Full Irish Murder

by Kathy Cranston

  “These people have nothing meaningful to complain about,” Ben noted bitterly.

  “Sure neither do you,” Francis said without pausing. “Living here for free and not bothering to go and do an honest day’s work. Don’t tell me you’re working in the hardware shop because I know Marty isn’t working you half as hard as he should be. Aren’t you meant to be there today? Marty’s gone back now after his lunch. He’s too soft. Those people—the ones you’re so keen to give out about—they’re the ones who’re paying for your dole.”

  Fiona smirked.

  “Yeah, love. I’d go talk to the secretary about this. He’ll be able to tell you what year this is from. He’ll possibly even be able to give you a list of members who received one.”

  “Really? Aren’t there hundreds of members?”

  Francis nodded. “There are, but as far as I know they don’t all buy the new pins every year.”

  This was encouraging. Fiona couldn’t help but feel optimistic about their chances. “Brilliant! Do you have any idea who’s the secretary now or should I give Donnie a call?”

  “I do. Wait ‘til I see.” Francis rubbed his chin, frowning. “Ah that’s it—I remember reading about the new committee in the paper. It’s Bernard Boyle. He’s a lovely man; he won’t mind answering a few questions.”

  Fiona’s heart sank. He was a lovely man alright—she’d met him around the town down through the years and he’d even been into her bar a few times. The problem was, she thought, that he might know a bit too much about the case.

  “What’s the matter, love? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  She shook her head. “Dad, Bernard Boyle is one of the people who responded to Mrs Stanley’s message.”

  “No.”

  “You saw the list yourself. I showed it to you.”

  “Ah, I was only half paying attention. But now that you mention it again, it doesn’t surprise me all that much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, there was always something a bit shifty about that fella. I could never put my finger on it, but Mrs Stanley obviously had something on him.”

  “I suppose,” Fi said slowly. “Or it could be like with Mam—she had nothing really, she was just fishing to chance her arm and see if Mam would pay up.”

  “It could be,” Francis said, with a serious expression that made Fiona very uneasy. “But then again maybe she had something on some people.”

  Fi threw her hands up in frustration. “We’re going round and round in circles here. I keep thinking we’ve found something useful but then it turns out to be completely unclear. Like now. Is Bernard Boyle just another victim or is there something more sinister going on?”

  Her father cleared his throat. “It would seem that he’s just a victim. If he paid up—which it seems he did—he might have thought that was the end of it.”

  “There were several messages back and forth between them. What if she decided she wanted more?”

  “We have no way of knowing.”

  “No,” Fiona said, shaking her head. “Not without access to that Facebook profile, we don’t. All we can see are the messages she received from her victims. And we have no way of getting into it that I can see. Without it, we’ve a long list of potential suspects and no way at all of knowing whether they took Mrs Stanley’s threats seriously enough to pay up—or worse.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Kate piped up. She’d been stuck on her phone ever since Fi got back, and she had half-forgotten her sister was even there. “Why don’t you just go to the guards? They’ll be able to get a warrant for access to the messages.”

  “She has a point, love,” Granny Coyle whispered, squeezing Fiona’s arm. “The only way we benefit from investigating this ourselves is if we’re making real progress and we’re not making progress now. It seems as if we’ve hit a brick wall. I think it’s time we reconsidered getting the guards involved.”

  Fiona sighed. “I suppose. I’ll go get Mam.”

  23

  “WHOA, WHOA, WHOA,” Sergeant Brennan said, holding up his hand. On his wrist was a very shiny watch Fiona had never seen before. She stared at it in disdain, urging herself to stay quiet and not say anything to make him even more sour.

  “What?” Margaret McCabe asked, clearly affronted.

  He smiled his reptilian smile. “You come in here and tell me a fairy story and then it surprises you when I don’t fall for it hook, line and sinker? I must say, you’ve underestimated me.”

  “No,” Fiona muttered. “I’m not sure that’s possible.” It was so easy to let a smart comment slip out when you were faced with his hopelessly smug little head.

  “Miss McCabe.”

  “Sergeant Brennan. Apologies if I offended you, but you were being rather dismissive to my mother.”

  “And we all know you McCabes stick together,” he said, sighing as if he was extremely put-upon. “Now, I want you to slow down and tell me what you’re trying to say, Mrs McCabe. You’re telling me that Mrs Stanley tried to blackmail you.”

  “Yes,” Margaret said, nodding and pulling her cardigan tighter around her. She had been opposed to going to the Garda station at first, and it had taken them over an hour to talk her round. Fiona could see she was growing more agitated and disillusioned by the minute.

  Fiona grabbed her hand under the table and squeezed it, hoping her mother would just ignore the sergeant and keep telling her story.

  Margaret cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said with more certainty. “I didn’t see the message at first; not until today. Like I told you, we argued after I saw her on the computer with a picture of me.”

  He leaned across the desk, eyes narrowed. “And that prompted you to go to her house and poison her breakfast.”

  “That’s clearly not what she was about to say.”

  “No, indeed,” Margaret said with a nod. “No, I only saw those Facebook messages when Fiona asked to get onto my Facebook. I hadn’t been on it in months since my son set up my account. It was then that they found the messages from Mrs Stanley.”

  “And do you have any record of these messages? Am I supposed to take your word for it?” He said this as if the very act of sitting in the room with them was deeply painful for him.

  “Here,” Fiona said, passing over the pages they had printed out earlier. “This is a printout of the whole conversation.”

  Beside her, Margaret stiffened. They had tried, but they still hadn’t convinced her that Mrs Stanley’s accusations against her wouldn’t lead to her being arrested. There was no truth in them, and it wasn’t a crime to shortchange the offertory collection as long as you weren’t stealing from it. They had finally convinced her that the Gardaí wouldn’t be able to breathe a word of the accusations, because they had a duty of confidentiality towards their informants (they had made up this last part, but it had done the trick).

  “And you promise not to breathe a word of it to anyone.”

  Sergeant Brennan looked up, seemingly irritated. “If it’s evidence, it might be used in court.”

  “Oh Fiona, I—”

  “It’s fine, Mammy. Please. Sergeant, it’s all there. She made repeated threats against my mother, saying she’d blacken her name if she didn’t pay five hundred euro.”

  The sergeant sighed but he bowed his head and started to read. Less than a minute passed before he looked up again.

  “This isn’t from Mrs Stanley. It’s from a Pete Smith.”

  “I know,” Fiona said. “It’s a fake account she set up.”

  “Oh. Right.” He pursed his lips. “And why on earth should I believe that? For all I know, you set up that email address yourself.”

  “Why would I do that? Why would I set up an email address to threaten my own mother?”

  “I don’t know? To try and get her off the hook?”

  Fiona told herself to breathe and be calm—it was difficult. She glanced at Garda Fitzpatrick, as if appealing for some sense of reason. He jerked his head to one sid
e. It was a subtle gesture, but the meaning was clear. He wasn’t going to put his neck on the line.

  “That’s not true and I’ll swear to it. It’s Mrs Stanley. Look, Mam wasn’t the only one she was blackmailing. I went to find the bucket beside the gate to Fleming’s field and look what I found.” She took the pin from her pocket, congratulating herself again on having the foresight to pick it up off the ground with a tissue, so as to preserve any fingerprints that were on it.

  Sergeant Brennan leant across to look at the badge she’d dropped in the middle of the table. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a badge. Somebody dropped it in the field near the drop-off point. It’s a pin from the golf club. That should help narrow things down. And…” she sighed. She didn’t know the legality of guessing somebody else’s password, but there was no way she could explain the truth without referring to Granny Coyle’s internet wizardry. “We found a Gmail address in the same name. We weren’t able to get into the Facebook, but the Gmail address had the same password as Mrs Stanley’s own Gmail address.”

  The sergeant’s expression darkened. “And how, Miss McCabe, would you know what her password was?”

  “We…I…I guessed it. It wasn’t hard. She’d been using the computers at the library and her email address must have been saved in the cache there. I tried a few things and then thought of Fort Lauderdale. It’s where her sister lives and apparently she was always mad to go there. There was nothing in her own Gmail but then we… I hit backspace to get out of Gmail and there it was. It was a little list of email addresses that had been accessed from that computer, and this name, Pete Smith, was on there. When I didn’t recognise it, I had my suspicions and sure enough it opened with the same password as Mrs Stanley’s email account.”

  He stared her in the eyes without saying anything, before turning to Garda Fitzpatrick. “What do you think, Garda?”

  Fitzpatrick shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anything like this around town.”

  “No, indeed. It seems far-fetched in the extreme. Tell me this: ye haven’t been watching crime movies, have ye? That’s the only explanation I can think of.”

  Fiona shook her head, unable to believe what she was hearing. “Crime movies? A woman is dead and my mother’s after receiving a blackmail threat. Now, it’s clear from Mrs Stanley’s email address that she’s been threatening more people. In fact, if you get on there, you’ll see responses from a lot of people around Ballycashel. Now, is that not enough for you to get a warrant to get access to the Facebook profile? It’s clear that one of those people is behind her murder. And these are people you didn’t even suspect before.

  “Bernard Boyle, for example. He’s the secretary of the golf club and there was a message in there from him. You see? Maybe the golf club pin and the weird messages don’t mean much alone, but together? There’s something going on here.”

  Brennan blanched. He stared at her for a few moments, seemingly in disbelief. “It’s a lovely little story.” The corners of his mouth were working up and down, as if he was struggling to contain his anger.

  “It’s not,” she said, working hard to stay calm. “It’s a horrible story of greed and murder. I’m trying to help solve it.”

  “Why?” he jeered. “Do you not have enough on your hands running a failing pub? Maybe you should concentrate your energies on doing that instead of wasting Garda time and resources.”

  “I’m not wasting your time! I’m trying to give you important information!”

  “Important information!” he cried, throwing the printed sheets back at her as if they were infected. “This proves nothing! I’ve never heard of Pete Smith. Why would she create a false name?”

  “Um, to keep her identity hidden?”

  “This is nonsense. You’ve no proof of that.”

  “Well look at the messages! Isn’t it clear that there’s a malicious intent behind them?”

  He rolled his eyes so dramatically that he looked like a TV medium at a séance. “Would you go away with your malicious intent! How do I know these are even real? You could have put them together in Photoshop in some misguided attempt to get your mother off the hook!”

  “I can barely even format a table in excel, never mind use Photoshop. Anyway, that’s easily proven. We can log into Mammy’s Facebook account now and I’ll show you the messages.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Don’t you want to solve this thing?”

  He shook his head. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re wasting my time. You’re trying to lay the blame at the feet of other Ballycashel citizens and you’re mad if you think I’m going to tolerate that.”

  “It’s real!” Fiona cried, jumping to her feet and slamming her fist on the table. “I can prove it to you if you’d only listen to me! What’s the harm in investigating these people? I can give you the list.”

  “This isn’t East Germany. You can’t go around spying on your neighbours and getting them into trouble.”

  “I know it’s not! And I’m not spying on anyone.”

  “You admitted yourself that you broke into Mrs Stanley’s email account. Who knows what else you’ve been doing. I ought to charge you for that.”

  “Maybe you ought to,” she cried, shaking her head and turning to leave. “Because it seems like you won’t rest until you have a full collection of McCabes crowded into those cells back there!”

  She stormed out, not waiting to hear his reply.

  Garda Conway was at the desk. He smiled and nodded at her as she passed. “Howaya Fiona?”

  “Hey, Garda Conway. Not great to tell you the truth. How do you put up with him? I don’t understand it. I have leads in the case and he won’t even listen.”

  Conway shook his head, glancing behind him with a hunted expression in his eyes. Fiona had seen the same look in her brother Enda’s eyes after he’d been caught drinking on the night of the leaving cert results, and she knew there was something behind it.

  “What?”

  At that moment, Garda Fitzpatrick, Sergeant Brennan and Margaret McCabe emerged from the sergeant’s office and Garda Conway went to great lengths to look away from Fiona. She stared at him, willing her to explain what had been going through his head, because it had seemed like he was just on the verge of telling her something important. But no, it looked as if he was busying himself with paperwork. She stood staring at him for a while before the sergeant’s presence became repulsive.

  “Come on, Mam. I’ve a good mind to make a complaint to the Garda Commissioner, only I know there’s no point since he’s firmly entrenched in the sergeant’s father’s best friend gang.”

  She stormed out without giving him a chance to reply. She felt no satisfaction at having delivered such an insult, only frustration at his obvious refusal to listen to what she’d been trying to tell him.

  24

  “WELL, WE TRIED,” Margaret said after she’d delivered so much food to the sturdy kitchen table that the poor thing seemed to groan under its weight.

  “Leave it to the guards,” Kate muttered. “Don’t let Fiona carry you away on one of her crusades.”

  “Is it so wrong that I want to keep Mammy out of jail?”

  “She hasn’t done anything wrong. They can’t send her to jail.”

  “You’re so naive!”

  Francis dropped his knife and fork with a clatter. “Stop fighting. It’ll do no-one any good.”

  “Fi has a point, Dad. We’ve got to do something.” Marty looked around at them all.

  Normally, she’d be heartened by the support, but she had lost all sense of optimism. She shook her head, feeling sickened by what she was about to say. “We’ve tried. We’ve tried everything. We can’t get into that Facebook account and there’s no point in incriminating myself with the Gardaí by shouting from the rooftops about it. It’s obvious that Brennan isn’t going to pay any heed to anything we’ve told him.”

  “Well what have we got? We’ve already
found out a lot.”

  Fiona dropped her fork onto her plate. Her mother’s roasts were usually something she looked forward to all day, but she found her appetite was diminished since their visit to the station. She just couldn’t see a way forward in the face of the sergeant’s refusal to listen.

  “There’s no point. If we can’t get the Gardaí’s support, we’re not going to be able to put that information to use.”

  “Oh come on, Fi,” Marty said with his usual good spirits. “Humour me. What’s the harm in going through the details one more time?”

  She sighed and pushed her plate away. She wasn’t hungry anyway so what was the harm?

  “Fine. We know that Alan Power somehow unmasked his blackmailer as Mrs Stanley. He’s been in her house before and he broke in to steal her computer. He may or may not have paid her off.

  “That could be the reason that she started to work from the library—maybe she got rattled that she could be tracked. Then again, maybe he waited at the gate or other drop-off point and found her out that way. Either way, I don’t think he’s our killer. If he was, it would have made far more sense for him to take the computer when he poisoned her, instead of going back for it. Plus there’s the matter of timing. We know he couldn’t have been in Ballycashel at the time she was poisoned.

  “We know at least one of her other blackmail victims found out her identity, but we don’t know who. We also found the golf club pin at the scene of the drop-off. Now, we haven’t been able to pursue that because the secretary of the golf club happens to be on the list of blackmail victims slash suspects.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Francis said. “Leave it with me. I’ll talk to Donnie and find out what’s going on. Do you still have the pin?”

  “No!” Margaret cried. “Fiona gave it to Brennan!”

  Fi smiled and reached in her pocket. “Actually, Mam, I took it back. Remember when I slammed my hand on the table? I grabbed it when he was scowling at me. It’s here. Of course, my fingerprints are probably all over it, but when they’re not going to use it as evidence anyway…”