Deadly Intent (30 page)

She dropped Zoe at O'Donovan's pub on her way home. Something had been bothering her for days about Zoe and Stella and she asked Caitlín quietly to try to get into conversation with the young woman about her family background – how she had found her sister, whether Stella was in touch with her father, that sort of thing. If anyone could ask personal questions without appearing rude, it was Caitlín.

Back at home, she tried Ben a few times but got no answer. After a quick toasted sandwich for the two of them, Ronan drifted off to the living room and she had an opportunity to look again at the photographs. She needed to act quickly before Zoe lost patience or Patrick found out that she had contacted James without telling him. But she also needed time to think everything through. Patrick had just left the house to meet the crew and actors at the Briary, and would drive Ronan to his afternoon kayaking session as soon as he returned.

But really, it was not about practicalities. Nessa's biggest worry was her gut instinct that she was on the wrong track. She had uncovered new and chilling information about Oscar, but it told her nothing about why or how he had been murdered.

She slipped out the back door and up beyond the gate at the top of the garden. It was a beautiful autumn day and a golden light shimmered amidst the trees. She looked back at the house, where orange-red flames of colour danced on the clambering ivy. All around Cnoc Meala, the hillsides sloped in folds and rucks towards a triangle of sea. A glorious afternoon, as nature wove its radiant tapestry for her eyes. A moment of peace, a chance to feast her senses as if nothing in the world could trouble her.

As if. As if there were a single quiet corner of the world free of the shadows of evil and calamity. As if scenic loveliness existed in pristine isolation, unsoiled by nature's rotting carrion. We could enjoy our moments of peace, she reflected, indeed it was essential to enjoy as many moments as came our way to make life worth the bother; but while we might forget the weight of death's noose around our necks at those times, we could never cast it off.

She opened the gate to return to the house, but froze as something stirred beside her. She looked around warily at a rambling blackthorn tree near the gate and the walls of an old stone outhouse beyond it. Cats and other animals made a habit of sheltering under its eaves.

‘Shhh!' The sound came from the shrubby tree, where a pair of dark eyes stared back at her, like deep brown pools rimmed by snow.

‘You bold thing, come out of there this minute! You gave me a fright!'

‘I've been hiding for ages, and you'd no idea I was right beside you. See, I told you I'd make a good secret agent.'

Ronan slid out between tangled blackthorn branches, as lithe as a cat. Nessa picked stray leaves off his shoulders, and reminded him that he had to get ready for sea-kayaking.

‘But I'd prefer to stay here,' he pleaded. ‘I heard the TV people say that they've more filming to do when it starts to get dark, and that's the best time for spying on people. I did it yesterday evening.'

‘What do you mean, spying on people?'

‘I followed that man, Fergus, that's all I mean. It was when he went out for a walk, just after it got dark. He's kind of like a spy himself, isn't he, the way he creeps about?'

‘I hope you didn't leave the garden, I've told you before—'

‘I know, but I don't think the murderer will come near us while the TV crew is here, because otherwise he might be spotted by the camera. Anyway, I hid behind the front wall and watched Fergus when he went down the road. Sal went out a while later and she didn't see me until I sneaked up on her on her way home.'

Nessa steered her son into the house as she listened to him. She was surprised to hear that Fergus had been out for a walk – she remembered him telling her that he would rest in his room before dinner.

‘Sal is so cross these days, isn't she? Just because that guy Marcus won't phone her, she thinks everyone should feel totally sorry for her.'

Nessa glanced at her watch. She hoped Sal could cope with her own filming bout later, when Maureen's incident on the boreen was to be recreated. Another week had passed and still no word from Marcus.

‘Anyway, I think Sal is just jealous. When I asked her where she was last night, she said she wanted to talk to Darina but couldn't, because she saw Darina and whatsisname, Fergus, on the Briary together, and she thought they were, you know …'

Nessa looked at him with curiosity. Like most boys of his age, any mention of personal relationships left him tongue-tied, so she kept her own voice in neutral.

‘How do you mean, “they were, you know”?'

‘Nothing really. Just that Sal said they were standing very close and she saw Fergus kind of … I think he put his hand on Darina's shoulder or something, but Darina was cross with him and pushed him away. So Sal thought they were having a row and she came home again without speaking to Darina.' He paused and looked embarrassed. ‘That's all Sal told me, and then she banged the door and went up to her room.'

Patrick and two of the television team arrived into the kitchen at the same time as Nessa and Ronan. She offered them coffee, but her mind was on Ronan's rigmarole.

‘The director wants to check something with you,' said Patrick, ‘about the scene you'll be filming in a while. I showed them the spot where Maureen was found.'

‘I wanted to see it in advance, to work out the lighting we'll need,' said the director. She was a lively young woman, tall and quite dark, and looked as if she had Spanish or Mexican origins. Nessa had noticed some signs of rivalry between herself and the cameraman.

‘I'll leave the discussion to yourselves,' said Patrick. He called up the stairs after Ronan. ‘Once I get our young sailor out to sea, I'll phone you to check how things are going.'

Nessa followed him into the hall for a quiet word. ‘Have you seen Sal this afternoon?'

‘As it happens, we met her while we were filming. She was on her way to Darina's yet again, same old story, but the latest news is that Carl, Marcus's brother, is coming to the Barn with his van. I believe he's going to make the trip to France, to bring over Darina's pieces for her exhibition. So poor Sal is hoping to get an answer out of Carl about his absent sibling.'

Nessa returned to the kitchen and made her apologies to the director for ignoring her question. She was trying to juggle three or four different conversations in her head.

‘If I could explain my colleague's question about the lighting,' said the cameraman quickly. He had a world-weary air, although he looked younger than the director. ‘The issue is how bright or dark it was when Maureen was found on the ground. It's not a problem of filming per se, because of course I can make adjustments to the exposure. But we've been told it was twilight, and yet your husband said she'd been lying in the shadow of the stone wall, which didn't quite tally.'

The director took her turn to speak. ‘I was surprised, you see, that Maureen could be seen at all in the twilight. We've been told that the woman who found her, Darina, had stopped at the top of the track, quite a distance away, and I couldn't quite imagine how she saw her.'

Nessa poured coffee, wishing she could sit and think in silence. She suddenly had an image of herself in a darkened room, watching a reel of film over and over again. The film had been out of focus from the start, but now she could grasp a few scenes, even if she did not know how they fitted into the storyline.

‘It was fairly dark when I arrived at the boreen,' she replied then. ‘And I remember Sal saying that she and Darina had tried to take photos, maybe five minutes earlier, but that daylight had already faded. There had been a delay, though, after Darina found Maureen, because she couldn't get a phone signal on her first few attempts.'

‘On a fairly good September evening, I'd expect up to half an hour of twilight,' said the cameraman. ‘We can ask your neighbour Darina about these details when we get to the location, but she was hardly delayed all that time by signal problems.'

Nessa did not reply this time. She would like to pay attention to the discussion, but something far more urgent had to be done straightaway. She looked from one to another, and made a vague excuse about having to go out for a while. They were welcome to do the exterior shots of the house they had mentioned earlier, she said, and she would get back before the filming session on the boreen. Her heart was pounding as she hurried towards the road.

Redmond pulled his jacket zipper up to his chin. The afternoon was bright and sunny, but he felt cold, even after walking a few miles. He felt cold all the time these days. Perhaps lack of sleep had that effect, or eating only a few mouthfuls instead of proper meals.

Conor had taken time to meet him at Scannive Strand, when he got a lunch break from his work with the television crew. The sergeant's job was to observe the participants and take note of any unusual comments or interaction. He told Redmond that it was about as exciting as watching grass grow. Every second time the crew set up to do a shot, the cameraman seemed to go into slow motion, looking anxiously at the sky, muttering to the director, and then shifting the tripod a footstep to the left or a centimetre backwards. But the sound recordist had told Conor that the cameraman was highly regarded, and saved a lot of editing later on by getting consistently good takes in the can.

Redmond would have paid to watch grass grow, if it had meant being on duty. But he had been suspended from work a fortnight earlier, while an official investigation took place into the events of the night he crashed his car into a tree. He was ill for days afterwards, and then spent hours answering questions at Bandon station. He had to hand in his garda ID, and pass his time as best he could while others decided on his future.

His home computer had no record of the photographs he took that awful night, showing rows of cannabis plants in the attic room of the old house. As for the phone itself, it had disappeared. So he had no evidence to support his story, and the longer he tried to explain it, the more sceptical the two senior officers questioning him became. Redmond could see their eyebrows almost hit their hairlines when he could not even confirm where the house was located. The only question that was not in doubt was the high level of alcohol in his own bloodstream.

He spent a long time driving up and down minor roads, looking for the accursed house. When he finally found it, he noticed signs of recent activity on the gravel and rough grass by the gate. He phoned Trevor to report its location, remembering just in time to address him as Inspector O'Kelleher. The days of easy familiarity had not lasted long. The inspector thanked him politely and said that he could not say for certain whether gardai had valid justification to search it. But in any case, Redmond was sure the attic would be empty. Meanwhile, he learned that Carl and Katya had both stated that they had spent that evening together at her apartment. As for Marcus, nobody seemed to know where he was.

Back in his own house, a letter from Inspector O'Kelleher lay in a drawer, like a phial of poison gas whose fumes had seeped into every corner of Redmond's life. It outlined the possible consequences of the incident. Witnesses were being sought who may have seen him driving to the spot where he was found. If the evidence against him was borne out, both garda disciplinary action and criminal charges could follow. The letter's bland, bureaucratic language allowed him no false hope or comfort. As it concluded:

A thorough investigation is taking place into all of the issues that have arisen in your case. If you have any queries, you may contact the Garda Síochána at the divisional headquarters in Bandon, either directly or through your solicitor. Otherwise, you will be contacted in due course about the outcome of our deliberations.

He sat on a wooden bench which gave him a wide view of Derryowen and its surrounding countryside. After meeting Conor, he had walked up the trail from Scannive to Coomgarriff, and down the other side as far as the bench. He had checked his newly replaced phone a few times, and noticed that the signal was very weak on the Scannive side of the hill. So Oscar must have been closer to Derryowen when he had made the final phone calls of his life.

But Redmond knew it was futile for him to speculate on such matters. Walking the trail was just a form of killing time. It would have been better, he told himself, to go to the Buddhist Centre on the other side of the peninsula, which he had visited twice since he was suspended, hoping to snatch a whisper of peace there. He had resorted to sleeping pills to get him through the nights, but even so, he rarely slept more than three or four hours. Some days, he was numb; others, he felt as if a wild animal was clawing and tearing him apart from the inside. His greatest fears were that Inspector O'Kelleher had lost all faith in him, and that one day soon, Conor would not believe him either.

He looked out at the Atlantic's wide plain stretching to the horizon, as empty as the life he saw ahead of him. If he was convicted of drunk driving, his shame would force him to leave Ireland and never return. He would go to one of those teeming cities he used to enjoy visiting, take a new name and endure a low-paid job that demanded no references.

Loneliness, his companion since childhood, would follow him across the seas. Regret would lurk at every corner too. Instead of accepting the gifts of ordinary life offered by Conor and Trevor, he had thrown them away in one stupid night, desperate to be singled out for applause instead of learning how to work as one of a team.

He hung his head over his knees, pain burning in his belly. It was a mistake to come to Beara. The shapes and colours of the landscape looked radiant rather than bleak, as they used to appear to him. But now he had no right to gaze at them. Up on the hillside, he was like a rapparee of former times, brooding over the land of which he had been dispossessed.