Switching off the dome light before opening the car door, Ward made sure the car was locked before ambling up the street, noting which of the adjacent houses had lights in their windows. What he was about to do was surely illegal, unless, of course, Geraldine Breen was presently in Manahan’s house, as Parmalee had said.
At the top of the street, Ward paused for a while. It was a soft spring night. Out on the Irish Sea in the direction of Wales, a half-moon had just risen and was casting a fan of achromatic light across calm silver waters.
From that perspective he could see all the way south to Bray Head—a massive promontory—and the Big and Little Sugarloafs, two mountains that he had climbed often with Ruthie and would again with his entire crew, kids and all. He promised himself.
There was that, he now realized, which could never be taken from him. The mountains and the crescent sweep of buff beach that stretched out from the base of Killiney Hill, all the way to Bray. No matter what happened, he’d always be able to tramp the hills or bathe in that shimmering water. Which thought cheered him somewhat.
Walking back down toward the house that Delia Manahan owned, Ward pulled out his notepad once more and recorded the number plates of the other cars on the street. At the low wall that bordered Manahan’s back garden, Ward vaulted the obstacle in one movement and found himself in the shadows of the house.
It had seemed almost modest from the street. But as he worked his way around toward the front, where he could see a light, he came upon a zigzag pattern of tall and wide windows that, he imagined, provided the front windows of the large house with a fractured 180-degree panorama of the sea, the bay, the wooded Shanganagh Vale, and the mountains in the distance.
What must the place be worth? Surely close to a million pounds. Had Manahan, as he had his loft, bought when prices were low? Or was her legal practice that lucrative and her financial commitment to Opus Dei not as complete as most critics assumed of numeraries?
The view from the wide deck that fronted the house was all that he imagined. The green port running light of a fishing boat that was motoring north looked like a brilliant emerald in a jade-colored sea. Now, as the breeze shifted, Ward could hear the gentle ticking of its engine.
Which was when Ward saw Geraldine Breen through a gap in a drape.
Wearing a housecoat, she was sitting on a divan with her legs folded under her in a position that resembled something from yoga. Yet she was watching the television.
The plackets of the garment had opened to display one decidedly taut breast for a woman of—how old could she be?—about Ward’s own age, which was forty-two. The rest of her—emphasized by her erect posture and shoulder muscles that were testing the material—seemed similarly fit.
Even with the bandage plaster across her swollen nose, she was not an unhandsome woman, Ward judged, with regular features and blondish hair that had only begun to gray. What he could see of her stomach was a narrow washboard. She exercised regularly, he imagined. Strenuously.
The picture on the television changed to show McGarr in Noreen’s Rover, politely but firmly declining to comment about anything, Ward could tell. One of the journalists pointed at his swollen face, doubtless wondering how it had happened.
While Breen was distracted, Ward decided to try the handle of the deck door. It was locked. But a strident klaxon began sounding at the side of the house, and in a flash Breen was up and out of the room.
Ward did not know what to do—smash his way into the house or rush toward the street to prevent her escape. She could hardly get down the mountainside with its nearly sheer drop to the sea. And now he was on firm legal footing, given the fact that she was wanted on a criminal charge.
But could she be armed? Is that what she had gone for? Could he have precipitated a gunfight or, worse, a standoff that would further involve the press? Ward did not want that.
Stepping back, he raised a leg and with three well-placed thrusts shattered the frame and was into the room, his Beretta 84 held before him. Cautiously he began moving through the large sitting room, the dining room, the kitchen, which was furnished with every class of modern convenience.
Until he heard a car door slam out on the street and the squeal of tires as a car roared away. She had taken the black BMW, the new Schwarzwalder model with the powerful V-12 engine that cost…what? Nearly sixty thousand quid.
Digging out his notebook, where he had copied down the number plate, Ward reached for his mobile phone to call it in.
By the time McGarr located the chemist over whose shop Dery Parmalee rented a flat in the village of Dunlavin, it was well after midnight.
“This is really quite extraordinary,” Joan Daley, the pharmacist, complained yet again, twisting the key in its lock.
Dressed in a housecoat, she had her dark hair studded with hot-pink curlers, and there was something like a meringue of mud on her face. The tops of her bedroom slippers were punctuated with blue pompoms. McGarr’s phone call had got her out of bed, she had told him more than once.
Switching on the lights, she stepped back as though to let McGarr enter first.
“Please, lead the way,” he said. “The more quickly we get this over, the sooner you’ll get back to bed.”
All chemist shops smelled the same, McGarr believed—a saccharine mélange of soaps, perfumes, and lotions with a hint of more powerful substances emanating from behind the counter where the prescriptions were made up.
But not all chemist shops contained what amounted to a little shrine in one corner with a barren cross and a devotional rail where waiting customers could kneel and pray.
“You’re religious, I see.”
“Which is none of your business.” Using a key to open a door between the counter and the shrine, the woman switched on another light and again stepped away from the door.
“If you’re going up there, you’re going up yourself,” she advised, her eyes bright with contempt. “You’ll not make me a party to any police illegality. If you insist on violating Mr. Parmalee’s privacy, you’ll do it yourself over my stated objections.”
Smiling slightly, McGarr nodded. “Perhaps you’d like to return to your bed. I could show myself out.”
Her head went back. “I’ll wait right here.”
Not trusting him, McGarr imagined, because she knew herself too well.
The staircase up was dark and lined with stacks of books and magazines, one of which was dated six years earlier, he saw as the beam of his pocket torch slid over the cover.
And the flat was dusty. From the cobwebs in the corners and the dust balls on the hardwood floor, McGarr judged that the place had not been cleaned in some long time. At the top of the stairs, he found another switch.
The apartment was two long rooms following the T-pattern of the building, the larger, where he stood, being a work area. Tables, chairs for six, and three desks ran the walls, with what appeared to be a mini–command center in the middle of the space.
The collection of tables held a veritable array of electronic equipment—computers, printers, faxes, a telephone console, and the like. Along with a bank of other devices that McGarr only recognized partially but assumed were the electronic eavesdropping devices that Parmalee had lied about having in his car.
McGarr attempted to activate one of the devices, but nothing happened. Nor with a second and a third. Things were happening so fast in electronics that it was impossible for somebody not involved in the field to keep up with the advances.
It had taken McGarr a good fortnight to master the intricacies of his cell phone—voice mail, call forwarding, messaging, beeping, conferencing, and so forth—and his adolescent daughter sometimes had to help him open files sent via e-mail to his home.
The second room contained only a large, circular bed and a magnificent hand-carved armoire fronted with a tall mirror. Unlike the rest of the apartment, the glass sparkled, its purpose being—McGarr assumed—to present the occupants of the bed with a clear view of themselves. The be
d was unmade and, from the arrangement of the pillows, had last been occupied by one person only.
In the armoire, McGarr found only a jacket and several pairs of trousers, with socks and underwear in the lower drawers, which had not been opened in some time. McGarr had to tap them back into place.
Between the mattress and its box spring, where it could still be felt, he imagined, but a pillow would cushion its shape, was a Sokolovsky .45 Automaster, the engraving said. Handguns were something McGarr knew well, and the large, heavy, and powerful gun was something of a rarity.
While its smooth lines probably did not disturb Parmalee’s comfort much, it was the sort of weapon that could be pulled out and fired quickly. All controls, including the safety, were contained ingeniously within the trigger guard.
But at what cost. The last McGarr knew, the 3.6 pounds of an Automaster weighed in at close to fifteen hundred quid. Conclusion? The editor-in-chief of Ath Cliath slept in Dunlavin in fear of his life.
But since Dery Parmalee could not possibly possess a license to own such a weapon under Ireland’s strict gun laws, McGarr removed the clip, checked the chamber, and slipped the gun under his belt.
Back in the other room, he looked for the documentation, all the instruction manuals, advisories, warrantees, and the like that inevitably accompanied electronic devices. Perhaps he could find out how to switch the equipment on.
Finding nothing of the sort in the filing cabinets or desk drawers, he began looking behind the machines for a dealer’s sticker or something that might give him a lead.
Again he came up empty, except for a business-sized card under one of the machines that McGarr had switched on. Obviously rather old, with tattered edges, it had been taped to the surface of the table.
On it in tight script, somebody had written: M-J, 1; Duggan, 2; Breen, 3; guest A, 4; guest B, 5, and so on through many of the rooms of Barbastro, McGarr guessed, including Mudd office, 14; Mudd cottage, 15.
With the blade of his penknife, McGarr cut the tape around the edges of the card and turned it over: “Dery Parmalee, Ph.D.,” it said. “Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, Ath Cliath.” And then in smaller type near the bottom, “Dear, dirty Dublin revealed for what she is—a strumpet and a whore.”
Although jaded and over the top like much of what Parmalee’s tabloid ran, it was not a new observation, Joyce and Plunkett having given voice to the thought during the last century, and Swift in his own way before that.
Down in the chemist shop, McGarr found Joan Daley waiting by the door.
“How long ago were those machines brought into the flat?”
Her eyes shied. “What machines? I don’t go into Mr. P.’s flat. I have no idea what’s up there, nor do I care.”
“Surely he comes and goes when you’re here.”
“And when I’m not. He has a key.”
“You trust him, then—with your shop?” And all the drugs it contained, went unsaid.
“He’s a gentleman. Are you through?”
“Is Fred Duggan your priest?”
She opened the door and pointed toward the darkness. “If you mean Father Fred Duggan, that’s none of your effing business. I hope I’m understood.”
At his car, McGarr rang up Barbastro. “Fred—Peter McGarr here. I’ll be there in five minutes. I want you to open the gate.”
“Why?”
“I take it you’re the executor of Mary-Jo’s estate.” It was a guess, but—
“That’s right.”
“Her will—you have it there?”
“Yes, but—”
“I want to see it.”
“Oh, Peter, isn’t this highly unus—”
“Five minutes.” McGarr rang off.
It took Ward several hours to search Delia Manahan’s house in Killiney. Beginning in the basement, he worked his way up.
What was plain from the outset was the woman’s dedication to sport. Yes, she had two children, a girl and a boy from the look of the bicycles and other outdoor paraphernalia stored in the cellar, but much of the hiking, camping, even technical mountain-climbing equipment had to be hers. Ward counted over a dozen different kinds of hiking boots and climbing boots in the one woman’s size.
Also, she fished both saltwater and freshwater, and hunted. Up in a rather large room off the sitting room that was dominated by an enormous television, Ward found heads of an emu, a water buffalo, and a leopard on the wall, all bagged by Manahan, as photos on a nearby table corroborated. There was also a glass-fronted and climate-controlled gun case that contained two large-bore hunting rifles and a number of fowling pieces.
Apart from hunting and fishing, seemingly alone—the men in the sporting pictures all appeared to be guides, from their deep tans or weathered faces and well-worn outdoor garb—her life seemed unremarkable.
She was religious, certainly, with holy pictures, crosses, and replicas of icons everywhere he turned. But that was not unusual in a deeply religious country. Many of the photos showed Manahan visiting Notre Dame, Chartres, Assisi, and the Vatican, with the other woman—Geraldine Breen—also present. In three, Father Fred Duggan had his arms around both, and from the shadow in the Vatican shot, it appeared as though Duggan had taken the snap of the two women.
Ward climbed the carpeted stairs to the bedrooms, hoping to find…what? Some telling detail, some memento, perhaps even a sheaf of letters too precious to be destroyed that would reveal who Delia Manahan was. What her involvements had been since—he knew from having questioned her—the death of her husband a decade before.
After all, it was in bedrooms that people spent the most intimate moments of their private lives, where they assembled themselves in the morning and regaled or composed themselves at night.
Among their undergarments, jewelry, family photographs, books, magazines, and sometimes correspondence, there was almost always something revelatory of character or tastes.
But there too, as in the photos on the first floor, only one event seemed to have changed how she lived her life—the death of her husband.
At the time, Manahan had been thirty-two or thirty-three, Ward judged, but the husband much older. Perhaps in his early fifties. While he was alive, all their cars were large, the house appeared to be under construction, and there had been other dwellings as well in some tropical clime where people—could they be servants?—had dark skin.
But after his death, the woman’s image changed dramatically. Formerly decidedly chic, with a pretty face and a good figure, she suddenly abandoned stylish clothes and makeup.
Gone was her long, dark, and wavy hair and any attempt at stylishness. Instead she kept her locks close-cropped and almost mannish in cut.
As well, she appeared to have taken to wearing muumuus—what Ward’s mother had called the shapeless shifts worn by some of her sister crones late in life. Sacks that concealed the woman’s pleasant curves.
Sports bras that tightened her breasts to her chest yet produced odd high crescents in her clothes became usual, slacks often, and mannish footwear.
Perhaps it was then that she had entered Opus Dei, Ward guessed. Geraldine Breen appeared often in those shots as well, sometimes with Manahan’s two children. Hiking, camping, and climbing were sports that Manahan took up during that period in her life.
From the look of their bedrooms, Manahan’s children had since grown up and left home. The closets were virtually empty, and the posters of rock stars on the walls were dated. In the portrait of the girl’s field hockey squad from St. Columba’s College, two were holding a banner that read “1996 Champs.”
The caption also listed the names of the squad members, but nowhere was a Manahan listed. Using what appeared to be the girl’s graduation portrait, Ward found her among her classmates, Marguerite Foley being her name in that photo.
The name also appeared on the letterhead of some stationery in the desk and was burned into the butts of the hockey sticks that were hung crossed on a wall.
Obviously, Delia Manahan’s
husband, the father of her children, had been Foley by name.
But nowhere—not in any of the several photo albums that Ward had gone through and in none of the correspondence that referred to the deaths of Manahan’s parents, their burials, and the arrangements of their separate wills—was a son mentioned. Or a Frank. Or perhaps a stepson by the surname of Mudd.
In fact, Delia Manahan Foley appeared to have been an only child.
Ward moved to the fourth and final bedroom, which appeared to have been occupied by Geraldine Breen. An overnight bag was open on the dresser, and the bedcovers had been turned down.
But Ward had only spread open the bag when he heard the sound of feet behind him and glanced up in time to see something descending at the end of Breen’s fist—a sap, he guessed, as it smacked into his skull and filled his eyes with a blinding luminescence. Stunned, he staggered into the wall.
“Shame on your mum,” she said. “Didn’t she tell you it’s not on to be rummaging through other people’s belongings? Not acceptable at all.”
Ward tried to straighten up, but his balance was gone.
“Did you find what you were after? Or can I relieve you of the need?” She was still dressed in the housecoat, which was tied with a wide sash, rather like a kimono.
As he staggered toward her, her foot came up with great force and struck him in the groin, nearly lifting him off his feet. When he buckled up, she whipped the sap across the back of his head, and he fell hard on the carpet
“So much for the Marquis of Queensberry,” he heard her say, before the blinding light faded to nothingness.
Father Fred Duggan was waiting for McGarr beyond the stout gates of Barbastro, as he had been on McGarr’s other visits.
“I’ve had a chance to think about this, Peter”—Duggan wagged his head—“and really, it’s not right. Not by custom, not by law. The will should be sealed and submitted to a court, and—”
The Death of an Irish Sinner Page 15
