by Paul Charles
Once again, Eimear spent quite a bit of time hoaking around in her bag until she produced two more packets of Sweetex. And once again she lined them up and tore the top right-hand corner simultaneously off the packets before pouring the contents into her tea.
Browne’s interruption had been planned in advance by Starrett for this very moment. He quickly pulled a new pair of evidence gloves from his pocket and put them on and then very cautiously picked up the four pieces of the two Sweetex packets from the table between them and placed them in an evidence bag.
Eimear Robinson smiled at Starrett as though she first thought the detective’s actions were amusing and then the smile disappeared when she slowly came to the conclusion that they were not.
‘Eimear,’ Starrett said, as he peeled open one of the small Jacob’s bars, ‘when did you discover that your daughter had been made pregnant by Father Matthew?’
Eimear blinked but barely once more than normal. Apart from that single indiscretion, there was no other reaction to Starrett’s question. This, in its own way, and all things considered, was quite an over-reaction.
‘Starrett, we just discussed this up at St Ernan’s,’ she replied, slowly and firmly. ‘Father Matt was a friend of my family, nothing more, just that. And God forgive me for saying “just that” because he was a good friend to all of us, a good friend. Who’s got it in for my family? Who’s been telling you lies, Starrett?’
‘Eimear, Jessica has received confirmation from her doctor that she’s pregnant,’ Gibson offered sympathetically, and when Eimear didn’t react positively to the fact, she added, ‘It won’t take very long to prove Father Matt is the father of the child.’
‘You can’t do a test,’ Eimear snapped back at the ban garda in shock, ‘Father Matthew is in the ground!’
Those last five words proved to Starrett, if proof were needed, that he was correct.
‘Mrs Robinson, the pathologist will have kept samples when she carried out the autopsy,’ Russell Leslie offered, clearly hoping that his client would be guided to a safer route.
‘Okay,’ Starrett announced, feeling this wasn’t fair anymore, ‘Eimear, shall I tell you what you did?’
Eimear turned to her solicitor who was very slowly mouthing a ‘no’ to her. She kept quiet.
‘You came across your daughter, Jessica, and Father Matt making love on the sofa in your sitting room just over a month ago. Your husband, Gerry, was asleep upstairs so you very quietly sent Father Matt off into the night and you took your daughter up to her room, and not another word was said about it. That was that, until two weeks later you discovered that your daughter was pregnant.’
This time Eimear Robinson did not complain, although Starrett reckoned she was far from giving up the fight.
‘Everyone I’ve spoken to has told me the same thing: Eimear Robinson lives for her daughters – you even told me yourself how much you struggled with a few jobs to push yourself beyond your comfort zone to get the house, mainly for your daughters. Eimear, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But it did lead me to start to think of you and examine the fact that you were prepared to do anything for your daughters.
‘Wednesday is usually your day off and so when Father Dugan said that he didn’t see you come across the causeway that fatal Wednesday, I’d already counted you out. Not that I even felt I needed to do a check on you in the first place. I didn’t suspect you in the slightest; out of all the people I met, you were the one who seemed most moved to genuine tears by the death of the young priest.
‘But then earlier today I realised you’d been in the dining area with Father Matthew on the afternoon he died. You told me he was meticulously clean and kept the kitchen perfect, cleaning up after himself as he went along.
‘When I was searching the kitchen-cum-dining area in St Ernan’s last Wednesday, I discovered four pieces of Sweetex packets on the seat of the chair, beside where Father Matthew was found. Clearly, if you’d dropped the Sweetex packets when you were in St Ernan’s the previous day, Father Matt would have cleaned them away.
‘But the most incriminating thing is that we’re not just discussing the discovery of any auld Sweetex packets, are we?’ Starrett posed. ‘Bejeepers, no we’re not. We’re discussing Sweetex packets that have identical tears, tears which betrayed your unique way of opening two packets at once. We’ve got the original Sweetex packets from last Wednesday and I’m sure Eimear’s prints will be on them,’ he said, directing that last statement to the solicitor.
Russell Leslie scrunched up his face as if to suggest, ‘Is that it, is that all you’ve got?’ Well, he was paid to really, wasn’t he?
‘So how did Eimear get on to St Ernan’s?’ was what the solicitor actually asked.
‘Easy,’ Starrett replied, using the pause to open another Jacob’s orange chocolate bar. ‘She simply wore trousers, most likely a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a top and hid her hair up under a baseball cap, and from that distance Father Dugan would have most certainly pegged her as a man.’
Starrett guessed as much, only because that’s exactly what he would have done if he’d been a female trying to overcome the same obstacle.
‘Then what?’ Starrett asked, voicing the question on everyone’s mind, including his own. ‘Eimear discreetly made her way into the dining area, where she knew Father Matt would be hard at work, preparing the evening meal. She’d be aware of Father Mulligan’s afternoon walking habits – he habitually goes out at 3:30 and returns at 5:30. She knew that volunteers to help with the cooking would be as rare as hen’s teeth. Eimear, you then sat down in Father Matt’s kitchen. He made you a cup of tea as he was getting ready to boil the potatoes. Then he joined you and you chatted.
‘There were no marks about Father Matt’s body, no signs of a struggle, which suggests to me that he knew his murderer. When the father was still sitting at the table, Eimear, you got up and quietly went behind him and you killed him.’
‘And killed him?’ Russell Leslie shouted, incredulous at the very insinuation, ‘Inspector Starrett, really?’
Starrett had two more cards to play but his fear was, he really needed three. The good news, though, was that Eimear hadn’t uttered a peep.
‘Okay Russell, fair point, fair point,’ Starrett admitted, ‘I’ve got one more piece of incriminating evidence.’
‘Oh yeah?’ the solicitor tutted.
‘Yes,’ Starrett said and paused, ‘after Eimear murdered Father Matt, she grabbed a damp tea towel and used it to clean away the discharge from the small wound found above the hair line on the back of Father Matt’s neck. There would have been a considerable discharge of blood and brain and body tissue, possibly a lot more than she’d been expecting. Her second mistake was that she tried to hide the tea towel in the back of the cupboard, under the sink, the exact same place we all dump stuff we don’t know what to do with. For this last week, that soiled teatowel has progressively stank out the kitchen-cum-dining area of St Ernan’s. That was until Eimear – earlier today, in fact, on her first time back in the building since the murder – rescued the incriminating evidence, placed it in a white plastic bag, and attempted to seal it by knotting the top of the bag.’
Eimear merely shrugged as if to say, ‘Really, me?’
‘And,’ Starrett started, drawing the word out for as long as he possibly could get away with it, ‘that white plastic bag is currently in Mrs Robinson’s handbag.’
Gibson looked like she was impressed. Well, Starrett figured, she either thought that or she thought her boss was crazy.
‘Can I have that bag please, Eimear?’ Starrett asked, politely. ‘We have to send the contents to the lab for testing but I’d bet you my trusted BMW that we’re going to find Father Matt’s DNA all over it.’
‘Do I have to?’ Eimear asked Russell Leslie.
‘Before you answer that question, Mr Leslie, can I just say that said tea towel is the property of St Ernan’s; what’s more, the bag the towel is contained in was also purchase
d by a member of St Ernan’s to transport groceries back to the house from Donegal Town.’
On hearing that, Russell Leslie advised his client that as neither the towel, plastic bag, nor the premises said towel and plastic bag were discovered on, were her property, she would have to comply with the inspector’s request.
Eimear reluctantly and unhurriedly did so. She still didn’t look like she was going to admit to anything though.
Starrett crossed his fingers inside his trouser pocket and played his final card.
‘Eimear, of one thing I am certain,’ Starrett said, ‘if it wasn’t you who murdered Father Matt, it must have been Jessica.’
At first she just glared at Starrett for close to a minute.
‘You can’t hurt the dead,’ Eimear Robinson eventually said calmly and quietly, ‘but if you could I’d be happy to dig him up, just so I could kill him all over again.’
Starrett checked the tape was still rolling. The room was surreally quiet. If you allowed yourself to be distracted, there were still sounds of a normal Tuesday in the garda station, still sounds of Ramelton working its way slowly up through the gears of the day. But for the four in the basement interview room of Tower House, there was nothing, nothing apart from the sound of their own breathing, which was just about to be interrupted by the sound of Eimear Robinson’s voice rising at the beginning of her sentences and trailing off towards the end, trailing off to the extent that sometimes she was barely audible and Gibson kept having to ask her to repeat parts of her confession.
‘When I walked into our new lounge and saw them…well, actually, I heard them before I saw them, they were suppressing their animal sounds of pleasure so that they wouldn’t be discovered. Then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I started to be able to make out their forms. Our Jessica, God forgive her, naked as the day she was born, riding him like she was on a horse. They were so preoccupied with their pleasure they didn’t even notice me enter the room.
‘He’d still his priest’s black shirt on, but opened all the way down. His trousers and underpants were down around his ankles. But he’d still his black leather shoes on. Of all the things that could have run through my mind at that moment, the one that annoyed me the most was that that fecker was on my new sofa with his fecking shoes on!
‘I remember thinking about my poor Gerry, upstairs, asleep, and all the overtime he’d had to work just so we could buy that sofa and here was this…this pric…this priest, defiling our eldest daughter on it with his fecking shoes on. Gerry and I have had our differences and we’ve had our problems, and I’ll admit I’m responsible for as many of our problems as he is, but for all of that he was – he is – a good father and a good provider for our children and this is the way Jessica thanks him?
‘Jessica was a child, she’d an excuse, but he should have known better. He was an adult; adults are not meant to take advantage of children. But on top of being an adult, he was a PRIEST, for heaven’s sake. A priest, a disciple of the Holy Father. How could God let that happen? You answer me that, Inspector Starrett, how could God let one of his priests defile my daughter?’
Starrett didn’t have an answer to the question that had most troubled the island of Ireland for the last hundred years.
‘I watched them for a good few minutes and then I started to realise Jessica knew what she was doing, she knew how to take her pleasure. She’d clearly done it before. Was she as bad as he was? No, of course not, at least he should have known better!
‘I waited until I thought they were about to climax and then I walked up to them out of the shadows. I half hoped that I’d scare them both to death, particularly Father Matt. Sadly, yet another of my prayers bit the dust. I started whispering to them, shaking them, and they stopped in shock. I remember being so happy at the fact that I’d been able to prevent their climax – a small victory, I know, but a victory for me nonetheless. I wrapped her dressing gown around her, stuffed her jimjams into one of her arms while I held on to her other firmly, and I just kept pushing my other hand into his chest, little punches, but as strong as I could muster, whispering at him to get his clothes on and get out and never come back.
‘Once he’d gone I led her up to her bedroom. I didn’t say a word to her, I didn’t trust myself. I just shoved her into her room and closed the door.
‘I went downstairs again, but by now I was weeping so much I could hardly see what I was doing. I took all the covers off the cushions on our sofa and I put them straight into the washing machine and I sat up crying until the cycle had finished and I moved them to the drier.
‘There was still a smell of their sex in the lounge so I sprayed the room a few times with air freshener and finally went to bed. I got up first the next morning and I was surprised by my resolve, how un-upset I was feeling.
‘A few days later our Julia was a bit off – she’d been very upset for a wee while – so I took her out on one of our walks and eventually I got it out of her, what had been upsetting her. She dropped the bombshell. Jessica was pregnant. Father Matt’s name wasn’t mentioned. I still don’t even know if Julia knew about her sister and the priest.
‘Later that day I realised that Father Matt was just downright evil. I knew the Church would never ever do anything about him fornicating with my daughter. All they’d do is to try to manage the situation. This incident, my beautiful daughter being defiled by that priest, would become just another part of their permanent and ongoing damage control. This was totally unacceptable to me and so I resolved to find a way of ridding the world of him.’
Eimear finished talking like she’d concluded all she needed to say.
‘Eimear,’ Starrett started, ‘talk us through what happened last Wednesday afternoon at St Ernan’s, please.’
‘It was easy,’ she began, ‘I mean, it was so easy it was untrue. I decided Father Matt was evil. I decided that he needed to die. The next night, I was watching late-night TV – I put myself to sleep most nights watching TV. So I miss most of the stuff. but for some reason I was awake for this one programme, you know, the one where they take some subject and try and prove if it’s true or false. On this particular night, the night I was watching, the topic was: Is it possible to kill someone using an ice pellet?’
‘Sorry?’ Starrett said, confused.
‘You know,’ she said, from the benefit of knowledge gained from watching a fifty-minute documentary, ‘instead of using a lead pellet or a bullet, is it possible to kill someone with an ice slug?’
‘Really?’ Starrett said, totally amazed.
‘Yes,’ she said, bemused at Starrett’s reaction, ‘it was on the History Channel. It’s a great programme. Most of the subjects they tackle, though, I’d go “why would you even want to bother to try that?” But this particular one was, as I say, of growing interest to me.’
‘And did they prove that they could? Kill someone with an ice pellet?’ Starrett asked.
‘In theory, yes,’ Eimear Robinson claimed, ‘but I proved it in practice.’
‘How?’ Gibson asked, appearing to want to keep the confession on track.
‘Don’t you see? It’s the way to commit the perfect murder,’ she continued, ‘the man in the programme said, “This way,” he said, “there would be no tell-tale bullet left behind to forensically incriminate the suspect.”’
‘I experimented a bit at home, making the ice pellets in the icebox of our new freezer. Up at St Ernan’s, we all have a go with the air rifle, trying to rid the island of the rabbits and making a bit of rabbit stew as a by-product.
‘Using a biro pen top as a cast, I perfected my slug. I used a nail file to trim it down to the perfect size. I tried a few times until I got it just right.’
‘But how did you manage to get them to St Ernan’s without them melting?’ Starrett felt obliged to ask.
‘Simple, I just popped them in a small thermal flask of Gerry’s,’ she replied and then added proudly, ‘I’d been thinking I’d have to cart an icebox to St Ernan’s
until I came up with that part of the plan.’
‘And the ice slugs don’t melt in the barrel?’ Starrett asked, realising how bizarre this whole thing was becoming.
‘The man on the telly explained that the secret with the air rifle is that it uses compressed air rather than explosives. And if there are no explosives, there is no heat.
‘So, last Wednesday, on my day off, I headed up to St Ernan’s, but instead of driving or getting a lift with our Mary, as I would normally do, I parked my car in the driveway of one of the holiday homes, which are never used this time of the year. As you guessed, I dressed in trousers and put my hair up into one of Gerry’s old black cloth caps. I knew Father Dugan would clock me crossing the causeway but because of the clothes I was wearing, he would put me down to be one of the priests returning. I got there just after 3:30, knowing that’s when Father Mulligan goes off for his constitutional around the island, his daily intake of fresh air.
‘Father Matthew was surprised to see me on my day off,’ Eimear continued, now appearing to move into a different gear. ‘I was immediately friendly to him, which seemed to please him. Obviously things had been very frosty between both of us since the night I’d discovered him with Jessica.
‘He made me a coffee and we talked at the table like we’d done hundreds of times before. He pulled his chair around to face the fire and we must have been there for an hour and he said, “I’ll better get back to my chores,” he said, “the potatoes will soon be boiled.” I told him to sit where he was in the heat of the fire and I’d bring him over another fresh cup of coffee.
‘I nipped over to the sink, turned on the water to hide the sound of me getting the air rifle from beside the back door, and I took one of the ice pellets from my thermos flask. I broke the barrel, placed the pellet in, shut the barrel, and crept over to Father Matt. I placed the barrel of the air rifle as close as I could to the back of his neck, placed it just above his hair line with the barrel pointing upwards,’ she said, and then turned her head slowly away from Starrett and Gibson and used her index finger to demonstrate the point on her neck and the direction of the barrel.
