Cruel Winter: A County Cork Mystery

by Sheila Connolly

  Eleven

  Most people found themselves a seat, while a few remained leaning against the bar. Maura was surprised when Liam and Donal approached her, followed by the sheepish lads who still looked half-drunk. “If it’s all the same to you, Maura, we were thinkin’ we might rather sit in the back room—or the kitchen if it’s too cold there. This old case means nothin’ to us. But yeh’ll still let us have our pints?”

  “Sure, fine, whatever. Just don’t freeze your buns off. And take one of the lamps with you—we’ve got the two others.” Maura pointed them to the bar and nodded at Mick when they asked for another round. Jimmy was nowhere to be seen, and Rose was sitting near Gillian. Billy looked half-asleep, but then he often did at this time of night. They were ten—eleven if Jimmy came back in from wherever he was hiding. How big were Irish juries?

  “Everybody set? In case the Guinness has gone to your heads, we’re here to try to figure out who killed Sharon Morgan. Most of Ireland, including the gardaí, think it was Diane here. How many of you agree with that?”

  Joe and Danny raised their hands, and Jimmy, now lounging in the doorway to the kitchen, added his. Rose just looked bewildered. Gillian kept her opinion to herself, looking speculatively at Diane.

  “Okay, that’s a start—three of you. How many of you think she was railroaded?”

  “Are you sayin’ falsely accused?” Billy asked.

  Maura nodded. “Yes. The gardaí really wanted to point their finger at her, but then they couldn’t find anything to prove it.”

  Billy and Mick raised their hands. Interesting, Maura thought. Billy’s response she could understand, since he had a soft spot for women, even if he’d never managed to marry one. Mick’s reaction was more surprising. Did he know something? Seamus slowly put his hand up as well. Three to three now. Bart hadn’t chosen a side.

  “And what about yerself, Maura?” Mick asked.

  “I have no opinion. I’ve been here in Ireland for about three minutes, and the first I heard about this murder was today. So I’m going to stay neutral for now. Somebody has to convince me one way or the other.”

  Billy leaned forward in his chair and looked at Diane, and Maura was absurdly reminded of a talk show host. “You’ve set the scene fer where it happened, Diane, but before yeh go on, what can yeh tell us about the woman herself?”

  Diane settled herself more comfortably in her chair and seemed to be collecting her memories. “I can’t say I knew Sharon Morgan well. As I told you, she and her husband were strangers to the area. She was about my age. Attractive, nicely groomed. Not too tall, not overweight. Just kind of, I don’t know, ordinary. They had a late-model car but nothing too showy—I’d see them driving to Schull now and then. We might cross paths in town when we were food shopping, and we exchanged a few words, most often about the weather.”

  “Did yeh not share a meal now and then?” Billy asked.

  “Not that I can recall. Remember, this was just a second home for both of us, and we didn’t come and go on any kind of regular schedule, so it was hard to plan ahead. If you’re wondering, there was no animosity between us. We just didn’t happen to see each other often.”

  “Did they have a dog?” Bart asked suddenly.

  “No, not that I remember. It’s hard to keep a pet when you’re moving between two houses.”

  “Did she have any hobbies? Gardening? Painting? Writing, mebbe?”

  Diane shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

  “Did she drink?” Jimmy’s voice came from the far end of the bar.

  Diane glared at him. “Now how on earth am I supposed to know that? I’ve already told you that I’d never seen the inside of her house, and she’d never been in mine. My husband and I rarely went to pubs around here. I never noticed her stumbling around the pastures singing or cursing or anything like that. And why do you think it would matter?”

  “It’s a fair question,” Seamus said. “Seems like the two of yez were like ships passing in the night. Did you even know when the two of ’em were there?”

  “I couldn’t see lights from their cottage from ours. Usually I knew only when their car went by. There’s little traffic on that lane.”

  “Did they have a field?” Danny asked.

  Diane appeared confused by the question. “I have no idea. Why?”

  “Might be they rented it our fer the grazin’ when the season was right. It would have nothin’ to do with them, but there could have been someone coming to check on the cattle now and again.”

  “Ah.” Diane stared at the ceiling for a long moment. “I don’t remember seeing any cattle back then, but there could have been some. My family owned the land just next to our cottage, and I don’t think anyone ever asked if they could use it. It wouldn’t have been a problem—I grew up with cattle in those fields. I’m not sure what my husband would have thought about it. He’d never lived on a farm.”

  “So why did they buy the place, then?” Bart said.

  “For the same reason we held on to our cottage. It was quiet, and there weren’t many people around. It was a good place to come and relax when the city got to be too much.”

  “Unless someone’s lookin’ ta kill yeh.”

  Maura spoke up. “Hang on. Before we go any farther, can we dump the random stranger theory? That somebody just showed up looking for someone to kill, and Sharon was handy?”

  Several of the men looked at her with disgust. “And why would we be thinkin’ that, Maura?” Seamus asked.

  “Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?” she said stubbornly. “So it should be crossed off if it couldn’t have happened.” Could it?

  “Easy. Yeh live up at Knockskagh, am I right?” he said.

  “Yes, about two-thirds of the way up the hill.”

  “Do yeh know yer neighbors?”

  “Only Bridget Nolan, I guess. The houses right next to mine have been empty for a long time. Most of the ones up the hill farther are empty too. Closer to the road, there are some others that are newer, and there are people living there, but I wouldn’t recognize them if I met them on the street. Why?”

  “Does anyone walk by yer cottage? Or drive?”

  Maura shook her head. “Not much. I hear Mick’s car when he comes to visit his grannie. Some of the other owners have jobs, I guess, so I hear them leave in the morning and come back after work if I’m around, which I’m usually not. What are you getting at?”

  “Yeh’d notice a stranger’s car, would you not? The sound of an unfamiliar engine?”

  “I guess, but like I said, I’m not there a lot, day or night, so people could be going back and forth all the time and I wouldn’t know it. What’s your point, Seamus?”

  “If there was someone who knew the lay of the land, say, and knew when the people who lived there would be comin’ and goin’, it’d be easy enough to slip in without bein’ seen.”

  “So?” Maura said. “That doesn’t eliminate a stranger.”

  Seamus raised one finger. “But at night, he’d have to know his way around to cross the land.”

  “Exactly, Seamus,” Diane said quickly. “A torch would show up a mile away at night, save on a night like this. I wouldn’t risk crossing it in the dark, and I know the place. Too easy to twist an ankle or worse.”

  “Yer sure Sharon was killed in the night?” Mick asked.

  “That’s what the gardaí believed then. And she’d eaten her supper,” Diane said. “But without sounding like I’m trying to defend myself, mistakes were made on their part from the start.”

  “And they’d be?” Bart asked, trying to keep his tone neutral. Maura wondered again what he really thought.

  Diane looked at him squarely. “You know them. First, Sharon was found in the morning by a neighbor. But the gardaí had to call in the state pathologist from Dublin to take a look at her officially, and it took the man over twenty-four hours to arrive, so you can guess what state the physical evidence was in by then, after the body had sat out that long. As a r
esult, the gardaí really weren’t sure when she died.”

  “Wait,” Maura interrupted. “There’s only one person in the whole country who can examine a body?”

  “That’s right,” Bart said. “The state pathologist who investigates anything related to foul play. Yes, there’s only the one, although there may be a couple of assistants. This case was big enough to bring in the chief.”

  Maura resisted the urge to shake her head. No forensic evidence for how long? What on earth had the pathologist been doing all that time? “Walk me through it again. Sharon shops for supper in Schull and heads home sometime after five, which was the last time anyone saw her. Or admitted to seeing her. She’s found the next morning at the edge of her own property by a neighbor—out for a walk? Who was that, and why was he there?”

  “Married couple, lived the next farm over,” Seamus volunteered. “They were walkin’ the dog early—a King Charles spaniel, female. She’d gotten loose before and gotten herself in the family way, so they kept a close eye on her after that because they’d hopes of breedin’ her fer pups they could sell.”

  Maura stared at him. “Seamus, why do you know all this?”

  “I’ve followed the case, and every time I think it’s done, there’s another interview on the telly or something. They always repeat the same facts—not that there were many to be had.”

  Was that ghoulish of him? Maura wondered. To keep thinking about a twenty-year-old murder? “What did these neighbors do next?”

  “Well, like yeh said, there was no mobiles then. They’d’ve had to walk back to their own cottage to make the call to the gardaí. If they had a phone.”

  “Why no phone? No phone wires? Or no money?”

  “One or the other.”

  “What do we know about those neighbors?” Maura demanded. “Were they locals or blow-ins? Old or young? How did they get along with Sharon and her husband?”

  “Yer gettin’ ahead of yerself, Maura,” Billy reminded her. “We’ve only just found the body in the tale. The call’s been made to the gardaí by those neighbors, and the gardaí have to work out who’s in charge and who else should be told and then who to send.”

  “It was the Bantry station sent a man out to keep watch over the body,” Bart said levelly. “He put a tarp over the victim.”

  “So it’s already a day since Sharon died, and the investigation really hasn’t started yet?” Maura demanded. Diane gave her a sad smile but said nothing. “All anyone really knows is that the woman is dead, on her own property, outside.”

  “Right so.”

  The group fell silent, thinking. Diane had been right: there were problems with the investigation from the start. Maura felt more and more sorry for her. But it still wasn’t clear to her how the gardaí had come to focus on Diane as their prime suspect.

  “Did any of you ever meet any of the people involved?” Maura began again. “See the inside of their houses?”

  When nobody said anything, Bart asked, “This all happened over past Schull. What would these people be doin’ over there? Yer thinkin’ like an American again. Most people there—and here as well—kept cows. Cows take a lot of tendin’. Dairy farmers don’t just take themselves off joyriding. Am I right, Seamus?”

  “You are,” Seamus agreed. “Cows won’t wait when they need milkin’.”

  “Just asking,” Maura said, trying not to sound whiny. “So all we have to work with is what was in newspapers and whatever stories people have told you,” Maura said, almost to herself. Well, it couldn’t be helped now. “All right, back to the scene. There’s a garda standing watch over the body, waiting for the pathologist and maybe more gardaí to show up. Did the local gardaí—from Schull or Bantry—take a look at Sharon’s house? There could have been another body there—or a real messy scene that might tell them something.”

  “They did, right enough,” Bart said.

  “What can you tell me about it, then?” Maura said. “Seamus, you seem to know a lot of the details.”

  “So does Bart there,” Seamus pointed out.

  “True, but he was part of the official investigating team, and we aren’t sure we believe them. Sorry, Bart.”

  “I take no offense, Maura,” Bart said. “After all, we never solved it, did we now? Seamus can tell us what the average person heard about it.”

  Seamus shut his eyes, the better to remember, Maura hoped. “She had no keys on her,” he said slowly, “but the door wasn’t locked anyways—people didn’t do that much then, nor do they now. But it wasn’t standing open. It was closed nice and neat.”

  “Was there a back door?” Maura asked.

  The man cocked his head at her. “Now why would she have gone out the back to run toward the front? That’s daft.”

  “Humor me,” Maura retorted. “Okay, the place was wide open, and she went out the front door. She kept going for a while, because she wasn’t found close to the house. The gardaí arrived, took a look at the body, figured pretty fast that it was murder, and went inside. What did they find?”

  “No mess. She’d left a plate and a glass by the sink in the kitchen—just the one of each—like she’d had her supper but hadn’t washed up. The lights were on. The radio was playin’. Upstairs, her slippers were by the bed, but she was wearin’ a pair of boots when she was found. She hadn’t changed out of her nightclothes.”

  “Which were?” Maura wondered if a guy would remember that detail.

  “Clothes she’d wear to be comfortable in, like an old shirt and—what do yeh call ’em?—pajama pants. No fancy negligee, if that’s what yer thinkin’.”

  “But nothing was broken or messed up inside the house?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “How would anybody know what ‘usual’ was? Like, was she a neat person or a slob?”

  “I’m only sayin’ that a woman alone, with no callers expected, wouldn’t much care about how tidy the place looks. It looked . . . ordinary, I’d guess. Mind you, nobody said.”

  Maura thought briefly of her own cottage, which would probably look a lot more messy if she owned more than her clothes and a few pots and plates. And unless there was a real mess at the house, why would the gardaí, who most likely were all men back then, have even thought about the victim’s housekeeping details, much less included them in a report? All they’d reported, apparently, was that nothing looked unusual inside the house. “Okay. So bottom line—nobody had been fighting inside the house, right? Nothing broken, no blood? And she’d already eaten her dinner that she’d bought earlier in Schull.”

  That produced nods from the audience.

  “So either Sharon opened the door to whoever it was,” Maura pressed on, “or the intruder walked in quietly and surprised her. But she didn’t fight, and she didn’t run.” She’d taken the time to put on boots? Did that make sense?

  “That sounds right,” Joe said.

  Maura was surprised to find that she had somehow taken on the role of interrogator, but she was horrified by how the case had been handled from the beginning. She had to remind herself that that was hardly fair: Ireland had few murders, and most gardaí had little or no experience with serious crime back in the 1990s and little access to technology that most Americans now took for granted. She shouldn’t let herself jump to conclusions. It seem like at least they had asked the logical questions, like had the dead woman shared a meal with anyone? Was the bed disturbed? Was anything broken?

  She surveyed her small group, most of whom looked mildly interested but sleepy. The pub was warm and dark, full of the odor of burning peat and unwashed woolens. “Who would Sharon have opened the door to? Did she have any friends? Diane, do you have any ideas?”

  Diane had been oddly silent so far, even though she had started this. “I didn’t know her well. I can’t say,” she said.

  “Didn’t the gardaí talk to the husband? Where was he, anyway?”

  “England,” Diane said flatly. “With a boatload of witnesses. He was nowhere near
the place.”

  “So he had a solid alibi. What kind of work did he do?”

  “Construction and the like,” Danny said. “He was a manager, a planner—didn’t get his hands dirty any longer, though he had once at the start. He was having a grand ol’ time with the Celtic Tiger and all, puttin’ up buildin’s all over. I worked with him a time or two back then.”

  “Did Sharon work?” Maura had been a child in the 1990s, so she had little idea how many women, with or without children, held down a job in Ireland—or anywhere else. Apart from raising the kids and helping out around the farm, of course. To make it worse, she knew only what Boston women did; here in West Cork, jobs might have been hard to find unless you were a farmer, which most of these newcomers weren’t, although they might put a cow in the garden as an ornament. She knew of one house near hers that kept a goat tethered in the front, although she couldn’t guess why. Goat as lawn ornament? She straightened up and rotated her head, trying to get the blood flowing to her brain again. She was getting punchy.

  “I couldn’t say, but it might be in the records,” Bart said. “She might not’ve needed to, since her husband’s business was growin’ fast, and he’d hired plenty of people from all over the county. And she took a fair number of holidays with or without her husband.”

  “Was he ever a suspect?”

  Some men in the small group exchanged glances. “Like Diane said, he could prove he was somewhere else. So the gardaí fixed on her there”—Jimmy nodded at Diane—“from the start.”

  “Why?” Maura asked. Her question was met with silence. Maybe the people in the room were uncomfortable talking about it with Diane sitting there, although she hadn’t objected. In fact, she’d she said she wanted to talk about the old—if unfinished—story, to give her side of things. Did the others really have no idea what had happened, or did they know something Maura didn’t? Or had they all made up their minds two decades earlier, and nothing was going to change that? “Why would Diane have killed her?”

  The men in the room shuffled their feet and shifted their glances, avoiding looking at her or Diane. That was odd. Didn’t motive matter in Ireland? Or was the supposed motive something that people here—particularly men—didn’t like to talk about? Had Sharon been in a lesbian relationship with someone? With Diane? In the 1990s, that whole subject would have been pretty much off limits, Maura guessed. But how would that provide a motive? Maura glanced at Diane, who was sitting as still as stone. Was she hiding something now?