St Ernan's Blues: An Inspector Starrett Mystery

by Paul Charles

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Well, it happens a lot you know.’

  ‘You’re surely not claiming that he became a priest just so that he could wear a black suit, black shirt, and clerical collar?’ Gibson said, in clear disbelief.

  ‘I was speaking in symbolic terms, not material, my dear,’ the bishop pronounced. ‘You see, it’s important to note that Father Matthew was himself an orphan and had been in various homes over his lifetime without actually benefiting from having a true home. And so, don’t you see, the priesthood and all it entails offered a spiritual home as well as a physical one.’

  Gibson reckoned that made sense.

  ‘But then people who come to us for such reasons realise there is a price to pay,’ the bishop continued, clearly feeling the need to explain himself. ‘But, don’t you see, the price to pay only affects those of us who are not here first and foremost to serve our Father in Heaven but those of us who, as I was trying to say, are attracted to the lifestyle.’

  ‘Was Father Matthew thinking of leaving the Church?’ Gibson asked.

  ‘Good heavens, no! Usually people only leave the Church when they think they have somewhere better to go.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Gibson said. ‘Did Father Matthew ever discuss this subject with you in detail?’

  ‘No, not really. It is said our Father spoke to us in parables which were Earthly stories with heavenly meanings, but Father Matthew spoke in codes; Earthly stories with oblique meanings. For instance, when he said how much he enjoyed going around to Eimear Robinson’s house for Sunday lunch, how all the family got together and there was great craic around the table, what he was really saying was how St Ernan’s was not providing him with the family support structure he thought he had bought into.’

  ‘Eimear is the…’ Gibson started.

  ‘Mrs Robinson is the housekeeper here at St Ernan’s,’ the bishop offered, concluding Gibson’s sentence for her.

  ‘And she lives?’ Garvey asked, pen primed at the ready for the answer.

  ‘Somewhere in Donegal Town, I believe,’ the bishop replied, ‘Father O’Leary would be able to furnish you with the address. She’s one of those incredible salt-of-the-earth women, and St Ernan’s is very lucky to have her.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Gibson said hesitantly, ‘and I’m really not meaning to insult anyone here but just so I have this 100 per cent clear in my mind, you’re not suggesting that Father Matthew and Mrs Robinson were having an…’

  ‘An affair?’ the bishop asked and burst into a fit of laugher, ‘why good heavens no, not at all!’ He looked like he was going to offer further explanation but then seemed to think better of it.

  ‘Okay, I just wanted to be clear,’ Gibson said. ‘So, let’s go back to your lunch. Would it be usual for a visiting Bishop to go to lunch with a curate?’

  This question seemed to achieve some kind of direct hit because the bishop immediately grew crimson. His already bulging eyes looked like they could pop out of their sockets at any second. He raised his hands in front of him and looked for a second as if he might break into prayer but instead he started to rub them together, as if trying to generate heat.

  After a moment, he appeared to regain his composure and paused further to refresh everyone’s coffee cups before saying, ‘So, you caught me unawares there and I’m sorry, but for the first time I realise how sordid this is all going to get. You’re going to go chasing for motives and suspects and in the meantime everyone is going to believe the worst of everyone involved and Father Matthew’s name and our names are going to be dragged through the mud until you come up with the real reason for his murder.’

  ‘Have you any ideas at all who would want to murder Father Matthew?’

  ‘Is it definitely murder?’ the bishop asked.

  ‘We’re treating it as suspicious until such time as the autopsy is completed,’ Gibson replied.

  The bishop rubbed the back of his neck and scrunched up his face.

  ‘Sorry, but you never answered my question: have you any idea who might have had a reason to murder Father Matthew?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know where to start to answer your question,’ the bishop replied.

  ‘Okay, well let’s explore your theory that Father Matthew was dissatisfied with the priesthood?’

  ‘We are certainly not in the habit of assassinating priests who wish to leave our ranks,’ Bishop Freeman replied.

  ‘Could there be any other reason, apart from that which we’ve discussed, why Father Matthew wished to leave the priesthood?’ Gibson asked, trying desperately hard to give the interview the kick up the backside it so badly needed.

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘For instance,’ Gibson puffed impatiently, ‘for instance, money problems, woman problems, man problems, drug problems – for instance, Father Matthew becoming aware of something he wasn’t meant to be aware of?’

  ‘What, like all the priests in St Ernan’s were running a crack house? Ban Garda, this is Donegal Town, not the Bronx, nor even Brixton for that matter,’ the bishop chastised.

  ‘Like he was being blackmailed,’ Gibson continued unperturbed, ‘or like he was blackmailing someone?’

  The bishop laughed.

  ‘Can you tell me, Bishop Freeman, what you were doing between the hours of 3:30 and 5:30 yesterday afternoon?’

  ‘Ah, the scorpion question.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Gibson said.

  ‘The sting in the tail of the interview,’ the bishop replied.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, as it happens, after the aforementioned lunch with Father Matthew, I stayed in Donegal Town, you know, I wandered around. I went to the castle to see if the roof had been returned yet–’

  ‘Sorry?’ Garvey said, looking up from his notebook for the first time in ages. If there was such a thing as an all-American man then Packie Garvey would most certainly have qualified as the all-Donegal man. He looked healthy, was in great shape and clean shaven, and had tidy dark brown bordering on black hair and reddish cheeks. But both physically and visually he was still a work in progress, when in twenty years’ time he would mature into his prime.

  ‘Oh, the wee castle we have in town doesn’t have a roof and the story goes that when a captain, a man by the name of Basil Brooke, was leaving for Fermanagh, he either destroyed the roof or took it with him, preventing others from using the castle. So we’re all still waiting – since the early 1800s – for Captain Brooke to return the roof of our wee castle. Mind you, in their defence the Brookes’ always maintained that it was the O’Donnell clan who wrecked the castle before the English moved in and granted all of Donegal, including the castle, to Brooke. It also has to be said that the captain did a wonderful job of refurbishing and remodelling the castle while planning the original layout of the town, including our famous Donegal Town square, a.k.a The Diamond. They say there is a tunnel from the castle to…’

  ‘Right,’ Gibson sighed, drawing out the word as long as good manners would permit and pretending she hadn’t heard Freeman’s previous few words, ‘all very interesting but I still need to know what you were doing between 3:30 and 5:30 p.m. yesterday please?’

  ‘Yes sorry, I knew there was a point to this somewhere,’ Freeman began. ‘So, I was wandering around Donegal Town and I got back here about…well, just shortly after Inspector Starrett arrived and all hell was breaking loose.’

  ‘Did you visit anywhere else? Did you meet anyone, bump into anyone?’

  ‘In all seriousness I did wander around the castle. For ages. I find it very spiritual there. Very uplifting. No, I didn’t collide with anyone I knew. I visited the book store up in the square.’

  ‘Did you purchase anything on your travels?’

  ‘No, not a single item,’ the bishop offered with a tone of finality.

  ‘I expect Inspector Starrett will want to talk to you presently,’ Gibson said in conclusion.

  ‘I expect he will,’ Bishop Cormac Freeman said, rising from his seat in
all his finery, ‘I expect he will.’

  * * *

  ‘Well now, the words of a bishop,’ Garvey declared, tapping his notebook before putting it away in the breast pocket of his uniform jacket, ‘I’ve never heard a man say so much without actually saying a single thing.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Garvey checked his mobile to discover five missed calls, all from Garda Francis Casey.

  He returned the calls immediately, spoke a few words, and went off in search of Inspector Starrett, who he found down in the kitchen area alone with his thoughts.

  ‘Garda Casey on the mobile, Sir – he says he’s got something good for you,’ and he switched his phone to hands-free mode.

  ‘Francis, what do you have for me?’ Starrett said, not quite exactly snapping his sergeant’s iPhone 5 but asking his question before he was in full possession of the thing, which he proceeded to hold as delicately as if it was an ice-cream slider and he was considering how to accomplish his first lick.

  ‘Okay. Fr. Gene McCafferty claimed that his previous two cathedrals had been at St John the Baptist, in Cork, in the Diocese of Cork and Ross, to be exact’ Casey started, without any preamble. ‘But Cork only has two cathedrals: a St Mary’s and a St Anne’s. What I’m saying is that there is no such cathedral as St John the Baptist in Cork, but this was a simple lie that any clergy would pick up on. So why tell it?’

  ‘To buy himself some time?’ Starrett offered.

  ‘And…’ Casey continued, not quite confirming that he agreed with his superior. ‘…and before Cork, Father McCafferty claimed he was at The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Ennis, in the Diocese of Killaloe. But Ennis only has a St Peter and a St Paul.’

  ‘So he’s clearly trying to hide his past, but why? And why not so cleverly?’ Garvey offered.

  ‘Maybe he thinks that because he’s a priest we, the Gardaí, won’t question what he tells us and he’ll cover up what he wants to cover up,’ Starrett said, looking at the mobile instrument of communication as if expecting the phone itself to formulate an answer.

  ‘Maybe it was the best he could come up with on the spur of the moment?’ Francis Casey suggested.

  ‘So should we question him next?’ Garvey asked.

  ‘And blow Francis’ great work? No, I don’t think we need to tip Father McCafferty off just yet that we’re on to him. Francis, why don’t you do a bit more digging and find out where he was really stationed for his previous two posts, and then contact both of those fine establishments and discover what it is exactly he’s trying to hide. This way, the next time we speak to Donegal’s answer to Buddy Holly, we’ll hopefully have the upper hand.’

  ‘Grand,’ Garvey and Casey said in unison.

  ‘Excellent work, Francis,’ Starrett said, as he handed the mobile back to Garvey, and after his sergeant had disconnected he asked him, ‘How many ciggies do I have left, Packie?’

  ‘Ah Starrett,’ Garvey protested, ‘I’m going to get it in the ear from both Maggie Keane and Gibson.’

  ‘Ah, they’ll never know – I haven’t had one for ages and, as you know, I do me best thinking when I’m puffing on an auld Lucifer stick.’

  Starrett was in fine form now, the investigation was up and running, things weren’t exactly falling into place but at least they were falling. He just had to make sense of all the leads, if, in fact, any were leads. But the thing he was most happy about was that the case was distracting him enough for him to have lost his preoccupation with Bishop Freeman. That had been his one fear about working on this case: the worry that Freeman might affect his ability to do his work properly. At the same time, just because he was prejudiced against the Bishop didn’t necessarily mean that the Bishop didn’t do it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Starrett next took a call, also on Garvey’s iPhone 5, from the always vivacious and occasionally flirtatious Dr Samantha Aljoe.

  ‘Good morning Starrett, how are you getting on up there?’

  ‘Down here,’ Starrett corrected, ‘we’re south of you.’

  ‘Really? Okay, if you say so,’ she continued, sounding somewhat amused. ‘How are you getting on down there?’

  ‘Slowly, but in the meantime, have you wrapped the case up for us yet?’ he replied, only half joking.

  ‘Well, funny you should say that but I do believe I have something very interesting for you.’

  ‘Goodness Sam, I'm thinking of getting one of these things permanently grafted onto my ear!’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘No, it’s that I’ve just, only a few minutes ago, taken a call, also on Packie’s mobile, which produced some interesting information as well.’

  ‘Oh right, but you’ll never guess my information.’

  Then there was nothing but electronic static on the phone. At first Starrett thought they’d lost the connection. Then he thought she was just leaving him a space to comment on her last sentence, but before he’d a chance to react she started to talk again.

  ‘Our Father Matthew McKaye was murdered all right.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘“Really?” Rather than “Bejeepers”, Starrett?’

  ‘Oh you noticed,’ Starrett began, sensing the doctor’s usual need to mix things up between the lighter things in life and the much heavier topic of her recent examinations into the cause of death of a human being. ‘It’s just that…ah…Maggie Keane’s youngest daughter, Moya, has recently been sending me up a bit about my overuse of that particular word. So I’m consciously trying to avoid it where possible.’

  ‘O-kay,’ Aljoe replied, giving nothing away. ‘Father Matthew was shot in the brain.’

  ‘Be feckin’ jeepers!’

  ‘That’s more like my old Starrett.’

  ‘But hauld your horses a bit there, Sam, when you examined the body, you found no marks and certainly no gunshot wounds?’

  ‘And that, too, is correct, except for one small hole hidden by the hairline on the back of his head, more like the neck.’

  ‘And traces of blood?’ Starrett asked.

  ‘None,’ she claimed, ‘none at all, but one of two things could have happened. Death would have been pretty immediate and so the heart would have stopped pumping blood in almost the same second. Nonetheless, even in these instances there’s usually a little trickle of blood that leaks from the wound. So if the latter was the case, then maybe our murderer knew exactly what he or she was doing and wiped the blood away in the hope of hiding the wound.’

  ‘But hang on a minute – a bullet to the brain? Surely there should have been blood all over the place?’

  ‘Oh didn’t I tell you?’ she started coyly. ‘There wasn’t a bullet.’

  ‘Sorry, this must be a bad line, Sam, I’m sure you just said that there wasn’t a bullet, but just a few seconds before that you said he’d been shot?’

  ‘Both are correct Starrett. He was shot but I didn’t find a bullet in him.’

  ‘The JFK magic bullet, which bounced all around the insides of both President Kennedy and Governor Connolly and was never located, strikes again?’

  ‘More magic than that, Inspector – we have no bullet and neither do we have an exit wound.’

  ‘But surely that really is impossible?’

  ‘I have an entry mark, I have a route of trajectory, and I have witnessed and examined all the damage caused along the way but…I do not have a bullet.’

  ‘Nor an exit wound?’

  ‘Nor an exit wound.’

  ‘Bejeepers,’ Starrett hissed involuntarily.

  He advised Samantha to keep this information under her hat but as he was doing so he realised he didn’t really need to – she was the mistress of discretion. On top of which, he’d never seen her wear a hat. He also needed to find a way of getting Bishop Freeman off St Ernan’s Island as soon as humanly possible. In honour of his history with the bishop, he just might bypass the human route.

  Chapter Sixteen

  By this point – mid-morning on the Th
ursday – and thanks to Father Robert O’Leary, Starrett and his team had been assigned three sets of rooms in St Ernan’s, from which to work. Starrett had the room between Father Edward McKenzie (the ginger haired gardener) and Father Fergus Mulligan (the priest with tidy handwriting, who had compiled the original list of priests for Starrett and also assisted Father Dugan’s trio with the massive writing project). The Ramelton Serious Crimes Unit also had access to the two rooms directly across the landing from the inspector. Starrett had advised Father O’Leary that two sets of rooms would suffice but the priest had insisted they might want the three, if only to give Ban Garda Nuala Gibson some privacy should they need to stay overnight.

  Starrett figured that with the long drive to Ramelton, and back again in the morning, it might be an idea to stay over himself. Then he remembered he’d promised to visit Major Newton Cunningham at the end of the day, to see how he was doing and also to update him on the bishop Cormac Freeman situation and the potential conflict of interest there. He also really needed to drop in on Dr Aljoe and get the full SP on the mysterious, yet absent, bullet.

  After they’d all decamped to their various suites (Gibson in the room across the landing from Starrett, and the boys between Gibson and Father Pat’s room), they then met up in the boys’ (Packie and Browne’s) room, which was going to serve as the general meeting room for the time being.

  Starrett was thinking of having a catch-up debrief but then decided against it, feeling that fact-collecting, rather than discussing, was much more important at this point. So he sent Packie and Pips (which Starrett felt had a certain Cagney and Lacey ring to it) to get on the phones with Francis Casey and assist him in his efforts to uncover just why Father Gene McCafferty had been lying about his previous appointments. Then they could interview McCafferty with better information in their arsenal.

  Romany Browne passed over to Starrett a page that he said contained the results of his boiled potatoes experiment, and the inspector offered his thanks as he folded the sheet and slipped it into the inside pocket of his blue, zip-up, hooded windbreaker. He and Gibson, he explained, would negotiate the heavy traffic while they nipped into Donegal Town to visit Mrs Eimear Robinson, the housekeeper of St Ernan’s. Father O’Leary had kindly furnished him with her address.