by Paul Charles
Starrett was basking in these words of wisdom when she hissed, ‘Absolute bollox, love, if you ask me.’
The detective couldn’t work out if the love referred to was a term of endearment for him, or if love was itself ‘absolute bollox’. He decided not to ask for clarification, just in case.
‘But as I said,’ Eimear offered, draining the remainder of her coffee, ‘it’s all about our kids and it matters not a lot about whether or not Gerry and I are in love.’ As usual, Eimear’s voice was fading. ‘We can deal with all of that when the girls have left home to start up their own families.’ By now Starrett was straining to hear her, ‘I just hope they don’t make the same mistakes I did.’
When Gibson returned, Eimear said, ‘Right, I need to go off and do a bit of shopping for my girls for their dinner tonight, and Gerry too, of course.’
As she walked out the door, Starrett nodded in her direction and said as much to himself as to Gibson, ‘Another fine example of what the lack of love has done.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
By the time Starrett and Gibson had returned to St Ernan’s there was a still eeriness about the historic house. A collective feeling of resignation, of ‘Okay, that’s that, let’s try and get on with it.’ The smell of scented candles and air freshener had all but disappeared and the stale odour had returned. The priests of St Ernan’s were still missing the woman’s touch of Eimear Robinson. Starrett wondered when she’d be coming back. Was that perhaps what she and Father O’Leary had been chatting about up at the graveyard?
Sergeant Packie Garvey and Garda Romany Browne were kicking their heels up in the boys’ room. Garvey reported that they had checked out Mark Mooney’s alibi and he had definitely been on the flight from Geneva that had landed in Dublin at 17:00, and Garvey reckoned Mooney’s claimed 8 p.m. arrival in Donegal Town was the earliest possible.
‘So what are we missing here?’ Starrett asked, of the blackboard as much as his fellow colleagues.
‘Eimear Robinson seemed to think Mark Mooney is to blame,’ Gibson started slowly. ‘Perhaps things hadn’t been the same between him and Mary since she’d taken up with Father Matt. Perhaps when Father Matt dumped her she didn’t want to go back to cheating on her husband with his own brother.’
‘We’ve been told a few times that Father Matt had made a decision, a big decision,’ Starrett mused, still looking at the blackboard as if he was expecting the hand of God, or even the fingers of Father O’Leary, to write the name of the culprit for him. ‘What if that decision involved leaving the priesthood and settling down with Mary and Mary was totally committed to that and then Father Matt fell in love with someone else and dumped her?’
‘But she still has a cast-iron alibi,’ Garvey suggested.
‘But didn’t Eimear say that she had her family – meaning Callum and Mark – to protect her, the way Eimear protected her daughters?’ Browne offered, now following Starrett’s stare to the blackboard.
‘Yes, and?’ Starrett said in encouragement.
‘And so Mary went crying to Mark, saying, “Look what he’s done to me, it’s not fair–”’. Browne stumbled a wee bit, sounding as though he was unsure how to develop his theory.
‘As in, “Bring me the head of John the Baptist”?’ Starrett suggested.
‘Sorry?’ Gibson said, shaking her head as if she was lost in all of this.
‘Okay, long story short; John the Baptist, the man who baptised Jesus, criticised Herod for marrying Herodias, his brother's ex-wife.’
That in itself was enough to stop the gardaí trio in their tracks. It was even enough to make Starrett think twice.
‘Not only that, but Herodias was also Herod’s niece,’ the detective continued, starting to realise once again exactly how bizarre a story it was. ‘So Herodias’ daughter, Salome, dances a very seductive dance for Herod and he is so impressed, or turned on by her dance, that he promises her she can have anything she wants. Her mother – still pissed at John the Baptist for criticising her for marrying her brother-in-law – persuades Salome to ask Herod for the head of John the Baptist, to be delivered to her, on a plate.’
‘And all that just because John the Baptist had denounced Herod and Herodias over their union?’ Gibson asked.
‘Exactly,’ Starrett said, looking a bit embarrassed that it might appear he still knew the Scriptures so well, or at least reasonably well – well maybe not even reasonably well, but well enough that he still had a few quotes up his sleeve.
‘Yeah, I think I saw that movie as well,’ Browne claimed, taking some of the wind out of Starrett’s sail.
‘So let’s see now…’ Starrett said, starting to scribble on the blackboard again, ‘Mary Mooney is Herodias (the wife), Mark Mooney is Herod (the husband), Callum Mooney is Philip (the cuckolded brother), and Father Matt is John the Baptist.’
‘So who is Salome?’ Browne asked.
‘I don’t think she appears until the sequel,’ Gibson chipped in.
Starrett smiled.
‘So, Mary Mooney asks her brother-in-law, Mark Mooney, to bring her the head of Father Matt,’ Starrett said, completing his version of the parable; but in this case, not an earthly story with a heavenly meaning, but more one in which a Bible story begat a crime novel.
‘But Mark also has a cast-iron alibi,’ Garvey stated, for the record.
‘Yes, but what if he hired someone else to do it?’ Browne suggested, his momentum and enthusiasm growing by the second. ‘I mean, surely Herod wouldn’t have chopped off John the Baptist’s head himself?’
Starrett nodded his agreement.
‘And so he only went to Geneva on that particular day to ensure he’d be away and have that cast-iron alibi?’ Browne continued, on a roll.
‘Nagh, I don’t buy it with Mooney,’ Gibson said, shaking her head very positively and very slowly, ‘he’s too intelligent–’
‘Too intelligent?’ Browne cut in, ‘He was shag…sorry, I meant of course that he was sleeping with his brother’s wife! That’s hardly someone who’s too intelligent!’
Starrett, Gibson and Garvey all looked surprised and impressed by Browne’s moralistic statement.
‘I still think he’s too smart to expose himself by hiring someone to murder Father Matt,’ Gibson concluded.
‘He did suggest that Father Matt’s murder completed the “cosmic circle” and “balanced up” the right and wrong,’ Starrett added. ‘But I’m with the ban garda on this one; he wouldn’t have hired someone else to do it.’
‘Okay, okay, I can live with that,’ Browne said. ‘However, we still don’t know 100 per cent how Father McKaye was murdered. Right?’
Garvey said, ‘Right.’
‘Correct,’ said Gibson.
Starrett said, ‘Yeah?’
‘And you’re saying this guy is clever?’ Browne offered, still pushing onwards.
Starrett and Gibson nodded positively in unison.
‘So what if Mark Mooney was so clever that he could have figured out some kind of system and set it up, whereby Father Matt could be killed remotely while he was in Geneva?’
‘On first glance,’ Starrett started slowly, ‘that sounds fanciful at best…however, on second consideration it sounds…even more fanciful.’
They all laughed.
‘Phew, that was close,’ Browne said, when the laughter had finished. ‘I thought you were going to ask me to work out exactly how he’d managed to get that to work.’
‘Ah, that would be more a case for Inspector Christy Kennedy,’ Starrett said, remembering the case he’d worked on with the London-based Portrush detective.
‘I don’t think the garda has ever seen that movie,’ Gibson offered.
‘Which all leaves us…where?’ Starrett continued, happy to see his team at least pushing together in good humour to try and resolve this case.
‘Low on suspects,’ Garvey replied.
‘So, exactly how many suspects do we have left at this stage?’
They all looked at their blackboard and Browne was the first to offer ‘None?’, even though they were all thinking the very same.
‘What are we not considering?’ Starrett asked, thinking again about the bizarre method of murder.
‘Who of those that knew Father Matthew have we not yet considered?’ Sergeant Packie Garvey asked, displaying he was as good with a bit of fancy footwork off the field as he (most definitely) was on it.
‘Father Robert O’Leary,’ Starrett said, without even thinking about it.
‘Father Peregrine Dugan,’ Ban Garda Nuala Gibson offered, a split second later.
Chapter Fifty
At the very least Starrett still had his trusted brown-green hat. It was a good hat from Christy’s of London and of the shabby chic look and style as favoured at the Curragh. It had served him well on numerous occasions, this time proving to be very handy against the bleak winds circling the graveyard..
‘I find it’s not so much about swimming,’ he said, as he picked up his hat from the chair beside the blackboard and left the makeshift meeting room by himself, ‘it’s more about how long you can hold your breath.’
As the detective disappeared out the door, Garvey, Browne, and Gibson looked at each other.
‘Did you get that one?’ Gibson quietly asked her two colleagues.
‘You mean you got any of them?’ Browne said, in clear amazement.
‘The important thing,’ Sergeant Garvey volunteered, scratching the crown of his head, ‘is that Inspector Starrett knows exactly what he means.’
A few seconds later, Starrett tapped on Father O’Leary’s door.
A few seconds after that Starrett and Father O’Leary were making their way to, and tapping on, Father Dugan’s door.
And before they knew it, wasn’t the old and supposedly decrepit Father Dugan brewing them up a pot of tea and sending O’Leary down to the kitchen to heat up some fresh apple pie for the three of them. Starrett reckoned that, so far, he was holding his breath pretty well.
‘So Father Matthew’s remains are buried,’ the old priest said, by way of starting up the conversation, so much so that Starrett reckoned he was totally transparent. Better than being so old and settled that he was going to be happy to sit there in silence with his own thoughts and ignore the detective altogether.
‘Aye, that’s him off now, poor soul,’ Starrett said, and realised, and accepted the fact, that he was really saying nothing. He knew he was reacting to some form of post-funeral, St Ernan’s blues.
He dreaded the conversation might head down the ‘old man viewing the death of someone he knew and starting to get preoccupied with his own demise’ route, if he wasn’t careful. But no, that was not where Father Dugan was heading, not at all in fact.
‘You know,’ Dugan said, swishing some warm water around his rose-smattered white tea-pot, ‘I look at him and I’m astounded by how happy I am that it’s not me. That I’ve been spared for another day, I’m still alive.’
‘Aye, you’ve got your book to complete,’ Starrett said, as the old priest took his still swishing teapot to the sink to dump its contents.
‘I’ve been working on it so long I don’t know anything else,’ he replied, shuffling back to the table and adding three spoonful’s of tealeaves and then the just peaking boiling water, the steam of which rose quickly and disappeared into his hanging grey hair. ‘Sometimes I believe I’ll never finish it, and maybe not because I can’t, but because I don’t want to.’
His voice was so loud, Starrett imagined that Father O’Leary, in his apple-pie warming absence, was missing only a little of the conversation.
‘But do you not feel having worked this long and hard on your book,’ Starrett started, stopping to observe the room around him, which was packed with books and files, all neatly stored in every available nook and cranny and on top of all the floorboards not required to support something or be walked on, ‘it would better to top and tail it with your own words?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Inspector.’ The priest broke into a large smile and bobbled around the room, picking up cups and saucers from a cupboard here, a drawer there, and a teaspoon from just about everywhere. ‘If I agreed with you, would that make me guilty of the sin of vanity?’
‘Bejeepers, not at all, Father,’ Starrett said immediately. ‘If a scholar is going to invest his energy and time using your book for reference, they’re going to want to ensure that no Tom, Dick, or Paddy added to it after your death.’
Father Dugan seemed to have stopped mid-floor to consider this very point when Father O’Leary returned to the room with the hot apple pie. All pretence of polite conversation ended there and then, as the three men got down to the serious issue of their afternoon tea.
Father O’Leary was the first one to break the silence.
‘I heard you and your boys and girl discussing King Herod and John the Baptist,’ he started, as ever accompanied by his very finest air writing. ‘And while it’s a conversation which shouldn’t be alien to these rooms, I was somewhat surprised to hear it being discussed by the gardaí.’
‘Very interesting,’ Father Dugan added seamlessly, as Starrett wondered how much more, and how many, of the gardaí’s conversations had been overheard.
‘Does it tie in with this case?’ Father O’Leary said.
Starrett hesitated; his hesitation was picked up immediately by both priests.
‘Okay,’ Father O’Leary started, ‘let’s reverse the situation: I’ll tell you what I know or suspect and you can confirm it when I’m right, just like I’ve been doing with you. And maybe, just maybe I’ll be able to give you a few hints.’
‘That seems only fair,’ Starrett replied, feeling he’d little left to lose.
‘Good,’ the father said, rubbing his hands together as if to warm them. Or perhaps he was just warming up his invisible nib. ‘So, at the hub of this story we have a man, Herod, who took his brother’s wife,’ Father O’Leary said, voice and nib in full flow. ‘The wife (assisted by her beautiful daughter) tricked Herod into beheading a man called John the Baptist.’
‘Important point of order here,’ Father Dugan’s voice boomed out all around his room.
‘Yes?’ Father O’Leary said, conceding the floor.
‘We’re not talking about any other common garden man here, are we? Point of fact, there are some who would say that at the time of the death of Yochanan Ben Zechariah-’
‘Sorry,’ Starrett said, interrupting the old priest, ‘who?’
‘Yochanan Ben Zechariah was John the Baptist’s Jewish birth name,’ Father O’Leary offered, smiling at Father Dugan.
‘Yes,’ the older priest confirmed, ‘sorry, what I should have said was, at the time of John the Baptist’s death, he was not just a contemporary of Jesus, not just an equal of Jesus, but, some would say, maybe he was even better than Jesus.’
‘Agreed,’ his colleague said, and did an air-tick to the positive.
‘There are some who would say that John the Baptist had to die in order for Jesus to emerge,’ Father Dugan continued, before nodding at Father O’Leary.
Right, right, Starrett thought, I’ve already been around this house with my team and it didn’t lead us anywhere, anywhere that was apart from right smack-bang back where we’d started. Then he thought how there didn’t seem to be anything this priest didn’t know, so perhaps he should just shut up, pretend he knew more than he really did and see what he could learn from this lecture.
‘So, we know that Eimear Robinson has a sister called Mary – she would be Mooney by marriage – and Mary cheated with her sister’s husband,’ Father O’Leary said, not as much taking the floor again but more totally flooring Starrett with what he knew. ‘Another way to put that would be that Mark Mooney cheated with his brother’s wife.’
‘Good so far,’ Father Dugan more graciously conceded.
‘Now, in your little domestic drama, Inspector, you have one additional twist – or that maybe should be one extra twist
that we know of, or we think we know of. In this scenario we’re suggesting that John the Baptist, Heaven forbid, also lay with Herod’s wife, or, in our case, Father Matthew lay with Mary Mooney.’
Father Dugan just rolled his eyes as if to suggest, ‘Ah, the kids today.’
‘Father McKaye, aka John the Baptist, lost his life, if not his head,’ O’Leary said.
‘So we need to work out who insulted Herod enough–’ Starrett started, only to be cut short.
‘Don’t be afraid to look back to the original story,’ Father O’Leary offered very seriously. He also did his air-writing version of his sentence, but he did something else, something he’d never done before. He underlined it and not just once, but several times.
The meeting broke up several minutes later, Starrett making elaborate excuses when he’d decided the priests had started repeating themselves.
He slowly and carefully closed the door, but not all of the way – he walked away from it, waited at the top of the stairs for a few minutes, tip-toed back to the door to Father Dugan’s suite of rooms, gently knocked on it once and walked right in to catch Father O’Leary
saying: ‘…yes, but Herod wasn’t really all that bad, his only problem was that he was too easily led by his append–’
‘Ah sorry, I must have left my hat in here somewhere,’ Starrett offered, as Father O’Leary pulled up on his sentence very quickly.
Starrett eventually spotted it exactly where he’d planted it. ‘Bejeepers, here it is,’ he said, pointing to it and grabbing his favourite clothing accessory, before looking on the inside and adding very innocently, ‘Yes, this is mine, look, I’ve got my name tag sewn into the inside.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ the voice of God boomed, knowingly. ‘Is that a trick you learnt at boarding school?’
Starrett wasn’t sure if the old priest, who’d been born on the same day as Mickey Mouse, was referring to the trick of marking his clothing, or the trick of trying to catch persons (or priests) of interest totally unawares.
