by Des Ekin
There was a long silence.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘And what time did he leave?’ O’Rourke asked patiently.
‘Six. Roughly.’
‘Exactly? I really need to know, Tara.’
‘About ten to six. I remember opening the door and being surprised to see the sunshine flood in. So I looked at my watch. I’d no idea how late it was. I mean, how early.’
O’Rourke clicked his pen. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘No, I went straight to sleep after that.’
‘I mean, would you like a cup of tea. Now.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. Yes, please. White, no sugar.’
Behind her, someone left the room. The detective surveyed his notes carefully. ‘So we’re talking nearly four hours in your house.’
‘Three and a half. Roughly.’
‘Right. Three hours, and another twenty minutes or so. That’s quite a long period.’
He paused, apparently unwilling to ask the question.
‘You want to know how we passed the time,’ said Tara.
‘Yes. I’m sorry. But I have to ask these things. Did you have sex with him?’
Oh, no. Please God, don’t let this be happening. His rusted-metal voice made it sound so sordid, like some brief encounter down a back alley. She could imagine herself in a courtroom, giving evidence. The judge leaning forward. Answer the question, Miss Ross. Did you have sex-ual in-ter-course? Did you have car-nal knowledge? Did you achieve intimacy outside a state of wedlock?
It wasn’t like that. Really it wasn’t.
‘Yes,’ she said.
That night, as she looked at him she’d felt something stir within her. She knew she wanted him. Maybe it was just the effect of the wine and the candlelight and months of celibacy, but it didn’t make the longing any less powerful.
By the time she’d come back from the kitchen with the pot of espresso, Fergal had already found the Armagnac and had poured two generous measures.
‘I hope you didn’t mind,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to round off a perfect evening.’
He’d dimmed the lights and lit two candles on the mantelpiece.
She accepted the glass. ‘What a nice idea. Why not?’
He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to us.’ Before she could respond, his face became tense with concentration. ‘Hold it,’ he ordered her. ‘Don’t move a muscle.’
‘What? What’s the matter? A spider or something?’
‘No, nothing like that. Just don’t move.’
He jumped up and grabbed a pencil and an A4 pad. ‘You look so…so goddam beautiful sitting there,’ he explained. ‘At that angle. Your hair’s shining and your face is glowing in the candlelight. And those eyes! This is an artistic emergency. You’re lucky there happens to be a painter in the house. I’m going to sketch you.’
His hand moved briskly over the paper, sketching the outline and filling in the details. She smiled warmly, and only partly because she was posing. She was genuinely flattered by the compliments.
‘Okay,’ he announced after a couple of minutes of frantic sketching. ‘Finished.’
‘Let’s see.’ She stood up to examine the drawing, but, annoyingly, he closed the notepad at the last minute. ‘Oh, come on, Fergal. Let me have a look.’
‘No. It’s for the artist’s eyes only.’
She wasn’t sure whether he was serious or only teasing. He looked serious.
‘Oh, don’t be such a pain. Let me see it.’ She made a grab for the pad, but he passed it deftly from one hand to another, so that she had to lean across him to follow it.
‘I’m warning you. Don’t mess around with me,’ he said, only half-jokingly, and she didn’t know whether he was talking about the sketch or their relationship.
‘Ooh, like I’m really afraid,’ she said defiantly. She made a frantic lunge for the notepad but instead she slipped and fell across him. And then suddenly they were rolling on the carpeted floor and she was returning his frantic, hungry kisses, and his hands were inside her dress and her own hands were inside the back of his shirt, involuntarily digging her fingernails into his shoulders.
It was raw, it was rough-and-tumble, at times it was more like all-in wrestling than sex. The static sparks flew like fireworks as they tore each other’s clothes off and practically devoured each other, exorcising all the frustrations that had built up between them for the past three months.
After so many months of slow build-up, this was glorious. It was anarchy. It was lovemaking with a capital F. It was frantic, lustful, panting, floorboard-rattling, cupboard-door-banging sex, so noisy that Tara was afraid they’d wake the neighbours. And the neighbours lived three-quarters of a mile away on the other side of a granite hill.
‘Whooo,’ she said when it was over.
‘Wowee,’ he agreed.
‘Why did we wait so long?’
He rolled over and kissed her on the lips. ‘You tell me.’
After a while, they sat upright to find themselves placed at the epicentre of what looked like a minor natural disaster. They cleared up the debris, the overturned footstools and the spilled drinks. Then they poured themselves two more Armagnacs, and moved upstairs to investigate this puzzling question further in her bedroom.
After he’d left to go home, she lay back on her bed and smiled. Every single cell, every pore, in her whole body seemed to be smiling in its own biological fashion. That was how good it had been, and that was how good she had felt, but how could she explain all this to a coldly efficient policeman? A policeman whose lips were moving right now, and asking her some sort of question…
‘Pardon me?’ she said.
‘I asked, how long had you been going out together?’ O’Rourke repeated.
‘Just under three months. It began around March.’
‘How often would you go out with him?’
Tara thought for a minute. ‘I suppose about twice a week. Weekends and sometimes midweek. It was all very informal. We’d just go out for meals, or trad music sessions, or sometimes we’d go to Limerick or Galway to hear a rock band. The usual thing. We just enjoyed each other’s company, that’s all.’
O’Rourke exhaled a long plume of smoke, carefully aiming it away from her face. ‘That evening. The night of the murder. How would you describe Fergal’s demeanour? During the meal and…well, afterwards.’
‘During the meal he was very relaxed, very mellow. In fact, he was very good company. He talked about Canada, about Clare, about his mother…’ Tara stopped suddenly.
‘What about his mother?’
‘He told me he loved her very much. He knew how badly his father – how badly Martin Kennedy had treated her and he wanted to make it up to her by ensuring that she had everything she ever wanted.’ She smiled sadly. ‘It was ironic. Within a few hours he went home and found her dead.’
O’Rourke met her eyes and held them. ‘That all sounds very…’
‘Convenient? Perfectly scripted? I realise that’s how it sounds. But that’s the way it was.’ She looked out the window at the playground where the blue-overalled gardaí on search duty were sitting having a break. ‘He just chatted about this, that, everything.’
‘And you?’
‘Me too.’ The tea arrived, big brown mugs from the school staffroom. ‘Thanks. Yes, I was talking nineteen to the dozen, too.’
‘What were you talking about?’
‘I don’t know. Silly things, really. About my plans and hopes for the future.’
‘Which were?’
Tara smiled. ‘Still are. To spend my whole life in Claremoon Harbour. I have this dream. It’s a stupid dream.’ She pointed out through the window to the hillside.
O’Rourke’s eyes followed her pointing finger to the shell of an abandoned building. It was constructed of solid local stone, and the masonry around the doors and windows was painstakingly carved in the Art Nouveau style. But all the windows were broken and part of the roof had caved in.
‘It was once a Victorian spa-house,’ she explained. ‘Its garden contains a natural spring which is supposed to have health-giving properties. In the last century, people came from all over Ireland and Britain to take the waters.’
O’Rourke raised his eyebrows in a puzzled gesture.
‘That’s what we were talking about,’ she clarified. ‘I’ve always had this dream of buying that old shell, restoring it to its former beauty and perhaps even reopening it. But I could never raise as much cash as the Dutch and Belgians are prepared to pay for property around here.’ She caught herself on. Her tongue was on overdrive again. ‘It was just silly talk. Four o’clock in the morning talk.’
O’Rourke nodded. He went on to ask about her relationship with Ann and about her visits to the Kennedy home. Then he sat in silence while he prepared her final statement. It was stripped to the bare details of dates and times.
She read it and signed it.
‘You know, you had an advantage over us,’ said the detective when she’d finished. ‘You had confidential information about the time of death. It would have been very easy for you to have added half an hour or so and put Fergal completely in the clear.’
Tara, who had relaxed, sat upright. ‘What do you mean? I thought he was completely in the clear. You can’t possibly think that he left me at ten to six, drove home, killed his mother without a motive, went for a walk along the shore and then phoned the police by seven!’
O’Rourke didn’t look up. ‘It’s technically possible.’
Tara sighed with exasperation. ‘But not likely. No jury would think it likely. You know that.’
O’Rourke remained silent.
‘You know he has a brother,’ Tara said at last. ‘Manus has a history of mental instability. He is the one you should be interested in.’
‘We’re always interested in all possibilities, Tara.’
‘So why don’t you take him in for questioning?’
‘We can’t find him. He was discharged from hospital six months ago. He spent a bit of time in sheltered accommodation near the hospital and then vanished. Nobody knows where he is. It’s quite possible he doesn’t even know his mother is dead.’
Tara finished her tea. The sugar lay at the bottom of the mug in a gelatinous heap. ‘One question. When are you going to release Fergal?’
‘Well, that depends on whether that’s a question from Tara Ross, journalist, or from Tara Ross, private citizen. In the first case, no comment. In the second case, he was freed…’ He looked at his watch… ‘exactly half an hour ago. And we have no plans to re-arrest him. Not after your evidence.’
Tara checked her own watch. It was precisely two-thirty. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I’ve only just completed my statement. Yet you say he was released at two o’clock, before we’d even started.’
O’Rourke fished out a spoonful of damp sugar from the bottom of his own mug and put it in his mouth. ‘Read up on your newspaper-law, Tara. You’re supposed to know these things. Section Four permits us to hold someone for six hours, give him an uninterrupted night’s sleep between midnight and eight, and then detain him for another six hours maximum. His six hours have just elapsed.’
Tara looked at him directly. ‘Tell me the truth. You do believe he’s innocent, don’t you?’
‘Who’s asking the question?’
She smiled. ‘Tara Ross, private citizen.’
He thought for a moment. ‘I think that there are cases in which women make up alibis to protect their men,’ he said at last.
Tara felt a chill in the pit of her stomach.
‘But this isn’t one of them.’
‘Thanks. That’s a relief.’ Tara rose to leave. ‘Anyway, I’d better find Fergal and tell him that he can stop this nonsense of pretending we didn’t spend the night together.’
O’Rourke shook his head. ‘No need,’ he said, apparently engrossed in sorting through his pile of papers. ‘He’s already told me he slept with you that night. In fact, it was the very first thing he told me.’
Bastard.
It was all Tara could do to stop herself hissing the word out loud at the detective as she spun on her heel and stalked towards the door, realising that she’d fallen victim to one of the oldest tricks in the book.
‘Tara?’
She paused.
‘It’s not going to be easy. Finding your dream in Claremoon Harbour. Not after this. You know that.’
Tara ignored him and slammed the door behind her. She had walked through the corridors, out through the playground and into the village street before it suddenly dawned on her that O’Rourke had not answered her last question at all.
Chapter Seven
TARA WAS walking down a long alleyway, colder and darker than the streets of hell. She was shivering, wet and cold. She knew someone was following her, but she dared not turn around. She walked faster and the mysterious follower quickened his step as well. She ran and the pursuer broke into a run, too.
She tried to scream for help but her lungs would only produce a muffled moan. There was a doorway. She tried to hammer on it for help, but her limbs were moving as slowly as a swimmer’s through water.
Suddenly she was inside, in a room where the stifling warm air was as thick as treacle. It was suffocating her, slowly, breath by breath. An old-fashioned black phone was ringing persistently. It rang and rang and rang. She had to answer it and get help. But every movement she made took an eternity, every step towards the table left her drained and exhausted.
Her screams of frustration, howled with all the strength in her lungs, emerged as weak, stifled groans from behind a gag of cotton wool. The phone kept ringing. And ringing. And…
‘Hello.’
‘I thought you’d never answer.’
‘Fergal! Where are you? How are you?’ Tara switched on her bedside lamp. The alarm clock showed six thirty-two am.
‘Sorry to phone you so early, but I need your help to get home. That is, if they don’t put me in jail first.’
She sat upright. Two seconds later the full force of a mighty hangover struck her and she wished she were back in her nightmare. Doom, doom, doom went the steel hammers inside her head. It was as though a contractor’s wrecking ball was demolishing an empty gasometer inside her skull.
She remembered the previous night. After Ann’s removal ceremony Fergal had left Claremoon to escape the media and had spent the night with friends in Ennis. Meanwhile Tara had brought Melanie back to her cottage. Before retiring, they’d been unable to resist a small nightcap. But with Melanie in charge of the bottle, it had inevitably become a large night-cap. Never again, she groaned silently. Never, ever again.
Tara massaged her aching head. ‘Where are you phoning from?’
‘A phone box in Ennis.’
Doom, doom, doom went the wrecking ball.
‘I’m seeing a lawyer this afternoon, after the funeral. A real one this time, not the redneck hick who’s supposedly been looking after my interests so far. I can tell you, I’ll be suing. And just in case they’ve got your phone tapped…I’m not settling for less than a hundred grand, guys.’
Tara, head pounding, resisted the impulse to say: Well, if you’re going to be so bloody rich you can call yourself a taxi.
‘Anyway,’ he said, as though reading her thoughts, ‘I came away without any money for a taxi and I haven’t time to wait for the first bus. Besides, I need to talk to you. I must see you, Tara. Can you pick me up?’
‘Go for a coffee in Maguire’s,’ she instructed. Coffee. The very thought made her feel slightly better. ‘It’s a café that opens early for farmers and market workers. Read a paper. I’ll be there by a quarter to eight.’
She put down the phone and sank back exhausted on to the bed. She could have risen straight away and made it by seven, but she needed that extra forty-five minutes. God, how she needed it.
The little Fiat rocked and rolled along the potholed road from Ennis back to Claremoon Har
bour. Every metal-on-metal clunk of the shock-absorbers was another hammer-blow in Tara’s hangover-ridden head. But hangover or no hangover, she was overjoyed to be alone with Fergal again for the first time since his release. Although they’d met briefly at the removal, the watching eyes had forced them to remain distant and formal. This morning, when they’d met in Ennis, she had run up to him and flung her arms around him passionately.
‘Not now,’ he’d said, disentangling himself. ‘Not on the street.’
They had almost reached Claremoon Harbour when Tara steered the Fiat into a lay-by overlooking the town. She switched the engine off and threw herself into his arms. This time she met no resistance.
‘I think you should get out of the area for a while,’ she said after a while.
He looked astonished. ‘Why? How can you say that? I haven’t done anything wrong. And anyway, I want to stay with you, Tara.’
Tara said: ‘You saw the looks you were getting last night, Fergal. Everyone’s going to shake your hand today at the funeral and wish you the best. But after that, you’ll see the other side of this town.’
Fergal shook his head incredulously. ‘Tara. Look at me. I haven’t done anything. I’m innocent,’ he repeated.
‘I know that. You know that. But you know what it’s like. You grew up in this village. Best neighbours in the world if you’re in trouble – if your cow falls into a ditch or your boat gets wrecked. But if they sniff out a different kind of weakness, over something they disapprove of, they’ll form a queue to destroy you. They scent blood, and in a small community, that can cause a sort of collective hysteria. You know the way gulls gang up on an injured bird?’
She frowned and stared at two black-backed gulls who, coincidentally, were soaring overhead with fluid grace. She sensed his irritation. ‘This isn’t what you want to hear at a time like this,’ she said.
Fergal fell silent. ‘I was going to say that you shouldn’t be giving me all these problems just before my mother’s funeral,’ he said after a while. ‘But now I realise that only a true friend would.’ He tugged at his moustache, a sign that he was deep in thought. ‘I’m going to stay,’ he announced finally. ‘To hell with ’em all.’