St Ernan's Blues: An Inspector Starrett Mystery

by Paul Charles

  ‘It had to be someone who didn’t mind that they wouldn’t be on a traditional date, someone who didn’t mind that it wasn’t going to go somewhere.’

  ‘Someone like another married woman?’ Gibson suggested. ‘Maybe even a protective mother?’

  ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the stomach doesn’t miss!’ Starrett exclaimed. ‘Stop the car here.’

  ‘But we’ll be double parked,’ she complained.

  ‘What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and not be able to park his car wherever he wants to? On top of which, we’re the gardaí.’

  Starrett had hopped out before Gibson had even a chance to pull up. He actually ran into the home bakery, and if Gibson’s eyes weren’t deceiving her, he jumped the queue and came running back with a white bag nestled securely between his hand and his chest.

  ‘However,’ he said, when he was settled back in, secured by his seat belt, ‘what the eye does see,’ he continued, patting the bag he was now holding on to for dear life, ‘that is to say half a dozen freshly baked wee cheesecakes, then the stomach most definitely misses.’

  When Starrett walked back into St Ernan’s, the first thing he noticed was the strength of the stale smell he’d experienced on previous visits. To expel the staleness from his nostrils, he stole a quick whiff from within his cheesecake bag as he rushed up the stairs. He knocked on Father Robert O’Leary’s door, directly across the landing from where the stairwell emerged into the bright light from the large window. The beam was breaking through the clouds for the first time in days and it was so sharp, he felt it should be spiritually empowered, like the torch of God.

  Father O’Leary welcomed the two of them and seemed as equally tickled as the inspector about the prospect of the cheesecakes. Starrett felt as though he’d just been to the tuck shop and now he was about to share his spoils.

  ‘We’ll save them to have with a fresh cup of tea,’ Father O’Leary insisted, and Starrett couldn’t have been happier. Full stop, he just couldn’t have been happier.

  ‘How are you progressing on the case?’ the father asked as they settled down to their tea and cheesecakes.

  ‘Well, we’ve managed to rule Father McCafferty out; his alibi is solid,’ Starrett admitted.

  ‘Okay,’ Father O’Leary replied. ‘What about the Mrs Orla O’Connor business – will you do anything about that?’

  ‘Father McCafferty is in the hands of the Fraud Squad now, they’ll take care of all that,’ Starrett offered, stopping for the final bite of his first cheesecake and a swig of his strong tea before breaking the pause with, ‘I’ve been thinking about your own investigative work and I was wondering if you’d had a chance to see if there could be any connection between some of that work and Father McKaye’s death.’

  ‘As I mentioned last time, those under scrutiny themselves don’t even know we carry out the investigations.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Starrett said, ‘I hear you, but at the same time, I know certain members of the ministry who, should they be investigated, wouldn’t just allow it to stop there. They’d use their considerable clout to discover who was behind their potential downfall.’

  ‘For some of the same reasons of confidentiality I mentioned earlier, I can’t explain to you why I know this, but I can tell you: there is no reason to even suspect Father Matthew’s loss of life was due to my investigations,’ O’Leary said, with such a degree of finality that Starrett felt it would be counter-productive to continue with this thread. ‘So where does that leave you?’ he said, offering Starrett at least a bit of a lifeline.

  ‘Okay, Father O’Leary, I will take you into my confidence in the hope you’ll take me into yours,’ Starrett said, noting that even though the priest didn’t seem all that impressed, his Ban Garda definitely seemed to be. ‘Earlier today I discovered that Father Matthew was having an affair with a married woman.’

  The priest didn’t bat an eyelid.

  This fact threw Starrett completely off his stride. If Father O’Leary knew all about the affair, and he clearly did, why hadn’t he told him? Then the detective remembered their earlier conversation, when the priest had pretty much admitted he wouldn’t shop anyone, but if Starrett came to him with legitimate information, he would confirm it to be true.

  ‘I did try to drop you a little hint that Father Matthew was not exactly what we’d consider perfect material for the priesthood.’

  Taking all this in, the inspector became convinced that if he’d managed to film the priest for the last minute or so, and he re-ran said film several times over, he’d have been able to confirm that Father O’Leary spelt out his last sentence in its entirety, and word perfect, with his thumb and forefinger acting as a fountain pen nib. Next, the word ‘nib’ served to remind him of the stolen John Hamilton antiques.

  ‘Well, that was a little bit too subtle for me,’ Starrett admitted. ‘Anyway, this lady said she felt that Father Matthew stopped having relations with her because he’d met someone else.’

  ‘So, now you know more than me, Inspector, and that’s as it should be,’ O’Leary said, contentedly.

  ‘Have you any idea who this other woman might have been?’

  ‘I could tell you who she wasn’t, but that mightn’t be of any assistance to you,’ the father said.

  ‘You just never know, and don’t be too worried about disappointing me. I always find it’s equally important to be able to rule people out rather than try to find evidence to add them to a suspect list.’

  ‘Well, all I can tell you is that Father Matthew and our cleaner, Eimear Robinson, did get on very well. Perhaps some naysayers may suggest there was a liaison, but I don’t believe you need to speculate on anything deeper than friendship.’

  ‘Have you discovered the whereabouts of the Hamilton nibs yet?’ Starrett asked, not wishing to push any further on the Father Matthew and Eimear relationship because he realised he would get nowhere with it in this interview.

  ‘Sorry, nothing on that front,’ he replied spelling out the words ‘that front’ with his finger.

  ‘It was suggested to me earlier that Father Matthew was not short of funds.’

  ‘You think he might have taken them and sold them himself?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Starrett replied, shrugging his shoulders.

  ‘Perhaps. But I only say “perhaps” because I don’t know otherwise, although I admit to you that I would very much doubt that possibility.’

  Gibson refreshed their teas and Starrett and Father O’Leary helped themselves to their second cheesecake. Starrett imagined he and the priest, if only because he himself had thought so, would’ve split the sixth cheesecake between the two of them. Gibson was having none of that, which meant she was having all of her entitled second cheesecake intact, albeit temporarily. He went to ask several questions but in the end asked none, hiding behind his tea and enjoying the last bite of his cheesecake.

  ‘How is your young garda, Romany Browne?’

  ‘Yes,’ Starrett offered, finding his voice again, ‘he was very lucky; he managed to jump back on the horse quickly and is back into the investigation.’

  ‘Ah yes, the speedy revitalisation process of youth,’ Father O’Leary said, pensively. ‘Now you come to mention it, there didn’t seem much wrong with him when he and the sergeant took Bishop Freeman away for questioning.’

  ‘Listen,’ Starrett said, standing up, ‘we need to get back into town to talk to a few more persons of interest.’

  ‘Yes of course,’ the priest said, showing them to the door. When Gibson had walked through it, he put his hand out to stop Starrett from following her. Waiting for Gibson to move from earshot, the priest continued, ‘Please be very, very careful in your dealings with Bishop Freeman. He’s a very, very powerful man, Starrett, and like most men of great power he has no preference to wield it justly. I’ve always found it’s good to look at those who have gone before.’

  Father O’Leary air-wrote the last sentence in the smallest letters he
’d used so far.

  Chapter Forty-One

  ‘Let’s head back to Eimear Robinson’s house,’ Starrett said, as he and Gibson hopped back in his car, ‘I want another chat with her and you can interview Gerry at the same time.’

  Just then the ban garda’s mobile rang. It was Browne, saying he was on his way back to Donegal Town. Starrett told Gibson to tell Browne to meet them at Eimear Robinson’s house.

  Garda Romany Browne was already waiting for them by the time they got there, and Starrett got right down to the business of their visit, and invited Eimear to join him for a quiet chat in the privacy of her own lounge.

  Eimear seemed upbeat – if her rosy cheeks were anything to go by, it looked like she might have been out in the blustery afternoon air for a clearing-of-the-head walk of her own.

  ‘So, you got to meet our Mary at last?’ Mrs Robinson said, as she proudly settled into her pale sofa in the lounge she’d never used before she’d met the Ramelton detective. Starrett was worried that if he didn’t solve the case in a hurry, he might wear that sofa out.

  ‘Yes, and quite an interesting chat at that, Eimear,’ Starrett said, as he removed his notebook from inside his windbreaker. Starrett was a fan of windbreakers – you didn’t have to worry about them. You could just toss them in the back of the car and they wouldn’t complain by producing creases. But the main problem with windbreakers, as far as he could tell, was they didn’t, for some reason or another, have inside pockets where a member of the garda, such as himself for instance, could store his notebook and pens. Trouser back pockets didn’t work for Starrett either because while in there, his black leather notebook tended to get badly bent out of shape quite quickly and he’d more than a couple of pairs of trousers ruined by a leaking pen. But now, after all these years, he’d managed to find a Burberry windbreaker with an inside pocket, just the one mind you — but then that was all he needed to get by.

  As Eimear gushed about her new house, Starrett began to wonder how well her husband was getting on with the ban garda.

  ‘Surely,’ Eimear said, proving her mind wasn’t too far from that very same matter, ‘in this day and age of political correctness, she should have interviewed me and you should have interviewed Gerry.’

  ‘It’s just an interview, not an interrogation,’ Starrett explained, trying to bluff his way around her correct assumption.

  She seemed to relax a bit with that reply.

  ‘So,’ he offered up, his notebook and pen at the ready, ‘Mary confessed to me that she’d a relationship with Father Matthew McKaye.’

  ‘Sure, he was friends with all the family,’ Eimear replied, now not as relaxed as she had been a few moments ago while enjoying the comforts and newness of her lounge. ‘Didn’t I tell you that he’d often come up and eat with us, or sometimes he’d even just have a cup of tea? In the early days he’d come up just to watch TV with the girls – sure, he was nearly one of the family.’

  ‘Yes, I believe you told me most of that, Eimear,’ Starrett replied, writing something down in his notebook in his neat handwriting. ‘But what you didn’t tell me was that he was also coming up to enjoy sexual relations with your sister, Mary.’

  Eimear Robinson crossed herself. ‘That’s no way to speak of the dead, Inspector,’ she said.

  ‘Mary’s words were even more to the point,’ he sighed. ‘Tell me this, Eimear: Were you aware that Mary and Father Matt were sleeping together?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I tried to stop her; I said to her, “Mary,” I said, “you can’t be sleeping with a priest.” And do you know what she said back to me, she said, “I wouldn’t normally, they’re all much too old and ugly for me, but he’s young and cool and well fit.”’

  ‘You still haven’t told me why you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘I was ashamed,’ she admitted. ‘But listen, Inspector, what you have to realise about our Mary is that, from a very early age she felt, she felt that…’

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘I feel embarrassed talking to a man about this.’

  ‘Think of me as you would your doctor,’ Starrett said softly, trying to encourage her. But Eimear Robinson seemed to grow so self-conscious by his remark that he started to wonder what she got up to with her doctor.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll try. The thing about our Mary is…she is very well meaning and all and she…she…well, she’s never really taken on board the whole emotional side of making love. So to her it’s like the same as you or I would think or feel over having a kiss.’

  ‘You’re saying she was generous with her favours?’

  ‘Yes, but not in a bad way!’ Eimear said. ‘To her it was her way of making a connection with people. But she’s really very nice; she spends more money than anyone I know on her appearance. Make-up, clothes, you know, she has the best of everything, absolutely the best.’

  ‘So she spends a lot of money on her make-up and clothes?’

  ‘A lot?’ Eimear laughed, ‘I keep saying to her, “Mary,” I’d say, “it’s not Callum you should have married, it’s Sir Richard Branson!”’

  Starrett had a bit of a chuckle at that.

  ‘Then she’ll say,’ Eimear continued, appearing happier on this topic, ‘“Eimear,” she’ll say, “I know you think I’m not picky over who I shift, but I would draw the line at your man Branson, he’s much too in love with himself to give anyone else a look in.”’

  ‘You see,’ Starrett said, revealing he’d already moved on from this topic, ‘when someone is murdered, jealous husbands of unfaithful wives would automatically appear on our suspect lists.’

  ‘Well, I can see how Callum’s family would be on your list,’ Eimear said.

  ‘Is Callum aware that his wife has other relationships?’ Starrett asked, as he remembered Mary’s discreet message suggesting he get her number from Eimear and give her a ring. Initially he felt she was just coming on to him but he wondered if she’d a piece of information she wanted to give him about Father Matthew, away from Nuala Gibson.

  ‘Inspector, my sister is generous with her favours but she doesn’t think she’s cheating.’

  Starrett raised his eyebrows without even knowing he was doing so.

  ‘No, no, listen to me, Callum is her husband and she’s very fond of him and she’ll always go home to Callum.’

  ‘Was Callum aware that Mary had a relationship with Father Matthew?’

  ‘Did he know?’ she started, ‘or did he turn a blind eye? I wouldn’t be the one to ask.’

  ‘Did Mary have other men she saw regularly?’

  ‘My father had a saying he’d often use, “Eimear,” he’d say, “I’m not my brother’s keeper.” Well, I’d like to say to you that I’m not my sister’s keeper.’

  ‘But youse get on well?’

  ‘Of course,’ she smiled, ‘we’re sisters, but my priority is my daughters.’

  ‘So Mary…?’

  ‘So Mary has another family now, Callum and his brother, Mark, and their family unit. They’ll take care of her the same way I’ll take care of Julia, Jessica, and my Gerry.’

  ‘Okay, Eimear, but I just want to ask you this one more time because it might be vitally important to this case,’ Starrett said, speaking as slowly as he knew how, in the hope he was making his point, ‘could Mary have been having an affair–’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Eimear protested, ‘our Mary would go out of her way to tell you this herself, she does not have affairs!’

  ‘But she sleeps with other men?’ Starrett in turn protested.

  ‘Yes, but she’s never seen out with them in public, never runs around with them, or goes away with them for dirty weekends, or out for cosy romantic dinners to rub her husband’s nose in it. Our Mary loves sex, she loves having a beautiful body and she loves displaying her beautiful body – she really does. Callum …well, Mary herself has often said, “Callum,” she’d say, “he’s only a three-quarters man: h
e looks like a man, he eats like a man, he sleeps like a man, but he’s absolutely no use at all to me in the bedroom.”’

  Starrett felt just then - during the three-quarters man line - Eimear looked like she’d just let herself down. That she’d started off trying to say something funny to lighten the mood of the interview but it had backfired, and she’d ended up doing her sister, and her sister’s husband, a disservice.

  ‘Okay, let’s leave your sister for now,’ Starrett offered, to Eimear’s visible relief. ‘After Mary and Father Matthew stopped enjoying their physical relationship, he started seeing someone else. That’s what Mary claimed.’

  Eimear looked like totally deflated and Starrett couldn’t work out if it was because, even though he claimed he was going to draw a line under the Mary topic, here he was talking about her again.

  ‘I’m interested in who Father Matt was seeing after Mary,’ Starrett declared, hoping to let Eimear see he really was moving on. Once again she didn’t seem to take any comfort from his words.

  ‘Have you any idea who it was he was seeing?’ she asked.

  ‘I was hoping you might tell me.’

  ‘Sure, how would I know? Did our Mary not tell you who it was?’

  ‘She said she didn’t know. And you’ve no idea?’

  ‘If our Mary didn’t know I doubt anyone would know,’ Eimear claimed.

  ‘Eimear, I have to ask you a very sensitive question now and I want you to realise that there is nothing personal behind this question,’ Starrett offered, trying to soften the inevitable blow.

  ‘Fire away,’ Eimear said half-heartedly.

  ‘Did you…did you and Father Matthew ever have a physical relationship?’

  Eimear appeared to breathe a large sigh of relief, before laughing openly, yet defensively, at Starrett and then nudging him in the arm a few times before saying, ‘Sure, Father Matt and me were good mates, you should never ever mess around with a mate.’

  ‘Especially when he’s a priest,’ Starrett felt obliged to add.