The Man on the Cliff

by Janice Macdonald

  “Maybe we could schedule it for another time,” she said.

  “And when would you like to schedule it?” he asked, pronouncing the word as she had, in the American way. “Will you need to consult your calendar?”

  She gave him a long look. “I’ll give you a call,” she said. “Maybe we could get together in town, or something.”

  “Right, then.” Niall opened the front door for her. No point in arguing. Clearly, she wasn’t convinced that she was safe around him. And as much as he wanted her company, all the talking in the world wouldn’t change her mind. Trusting him was her only choice.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “WELL, IT WAS WISE of you to leave,” Annie told Kate as they walked down the high street later that afternoon. “I was worried the whole time you were up there, you can ask Pat. When I found that note of yours saying you were up to see Niall Maguire, I was all for having Rory go up there to bring you back.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I was just playing it safe until I get a little more information,” Kate said. Which was true, but she felt a tug every time she thought about the look on Niall’s face when she’d cut the tour short. And, no matter how many times she reminded herself that she knew nothing about his temperament or character, she just had this feeling that when he said he hadn’t murdered his wife, he’d been telling the truth.

  “Pity I didn’t put two and two together before you went off to meet him Wednesday morning,” Annie said. “Him coming into the tourist office just the day before, asking did I have an American girl with long red hair staying with me? And then you all over the moon about that note. Just don’t get taken in by him, Katie, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kate said with more assurance than she actually felt. “I won’t.”

  “Sure, you wouldn’t be the first girl to fall for a good-looking man with a black heart,” Annie said.

  Kate grinned. Why couldn’t she have had someone like Annie around when she was making her first forays into the dating world? Even if she disagreed with Annie’s assessment of Niall, it was great to have someone a little older, and definitely more grounded, to talk to.

  “It was pretty romantic, though. Meeting him up on the cliffs like that.” She smiled, remembering. “We kissed, Annie. And I didn’t even know his name.”

  “Ah, Katie,” Annie said softly.

  “I know. That’s what I mean, it’s like it wasn’t even me. I swear, I’ve never done anything like that in my life. Really.”

  Annie laughed. “Ah, come on, darlin’, it’s not such a crime, kissing a good-looking man, even if you don’t know his name. The thing I can’t picture is Niall Maguire coming down out of the clouds enough to do something like that.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said, wanting to convert Annie. “I think people just don’t know him and that’s how all the rumors started.”

  “They know him well enough,” Annie said darkly.

  Kate said nothing. Annie and everyone else in Cragg’s Head had known Niall for a lot longer than she had and weren’t likely to be easily swayed. What she had to do was try to keep an open mind, at least until she’d interviewed some less biased sources. This afternoon, she was meeting a former roommate of Moruadh’s in Galway and tomorrow a musician who had toured with her.

  A bell pinged loudly behind her and she turned to see a woman on a bicycle approaching.

  Black raincoat flapping like a sail around her portly body, mouth set in grim determination, the woman rode stiff as a rock, looking neither right nor left.

  “Brigid Riley,” Annie whispered. “Poor old thing drops in at Dooley’s every evening for a pint. Parks the bike outside and when she comes out, the tires are always flat. They say that after she’s had a few, she doesn’t notice anyway.” She laughed. “Who knows, she might even ride better that way.”

  Kate watched as the woman came to a sudden and shaky stop, dismounted and bent down to inspect the back tire, her ample behind sticking up in the air. After a moment, she straightened up. A frizz of red hair poked out from the front of a head scarf patterned with horses, her eyes were dark currants in a suety pudding of a face. Kate recognized her as the woman she’d seen in Hugh Fitzpatrick’s office.

  “Look at that, will you?” The woman flapped her hand at the flattened tire. “There’s not enough air left in there to blow out a candle. Them divils, pestering me all hours of the day and night. They have me patience worn out, sure they do.”

  “I’ll fix it for you.” Kate reached for the rusted bicycle pump strapped to the crossbar. “I think I can figure this thing out.”

  The woman stared at Kate with frank curiosity. “American? Didn’t I meet you in Hughie Fitzpatrick’s office?”

  “Katie’s here to write about Moruadh Maguire,” Annie said before Kate could respond. “She’s staying at my place.”

  Kate stuck out her hand, which the woman took awkwardly, as though shaking hands wasn’t exactly an everyday occurrence. “Kate Neeson. Nice to meet you.”

  “She’s the girl Mr. Maguire was asking about the other day?” Brigid addressed Annie. “Doesn’t let much grass grow under his feet, that one.”

  Kate got busy pumping the tire. She didn’t want to think about the grass not growing under Niall’s feet, but Hugh Fitzpatrick’s remarks about women falling all over Niall demanded consideration. Rory McBride had also called Niall a womanizer. A possible story angle popped up like a mechanical duck in a shooting range. Moruadh Maguire’s songs about love gone wrong were prophetic. Hoping that she’d finally found true love, Moruadh made the unfortunate mistake of marrying a man who, although handsome and charming, was also a heartless womanizer. In desperation, she killed herself. Kate finished pumping the tire. Philanderer? Murderer. Both angles were almost equally unsettling.

  Under the blue-striped awning of Sullivan’s Butcher Shop, Annie and Brigid were talking in hushed voices, their heads close. Annie winked at Kate, then composed her expression as she listened to Brigid.

  “…anyway, in she walks all damp from the weather,” Brigid was saying. “Like a drowned rat, she was.”

  “Mary, you mean?”

  Brigid sighed. “You know quite well who I mean, Annie Ryan. Bold as brass she goes right up to the bar and asks for a pint.” Brigid paused, evidently to let this sink in. “And then she has another one.”

  Annie’s eyes widened. “Never.”

  “Indeed. Mary heard it herself from Maureen Gallagher. Seamus was there. Of course, isn’t he always?” Brigid lowered her voice. “Sure, could you imagine crawling into bed with a man who has the smell of whiskey on him every night?” She unbuttoned her raincoat. “Is it hot today, or just me?”

  “I’m not hot,” Annie said. “Are you hot, Katie?”

  Trying not to grin, Kate shook her head. She suspected Annie of deliberately drawing out the exchange to provide her with a little entertainment.

  “Must be you, Brigid,” Annie said.

  “Must be me then,” Brigid agreed. “Anyway, where was I? Right, so there at the bar she was drinking as though she hadn’t a care in the world. Talking to all the men and herself all tarted up like a dog’s dinner.”

  “A drowned rat.”

  “What?”

  “A drowned rat.” Annie winked at Kate. “That’s what you said. She looked like a drowned rat.”

  “Did I?”

  “You did.”

  “Ah well. Getting forgetful in my old age, aren’t we all? Now, Annie, have you heard about the terrible fight up there at the tinkers’ camp?”

  “I know the girl she was talking about,” Annie said after Brigid had mounted her bike and taken off down the road. “You’d never know from hearing all that that she’s a perfectly decent young woman, happily engaged to a fine lad and hardly touches a drop of the drink. But that’s village life for you.”

  Kate mentally rewrote the article’s lead. While village gossip branded him as a heartless womanizer who callously pushed his
young wife to her death, the real Niall Maguire is a quiet, introspective man who…

  “WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND—” Kate told Moruadh’s former roommate over lunch in Galway “—is why there’s so much hostility toward Niall Maguire. No one really seems to know him very well and they all seem convinced he pushed Moruadh. Even though the Garda ruled her death was an accident, people just can’t seem to accept it.”

  Rose Boland smiled. An actress currently starring in a Dublin play, Rose was starting to make a name for herself in New York. She wore her hair tightly pulled back and a great deal of tasteful, expensive-looking silver jewelry. It occurred to Kate that Rose would have looked quite at home in one of Santa Monica’s trendier bistros.

  “Maybe some of it is Niall’s own fault,” Rose said. “I suspect he doesn’t want anyone to get too close. He’s a beautiful man to be sure, but not an easy one to get to know. He keeps his thoughts to himself.”

  Kate thought again of the look on Niall’s face when she’d left the castle so abruptly. The disappointment at her leaving clearly there. Swept by a sudden urge to see him and apologize, she imagined excusing herself right then and driving up to the castle. Instead, she wrote “Keeps his thoughts to himself” on her notepad and looked up at Rose Boland.

  “Niall had nothing to do with Moruadh falling,” Rose said. “I’m absolutely certain of that. He’d spent half his life protecting her from harm. Why would he suddenly turn?”

  “Jealousy? A lovers’ spat?” She thought of Rory McBride’s strange story. “Maybe Moruadh became too much of a burden.”

  “That doesn’t ring true, somehow. It’s not…Niall just doesn’t have it in him to do something like that. No, he’s just getting his comeuppance,” Rose said. “That’s the way the village sees it. He’s from an old-money family. Anglo-Irish. It’s the whole bloody thing about the gentry getting rich on the backs of the peasants.”

  Kate frowned, unconvinced. “But that’s history now, surely?”

  “You’d think so, but that’s where it all comes from. They mistrust his type. It’s as if he thinks he’s above the rest of us. People resent it. They’d just as soon see Niall locked up as face up to the fact that maybe one of the local lads could be responsible, which, incidentally, I don’t believe, either. And, as I said, Niall’s attitude doesn’t help much. He can seem very cold and aloof. I’ve seen it myself.”

  Kate nodded, although she hadn’t seen those qualities herself. Yet. She made another note.

  “My God, that man’s had it rough,” Rose said. “While Moruadh was alive, she led him a merry dance and now she’s dead, she’s still causing him problems.”

  Kate caught the eye of the waiter across the room and beckoned him over. After they’d ordered, Rose flipped open a gold cigarette case and held it out.

  “No, thanks, but go ahead.” She watched Rose light up. “What did you mean just then about Moruadh leading Niall a dance?”

  Rose exhaled smoke, peered at Kate through a pale blue haze. “You’d never met Moruadh?”

  “No. Just talked to her on the phone.”

  “We shared a flat in Dublin for nearly five years.” She laughed. “A grand old time we had. Both of us just starting out. I was beginning to get small parts here and there and she was singing in clubs around town. But Moruadh’s moods were…mercurial would be a way to describe it, I suppose.”

  Kate made a note, looked up at Rose.

  “So much so that at times she’d seem almost out of control. God, I can remember trying to sleep and she’d want to talk. And talk. And talk.”

  Kate smiled, remembering their transatlantic telephone talks.

  “And she’d get all these ideas. Songs, a line of lyrics. A thought about this or that. One idea giving rise to the next. It was as though the ideas came faster than the words she could use to express them. Like shooting stars, she once said. Her voice would rise and she’d be talking a mile a minute, faster and faster, until it seemed she would fizzle out like a firework.”

  “Manic,” Kate guessed. “And then she’d crash, right?”

  “Ah God, did she.” Rose watched as the waiter set the food down, then she looked across the table at Kate. “You knew about it, then?”

  “I recognize the symptoms. I have a friend who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.” She picked at her salad. “Manic-depression is another name for it. So where did Niall come into it?”

  “When all the euphoria faded and hopelessness set in, it was him she wanted. No one else would do. I remember, once he was in America, an exhibition of some of his photos, I think it was, and this mood came on her.” She looked at Kate for a moment. “I worried that she would kill herself, she was that desperate. Anyway, he came home early to be with her.”

  “So they had a good relationship?”

  “Well, I think Moruadh needed him. And, clearly, she was very fond of him. Although she was always a bit of a user. When life was going well, she’d less time for everyone.” She smiled. “I’d call her a butterfly, just flitting around from flower to flower, never stopping long. I think she was like a lot of artists. Not really in reality. The world was an extension of her own world, it revolved around her.”

  “Did Niall love her, do you think?”

  “I think Niall was enchanted by her,” Rose was saying. “It’s a funny thing to say, but you’d have to have known Moruadh. Sure, she was lovely looking. Beautiful even without a speck of makeup. She had this fanciful way of seeing things. Mystical, really. A red sunset. The way a seashell was curved. A dog’s bark. Anything. Messages from an unseen world, she’d call them.”

  “And Niall bought into it all?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but I think something about it appealed to him. Sure, he wouldn’t be alone. Yeats himself was a big believer in that sort of thing.” She grinned at Kate. “You’re not yourself, I take it?”

  “Not exactly,” Kate said, smiling back at her. “Maybe if I could keep the cynic in check.” She looked down at her notes, then up at Rose. “So, about Moruadh’s fall from the cliffs? What happened do you think?”

  “An accident.”

  “You believe that? Despite her moods?”

  “I do. She would have turned to Niall for help before she’d kill herself. I have no doubt of that.”

  They talked for a little longer, and then Rose glanced at her watch and remembered an appointment she had. As they were leaving the Quay House, she put her hand on Kate’s arm. “Niall Maguire’s a good man,” she said. “You can quote me on that.”

  NIALL WAS DEVELOPING prints from film he’d shot in Sligo, when Kate rang. At the sound of her voice, he felt a grin spread across his face. The phone cradled between his head and shoulder, he finished rinsing the last print and hung it to dry. After she’d left so suddenly that morning, he hadn’t expected to hear from her so soon.

  “Anyway, I consulted my schedule,” she said, “and I found I have this evening free. I felt sort of bad about rushing off the way I did and I wondered if I could buy you a beer to make up for it.”

  “You don’t have anything to make up for, Kate. I understand, really.”

  “Good, because I thought I might have hurt your feelings.”

  He laughed. “Since you know nothing about me, I’d say if you had to choose between hurting my feelings or your own safety, you made the right decision.”

  “Yeah, well…listen, Niall, have you ever thought that maybe all the gossip got started because no one really knows you? I mean, talking to people, I get an image of an aloof, detached guy who lives by himself in this Gothic castle and, when he’s not taking pictures of rowboats and thatched cottages, he’s got women falling all over him—” she paused dramatically “—and he probably pushed his wife off the cliffs.”

  He laughed. “That is me, Kate. Except for the last part. Well, maybe not the bit about the women, either.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “What part of it don’t you believe?”

 
“I think there’s a lot more to Niall Maguire than he reveals to most people.”

  He hung up another print. Looked at it for a minute. A view through a windowpane into a room, empty but for a wooden chair. “Do you have a pen in your hands as you’re talking to me?”

  “Actually, I do. Want me to put it down?”

  “What I think you should do is take a walk up here.”

  “I could do that,” she said. “We could finish the tour. Give me an hour, okay?”

  “An hour it is.” He hung up the phone and grinned like an idiot.

  “YOU’RE NEVER GOING to see Niall Maguire at this hour.” Hands on her hips, Annie regarded Kate. “It’s after six, and I’ve a nice meat pie cooking and a bit of that jam roll you like with some custard for afters.”

  Kate exchanged glances with Caitlin, who sat at the kitchen table flipping through a bridal magazine, and tried not to smile. Annie made her feel like a teenager chafing against the restraints of an overprotective mother. Something she’d never personally experienced, but not altogether a bad thing. “I won’t be late, Annie,” she promised.

  Caitlin hooted. “You’re a grown woman, Kate. Stay out as late as you bloody well want to. All night, if you feel like it. I tell you, if I didn’t have Rory, I wouldn’t mind paying Mr. Maguire a little visit.”

  “Caitlin.” Annie flicked a tea towel at Caitlin’s head. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Well, it’s true, Mam. He’s a lovely man. Those eyes of his. Half the girls in the class are in love with him. Elizabeth included, which is why she made plans to meet him when she knew we were to look for dresses.”

  “That girl.” Annie shook her head. “Four days and not a word from her.”

  “Do you think maybe you should call the police?” Kate asked, trying not to speculate on Niall and Elizabeth. “I know you said she’s done this sort of thing before, but what if something’s wrong?”

  “We’d have heard,” Annie said. “Besides, I’ve had calls from people who say they’ve seen her. I’m telling you, though, I won’t put up with this again. Niall Maguire showing up on my doorstep asking after her.”