Cruel Winter: A County Cork Mystery

by Sheila Connolly

  “I’m thinkin’ the gardaí may have bigger problems than worryin’ about you servin’ toast. If they come pokin’ around, tell ’em it’s a private party and yeh forgot to get the special license.”

  “I will. It’s more or less true anyway. Can you remember a storm like this?”

  “As a kid, maybe, but they all seemed bigger then. Not often, fer sure.”

  “Coffee’s ready,” Rose announced, “and I’ve sliced all the bread. If the guys want it toasted, they’re on their own.”

  “Fair enough. Go on and tell them—I’ll be out in a minute,” Maura told her. She watched as Rose juggled a plate stacked with bread and a large aluminum coffee pot she’d found who knew where, then was greeted with cheers in the front room. Then she turned back to Mick. “You think it’s worth going on with what we started last night—with Diane, I mean—or should we just let it rest?”

  Mick didn’t answer right away. Finally, he said, “Yeh’ve raised some good points, I’ll admit. Like who’d the woman open the door to. And the boots. That kind of says that she went out by choice, but she didn’t expect to meet her death. Why not leave it to Diane? It’s her life, after all. She’s sold the old farm, and she’s ready to close the door on all of it.”

  “Fair enough. It’s not really my problem, is it?”

  “Yeh seem to have made it your own, Maura. Why would that be?”

  “If Diane is innocent, if the gardaí got it wrong, I think that should come out, I guess. Nobody’s managed to prove she did it, but it’s screwed up her life anyway. That doesn’t seem right. And I guess I have to wonder if that’s because she was an outsider. Like me.”

  “She’s no more or less an outsider than yeh are—both of yez have grandparents from here.”

  “That’s true—I hadn’t looked at it that way. Look, if she says no to it, I’ll let it go. We’ve got enough to worry about today.”

  She headed into the front room, where most people were now upright and looking busy. Several were seated along the bar with coffee mugs in their hands—Rose had apparently managed to wash all those up the night before. Someone had added plenty of fuel to the fireplace. Billy was still in his favorite place, and Gillian had reclaimed the matching chair on the other side of the fireplace. Rose looked like she was having a good time managing the guys who wanted to toast their bread, making them line up and be patient as she doled out long-handled forks.

  Diane too had a coffee mug in hand but was standing in the corner, watching warily. Did that signal that she was retreating again? Maura decided that she might as well find out what she wanted now, before someone else brought it up. She made her way over to the woman. “How you doing this morning?”

  “Stiff, I guess. Thanks for the coffee. You have any idea when we’ll be able to get out of here?”

  “If it was Boston, I might be able to guess, but this is my first winter here. Mick says it doesn’t happen often, so probably most people don’t have a clue about what to do.”

  “I guess I wouldn’t either,” Diane said. “Listen, Maura, about last night . . .”

  “Look, Diane, if you don’t want to talk about it anymore, that’s okay. Or if you’d rather talk just to me or someone else instead of to the whole group, that’s fine too. Your call.”

  Diane hesitated. “I’d have to say I’m of two minds about going forward. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to put this behind me, and if I’d had any sense, I probably could have found a solicitor in Schull or Cork city and sold the place without leaving England. Instead, I chose to come back. Maybe it was a silly, sentimental choice, but I remember being happy on the farm when my grandparents were alive. I guess I wanted to see for myself if I could call up anything like that again.”

  “And you decided to sell,” Maura said.

  “I did, but it doesn’t make me happy. The thing is, even if my name was cleared—if the real killer was found and convicted—I’m not sure it would change anyone’s mind around here. I’ve been their favorite suspect for nearly twenty years. That’s a whole generation.”

  Maura chose her words carefully. “I see what you’re saying, but that cuts both ways. I’ve been here less than a year, but people remember my family—the good things. They’ve helped me a lot from the day I arrived because of who my grandmother was. I wouldn’t still be here if they hadn’t—I’d never planned to stay.”

  “And how does that apply to me?” Diane asked.

  “Because you do have roots here. People knew your grandparents and the history of the land, right? Were they good people? Honest, hardworking, all that stuff?”

  “They were, I’d say. You’re telling me that’s what people will choose to remember, rather than the fact that a lot of them believed I could kill someone I barely knew?”

  “Maybe. Like I said, I’m the new kid here, so I’m not going to guess how those people out there feel. It’s up to you to find out which side they’ll land on. You walk away, you close that door. What have you got to lose by wrapping up what we started last night?”

  Diane smiled. “Ah, Maura, I wish you’d been here back when it all happened. You would have cut through all the fuss.”

  Maura smiled back. “I’d have been six years old and totally useless to you. But I know what you mean. You want to kick this off?”

  “Why not?” Diane stepped out of the corner and stood in front of the fire, waiting until she had the attention of most of the room. “Folks, last night we all took a long, hard look at Sharon Morgan’s murder, the one people think I committed twenty years ago. With Maura’s help, I think you all came up with some new ideas, things that weren’t seen back then. It looks like we’ll be stuck here a bit longer, until the roads are cleared, so I’m asking you now—do you want to see this through? Or maybe I should start with the question, how many of you still think I did it?”

  There were some furtive glances exchanged, and a couple of the men raised a hand.

  Diane pressed on, “How many of you think I didn’t?” Three or four hands went up, including Rose’s and Gillian’s.

  “How many of you haven’t decided?” At least half the hands went up.

  “Fair enough—and that’s better than it was when we started. Okay, last question: how many of you want to see if you can figure out who else might have done it, if it wasn’t me?”

  After a long moment, a majority of the hands crept up. “If it don’t take too long,” Danny called out.

  “It’s been an open case fer close to two decades,” Mick said. “Now yeh want an answer in an hour or two?”

  “Hey, we did all the hard stuff last night,” Maura informed him. “There’s not many suspects to choose from.”

  Diane smiled. “Thank you, Maura. You want to summarize what we’ve figured out so far?”

  How had she gotten herself into this? She was lousy at civics and hated public speaking, and now she was defending a suspected murderer. Had she skipped that page in the pub owners’ handbook? She cleared her throat. “Okay, guys, don’t throw things at me—I’m not good at this. I think what we figured out last night was a couple of important things that a woman might think of but not a man.”

  A couple of the men in the room booed, but they were smiling.

  “Give the lady a chance,” Billy said, and the noise subsided.

  “Thank you, Billy. One, Sharon wouldn’t have opened the door to just anyone—a stranger in a ditch, say. She wasn’t a very friendly type of person, and she was a woman alone at night, so she would have been cautious. You all buy that?”

  Most people nodded.

  “So for her to open the door late at night, she would have to have trusted whoever was at the door. Either it was another woman, which didn’t frighten her, or it was someone she knew.”

  “Diane fits that, right?” one of the naysayers called out.

  “Yes, she does, but we’re looking at other possibilities right now, okay? So this person comes to the door, and Sharon opens it to him or her, and the perso
n tells her a story—there’s some kind of trouble, and can Sharon help? So Sharon puts on her outside boots—and that’s a big red flag for me. She’s in her at-home grubbies and she doesn’t change, which to me makes it look like she’s in a hurry, but she stops long enough to sit down and pull on her high boots and lace them up before she goes out. What does that tell you?”

  “She was going somewhere mucky?” Bart suggested.

  “Yes, or at least on uneven ground. She had a car—why didn’t she take that?”

  “It wasn’t far? Or whatever the emergency was, it was someplace a car couldn’t go?”

  “Right. Maybe both. Someone came and asked for her help and needed it fast. This person couldn’t handle whatever it was by himself. Or herself. Sharon was the closest person to ask. She said yes, she’d help. So she puts on her boots and goes out with this person into the dark and rain. And she only makes it as far as the end of her property, close to a regular path where somebody was likely to find her. She’s stabbed many times. She doesn’t seem to have put up a fight. Nobody found the knife. Nobody could give any reason she would be where she was found.”

  “What about the mystery lover?”

  “If there was a lover. Look, she was home alone. Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to invite him in, where it was warm and dry?”

  “Maybe he liked to do it in the rain?”

  There were a few sniggers at that comment. “With the woman wearing boots?” Maura shot back. “Let’s keep it clean, boys. Seriously, what reason would a lover have had to take her outside? No, I think somebody made up a reason to get her out of the house. Someone who knew she was there alone. Someone who knew what her soft spots were and what she would be willing to help with. Someone who was angry enough at her to stab her over and over again, after convincing her that someone needed her help. Someone who planned this whole thing.” Maura looked over the crowd: everyone seemed to be paying attention. “The question is, who was that person?”

  Twenty-One

  “Yeh know,” Jimmy said suddenly, “it still comes back to the motive. Why’d this person do it?”

  “You’re right, Jimmy,” Maura said, trying to encourage his participation if he was going to be serious about it. “We haven’t given him one yet. Is there something about Irish law that says motive doesn’t matter? Or can’t be considered?”

  Jimmy waved a hand dismissively. “We’re not in a courtroom here, are we now? What’s important to most ordinary people is knowing why someone would do such a thing. Even if the reason only makes sense to whoever done it, and they’re seriously messed up in the head—it has to make sense to someone. Nobody is sitting in front of the fire and suddenly sez, ‘I do believe I feel like murderin’ someone.’ There’s got to be a reason. And some time to think about it. So this guy makes up his mind, ‘I want to murder Sharon or whoever because . . .’ and once he’s worked that out in his head, he goes on, ‘And the best way to do it would be . . .’ Am I right? It’s not like a fight in a pub that gets out of hand, and one guy grabs up a chair and whacks his mate over the head with it. Somebody had to give this murder some thought. And he had to have a reason,” Jimmy finished triumphantly.

  It was possibly the longest single speech Maura had ever heard Jimmy make—and he had boiled down the situation pretty well. Motive might not be a legal issue, but it certainly was a human one. People wanted to believe that most killers had a reason to kill, not just a random urge to end a life. And this particular murder didn’t offer many options for motive. Maybe in the beginning of the investigation somebody—garda or journalist—had hinted that it was all about sex, and that had made people uncomfortable, and they hadn’t looked any harder. “Oh, right, it was all about the adultery, enough said.” Since the two husbands had solid alibis, Diane had been next in line as a target, as the wronged wife. They might have assumed that her husband’s affair would have made her angry if her husband was really messing around with Sharon, and that was enough motive. At least nobody had tried to manufacture evidence—it could have been worse.

  “So where’s that list we made?” Diane asked. “I seem to remember we eliminated quite a few people. Who’s left that fits with this new point of view?” She sounded no more than mildly curious, rather than eager.

  Billy fished around behind his chair and pulled out the slightly rumpled piece of paper. “Would this be it?” he asked.

  “It is, Billy.” Maura smoothed it out and laid it on a table. “So last night—possibly under the influence of drink—we decided that the two husbands were the most likely suspects if we set aside Diane, but they both had alibis, and even though we tried really hard to put them in two places at once, it didn’t work. Our Possible list has a former patient of Sharon’s, over from England; a hit man hired by one or the other husband; a local shop owner that Sharon hadn’t bothered to pay; a blackmailer of some sort; and a neighbor with some kind of emergency. Remember that the gardaí never found a stranger that fit the bill. Anybody want to add someone else?”

  “Who was it that said, ‘The simplest solution is usually the right one’?” Bart asked.

  “Sherlock Holmes?” Liam called out.

  “Nah, some ancient philosopher or somethin’ long before Sherlock,” Bart replied. “Don’t they teach you kids anything in school these days?”

  Maura ignored Bart’s comment. “And which of these candidates is the simplest solution?”

  “The neighbor with a problem,” Jimmy said.

  “Right,” Maura said. “But the gardaí talked to all the neighbors, didn’t they?”

  “Of course they did,” Bart said, sounding a bit defensive. “Many times over. The local gardaí did, and then those from the other stations as well.”

  “And nobody the gardaí talked to looked likely to them,” Maura said. “There were no accidents reported, no medical emergencies, and no missing kids or even a cow. How many of those neighbors had dogs?”

  Men looked at each other and shrugged. “Like we said last night, if it was a farm, there’d be a dog or two,” Joe said.

  Maura refused to be discouraged. “The Laytons lived closest. We know the Laytons had a dog, and they walked their dog near Sharon’s house a lot of the time. That’s how they found the body.”

  “That’s right,” Seamus agreed. “But why would they kill the woman and then just happen to find the body?”

  “You tell me,” Maura challenged. “What did the Laytons tell the gardaí?”

  Seamus stretched and looked up at the ceiling. “Seems I remember Ellen Layton had hysterics and had to be put to bed. It were her husband called the gardaí, back at their house.”

  Which left Sharon’s body unguarded for a while, Maura realized. But then, it had been unguarded all night anyway—what was another hour or two? “Did the gardaí stop first at their house to talk to them?”

  “Must’ve done, wouldn’t they?” Seamus said. “If Ellen was too gutted to hang around near the body. So Denis got her calmed down at the house, then showed the gardaí where to find Sharon.”

  “Did they talk to Ellen that day?”

  “Not much to be told, is there? They were walking the dog, like they often did. They found Sharon, dead. Ellen went to pieces, and Denis took her home and made his call. Her story never changed, nor did her husband’s. What’s it matter when they were asked?”

  “Think about it,” Maura said impatiently. “Who could be better to report finding Sharon? They had every reason to be there, since they lived next door—they often walked their dog past Sharon’s house. If their footprints and stuff were found on the scene, they had the perfect excuse. And if they had carried away any evidence from the killing, like blood on their clothes or shoes, they had plenty of time to clean it up or get rid of the clothes or whatever. And plenty of time to sort out their stories.”

  “But they were nice people!” Seamus protested.

  “And Sharon wasn’t?”

  “The people there knew the Laytons. They didn’t kn
ow Sharon near as well,” Seamus said.

  “What about yer precious motive, then?” Jimmy asked.

  “We kind of talked about that last night—the land,” Maura said impatiently. “Look, I didn’t grow up around here, but from listening to a lot of you, I get the idea that land really matters to you, or to your families. I mean, you know who owned which field a century ago. Am I wrong?”

  “Yer not, Maura,” Seamus said. “I can’t speak for the towns, but in the country it matters who owns what. People who build new homes here often as not build right next to or even over top of the old family cottage. So yeh may be on to somethin’.”

  “Thank you, Seamus.” Maura turned back to the group to appeal to them. “We may not have all the facts, but isn’t it possible that the Laytons bought back the field for their cattle business and got it cheap? It’s simple enough to check property records, isn’t it? That would be a motive, sort of.” Even if it was a long shot, Maura added to herself.

  “Mebbe, or not,” Seamus said. “If yeh’d met the Laytons, yeh’d have a hard time seein’ them as plotters and schemers, much less killin’ anyone. And they were strapped for money, so how’d they manage to buy anything?”

  “Seamus, I don’t know. I’m just looking for possibilities. Do they still live there?”

  “They do—or rather, the missus does. The mister died a few years back.”

  “So at least they managed to keep the business going back then. Which one of them could have done it?”

  “Yeh mean the killing?” Bart said. “Denis or Ellen? The gardaí took a hard look at ’em at the time, since they were first on the scene, but it went no further. Hard to see either one doin’ somethin’ like that.”

  But they could see Diane doing it? “Do you know what a killer looks like, any of you? Bart? Seamus? Or look at it from the other side: can you imagine yourself killing anyone under just the right conditions?”

  Some of the men exchanged glances. “In the heat of the moment, mebbe,” Bart said. “Happens now and then. But planning it out ahead? Not likely. And of this lot, I’d know best how to do it. The rest of ’em would just muck it up.”