by Anna Sweeney
As they headed westwards from Cork, they began talking about those concerns. ‘I haven’t paid serious attention to the news stories about ourselves or even about Oscar,’ Patrick began. ‘I was quite well aware that they were available online, but it all seemed so unreal to me while I was on another continent.’
Nessa smiled as she noticed how Patrick’s speech was tinged with a gentle kind of formality after his return from Africa. It was always the same, and in a few days, he would take on the hues and rhythms of Beara. ‘I’m not looking forward to reading my own biographical excerpts,’ he added, ‘and, in particular, the ancient history of my period in Russia.’
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to handle things better,’ said Nessa. ‘I thought I’d know how to deal with unwelcome media attention – but it all seems so different when the storm is raging around your own ears.’
‘There’s no need to apologise to me, Nessa. You’re not personally responsible for the media’s shortcomings, are you?’
‘No, of course not. But I’ve been thinking back over my own work, and wondering who I might have trampled on blithely and left in a state of torment when I’d moved on to the next story.’
Patrick’s face broke into a big smile. ‘I had the impression that one of your journalistic purposes was to torment powerful people?’
‘Yes, I know. But there’s a difference between making life difficult for the rich and powerful who are in the public eye, and harassing innocent bystanders who happen to be caught up in a major news event.’
‘You’ve always been clear about that distinction, Nessa.’
‘I may have gone on about it but it’s still really easy to get carried away by a good story. And now that I know what it feels like, I’m sure I wasn’t always sensitive enough …’
‘You’re very hard on yourself, sweetheart. I appreciate that the stories written about me in my absence have been very upsetting for you. But that hardly means that all journalists are suspect, yourself included.’
‘Once you’ve read those stories, you might have a different view, Patrick.’
‘That’s true enough. But I would still choose Ireland’s media culture any time rather than the conditions I grew up in. They were truly frightening, I promise you – people being kidnapped and put to death in total secrecy, and not a single word written or reported about them.’
‘Surely these aren’t the only two options? If we had a dictatorship in Ireland, I bet you Talbot and his hack friends would be first in the queue to pump out government propaganda. Their real motivation is having power and influence, not calling governments to account or questioning our values.’
They drove through Inishannon, crossing the Bandon river on their way to the town of the same name. Patrick’s friend, James, was on night duty at the airport and had met them there briefly to give them the keys to his house. The plan was that Patrick would stay overnight in Bandon and meet gardai at the district headquarters the following morning, before news of his arrival home became public. His car was also back at James’ house, having been returned after gardai examined it for any traces of suspicious activity.
Nessa’s intention had been to stay the night in Bandon too. Ronan was still in Dunmanus and Sal had not argued about sleeping over at a school pal’s house. But as they neared the town, Nessa suggested to Patrick that she would continue on to Beara after all. Now that she had been with him for a few hours, her mind was greatly eased, and she was also sure that he would welcome that private space he had so lacked in Malawi. What’s more, they would probably keep each other awake, on tenterhooks about his morning interview. Nessa had learned on Monday that gardai had tracked Patrick’s mobile phone signals for the day of the murder, to check whether he drove directly to Bandon after his brief meeting with Oscar, as he had claimed; but she did not know what the signals had shown.
Patrick made a token protest at her plan to drive all the way home, but gave in quickly once she agreed to stop for a cuppa at the Bandon house. ‘I’ve been going over my conversation with Oscar that day,’ he said, as they stood at the kitchen counter. ‘It was very short, probably only three or four minutes. Most of it was about Jack Talbot and his planned newspaper feature.’
‘I presume, then, that Oscar didn’t confide in you about death threats he might have got that week?’
‘You presume correctly.’ Patrick smiled warmly, and as they held each other’s eyes for a moment, Nessa felt her heart lighten with gladness. ‘What I remember most vividly,’ Patrick continued then, ‘is not what Oscar talked about, but just that he seemed to be in a very happy mood, singing to himself as he went off and certainly not fearful of death threats or anything of the sort.’
‘Was he impatient or annoyed at Jack’s pursuit of him, do you think?’
‘He started laughing about it, actually. Again, I cannot recall his exact words, but he gave me the impression that they knew each other well.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me one bit. I thought it was pretty odd that Jack didn’t phone Oscar directly about his article, and pestered us instead.’
‘Well, there was something about that. Yes, I remember now that Oscar mentioned a falling out between himself and Jack in the past. It had something to do with a woman they were both keen on. But really, I was so preoccupied that morning that I was not listening carefully to what he said.’
Nessa stared at him for a moment, trying to interpret the significance of what he had just told her.
‘I hope the gardai have checked Jack’s movements on the day of the murder,’ she said eventually. ‘To the best of my knowledge, he has never informed the great Irish public of a personal connection between himself and Oscar, least of all a juicy outbreak of jealousy over a desirable woman.’
‘Be careful not to get carried away, Nessa! As you suggested yourself a while ago, hints and rumours should not be confused with evidence.’
‘I know, I know. He’s quite unlikely to be the murderer, however attractive a theory it might be.’ Nessa tried not to sound bitter. ‘The more I think about it, the more I believe that Jack knew full well that Oscar would refuse to be profiled by him. But Jack pursued him anyway so that he could write a piece of tittle-tattle about the elusive and desirable rich bachelor who deigned to spend a short holiday among the plebs. The pair of them were getting at each other, and we got caught in the crossfire.’
SEVENTEEN
Wednesday 30 September, 11.20 p.m.
Nessa pulled in by the roadside on her way into Adrigole, halfway along Beara on the shores of Bantry Bay. She needed a few gulps of night air before the final lap home. The rising moon above the looming outline of Hungry Hill appeared very large and when she stepped out of the car, she could hear the sea’s low swishing nearby.
Her head was filled with unresolved thoughts about Oscar’s murder. Could Jack Talbot possibly be the perpetrator? Somehow, he seemed too smug, too calculating, to allow raw emotion to lead him to such an extreme – but then again, who knew what sort of person lay behind the smooth mask of his public persona? His Friday visit to Cnoc Meala may have been for the purpose she and Patrick had just discussed, but if he had strangled Oscar the previous day, could it be seen instead as part of an elaborate plan to cover his tracks?
Nessa was fairly sure, however, that he had a solid alibi, which he was rumoured to have boasted about in Derryowen Hotel. The fact that she and many others despised him did not amount to evidence against him; and keeping quiet about a personal connection with Oscar was no proof of a motive either. The degrees of connection between people in Ireland was a frequent subject of wonderment among her guests: two complete strangers on holiday in Cnoc Meala who found out that they were second cousins on their mothers’ side, or that their sisters had been in the same class in school, or that they had both been on the same plane that was delayed for six hours on a New York runway a month earlier. It was hard to believe, really, that the country had a population of millions.
One of the central pu
zzles about Oscar’s death was why it had taken place in Beara. Would a dangerous business rival from the Middle East or Russia travel all the way to a distant peninsula on an island off the northwest of Europe to eliminate him? Would a rejected lover from Tipperary, Dublin or anywhere else do so? But if the murderer was not a stranger to Beara, there had to be some connection between Oscar and somebody who was in the area that week. Caitlín was probing her extensive network of local sources to see if such a link could be found; and gardai were sure to be working on it too. Or could Fergus have slipped out from Cnoc Meala while Nessa and others were tending to Maureen’s fall, and somehow met up with his father late that evening, killed him and disposed of his body the following night?
Nessa looked up at the majestic and forbidding mountain above her, stooped against the sky. She was less than ten minutes away from the little bridge where Oscar’s body had been found. His killer drove on the Healy Pass road, and may have approached it from Adrigole, on the County Cork side, where she was now. Dominic had certainly had time to make the journey, either before or after his demented visit to Cnoc Meala. Marcus had a similar opportunity when he left the party in Castletownbere in the early hours of Saturday, claiming to Sal that he had a pressing work task to deal with.
Nessa drove up the valley to the bridge. She was bone-tired, but there was something niggling her about the place, ever since the day she had stopped there with Caitlín. After her long day of travel, another half an hour would make no difference.
The road was empty and lonely. Under the moon’s pale lustre, the great boulders on the hillsides looked wan, almost colourless, and Nessa began to imagine them as a multitude of ghosts gathering around her. She felt reluctant to leave the car when she arrived at the bridge. She had always believed that spirits were a manifestation of deeply rooted human fears and fervid imagination, but in such a bleak place, she could not easily keep her own fears in check.
She stood by the parapet wall, listening to the water gurgling below her, its sounds insistent and clamorous in the huge silence of the mountain valley. She looked up and saw the lights of a car in the distance, glittering like an animal’s eyes in the darkness. The car was coming towards her on the twisting road from the pass, where Redmond had watched herself and Caitlín throw a stone-filled bag down to the stream.
She crouched quickly behind her own car, not wanting to be caught at a crime scene for a second time, or to confront a predatory driver who might relish an encounter with a lone female. She held her breath as the car slowed on the bridge, but it drove by without stopping.
She remembered again the story Caitlín had told about coffins being carried up to Ballaghscart, or Bealach Scairt, as the Healy Pass was known in the past, returning the corpse of a childless woman to her own people. They had speculated that such a woman had not earned the status required by her community for burial with her husband. To Nessa, the story illustrated starkly how the rituals of death could dishonour rather than honour the deceased, and she realised now what had niggled her about its link with Oscar.
Whoever killed him hated him bitterly – hated him enough not only to end his life, but to dump his body in a public place, where birds and animals could feast on his carcass. His killer wanted to shame him in death, and instead of hiding his remains, had put them on display for passing strangers. It reminded Nessa of something she had read about the ancient Greeks and their belief that a soul could not rest in peace until the person’s corpse lay under a decent covering of earth. Oscar would not be left to rest in peace even after his murder.
She stood by the wall and tried to picture the murderer driving around Beara at night, preparing to dump his body – a man more likely that a woman, she thought, because Oscar’s dead weight had to be hauled onto the parapet, and indeed dragged into the boot of a car in the first place. But wherever Oscar had been strangled, hiding his body would not have been difficult in Beara. The peninsula was dotted with woodlands, ditches and isolated mountain roads where it would have lain undiscovered for weeks, or indeed forever. In that case, gardai could have believed that Oscar had left Beara with whoever he had met that Thursday lunchtime, and would have had no idea where to search for him.
But if his body was deliberately dumped in the open, and the motive for his murder was a deep personal hatred, surely it was unlikely to be the outcome of business rivalries? Or could Dominic have grown to hate Oscar so viciously over the course of four or five days? It seemed more plausible that the killer had nursed a desire for revenge over a longer period. Caitlín had told Nessa about the message sent to a radio station on the day of his funeral, and she thought again about its insinuations of rape and torture against Oscar. The message, as far as Caitlín knew, did not say whether Oscar was accused of raping a woman once or repeatedly, and what kind of torture was suggested. But anything of that kind could certainly arouse a thirst for revenge.
Nessa shivered in the night air, disappointed that her glimmer of understanding a few minutes earlier had left her with more questions than ever. Why was she digging into Oscar’s business history, if personal revenge was a likelier motive? She had encouraged Zoe in that direction, but had Zoe spurred her to do so in the first place? Should she even spend time pursuing Stella’s list of contacts, or was she being led up a garden path?
But the two sisters were not the only people who had suggested that Oscar’s entrepreneurial activities were key to his violent death. He himself had told Nessa that he was leaving Beara early because of an unexpected work problem. And she recalled somebody else referring to the pressures of his work the same day. Yes, it must have been his son Fergus, while they were on the way to or from the pharmacy in Castletownbere. Fergus mentioned a phone call his father got at lunchtime, about a business quarrel he was trying to sort out. He had added something about the call being from France, she remembered now, and that he was worried about it because of how his father dug his heels in whenever it came to a fight.
She took a last look down at the stream before getting back into her car. In the moonlight, she could see the water’s ripples at the edge of the heathery banks. Perhaps she was wrong about the reason for dumping his body in this particular spot. The killer might have searched for a more secluded place, but then panicked in case his car was noticed and later identified. And it was also possible that two people were involved, just as she and Caitlín had concluded from their hurried experiment at the bridge.
Coming up with theories was one thing, but it was quite another to figure out which theory was worthwhile. Appearances and truth did not always coincide. The moon might shine brightly in the sky, making us believe that its radiance was generated from within, instead of being a reflection of the sun’s low rays lighting up a cold and dark lump of stone.
Nessa decided to have a warm, comforting bath, to ease away the day’s weary tensions. She poured herself a generous glass of wine and carried it upstairs to her bedroom. Now that she had made it all the way home, she did not have to worry about getting up early in the morning. She threw off her sweaty clothes and took a large towel from the ensuite bathroom. She was not going to confine herself to an indoor bath – instead, she would soak in the outdoor hot tub on the flat roof of a single-storey extension built beside the guest bedrooms.
She padded across the house, pausing to take a sip of wine and to notice how quiet the house was. They had had motion sensors installed on the house lights the previous year and it was easy to make her way along the corridors. Nessa was surprised, though, that the hot tub switch beside the door leading on to the roof had its red light on, indicating that the tub was in use. Then she heard sounds from outside.
A gurgling noise and a burst of laughter, amplified when she pushed open the door softly.
She waited, clutching her wineglass tightly. Silence. Several seconds of silence, followed by a gentle murmur of voices, with a backing track of bubbling water. Words drifted across the rooftop air.
‘This was a seriously hot idea of yours, cle
ver girl!’
‘Totally! I said I’d a surprise for you, didn’t I?’
‘Mmnn …’
‘If only we had the place to ourselves regularly, it would be just …’
Silence again, and then an unmistakeable moan of pleasure. Nessa was rooted to the floor, as if her limbs had turned to stone.
Marcus and Sal, having a fine time for themselves. Clearly, her daughter had lied about the sleepover arrangement with her school friend. She was taking advantage of the upheaval in all their lives, but Nessa’s first reaction was a pang of guilt at her own behaviour. She was allowing herself to be sucked into her old journalistic zeal, convinced that she could unearth truths others would miss, while ignoring Sal’s need for quiet study routines and supervision.
‘You so have to let me spend more time in your house, Marcus.’ Sal’s tone was coaxing, even honeyed. ‘That’s if we want to be together properly …’
‘I know what you’re saying, babe, but it can’t happen, I’m afraid. It’s not as private as I’d like, see.’ Nessa took a step from the doorway to the edge of a low screening wall and saw two heads close together. The water slopped around as Marcus detached himself and sat up a little. ‘I’m getting work done on the place, I told you that already.’
‘But workmen go home at night, don’t they?’ Sal turned her head and Nessa missed the next sentence or two. She rested her back against the wall, feeling utterly exhausted. Then she heard Sal’s voice rise and become plaintive. ‘I didn’t believe Darina when she told me that you had other women down there recently, but maybe I should have listened to her. She said you had a blonde visitor last week, from Eastern Europe. And I’ve heard other rumours …’
‘Hey, what’s with the inquisition, kid? So, I’ve a business partnership with a woman who happens to favour a nice blonde hair colouring? And I sometimes have to meet with other females of the species? That’s what the working life involves, entiende?’ Marcus sounded more dismissive than angry. ‘Anyway, I don’t get why you’re paying so much attention to what Darina says. What do you think she knows about the outside world, locked up in her crummy barn with her paintbrushes and her hammers all day?’