St Ernan's Blues: An Inspector Starrett Mystery

by Paul Charles

  Mooney, clearly loving the shockwaves he was generating, said, ‘Yes, but just the once.’ He ran through his mobile phone routine yet again before adding, ‘The big chump. He went on a guilt trip, started to act really strange – he wouldn’t admit it to Eimear, so Mary did. Eimear had been thinking Gerry’s bad mood had something to do with her. So Mary told her. Told her it wasn’t her fault, told her it wasn’t even Gerry’s fault, and took all the blame herself, so she did. Okay so far?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But the cosmic circle was out of kilter at that point. Eimear needed to balance up her circle of power again. But she didn’t have it in her to take revenge on her sister by sleeping with her sister’s husband, Callum, because she truly loves her sister. So she took her revenge by doing the next best thing – sleeping with her sister’s husband’s brother. Moi!’

  Starrett couldn’t believe he was actually hearing all of this. Gibson looked like she really wished she wasn’t hearing all of this.

  ‘So Eimear and I got it together one night when we were all around at Mary and Callum’s for a barbeque and she’d a few drinks and no one noticed us nip into the field at the other end of Callum’s garden and–’

  ‘Okay, Okay,’ Starrett interrupted, hoping to spare Gibson her blushes.

  ‘Mary has had the complete set of the three of us, Callum, Father Matt, and me,’ Mooney boasted, on her behalf. ‘So it’s all good.’

  Where exactly did this leave everything Starrett wondered? Clearly Mark Mooney, Mary Mooney and Father Matthew, were the three he felt he needed to concentrate on.

  Mary Mooney was sleeping with her husband’s brother, Mark. Mary Mooney then slept with Father Matthew. Had she still been sleeping with Mark at the same time? Father Matthew was then murdered. Was Father Matthew murdered because he’d been sleeping with Mary Mooney? Mary Mooney’s husband would have been the most likely suspect except for the fact that he was (apparently) incapable of…jealousy. On top of which, he appeared to have a genuine alibi. Mary Mooney’s husband’s brother, on the other hand, was the jealous type and he was sleeping with Mary Mooney, so he would appear, by the processes of elimination and deduction, to be the prime suspect.

  Unless of course, as Mary Mooney herself had suggested, Father Matt had indeed started to sleep with someone else; the mystery woman he gave up Mary Mooney for. So could Mary Mooney have been capable of murdering Father Matt, perhaps because she was jealous? But she claimed she loved her husband – yes, she occasionally ‘shifted’ other men, as she so politely put it, but it really didn’t seem to mean anything to her. Aside from which, she too, had a cast-iron alibi for the time of Father Matt’s demise.

  All this, this cosmic circle, only served to bring Starrett back to trying to discover Mary’s successor in Father Matt’s arms.

  ‘You know Mary and Father Matthew stopped sleeping together before he died?’ Starrett started, formulating the question in his mind as he felt his way along it.

  ‘Yes, and I can also confirm that they certainly haven’t slept together since he died,’ Mooney said and laughed, then noticing Gibson’s disdain added, ‘don’t worry sister, I’m not religious.’

  Starrett was convinced had Gibson not been present the godless Mooney would no doubt have included some kind of tactless rigor mortis gag.

  ‘Mary reckoned Father Matt stopped sleeping with her because he was seeing someone else,’ Starrett suggested, trying to get back on track again.

  ‘Yes, she mentioned that to me as well,’ Mooney agreed, returning to a more respectful mood. He gave his phone yet another serious clean. He pretty much ignored them as he concentrated until the imaginary stubborn piece of dirt would surrender.

  ‘Do you have any idea who he might have been sleeping with after Mary?’

  ‘You know, Mary and I discussed it a lot and neither of us had a clue.’

  ‘Does your brother know about you and Mary?’

  ‘I know how Mary comes across, maybe even a wee bit slutty,’ Mooney started, ‘but really, please believe me, she’s got a heart of gold and she cares about Callum. She really does love him; she’s respectful of him. She goes out of her way to be discreet about her needs. But to answer your question: I think he knows, but I don’t know for sure. We once had a very oblique conversation when he said if Mary needs to be with someone, he’d prefer it was me rather than some tube. I don’t know if that was him discreetly giving us his blessing. I never even acknowledged that I knew what he’d been talking about.’

  ‘Can I ask you what you do for a living?’ Starrett asked, being careful he didn’t side-step into the path of the mutt’s salivating jaws.

  ‘I work as a Risk Officer for PayPal.’

  If Starrett had drawn up a list of jobs suitable for Mark Mooney, a Risk Officer for PayPal wouldn’t have been in the Top 10, nor even the Top 100 for that matter.

  ‘Listen,’ Mooney said, proving it wasn’t the first time he’d received such a reaction. If anything he seemed pleased by it. ‘You should see me in my suit.’

  ‘So, a Risk Officer,’ Starrett said, genuinely interested, ‘what exactly does that entail?’

  ‘Well, I get to check out the viability of the projects PayPal are offered.’

  ‘That sounds like it could be interesting?’

  ‘Yeah sometimes, and sometimes it’s just corporate stuff you have to do,’ Mooney deadpanned, as he unconsciously slipped into his phone routine.

  ‘Would a job like that pay well?’

  ‘On paper, the salary is good but when you factor in all your travel time and time away from home, which you don’t get paid for, not as richly as rewarding as you originally think, aye, not quite so good. But no complaints from me. All good.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  He replied immediately in what sounded like his standard answer: ‘Never needed to.’

  ‘Do you have a partner?’

  ‘Ditto, see above,’ Mooney wise-cracked.

  ‘Have you ever had a serious relationship?’

  ‘Now you’re just being nosy,’ Mooney said, but not sounding upset. ‘But if you must know, yes, I had a very, very serious relationship with a German lady called Bernadette Atinka and…it just didn’t work out for us. So rather than keep on trying, I stayed true to my feelings for her. I genuinely believed Bernie was the one and when that didn’t work out, I knew that no one else could be the one, so I never bothered to seek further.’

  ‘But Mary?’

  ‘I believe our American cousins would call it “friends with benefits”.’

  Starrett and Gibson sighed in unison.

  Judas had now started to chew on his leather lead. Mooney seemed either to not to notice or not care. How long would it take the mutt to chew himself free, Starrett wondered? Now might be a good time to ask his final question.

  ‘Mr Mooney, could you please tell us what you were doing on Wednesday past between the hours of 3:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.?’

  ‘That’s simple, I was mid-air, between here and Geneva, or should I say mid-air between Geneva and here. I landed in Dublin about five and with one thing and another it was just before eight o’clock before I got back home.’

  Gibson wrote away in her notebook, seemingly disappointed. No doubt she would be intrigued to see if this alibi actually checked out.

  Just as they were about to return to the gardaí car, Mooney looked like something was troubling him, like he was feeling something had been left unresolved.

  ‘I hope you understood what I meant about the strength of the cosmic circle,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’ Starrett felt obliged to say.

  ‘Okay, I’ll spell it out for you, because I feel it’s very important,’ Mooney said, giving Judas a playful nudge with his foot and only getting a shoe covered in dribble for his efforts. ‘Remember when I told you that whenever Gerry cheated on Eimear with Mary, things were out of sorts, and Eimear had to balance them up again by sleeping with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Starrett
replied, dragging it out so that it sounded more like ‘no, I don’t’.

  ‘Okay. Then the priest slept with Mary, breaking the cosmic link between her and Callum and I.'

  ‘And me,’ Gibson felt compelled to say in correction.

  ‘If you had been there as well, sister, I’m sure I would have noticed,’ Mooney said, to Gibson’s clear disdain.

  ‘I was just saying that it should be “Callum and me”, not “Callum and I”,’ Gibson said, looking like she now wished she hadn’t bothered.

  ‘But you were saying?’ Starrett coached Mooney, wondering if he was going to fall into a trap of his own making.

  ‘Yes,’ Mooney replied, also happy to be getting back on track again. ‘So then someone had to play a cheat card on the priest.’

  ‘So are you saying that either you or Callum had to cheat with someone behind Father Matthew’s back?’

  ‘No not us, well, yes, it could’ve been us for the cosmic circle to work but it wasn't us. For this to work it could have been anyone else in the universe. And as the priest wasn’t married, the cheat card had to be against something he loved.’

  ‘God?’ Gibson suggested.

  ‘Close, sister, close,’ Mooney said, sneering, as he achieved another quick check and clean of his mobile. ‘Something, or maybe more accurately, someone he loved even more than God.’

  ‘Okay, you’ve got our undivided attention?’ Starrett prompted.

  ‘Himself!’ Mooney said, gleefully.

  ‘Really?’ Starrett muttered, while he thought: absolute poppycock.

  ‘Yes! And so when someone took the priest’s life, the cosmic circle was realigned so the universe could roll on again.’

  * * *

  ‘Bejeepers, isn’t it just great for the universe to be rolling on again,’ Starrett said, when he and Gibson were back in the car and heading up north again.

  ‘I’ll certainly sleep a lot better tonight.’

  ‘Do you think he actually believes all that crap?’ Starrett asked, to the universe in general and Ban Garda Nuala Gibson in particular.

  ‘Well, it probably sounds good to Mary,’ Gibson suggested, ‘and it clearly works.’

  ‘How do some women end up taking excuses-for-men to their bed?’

  ‘I’ll tell you better than that Starrett, some women I know are better friends with their dinner dates than the men they’re prepared to go to bed with,’ Gibson added.

  ‘Perhaps they feel so gutted about their actions that someone – their dinner dates, for instance – will have to pay,’ Starrett suggested, before adding, ‘in more ways than one.’

  Just then the Don Williams song ‘Lay Down Beside Me’ came onto Highland Radio. Starrett mentally tuned into it for the few remaining minutes of the song. As he listened to Don’s soulful delivery, he began to think that all the great songs must be about love. But then the penny finally dropped when he realised that all the really great love songs are in fact about the lack of love.

  ‘So have you figured out the answer to my question yet?’ he asked Gibson, who’d appeared to go into her own wee world during Don’s record.

  ‘You mean, how do some women end up taking men like Mooney to their bed?’

  ‘Yes, but I was being a little more general than that.’ Starrett replied, feeling he needed to clarify.

  ‘Maybe because they can’t find anyone else?’

  ‘Really?’ Starrett said, wondering where all those women were when he was smack-bang in the middle of his wilderness years.

  ‘Either that,’ she continued, ‘or they just don’t feel they’re entitled to anyone better.’

  Chapter Forty-Four

  By the time Gibson dropped Starrett off at the Major’s house, it was, as he had feared, just too late in the day for a visit. Maggie Keane’s car was still in the driveway so Starrett told Gibson to scoot off home. He also asked her to have whoever was on duty at the Station House in Ramelton advise the bishop and his solicitor that Starrett and Gibson would interview him the following morning, Sunday, at 10 a.m.

  It turned out the Major had enjoyed quite an improvement during the day. There were hardly any visitors, just Starrett’s parents and Maggie Keane. Maggie had insisted that the Major be left alone to rest. Her philosophy was that the body is the best healer of itself, you just need to allow it the luxury of rest so its powers could be most effective. The Major even felt like getting up the following day. ‘We’ll see?’ his wife had responded.

  ‘There you go,’ the Major had said before releasing a huge sigh, ‘the official acceding of power has happened. Now I’m reduced to waiting around to see if my wife will allow me to get up out of my own bed. Things are definitely on the slide.’

  ‘Oh aye, and I can remember well the times you were just as happy to stay in bed all day.’

  When the Major eventually realised what she was getting at, all he did was look at her, blush, and smile knowingly at the memories. Maggie reported that it had been a beautiful moment for all of them.

  So as to make the most of the moment, Starrett quietly crept over to the Major’s bedside to say a silent good night.

  Then, on the way back home, the detective and Maggie nipped into McDaid’s Wine Bar for the heat of the fire, the warmth of the wine, and, for his part, the need to put Bishop Cormac Freeman out of his mind. One bottle later, Maggie drove them home, claiming Starrett had drank most it, and what she had needed was just a nightcap.

  When they got to Maggie’s fine house, he’d a Guinness and she’d another glass of red wine. They retired to bed about midnight, enjoyed half an hour of delightful naughtiness and fell from consciousness into an alcohol- and post-coital, bliss-induced sleep.

  A few hours later Starrett inadvertently woke Maggie. She explained to him afterwards that he’d been moaning on and on and thrashing about like he was physically fighting demons or monsters or something in his dreams.

  And Maggie Keane had been right. There had been a monster in Starrett’s nightmare. It was a monster in priest’s clothing and he’d returned to disturb Starrett’s sleep just as he’d done all those years ago and just as he’d done in his nightmares several times over in the intervening years.

  As Starrett thrashed about in Maggie Keane’s bed, his reality was that he was in his dormitory, in a church building somewhere in Armagh, where he’d gone in his youth to study to become a priest.

  The monster on the other side of Starrett’s dormitory door was bullish, arrogant, red-flushed, and high on sexual power. He was someone who subscribed to the theory that a person was never in question when God was on his side. In the melee, the handle had come off the door and Starrett grabbed the door with both hands, fingers on the outside. He could see through the widening and closing of the door as he and the monster fought for their ground and, far from being stressed by the seminarian’s efforts to keep him at bay, the monster seemed to enjoy the tussle. Starrett realised that to the monster it was some kind of bizarre foreplay and he was clearly aroused. The monster grabbed Starrett by the fingertips and surprised him by making to close the door, in Starrett’s favour. By the time Starrett realised what was happening it was too late and the door was being slammed against its frame. By a microsecond, and only a microsecond, Starrett managed to free his left hand and three of the fingers of his right, but…the forefinger of his right hand was trapped by the monster’s razor-sharp fingernails and was slammed in the vice that the door made with its frame. Starrett could feel the lightning pain mainlining its way to his brain and immediately back down to his poor forefinger, where the shattered metacarpal would forever remind Starrett of this ordeal. He sank to the cold chess-board-tiled floor and the leering monster tugged the door open. Starrett’s energy was all spent and he could feel himself at the mercy of his nemesis. Starrett’s right index finger was a full 90 degrees to the normal and limply folded over the back of his hand. The monster seemed magnetised to the battle wound and he dragged his victim from the floor. Starrett could barely stand but
he noticed now that the monster was so aroused, he was uncomfortable in his trousers. The monster awkwardly attempted to free himself, looking to Starrett every inch the Devil he was meant to protect his flock from. Starrett thought about his parents, preoccupied by the idea that he might be letting them down. He mustered all of his reserve and ran at the monster, going for the plural, at 29 inches above floor level, and kicking with all his might. The monster sounded like a pig squealing when conscious of the knacker approaching with a captive bolt stunner. He squirmed eel-like on the floor, still emitting an ear-piercing scream as his amorous intent wilted.

  As Starrett was cautiously shaken from his nightmare by Maggie Keane, he saw the face one final time, and he shuddered, now in sweat-drenched consciousness, at the memory of that visage.

  ‘Jeez, what was that, Starrett?’ Maggie whispered, ‘I’ve never seen you like that before!’

  They got out of bed, even though it was still only 2:50 a.m.; Starrett had a quick shower and joined her in the kitchen. Over a tea and a couple of the cheesecakes her daughter Moya has made especially for Starrett, he told her the full story, the story behind his nightmare.

  Even the re-telling of it, he shuddered uncontrollably at the memory of that monster’s face, the priest who all these years later had come back into Starrett’s life again, only this time dressed in the purple robes of a bishop.

  ‘I caught my breath,’ Starrett said to Maggie Keane across her kitchen table as he concluded his retelling, ‘and I gathered up a few clothes from around the room, which I hastily stuffed in my father’s army rucksack. I’d time only to pause, gingerly wrap a tie around my pathetic excuse for a forefinger, and I ran out into the night, and didn’t stop until I reached London a couple of lifts, a lot of pain, and two days later.’

  ‘You poor man, well boy, really,’ Maggie said as she went around to his side of the table, sat on his knee and gave him a hug, holding his bent forefinger very carefully in her hand.

  ‘But you know, Maggie,’ he started up again, ‘earlier on today, Nuala and I were questioning a suspect and he spouted on about this cosmic theory of his, where he maintains that when someone is wronged there has to be a price paid and if there’s not, then something very bad happens.’