The Death of an Irish Lover (3 page)

Out in the hall, McGarr pointed at Tallon, who had some other man standing with him. “You. Go with Sergeant Riley to the barracks. He’ll take your statement.”

“My
statement
! About what?” Tallon complained. “I can’t be seen walking in the street with—”

The other man opened his mouth to say something, but McGarr cut him off. “And go out that way.” He pointed to the door that opened in the archway that led into the inn. “This floor is now a police zone. And if I find either of you in it, you’ll be charged with hindering an investigation.”

But even after McGarr drew the maid into the room and closed the door, they could hear Tallon and his solicitor in the hall.

“May I have your name, please?”

“Grace O’Rourke.”

She was a tall but slight woman in her early thirties,
dressed in a light blue maid’s uniform with dark blue piping, colors that matched the walls and trim in the hall.

“You discovered them?”

She nodded. “I’d finished doing the other rooms apart from the one across the hall, of course—they’re changing the carpet in there—and I knocked. When nobody answered, I tried the door.” She took a key from her uniform pocket; it was yoked to a hotel-style tag.

“It was locked, so I used this to see if theirs was still in the door. It wasn’t. So, I opened the door. And…there was Ellen. On top of him.” She closed her eyes and turned her head away.

“You knew her.”

Trembling now, she pulled in a bit of air to signify that she did.

“Well?”

“Didn’t we go to school together? Her mother lives just up the lane from us.”

McGarr waited, taking in her long plain face and lank hair. No rings on her fingers, no care taken with her appearance. The small towns of Ireland were home to many young women such as she, with no prospects or even hope of any. Unlike the woman on the bed, who had been a belle.

“Never would I have expected this of her,” she continued, her hazel eyes swinging to McGarr. “Sure now, the boys were mad for Ellen at one time, and who could blame them. She was a catch, and Quintan Finn, her husband, was—is—the best.” There was a pause, and she seemed to blush.

“But, you know, she wasn’t said—ever—to be the easy sort that you’d expect this of, God rest her soul.”

She sighed. “But you just never know who people are, do you?”

“Work here long?”

“Since Madame Sylvie opened.”

No Tallon in that. “How long ago?”

“Six years now.”

“Did Mr. Burke have many women visitors?”

She closed her eyes and again drew in some air in affirmation. “Not that he made a show of it. Usually they’d be out of the room before I began my work. But there’d be times that a woman would tarry too long, and I’d see the back of her fleeing down the stairs. And, of course, there was the evidence in the room.”

“Of what sort?”

Grace O’Rourke blushed and turned her head away. “The usual sort—the sheets, the bed. Condom wrappers. The…odor.”

“Names? Did you know any of these women?”

“I tried not to look. Sure”—she whipped her head back at McGarr, suddenly exercised—“it wasn’t any of my business, was it? He paid the rate for the room, didn’t he? He could do whatever he wanted in here, once the door was closed.”

“Let me ask you again—did you know any of the other women or men who visited Mr. Burke in this room?”

She folded her arms across her chest. “No.”

Plainly, she did. “You’re sure.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

McGarr let a few seconds pass. Through a window he could see the Shannon; a sizable white boat—one of those that could be rented and oper
ated by tourists without a captain—was struggling against the current as it motored north. Several skiffs of fishermen had anchored by the bridge. “I want you to look at those two people. At the wound in her temple.”

“I can see them.”

“No—look at them directly.”

“I will not.”

“Shouldn’t whoever murdered them be caught and punished?”

“Of course.”

“Then—I want you to think about what I just asked and ring me up at this number when you’re ready to say more.” From his billfold McGarr removed a card and handed it to her.

“Are you through with me?”

McGarr nodded. “I’ll be expecting you to do the right thing.”

Once the door closed, McGarr again took out his cell phone and rang up his wife, Noreen, telling her the general details of what happened and advising her that he wouldn’t be home for at least a few days.

“Well, then—why don’t we come down and join you? It
is
the weekend, after all, and we haven’t had a decent getaway in the country for…for longer than I can remember.”

McGarr glanced out the window that looked into the street, hoping he could get down to the bar and interview the personnel there before the tech squad and ambulance arrived. “Could I be mistaken, or didn’t we just visit your parents?” Who owned what amounted to an estate and horse farm south of Dublin.

“Ah, but that’s different. We know Dunlavin, yet I don’t believe I’ve ever been to Leixleap. And surely Maddie hasn’t.” She was their ten-year-old daughter. “We’ll need directions. Hold on, so—I’ll get something to write on.”

McGarr smiled and shook his head, knowing that a few days in another part of the country was not the cause of her eagerness but the fact that he was on a case important enough to take him away from home for some time.

Although they had been married now for over a dozen years, Noreen never tired of hearing and speculating about the details of his investigations. Such that he sometimes wondered if she had married him for himself as a person or because he was the country’s top homicide cop.

“We’ll be there in a jiff,” she said, after he had given her directions. “Is it a cow town? Or would there be someplace nice to stay thereabouts?”

“I’ll make the arrangements,” McGarr said, resignedly.

“There’s a good man. Ta.”

After ringing off, McGarr surveyed the bodies one final time and conducted a cursory search of the room, careful to keep his contact with the objects to a minimum.

He noted, however, that while the contents of the woman’s purse had been rifled and her service weapon was still in the holster under her uniform jacket, her service-issued beeper—which all field personnel carried—was nowhere to be found.

Whereas, Burke’s beeper was firmly affixed to the belt of his trousers. His billfold was fat, stuffed with a sheaf of twenty new hundred-pound notes wrapped
with a belly band and nearly another hundred quid in smaller denominations.

Otherwise, the contents were unremarkable—some dog-eared business cards from Shannon area fishing and tackle shops, marinas, boat-rental liveries, and a Dublin
24-Hour Adult Services
agency. He slipped them into his overcoat pocket, along with Burke’s small leather telephone directory.

Pockets: a ring of keys, a packet of unopened cigarettes, some small change, and a nautical knife with a marlinspike to loosen uncooperative knots. Handy for somebody often in boats, McGarr supposed.

The woman’s uniform also yielded little in the way of a lead: a tube of protective ointment for her lips, dental floss for her large even teeth, some tissues, and a biro.

Money was also visible in the woman’s open purse on the carpet. A clump of notes of various denominations was protruding from a pouch within. McGarr squatted and, picking up the purse from the bottom, shook out the rest of the contents.

Among the clutter—compact, hairbrush, breath mints, a tin of acetaminophen, more tissues along with a packet of Thunderbolt condoms that pictured a golden lightning bolt piercing a suggestively shaped cloud mass. It was unopened.

There was a telephone directory and envelope that contained a number of photos that looked to have been taken from afar with a long lens at night. Both the light and the depth of field were minimal.

All pictured sometimes four—in other shots six—men working between a boat and a van that was parked on the riverbank. Only in two of the twenty-four was
the face of the one man, who was in all of the photographs, fully visible.

He was dark and so hirsute that his cheeks, which he’d shaved, seemed almost blue.

McGarr put the photos in his pocket as well, along with her phone directory.

Back beside the bed, he studied the two victims again. They had been caught, like that, when they had to have been least aware of what was going on around them—she on top of him, her face against his chest, his head thrown back on the pillows.

How could the murderer have come through the door to the hall, which the couple—who had planned to have sex, as the neatly hung clothes implied—would surely have locked? How could he then have advanced on the bed without being seen or heard, and then held the gun so close to her temple that the skin around the entrance wound was thoroughly burnt from the muzzle blast?

And not have been heard? Or at least the report had not been so unusual that it had been brought to the attention of the Tallons.

Perhaps the murderer was already in the room before they arrived. Where would he have concealed himself in the sparsely furnished quarters?

Not in the closet where they’d hung their clothes. Under the bed? No, not there either, McGarr judged, when—back at the door, as though entering—he scanned the room. The bed, which was the only large piece of furniture, was so tall that he could see right under. And the light switch was right there by the door. He flicked it on. The bulbs in the globe on the ceiling were strong.

The toilet? The door was half-open, and McGarr left it like that, squeezing in to look around.

No tub, just a shower in a corner with three translucent glass panels, the commode, a medicine cabinet, and a bidet. Could the murderer have concealed himself in the shower such that the victims would not have seen him if, say, they had entered to use the facility?

McGarr couldn’t tell without having another person get in, and he wouldn’t touch anything until the tech squad went over the place. But, he supposed, it could be possible, if the party who came into the small room had been distracted and had not looked directly at the shower. And the lights had been low. The fixture on the ceiling was controlled by a dimmer, which had been turned down to a glow.

And what was he smelling? A toilet cleaner—pine-scented and rather strong. Yet the maid had said she only opened the door before rushing for the proprietress. How long would the smell of a disinfectant last in a small room such as this? A full day? McGarr didn’t know, but it seemed unlikely.

The old octagon-pattern tiles on the floor near the toilet had a single prominent chip out of the surface that was somewhat whiter and looked fresh.

Stepping back into the room, McGarr realized that he had not seen a room key with a hotel-like tag, like the one that Grace O’Rourke had shown him. Another quick search failed to turn one up. Their commingled blood had soaked through the thick mattress so thoroughly that it was now dripping on the carpet beneath the bed.

Time. He glanced at his watch, wanting to get down
to the bar and speak with Benny Carson, the head barman, before the others from Dublin arrived. Also, there was the register of other guests to go over. And he should make arrangements to stay in the inn.

Closing the door, he went over what he knew for sure so far: that Ellen Gilday Finn and Pascal Burke, two Garda fisheries officers with what was known as the “eel police,” had been murdered. Somebody had either already been in the room before they arrived or had been able to approach them unawares while they had been locked together.

One shot to her temple had passed through her head, it appeared, and then penetrated his chest in the area of the heart. His handgun—which, McGarr supposed, was the same as her standard-issue Glock 9 mm—was missing. As was her beeper.

The murderer might have concealed himself in the stall of the
en suite
shower, where there was the odor of disinfectant, as though it had recently been cleaned. After the crime, the murderer had locked the door and taken the key with him, McGarr could only assume at this point.

Tim Tallon—McGarr’s erstwhile nemesis and avowed (by Tallon) “boyhood chum” who owned with his common-law wife, Sylvie, the large and seemingly successful fishing resort, inn and pub—had tried to control McGarr’s investigation from Tallon’s initial phone call, reporting the double murder to McGarr’s subsequent interview with the couple.

Tallon’s main concern, he had told McGarr time and again, was to limit or even squelch any public report of what had occurred. Which was understandable from Tallon’s perspective, but highly unrealistic.

Sylvie Zeebruge, on the other hand, seemed much
more disturbed by the actual deaths of the couple in the bed. And her relations with Tallon appeared to be strained.

Without question the maid, Grace O’Rourke, knew more than she was saying about what other women Burke had bedded.

McGarr opened the door into the archway corridor that linked pub and inn, and—looking out the tall windows into the street in one direction and the courtyard in the other—he remembered having encountered the little curly-headed blond girl in the car park. She had been holding a beeper.

At the desk in the inn, McGarr asked the receptionist who the girl might be and where he could find her.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” the older woman replied; she was using a scissors to clip coupons from a newspaper. “Her father and uncle drink in the bar—blow-ins from the North.”

“Fishermen?” McGarr asked.

“And anything else with the promise of readies.”

“Like the eels?”

She smirked. “It’s said, but not by me.” The woman stopped a passing waiter and ordered him to take the platter of petit fours he was delivering back to the kitchen. “Those are stale. Tell Kurt I said Madame Sylvie wants them fresh.”

“Do they have a name?”

“Who?”

“The people from the North. The men in the bar, the girl in the courtyard.”

“Frakes. What else can I do for you?”

McGarr arranged for accommodations for himself and his wife and child.

“You’re the policeman?” the woman asked.