Stone Heart

by Des Ekin

  ‘Take your hand away,’ she warned icily.

  ‘I’ll even get you a council house, pet.’ The mock-leer remained and the spidery fingers were edging towards her inner-thigh.

  ‘Look! Someone’s coming out of the house,’ Tara said abruptly. Rising, she leaned on the largest and wobbliest rock on the dry-stone wall and sent it tumbling down to smash painfully on the toe of Gellick’s brightly-buffed shoe. ‘Oops, sorry,’ she said, eyes still glued to the house. ‘False alarm.’

  She noticed with satisfaction that the sharp granite stone had cut a gash in the leather toecap of what was obviously an expensive piece of footwear. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ she said, moving off.

  But Gellick’s face was a mask of black fury. ‘You did that deliberately, you culchie bitch,’ he shouted. ‘Hey! Come back here. You don’t just walk away from me like that!’

  He had grabbed her arm. Even through the thick material of her jacket, the grip hurt and was obviously meant to. Gellick wasn’t particularly well-built, but he was wiry and he had a streetfighter’s strength.

  She stood stock-still, looking him directly in the eye. ‘Let me go,’ she said quietly.

  He hesitated for a few moments, weighing her up, then slowly released her arm.

  Tara shook herself free and walked over to the blue and white boundary tape, where a heavily built man in garda uniform was helping a squad car to execute a twelve-point turn in the narrow laneway.

  ‘Steve. I need to talk to you.’

  Steve McNamara pulled off his police cap and wiped his brow. ‘That’s it, you’re clear now. Work away,’ he called out to the squad car driver, banging twice on the roof with a fist the size of a bowling ball. The driver winced and drove off.

  ‘Are you all right, Tara?’ Steve turned around to face her. ‘I was watching you out of the corner of my eye and you seemed to be having a bit of trouble with that fella. If you want, I’ll go over there and soften his cough for him.’

  ‘It’s okay, Steve. I can look after myself.’ She glanced around at Gellick, who was examining his mutilated shoe and glaring balefully at her, resentful as a poker player who’s just folded without calling his opponent’s bluff. ‘Listen, I really need to talk to you. About the murder.’

  Steve replaced his cap. ‘I can’t talk now, Tara. I’m really up to my tonsils. How about if I call round to your house tonight, after I get off duty? Things should have quietened down by then.’

  Tara bit her lip tensely. ‘Yes. I suppose that’ll be okay.’

  ‘Tara.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘You already know everything I know about this case.’

  ‘It’s not what you know, Steve,’ she said. ‘It’s what…’

  Her voice tailed off as she realised he wasn’t listening. Following his eyes, she understood why. There had been a sudden explosion of activity outside the Kennedy home. Two bulky detectives were emerging from the farmhouse, a third figure sandwiched awkwardly between them.

  Tara turned back to the sergeant. But he’d already gone.

  ‘A 29-year-old man has been arrested under Section Four of the 1984 Criminal Justice Act in relation to the murder of women’s rights campaigner Ann Kennedy…’

  It was seven-thirty, and Tara had finished for the day. Taking longer than usual to decipher her pages of shorthand notes, she had typed up the news story and sent it down the computer line to the national paper which employed her as part-time stringer.

  Then she’d turned her attention to her own Internet newspaper. The Clare Electronic News had been Tara’s own brainchild. Working with a single computer in the cramped conditions of her own bedroom, she had created a full-scale Web publication that looked and read exactly like a local newspaper, complete with ornate Victorian masthead.

  She designed a new front page, making the Kennedy murder the main story. From her library of archive photos, she selected a picture of Ann Kennedy and placed it top-centre of the page. Ann’s clear blue eyes looked out at her, almost in amusement, as Tara typed up a brief tribute to the work of this extraordinary campaigner and launched it into cyberspace. Satisfied, Tara switched off the computer, popped open a can of chilled Perrier and used the cold metal to massage her aching temples.

  A 29-year-old man has been arrested…

  For legal reasons, the man could not be identified. But everyone in County Clare would know it was Fergal Kennedy, Ann Kennedy’s elder son.

  She sat back and closed her eyes. The thirty seconds that it had taken Fergal to walk down the muddy driveway, escorted by the two grim-faced detectives, were burned on to her mind’s eye like a bare lightbulb burns into the retina. The scene played and replayed in her consciousness like a loop of film, until the sequence of frames was as familiar as the footage of the first moonwalk, or the ambush of that presidential limousine in Dallas.

  Fergal looked much the same as he’d always looked. That was the surprising thing. For some reason she’d expected a haggard, red-eyed figure with a heavy growth of stubble. But he looked so ordinary – his solid frame dressed in his usual checked workshirt and jeans, his bewildered face partly hidden by the downward flop from his mass of unruly brown hair.

  As the cameras flashed and the photographers jostled for position, Fergal had paused for a second at the gate. Then he’d spotted her face among the crowd.

  And he’d winked.

  She had anticipated an apprehensive look, an expression of anguish, maybe even a hint of tears. What she didn’t expect was that rapid flick of the eyelid, so virtually imperceptible that she was sure no one else had even noticed.

  It was a wink. Definitely a wink.

  It was a wink that said: ‘Don’t worry. I’m innocent.’

  A few seconds later, he was pushed into the garda car, and he was gone. For a while she’d watched the flashing lights disappear down the road towards Ennis and listened to the roar of the motorcycle escort. And then she’d taken a short-cut along a sheep-track through the bracken, and walked slowly home.

  Her copy filed, her job done, she looked back at those shorthand notes which had taken so long to decipher. The pages were dotted with random marks, odd little circles that had smudged the ink and soaked through the paper like raindrops.

  That was nothing extraordinary. Her notebooks had lots of pages that looked like that. It usually happened when she conducted interviews outside in the rain.

  Only today it hadn’t rained at all.

  Chapter Two

  IT HAD rained the first day she met Fergal.

  Lord, how it had rained.

  It wasn’t just the usual rainfall you get around the west coast of Ireland, the constant mizzle of shower and mist that folk describe euphemistically as ‘a soft day’. This was a lashing downpour, flogged into a frenzy by a March storm somewhere out there in the slate-grey Atlantic Ocean. It was lashing hard enough to hurt. It made you feel that the whole world was made of cascading water. Even the hard granite of the paving stones became alive with thousands of liquid explosions as the rain battered mercilessly against the stone.

  Running from her rusted, leaking old Fiat into Claremoon courthouse, Tara was soaked in seconds. Her navy woollen overcoat repelled some of the rain, but her legs were spattered with mud, and her flimsy shoes seemed to suck up the water underfoot like blotting paper.

  ‘Waterworld!’ she shouted as she burst through the door in a flurry of flying moisture.

  ‘Rain Man,’ responded Pat McEndle.

  ‘Splash.’

  ‘Singing in the Rain.’

  ‘Okay, you win.’

  Tara grinned back at Pat McEndle, the middle-aged court clerk, as they played their familiar game. Every month for the past two years she’d covered this same court in Claremoon Harbour, and every time they met they played the same game of wits and movie-buff skills.

  It had begun as a joke about the courthouse, which was actually a courthouse in name only. Claremoon District Court was held in the local cinema, a run-down fleapit that looked
grim even by the romantic glow of the silver screen at night. In the harsh light of day, it was even more shoddy and dilapidated. But it had been the only building available after the old church hall had been condemned as unsafe.

  Claremoon Harbour was so far away from anywhere else that it had its own district court session. The judge would travel all the way from Ennis and spend the morning dealing with traffic cases, agricultural infringements and minor drink-related offences while grumbling publicly about the courtroom conditions in the hope that someone in authority would one day take heed. No one ever did.

  So once a month the long-suffering judge would take his seat at a table just under the moth-eaten screen, while the solicitors and garda witnesses would crowd into the front rows of red velveteen tip-up seats. The only people who got any fun out of the arrangement were Tara and Pat McEndle, who would vie with each other to dream up the most likely feature film to suit the weather conditions.

  Tara shook out her sodden overcoat and hung it over the back of her metal chair. She shared a table with Pat, which suited her fine because she could easily get names and addresses from the charge-sheets. ‘Anyone due to be sent to Devil’s Island this morning?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Not unless they shoot the judge. We’ve just got the usual minor stuff – speeding, parking, thumping, peeing in the street and drinking after hours. Want a look?’

  ‘Thanks.’ She accepted the thick sheaf of charge-sheets and began flicking through it.

  ‘There’s one case you might be interested in,’ mused Pat. ‘Francie Mahony, up on six charges of receiving stolen goods, namely one gate.’

  ‘A gate?’

  ‘Yes. One of those big country-and-western jobs. You know – two giant cartwheels and a big pair of cow-horns and lots of brasswork, the sort of thing that self-made businessmen like to put up in front of their Dallas-style bungalows. Francie stole one of them somewhere around Kilkenny last year and he’s sold it six times since. Here we are.’ Pat pointed to the relevant summons. ‘In Carlow, Kildare, Meath, Westmeath, Galway and finally in Clare. What he’d do was, he’d offer it around the bungalows and sell it to some sucker for two hundred cash. No questions asked. Then he’d come back at three in the morning with his van and his screwdriver and steal it right back again.’

  ‘That’s a nice one. You’re sure it’s going ahead today?’

  ‘No doubt about it. Francie isn’t turning up, but we’re holding the party without him.’

  Tara took down the details and then sifted rapidly through the rest of the summonses. One name leaped out at her – Fergal Kennedy, Barnabo, due up on a charge of driving without due care and attention on the main Ennis road.

  Pat pointed to the summons sheet. ‘Know him?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Well…yes and no.’

  She’d known Fergal since childhood, but there were more than three full years between them, and at that stage he had seemed almost like a member of an older generation. When she was still climbing trees and raiding orchards, he was already learning to drive and dating the sixth-year convent girls who seemed to her to be the epitome of bored, worldly-wise sophistication.

  Even as a child, she had heard the rumours about Fergal. How those cuts and bruises that he seemed to carry like permanent tattoos were not, as he claimed, the result of schoolyard tussles or falls downstairs. How on a still night the neighbours could almost time their watches by the interval between the moment his morose, embittered father Martin Kennedy left Breadon’s pub, and the moment the first young voice would cry with sudden pain and terror from their hillside farmhouse.

  And even at that early stage, while chattering childishly behind the red brick buildings of the tiny school, Tara had encountered the most potent rumour of all – that the Kennedy farmhouse on the hill concealed some shameful secret which even the grown-ups in the village talked about only in the most guarded whispers.

  ‘That’s him over there,’ said Pat. ‘The one who looks like a character out of a Monty Python sketch. He’s a lumberjack, and he’s okay.’

  She glanced around the threadbare seats. They were rapidly filling up with defendants, witnesses, and curious spectators waiting to see the most interesting entertainment Claremoon Harbour had to offer on a wet Wednesday.

  Finally her eye settled on a tall figure at the back. He was wearing a heavy red-checked lumbershirt, open necked with a white T-shirt underneath. A brown leather jacket, spattered black with raindrops, lay across his lap.

  At first she didn’t recognise him as the spidery, underdeveloped lad who’d left Claremoon Harbour when she was barely out of her teens. The years in Canada had been good to him. He was heavier-built and his skinny face had rounded out and matured, but the green eyes remained the same – bright and alert, like those of some watchful bird of prey. They seemed to flicker around the room, eager for challenge, missing nothing.

  The unruly dark brown hair still looked as though it refused to submit to the control of brush or comb, but he now wore a neatly-trimmed moustache. It suited him, she thought casually, as she returned to her work and moved on to the next case on the list.

  ‘Poor old Fergal,’ mused Pat. ‘Just back from Canada the two months, and he’s in trouble already.’

  ‘Why? Has he been in trouble before?’

  ‘Fergal? No, he’s a good lad. Never had much of a chance, that’s all. His da, now…that was a different story. He was a regular customer of ours. In and out so often we practically had to give him a season ticket. Drunk and disorderly, the odd assault. And all down to the same old problem. John Barleycorn.’ Pat raised an imaginary bottle to his lips. ‘Sober, he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But once he’d had a jar, there was no living with him. I don’t know how Ann Kennedy put up with it all those years.’

  Tara gave a token tut-tut of concern and got back to work. She liked Pat, but she sometimes wished he wouldn’t talk so much when she was trying to take notes.

  The task of copying details from the charge-sheets had to be done quickly, before the judge finished his morning cup of tea, otherwise her job of reporting the often-chaotic courtroom proceedings would be very difficult indeed.

  ‘I could never stand a man who beats up his kids,’ Pat was saying. ‘I mean, the odd swipe at the wife is okay – only joking, Tara – but children. My God. They say that as soon as he got back from the pub every night, he’d wake up his two young lads, Fergal and Manus, and make them perform for him.’

  ‘Perform?’ That got Tara’s full attention.

  ‘Yes, perform. Recite their Catechism, do their twelve-times tables, sing a song they’d learned at school, whatever. Then, at the first slip they made, out would come the blackthorn stick from the cupboard.’ Pat shook his head. ‘It was almost as though, in his poor whiskey-fuddled mind, he was getting revenge for everything that had gone wrong in his own miserable life.’

  Tara had almost finished. ‘Well, he can’t hurt them any more, can he?’ she said distantly.

  ‘That’s true. He’s been dead, what? Five years now. And Fergal didn’t even bother coming home for his funeral.’

  Tara finally reached the end of the list. She handed the batch of summonses back to Pat with relief. ‘Yes, I remember. There was a big scandal in the village over that,’ she said. ‘Everyone expected Fergal to take over the family farm after Martin died. But he just ignored the whole business and stayed put in Canada.’

  Pat checked his watch. The judge was taking longer than usual over his morning cuppa.

  ‘Well, you can’t blame young Fergal,’ he said. ‘He hated the whole idea of becoming a farmer. As soon as he finished art college, he was out of Ireland like a shot. He had big ideas about making a name for himself as an artist in Vancouver, but from what I hear, it didn’t work out and he ended up working in the forestry service or something. Then he got fed up with that, and came home again with his tail between his legs.’

  Tara nodded. The story of Fergal’s six-year exile and his eventual
homecoming had been thoroughly discussed in a community where most emigrants never came back at all.

  ‘I heard there was another reason,’ she told Pat. ‘A more personal one.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘They say there was a woman,’ she said. ‘And when they broke up, he was so devastated that…’

  But Pat wasn’t listening. He’d sprung to his feet in deference to a small, rotund figure who was walking towards his allotted place under the silver screen and trying his best to look dignified in circumstances which he knew quite well were utterly ridiculous.

  ‘All rise,’ Pat shouted.

  Fergal’s case, like most of the others, seemed routine and almost boring until the arresting officer gave evidence. It appeared that Fergal had been driving his imported 1966 Corvette at seventy miles per hour on an open stretch of road, ignoring the fact that there was an overall speed limit of sixty, when he rounded a corner and rear-ended a vehicle that was parked by the side of the road about fifty yards past the bend.

  ‘What sort of vehicle?’ yawned the judge.

  ‘An ambulance, Judge.’

  A titter of laughter rippled through the sodden ranks of the spectators. This was more like it.

  ‘An ambulance?’

  ‘Yes, Judge. A local resident had fallen off his roof and was being removed to hospital.’

  ‘Was anyone injured in the crash?’

  ‘Only Mr Kennedy himself, Judge. He was knocked temporarily unconscious. They just lifted him out of his car and straight into the ambulance, and took the two of them to hospital together.’

  ‘Forty pounds,’ said the judge, trying to keep his face straight.

  An hour later the court ended and the disappointed spectators filed out of the cinema, once again cheated of any sex, violence or major scandals in the village.

  Tara stood up and tried to brush the dried mud from her legs. At least the rest of her navy suit seemed to have dried out. Now for a bite of lunch and on to the town commissioners’ meeting at two thirty…