‘Nothing. It’s just unusual, that’s all. There must be a story there.’
‘Maybe there is, and maybe there isn’t,’ Des said. ‘But you know what? Some stories are best left alone. Give people their privacy. Give them a chance to make a fresh start.’
Peter made a non-committal noise, looked back down at his file and tried to focus on the work in front of him. He didn’t want to be drawn into an argument.
‘You need to finish up with that thing,’ Des said. ‘It’s a dead case, stinks like a week-old fish. I want it put away by the end of the day.’ He looked towards the window. Snow had started to fall again. ‘And this afternoon I want you out on speed patrol. It’s dangerous weather. Let’s see if we can get them to slow down.’
Peter didn’t object. No one would be speeding with snow on the ground and with the temperature plummeting, and he’d be frozen solid if he stood out on the side of the road with a speed gun in hand. But he nodded anyway. He had plans of his own for the afternoon, and if Des thought he was otherwise occupied, so much the better.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
After lunch, Peter packed up and left the station. It was still freezing outside – he had to let the engine and heating run for a while to clear the windscreen. Clouds had gathered overhead and more snow was obviously on its way. It was a half-hour drive to Clifden in good weather. Today he would allow for at least an hour. He would have to crawl along, keep an eye out for black ice. Snow started to fall gently again as he passed the turn-off for Dog’s Bay. Peter checked his watch before slowing his pace again. He worried about the drive back; the snow was sticking. His conversation with Stuart Connolly would have to be short and to the point.
Peter got in to Clifden at ten minutes to two. Connolly’s office was on Market Hill, a narrow little street in the middle of the town with no views of the water. The building was obviously old but looked like it had had a recent renovation. The plaster that had covered its cut-stone facade, unlike that of the neighbouring buildings, had been sandblasted away to reveal the original sandstone and it had new windows. Peter pushed open the outer door. There was a receptionist, headphones on, fingers busy on the keyboard. She saw him and slid her headphones off one ear, tilted her head in his direction.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘I have an appointment,’ Peter said. ‘Garda Peter Fisher for Stuart Connolly.’
She pointed him in the direction of a small waiting area.
‘Garda Fisher?’ Connolly appeared in the doorway, offered his hand. He was in his thirties, dressed in navy slacks and an open-necked blue shirt. ‘Come on through.’
Peter followed Connolly into his office, took the seat that was offered to him.
‘Good to meet you,’ Connolly said. ‘You’re new to Roundstone?’ He had a slight Dublin accent.
‘I’m on a short-term reassignment from Galway,’ Peter said. ‘Helping out with a few things.’
Connolly nodded. ‘I don’t do that much criminal work,’ he said. ‘But I thought I’d met all the gardaí in the local districts. How can I help you?’
‘I was hoping to talk to you about Miles and Carl Lynch.’
Connolly raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh?’
‘Did you know them?’
‘Who, Miles and Carl?’
Peter nodded.
‘Miles was a client.’ Connolly gestured behind him to a filing cabinet full of manila folders, some of them aging. ‘I bought this practice from a solicitor who’d worked here for fifty years. Miles was one of his. I only met him a couple of times. He came in once to change his will . . . I suppose it must have been six or seven years ago. And then once, maybe a year later, to arrange a lease for some farmland adjoining his own. I didn’t see him again after that, I don’t think, and I’ve never met his nephew.’
‘I’ve been told that Carl Lynch believed that his uncle would leave the farm to him in his will.’ Peter chose his words carefully. Miles Lynch was dead. Stuart Connolly couldn’t owe him a duty of confidentiality, but some lawyers were sticky about these things, wanted to call the next of kin before they’d have a conversation.
‘That’s true,’ Connolly said. ‘That was the point of changing the will, actually. He wanted to leave the place to his nephew.’
Connolly was curious; Peter could see it in his eyes. That was good. If he was curious, he was more likely to want to keep the conversation going. ‘And he didn’t change it after that? Miles never changed his mind?’ Peter asked.
Connolly shook his head. ‘No. In fact, I’m doing the probate of that will at the moment. Miles’s second cousin lives in Yorkshire. Carl was the primary beneficiary, but as he died at the same time as Miles, everything went to this other man. I’d be happy to give you his name, but I should ask his permission first.’
It seemed Connolly’s openness had its limits.
‘That’s fine,’ Peter said. He paused. ‘I’ve been told that Miles and Carl fell out, in the last few months. That Miles had agreed to sell the farm to someone else. Not the farmhouse – he was keen to stay living in it, it seems. But the land was to go.’
Connolly’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That seems unlikely,’ he said.
‘Miles didn’t come to you? Talk to you about a sale?’
‘No. Not at all.’
‘Is there anyone else Miles might have gone to?’
‘Maybe,’ Connolly said. ‘But there’s only one other solicitor within easy driving distance and he’s all but retired. And . . . I don’t know why Miles would bother.’
‘Well—’ Peter took in the room. The decor was clean and spare, very modern. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but Miles was in his late seventies. I get the impression he was very much . . . of that generation?’
‘Whereas I’m young and groovy and could have put him off by my progressiveness?’
Peter shrugged. Connolly looked amused.
‘People around here can be slow to accept newcomers,’ Peter said.
Connolly laughed. ‘Jesus. You’re telling me.’ He held up one hand. ‘No, I get it. Believe me. My ex – who has since decamped to West Cork by the way – is Swedish. She was the one who dragged me down here. She didn’t like Dublin, wanted to get out of the rat-race to somewhere quiet, by the water. Somewhere with a close-knit community. By the time she decided that Clifden was a tad too close-knit for her, I’d already bought the practice and signed a ten-year lease for this place.’ Connolly looked about the room with a dispassionate eye. ‘Not every client was happy when the old fella sold his practice to a blow-in from Dublin, particularly as I’m the wrong side of forty for some of them.’
‘But Miles was okay with it?’ Peter found himself warming to Stuart Connolly. He was very comfortable in his own skin, was not at all defensive and seemed to welcome the conversation with Peter as an interesting diversion from an otherwise routine day.
Connolly shifted his position on his seat. ‘Look, it’s like this,’ he said. ‘This practice is mostly probate, with a bit of conveyancing and a small bit of criminal defence work. That’s it. But probate is my bread and butter. By that I mean the wills my predecessor spent fifty years building up, and the wills he bought from the man before him. The testators from the oldest wills are passing away, their wills are here, in the safe, so nine times out of ten the executors of those estates come in to see the will, then they ask me to do the legal work. The fees are good and I get to pay my bills. So the will bank is a valuable asset for me. And I want to keep it that way. One day, I’m going to want to sell this place myself, retire somewhere sunny, and the more wills I have in my safe, the better the price I’ll get.’ Connolly shrugged. ‘It sounds a bit mercenary, but that’s business. What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that I’ve had to . . . adjust, a bit, to how people do things around here.’
‘Okay,’ Peter said.
‘I get farming people in here all the time. I had a couple in just this morning. Nice people, in their sixties. Three grown-up children. They
want to get their affairs in order, make a will. Great. I ask them about their kids. They have one boy, two girls. Very proud of them all. Boy is working in London in the City. He’s some kind of maths genius, works for one of the merchant banks. One of the girls is a nurse, married and living in Dublin. The other lives in Galway, has her own business. But their instructions are very clear. They want to leave the farm – which is a good one, worth about half a million – just to the son. That’s it.’ Connolly sighed. ‘Now, that kid is never going to come back to Clifden to farm. Not a chance. And they love their girls, you can see it. But they will still leave everything they have to their boy, because they will not split up the land. Even though he will sell it six months after their death and bank the proceeds, while the girls get nothing.’
Connolly sat back in his chair, picked up his pen. ‘Now you may think, and I may think, that decision is madness, but probably more than eight out of ten couples that come in here want exactly the same thing.’
‘So, what do you do?’ Peter asked, drawn in despite himself.
Connolly shook his head. ‘I gently point out the unfairness and impracticality of what they are proposing, and then I do exactly what they want. It’s their money, their farm, and they can leave it to whomever they like. Whatever I may think about their mindset, it’s not my place to change it for them. So, you see, Miles Lynch had no reason to go elsewhere for his legal work. I wrote his will for him. And when he wanted a back-up beneficiary who wasn’t a woman, I helped him track down his next male relative, who is, by the way and just between us, the principal of a private school. Quite well-to-do. Very pleased to inherit, of course, but has already instructed me to put the farm on the market as soon as probate clears.’
‘Right,’ Peter said. He felt deflated. His original instinct in the Lynch case was to follow the money. The only thing Miles and Carl Lynch appeared to own of any value was the farm. He’d jumped on the trail of the inheritance straight away. Des had told him he was on the wrong track and he’d ignored him. Naoise O’Gorman’s comments about the deterioration in the relationship between the two men, and the cause of it, had given him fresh impetus. But it felt like he was hitting the end of the road. A private school principal in Yorkshire seemed no more likely a candidate for murder for inheritance than Naoise O’Gorman had been.
‘What’s the farm worth, do you think?’ he asked Connolly.
‘I’ve had it valued,’ Connolly said. ‘For probate purposes. Including the farmhouse, just over six hundred thousand. It has great views over the water, and there’s still a market for that kind of thing. But just the farm by itself? It’s about sixty acres, I think. Poor-quality land. About five thousand an acre, very best-case scenario. So about three hundred thousand.’
Peter was surprised. ‘That’s more than I was expecting.’
‘Back in the boom, he could have sold it for a million, maybe. With views like that, over the sea? Not that you’d ever get planning permission to build there, but people were buying speculatively, you know, for crazy money, in the hope that land would be rezoned.’
‘Right,’ Peter said. Three hundred thousand wasn’t a million, but it was a lot of money for the right person. Maybe it would be worth looking into the Yorkshire principal a bit further. Just to make sure he wasn’t a bit less well-to-do than he appeared.
Connolly looked thoughtful. ‘There were rumours, you know, that land to the west of the village was going to be rezoned for a mix of amenity and residential. That was, I don’t know . . . a year ago? Maybe less? But it was all talk. Came to nothing.’
‘Land to the west of the village – that would include the Lynch farm?’
‘Probably,’ Connolly said. ‘But as I said, it was all talk. There was no formal proposal that I ever heard of, which means no map and no boundaries. Look, it was probably someone’s hopeful notion that got people talking.’
‘But if the land was rezoned, that would make it more valuable, wouldn’t it? Maybe that’s why Miles came to you. Maybe he thought he was going to sell for big money.’
‘It’s possible,’ Connolly said. ‘But if he did, the notion would have come crashing down pretty quickly. You can’t sell for big money unless you have a buyer willing to pay it. And no one’s going to pay top dollar on the possibility of a future rezoning. That sort of madness ended with the Celtic Tiger.’
They heard voices from the waiting room, and Connolly gave Peter an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I have an appointment, more’s the pity.’
Peter stood. ‘Thanks for your time,’ he said.
‘Well, I’m sorry that I couldn’t be more help.’
‘Not at all. If you could give your client a call in Yorkshire, ask him if he’d be happy to have a chat, that would be great.’
Connolly agreed, walked him out.
‘Thanks again,’ Peter said, and he shook Connolly’s hand.
‘Jesus,’ Connolly said, turning to look out of the window. ‘Look at that weather. You’d better go if you’re going to make it back to Roundstone. If it keeps going like this, we’ll be snowed in.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Peter made it back to Roundstone in one piece, but the drive was as challenging as he’d feared. The temperature had dropped again. Snow was sticking on the surface of roads that were already frozen. The roads around Clifden had been gritted, but a kilometre out of town they were very slippery. He passed more than one car abandoned in the ditches by their drivers. It helped that the roads were very quiet, at least, so that when he did skid, and it was impossible to avoid it entirely, he had a bit of room to correct his course without careening into someone coming the other way. The hill up to Maggie’s cottage, however, proved impossible. Peter parked the car in the village and trudged up the hill on foot. Doctor Barrett’s car was parked outside when he arrived. No sign of the bicycles.
Peter knocked on the front door, and Anna answered it. She stood back to let him in.
‘Doctor Barrett’s upstairs with Maggie,’ she said. ‘Do you want to wait?’
He followed her inside. The living room was warmly welcoming – everything was clean and tidy and there was a good fire burning in the grate. It was a charming picture of a lovely family home, and he wondered if it was for his benefit or if things were always like this. The little girl – Tilly – was sitting on the floor by the coffee table, colouring. She looked up at Peter with cautious eyes.
‘Hello,’ he said. He sat down quickly, made himself a bit smaller. ‘What are you drawing?’ She seemed to be making a comic. She’d divided her page into six squares, had already filled in four of them with images and speech bubbles. He could make out a dragon and what might have been an archer but when he leaned in for a closer look she spread her hand over the pictures protectively. He would have put it down to timidity, but she was trembling slightly, in a way that went beyond the normal shyness of a young child for an adult who was a stranger.
‘Oh, sorry, it’s private, is it?’ He smiled at her, but she wouldn’t look at him.
‘Why don’t you go upstairs for a little while, Tilly?’ Anna said. ‘You can read, if you like. Finish that later.’
Tilly hesitated, then gathered up her pages and left the room, with a worried backwards glance for her mother.
‘Is she all right?’ Peter asked. ‘She seems bothered about something.’
Anna compressed her lips. ‘She’s gotten very close to Maggie since we’ve been living here. The last couple of days have upset her.’
‘Right,’ Peter said. ‘Of course.’
‘Before Maggie got sick Tilly was very happy. The school is great. She’s got good friends. Everything’s been going great.’
‘That’s good,’ Peter said. She was so obviously defensive that he wanted to know more. There was a mystery here, and he wanted to solve it.
Anna had her arms tightly folded. She looked at him, her eyes measuring. ‘You think it’s my fault, don’t you?’
‘Sorry?’
He thought about lying, brushing off her queries until he’d found out more of what had been going on here, but the look in her eye said she wouldn’t be easily put off.
‘I’ve wondered,’ he said. ‘I’m not suggesting . . . look, I’m not suggesting that you’ve been neglectful or anything like that. I’m just saying . . . well, you don’t have a carer’s qualification, do you?’ He sounded like an idiot. It wasn’t like him to stumble over his words like this, but something about her was throwing him off his stride.
Anna snorted. ‘A carer’s qualification? What’s that? You need a qualification now to feed someone? To bathe them, dress them?’
Peter said nothing for a moment. ‘Has she been eating?’
It was Anna’s turn to pause. ‘Not much,’ she said eventually. ‘And less and less, lately.’
‘Well,’ Peter said.
They fell silent. There was a noise from upstairs.
‘No school for Tilly today?’ Peter asked. He glanced out the window, where the snow was still falling.
‘Not in this weather,’ Anna said, and she was irritated again. ‘I didn’t want to risk walking her down the hill. There’s no footpath. If someone lost control of their car, we’d have nowhere to go.’
‘It’s really coming down, isn’t it?’ He’d meant to move the conversation on, not give her reason to feel more defensive. But he was curious about the little girl.
‘It’s supposed to get down to minus twelve over the weekend,’ Anna said.
‘If it keeps going like this, we’ll be snowed in,’ Peter said. ‘I couldn’t get my car up the hill.’
Anna nodded, and the conversation sputtered to a stop. She stood up abruptly.
‘I’m going to get dinner started,’ she said. She paused awkwardly for a moment. ‘The doctor should be down in a minute.’ She disappeared into the kitchen. Peter looked at the door she’d closed behind her. Something was very wrong here. They seemed, both of them, to be afraid of him. Anna’s fear was better hidden, under all that spikiness, but it was there. And it wasn’t just fear that he might push Maggie into a home and throw them out on the street. She was afraid-afraid. As if he might hurt them. It was unsettling. Maybe Anna had been a victim of domestic violence? It would make sense. Her showing up here with very little money, needing somewhere to live. And maybe he looked like her ex, or something? Or the ex could have been a garda, which would explain Tilly’s fear. God, that was an awful thought. Better to leave her alone, give her a bit of space. Peter stayed by the fire, let the heat of it ease out his tiredness and his worry. Just being there, in Maggie’s house, was such a comfort. He let his eyes wander around the room, cataloguing what made this place a home, compared with his shitty flat, which felt like subsistence. There was a blanket neatly folded over the back of the couch. There were books on the bookshelves, a few more on an end table. Tilly’s colouring pencils lay where she had left them. The decor was Maggie’s. It wasn’t necessarily what he would have chosen, but the fact was that it had been chosen, every bit of it, with the love of a place in mind, and with the desire to make that place a source of comfort and of safety.
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