Cruel Winter: A County Cork Mystery

by Sheila Connolly

  Maura followed and turned to the group. “Diane wants to keep going. Do any of you want to quit? It’s getting late, and you can make yourselves comfortable and go to sleep if that’s what you want.”

  “This is better than the telly,” Seamus said, grinning. “Our own reality show, like. I fer one want to know more. I want to hear the rest of the story. Youse guys, are yeh with me?” He looked around the room. Most people nodded. Rose, still behind the bar, flashed Maura a smile. Jimmy still looked pissed off at something, but Maura wasn’t going to take it personally.

  “All right, then. Where were we?”

  Diane cleared her throat. “May I say something?”

  “Of course—it’s your show.”

  Diane started pacing in front of the fire. “Look, I understand why the gardaí—and a lot of other people—looked to me as the killer. Really, I do. I was an outsider, even if my grandparents did come from around here. I had more money than most people. I was independent—I didn’t always travel with my husband. And that last point matters. My husband was having an affair with Sharon. I knew that. Maybe calling it an affair made it more than it really was. Let’s just say they got together when the opportunity arose, which wasn’t all that often. I don’t know who else knew they were involved—as I’m sure you know, it isn’t easy around here to see who’s going where when.”

  Diane swallowed. “Sharon wasn’t the only one, for that matter, although she was the only one here, as far as I know. But to tell the truth, I was debating about leaving my husband that winter. That’s another reason he wasn’t here with me on that trip. I told him to stay home because I wanted to think. By myself.”

  “Were yeh angry with Sharon?” Joe called out.

  Diane faced him. “No, I wasn’t. Don’t believe me if that’s what you want. As I said, she wasn’t the only one. She wasn’t the first one. My husband was—and is—a jerk.”

  “Yer still with him, aren’t you?” Danny asked.

  “I am. It’s complicated. How many of you are married?” About half the people in the room raised a hand slowly. “Okay. The rest of you, have you been married in the past?” A couple more hands came up. “So most of you know what marriage—or at least a long-term partnership—is like, right? We didn’t have children together. We both had jobs that we liked. We had plenty of money. We took a hard look at our lives and decided it wasn’t worth splitting up.” Diane held up a hand. “Before you judge me, I know that isn’t a decision that you’d like. We weren’t madly in love, and I don’t think we ever were. He’d been married before. We were adults when we got together, and we had a more or less happy life. I knew he slept around. If it matters to you, I didn’t. I wasn’t out to prove anything, to get some kind of payback. I just never met anybody I was that interested in. So Mark and I muddled along, and I ignored his affairs, and eventually they ended. Sharon was nothing special. Mark wasn’t planning to leave me to marry her.”

  “Why are yeh tellin’ us this?” Joe asked suddenly.

  “I’m telling you I didn’t care what Mark did with Sharon—or anybody else—because that means I had no motive for killing Sharon. She wasn’t that important to me. Why would I lure her out in the middle of the night and stab her however many times? It makes no sense. But the gardaí had trouble believing that—they thought I should be angry.”

  “Why should we believe yeh?” Danny asked.

  Diane shrugged. “Because it’s the truth. Think about it, will you? The gardaí found no evidence on which to arrest me. If I’d been in Sharon’s house that night, if we’d shared a cup of tea or a drink or whatever, wouldn’t I have left something behind? Fingerprints? Hair? Spit? Anything?”

  “You coulda cleaned it all up,” Bart said.

  “When?” Diane shot back quickly. “Okay, say I was there, and we were chatting. How would I have convinced her to go outside with me? She was in her sleeping clothes, for God’s sake. It was January and cold. Did I say, ‘Hey, let’s take a walk, shall we? Admire the stars?’ Does anyone even remember the weather that night?”

  “It was rainin’. A soft rain, mebbe, but no stars,” Bart said.

  “Fine, no stars. You’re saying I convinced Sharon to take a walk—in the rain, in the middle of the night. Somehow I concealed a large sharp knife, and when we reached the fence, I faced her and stabbed her. Again and again. Can you imagine me—or any woman of my size—doing that? Not one single blow, but blow after blow. While she stood in front of me and never even fought back.”

  “You’d have surprised the woman, would you not?” Seamus said.

  “Well, yes, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have guessed I wanted to kill her—if I was even there. But hear me out. You’d have me standing there in the pitch dark, with the knife in my hand and Sharon dead at my feet, yes? And there would have been blood, wouldn’t there? All over myself. So then you’d say I turned around, got rid of the knife somewhere, in the bog, maybe, and walked home to clean myself up, and I concealed anything that might have had her blood on it. And then after that, I went back to Sharon’s house and made sure to remove any fingerprints or anything else I might have left? Do you really believe that?”

  Nobody spoke.

  Diane went on, “The gardaí went over that house: no blood inside anywhere. The only blood was where she died. And they looked at my house very carefully, and they found no blood there. They looked at my clothes and my shoes and my drains and anywhere they could think of, and there was no blood. I’m not that good a cleaner, I promise you. There was no evidence. The gardaí never arrested me. They talked to me, yes, that very day, and they found nothing. And whatever you may think of me, it’s not possible that I could have brutally murdered a woman I knew and left her out in the rain, then run home and cleaned myself up, then run to her place and cleaned that up as well. It couldn’t be done. Just think about it, will you? All of you? Not possible.”

  Maura almost smiled. Trust a woman to think about how long it took to really get something clean—and all the investigators had been men.

  Sixteen

  A sudden thought hit Maura. “Is there a map for this? I mean, something that shows whose house was where? Remember, I’ve never seen the area.”

  Diane looked at her as though she’d gone nuts. “I don’t carry one around with me. There may be a map in my car, which is now buried out there under the snow, but I doubt it would show the kind of detail you want, I’m guessing.”

  “Can you sketch one from memory?”

  “I suppose, since I’ve just been over the details with my solicitor for my property. But why does it matter?”

  “Because I don’t know who lived where or how far apart. Anybody here know?” Maura asked the crowd. Most of them looked blank. “That’s what I thought. For years, you’ve been hearing that So-and-So was the closest neighbor, or What’s-His-Name lived too far away to be part of it. But what does that really mean? Hey, I grew up in a city. I know city blocks and how long it takes to get from one place to another. But we’re talking about country, right? Fields and fences and hedgerows. Bogs. Cow and cow pats. Sheep. We’ve already said that it was dark and raining. A stranger would have had to stick to the roads, right? And people would have noticed a car.”

  Liam finally spoke. Had he been napping? “It was dark and cold. People’s windows would be shut. They might not have heard nor seen a car passing.”

  Trust a musician to think of the sound of things, Maura thought. “Good point. If we’re doing a map, we need to show how close the houses were to the lanes and if anyone could have seen anything outside. Diane, can you at least get us started?”

  “I’ll need some paper, I guess. Do you have a big sheet of it?”

  “Uh . . .” Maura said.

  “There’s a roll of drawing paper in my car,” Gillian volunteered. “If someone could go out and get it.”

  “I’ll go,” Jimmy said abruptly. “I can use the air. Where’s the car?”

  “Just by the bridge,” Gillia
n told him. “It’s not locked. The paper would be in the back seat.”

  “The blue car, yeh?”

  “Yes.”

  Jimmy grabbed his coat from a peg by the door and stomped out, slamming the door behind him. From the brief glimpse outside, Maura could see only more blowing snow. The storm didn’t seem to be stopping.

  She turned back toward the room. “Okay, we’ll need something flat for Diane to draw on. Let’s push a couple of tables together. Will that work for you, Diane?”

  “Sure, why not? And some light, please. I can’t do this in the dark.”

  A couple of the men leapt up and starting moving furniture. Others set about rearranging the chairs. Billy remained in his usual seat, watching, a half smile on his face. Maura went over to his side, mostly to stay out of the way.

  “A smart idea, that,” Billy said quietly.

  “I just wanted to get a picture of the layout in my head, you know? I’ve never seen the place. I’m still getting used to how places around here relate to each other. I can look at a map, but that doesn’t tell me about some ancient right-of-way or the path that everybody uses that’s not on the map. Sure, maybe it was five miles to the nearest neighbor from Sharon’s house, but if there was a shortcut, who would know about it?”

  “Yer thinkin’ that this had to be someone local, are you not? Else they would’ve gone bumbling around in the dark, makin’ a lot of noise and fuss—or fallin’ into the bog.”

  “I guess that’s what I’m getting at. Someone who knew the cottage and how to get there, anyway. I’m going to make a big leap and say that there wasn’t somebody from somewhere else staking out Sharon, looking for the right moment to kill her—that seems kind of ridiculous. And wouldn’t the gardaí have found someone who had seen a stranger lurking around? Anyway, if we assume it was a local person who knew the land, that can’t be a very big group.”

  “Are yeh thinkin’ the gardaí didn’t have the same idea?”

  “I hope they did. But didn’t someone say they came from more than one station? So not everyone would have known the layout of that specific townland or thereabouts. Or the people who lived there.”

  “That’s a fair point, Maura.” Billy nodded with approval.

  If they had had Internet handy, Maura thought, they could call up the newspaper reports from 1996—there might have been a map. Maybe. But there was no laptop and no power. Funny, wasn’t it, that they were looking at the evidence now the way it might have been done when Sharon died? No fancy tools, just personal knowledge and common sense.

  Jimmy slammed back in, clutching a thick roll of paper. “Sure, it’s desperate out! The wind would skin you alive.” He shook himself like a dog to get the snow off, then crossed the room to hand the roll to Diane.

  “Thank you, Jimmy,” Diane said sweetly. She laid the roll on the bare table and unrolled a piece about three feet long, then tore it off. “Could you nice fellas find a way to hold it down?”

  Several men all but tripped over themselves offering ways to fasten the paper so it wouldn’t slide around. Maura decided to stay out of it—let them sort things out. Eventually the paper was attached more or less securely to the tabletop.

  “All right, then. Diane, will you do this?” Maura said.

  “I can try. But don’t hold it against me if I get the distances wrong. Anyone have something to write with?” Diane looked around. “Pencil? Pen? Marker?”

  Bart fished a felt-tip marker out of a pocket and presented it to her with a flourish. “There yeh are. And we’re only after setting out the relationships of the places. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

  “Thank you.” Diane took the marker that Bart held out toward her, pulled her chair closer to the table, and leaned forward. “Where do I start?”

  “Schull,” Maura said. “That’s the nearest town, isn’t it? And most people here know where that is.”

  “Right.” Diane made a circle about an inch across in the center of the paper and labeled it. “Now what?”

  “Where was Sharon’s house?”

  “Let me think,” Diane said, then pointed to the Schull circle.

  “The N71 here runs as far as Ballydehob to the east. Then you take a smaller road to Schull—I forget the number. Once you’ve passed through Schull, it’s maybe another five miles south to Sharon’s place, maybe a bit less. Toward the water but not in sight of it.”

  “Are there many roads?” Maura asked.

  “No more than here, I’m guessing. Mostly farm lanes. I can draw you the main roads, but not all the small ones.”

  “Fine. Put in the ones you know, and then show us where the properties were.”

  Diane thought again and then sketched in a road running roughly from northeast to southwest. “Sharon’s place was about here.” She made an X on the map, maybe six inches south of Schull on the paper. “Mine was here.” Diane made another X about six inches from the first, farther west. “The Laytons, who found her in the morning, lived here—their land abutted Sharon’s.” She made a smaller X between Schull and Sharon’s house.

  “Were there other neighbors?”

  “Some. Mainly farther out. The ones who’d been there for generations, who were still farming. Like the Fosters that I mentioned. You want me to add those?”

  “Can you make a guess? How many different places?”

  “Five or ten, maybe. Things may have changed since. They were pretty evenly scattered about.” After another moment, Diane added a few more Xs and labeled them with names.

  “All right, what about bogs?”

  “There was a bog that lay between my property and Sharon’s,” she added. “I’ve told you that you wouldn’t want to try to cross it at night. Sharon put up a fence there so no animal would stray into it. Although animals are usually fairly smart about things like that. But she hadn’t been raised in the country, so she wouldn’t know.” Diane crosshatched an area near the X for Sharon’s place.

  “Was that the only bog?” Maura asked.

  “The biggest one, certainly. There were patches here and there, depending on the weather any year. Even upland bogs.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can run into a bog on a hillside—they’re not all low-lying. They’re not usually deep, but they can surprise you if you walk into one.”

  “If you were walking, how long would it take you to get from one house to another?”

  “By the road? Maybe ten minutes from the closest houses. Across the land, it could vary widely.”

  “Or if someone was to come by water?” Donal said suddenly, breaking his long silence.

  Diane peered at him in the dim light. “You mean, if they arrived in a boat and walked to the house?” She sketched in a shoreline to the south.

  “Could it be done?”

  “If you knew where you were going, maybe. Might take half an hour once you got off the boat.” Diane studied the map for a moment, then pointed. “Here’s the closest beach where you could land a small boat. And of course, there’s Schull—they have a good harbor. But again, it was a miserable night, which would have made it harder for anyone on the water.”

  “Say the husband went to his party or pub or whatever back in England to set himself an alibi,” Donal said. He seemed to have finally gotten into the spirit of the discussion. “And then he ducked out and found someone with a fast boat to take him across. How long would that take?”

  Diane stared at him. “I have no idea. I think it would have to be a very fast boat.”

  “Did yer man know boats?” Bart asked.

  “Barely. He’d been out with friends, I think, but he couldn’t manage one on his own.”

  “Could the man have rented a plane?” Seamus asked.

  Absurd though the question was, Maura felt a small thrill: now the guys were thinking outside the box, which at least meant they were willing to consider someone other than Diane as the killer. “Diane, did he have the money or the connections to do that?”

&n
bsp; Diane turned to her. “I have no idea. I don’t think Mark would have had the cash, but I can’t speak for Paul. I saw Paul only a few times, and we certainly didn’t talk about money. Sharon didn’t flash any around.”

  “He was a property developer, though, so it’s possible?” Maura pressed.

  “Two problems with that, even if he had the money fer the plane,” Mick said suddenly. “One, where could he have landed the thing that would be close to the house? And two, that would have meant involving other people—a pilot and someone with a car to get him from the plane to the house and back. Somewhere there would have been a record—a charge to his account or a lump of cash he’d taken out. Something. The gardaí would’ve looked.”

  “But would the gardaí have looked that hard?” Maura demanded. “Would they have looked at his business accounts? Remember, the gardaí were local. They were thinking it was a local crime involving people in West Cork, not flying in from who knows where. They weren’t looking at international connections, were they? At least, not after they’d talked to the alibi witnesses in London. They wouldn’t have seen the need to.”

  Mick looked exasperated. “Maura, yer tryin’ too hard. Say he did hire a plane and paid the pilot enough to shut him up. And he knew where to tell the pilot to land. The timing would have been tight. Both Paul and Mark were seen in London at eleven. Sharon died sometime between supper and when the neighbors found her in the mornin’. I don’t know much about air speeds and the like, but I’m not sure it’s possible. When was Paul seen again in London?”

  “Sometime the next day,” Diane said. “Once Sharon’s body was found and identified, the gardaí called him and found him at home. Nobody thought to look at the time between.”

  “His motive would have been the same as yer own, right?” Mick said. “If he knew his wife was seeing other men behind his back.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. She and I didn’t exactly share that kind of information, and I was too far away from the house to see who was coming or going.”