“The machine has cameras, but the attacker knew enough to wait until Bart Hayes had moved away before he struck. It may be that he’s done this before, or he’d planned it.”
“It was just supposed to be a robbery, wasn’t it? I mean, it wasn’t like somebody wanted the guy dead.” She flashed on a memory of Hayes at the pub; he’d seemed so happy.
“We’ve no reason to think anyone held anything against Bart Hayes. The shopkeepers are hoping it was someone passing through who saw his chance and took it. Which would make it nearly hopeless for us to solve, of course.” He shook his head. “The blow probably wasn’t meant to kill, but nobody saw the body until the next morning, and by then it was too late.” Sean sighed. “Nobody saw the attack. Shopkeepers hadn’t seen anyone suspicious loitering about. Wasn’t even very much money.”
“Happens all the time back home,” Maura said. “And it seems like everybody has guns these days. Kids, even. They get into some argument with another kid and blam, they shoot him. It’s stupid.”
Sean smiled at her. “You won’t be finding that kind of violence around here. Maybe in Dublin, or Cork City. I won’t say we’re all angels, but we do draw the line at gun violence.”
“Still, what a waste that Bart Hayes is dead.” Maura shook her head and stood up. “I’ll let you get back to work. I’m due at Sullivan’s anyway.”
To her surprise, Sean stood as well and said, “I’ll see you to your car.”
“What, you think Brown Car Guy is waiting for me outside a garda station?”
He smiled. “Criminals aren’t known to be smart.” He walked her to the front door, but he seemed to be in no hurry. “You’ve been having quite the time of it since you arrived.”
Maura nodded. “I guess. I never had this kind of trouble back home, and nobody ever claimed that our neighborhood was a good one, at least when I was growing up, although it’s cleaned up its act in the past few years. Is this normal, or is there something weird going on?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, the first day I’m here you drag a body out of the bog, and I happen to be driving by. Then Jimmy at the pub falls down the stairs and breaks his arm, and when I take him to the hospital you’re there and tell me there’s been a murder in Skibbereen. Then there’s this jerk who tries to run me off the road, and follows me to a cemetery. Am I attracting this crazy stuff?”
Sean shook his head. “That I can’t say, but I will tell you it’s not the usual order of things.”
“Do you know yet who the guy in the bog was?”
“That we do not. We’ve had the people from the National Museum down, and they said he was modern, been dead no more than a century, which is much too young for them. No documents on him, no wallet, no keys, but that’s not necessarily unusual. We’d guess he died sometime after 1925, based on the few coins in his pocket. We’ve yet to find any record of the man’s disappearance. We may never put a name to him.”
“Poor guy—you want to think that somebody missed him. What do you do now?”
“We’ve been handling it like any other crime scene—the detective inspector thought it would be a good idea for us to get some training in how to handle one. Good thing too, what with the second murder hard on the heels of the first. Anyways, we performed a thorough search of the crime scene, collected the poor man’s few possessions and inventoried them, had the official autopsy done. But clearly we’ve no witnesses to his death and no likely suspects in our sights.”
“But he was murdered, right? No way that was an accident?” Maura asked.
“That’s what the autopsy tells us,” he said.
“Maybe he just fell and hit his head on a rock or something?” She found she wanted it to be an accident, not a murder.
“I’m afraid not. The marks on his head were unmistakable—a strong blow to the back of the head with a long, narrow object, a cane or a stick. That much we know. And then this other killing comes along, so who knows when we’ll get back to our man in the bog.”
“Will he be buried? Or I guess, reburied?”
“Most likely, although it’s still an open investigation right now. It would be good to have a name for the stone, though.” He leaned up against her car. “So, will you be staying around much longer?” he asked.
Maura wondered briefly why he wanted to know. “It looks like it—I’ll be helping out at Sullivan’s until they figure out what’s going to happen with it.” She could have sworn he looked pleased. “Well, it was nice talking to you, Officer Sean Murphy, but I need to get back to Leap.” Maura fished in the depths of her bag for her car key and felt the crackle of paper—the letter addressed to Old Mick, that she’d picked up in the pub. She’d forgotten she was still carrying it. “Oh, shoot.”
“You’ve lost your key?”
“No, I’ve found that letter. So much has been going on that I forgot all about it.” She pulled the letter out of her bag and looked at Murphy. “I think we’d better talk to that detective of yours. I may have something about your Bog Man that he should hear.”
Chapter 22
Maura had to give Officer Sean Murphy credit: after a first startled glance, he said simply, “Follow me,” no questions asked. Good for him—at least by now he seemed to trust her judgment. Although Maura worried that when she presented his boss with her small bit of information, they’d both look foolish.
Inside, Sean said, “Wait here, will you?” and headed for the corner office. The door was open, and after a brief rap on the door frame, he went in. The man seated behind the desk looked up, then listened. Sean nodded toward Maura out in the common area, and after another word with the higher-up, he beckoned her forward.
The man behind the desk stood up courteously when she entered. “I’m Detective Chief Superintendent Patrick Hurley. Please, have a seat.”
He was the man she’d seen before—the one who was in charge. Now he wanted to talk to her? He waited until Maura had settled in a chair before sitting again. Sean remained standing, behind Maura’s chair.
“My officer here says you have information regarding the dead man from the bog?” Detective Hurley began. Deep voice, cultured accent, Maura noted. She squared her chin and quickly assessed the man’s appearance: his dark hair was tinged with silver, and his eyes were a color that she would have said was impossibly blue. He was solidly built—and he exuded authority. She could see why he was the man in charge here.
Maura found her voice. “I’m Maura Donovan, from Boston. I’m just visiting, staying in Leap. And I wouldn’t say I have information—only a guess, but I thought someone here should know, just in case, you know.” She stopped: to her ears she sounded like she was babbling.
The detective nodded, once. “I’m in charge of investigations of all murders in this district. How did you come to know about that body?” He gave the impression that he was paying close attention, without any sense of hurry.
Maura took a breath to calm herself. Why should she be nervous? “I happened to be driving by when your people were pulling the body out of the bog a few days ago. And of course everybody was talking about it at the pub in Leap after that. Sullivan’s.”
“Ah. Mick Sullivan’s place. He was a good man, and he’ll be missed.” Detective Hurley paused for a moment. “What was it you wanted to tell me?”
“Well, it kind of relates to Mick Sullivan. I’ve been helping out at the pub, and I was cleaning up behind the bar and found this letter with a bunch of other mail. It’s addressed to Mick, and it was already open so I figured he’d read it. I read it too, to figure out whether it was important and who should get it. I suppose I just could have taken it to the post office and told them to send it back, but it was from a guy in Australia, and I guess I thought it was kind of a cold way to find out that Mick Sullivan was dead.” She pushed it across the desk. Detective Hurley looked briefly at it but didn’t touch it. “I didn’t know what to do with it, so I asked Mick Nolan’s grandmother if Old Mick had any family living a
round there, or who was handling his estate or whatever you want to call it. She couldn’t help much, and no one else seemed to know. I tried to bring it to you the other day, but everyone was busy with Bart Hayes’s death, so I put the letter in my bag, and then I kind of forgot about it. The last few days have been, uh, distracting.” Maura stopped to take a deep breath. The detective must think she was an idiot, the way she was rambling.
When Detective Hurley raised an eyebrow, Officer Murphy spoke for the first time. “Miss Donovan was run off the road, this side of Knockskagh—no damage, and she couldn’t identify the car or the driver at the time. Today she came in to report that she saw the same man today, and he threatened her. Then she recalled that she still had the letter.”
The detective turned his attention to Maura. “Is that correct?”
Maura nodded. “More or less. Look, before you ask, I’ve been here less than a week. I don’t know anybody or anything, and I have no idea why somebody would be pissed off at me.”
“I understand. Murphy, you’re dealing with this harassment issue?” When he nodded, the detective turned back to Maura. “Let’s go back to the letter and how it relates to our man in the bog. What’s in this letter?”
“Well, it came from a guy named Denis Flaherty in Australia. His family emigrated from Ireland when he was young, and now he’s getting old and wants to fill in his family tree while he still can. All he knew was that they were from Cork somewhere, possibly from around Leap. He thinks he and Old Mick might have been related, and he mentions a family story about an uncle of his who kind of disappeared back in the 1930s, and no one ever heard from him again. I know it would be a huge coincidence, but I couldn’t help wondering if that missing uncle might be the dead guy you’ve got.” Maura stopped, appalled at how confused her story sounded.
Detective Hurley was looking at her with curiosity. Which at least was better than contempt. “So you’ve brought the letter to me.”
“Well, I figured somebody should have it. I know, it sounds crazy. You must be busy, and I’ll just get out of your hair now.”
The detective smiled. “Please, don’t rush off, Miss Donovan. Your information is no stranger than some we’ve had. Everyone has an opinion, as no doubt you’ve already seen at Sullivan’s.”
At least he hadn’t dismissed her as an idiot. “Can you tell me anything more about the body?”
After a few seconds of consideration, he said, “We have the postmortem from the county pathologist, of course. The body appears to be male, no more than fifty.”
So far, so good, Maura thought. “Do you know how long he’s been in the bog?”
“That’s more difficult. Do you know much about bogs?”
“Nope.”
“Well, they’re peat, a plant that used to be used as heating fuel—after it’s dried. It’s still used for power generation these days—there are quite a few bogs around. As bogs are usually very wet and acidic, they can preserve things for a very long time. Sometimes things—and bodies—have been preserved for centuries. This body was found a foot or two below the surface, so we’re guessing it had been there a good long time, but not more than a century. We could make a rough estimate based on the rate of growth of the peat, but we also had what’s left of the clothes as well—buttons and such.”
“No buttons in the Middle Ages?” Maura asked.
“Not like these.”
“So it’s possible that it could be Denis McCarthy?”
He cocked his head at her. “It is. Did your Denis Flaherty know the townland?”
“He didn’t seem to.” Maura said. “Me, I’m barely clear on what a townland is. I asked a couple of people at the pub if they knew of any local McCarthys, and they practically laughed at me. Seems there were lots of McCarthy families around.”
“There still are. Murphy, you can check the records, see if any McCarthys reported the man missing.”
“Already done, sir,” Sean Murphy responded quickly. “We’ve been through what few records we have for people who have gone missing, and found no one who fits the description. Of course, the early records are a bit scant, and not everyone would have made a report, nor are those earlier records in the best of condition.”
Hurley turned back to Maura. “We’ll hold on to the letter for now, if you’ve no objection.”
“Please! It’s not exactly mine—I kept it only because I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. And it didn’t seem right just to throw it away.”
“I’m glad you brought it in.” He glanced at it again, and his focused sharpened. “Your letter writer says here that the only thing that went missing with this uncle of his was his favorite pipe, carved by his brother, with a knot pattern on it. Murphy, do you have that list of items found on the body?”
“I do, sir. Give me a moment.” Sean Murphy went quickly to his desk in the open area and returned a few moments later with a folder, from which he extricated a sheet of paper and handed it to the detective.
Detective Hurley looked at the page, then looked again at Maura. “It appears we have a match.”
Maura went cold. This was ridiculous—she just happened to be around when the body was found, and she just happened to find a letter that could just as easily have been thrown away, or lain in the pub for years, and the two just happened to be connected? What were the odds of that? “So the Bog Man is Denis Flaherty’s missing uncle? And he was murdered?”
“It appears likely. Too bad we can’t ask Old Mick what the connection was, if Denis had the right family. I understand there’s some issue as to who inherits, so I assume someone is looking into the family history. Check on that, will you, Murphy?”
“Right, sir.”
Maura wondered briefly why the head police officer of the entire district would know about Old Mick’s lack of heirs; obviously she still had a lot to learn about how things worked around here. “What do you do now?” she asked.
“We are still treating it as a murder investigation. You’ve done us a great favor by providing a possible identity for the body. Can I count on you not to share the information about the murder?”
“Sure, of course,” Maura said, “but I’m pretty sure most people know about it already. You know, people talk in pubs.”
He nodded. “If they talk, listen carefully, then let me or Murphy know if you hear anything that might be of value.” He stood up, signaling the end of the interview. “Thank you for stopping by. Most people might not have done. Officer Murphy has your information, if we should need anything further?”
Maura nodded. “Yup. If you need to find me, try the pub, or maybe Ellen Keohane’s place by the harbor—that’s where I’m staying. And Officer Murphy has my mobile number.”
“He’ll see you out, then. Thank you again.”
Sean Murphy opened the door and waited while Maura went through. At the front door she found herself standing on the station steps, feeling confused.
“What just happened?” Maura said.
Sean Murphy smiled at her. “You identified a man who died long before you were born.”
“But things like this just don’t happen!” Maura protested. “I don’t understand. Why me?”
“I can’t say. Why did you bring the letter in at all? Others wouldn’t have.”
“It seemed like the right thing to do. I felt bad for the poor old guy in Australia, hoping to find an answer after all this time.”
“It was good of you to bring the letter in—you never know what might be important. Will you be all right, getting back?”
“You mean, driving back to Leap? I think I can handle it.” Maura smiled at him. “I’ll let you know if I see that damn brown car again. Thanks, Officer Murphy. Sean.” Maura extended her hand.
“Take care, now.” He shook her hand, then let her go.
Maura made the loop around the town and found herself on the main road once again. The drive back was uneventful, although she kept glancing in her rearview mirror, looking for the brown
car. There was little traffic, and none of it looked ominous.
Her mind kept jumping around. What could that jerk want? Was he actually following her? Why? As far as she knew, she didn’t have any enemies, here or in any country. She had to admit that he hadn’t looked very bright; maybe he had her mixed up with someone else? Not that there were too many people of her description around at the moment.
And then that thing with the letter. How weird was that?
She arrived back in Leap and left the car behind the Keohanes’ house, walking up the drive to the road above. She looked both ways for cars but could see only one, at least half a mile away, and it was red. Getting paranoid, are you? She crossed over to the pub and found Rose behind the bar. Her father, Jimmy, was seated in front of the fire, giving Old Billy Sheahan all the details of his hospital stay. To hear him talk, he’d survived intricate major surgery, not a simple cast for a broken bone in his forearm. Maura dumped her bag and jacket behind the bar and went over to the two men.
“So, Jimmy, are you back to work?”
“There you are, Maura my dear. My doctor says I should take it easy for a few more days—no heavy lifting and all. But I didn’t want to leave you two ladies here on your own, not with a killer running around the streets.”
Maura tensed, then realized he was talking about the mugging death. She wondered how long he could spin out the “no heavy lifting” excuse. Apparently a full pint of Guinness didn’t fall in that category. “Can I get you anything, Billy?”
“I’m grand, thank you very much. If you’ve the time, why don’t you come sit with me awhile? I’ve heard all this fella’s stories more than once.” He nodded at Jimmy.
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