Deadly Intent (29 page)

‘When will that happen?' The news was unexpected, and Nessa was unsure how to react. ‘Would you like to film here in the house?'

‘The production team will have to speak to you about that, but one or two short scenes may be helpful, yes. I think most of the filming will be outdoors, though, along the cliff path near the hotel, around the Briary and up to the Coomgarriff Walk. It'll happen in a week or so, we hope.'

‘By all accounts this kind of thing can have a dramatic effect on people's memories,' added the sergeant.

O'Kelleher sipped at his juice before he continued. ‘The production team will bring in a few actors, but we'll also ask some of your guests to return to the area – Fergus Malden, certainly, and two or three others who were around Derryowen that Thursday. We'll encourage local people to take part too, and indeed the process of filming itself might jog a few memories.'

‘What about Maureen, inspector? Are you considering …?'

‘I think she'll be invited, yes, but I doubt if she'll be up to it. And unfortunately, there's no question about Dominic. The actors will have to cover his part as well as Oscar Malden's.'

Nessa decided to venture a few questions about the investigation itself. ‘Can you confirm yet whether Maureen's incident on the Thursday evening had anything to do with Oscar's murder?'

‘Or whether she was actually assaulted?' Patrick put a question that he had asked Nessa several times since his return home.

‘I'm afraid we can confirm very little,' said O'Kelleher, ‘one way or the other. Either Maureen genuinely doesn't know what happened, and gives us a different version each time we ask, or she doesn't want to tell us.'

‘We've heard that Dominic is still in hospital,' said Patrick. ‘Is there any word?'

‘He'll be staying in hospital a fair while,' Fitzmaurice added. ‘And he may never be right in the head again, God help him.'

Nobody spoke for a few minutes. Nessa wondered whether gardai had decided on the television piece because Dominic's condition left them with little else to pursue.

‘I know you're constrained in what you can tell us,' she said then. ‘But is Dominic still suspected of killing Oscar?'

Trevor O'Kelleher held his hands to his lips as if in prayer. Unlike most people, he was at ease with silence.

‘I can tell you one thing,' he said eventually, ‘provided it stays in this room.' He waited until Nessa and Patrick nodded their agreement. ‘We got some information this week that supports Dominic's alibi for the day in question.'

‘Is this the boat he's supposed to have seen while he was fishing?'

‘Yes, his story was that a group of tourists who were out on the bay watching seals waved at him a few times, and that they were within view of his rock for a number of hours. However, he couldn't tell us the name of the boat, and as a result we were unable to send out a VHF message to track it down.' The inspector weighed his words carefully. ‘All he told us was that it was flying the French flag.'

‘Which narrowed down the search to one or two hundred boats,' said Patrick.

‘Exactly. We sent a description to all the marinas on the Irish coast, but got nothing useful back.'

‘It was very unfortunate for Dominic,' said Fitzmaurice heavily. ‘It turns out he told us the truth about the boat, but the French group on board went off the next day on a tour of some of Ireland's remotest islands, where there are no marinas to deal with.' The sergeant glanced at the inspector and got the nod to continue. ‘They arrived in Donegal four days ago and mentioned their visit to Beara to someone in a pub, whereupon they heard about our alert for French boats who'd been in this area.'

‘And they confirmed that Dominic stayed put at Pooka Rock all day?'

‘They did indeed,' said O'Kelleher. His eyes met Nessa's and Patrick's in turn. ‘As I said, I'm relying on you not to broadcast it, but as Dominic was your guest …'

‘We're very grateful to you,' said Nessa quickly. She was anxious to get in another question while she had the opportunity. ‘We also heard that there was forensic evidence against Dominic. Something about threads of wool, was it?'

‘Something of the sort, yes,' said O'Kelleher. ‘But there was nothing to indicate what time of day they got snagged on Oscar's jacket, or precisely why. So that's another mystery we may not solve, I'm afraid.'

‘What's more, I doubt if we'll ever find out what was in Dominic's mind when he drove down that pier.' Fitzmaurice spoke in a tone usually reserved for someone who had just died. ‘Maybe the truth is that Dominic himself had no idea what he was doing. He was a fragile individual in the first place, as his wife was, and people like that can fall apart completely in the face of a public and media hullabaloo.'

The four of them fell silent again, and Nessa wondered whether to risk the inspector's forbearance with more questions. She would love to know what the gardai had found out about Oscar's business dealings, to help her decide what to tell them about her own investigations. But before she had formulated what to say, a loud thud came from the direction of the kitchen, followed by a wail and a string of expletives from Sal.

‘Excuse me a minute,' said Nessa. ‘I'd better check what's up.'

‘We were hoping to speak to your daughter,' said O'Kelleher, smiling a little. ‘But if this isn't the best time …?'

Nessa hurried out of the room. She found Sal in the kitchen staring at the coffee grinder lying on the floor amid scattered beans. Her lower lip was trembling like a child's.

‘You sit down, Sal, and I can clear this up.'

‘Don't pretend to be all sorry for me.' Sal's tone was bitter. ‘I'm sure you're thrilled to hear that Marcus hasn't phoned me for over a week. I think he's left Derryowen, and no wonder.'

Nessa found a brush and dustpan in the cupboard. ‘I'm not thrilled that you're upset, of course I'm not. But maybe Marcus had to go away for some reason. Have you asked Darina about him?'

‘Yes, as it happens I asked her yesterday but it was no use.' Sal sat hunched at the table, cradling her phone in her hands. ‘She was all, like, terribly busy with some art exhibition abroad that she's getting ready for, so she couldn't be disturbed for long. The only thing I know is that Carl asked her to drive the hackney one day earlier this week, and that means that Marcus wasn't around.'

‘I'm sure she's genuinely flat out for the exhibition, Sal. It's a big opportunity for her, and it's also a hard time of the year, with her mother's commemoration coming up.'

‘Yeah, well, that's all fine but I'm having a hard time too.' Sal lifted her head and looked defiantly at Nessa. ‘And maybe Darina should count herself lucky in one way, not to have a mother who shouts at people in the middle of the night. Can you not understand how totally humiliating that was?'

‘Sal, you can't speak like that, as you know well.'

They both turned at a soft knock on the door, which was opened by the sergeant. ‘I'm sorry to bother you,' he said, but stopped when he realised that Sal was staring at him.

‘Is there bad news?' She spoke in a strangled voice. ‘I just knew it, I told Darina that Marcus wouldn't go away without telling me.'

‘I haven't any bad news, thank God,' said Conor. ‘But we're anxious to have a word with Marcus O'Sullivan as soon as possible, and we've found it hard to contact him. So if you had an opportunity …?'

‘I've heard nothing from him in the past week. Not a single solitary text, and he's posted nothing on Facebook or Twitter either. Something awful has happened to him, I'm sure of it.'

F
ilming was well underway. The TV crew and actors had installed themselves at Derryowen Hotel the previous night, and got to work after an early breakfast. They recorded a scene on the coastal path and another at the hotel. Nessa and Fergus Malden were filmed driving off from Cnoc Meala and passing by Scannive Strand. Then Ambrose exerted his theatrical talents to the full, telling the actor in Oscar's part the precise tone of voice needed for the encounter by his gate. He was back on form after the attention lull of the previous two weeks.

Nessa became rather less enthusiastic as the day passed. There was no guarantee of a breakthrough in the case, and the television broadcast would stir things up anew, reminding the country of how Oscar Malden arrived at Cnoc Meala on holiday and left in a coffin. The blemish left by his murder could only deepen.

She had begun to understand why people wanted to hide such traumas from the public gaze, and closed their doors to journalists when shocking events struck their home place. No matter that she bore no responsibility for Oscar's death, she still felt guilty and ashamed of it. Her guilt was irrational, of course, and the truth had to be sought, but she found herself wishing hard for the quiet life she had come to enjoy.

In the end, only two of the guests had returned to Beara to assist with the reconstruction. Fergus asked to stay at Cnoc Meala in order to avoid prying eyes at the hotel and, after consulting with Trevor O'Kelleher, Patrick and Nessa agreed. Zoe was also keen to return, but luckily she opted for a hostel in Castletownbere. She would hardly make good company for Fergus, spitting fire at him over his father's sins while he sank further into nervy silence. Stella was too busy to travel, it seemed, so her restraining influence was absent. As for Maureen, she had declared to gardai that she would never set foot on the peninsula again, but then she had helpfully suggested which well-known actors might suit her
Crime Scene
role.

Nessa allowed Ronan to watch her own short scenes being filmed. Afterwards, she stayed on chatting in a huddle of neighbours near Ambrose's gate. It was a good opportunity to pick up on the local mood, but by lunchtime, Ronan was getting impatient. She looked around for Fergus, to check on his lunch plans, and saw Zoe beckoning her urgently.

‘Ben's just texted me,' she said. ‘He emailed you an hour ago but heard nothing back. It's something about a patent, if that makes sense?'

Nessa quickly checked her phone. She had switched it to mute earlier, and saw now that she had missed two calls from Ben. His news was that his expert source had found a record of a patent taken out by Oscar Malden on a particular electrical device made by his firm and installed on high-level security gates. Repeated attempts to open the gates without a required code would cause an electric shock to be delivered to the culprit. According to Ben's contact, the same patent was being used by the company in the Ukraine that manufactured prison restraints.

‘Has he got the evidence we need? Ben was a bit vague the last time I asked him what he'd found out.'

Nessa signalled to Zoe to keep her voice down. She spotted Fergus across the road, hands gripped tightly in his armpits.

‘I think it's a step forward, yes. But I'll have to phone him back about the details.'

‘So is it time to break the story? Should we go directly to the media about it, Nessa, and bypass the gardai? If Oscar was involved in something illegal …?'

Nessa glanced around again. Patrick's friend James had forwarded two photographs to her the previous day. She might show them to Zoe later in the afternoon, but for the moment, she would say just enough not to appear cagey.

‘I don't think the business we've tracked down was illegal. But it may have been very nasty, because my fear is that he was making money from instruments of torture.'

‘Oh Nessa, surely we must expose this now? I mean, rape and warfare often go together, as I'm sure you know, but now you're saying he made it an unholy trinity by including torture as well.'

The photographs had shown two items, and were accompanied by some marketing blurb translated from Russian. One was a chain with which to attach prisoners to a wall. Taking a step too far from the wall would set off an electric shock from a device integrated in the chain. The second item was a stun gun in the shape of a mobile phone, capable of discharging an electric shock to a person at a distance of up to five metres away. By pressing a switch on the gun, a narrow cable was released, to enable convenient restraint of uncooperative prisoners.

‘I'm still trying to verify the details,' Nessa said, keeping her emotions carefully in check. ‘I've been told that the company involved had a contract with security forces in Saudi Arabia, and maybe other countries that have no qualms about inflicting torture.'

‘So Oscar may have been killed by someone who wanted revenge, is that what you think? Someone who suffered as a result of his horrible products …?'

‘The problem, Zoe, is that we still have no idea how his business relates to his death. That's why I've been holding off telling the gardai.' Nessa lowered her voice again. She noticed Ronan eyeing her, signalling his boredom. ‘The thing is, there are thousands of people tortured in dozens of countries. Most of them are accused of ordinary and not political crimes, and there are plenty of vile ways of hurting them without technology, such as solitary confinement in a darkened cell inhabited by rats, or burning them with lighted cigarettes, or any damned thing. So no, I think the motive must have been more personal than you've suggested.'

‘Well, it's time we got it out. If the TV crew include this insight on Oscar in their story, just imagine the reaction!'

Nessa sighed and nodded to Ronan. He was shifting from foot to foot, a sure sign that he wanted to make a move.

‘Let's decide later this afternoon,' she said quickly. ‘The crew still have several scenes to shoot, and we'll have to discuss it with Inspector O'Kelleher first, not to mention clearing it with Ben himself. So it's really important to keep it quiet for now, OK?'