two a penny in Ballycashel. Now that there’d been two in a relatively short amount of time, it was probably safe to say that things would calm down and there wouldn’t be another person killed for a very long time.
At least, she hoped so.
She fell into a familiar routine, spraying and wiping, spraying and wiping. Not that the counter was dirty, but it gave her satisfaction to know that the place was pristine. She moved onto the kitchen behind the bar next, working her way along all the counters and food preparation areas.
“Well I spoke to him,” Rose bellowed from back in the bar.
All thoughts of cleanliness evaporated from Fiona’s mind. She threw down her cloth and pulled off her gloves as she hurried back to the snug.
“Well? What did he say?”
Rose’s eyes sparkled. “Oh, he was quite dismissive. Where did I come across his number and he was sorry if I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick, but he’s a working professional not a computer teacher. He’s got a very important job and certainly doesn’t have time to come to help me get to grips with technology. If I need help, they run courses for the elderly in the library once a month. He sounds like a remarkably unpleasant fellow, but that’s good for our purposes, isn’t it? At least we know without a shadow of a doubt that he wasn’t over at her house for—”
“Wait!” Fiona cried. “What did you just say?”
Rose frowned. “You need me to repeat all that? Were you not listening?” She sighed, as if she’d been slighted. “I suppose I can tell you again. Wait ’til I see. I asked him if it was possible at all that he might come over and help me get my computer connected to the online. Of course it pained me to go on as if I knew nothing about it, but I thought it was the best approach. Anyway, he said—”
“No, Granny. The bit about the library.”
“Oh. Apparently there are computer classes there once a month. He didn’t lower himself to tell me when, but I imagine the details are on the internet if you want them. Though he did say they were aimed at the elderly—you should have heard the way he said it. So dismissive. Ah, he’ll be old himself one day. Hah, he’ll regret it then.”
Fiona shook her head. “No, not the classes. Just…” She picked up her phone and searched, not expecting to find anything. She was surprised. Ballycashel library had a basic-looking website but it contained all the information anyone could ever hope to know about a small-town library. The classes were held on the first Saturday morning of every month. She closed her eyes. Her mother had had her run-in with Mrs Stanley on Tuesday. So she couldn’t have been there for class. Fi scrolled down through the events page and couldn’t find any reference to any classes on Tuesday mornings.
“What was she doing at the computers in the library?” she whispered. “She had a perfectly good setup at home. Those library computers are ancient; big old blocks of things. Hers was a top end all-in-one model.”
Rose shook her head. “It certainly sounds odd.”
“More than odd. Remember, Mam said Mrs Stanley was on the computer in the library. Whatever Mam caught sight of made Mrs Stanley hurry away. Granny,” Fi said, eyes lighting up. “I think we might be on to something!”
“OH.”
The library was almost empty at this time of day, but that wasn’t enough to comfort Fiona. She thought it was going to be an easy matter of asking someone nicely to get out of the way while they did a quick check of the history on the two computers.
She hadn’t banked on there being ten computers to choose from.
“I thought they only had two,” she hissed, earning herself a filthy look from Jean the librarian.
“They used to. Then the school donated the machines from their old computer lab. Most of them sit unused but Jean saw no sense in looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
“That’s great,” Fi said without enthusiasm. “But it doesn’t help us, does it? I’ll go get Mam.”
“No,” Rose hissed. “If she comes down here and sees me, she’s going to know immediately that we’re up to something.”
“What do you suggest then? That we go through the history for each of these? It’ll take us ages.”
“You’re right. But we can’t get her down here.”
“Wait, I have an idea.”
A moment later, Fi was outside, listening to dial tone and waiting for her mother to answer the phone.
“Mam, it’s Fi. Listen, do you remember which computer Mrs Stanley was at before you had the altercation in the street.” She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the onslaught.
Sure enough, Margaret McCabe was less than impressed at being reminded of her indecorous conduct. “What are you asking me that for, Fiona? Can I not just be allowed to forget the whole thing? I’ll have you know she was up to something. What was I supposed to do? I’m not a saint, Fiona. Lord knows, I have the patience of one at times, but I’m not. What do you think I’m—”
“Mam,” Fi said, trying to inject a soothing tone into her voice. “Mam, I’m not having a go at you. Listen.” She thought fast. “I’m at the library now and I thought I’d go in and clean the computer of any record of that picture of you.”
Margaret hesitated. “You can do that? So my picture is on there?”
“I don’t know,” Fi whispered. It was easy to lead her mother up the garden path because when it came to computers, Margaret really didn’t have a clue. Nor did she have any interest in learning. “Look, it’ll save you doing it and it’ll only take a minute, but I need to make sure I get the right one.”
Margaret made a strange groaning sound.
“Mam, are you alright?”
“Shush, I’m thinking.”
She made the noise again. It was very disconcerting, especially when it was your mother and you were hearing this on the phone. Fiona was about to ask her if she couldn’t just think silently, but she held back.
Finally, Margaret grunted. “It was the one at the back, closest to the shelves.”
“At the back, Mam?” Fiona asked, poking her head in the door and looking to see where her mother meant. “You mean not one of the ones facing the door?”
“Oh no, of course not. She was hidden at the back there, closest to the shelves. Probably thinking no one would discover her there, the little snake—Lord have mercy on her. I wouldn’t have had any cause to go anywhere near her if I hadn’t been looking for a book about local poets for the poetry week we’re looking at setting up.”
“Thanks, Mam,” Fi said, eager to get in there and see for herself.
“You’ll make sure it’s cleaned.”
“I will.”
“And are you over for your dinner tonight? I have gammon in the oven. And there’s stew in the fridge if you’re home before it’s ready.”
Her mouth watered at the prospect. Her mother always overdid it so the joint of meat stuck to the bottom of the glass dish. If you got in there early, you got to eat the bit at the bottom, all caramelized and deliciously salty-sweet. She shook her head—now wasn’t the time to be thinking about food.
“I don’t know yet, Mam. I’ll buzz you later, okay?”
She didn’t wait to hear the response. She hung up and put the phone back in her jacket pocket before re-entering the library. Jean was a real stickler for rules—that was probably the reason why Fiona hadn’t been in there in years.
She hurried across the floor to where Rose was standing close to the computers.
“Stand back,” Fiona whispered, nodding her head at Mrs Flannery, who was sitting at the machine closest to them. “Give her some privacy.”
Full Irish Murder Page 9
