Deadly Intent (17 page)

Nessa looked out at the lush greenery streaking past the windows. She could think of ten good reasons not to visit Maureen, most of them involving Dominic, but she felt strongly that it was a courtesy owed to her former guest. That much she could explain to Sal with no difficulty – it was rather trickier, however, to admit that she was also on tenterhooks to hear Maureen's version of Thursday's events.

Sal grimaced when her complaints were met with silence, and after a few minutes, she tried a different tack. ‘Well, here's an idea,' she said brightly. ‘How about Darina does the hospital thing with you, while I whizz into the nearest shops? I mean to say, I didn't get a chance to pack my funeral outfit before we left home, did I, so I'm not looking my best?'

‘Please, Sal, that's enough for now. It may not be your idea of fun, but you know very well that I can't see Maureen on my own in case Dominic is around, and Darina has other things to do.'

‘I'd offer to go in with you, Nessa,' said Darina hesitantly, ‘but I've arranged to meet an old family friend who lives only five minutes from the hospital. You know it's Mam's second anniversary next month, and we're organising a little commemoration, you see.'

‘I wouldn't dream of asking any more of your time, Darina, and anyway, Sal and I had this discussion already—'

‘Discussion? As in,
you
gave me my orders for the day,' Sal interrupted. ‘You haven't even explained why Maureen is still in hospital, considering she wasn't badly hurt in the first place?'

‘I understand she's having more tests, to check why she's still getting dizzy spells. Today is definitely our best chance to see her.'

‘Your best chance, you mean.'

‘Well, maybe I could make time to go in,' said Darina. ‘We'll get to Tipperary quickly enough on the motorway and the funeral is on quite late, isn't it?'

‘Yes, it's not until half twelve,' said Nessa, ‘which is handy for all of us who have a long journey to get there. But really, we've discommoded you enough already so there's no question of it.'

Darina seemed about to disagree. ‘I nearly feel I've a responsibility for Maureen, after finding her last week. But at the same time, I'd feel a bit awkward because I hardly knew her, really.'

‘You hardly knew Oscar,' said Sal, ‘and, what's more, neither did we, but look at us barrelling off to his funeral as if he was our favourite uncle. I seriously don't get this fixation we have in Ireland, so-called paying our respects to people we've only met once or twice in our lives.'

‘Give over, Sal, and please think of other people for a while.' Nessa felt worn down by three days of guerilla sniping. She could understand why Sal felt resentful at leaving Beara, but she found herself longing for the diligent and helpful girl her daughter used to be. Sal used to try to prevent arguments in the past, rather than fomenting them as she did now.

‘When I was on the phone to Marcus last night, we got onto this same subject.' Sal's voice softened when she mentioned her new boyfriend. ‘The whole Irish funeral thing, you know. It amazes him, he says, that any work ever gets done in this country, considering how much time people spend at funerals. Needless to say there'll be a mass exodus from Beara to Tipperary today.'

‘So is he coming himself?'

‘No, he's far too busy, that's the point he was making.'

‘I can't imagine that the hackney service takes all his time,' said Darina. Nessa noticed a barb in her voice. ‘And wouldn't you think he'd want to see you, Sal?'

‘Yeah, sure, and I
so
want to have a romantic rendezvous with him at a funeral. Anyway, he's working on the holiday homes, because his latest idea is to rent them out over the winter to a group of teleworkers from India, which is a pretty neat scheme, if you ask me. He says he can set up a satellite connection, or something.'

‘Marcus is a great man for schemes, alright. Did he mention whether they'll be male or female teleworkers?'

Nessa thought she should steer them back to a more neutral topic. ‘I do understand what you said about funerals, Sal. When I was your age, I remember telling my parents that funerals should be small family events, as they are in some countries. Once I'm dead, I said to them, I wouldn't care who'd be looking at my coffin.'

‘That's just exactly what I said to Marcus.'

‘But don't you realise, Sal,' said Darina fervently, ‘that the reason the whole community turns out for a funeral in Ireland is not only to show respect for the person who's died, but to honour the grieving relatives? I really didn't understand it until my mother's death. It's hard to put in words, but I remember someone saying that it's like being wrapped in a warm blanket, and I can tell you it helped me hugely to walk into a church full of people, after all the months I'd spent caring for her.'

Sal blushed at their neighbour's outburst, and Nessa told herself that she could not expect them to become close friends so easily. Their age gap of five years was still significant, and Sal had not really grasped what hard times Darina had had.

‘OK, right,' said Sal after a pause. ‘But when we get to Tipperary today, I promise you both that I'll have my shades clamped over my eyes. I wouldn't like anyone to think I was there just to gawp or to get my mug on the TV news, like some of the hangers-on in the crowd.'

Sunlight flashed through the leaves. Nessa had always enjoyed the changing vistas on the road from Bantry to Bandon, where the wild beauty of the west gave way to abundant fertility and great tunnels of stately trees along the river valley. She tried to relax for a while, but found she could not stop thinking of the murder investigation.

The senior gardai on the case would be present at Oscar's funeral, of course, and she planned to steer clear of them. Trevor O'Kelleher had phoned her on Thursday, and while he did not refer directly to the incident at the bridge the previous day, he let her know that he was aware of it. It was imperative, he told her, to tell the gardai of any new evidence she came across, or any stray details she might remember. He spoke as pleasantly as before, but when the call ended, Nessa's feeling was that Redmond Joyce had made a fool of her in the inspector's eyes. From now on, she decided she would stay out of the gardai's way unless she had solid new information to offer.

‘I wanted to tell you, Nessa, that I called in to see Ambrose yesterday, and he's in a bit of a state, poor man, because of the stuff that's appeared in the papers. As a matter of fact, he's worried that he's responsible for the garbage Jack Talbot wrote about the phone calls Oscar got.'

Nessa waited patiently for Darina to come to the point. She had a habit, quite common in Ireland, of approaching a story in a roundabout manner.

‘The thing is that Ambrose had two or three conversations with Jack Talbot, who encouraged him by turning up at his gate with a nice bottle of whiskey. But now Ambrose says he can't swear by every jot of information he gave him. And the problem is, he was the source of this whole notion about Oscar getting a call from Patrick.'

‘You mean, Ambrose heard Oscar getting a phone call, but he can't actually confirm who was on the other end?'

‘That's it, yes, and worse still, Ambrose also told Jack that Oscar and Patrick met up shortly afterwards, even though he didn't set eyes on them together. Then ten minutes later, while he was chatting to the postman at the gate, he saw Patrick's car passing by, something he only remembered a few days ago.'

‘At which point I'm sure Jack asked him if there was anybody in the car with Patrick?'

‘Exactly, and Ambrose couldn't say one way or another, but Jack pressed him until he said that Patrick could well have had a passenger. At that stage, I think Ambrose was so bamboozled that he said whatever Jack wanted to hear.'

‘You should tell him not to worry,' said Nessa. ‘I'll call in to see him myself when I'm back in Beara.' Her husband's explanations on the phone were fresh in her mind. ‘You see, the fact is that Jack's story was true – Patrick did phone Oscar at midday on the Thursday, and what's more, they met at the junction of the Briary, up the hill road from Ambrose's house.'

Sal raised her head from her mobile phone. She had been listening to new ringtones, and one of them continued to jingle when she removed her earphone.

‘So what's the big hoo-ha about it? Is Dad supposed to have strangled Oscar at the side of the road because he suddenly felt like it? Or the idea is that he drove off with Oscar and then strangled him a while later, because they had a little argument about some walking route?'

‘I know it seems ridiculous to us,' said Nessa. She gazed at her daughter's phone, willing it to stop so that she wouldn't have to complain once again. Sal glanced at her and sighed, clicking off the sound. To Nessa's relief, she seemed to have cheered up.

‘Anyway, even if Dad had been on the spot to do the dirty deed, what happened next, according to Slimy Jack's theory? Did he hump the body into the boot of his car so that he could feed it to the foxes at just about the same time as his plane landed on the far side of the world? I mean,
hello
?'

‘It is ridiculous, Nessa. The gardai couldn't possibly suspect Patrick of being involved, could they?'

‘They've been quite formal with me, Darina, so it's hard to work out what they suspect.'

‘There must be other evidence to show that Patrick had nothing to do with it.' Darina chewed on her lip for a moment. ‘The gardai asked me loads of questions about everyone I saw in the area between about one o'clock and two o'clock on the day, and if that's the crucial period of time, you should have nothing to worry about. As far as I remember, you said that Patrick left the house a lot earlier than that?'

‘Yes, he left around a quarter to twelve, and he should have been in Bantry by one o'clock, even after stopping briefly to meet Oscar.'

‘So that's alright then, surely? Plus, there must be people who saw him driving through Castletownbere or Adrigole or wherever?'

‘I don't know about that, but gardai have certainly examined Patrick's car. He left it in Bandon, because he has a friend there, James, who was on an afternoon shift at Cork airport and gave Patrick a lift the rest of the way.'

‘That means they can ask James what time Dad arrived in Bandon, and therefore work out that he'd no time to hide a body or whatever?'

‘Yes, but suppose the gardai claimed that Oscar got into Patrick's car at the Briary, and they went off to meet someone else, who killed Oscar later in the day? And maybe that James was in on the plot too? How could we prove that it didn't happen? It may sound farfetched, but sometimes the craziest scenarios turn out to be true.'

‘Well, it can't be true,' said Darina anxiously. ‘And we wouldn't even bother discussing it if Jack Talbot hadn't stirred things up. I hope you don't really think his lies will come to anything, Nessa?'

‘The longer the investigation goes on, the more dangerous these stories are. But yes, of course we have to be hopeful.'

Nessa tried to keep her voice upbeat, but she was very worried about Talbot's continuing researches. His Russian theory had tailed off during the week, but his latest find was a photo of two of the people who had been on the trip Patrick made to Moscow taking part in a human rights protest in Dublin against a visiting delegation from Saudi Arabia, because of that country's unyielding embrace of the death penalty. Talbot had paired it with a second photo, showing Oscar at a business event with Saudi government officials. Needless to say, he made no direct link between the two, but his conspiratorial hints kept a shadow of suspicion over Patrick. Any day soon, Nessa expected to read in the paper that one of her husband's grandfathers was a Muslim – another entirely innocent fact that Talbot would twist and taint for impressionable readers in search of a readymade culprit.

Sal had returned to her ringtones, and busied herself with two options from a well-known television series, seemingly immune to serious concern about her father.

‘You haven't enlightened us on why Dad met Oscar,' she said after a while. ‘I know he wouldn't be able to prove in court what they talked about, but still …'

‘The reason he met him was quite simple,' said Nessa. ‘As you remember, Jack was very keen to get an interview with Oscar earlier in the week, and pestered Patrick about it until he promised to ask Oscar once more. But then Patrick was up to his eyes changing his flight arrangements and so on, and it slipped his mind until the very moment he was driving out Cnoc Meala's gate.'

‘Typical Dad, always too concerned about doing things for other people.'

‘Yes, it would have been a lot better for him now if he'd forgotten all about it. But instead, he phoned Oscar, and when they realised they were both close to the Briary, they met for a few minutes and had an amicable chat. According to Patrick, Oscar undertook to phone Jack on Thursday afternoon, to sort out the interview issue once and for all.'

‘But Oscar was killed before he made that phone call?'

‘I guess so – which would explain why Jack turned up at our front door on Friday, annoyed that he'd heard nothing from Oscar and all set to make trouble for myself and Patrick if he didn't get a precious exclusive feature for his paper.'

‘So what's your own opinion, Nessa? I mean, who do you think is the killer?'

Nessa contemplated the horizon, where the city suburbs could now be seen. Her thoughts had been on Maureen, and her growing dread of the visit ahead. If Dominic turned up, she and Sal would have to leave immediately.

‘I really don't know, Darina,' she replied slowly. ‘I change my mind about it every second day. The easiest thing to believe is that Dominic did it, but that doesn't seem to fit some of the facts, does it?'