The children of the McDowds, whose search for such work had taken them far from the townland, returned heartbroken for their sister’s Mass. All four of them came, two with husbands, one with a wife, one on her own. The weddings which had taken place had been the last family occasions, two of them in Kilmona, the third in distant Skibbereen, the home of the girl whom the McDowds’ son had married a year ago. That wedding was on their minds at Maureen’s Mass – the long journey there had been in the Volkswagen, the night they had spent in Tierney’s Hotel, the farewells the next day. Not in the wildest horror of a nightmare could any of the McDowds have guessed the nature of the occasion destined to bring them together next.
After the funeral the family returned to the farm. The younger McDowds had known of Maureen’s and Lancy Butler’s attachment, and of their parents’ opposition to it. They had known as well of Mrs Butler’s possessive affection for her son, having grown up with stories of this maternal eccentricity, and having witnessed Lancy himself, as a child and as a boy, affected by her indulgence. ‘Oh, it can wait, Lancy, it can wait,’ she would say a dozen times an hour, referring to some necessary chore on the farm. ‘Ah, sure, we won’t bother with school today,’ she had said before that, when Lancy had complained of a difficulty he was experiencing with the seven-times table or Brother Martin’s twenty weekend spellings. The people of Drimaghleen used to wonder whether the farm or Lancy would suffer more in the end.
‘What did she see in him?’ Mrs McDowd mused sadly at the funeral meal. ‘Will anyone ever tell me what she saw in him?’
They shook their heads. The cheeks of all of them were still smeared with the tears they had shed at the service. Conversation was difficult.
‘We will never recover from it,’ the father said, with finality in his voice. It was all that could be said, it was all they knew with certainty: for as long as the older McDowds remained in this farmhouse – which would be until their own deaths – the vicious, ugly tragedy would haunt them. They knew that if Maureen had been knocked from her bicycle by a passing motor-car they could have borne her death with greater fortitude; or if she had died of an illness, or been the victim of incurable disease. The knife that turned in their pain was their memory of the Butlers’ farmyard, the barking dog running back and forth, the three still bodies. There was nothing but the waste of a life to contemplate, and the cruelty of chance – for why should it have been simple, pretty Maureen whose fate it was to become mixed up with so peculiar a couple as that mother and son? There were other girls in the neighbourhood – underhand girls and girls of doubtful character – who somehow more readily belonged with the Butlers: anyone would tell you that.
‘Why don’t you drive over and see us?’ one of the daughters invited. ‘Can’t we persuade you?’
Her father stared into the table without trying to reply. It was unnecessary to say that a drive of such a distance could only be contemplated when there was a wedding or a funeral. Such journeys had not been undertaken during Maureen’s lifetime, when she might have looked after the farm for a day; in no way could they be considered now. Mrs McDowd tried to smile, making an effort to acknowledge the concern that had inspired the suggestion, but no smile came.
Being of a nature that might interest strangers, the deaths were reported in the newspapers. They were mentioned on the radio, and on the television news. Then everything became quiet again at Drimaghleen, and in the village and in the town. People wrote letters to the McDowds, expressing their sorrow. People came to see them but did not stay long. ‘I am always there,’ Father Sallins said. ‘Kilmona 23. You have only to summon me. Or call up at the rectory.’
The McDowds didn’t. They watched the summer going by, taking in their hay during the warm spell in June, keeping an eye on the field of potatoes and the ripening barley. It began to rain more than usual; they worried about the barley.
‘Excuse me,’ a man said in the yard one afternoon in October. ‘Are you Mr McDowd?’
McDowd said he was, shouting at the dogs to behave themselves. The stranger would be a traveller in fertilizers, he said to himself, a replacement for Donoghue, who had been coming to the farm for years. Then he realized that it was the wrong time of year for Donoghue.
‘Would it be possible to have a word, Mr McDowd?’
McDowd’s scrawny features slowly puckered; slowly he frowned. He lifted a hand and scratched at his grey, ragged hair, which was a way he had when he wished to disguise bewilderment. Part of his countryman’s wiliness was that he preferred outsiders not to know, or deduce, what was occurring in his mind.
‘A word?’ he said.
‘Could we maybe step inside, sir?’
McDowd saw no reason to step inside his own house with this man. The visitor was florid-faced, untidily dressed in dark corduroy trousers and a gaberdine jacket. His hair was long and black, and grew coarsely down the sides of his face in two brushlike panels. He had a city voice; it wasn’t difficult to guess he came from Dublin.
‘What d’you want with me?’
‘I was sorry to hear that thing about your daughter, Mr McDowd. That was a terrible business.’
‘It’s over and done with.’
‘It is, sir. Over and done with.’
The red bonnet of a car edged its way into the yard. McDowd watched it, reminded of some cautious animal by the slow, creeping movement, the engine purring so lightly you could hardly hear it. When the car stopped by the milking shed nobody got out of it, but McDowd could see a figure wearing sunglasses at the wheel. This was a woman, with black hair also, smoking a cigarette.
‘It could be to your advantage, Mr McDowd.’
‘What could be? Does that car belong to you?’
‘We drove down to see you, sir. That lady’s a friend of mine, a colleague by the name of Hetty Fortune.’
The woman stepped out of the car. She was taller than the man, with a sombre face and blue trousers that matched her blue shirt. She dropped her cigarette on to the ground and carefully stubbed it out with the toe of her shoe. As slowly as she had driven the car she walked across the yard to where the two men were standing. The dogs growled at her, but she took no notice. ‘I’m Hetty Fortune,’ she said in an English accent.
‘I didn’t tell you my own name, Mr McDowd,’ the man said. ‘It’s Jeremiah Tyler.’
‘I hope Jeremiah has offered you our condolences, Mr McDowd. I hope both you and your wife will accept our deepest sympathy.’
‘What do you want here?’
‘We’ve been over at the Butlers’ place, Mr McDowd. We spent a long time there. We’ve been talking to a few people. Could we talk to you, d’you think?’
‘Are you the newspapers?’
‘In a manner of speaking. Yes, in a manner of speaking we represent the media. And I’m perfectly sure,’ the woman added hastily, ‘you’ve had more than enough of all that. I believe you’ll find what we have to say to you is different, Mr McDowd.’
‘The wife and myself have nothing to say to the newspapers. We didn’t say anything at the time, and we have nothing to say since. I have things to do about the place.’
‘Mr McDowd, would you be good enough to give us five minutes of your time? Five minutes in your kitchen, talking to yourself and your wife? Would you give us an opportunity to explain?’
Attracted by the sound by voices, Mrs McDowd came out of the house. She stood in the doorway, not quite emerging from the kitchen porch, regarding the strangers even more distrustfully than her husband had. She didn’t say anything when the woman approached her and held out a hand which she was obliged to shake.
‘We are sorry to obtrude on your grief, Mrs McDowd. Mr Tyler and I have been keen to make that clear to your husband.’
Mrs McDowd did not acknowledge this. She didn’t like the look of the sombre-faced woman or her unkempt companion. There was a seediness about him, a quality that city people seemed often to exude if they weren’t smartly attired. The woman wasn’t seedy but you could see
she was insincere from the way her mouth was. You could hear the insincerity when she spoke.
‘The full truth has not been established, Mrs McDowd. It is that we would like to discuss with you.’
‘I’ve told you no,’ McDowd said. ‘I’ve told them to go away,’ he said to his wife.
Mrs McDowd’s eyes stared at the woman’s sunglasses. She remained where she was, not quite coming into the yard. The man said:
‘Would it break the ice if I took a snap? Would you mind that, sir? If I was to take a few snaps of yourself and the wife?’
He had spoken out of turn. A shadow of anger passed over the woman’s face. The fingers of her left hand moved in an irritated wriggle. She said quickly:
‘That’s not necessary at this stage.’
‘We’ve got to get the pictures, Hetty,’ the man mumbled, hushing the words beneath his breath so that the McDowds wouldn’t hear. But they guessed the nature of his protest, for it showed in his pink face. The woman snapped something at him.
‘If you don’t leave us alone we’ll have to get the Guards,’ McDowd said. ‘You’re trespassing on this land.’
‘Is it fair on your daughter’s memory that the truth should be hidden, Mr McDowd?’
‘Another thing is, those dogs can be fierce if they want to be.’
‘It isn’t hidden,’ Mrs McDowd said. ‘We all know what happened. Detectives worked it out, but sure anyone could have told them.’
‘No, Mrs McDowd, nothing was properly worked out at all. That’s what I’m saying to you. The surface was scarcely disturbed. What seemed to be the truth wasn’t.’
McDowd told his wife to lock the door. They would drive over to Mountcroe and get a Guard to come back with them. ‘We don’t want any truck with you,’ he harshly informed their visitors. ‘If the dogs eat the limbs off you after we’ve gone don’t say it wasn’t mentioned.’
Unmoved by these threats, her voice losing none of its confidence, the woman said that what was available was something in the region of three thousand pounds. ‘For a conversation of brief duration you would naturally have to be correctly reimbursed. Already we have taken up your-working time, and of course we’re not happy about that. The photograph mentioned by Mr Tyler would naturally have the attachment of a fee. We’re talking at the end of the day of something above a round three thousand.’
Afterwards the McDowds remembered that moment. They remembered the feeling they shared, that this was no kind of trick, that the money spoken of would be honestly paid. They remembered thinking that the sum was large, that they could do with thirty pounds never mind three thousand. Rain had destroyed the barley; they missed their daughter’s help on the farm; the tragedy had aged and weakened them. If three thousand pounds could come out of it, they’d maybe think of selling up and buying a bungalow.
‘Let them in,’ McDowd said, and his wife led the way into the kitchen.
The scene of the mystery is repeated all over rural Ireland. From Cork to Cavan, from Roscommon to Rosslare you will come across small, tucked-away farms like the Butlers’ and the McDowds’. Maureen McDowd had been gentle-natured and gentle-tempered. The sins of sloth and greed had not been hers; her parents called her a perfect daughter, close to a saint. A photograph, taken when Maureen McDowd was five, showed a smiling, freckled child; another showed her in her First Communion dress; a third, taken at the wedding of her brother, was of a healthy-looking girl, her face creased up in laughter, a cup of tea in her right hand. There was a photograph of her mother and father, standing in their kitchen. Italicized beneath it was the information that it had been taken by Jeremiah Tyler. The Saint of Drimaghleen, Hetty Fortune had written, never once missed Mass in all her twenty-five years.
The story was told in fashionably faded pictures. ‘You know our Sunday supplement?’ Hetty Fortune had said in the McDowds’ kitchen, but they hadn’t: newspapers from England had never played a part in their lives. They read the Sunday Independent themselves.
The Butlers’ yard was brownly bleak in the pages of the supplement; the pump had acquired a quality not ordinarily noticed. A bicycle similar to Maureen’s had been placed on the ground, a sheepdog similar to the Butlers’ nosed about the doors of the cowshed. But the absence of the three bodies in the photographed yard, the dust still rising where the bicycle had fallen, the sniffing dog, lent the composition an eerie quality – horror conveyed without horror’s presence. ‘You used a local man?’ the supplement’s assistant editor inquired, and when informed that Jeremiah Tyler was a Dublin man he requested that a note be kept of the photographer’s particulars.
The gardai – in particular Superintendent O’Kelly – saw only what was convenient to see. Of the three bodies that lay that morning in the May sunshine they chose that of Lancy Butler to become the victim of their sluggish imagination. Mrs Butler, answering her notoriously uncontrollable jealousy, shot her son’s sweetheart rather than have him marry her. Her son, so Superintendent O’Kelly infers from no circumstantial evidence whatsoever, wrenched the shotgun out of her hands and fired on her in furious confusion. He then, within seconds, took his own life. The shotgun bore the fingerprints of all three victims: what O’Kelly has signally failed to explain is why this should be so. Why should the Butlers’ shotgun bear the fingerprints of Maureen McDowd? O’Kelly declares that ‘in the natural course of events’ Maureen McDowd would have handled the shotgun, being a frequent visitor to the farm. Frequent visitors, in our experience, do not, ‘in the natural course of events’ or otherwise, meddle with a household’s firearms. The Superintendent hedges the issue because he is himself bewildered. The shotgun was used for keeping down rabbits, he states, knowing that the shotgun’s previous deployment by the Butlers is neither here nor there. He mentions rabbits because he still can offer no reasonable explanation why Maureen McDowd should ever have handled the death weapon. The fingerprints of all three victims were blurred and ‘difficult’, and had been found on several different areas of the weapon. Take it or leave it is what the Superintendent is saying. And wearily he is saying: does it matter?
We maintain it does matter. We maintain that this extraordinary crime – following, as it does, hard on the heels of the renowned Kerry Babies mystery, and the Flynn case – has not been investigated, but callously shelved. The people of Drimaghleen will tell you everything that O’Kelly laboured over in his reports: the two accounts are identical. Everyone knows that Lancy Butler’s mother was a sharp-tongued, possessive woman. Everyone knows that Lancy was a ne’er-do-well. Everyone knows that Maureen McDowd was a deeply religious girl. Naturally it was the mother who sought to end an intrusion she could not bear. Naturally it was slow, stupid Lancy who didn’t pause to think what the consequences would be after he’d turned the gun on his mother. Naturally it was he who could think of no more imaginative way out of his dilemma than to join the two women who had dominated his life.
The scenario that neither O’Kelly nor the Butlers’ neighbours paused to consider is a vastly different one. A letter, apparently – and astonishingly – overlooked by the police, was discovered behind the drawer of a table which was once part of the furniture of Lancy Butler’s bedroom and which was sold in the general auction after the tragedy – land, farmhouse and contents having by this time become the property of Allied Irish Banks, who held the mortgage on the Butlers’ possessions. This letter, written by Maureen McDowd a week before the tragedy, reads:
Dear Lancy, Unless she stops I can’t see any chance of marrying you. I want to, Lancy, but she never can let us alone. What would it be like for me in your place, and if I didn’t come to you where would we be able to go because you know my father wouldn’t accept you here. She has ruined the chance we had, Lancy, she’ll never let go of you. I am always cycling over to face her insults and the way she has of looking at me. I think we have reached the end of it.
This being a direct admission by Maureen McDowd that the conclusion of the romance had been arrived at, why would the perceptiv
e Mrs Butler – a woman who was said to ‘know your thoughts before you knew them yourself’ – decide to kill Lancy’s girl? And the more the mental make-up of that old woman is dwelt upon the more absurd it seems that she would have destroyed everything she had by committing a wholly unnecessary murder. Mrs Butler was not the kind to act blindly, in the fury of the moment. Her jealousy and the anger that protected it smouldered cruelly within her, always present, never varying.
But Maureen McDowd – young, impetuous, bitterly deprived of the man she loved – a saint by nature and possessing a saint’s fervour, on that fatal evening made up for all the sins she had ever resisted. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – except perhaps a woman unfairly defeated. The old woman turned the screw, aware that victory was in sight. The insults and ‘the way of looking’ became more open and more arrogant; Mrs Butler wanted Maureen McDowd out, she wanted her gone for ever, never to dare to return.
It is known that Lancy Butler found two rabbits in his snares that night. It is known that he and Maureen often made the rounds of the snares when she visited him in the evenings. He would ride her bicycle to the field where they were, Maureen sitting side-saddle on the carrier at the back. Lancy had no bicycle of his own. It is our deduction that the reason the shotgun bore Maureen’s fingerprints is because they had gone on a shooting expedition as well and when they returned to the yard she was carrying both the shotgun and the snared rabbits. It is known that Maureen McDowd wept shortly before her death. In the fields, as they stalked their prey, Lancy comforted her but Maureen knew that never again would they walk here together, that never again would she come over to see him in the evening. The hatred his mother bore her, and Lancy’s weakness, had combined to destroy what most of all she wanted. Mrs Butler was standing in the yard shouting her usual abuse and Maureen shot her. The rabbits fell to the ground as she jumped off the bicycle, and her unexpectedly sudden movement caused the bicycle itself, and Lancy on it, to turn over. He called out to her when it was too late, and she realized she could never have him now. She blamed him for never once standing up to his mother, for never making it easier. If she couldn’t have this weak man whom she so passionately loved no one else would either. She shot her lover, knowing that within seconds she must take her own life too. And that, of course, she did.
The Collected Stories Page 148