Love and Leprechauns (Ballybeg, Book 3) (The Ballybeg Series)

by Zara Keane

  She flinched. His words acted like the lash of a whip, yet she knew them to be true. Fiddling with the sugar cubes, she blinked back tears. While she’d never seen eye to eye with her mother-in-law, the extent of Patricia’s hatred weighed heavily. She gave herself a mental shake and snapped to attention. This was not the time to indulge in frivolous sentiment. “You mentioned police had checked Aidan’s home and work computers. What about the laptop he kept at the summer house in Cobh?”

  Barry consulted his notes. “I have no mention of a property in Cobh.”

  “I assume police searched it. Aidan bought the house as a rental property, but over the past couple of years, he spent at least one weekend a month there. Twenty-four Sandy Lane.” The address was burned into her memory, and for all the wrong reasons. It was the place she’d first discovered Aidan in bed with another woman. It was also the setting for the first time he’d hit her. She exhaled sharply, the memories stirring up emotions she’d rather suppress. It had taken her weeks after his death to realize that in spite of their dysfunctional relationship, there was a small part of her that mourned him. Whether it was regret at all the things she hadn’t said or done to stand up for herself, she couldn’t tell.

  Barry retrieved his mobile phone from his briefcase. “One moment. I’ll call Connelly.” He tapped out a number and held the device to his ear. “Detective Inspector Connelly? Barry Brennan here.” A pause, followed by a wink at Olivia. “Yes, that Barry Brennan. I’m interested in the Gant case. Did you check the laptop that he kept at his summer house in Cobh? Hmm…okay. Thanks for the information. I’ll be in touch if I have more questions.”

  “What did he say?” Olivia asked after Barry rang off. “Another dead end?”

  “I wouldn’t discount it as that just yet. Connelly says they didn’t find a laptop at the summer house. Might be worth having a look ourselves.”

  “Are we allowed inside? I know it’s not the crime scene, but the house isn't really mine to access until probate is over. The solicitor hasn't even given me the keys yet.”

  “That probably has more to do with the murder investigation than probate. The police will want access to the house. I'm sure they have a set of keys.” Barry’s eyes twinkled. “And we have a connection at Ballybeg Garda Station.”

  “Seán Mackey.”

  “Exactly. I’ll phone him and see what can be arranged. Do you have plans for later? Or for tomorrow morning?”

  “I run a café but a friend took over my shift for today. I’ll need to work tomorrow, though.”

  “In that case, I’ll see if Mackey can meet us in Cobh in a couple of hours. I’ll text you with the details.” Barry rose to his feet. “In the meantime, I promised Susanne a quick round of golf.”

  “Thanks, Barry. I appreciate everything you’ve done.”

  “My pleasure. Jonas means a lot to Susanne, and she means the world to me.” The affection with which he regarded his wife warmed Olivia’s cynical heart. They looked at one another as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.

  Love…Not long ago, it had been an alien concept. Now it was all she could think of. It motivated her to get out of bed in the morning, to put one tired foot in front of the other. The timing was crap, but for the first time in her life, she had a shot at happiness. She’d be damned before she’d waste it.

  ***

  Detective Inspector Connolly wrapped up the afternoon round of Twenty Questions with obvious reluctance. Jonas’s solicitor, Karen McCormack, was making the most of Ireland’s spanking new law that permitted a suspect to have their solicitor present at all times during questioning. A law that—in Jonas’s opinion—brought Ireland in line with most other civilized countries.

  “He’s entitled to a dinner break,” Karen was saying to the fuming inspector, “and he’s entitled to consult with me in private.”

  “Fine,” Connelly growled. “I’ll give you ten minutes and not a second more.”

  He stomped out of the room and slammed the door.

  Karen shoved her mobile phone at Jonas. “Better make it quick.”

  Startled, he took the phone. “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” Olivia said. “I have news. I met Barry and Susanne at their hotel. We’re going to search Aidan’s holiday home in Cobh. The police haven’t found the laptop he kept there.”

  “I suppose Barry is going to want to talk to me at some point,” Jonas said gloomily.

  “Definitely. He’s not a bad guy, you know.”

  He laughed. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  She sounded amused. “You want Susanne to be unhappy?”

  “Yes. No. Hell, I don’t know.” He stared at the gray-speckled sky visible through the tiny window. “I appreciate her getting Barry to take up my case.”

  “The man has clout. No denying that. He’s also keenly intelligent. If he’s made a success of his legal career, I suspect it’s well deserved.”

  “Please tell me he has a toupee?”

  Karen snorted into her banana, then feigned deep concentration on her notes.

  Olivia chuckled. “Nope.”

  “A comb-over?”

  “Again, negative.”

  “Ah, well.” He sighed. “I can always imagine.”

  “Will a mop of bristly black Grecian 2000’d hair do?”

  “If it’s the best you have to offer, I’ll take it.”

  She blew him a kiss down the telephone. “I’ll let you know what we find. In the meantime, behave yourself and resist the temptation to strangle Connelly.”

  “I love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  BARRY WASTED NO TIME in contacting Seán. By six o’clock that evening, the four of them were assembled outside the door of Aidan’s two-story holiday home in the seaport town of Cobh, wearing hopeful expressions and latex gloves.

  Seán pulled a set of keys out of his jacket pocket and inserted one into the lock.

  “Does Connelly know you’re here?” Olivia asked.

  He grinned. “Hell, no. I’m off the clock.”

  “You really don’t like the Detective Inspector, do you?”

  Seán exchanged a furtive glance with Barry. “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re not going to tell me why?”

  “Let’s just say it has to do with a case we both worked on in Dublin.”

  “The same case that led you to meet Barry?”

  Again the shifty look. “Yes.”

  “Did this lead to your demotion?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, Olivia. I’d prefer to concentrate on the case against Jonas.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Fair enough. I’ll get the story out of you eventually.”

  Inside the cottage, Olivia gave them a brief tour. “Let’s split up. Susanne and Barry can search downstairs while Seán and I do the upstairs rooms.”

  Seán scratched his head. “The whole place has already been thoroughly searched. I don’t know what you’re expecting to find.”

  “Given its size, finding the laptop is probably a stretch, but there a couple of places you might not have thought to look.”

  The police sergeant checked his watch. “Okay. I’m back on duty at eight, so I need to leave before seven thirty.”

  “Then we’d better get a move on.”

  As predicted, the laptop was nowhere in evidence. After an hour rooting through drawers and boxes, the search party was on the verge of calling it quits.

  Olivia paced around the kitchen like a caged panther. “We can’t give up yet. Jonas is depending on us.”

  “But we’ve looked everywhere at least twice,” Susanne said, not unreasonably. “The house isn’t big.”

  “We’re not even sure the missing laptop contains relevant material,” Barry interjected, “and we haven’t found anything useful during our search.”

  Olivia pivoted on her heel and headed for the stairs. “I’m going to have one last look in Aidan’s office. It�
��s been a while since I was last in this house, but it hasn’t changed much. And yet I have a nagging feeling there’s something I’ve missed.”

  Seán followed her up the tartan-patterned stairs. “Why don’t you try a trick we were taught at police academy? Stand in the door of the office and close your eyes. Visualize the room as it was when you were last here. Take your time. Sift through each detail in turn. Then open your eyes and tell me the first thing you see.”

  “Okay,” she said dubiously. “It’s worth a shot.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and conjured an image of the office as it had been two years ago. In stark contrast to Aidan’s work office, it was crammed with furniture. Drawers stuffed with papers. Bookshelves filled with an eclectic mix of dry legal tomes and popular fiction. An upholstered chair that Aidan never used. A leather chair behind an antique wooden desk.

  She knew the answer before she opened her eyes. “The rug. The rug under the desk. That’s new.”

  Seán moved to the desk and crouched down to examine the gray woolen material. “We looked under the rug when we did the police search. I know because I helped one of Connelly’s men heave the desk, and it nearly killed our backs.”

  “Let’s look again.”

  Seán nodded, then went to the top of the stairs. “Barry? Can you give me a hand up here?”

  Barry bounded up the stairs two at a time, spritely for a man pushing sixty. Susanne followed at a more sedate pace.

  On the count of three, the men lifted the desk off the rug. Olivia darted forward and yanked the rug aside. The sight of the oak rectangles beneath was a bitter disappointment. “Nothing.”

  “Not so fast.” Seán knelt beside her and removed a slim penknife from his jeans. Gently, he inserted the blade between the wooden slats. “I helped move the desk. Connelly’s men conducted the search. I don’t recall them doing more than tapping on the flooring.”

  One of the slats came loose. Lifting it to the side, Seán shone a flashlight into the opening. “There’s a box in here. Can you get it out? Your hands are smaller than mine.”

  Olivia reached into the gap, and her fingers wrapped around a hard handle. She pulled her prize up and out. It was a green metal box with an old-fashioned padlock. “How good are you at picking locks?”

  “Bollocks to that.” Seán smashed the padlock with the butt of his penknife and flipped open the lid.

  Barry leaned over Olivia’s shoulder. “Well, well.”

  It was a British passport made out to one William Brent. Aidan’s smug face stared up at them, his arrogance immortalized by the forger’s camera. Underneath the fake passport was an equally fake driver’s license and credit card. Last but definitely not least, Seán withdrew a wad of colorful—and genuine—bank notes. “While this doesn’t exonerate Jonas, it certainly raises questions about other potential motives for Gant’s murder.”

  Olivia reached for the money. “May I?” She flipped through the banknotes, then froze. “I was right. See here? On the edge? That’s paint. I know that shade of blue. It looks like one of the paints Aidan used to touch up his gnomes. I might be stretching, but I don’t think so.”

  “And a gnome was smashed over Gant’s head.”

  They looked at one another for a long moment before Barry’s sonorous baritone broke the silence. “I’d rather like to meet these infamous garden gnomes.”

  ***

  An hour later, Seán’s police car and Barry’s Audi crunched up the gravel drive and parked in front of the Gant residence. Olivia stepped out of the police car and shivered in spite of the warm weather. Memories of her last visit loomed large.

  Susanne was staring at the gnomes, her mouth agape. “They’re hideous. I’d have nightmares if I had to live with them.”

  Olivia gave her a wry smile. “Frankly, they were less of a nightmare than their owner.”

  Barry, phone pressed to his ear, hauled himself out of the Audi and narrowly missed falling over one of Patricia’s cats. “Excellent work, Smith. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Did Smith have news?” his wife asked.

  “Indeed he did. Remember that fellow on the motorcycle who visited Gant the night he was killed?”

  They all nodded, ears pricked with curiosity.

  “One of my people sniffed him out. It was Lar Delaney.” He waggled his eyebrows in animation. “You remember him, don’t you Mackey?”

  Seán’s expression was grim. “Indeed I do. Delaney works for Ray Greer. On the surface, Greer is a respectable businessman. Underneath, he’s a crook and a swindler. We suspect he has a finger in every dirty little pie in Dublin, but we’ve never been able to make charges stick.”

  Barry shook his head. “This time won’t be the exception. Delaney says he delivered money to Gant at around eleven o’clock on the night of the murder and left ten minutes after. This ties in with the evidence from the house’s surveillance camera. He claims he was paid to deliver a package to Aidan Gant by a stranger he met in a pub. He denies all knowledge of the contents of the package and insists that Gant was alive when he left. Unfortunately for us, he was able to prove he was halfway to Dublin at the time the pathologist estimates Gant was killed. There’s CCTV footage of him at a gas station that gives a clear visual of Delaney without his helmet and the number on the bike.”

  Seán’s nostrils flared. “The stranger-in-a-pub story is total bollocks. Greer sent him with the money. But why?”

  Olivia stepped toward one of the gnomes. “Why don’t we ask this creature?” In one fluid motion, she smashed the gnome against the ground. It broke open to reveal…nothing. “Feck.”

  “Don’t give up so quickly,” Susanne said. “Let’s smash a few more before admitting defeat.”

  They struck gold with the fourth gnome. Olivia shoved her hand into the headless garden decoration and pulled out a wad of cash bound with an elastic band. “There must be around ten thousand euros here. What on earth was Aidan up to?”

  A screech drew their attention to the house. Patricia Gant wobbled down the front steps, clutching Olivia’s mother’s arm. “Is that you, Sergeant Mackey? What are you doing to my son’s gnome collection?” She stopped short at the sight of her daughter-in-law. “What is that woman doing on my property? I want her to leave at once.”

  “Calm down,” Olivia said to her former mother-in-law. The old woman was frail and had aged a decade since her son’s death. “Believe it or not, I’m here to help. Why are you here, Mum?”

  “Patricia is staying with friends in Ballybeg. Your dad drove us out to the house to get her more clothes. He’s due to collect us any minute.” Victoria paled when she registered the smashed gnomes on the ground and the cash in her daughter’s hand. “So that’s where he—” She broke off, wild-eyed.

  “Mum, do you know why Aidan was hiding large sums of cash in his gnomes?”

  “No, of course not.” She was about as convincing as an ad for antiaging products.

  “If you know something—anything—about this money, you need to tell us. I know Dad was running mysterious errands for Aidan that had nothing to do with the election campaign.”

  At the mention of her husband, Victoria snapped to attention. “Jim had nothing to do with this. Absolutely nothing. All right, I’ll tell you what I know. When the property market took a hit, Bernard Byrne and some of the other shopping center investors lost money.”

  “Including Aidan?”

  “Including Aidan. At the time, they were convinced it was a minor blip, but they were short of funds, so they accepted a loan from a Dublin property developer.”

  “Does this Dublin property developer have a name?” Seán asked dryly.

  “Jack Bowes.”

  The policeman whistled. “Jack Bowes is one of Ray Greer’s sidekicks. The loan was really from Greer?”

  Olivia’s mother nodded. “Bernard and Aidan only discovered that later.”

  “When the proverbial shite hit the fan and the shopping center development was in its death throe
s, Bernard absconded with whatever money he could lay his greedy paws on and left Aidan to deal with the fallout?”

  “Exactly. Greer’s been putting the screws on him ever since.”

  The gears shifted in Olivia’s brain. “Aidan smuggled cash out of the country for Greer. He made a few trips abroad during the last year we were together, and they were all—wait for it—to gnome exhibitions.”

  “I knew Aidan was smuggling cash,” Victoria said with a frown, “but I didn’t know he was hiding it in his gnomes.”

  Olivia let out a bark of laughter. “I figured as much. If you’d known where the cash was hidden, you’d have nicked it after Aidan died.”

  “Well, I never,” said her mother. “Do you really have such a low opinion of me?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that question? Were your recent trips to art exhibits to do with these shenanigans?”

  “Yes. I transported cash in my canvases.”

  “What was your husband’s involvement?” Seán asked. “He was employed as Aidan’s lackey, after all.”

  Her eyes darted from side to side. “Jim had nothing to do with this. It was all me.”

  Seán pinned Victoria with an accusatory stare. “Did you kill Aidan Gant?”

  “Yes.” Her voice broke on a sob. “I killed him. I—”

  She clammed up at the sight of a beat up VW van weaving its way toward them.

  Olivia’s father stuck his graying head out of the driver’s window. “What’s all this? Did you forget to invite me to the party?” When he noticed the broken gnomes, he turned chalky white. He tumbled out of the van, belatedly remembering the handbrake. “Don’t listen to a word she says, Mackey. It was me. I killed Aidan. Victoria is innocent.”

  “No, you fool,” his wife said through gritted teeth, “I killed him and you’re innocent.”

  Husband and wife stared at one another for a beat, comprehension dawning.

  “You didn’t kill Aidan?” Victoria whispered.

  “You didn’t kill him?” Jim scratched behind an ear. “Well if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, who was it?

  “Oh for God’s sake, would the pair of you ever shut up,” screamed Patricia. “It was me!”