She half turned. The girl had a bunch of bright marigolds in one hand and a glass vase in the other. She was small and slight with glossy brown hair that hung down her back. Her eyes were grey and her skin was sallow with a faint blush of pink across her cheeks. A row of silver rings decorated her ears and a couple of heavy silver chains were looped around her neck. She was wearing a long red skirt and a white blouse with an embroidered yoke and puffed sleeves. She might have stepped from the pages of a picture book.
‘Oh, I’m not sure. Perhaps if you ask the guy at the gate. He’d know.’ Margaret tried to smile as she spoke.
The girl frowned. ‘That’s a nuisance. I don’t feel like going all the way back over there.’ She looked for a moment as if she might cry.
‘Here.’ Margaret held out her bottle. ‘There’s a bit left in this. Take it if you like.’
The girl smiled and took it. ‘Thanks, that’s great.’ She opened the bottle and emptied it into the small glass vase. She pointed towards the flowers on Patrick’s grave. ‘They’re lovely, those lilies you brought. Except they make me sneeze. I’ve an allergy to the pollen.’
‘The flowers? Oh, they’re not mine.’ Margaret shook her head.
The girl looked at her in a puzzled way. ‘You didn’t put them on Uncle Patrick’s grave?’
‘Uncle Patrick?’ Margaret said. ‘He was your uncle, was he?’
‘Not my real uncle, not by birth, but he was a really good friend of my father and I always called him Uncle.’ The girl stared at her feet. She was wearing red leather clogs. The kind that have a wooden sole. ‘My father died when I was little and he’s buried over there.’ She waved the bunch of flowers in the direction of the trees. ‘I thought I’d come and see him today. It’s so nice here in the summer. It’s quiet and no one bothers you.’
‘Yes.’ Margaret smiled at her. ‘I know what you mean. They’re funny places, graveyards, aren’t they? Surprisingly beautiful, despite all the grief and sorrow they contain.’ She paused. ‘Your flowers are very pretty. I love marigolds. Did you grow them yourself?’
A flush spread across the girl’s face. ‘I didn’t, actually. I pinched them from a neighbour’s garden. I would have asked her but she was out. Anyway, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. I’ll tell her when I go home. I will.’
Margaret wanted to laugh. The girl seemed suddenly awkward, embarrassed and very young.
‘Well, I’m sure it’s OK. After all, it’s in a good cause, isn’t it?’ She bent her face to the flowers. ‘Mm, I like their smell. Marigold flowers are supposed to be really good for blood circulation. Apparently the Arabs feed them to their horses.’
‘I didn’t know that. My father liked horses. He used to keep them once, so my mother says. When he was alive he had a lovely house and lots of land up in the Wicklow mountains. And he had horses up there. And deer. Anyway, I’d better do this.’ She pushed the flowers carefully into the vase. ‘Are you related to Uncle Patrick? I’ve never seen you before. Although,’ she cocked her head on one side so the silver rings in her ears jingled, ‘you do look a bit like his wife, Auntie Crea. In fact, I thought that was who you were when I saw you first. You’re not her sister or something, are you?’
‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m an old friend of Patrick’s from years ago. I’ve been living abroad for a while.’
‘Oh, I see. OK, well, I’d better go. It was nice talking to you. But . . .’ She looked away towards the group of headstones under the tall yews.
‘Sure, of course.’ Margaret smiled. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘Yes, you too. Of course, I should have brought more flowers. My sister is here too. Although she’s in the new part, down by the road. It’s not as nice there. It’s noisy – traffic, you know.’ The girl seemed suddenly stricken, as if tears would come at any moment.
‘Your sister? Oh, I am sorry. Was she older or younger than you?’ Margaret wanted to touch the girl. Give her comfort.
‘She was older. Quite a lot older. I’m nearly eighteen and she was in her thirties. She was my half-sister, really. My father wasn’t her father, you know?’ The girl scuffed the ground with the toe of her clog.
‘How very sad. For you and your mother too.’ Margaret murmured. ‘Don’t worry about the flowers. I’m sure she’d understand. Why don’t you just go and see her anyway? She’d like that.’
‘Do you think so?’ The girl’s expression brightened. She looked hopeful. ‘They like it when you come to visit. The dead, that is. I’m sure they must be bored and lonely. I try to remember as many funny and interesting things to tell them as I can. I read to them too. You don’t think that’s stupid, do you?’
‘No, it’s great. My daughter’s here too. And because I’ve been away I haven’t visited her for ages. I’m sure she’s missed me. But it’s lovely that you care so much. What do you read?’
The girl reached into a big patchwork bag and pulled out a paperback. ‘I’ve been doing Shakespeare’s sonnets in school. For the Leaving Cert. And I love them. They’re difficult to understand but the language is so beautiful. So I read them aloud and, actually, it helps. Listen to this.’ She cleared her throat and flicked over the pages.
‘Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy—’
She broke off. ‘Isn’t that lovely? “Kissing with golden face the meadows green. Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.” I love it.’
‘Yes, I love it too.’ Margaret picked up her bag. Tears had suddenly filled her eyes.
‘Well, I’d better go.’ The girl shoved the book back into her bag. ‘Thanks for the water and . . .’ she smiled ‘ . . . well, just thanks.’
Margaret watched the bright figure thread her way through the graves. Then she turned back towards Patrick’s headstone. She bent down and fiddled with the flowers. ‘I’ll come again. I won’t leave it so long next time.’ She picked up her bag and walked away down the gravel path. A robin hopped ahead of her, jumping on its springy legs from grave to grave, then fixing her with its bright eye. She clicked her tongue at it and it chattered back. Then, with a flurry of its smooth brown wings, it flew up into the dark branches of a spreading evergreen oak. She could see the girl now, her skirt a patch of brightness in the gloom. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground, the book in her hand. She lifted her hand as Margaret passed.
Margaret waved back, then went over to join her. ‘I was just curious – I hope you don’t mind. I was wondering who your father was.’ She leaned down to look at the inscription.
‘James de Paor,’ the girl said, with pride in her voice. ‘He was a barrister, like Uncle Patrick. Are you a barrister too?’
‘No, I’m a doctor,’ she paused. ‘You must have been very young when he died. Only a baby.’
‘Not quite a baby. Nearly one. I don’t remember him. Although everyone says I look like him.’ She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? Inherited characteristics. My mother says I sometimes say things that remind her of my father. And I have likes and dislikes, different foods, you know, that she says are the same as his. I sometimes think it’s that she wants me to be like him so she’s made me like him. You know what I mean?’
‘Yes.’ Margaret nodded. ‘I used to think it was all nurture, and nature didn’t matter, but I’m not so sure any longer. Anyway, it’s good that you’re like him. It must make it easier for your mother. To feel she still has a part of him in you.’
‘Well, as long as she doesn’t want me to do law. I’m not going to get the points in the Leaving Cert for that. I’ll be lucky if I get in to arts. But I don’t care. And she’s so miserable since my sister died that she won’t care either.’
She opened the book again and flicked through the pages. Margaret watched her. Listened to her voice as she read the poem aloud again. Joined in as she walked along the path
towards the main road:
‘Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy . . .’
She went through the high gates, then walked away towards the canal. She would pick up a taxi and be back in the house by the sea in no time. She was tired. She would sleep when she got home. And perhaps this time it would be a sleep without dreams.
NINE
‘Why are you so sure it was suicide? Why not an accident?’ McLoughlin perched on the edge of a high stool at the lab bench that served as Johnny Harris’s desk, lunch counter and lectern.
Harris picked a black olive from a plastic container. He popped it into his mouth and sucked hard, rolled it around, then spat the stone into his cupped hand. ‘Mmm. These are good. Where did you get them?’ He helped himself to another.
‘Middle Eastern shop at the end of South Richmond Street. The guys behind the counter are an unfriendly lot, but they have lovely stuff. They keep those olives loose. And lots of others too. Big, small, green, black, stuffed, unstuffed. But they also have tins of the small green ones that are really good and incredibly cheap. Here,’ he thrust a hand into the plastic bag that nestled at his feet, ‘have one.’
He put the tin on top of Harris’s newspaper, obscuring the half-finished Sudoku puzzle towards which Harris’s gaze kept straying. Harris picked up the tin and scrutinized it, then put it down again. ‘Got anything else of interest in that bag?’ His cheeks bulged with olives.
‘A bunch of coriander, a lump of feta, some hummus.’ McLoughlin dumped them out. ‘A large packet of ground cumin, some paprika – oh, and these are nice.’
‘Let’s see?’ Harris was positively drooling. ‘What are they?’
‘Pickled green peppers. Very hot, but dee-licious.’
Harris pushed his glasses up on top of his head and looked speculatively at McLoughlin. ‘This is all great. And I’m sure we could carry on a long and fascinating conversation about the nature of Middle Eastern food and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, but tell me, Michael, what do you really want?’
His friend didn’t look good, McLoughlin thought. There were dark circles under his eyes and his skin, which usually had the ruddy health of a sailor, was grey and wan. ‘And what’s up with you? Too many late nights? Is that a healthy social life or are you sleepless for some other reason?’ McLoughlin rummaged in the bag again and pulled out a large round of flatbread. He broke off a piece. ‘Like some?’
Harris nodded, and for a moment McLoughlin thought tears were making his eyes shine so brightly.
‘There’s a knife in the drawer.’ He reached over and pulled it out.
McLoughlin split the bread in half and filled it with hummus. He handed it to Johnny. ‘So, Chicko’s gone, has he?’
McLoughlin had never been able to understand Johnny Harris. He was a straight guy in so many ways. Great sailor and tennis-player. A churchgoer to boot. But such terrible taste in men. Chicko, small, dark and handsome, had been the last.
‘Chicko? You want to know about the lovely Chicko? He said I was doing his head in. Whatever that means. So I’m on my own again. Footloose and fancy-free.’ Harris managed a weak smile. Then he cleared away the remains of the food and wiped the counter-top with his handkerchief. He got up and opened one of the huge filing cabinets that lined the walls and tugged out Marina Spencer’s records. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s have a look at these.’
They were the photographs taken post-mortem, arranged in chronological order. The first showed Marina’s body lying twisted on the rocks of the rapids. Her hair streamed out behind her head, pulled free by the flow of water. She was wearing a long dress with an exotic print. Her feet were bare. There were close-ups of her face, her hands, her torso. Her cheekbones and chin were bruised, but the rest of her body seemed untouched.
‘Now, these are the ones that were taken here.’ Johnny spread them out.
McLoughlin had seen such photographs tens, possibly hundreds of times before. They didn’t shock him in the way they used to. Now he could break the image into its constituent parts. He knew what to notice. And what to ignore. He knew that it was important not to see the person as a person. ‘What did you look for?’
‘The usual. Signs of violence. Strangulation. Haemorrhage. Abrasions. Bruising etcetera. She has bruises on her face and, see here, on her ribcage, knees and thighs. But they’re consistent with being carried down on to the rocks by the force of the water.’
‘And nothing else, no sign that she was restrained, tied up in any way?’
‘No, absolutely nothing. See here, these close-ups of her wrists and ankles? Not a scratch.’
‘And she definitely drowned?’
‘Absolutely. Here, I have the content of her lungs. See? Lake water. And we both know that if she’d been dead when she went under she wouldn’t have breathed so there would have been no water.’
‘And what about her blood? What did that show?’
‘OK. Alcohol, three hundred and sixty mls, traces of cocaine. Oh, and LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide, the king or queen of the hallucinogens. A synthetic alkaloid related to ergot. She was out of it.’
‘“Out of it”? Is that a technical term?’ McLoughlin raised his eyebrows.
Harris smiled grimly. ‘Very smart. LSD interferes with the natural action of serotonin in the brain. Induces severe hallucinations, what could be called temporary insanity, similar to schizophrenia. Given the combination of drugs she’d ingested, she would also have had bouts of nausea, followed by intermittent unconsciousness, leading to depressed breathing and eventually, possibly, death. So she was definitely out of it.’
‘But not so out of it that she wouldn’t have been able to get herself into the boat? If she was that bad I can’t see how she could have rowed out into the lake. She must have gone quite a distance because otherwise she would have drifted into the shore close to the house. Where was the boat kept?’
‘There’s a photo somewhere. It was usually tied up at the jetty close to the house. But I doubt she would have been able to row from the house nearly the length of the lake. It must have been somewhere else that night.’
McLoughlin picked up a magnifying-glass and studied the pictures of Marina’s head and face. ‘And where did the dinghy end up?’
‘Umm, let me see . . . Here.’ Harris rummaged through the pile. ‘Yeah, here. It got stuck at the top of the rapids, jammed up against the rocks. So they were both caught in the same current.’
‘But would she really have been able to manage in the boat? I would have thought she’d have passed out, and the boat would have drifted back into the shore, or even if it had ended up stuck on the rapids, she would have been found under a seat or something. From the amount of alcohol in her system it seems to me, the humble layman, that she might have died anyway from alcohol poisoning, but she wouldn’t have drowned. What do you reckon?’
‘Well, I reckon that what you say makes sense except for one thing. Have a look at the photo of the dinghy again. See there – what’s that?’ Harris took the magnifying-glass from him and angled it over the shiny black-and-white print. ‘What is it?’
‘Yeah, a bottle of Smirnoff. So what you’re saying is that she got into the boat, rowed herself out, was probably drinking at the same time, and chucked herself over the side?’
‘Well, that’s consistent with the blood analysis. The fact that her blood alcohol concentration was so high suggests that she died very soon after drinking it.’
‘And what about the others at the party that night?’
‘I’m not the person to ask, Michael. You’d better go and talk to Brian Dooley. I’m sure you’ll have no problem getting his files.’
‘But why suicide, Johnny? I can see accidental, all right.’
‘You’ve read the note, haven’t you? I’ve read it. I’ve read lots of those notes in my time. It rings true.’
‘Not to her mother, it doesn’t. And I wasn’t convinced either.’
‘OK, you’re the expert. I’m sure if there was force involved you’d have found signs of it. So . . .’ His voice trailed off.
‘Anyway,’ Harris rocked back on his stool, ‘what are you doing getting involved in all this? I thought you were on your way to Brittany or somewhere.’
‘I’m waiting to hear the details. Paul Brady is to call me about it. In the meantime I thought I’d keep myself busy. Old habits die hard, you know.’ He slid off the stool and picked up the plastic bag. ‘Here,’ he held out the bag, ‘I’ll leave you some of the goodies. Half of everything. The hummus, the olives and the bread. You take them. You look like you could do with feeding up. You’re as skinny as hell, Harris, my boy. Take, eat and enjoy.’
The two men walked outside into the sunshine. McLough-lin’s car was parked beside Harris’s Range Rover, which looked as if it could do with a long session at the car wash. It was mud-spattered from top to bottom. Harris pulled out his gold pocket watch and flipped open the lid. ‘Christ, look at the time. I was due at the morgue, like, half an hour ago.’ He opened the rear door of the Range Rover and threw the plastic bag inside, next to his sailing gear.
‘Anything interesting?’
‘Not sure. Did you hear about the woman who was found dead in bed last night?’ Harris fumbled with his keys.
‘Yeah, it was Rathmines or somewhere, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Heart of suburbia. I had a quick look at her in situ. Hard to tell. Could be one of your suicides. Or could be what I’ve taken to calling “husband-assisted death”.’
McLoughlin laughed and put his key into the lock. ‘Lot of it about, these days You’d think with the legalization of divorce that guys would take the more conventional route to freedom.’
I Saw You Page 6
