by Erin Hart
“Did you get the impression there was anything between herself and Osborne?” Devaney asked.
“I can’t say for certain. Nothing obvious. I do remember one day she thought they were being too hard on him, asking too many questions. Well, she reared up. Fairly chased ’em out of the place.”
“And she never made you tea and sandwiches?” Devaney inquired with a sideways glance.
“She did, of course. But I had mine below in the kitchen, not above with the great men. I’ll tell you what else bothered me: she was the one who kept pushing the notion that the wife had just scarpered. I mean, there were things missing, clothing and so forth, a couple of suitcases, right? But anyone in the house would have had access to those things, and could have nicked ’em before we even searched the place. Had three fuckin’ days to do it.”
Devaney felt foolish; he had never stopped to consider that fact. Put it together with the scarf Mrs. Hernan found under Jeremy’s bed—
“Listen, I have to be heading off,” Barry said, draining the last of his pint. “Sorry. I promised the wife I wouldn’t be late. New baby.”
“You’ve been a great help. Let me know if you think of anything else.” Devaney watched Barry’s broad shoulders push through the door as though it were made of cardboard, and imagined him stooped over, changing the nappy on a tiny infant. There was a father who hadn’t missed the delivery of his child, Devaney thought. He took another drink from his pint. Barry had helped uncover another side of Lucy Osborne, one he had never fully considered before. He’d been concentrating all this time on one motive, money, and never settled long enough on one of the other overwhelming human motivations—jealousy. He remembered Lucy’s vague disapproval, even disparagement of Mina Osborne as she stood before him, arranging those flowers. If she did have her eye on Osborne, was that enough to make her get rid of his wife? She’s there for years with her son, getting used to the idea that this little arrangement could go on forever, and what does Osborne do? He goes off on a summer course and brings home a pregnant wife. Must have been a shock, to say the least. Lucy and Jeremy get shunted aside, while he starts a new family. But what could have triggered a murderous impulse? In Devaney’s experience jealousy usually had a trigger point, sometimes brought on by drink, or seeing the person with someone else. Devaney cast his mind back again to the flowers, and focused on Lucy Osborne’s finger wrapped in a bandage. Was it just coincidence that she’d slipped and injured herself at the very moment he’d happened to mention her son?
The pub door opened, and who should appear again but Donal Barry. “There’s one more thing I forgot to mention,” he said, coming up beside Devaney and leaning forward on the bar. “Probably nothing, but you never know. There was one day when I was in the kitchen, one of the very first days after the disappearance. Lucy Osborne sets a plate of biscuits in front of me, right, and all of a sudden the stone drops right out of her ring. Huge fuckin’ diamond. And along with it comes a little shower of dried clay. I think nothin’ of it, and she brushes it away, sayin’ something about how she’ll have to give up digging in the garden.”
“What’s so strange about that?”
“My mam’s a great gardener. Colossal. Never gets the clay out from under her nails. Now, hanging about that place, I saw Lucy Osborne working in the garden plenty of times. And she always wore gloves. Always. That woman wouldn’t get her hands dirty for nothin’.”
After Barry left, Devaney checked his watch—ten minutes past five. He’d have to head off if he was going to make it to Dunbeg before Pilkington’s shut for the evening. In asking around, he’d found Dolly Pilkington had a small fiddle that might work for Roisin, and he had promised to come by the shop this evening to have a look at it.
Mullins had dutifully phoned this morning with the information he’d been checking. The scene-of-crime unit had found no complete fingerprints on the vehicles at Bracklyn, and nothing was missing from either car. This was going to be one of those cases where they’d never be able to prove who the perpetrator was—but they had to look as though they were making an effort. Mullins also reported that Hugh Osborne had indeed been on the seven o’clock British Airways flight from London on Sunday morning, just as he said. Fine. There was no reason for him to interfere with his own project. Maguire had a point: if whoever it was wanted to stop the priory development, why not actually put a spanner into the works at the site itself? Besides, there was fury in the way the damage had been done, Devaney thought. This wasn’t just some calculated, bog-protest publicity stunt, it was personal. So why target a couple of strangers? Could they just have been in the wrong place—too near the real target? What was it Osborne had said, that his car might have been damaged as well if he’d been at home?
And then there was Dr. Gavin’s mysterious dead crow. He didn’t want to disbelieve the woman, but he’d checked all around the house and found nothing to support her story. He agreed with her assessment of Jeremy Osborne: the boy’s destructive tendencies seemed more inward-than outward-directed. But his mother was terrified that he’d actually done the damage; you could see it in the way she looked at him. What did that say about how they were getting on? The word overprotective wasn’t strong enough for Lucy Osborne.
And then there was Brendan McGann, with straw in his clothes, broken Guinness bottles on the footpath, and a story about coming straight home to bed after the pub. Devaney made a mental note to have a word with Dermot Lynch tomorrow at the session, to ask if there was anything unusual about Brendan’s behavior Saturday night.
Devaney pulled up in front of Pilkington’s just as Dolly was locking up the old-fashioned double doors. She opened them again to greet him. “How are ye, Detective? I was just thinking you weren’t going to make it.”
“Sorry, Dolly—busy day.”
“I heard about the goings-on at the big house yesterday.” She clucked and shook her head. “Shockin’—I’d be terrified, livin’ in a huge wreck of a place like that. Have you any idea at all who did it?”
“We’re pursuing a few lines of inquiry,” Devaney said. It was what he always said, even when they had caught the doer of the deed red-handed. Besides, if he told Dolly Pilkington anything, he could be sure the whole town would have some version of it in a matter of minutes. Oliver Pilkington’s head appeared from around the corner of the back room, as he looked to see the person his mother was addressing. He squeezed past them and busied himself sweeping out the shop, sticking close enough to hear what they were saying.
“Ah, sure, we’ll never get so much as a midge’s dinner out of you, will we, Detective?” She opened the small fiddle case on the counter. “Well, here it is. Poor Oliver hasn’t a note in his head—sure, you may just as well try teachin’ music to a lump of stone. Try it out there, if you like.” Devaney picked up the diminutive fiddle and put it to his shoulder, leaning his head over the body, the better to hear its voice as he pulled bow across string.
“Got a good tone.” He plucked the strings, and held the instrument up to the light, to check the varnish and the straightness of the neck and sound post. “Could I have Roisin try it as well, to see if it suits her?”
“Surely. Keep it as long as you like, Detective.”
Devaney set the fiddle back in its case and began to examine the hairs on the bow. “You’ve lived in Dunbeg a long time, Dolly.”
“Born and reared.”
“I imagine you hear both sides of every quarrel. Like it or not.”
“Ah, there’s some of that, you know. The secret of staying in business is listening to what people say and keeping it to yourself.” She nodded wisely.
“So you might have heard a theory or two about what happened at Bracklyn House last night.”
Dolly Pilkington’s face lit up, and he knew she was about to ignore her own sage advice. “You won’t have to look very far to find the culprit.”
“Is that so?”
“Maybe only as far as across the road, they say.”
“I
understand Brendan McGann’s dead against the development at the priory. Can’t be easy when his sister is keeping company with your man.”
“Keeping company, indeed,” Dolly snorted. She glanced at Oliver and leaned forward. “There are some saying he’s going to sue.”
Devaney must have looked blank.
“For maintenance,” she said, and raised her eyebrows. “For the child.”
“His sister’s child?”
Devaney heard a snigger and saw Oliver Pilkington’s gingery head lift slightly. “Sure, everybody knows Aoife McGann is Hugh Osborne’s bastard,” the boy said, and almost before the words were out of his mouth, Dolly had whirled and delivered a resounding slap to the back of her son’s head. Oliver dropped his broom and made a dive away from his mother to avoid another clout, then stood a short distance away, rubbing his head and scowling.
“Go away out of that, you dirty boy,” she said, brimming with indignation. “I won’t have that kind of talk in here.” It was plain that Oliver had heard this very phrase on his mother’s lips, and was shocked to be dealt with so severely when he simply repeated it. Devaney was sorry to make the boy suffer for his benefit.
“It’s a few years ago, now, but you know how people go on,” Dolly Pilkington said. She offered a sniff of disapproval. Devaney’s mind began turning over this new information. Of course he’d heard the current whispers around the town about Hugh Osborne and Una McGann, but he couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard the whole story. Even the children of Dunbeg took it as fact. Perhaps his own children. He thought of Brendan’s bowed head and clasped hands as he sat in the church pew, of the crude letters carved inside the confession box. If Una McGann had had a child by Hugh Osborne, that might put Mina’s disappearance in a whole different light.
When they returned from their expedition to the tower, Cormac found a note slipped under his door. He read it in a glance, and hurried down the hall to Nora’s room.
“Message from Ned Raftery,” Cormac said when she’d answered his knock. She was daubing at the scratch on her forehead with antiseptic. “Just says to ring him back; he may have found something on our red-haired girl.”
“I might have had something for you earlier,” Raftery said when Cormac had him on the phone, “but I had to ask someone to read through some of the boxes of old papers I have here. I don’t know if I mentioned that I’d done a history of the Clanricardes some years back. I got to thinking, and wanted to check through some of the material. I knew that Ulick, the marquess of Clanricarde—he was the son of Richard de Burgo, who built Portumna Castle—wrote a memoir that was published a hundred years after his death. He lived from 1604 to 1657, so that puts him in roughly the same time frame as your red-haired girl, if she was indeed married in 1652.”
Cormac covered the mouthpiece and called out to Nora, “Come quickly, I think you’ll want to hear this.” She came and stood beside him, and Cormac tried to hold the phone so that she could hear as well.
“There was nothing in Ulick’s own memoir or letters,” Raftery said, “but what I found was a letter Clanricarde received from one of his neighbors, a Charles Symner, in the spring of 1654. Symner mentions attending the execution of a young woman named Annie McCann, convicted of killing her newborn child. The date on the letter is May twenty-third. It’s not much, but Symner makes particular mention of the young woman’s wild red hair.”
21
When Devaney returned home with the fiddle, he found his daughter Orla reigning over the kitchen, wearing a baker’s apron that nearly wrapped twice around her slender waist. She’d been on a French cookery kick for the last fortnight, ever since she got home from a school trip to Normandy, and the family were all beginning to put on weight from the cream sauces, herself excepted. Now she was trying to show Roisin how to make a rose from a tomato, which his younger daughter undertook with the same earnest concentration that she brought to every task. The aroma of onions and seared meat reminded Devaney that he’d forgotten to eat lunch.
“Begod, Orla, that food smells mighty.” He lifted the lid off a saucepan and breathed in the fragrant steam. “What is it?”
“Get out of that, Daddy, you’re not supposed to take the cover off while it’s cooking.” She sounded a bit like her mother. “It’s Supremes de Volaille Veronique avec Riz a l’Indienne,” she continued, with a perfect French accent, apparently anticipating his grimace at such a reply, because she quickly translated: “Chicken and grapes in cream sauce, with curried rice.”
“With the hunger that’s on me now, I’d eat the Lamb of God. Mammy home yet?”
“She’s on her way.”
“Orla, this is impossible,” Roisin said. Devaney felt her frustration, and appreciated the way her face brightened when she saw the fiddle case under his arm.
“Daddy, you remembered. I knew you would.” She quickly abandoned her bruised-looking tomato and began circling around him, hungry for a look at the new instrument. He set down the fiddle and noted the parcel beside it on the table, bearing a large number of foreign-looking stamps.
“That came for you in the post today, Daddy,” Roisin said. “Where’s it from?”
“From India,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Just my work, Roisin.” Satisfied with that answer, his daughter shifted her attention to the new fiddle, and he watched with pleasure as she traced her finger around its curved sides, and tried out the instrument as he had done.
When Nuala arrived home, Orla’s feast was ready. The girls had laid the table; now they lit candles and poured wine, and they all actually sat down and had a meal together—like a real family, Devaney thought—for the first time in months. Even Padraig tore himself away from his PlayStation battles long enough to sit and wolf down some food and trade a few good-natured barbs with his sisters. The phone rang at one point, and Devaney half rose to answer it, but Nuala threw him a look that said, Let it ring, just this once? And so he had. Probably for one of the children anyway.
He caught Nuala looking at him curiously several times. Why was he pushing himself so hard, when it seemed so simple, so easy to be here? The feeling, like the wine, seemed to warm him like a candle flame from the inside. It lasted all through the supper, through the fiddle lesson he gave Roisin, watching her fingers take their positions for a new tune. It hadn’t worn off by the time he and Nuala went to bed, and as he watched her undress, he imagined stopping his wife’s fingers as she reached for the zipper on the back of her skirt and undoing it himself. But even in his imagination, he was clumsy, hesitant, unsure of how she would react. Sitting on the edge of the bed removing his shoes, he watched as she slipped from the skirt and hung it in the closet. As she lifted the silky blouse above her head, he imagined reaching out and pulling her toward him, until he could drink in her subtle fragrance, feel the warmth of her breasts and belly against his face, the ever wondrous softness of her pale skin. There was nothing to stop him from doing so, nothing but the deadening force of habit and his own fear. As Nuala climbed into the bed beside him, pulled the duvet over her shoulder and plumped the pillow, the same way she did every night, the distance between them had never felt so great. He reached up to switch off the light.
When he did pull her against him during the night, he was amazed how easily it all happened. Why had he hesitated so long? For the first time there was no terrible urgency in their lovemaking. In its place, Devaney was aware of a new kindness in the way they touched each other; he felt they were once more moving in tandem as he heard Nuala’s voice whispering urgently in his ear. At the sound, he awoke abruptly from his dream to find her breathing softly beside him. Devaney had been here a thousand times before, suspended on the point of indecision, and wondered what would happen if he were to touch his wife the way he had in the dream. Disconcerted by the thought, he quietly slid out of bed and went downstairs. It was just after one o’clock, and the house was completely silent.
When he switched on the light, the package from Mrs.
Gonsalves awaited him on the kitchen table. It was done up in striped brown paper, with clear Sellotape, his name and address in a curious, old-fashioned hand. He hesitated for a moment, then got scissors from the drawer and sliced open the end of the bundle. As he did, a pile of tissue-thin gold-and-green-edged air mail envelopes slid out onto the tabletop. There must have been almost a hundred letters in all. It would be best to read them in order, starting with the oldest first, and so he dug every one out of the package and began organizing them by the dates on the postmarks.
He had not learned much about Mina Osborne from the case file. Despite the photos, the physical description, the witness statements that described the kind of person she was, he did not have a complete sense of her. It was typical of witnesses in a disappearance like this to offer vague descriptions that didn’t even begin to capture the complicated character of a human being. Even her husband’s attempts to draw a detailed portrait seemed to come up short. The fuller picture of Mina Osborne did not start to emerge until he opened her first letter home. “Dearest Mama,” it began. He thought of the mother’s voice echoing on the telephone line, and could almost imagine the sound of Mina’s voice from the way she wrote. “Give Pa an extra kiss tonight. Maybe someday you may tell him it’s from me.” That was the only reference she made to being cut off by the father. She promised to write often, and from the looks of the stacks of letters on his table, she had kept that promise. He carefully reinserted the letter in its dated envelope and moved on.
Mina offered vividly detailed descriptions of every room at Bracklyn House, no doubt in case her mother would never have the opportunity to visit. She marveled at its age, the comfort of its furnishings, the profusion of books in its library, the sweetness of the roses in the garden. The newly married Mina also painted a glowingly affectionate portrait of Hugh Osborne, and shyly confided to her mother the surprise and delight she found in being married. Devaney felt his face flush as he realized it was an indirect way to tell her mother how much she enjoyed sex. “I’m glad after all that you persuaded me not to join the Sisters of Mercy. I was so keen on it, too. How did you know it wouldn’t be the right thing?”
