Cruel Winter: A County Cork Mystery

by Sheila Connolly

“Well, when I showed up here last March, I thought I’d be gone in a week, but I guess Ireland kind of gets to you. But you’re still going back to England?”

  “You had people here, didn’t you?” Diane said, ducking the question.

  “Same as you—grandparents. I never knew about any relatives around here. But it seems they all knew about me.”

  “And how is that working for you?”

  “Not too bad, actually,” Maura said with a reluctant smile. “At least I admitted I didn’t know what I was doing, and people were willing to help.”

  “So now you’re paying it forward. You’ve helped me, like others helped you.”

  “I guess,” Maura admitted. “But when we started yesterday, I just thought maybe you didn’t get treated fairly. And I know some of the gardaí around here, and I respect them. We gave them a chance, and they got it right.”

  “And it was your doing, Maura.” Diane smiled, then glanced at her watch. “Make my farewells for me, will you?”

  “What, you don’t want to stay and enjoy the celebration? It’s for you, you know.”

  “No, but thank you. You enjoy the credit. And I’ll be forever grateful.”

  Maura was startled to feel the prick of tears. “Will you be coming back, do you think?”

  Diane smiled. “Maybe. We’ll see. Do you have a back way out?”

  Maura led her to the back door past the bathrooms, then watched as she got into her car and drove off toward Cork and the airport and London and her husband. Diane’s life had been changed here in Cork two decades earlier, and it felt right that it should be changed again here. As for her part, Maura had only done what she thought was right.

  But now she had a business to run and a pub filling rapidly with people who wanted the “real” story behind solving an old and very cold case. That was her business.

  Mick came up behind Maura and said quietly, “She’s gone?”

  Maura nodded. “She is. She didn’t feel like celebrating.”

  “Yeh know, yeh’ve a knack fer this.”

  “For what?” she asked without turning around, her eyes still on the crowd.

  “Bringin’ people together and, I dunno, making them look at things in a new way?”

  “That’s partly because I’m American. And I’ve been lucky,” she said.

  “Some people are born with luck. Diane, say, has had a long spell of bad luck until she bumped into you. Gillian? Still hangin’ in the balance, but she and Harry are together now, and it might stick, and yeh might’ve had a hand in that. Jimmy’s onto a good thing with Judith, even if he doesn’t see it, and that’ll free up Rosie to do what she wants, and I know yeh’d like to help her.”

  Now Maura turned to face him. “Are you saying I get credit for all those things?”

  “Not likely. But you might’ve given them a push in the right direction.”

  “Mick, if I’ve got this kind of power, I’m going to be scared to open my mouth.”

  “I wouldn’t worry yerself—it’s all good. Enjoy it, will yeh?”

  “Right,” Maura muttered. And then she stopped herself. After most of a year, she was beginning to understand how people in West Cork thought. What’s more, she had come to appreciate the support they had given her from the day she had arrived. She had made friends, and she had a place in the community. Maybe Diane had been right: she was beginning to pay it forward. That felt good.

  She turned to the gathering crowd. “So tell us what happened, Maura Donovan!” someone called out.

  “Order another round, and I’ll tell you what you want to know,” Maura said, smiling.

  Acknowledgments

  Ireland is a lovely, peaceful place where crime is fairly low—and where the gardaí (the Irish police) usually know who committed the crime before they even look for the culprit. It’s that small a country.

  Murder is taken seriously there because it’s so rare: while the number of police officers per capita in Ireland is about the same as in the United States, the homicide rate is far lower. As you might guess, that can be a problem for mystery writers, who usually look for a murder to open their stories.

  So I was happy when I came upon an unsolved murder that took place in 1996 in West Cork—one that was fairly high profile, involving film people from England and France, outsiders who did not mix well with the local population. The case still makes headlines today, twenty years later, as legal battles ebb and flow, and it remains an open case.

  Of course, I started thinking, “What if . . . ?” What if newer technologies could add any new information? What if the makeup and mind-set of the Irish gardaí had changed? And what if my young American Maura Donovan, raised in big-city Boston, could take a fresh look at what had happened? So I threw together Maura, her staff, her friends, her bar patrons, and the prime candidate for the murderer (never arrested, always suspected) in Sullivan’s Pub on a snowy evening and waited to see what would come out.

  There’s still no solution, officially, but I may have come up with an idea or two. But keep in mind that this is not a true crime story. There are no interviews with the people involved or analysis of the records. This is a fictionalized account of how the murder might have happened.

  The community of writers provides a wonderful support network, and none of my books would have happened without Sisters in Crime and the Guppies and Mystery Writers of America. The resources that are now available to writers—from forensics to police procedures to the psychology of criminals—are amazing, and we have no excuse for getting facts wrong. Special thanks go to Sergeant Tony McCarthy of the Skibbereen gardaí, who’s been helpful not only for explaining how things are done in Ireland but also for being willing to talk to me about crime in Ireland in general. Thanks also to the people in Leap and Skibbereen who I have come to count as friends—people who are willing to answer my dumb questions. Particular thanks go to Matt Martz and the crew at Crooked Lane Books for grabbing this book up and taking it to the next level and to my agent, Jessica Faust of BookEnds, for making it happen.