Deadly Intent (9 page)

She had been plagued by media phone calls since the story broke the night before. Some requested an interview with her, while former colleagues begged her to put them in touch with Oscar's fellow guests. She found several of them difficult to ignore, but flattering messages were also left on her phone by hacks she would cross the street to avoid. A few mentioned her success as a journalist and asked whether she had begun her own investigation into Oscar's murder.

She did not answer any of the requests, apart from writing brief texts to close friends and regular guests who sent their sympathies to her. She was afraid to switch off the phone in case Patrick tried to get through, but she knew she would be stepping into a minefield if she made even off-the-record comments on the situation. She wished she could be out and about, hearing every rumour and whisper and looking for glimmers of new information herself. But she was on the other side of the fence now and had to act accordingly. A throwaway remark by her could become tomorrow's tabloid flurry, just as her silence was already being turned against her by Jack Talbot.

She opened a link to his paper, which had eight full pages of the story. ‘Oscar Killer Crux'
was one of the lyrical headlines on offer, and another was ‘Hellish Scenes in Holiday Heaven'. Jack's name adorned several of the articles, of course, including one in which he insinuated softly that Patrick's trip to Africa gave cause for suspicion: ‘Family Silence on Sudden Departure'
.
Police sources were unable to confirm Patrick Latif's whereabouts, according to Talbot, but they were pursuing the precise circumstances of what was described as his ‘last-minute flight to faraway Africa'. Detectives were keen to interview him as a matter of urgency, he said, but Latif's wife Nessa was unwilling to say when exactly he intended to return to Ireland.

Damn and blast Jack Talbot, she said to herself. It was such an old trick, to place unrelated events in the same paragraph in order to imply a causal connection between them. She knew perfectly well that if she complained to him or to his editor, they would just ramp up their insinuations the very next day. There was nothing for it but to hold her nose as the contents of the sewer flowed past her.

Talbot's first approach had been to entice her to give him an exclusive interview. He had arrived at Cnoc Meala on Saturday night, and persuaded the young garda at the gate that he was a welcome friend. Persistent knocking on doors and windows yielded no results, so he left her a string of messages. At first, he sounded concerned for her and she was briefly tempted to believe in his sincerity. Then he suggested that he could share information from garda briefings with her, in return for confirmation of a few details of the holiday group. Finally, he added a lightly veiled threat to his blandishments: ‘You must be suffering terribly in the face of this appalling tragedy, my dear. I'm still hoping very sincerely for your cooperation and can promise you'll be treated on the most favourable terms. Indeed, I really fear for you if you leave yourself open to negative interpretations.'

She picked up the phone. She would tell Patrick that Oscar had been killed but suggest that he had left Beara before it happened. She would also omit Dominic's attack altogether, and play down the media invasion of the peninsula. Her husband would want to talk about Esther, and in a day or two, she could tell him more of what was happening at home.

By then, the gardai could well be making an arrest. Or if the murder investigation dragged on, she would have time to think properly about Oscar's time in Beara, and what she could do to help to identify the perpetrator.

‘There's a man …' Her son Ronan hovered at the door of Nessa's small office upstairs. He was slightly built and brimful of nervous energy. ‘He has a camera.'

‘I don't bloody well believe it!' Nessa knew that the job of the garda at the gate was not so much to protect the family as to keep the site secure until Oscar's bedroom was examined in the afternoon, so there was little point complaining to him.

‘He was at the window. I was playing
FIFA
on the Playstation, Barca against Man U., and Messi got a fantastic goal just after Rooney put one in. But when I looked up I saw a man staring in at me.'

Nessa closed the media pages on her computer. Ronan had asked nonstop questions about the murder after his return from his friend's house the previous evening. What colour was Oscar's skin when his body was found? Was he strangled by hand or with a rope? Would the gardai shoot the killer when they found him? Nessa's fear was that her son's curiosity would soon turn to anxiety. Ronan would ponder everything he heard and then lie awake at night as his worries festered in silence.

She hugged him tightly, something he rarely permitted at his grown-up age of twelve. ‘I'm really glad you told me,' she said. ‘You stay here for a minute while I look.'

‘Maybe he's a police cameraman, and he thinks the murderer is still in our house?'

‘We locked the doors last night, love, and the neighbours are helping us too, so I'm sure we're as safe as can be.'

But as she hurried downstairs to close the curtains on every window, Nessa felt anything but safe. They should probably abandon Cnoc Meala until things settled down, instead of pretending they could lead a normal life. For example, Ronan and Sal could hardly go to school next morning – there were very few black youngsters living in Beara, so they would be spotted all too easily by lurking photographers.

She could just imagine the kind of snake who would slither under the garden hedge to snap exclusive images of Oscar's holiday hideaway. And once they had their pictures, the papers could make them say whatever they liked. Ronan innocently playing his screen games could reappear as ‘Life Goes On after Holiday Horror'
.
Or much worse, ‘Murder Hunt Dad Abandons Lonely Son'
.

Nessa almost fell over the man standing at the bottom of the back staircase. He was calling out to someone upstairs. She panicked as she tried to think which door into the house had been left unlocked.

‘Get out! Get the hell out of here now!'

‘Hey, chill!'
The man had a mellifluous, laid-back voice. ‘Chillax, take it easy.'

‘We gave no permission to anyone …' Nessa was surprised not to see a camera in the man's hands. Then she noticed his sleek hair falling onto his cheeks, in a style reminiscent of seventies' rock musicians.

‘Pleased to meet you too,' he said, smirking as he gestured towards the staircase. ‘I do promise you I got permission to clamber up to the lovely Rapunzel in her bedchamber.'

It was Marcus O'Sullivan, the young man Sal had fallen for, his eyes dancing under long silky lashes. How many hours had he been in the house? Had he just come in, or had Ronan seen someone else at the window?

‘I'd like you to leave now, this minute. Things are difficult enough, as you must realise.'

‘So long, so.' Nessa thought she got a whiff of cannabis as he passed her. She watched him go out the back door and up the garden steps. Presumably he arrived without a car and was now taking a shortcut across the hillside.

She found Sal sitting on her bed, dressed in a long T-shirt which allowed her to display her shapely legs to best effect, and humming quietly as she listened to music on her earphones.

‘Are you soft in the head, or what?' Nessa felt like tearing off the headphones. ‘The whole country is watching us and you decide it's the right time for a smutty romance!'

‘Thanks for your vote of confidence,' said Sal. ‘Glad to hear you care so much about my feelings.'

‘Give it up, Sal, you're just trying to imitate him and his smart remarks.'

‘His name is Marcus.' Sal's eyes lit up as she spoke his name with slow pleasure. ‘He is so amazingly handsome, isn't he? Or were you too busy making a fuss to look at him properly?'

‘I can't believe what I'm hearing. Surely you understand the trouble we're in, Sal? We have to beware of every move we make and every single person we allow into the house.'

‘Listen, I know something horrible's happened. But I don't agree we have to be so totally paranoid about it.' Sal gave a faint smile and Nessa noticed the shiny gloss on her lips. ‘If we turn ourselves into, like, prisoners in our own home, people will assume we've something to hide, right? Plus, I think you're forgetting that I'm eighteen now and can make my own choices.'

‘I'm not forgetting that you live under this roof, where we've certain rules and standards, or that you're preparing for some very important exams this year.' Nessa felt the hammer blows getting louder in her head. ‘What time did he come to the house, might I ask?'

‘Why? Would you like to hear a full and frank account of what we've been up to?'

‘I'm warning you to keep control of your tongue, Sal. I was already angry with you for staying overnight at a party without a word in advance, and now you think it's OK to let your new pal Marcus sneak in here in the middle of the night or some such time, grinning all over his face from whatever he smokes.' Nessa gesticulated with frustration. She wanted to shake her daughter, to make her see sense. ‘Besides which, throwing yourself at anyone is a bad start to a relationship, you know.'

‘Oh my God, if you could hear yourself!' Sal plugged her earphones back in and rearranged her pillow. ‘You are just so clueless. Number one, you're plain wrong about drugs, because Marcus says we should only allow what's natural into our bodies, which means that smoking is a no-no. Number two, it so happens that he left the party before the crack of dawn because he had to sort some dreary work problem. And Number three, you are
way
mistaken to accuse me of spiriting him into the house last night so we could bunk up in bed together. In fact, you're doing exactly what slimy Jack Talbot does, inventing the kind of story that suits your own prejudices!'

Nessa felt hollow inside. Both she and Sal were too quick to fling sharp words at each other. Patrick would have said some of the same things without a row.

‘I expect you to study all afternoon,' she said as firmly as she could manage. ‘You should have asked me about Marcus coming over, considering the state we're in today. If you want to see him regularly, you'll have to prove that you can be responsible.'

‘What's the mission?'

‘What do you mean, the mission?'

‘I told you, the secret mission we've to finish before the assassination.'

Ronan was crouched behind the wall that ran along the upper boundary of the back garden. Nessa closed the gate and crouched down beside him. She had felt suffocated sitting indoors with the curtains drawn, and while she longed for a solitary walk to soothe her nerves, leaving Ronan in the house was not an option. Unsurprisingly, his planned game involved murder.

‘We're spies, you see, so we've to follow people to find out if they leave secret messages for each other. Then once we've decided who the enemies are, we can kill them. I've done it before, and now that I know about strangling …'

‘OK, I get it,' Nessa whispered. In a way she found it quite touching that Ronan still invented these childish games, so she tried to get into the spirit of it by adding her own ideas. ‘Let's say that the enemies have taken over Derryowen village,' she said. ‘They've just started to move out into the countryside, so part of the mission is to check which areas they control. That's before we kill them, of course.'

The game might help her to find out how much of the neighbourhood was being trawled by the media. But she was still taken aback at the image she had created for her son. News journalists were now her enemies in spite of her own years in the same profession. Of course, she had always believed that certain individuals, suspected of abuse of power or position, had to be pursued by the media and if necessary, slowly speared with sharply pointed questions. But it was a different matter when a whole community was targeted simply because a tragedy took place in their midst.

She followed Ronan as he moved swiftly along by the stone wall. The day was bright, the occasional shadow of a passing cloud adding to the graceful curves of the landscape. Open hillside rose above them to the left, while the fields below were dotted with a variety of scrub and wooded thickets. They soon arrived at a gate that brought them onto a steep road. Down the hill lay the village of Derryowen, and beyond it, the waters of the Atlantic. Cnoc Meala, the village itself and the surrounding hills were on a tongue of land just a few miles long, splayed out like so many others along the fringes of the Beara Peninsula.

Nessa had no intention of approaching the village, however. She and Ronan would stay inland, following tracks and boreens on the slopes of the hillside. They crossed the steep road, went quickly to a gap in the hedge and onto a track which widened into another road, known locally as the Briary. On Thursday evening, Sal had made her way from Cnoc Meala's front gate to this same gap, and along the Briary to meet Darina near the spot where she had found Maureen. The shortcut was too narrow for a car, however, and Nessa had driven a longer way around to the Briary.

She felt her stomach tighten as she and Ronan approached the place. She looked down the cul-de-sac on which Maureen had lain, peaceful now in clear autumn sunlight, a profusion of blackberries and dark red fuchsia bells glistening with the sheen of a recent shower. Had Maureen just ambled along the boreen to enjoy its pastoral delights – or to swig alcohol on her own, as Sal had suggested? Thank goodness she had been found in time, unlike Oscar. One funeral was more than enough to bear.

There were a few isolated houses further along the Briary. Nessa could see a curl of smoke from one of the chimneys, where an elderly couple lived. A white garda car was parked at their gate. She hurried Ronan past the house to a T-junction at the far end of the Briary.