Deadly Intent (23 page)

News coverage of Oscar's murder had grown a lot quieter since the funeral, but in case Patrick's return to Ireland stirred it up again, Caitlín had offered to spread a few false rumours about the date and place he was expected. Might as well play them at their own game, she said, as she put out word through her local radio friends that she had heard he would arrive at Kerry Airport the following day. Nessa checked her phone while she waited at Heathrow, and sure enough, Caitlín had texted to confirm that three journalists so far had been on to her to ask whether the rumour was true, to which she replied that it was plausible but not certain.

Nessa manouevred closer to the barrier in the arrivals hall so that Patrick would spot her as soon as he emerged. Even after his plane had landed, there was that grinding wait while he found his way to the baggage carousel, watched everyone else collect their suitcases ahead of him, and trundled his trolley past bland advertisements and poker-faced security officials. All the ritual frustrations of airline travel, magnified by mutual desire.

‘We'll get through these hard times, Nessa, I promise you. I'll do some of the worrying from now on.'

‘I'm so sorry that you couldn't stay longer in Malawi, love, and that you've been so stressed yourself.'

She nestled into Patrick's shoulder as he stroked her hair softly. She thought he had lost weight since she had seen him almost a fortnight earlier. He had always had that wiry mountaineer's build, but now he looked as if his skin was stretched thinly on his bones. She held on to him and felt relief wash over her. They had a lot to discuss and catch up on, but for these first moments, she wanted to believe that everything would soon be just fine.

They decided not to talk about Oscar on the plane to Cork, surrounded by fellow passengers who could overhear them. Instead, Patrick told Nessa about the conversations he had had with his aunt in her final days. While others were by the bedside with them, they chatted about Sal and Ronan and their young Malawian relatives, and how life had improved in Malawi in recent years. They also discussed food and the kind of meals that Patrick looked forward to tasting again, such as the cornmeal dish called
nsima
and the highly sought freshwater fish,
chambo.
But when they finally found themselves alone for half an hour, Esther had willingly opened up about the agonising years after his father's disappearance. Her voice was weak, but she had confirmed that a number of fellow activists imprisoned at the same time had sworn he was tortured. Nothing they said could ever be proved, however, and Esther used to get terrible pains in her own arms and legs in those years – stinging, stabbing pains that she believed to be her own haunted imitation of his suffering.

Nessa held his hand in silence when Patrick finished his account. She pictured his aunt's kind eyes, and then remembered what Ben had said at lunchtime, about the arms dealer standing next to Oscar who was alleged to trade in the tools of torture. It was horrifying to contemplate: people losing their minds in excruciating pain, and others making foul profits at their expense. She would like to tell Patrick about her researches, but knew that she would postpone it until they had dealt with their immediate concerns.

As they headed westwards from Cork, they began talking about those concerns. ‘I haven't paid serious attention to the news stories about ourselves or even about Oscar,' Patrick began. ‘I was quite well aware that they were available online, but it all seemed so unreal to me while I was on another continent.'

Nessa smiled as she noticed how Patrick's speech was tinged with a gentle kind of formality after his return from Africa. It was always the same, and in a few days, he would take on the hues and rhythms of Beara. ‘I'm not looking forward to reading my own biographical excerpts,' he added, ‘and, in particular, the ancient history of my period in Russia.'

‘I'm sorry I wasn't able to handle things better,' said Nessa. ‘I thought I'd know how to deal with unwelcome media attention – but it all seems so different when the storm is raging around your own ears.'

‘There's no need to apologise to me, Nessa. You're not personally responsible for the media's shortcomings, are you?'

‘No, of course not. But I've been thinking back over my own work, and wondering who I might have trampled on blithely and left in a state of torment when I'd moved on to the next story.'

Patrick's face broke into a big smile. ‘I had the impression that one of your journalistic purposes was to torment powerful people?'

‘Yes, I know. But there's a difference between making life difficult for the rich and powerful who are in the public eye, and harassing innocent bystanders who happen to be caught up in a major news event.'

‘You've always been clear about that distinction, Nessa.'

‘I may have gone on about it but it's still really easy to get carried away by a good story. And now that I know what it feels like, I'm sure I wasn't always sensitive enough …'

‘You're very hard on yourself, sweetheart. I appreciate that the stories written about me in my absence have been very upsetting for you. But that hardly means that all journalists are suspect, yourself included.'

‘Once you've read those stories, you might have a different view, Patrick.'

‘That's true enough. But I would still choose Ireland's media culture any time rather than the conditions I grew up in. They were truly frightening, I promise you – people being kidnapped and put to death in total secrecy, and not a single word written or reported about them.'

‘Surely these aren't the only two options? If we had a dictatorship in Ireland, I bet you Talbot and his hack friends would be first in the queue to pump out government propaganda. Their real motivation is having power and influence, not calling governments to account or questioning our values.'

They drove through Inishannon, crossing the Bandon river on their way to the town of the same name. Patrick's friend, James, was on night duty at the airport and had met them there briefly to give them the keys to his house. The plan was that Patrick would stay overnight in Bandon and meet gardai at the district headquarters the following morning, before news of his arrival home became public. His car was also back at James' house, having been returned after gardai examined it for any traces of suspicious activity.

Nessa's intention had been to stay the night in Bandon too. Ronan was still in Dunmanus and Sal had not argued about sleeping over at a school pal's house. But as they neared the town, Nessa suggested to Patrick that she would continue on to Beara after all. Now that she had been with him for a few hours, her mind was greatly eased, and she was also sure that he would welcome that private space he had so lacked in Malawi. What's more, they would probably keep each other awake, on tenterhooks about his morning interview. Nessa had learned on Monday that gardai had tracked Patrick's mobile phone signals for the day of the murder, to check whether he drove directly to Bandon after his brief meeting with Oscar, as he had claimed; but she did not know what the signals had shown.

Patrick made a token protest at her plan to drive all the way home, but gave in quickly once she agreed to stop for a cuppa at the Bandon house. ‘I've been going over my conversation with Oscar that day,' he said, as they stood at the kitchen counter. ‘It was very short, probably only three or four minutes. Most of it was about Jack Talbot and his planned newspaper feature.'

‘I presume, then, that Oscar didn't confide in you about death threats he might have got that week?'

‘You presume correctly.' Patrick smiled warmly, and as they held each other's eyes for a moment, Nessa felt her heart lighten with gladness. ‘What I remember most vividly,' Patrick continued then, ‘is not what Oscar talked about, but just that he seemed to be in a very happy mood, singing to himself as he went off and certainly not fearful of death threats or anything of the sort.'

‘Was he impatient or annoyed at Jack's pursuit of him, do you think?'

‘He started laughing about it, actually. Again, I cannot recall his exact words, but he gave me the impression that they knew each other well.'

‘That doesn't surprise me one bit. I thought it was pretty odd that Jack didn't phone Oscar directly about his article, and pestered us instead.'

‘Well, there was something about that. Yes, I remember now that Oscar mentioned a falling out between himself and Jack in the past. It had something to do with a woman they were both keen on. But really, I was so preoccupied that morning that I was not listening carefully to what he said.'

Nessa stared at him for a moment, trying to interpret the significance of what he had just told her.

‘I hope the gardai have checked Jack's movements on the day of the murder,' she said eventually. ‘To the best of my knowledge, he has never informed the great Irish public of a personal connection between himself and Oscar, least of all a juicy outbreak of jealousy over a desirable woman.'

‘Be careful not to get carried away, Nessa! As you suggested yourself a while ago, hints and rumours should not be confused with evidence.'

‘I know, I know. He's quite unlikely to be the murderer, however attractive a theory it might be.' Nessa tried not to sound bitter. ‘The more I think about it, the more I believe that Jack knew full well that Oscar would refuse to be profiled by him. But Jack pursued him anyway so that he could write a piece of tittle-tattle about the elusive and desirable rich bachelor who deigned to spend a short holiday among the plebs. The pair of them were getting at each other, and we got caught in the crossfire.'

N
essa pulled in by the roadside on her way into Adrigole, halfway along Beara on the shores of Bantry Bay. She needed a few gulps of night air before the final lap home. The rising moon above the looming outline of Hungry Hill appeared very large and when she stepped out of the car, she could hear the sea's low swishing nearby.

Her head was filled with unresolved thoughts about Oscar's murder. Could Jack Talbot possibly be the perpetrator? Somehow, he seemed too smug, too calculating, to allow raw emotion to lead him to such an extreme – but then again, who knew what sort of person lay behind the smooth mask of his public persona? His Friday visit to Cnoc Meala may have been for the purpose she and Patrick had just discussed, but if he had strangled Oscar the previous day, could it be seen instead as part of an elaborate plan to cover his tracks?

Nessa was fairly sure, however, that he had a solid alibi, which he was rumoured to have boasted about in Derryowen Hotel. The fact that she and many others despised him did not amount to evidence against him; and keeping quiet about a personal connection with Oscar was no proof of a motive either. The degrees of connection between people in Ireland was a frequent subject of wonderment among her guests: two complete strangers on holiday in Cnoc Meala who found out that they were second cousins on their mothers' side, or that their sisters had been in the same class in school, or that they had both been on the same plane that was delayed for six hours on a New York runway a month earlier. It was hard to believe, really, that the country had a population of millions.

One of the central puzzles about Oscar's death was why it had taken place in Beara. Would a dangerous business rival from the Middle East or Russia travel all the way to a distant peninsula on an island off the northwest of Europe to eliminate him? Would a rejected lover from Tipperary, Dublin or anywhere else do so? But if the murderer was not a stranger to Beara, there had to be some connection between Oscar and somebody who was in the area that week. Caitlín was probing her extensive network of local sources to see if such a link could be found; and gardai were sure to be working on it too. Or could Fergus have slipped out from Cnoc Meala while Nessa and others were tending to Maureen's fall, and somehow met up with his father late that evening, killed him and disposed of his body the following night?

Nessa looked up at the majestic and forbidding mountain above her, stooped against the sky. She was less than ten minutes away from the little bridge where Oscar's body had been found. His killer drove on the Healy Pass road, and may have approached it from Adrigole, on the County Cork side, where she was now. Dominic had certainly had time to make the journey, either before or after his demented visit to Cnoc Meala. Marcus had a similar opportunity when he left the party in Castletownbere in the early hours of Saturday, claiming to Sal that he had a pressing work task to deal with.

Nessa drove up the valley to the bridge. She was bone-tired, but there was something niggling her about the place, ever since the day she had stopped there with Caitlín. After her long day of travel, another half an hour would make no difference.

The road was empty and lonely. Under the moon's pale lustre, the great boulders on the hillsides looked wan, almost colourless, and Nessa began to imagine them as a multitude of ghosts gathering around her. She felt reluctant to leave the car when she arrived at the bridge. She had always believed that spirits were a manifestation of deeply rooted human fears and fervid imagination, but in such a bleak place, she could not easily keep her own fears in check.

She stood by the parapet wall, listening to the water gurgling below her, its sounds insistent and clamorous in the huge silence of the mountain valley. She looked up and saw the lights of a car in the distance, glittering like an animal's eyes in the darkness. The car was coming towards her on the twisting road from the pass, where Redmond had watched herself and Caitlín throw a stone-filled bag down to the stream.

She crouched quickly behind her own car, not wanting to be caught at a crime scene for a second time, or to confront a predatory driver who might relish an encounter with a lone female. She held her breath as the car slowed on the bridge, but it drove by without stopping.