The Eulalie Park Mysteries Box Set 1

by Fiona Snyckers

  He fell silent, his eyes distant as he stared into the past. When his face was at rest, it sagged into deep lines that didn’t belong on a man of forty-three. Then he seemed to get a grip.

  “It’s time to make some changes. I know you’re not supposed to introduce more changes when children have been through a divorce or a death, but I’m breaking my sons out of this prison. I’m buying a family home in Sea View with a big backyard and I’m moving them to Queen’s Town Middle School. I’ll work from home more and they’ll get to come home to their own bedrooms every day. I’ll put up a hoop over the garage and we can play a bit of ball before the sun goes down.” He gave a sharp nod. “I’m going to give my kids their childhood back.”

  Eulalie found herself hoping that this man hadn’t hired someone to kill his ex-wife because she really wanted his sons to have the life he had just described.

  “Tell us about your trip to Lagos at the time of your ex-wife’s murder, Mr. Hagan.” Chief Macgregor sat with his pen poised. “Was it a long-standing arrangement?”

  “Actually, it was fairly spontaneous. Our headquarters are in London and one of the directors had been speaking to a potential client about taking on his financial planning portfolio. The client had to return to Lagos before the arrangement was finalized, so they sent me there to close the deal. There was a financial planning conference happening in Lagos at the same time, so I attended a couple of days of that as well. All in all, I was gone for three days. It happened during the week, so I didn’t even have to make arrangements for Emma to have the kids.”

  “Can you remember exactly how much notice you had of the trip?”

  “The wary look was back. “What does this have to do with anything?”

  “Please just answer the question, Mr. Hagan,” said Chief Macgregor. “As precisely as possible.”

  Hagan looked up at the ceiling and drummed his fingers on the table. “It’s hard to remember. I know it was very short notice. About thirty-six hours, I think, or less.”

  “This was only a few days ago, Mr. Hagan.”

  “I know, but a lot has happened since then. Okay, it’s coming back to me now. I got the call from head office on Sunday night that I needed to be in Lagos on Tuesday morning. My secretary spent the whole of Monday organizing flights and accommodation while I researched the client.”

  Chief Macgregor made another note. Eulalie decided to stir things up.

  “It sounds like Emma’s death has been a blessing in disguise for you. No more alimony to pay. No more fights over money, or how to raise the kids. You finally get to do what you’ve always wanted, which is take them out of boarding school and give them a normal childhood.”

  She saw that Chief Macgregor was watching Hagan just as closely as she was.

  “A blessing?” he said. “If you call it a blessing to have to deal with two young boys who’ve just lost their mother, then you have a funny definition of the word. My kids will need counselling for the rest of their lives, Ms. Park. They will never have a normal childhood. Never. All I can do is try to salvage what’s left of it. Even a self-centered mother is better than no mother at all. And, by the way, I wasn’t paying alimony anymore. That stopped the day she married Mark.”

  Eulalie glanced at Chief Macgregor and he gave a tiny nod.

  “Then I think we’re done here, Mr. Hagan,” she said standing up. “We’ll let you know if we need anything else from you. We’re going to speak to the school now.”

  “That’s fine, as long as you don’t go anywhere near my kids when I’m not present.”

  “We won’t. It’s against the law to question a minor without a responsible adult being present.”

  They exited the guesthouse to pick up the tuk-tuks they had left parked in the road.

  “Interesting,” said Chief Macgregor.

  “Very. Now let’s see what the school’s take on all this is.”

  St. Michael’s School for Boys could not have been more unlike the public-school Eulalie had attended from the age of twelve. That had been a higgledy-piggledy collection of buildings dating back more than a century and added to in a random fashion every time the school got an influx of money. It had a few tennis courts, and a couple of playing fields, one of which sloped dramatically at the south end because of the proximity of the sea cliffs.

  St Michael’s School for Boys didn’t look like a school so much as a collection of grand old manor houses that appeared to have been there for centuries. The grounds were spacious and well-manicured, and the facilities world class. They had a science lab that would put the Mayo Clinic to shame, and an auditorium to rival Carnegie Hall.

  “Imagine going to school at a place like this,” said Eulalie.

  “I did.”

  Eulalie stare at him. “What’s that now?”

  “I went to school at Gordonstoun in Scotland.”

  “Really? Isn’t that where Prince Charles went? How long were you there?”

  “Ten years. From when I was eight-years-old until I finished A-levels at eighteen. My sister was also there, so at least we had each other.”

  Eulalie nearly drove off the path. “Your sister? Since when do you have a sister? Where does she live?”

  “In Edinburgh. She’s two years older than I am. She is married and has two young children, a girl and a boy.”

  Eulalie remembered the photograph of a family she had seen in his office once. That must have been them.

  “Are you close?”

  “My niece and nephew are the only people, apart from you and my sister, that I like to have near me. I enjoy playing games with them, and I like it when they hug me and call me Uncle Donal.”

  Eulalie longed to tell him how adorable he was, but instead she asked whether he had enjoyed boarding school.

  “It wasn’t bad for someone like me. I liked the routine and the predictability of it all. You were expected to do certain things at a certain time and in a certain order, which appealed to me. We had very good teachers, which I also appreciated. The masters made themselves clear. I didn’t have to guess what they wanted me to do or what emotions they were feeling. That made life simpler. The only disadvantage was that I had to start learning those things when I left school. I would probably have made better progress with my empathy if I’d grown up in an affectionate household with involved parents instead of in an expensive institution.”

  They left their tuk-tuks in the road and walked up the sweeping driveway to the main reception building. Chief Macgregor told her that he would leave her to interview the headmaster alone. He was going to speak to the catering department to pursue his smuggling investigation.

  Eulalie announced herself at reception and was shown straight into the headmaster’s office. Mrs. Belfast had phoned ahead to make an appointment. It was her first real taste of how convenient it could be to have a clever and experienced secretary working for her.

  The headmaster was a little younger than she expected, barely in his early forties. His accent declared him to be American, probably from somewhere in the mid-west, like Iowa. He introduced himself as Dermot Mulligan.

  “How can I help, Ms. Park? You’re investigating the death of one of our mothers - Emma Hagan, I believe? No, that’s not right. The boys are Hagan, but she recently remarried. Emma Egger, was it?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Mulligan. I’m particularly interested in your impressions of the family. How have the boys been adjusting since the divorce?”

  “They’ve adjusted well in the sense that it doesn’t seem to have affected their social or academic lives. I would have preferred to see them less emotionally closed off, but perhaps that’s expecting too much.”

  “They’ve had a lot to deal with.”

  “Yes, they have.”

  “It can’t have been easy for them to see their parents at loggerheads with each other,” said Eulalie. “I guess some parents can’t resist putting their children in the middle when they’re going through a divorce.”

  “You�
�re right, they can’t. As educators, we see it often, but it never gets any easier.”

  “Would you say the Hagans were each as bad as each other?”

  “Oh, very much so. It was impossible to apportion blame. As soon as one parent did something provocative, the other would find a way to top it. They didn’t seem to care about the boys getting hurt in the process.”

  “It must have got better after Mrs. Hagan remarried, though?”

  Dermot Mulligan shook his head. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “I just assumed. When one parent settles down again, it often takes some of the heat off.”

  “No, my dear. I’m afraid not. In the case of the Hagans, I must admit I did at first think that her remarriage had settled things down. But then it all started up again. Just recently too.”

  “What was the issue? And was it as bad as before?”

  “My dear young lady, it was worse. Mr. Hagan was pushing for his sons to leave the boarding house and become dayboys. He wanted them to live with him and make the commute by ferry once a day. We don’t consider it ideal, but there are children who do it. But Mrs. Hagan – Mrs. Egger, I should say – was firmly opposed to the idea. Then Mr. Hagan threatened to stop paying for the boys to board, so Mrs. Egger took out a restraining order against him to stop him from removing the children from school against her will. Or maybe she just threatened to get the restraining order, I can’t exactly remember. I just know it turned ugly – very ugly indeed.”

  “And when exactly was this?”

  “A couple of weeks ago. Goodness knows how it would have resolved itself if not for Mrs. Egger’s tragic and untimely death. So sad. We flew the school flag at half-mast when we heard the news.”

  “And what is Mr. Hagan going to do with the boys now?” Eulalie asked.

  “He can do whatever he likes. He’s their sole guardian. I believe he intends to remove them from St. Michael’s altogether and put them into Queen’s Town Middle School. But he hasn’t discussed it with his sons yet, so I’m not at liberty to talk about it.”

  Eulalie thanked him for his time and asked him to direct her to the catering department.

  It was a long walk across the school campus to the dining hall, past the kitchens, to a cluster of carefully hidden warehouses where the supplies that kept the school going were kept.

  She found Chief Macgregor speaking to a man in a boiler suit who was directing the offloading of a consignment of champagne flutes.

  “The annual garden party is coming up next weekend,” the foreman was explaining. “All the parents attend. You’d think this was Buckingham Palace. They put on their best clothes and gobble strawberries and champagne all afternoon.”

  Eulalie raised her eyebrows at Chief Macgregor, but he shook his head. Apparently, he’d had no luck in tracking down the location through which the smuggled liquor was being distributed.

  He shook hands with the foreman, and he and Eulalie turned to walk back to the main gate.

  “No luck?” she asked.

  “None whatsoever. Either they are very good liars, or they genuinely don’t know what I’m talking about. Whichever cay is being used to smuggle the liquor, it doesn’t seem to be this one.” He glanced at her as they walked. “What about you? How did you get on?”

  “More fruitfully than you, apparently. Remember how Michael Hagan told us that he and Emma had been getting on better since she got remarried?”

  “Yes. He said that. I made a note of it.”

  “Well, apparently it was a lie. They had been fighting worse than ever. He was trying to get the kids to leave the boarding house and become dayboys. She was fighting him tooth and nail. The headmaster thought she took out a restraining order against him to leave the children where they were, but perhaps she only applied for one?”

  Chief Macgregor thought for a moment. “Or perhaps she had only got to the stage of threatening to take out a restraining order. Nothing came through our department.”

  “The point is, he lied to us. His relationship with his ex-wife was worse than ever at the time of her death. He tried to make it sound as though they had resolved their differences, but that clearly wasn’t true.”

  “And now that she’s dead, he has carte blanche to do whatever he likes with the children.”

  “The headmaster is already aware that he intends to remove them from the school.”

  They had reached the main entrance. A porter opened the gates for them and they retrieved their tuk-tuks. They reached the ferry-master’s office just in time to catch the noon ferry back to Prince William Island.

  Chief Macgregor offered to buy Eulalie lunch on the way back. She accepted a sticky chicken and avocado panini, while he contented himself with a pastrami and salad sandwich on rye.

  They were just pulling into open water when Chief Macgregor turned to Eulalie and said, “Where exactly do you see this relationship going?”

  Chapter 15

  Eulalie choked on her sandwich, which sent her into a fit of coughing.

  “What… are you talking about?” she wheezed when she had caught her breath.

  “I mean this.” He pointed to himself, then to her, and then back again. “I mean us. Where is this relationship going? Are we going to get married? Have kids?”

  This set her off into another fit of coughing as her brain struggled to catch up with what he was saying.

  “This is the second time you’ve done this. Did you not get the hint last time?”

  “I did,” he said. “But our relationship has advanced since then.”

  “It really hasn’t.” She coughed some more.

  He gave her a pat on the back. “Don’t try to talk while you are eating.”

  “Don’t try to give me a heart attack while I’m eating.”

  “I don’t understand what I said wrong.” he said. “I consulted an article on the internet about women and relationships. It was called ‘Ten things women wish men knew about them.’ It said that women wish men would stop hiding their feelings and would be open and honest with them. It said women didn’t like men who were afraid of commitment and who played mind games with them.”

  Eulalie had to shake her head. “Chief, there’s a world of difference between playing mind games and being honest to the point of … well, to the point of what you just said. There are many, many steps in between being afraid of commitment and discussing marriage before the first date.”

  “Before the first date?” He was honestly amazed. “We’ve already had our first date. We’ve had lots of dates. Our first date was when you brought me a pulled chicken sandwich for dinner in my office. Yes, and you even kissed me afterwards. Our second date was when I took you to Roots and Shoots for lunch, remember? Our third date was dinner at Angel’s Place. We were supposed to have sex after that, but we didn’t. And then after the third date you’re supposed to talk about where the relationship is going. You’re both supposed to lay your expectations out clearly, so that nobody gets hurt.”

  “Those weren’t dates. We were working on the same case and talking things over. It was more like a… a meeting between colleagues. It was a working lunch and a couple of working dinners.”

  “You kissed me,” he reminded her.

  “Yes. Okay. I will concede that I kissed you, which may have blurred the line between working dinner and date somewhat. But I’ve been thinking all this time that we haven’t had our first proper date yet.”

  “What would a proper date consist of?”

  “Either you or I would ask the other one out. It would be a purely social occasion, with no need to talk about work. We would get dressed up and go out to dinner or a movie, or perhaps both.”

  “That sounds like a lot of pressure.”

  “You’re right.” Eulalie laughed. “It is a lot of pressure. There’s a reason why dating is regarded as an extreme sport. We totally shouldn’t do that. I much prefer our working dinners.”

  “I like work. I wouldn’t like it if I weren’t
allowed to talk about work.”

  “Me too.”

  “And what about sex?”

  Eulalie was tempted to laugh, but she didn’t. To laugh would be to mock him for being the way he was – goal-oriented, detail-oriented, and always in need of a blueprint to follow.

  “Sex is another one of those things that becomes more pressured the more you try to schedule it. I think it’s something that should happen organically, with both parties enthusiastic. I like touching you. You like touching me. We can see where that goes.”

  Chief Macgregor’s right knee started to bounce up and down, a sign that he was becoming anxious.

  “I know this is a bit vague for your comfort,” she said. “But my comfort is also important. I want this to be something unscheduled and free from obligation.”

  “I think I understand. I would like to be able to follow a timetable. We date for so many months, then get engaged for so many months, then get married and buy a house. Then we have children. You don’t like to plan ahead like that, so we have to compromise. A little bit of planning, a little bit of spontaneity.”

  Eulalie just looked at him. “Is it really that simple for you? Are you really that sure about me that you would like to schedule our future together?”

  “Of course. My skin recognized you from the beginning.”

  Eulalie sank back in her seat. That was either the strangest or the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her.

  It was early afternoon by the time Eulalie got back to the office. She stopped off at La Petite Patisserie for a couple of coffees to go.