Deadly Intent

by Anna Sweeney

  She felt weak. Her body would not obey her will. Electric shock tingled through her veins. She fell onto one knee.

  Redmond was struggling with Darina. He swung her arm upwards to grab the device from her.

  Nessa could not quite focus on what was happening. Darina seemed to turn in slow motion towards Redmond, but then everything shifted, and they became small figures in the distance, wrestling together.

  She bent her head to look at her hands. If she could concentrate on one single thing her brain might keep working. She tried to make a fist but could only manage a flabby movement. She flexed her fingers, counting them one by one.

  Her thoughts began to clear gradually. A stun gun. That was the word. The device was called a stun gun.

  Darina was firing at herself and Redmond. She could hit them even though she wasn’t standing beside them. It was something about the voltage.

  She turned her head and saw Redmond slumped by the wall of the Barn. He was holding his shoulder. Darina had stepped away from him, still holding that awful shiny thing in her hand.

  He tried to stand but his legs slid towards the wall again. He opened his mouth but said nothing. Darina pointed the stun gun at him again and Nessa saw how he was jolted by a spasm of pain.

  He was paralysed, just as she was. The paralysis seemed to last for a minute or two.

  The young artist’s eyes were cold, venomous. ‘Nobody asked you here,’ she said. ‘Nobody asked Sal to stick her nose in my business either, blabbing about myself and Fergus. It’s your own fault I had to hurt you.’

  Darina’s words hit Nessa like staccato bolts of lightning. But she felt stronger now. She had to keep Darina talking until Redmond could stand up. They could fight her together next time.

  ‘Please don’t hurt Sal,’ she heard herself say. ‘I’m begging you, just let her be. She had no idea …’

  ‘Give me the time to get away and Sal will be safe. Keep your mouths shut, that’s all you’ve to do.’

  ‘For my sake, Darina, let her out of the van.’ Nessa tried to look Darina in the eyes. ‘I know you understand what a mother and daughter’s love is. More than anyone …’

  This time, Nessa saw the two prongs of metal that appeared just as a white spark flashed in the air. A low humming sound followed the flash. It was a kind of taser, that was another word she remembered. It could inflict a form of torture when it was used to hit prisoners over and over again. People could die from it, she’d read that somewhere.

  Her eyes were losing focus again. Darina had pushed her back to the wall, before driving off in the van. She could hear the engine humming as it went out the gate. Or maybe the humming was in her ears, as if a swarm of bees was burrowing its way into her head.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Saturday 17 October, 5.20 p.m.

  A woman lay sprawled on a rough track on the hillside. She was in the shadow of an old stone wall where it was difficult to see her. Night was falling and the surrounding hills had become black shapes hunched over the fields.

  Nessa cried out at the sight – a woman on the ground, and two others standing at a distance, their heads bent together in conversation, just as she had seen them on the boreen over three weeks earlier, on the night of Maureen’s incident. For a brief hallucinatory moment, she believed that everything was alright. Darina and Sal were waiting impatiently for the filming to start, one of them pale and slight, the other tall and dark-skinned, their features accentuated in the harsh glare of headlights and the deep shadows surrounding them.

  At her cry, the two people on the boreen turned in her direction, and she realised her mistake. The smaller, paler of the two was Fergus, his hair light-coloured like Darina’s, and his arms clutched around his chest as she had done that same night. The second person was the television director, whose stance had Sal’s vivacious confidence. But as Nessa stared at them, she also took in how different they were to the image, filled with wild hope, that had leapt into her mind.

  After a short silence, three voices broke out in rapid succession.

  ‘The light is fading,’ said the director, ‘so we decided to get on with it when you hadn’t phoned us.’

  ‘There’s a change of plan,’ Redmond called out. ‘There’s no need for filming any more.’

  ‘You must help us, Fergus,’ Nessa pleaded. ‘You must talk to Darina. She has a gun. She has Sal, she’s hurt her already …’

  Other voices joined in the commotion. Zoe appeared from the shadows, and the actor playing Maureen’s part got up from her position on the ground to go into a huddle with the director and cameraman. Redmond stepped close to Fergus – even without the authority to question or arrest him, he would make damned sure that the young man could not bolt into the night.

  He had phoned Trevor and told him everything. Superintendent Devane had ordered gardai to cover the roads out of Beara, and had also asked Garda HQ for experts on hostage negotiations. Darina had to be stopped but not at the expense of Sal’s life. If necessary, the blue van would be tailed discreetly until the right people were in place. Nessa and Redmond were unsure how long it took them to leave the Barn, but they reckoned that Darina had a twenty-minute head start.

  ‘Darina will listen to you, Fergus, so please, please phone her now.’

  ‘It’s no good. She won’t listen, I know she won’t.’

  ‘But you met her yesterday evening, didn’t you? If Sal hadn’t seen you both together …?’

  Fergus, his face a ghostly white, clasped and unclasped his hands. Nessa thought distractedly that he and Darina were alike in their nervous intensity, which may have drawn them together.

  ‘It’s true, I went to see her yesterday, but she wouldn’t listen to a word. She just did … She did whatever she decided. That’s how it was all along.’

  ‘Why did you keep your mouth shut, then? Were you too spineless to tell us the truth?’ Redmond’s anger at his own failure to stop Darina leaving the Barn burst through his questions, as well as resentment at being taken in by Fergus. He remembered how sorry he had felt for him at Oscar’s funeral, picturing him as a solitary young man who had just lost a good parent.

  Fergus turned to shield his eyes from the headlights’ glare. When he began to answer at last, his voice was almost a whisper.

  ‘You’re right, I didn’t stand up to her. I didn’t stand up to my father either. Otherwise, none of this … But I was terrified my father would walk all over me in court if I tried to give evidence against him. Then Darina was so sure about the plan …’

  His words faded and silence fell again on the group surrounding him. It seemed to Nessa that the world had stopped turning, as everyone waited for him to finish properly or to speak again. The silence became so intense that even the tiniest insects must have stopped shuffling in the undergrowth.

  ‘We can’t just stand here wringing our hands,’ she cried out at last. ‘Try to phone her, Fergus, please. It has to be worth a try.’

  ‘I’m afraid … If I try that, Nessa, I think she’ll go berserk. We had a big row last night. I told her I was afraid we’d be found out soon. But she wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘So you were struggling with your conscience, is that what you want us to believe?’ said Redmond. ‘And meanwhile, everyone else wasted time with pathetic filming reconstructions, and allowed Sal Latif to walk into the lion’s den.’

  Nessa gestured her impatience. ‘We have to stop Sal being harmed, that’s what matters now. So let’s get the hell out of this cul-de-sac, in case people are trying to phone us.’ She tried to ignore the anxiety that was swallowing her up from inside. The wind was rising and in the failing light, she could see a band of low black clouds rolling in from the sea. She felt trapped, closed in by stone walls and darkness and fear.

  ‘Who else could speak to Darina, then? She must have other friends in the area.’ Redmond stayed close to Fergus as they walked out on to the Briary. He could be making excuses for Darina, pretending they had fallen out in order to gain time
for her to leave the peninsula.

  ‘What about Carl?’ said Nessa tersely. ‘He was supposed to be at the Barn today, wasn’t he?’

  ‘She mentioned him yesterday,’ Fergus replied slowly. ‘He’s driving to France with her art stuff tomorrow, or maybe even tonight. Do you think Darina would ask him—?’

  ‘I’ll tell Conor to phone Carl.’ Redmond checked his mobile, and stopped on the Briary as soon as he got a good signal. Nessa looked at her mobile too, hoping for a message from Patrick. He was in Castletownbere when she rang him from the Barn, and arranged immediately for Ronan to go to a friend’s house. He was going to ask Trevor O’Kelleher if he could join the gardai in their search for Sal.

  ‘That evening, I knew already …’ Fergus stopped alongside Nessa. ‘That Thursday evening, when I heard about Maureen, I knew the plan wouldn’t work out. I’d been sick with worry all day, even before that.’

  ‘But how did Maureen come into it? What difference did she make to your plan?’ Zoe had been walking with the television people, but now she pushed forward to face Fergus. Nessa was not surprised to notice the cameraman behind her, twisting the lens to re-focus it on them.

  ‘Maureen turned everything upside down,’ said Fergus. ‘Not just on Thursday, but the night before, on Wednesday.’

  ‘You mean the night Stella saw her going into Oscar’s room?’

  ‘Yes, she’d got it into her head that my father fancied her, and she practically threw herself at him on Wednesday night, I’m sure of it. He told me on Thursday morning that he’d had enough of her, and had decided to go home early.’

  ‘She didn’t just “get it into her head”, as you call it,’ said Zoe scornfully. ‘Oscar flirted with her for days—’

  ‘I’m not making excuses for him. I saw … I knew very well what he was like.’

  ‘You made damn sure not to tell us what you knew,’ said Redmond, putting away his phone. ‘So would you mind explaining what your masterplan was – the one that Maureen threw into disarray, as you claim?’

  ‘It was meant to happen on Saturday, two days later,’ said Fergus flatly. ‘Darina would invite him to the Barn in the morning, and ask to do his portrait. She’d already chatted to him when we went on that group visit to her studio earlier in the week.’

  ‘In other words, she was going to seduce him, was that it, and then kill him? And that’s what happened on Thursday instead?’

  ‘She hardly had to seduce him,’ said Zoe. ‘If he was true to his vilest form, he’d be fired up for action anyway.’

  ‘But one way or another,’ said Redmond, ‘by doing it on Saturday, nobody need have known that he’d met his death in Beara, because his disappearance might not have been reported for days.’

  Nessa was still clutching her phone as she tried to make sense of the exchanges. ‘So Oscar’s decision to leave on Thursday meant that Darina had to act quickly, and she talked him into coming to the Barn at lunchtime. But then all the hoo-ha about Maureen caused her a new problem that evening?’

  Fergus just nodded, looking dazed as accusations and questions were flung at him in the deepening twilight. The circle of people seemed to have closed in around him, a crescendo of voices competing from all sides.

  ‘My guess is that Darina was in a fix that Thursday night,’ said Redmond. ‘She had to get rid of Oscar’s body, but when she stumbled on Maureen, she got delayed—’

  ‘You’re right,’ Nessa broke in. ‘She’d told Sal that she was planning to go to a pub in Kenmare, so I’d say that’s when she hoped to get rid of his body. But then we called the gardai and it all got too complicated for her—’

  The television director interrupted in turn, resuming her earlier argument with the cameraman. ‘I told you Darina was up to something that evening, didn’t I? There was a gap in her timing all along. She spotted Maureen on the ground while there was still plenty of light in the sky, but there was a half hour delay before she told anyone. She was up to something on that cul-de-sac – probably on her way to hide Oscar’s phone and rucksack.’

  ‘Yes, down the far end of the boreen, maybe, but then she saw Maureen as she walked right past her.’

  ‘And her first thought was that it was Oscar who’d attacked Maureen, hours earlier.’

  Nessa stopped as dazzling headlights approached the Briary. She looked so distraught that Redmond put his hand on her shoulder, hoping she would take it as a gesture of support. A garda car pulled up and Conor jumped out, to tell them that Patrick had received a text from Sal’s phone. She seemed to have written it in a hurry, to tell them that Darina was trying to escape from Beara on a back road over the mountains, up north of the peninsula.

  ‘Patrick has just forwarded the same text to me,’ Nessa said, peering at her screen. She showed the phone to Redmond but most of the text made no sense to him: ‘sos n mtn rd bunan cmhola.’

  ‘We figure it could be an SOS,’ said Conor, ‘to say that Darina is taking a mountain road to Bunane, on the Kerry side of the road between Kenmare and Glengarriff. From there, there’s a very minor road across the county border at the Priest’s Leap and past Coomhola Mountain. That could get her past Bantry on back roads, and make it much harder for us to track her down.’

  ‘Patrick says checkpoints are already up on the main roads. He’s on his way to Glengarriff with Trevor. They think Darina must have boasted to Sal about her plans.’

  The television people made for their vehicle, with Zoe in tow. Fergus still looked dazed, in a world of his own, and Conor murmered urgently to Redmond and Nessa, making sure the young man was out of earshot.

  ‘We can’t rely on it that the text is genuine. Darina must be very careless, if she’s left Sal in possession of her phone.’

  ‘But you won’t ignore the text, surely? I thought—’

  ‘We certainly won’t, Nessa. All I’m saying is that we’ve to keep searching in this part of Beara too.’

  ‘I know where we should look,’ said Redmond grimly. ‘Carraig Álainn. Not just the houses, but Marcus’s boat too.’

  The sound of waves beating ceaselessly against the cliffs rose up to the wooden railings. Both gardai strained to hear any other sound from the small pier where Marcus’s boat was tied up. There were no lights on the boat and the evening was too dark to make out whether anyone was on board.

  Redmond felt in his pocket for the torch he had taken from his car. Going down the steps to the pier would be tricky at night. He looked across to the nearest house, which was also in darkness. Nessa was out of sight, creeping around the bushes to check whether Darina’s van or any other vehicle had been parked round the back. Conor had left the garda car outside Carraig Álainn’s gates, and the three of them walked into the holiday cluster without using a torch, to avoid alerting Darina or anyone else on the premises. A uniformed garda stayed in the car with Fergus.

  Redmond leaned over the railings as something new reached him from below. A voice, perhaps, but it was impossible to recognise if it was male or female. The swish of wind in the trees added to the soundscape and he wondered if it was just a seagull’s whine wafting on the night air.

  He turned again to see Nessa gesturing to him. He hurried over to her and she whispered that Marcus’s car was tucked in by a hedge at the side of the garage. She had stepped towards the front door of his house to see if it was open, but a security light had come on and she had had to back away quickly.

  Conor was crouched at the far corner of the railings. After a few more minutes he joined them, to say that he had seen torchlight on the boat – just a pinpoint shifting about in the cabin. Whoever was down there could return to the house at any time.

  Nessa and Redmond moved in behind the nearest bush. They heard a sound of footsteps from the top of the cliffside path. Conor stayed in the shadows closer to the porch to see who it was. Redmond had to dig his fingernails into his clenched fist in an effort to stay still. Just walking around Marcus O’Sullivan’s property made his blood curdle.

&nb
sp; They heard Conor’s voice, firm and polite, and then a smothered shout as a scuffle broke out. The porch light almost blinded Redmond when he rushed from his hiding place. He was almost on top of the two people struggling at the front door before he made out which was which. Conor was being pinned against the door by a lanky dark-haired man.

  Redmond caught the man by the shoulders and pushed him away from Conor. Those hateful mocking eyes stared back at him and he found his hands at Marcus’s throat. He wanted to kill him, to shake the life out of him in return for that glinting knife in the rear-view mirror and the burning whiskey he had been forced to swallow.

  ‘In the name of God, don’t do it!’ Conor caught Redmond’s wrists in a vice-like grip and bent them away from Marcus’s neck. He nudged the door with his foot and pushed Marcus inside. ‘Let’s find out what this fellow has to say for himself before we’ve another corpse to deal with!’

  ‘You bluebottle bastards, get the hell away from me!’ Marcus glared from one to another. ‘I’ll have you fuckers up for assault and trespass.’

  ‘Hold your curses, young man, and listen to what I said just a minute ago.’ Conor kicked the door closed behind him ‘Now, will you invite us into the kitchen like a decent citizen or I’ll arrest you for obstruction of urgent police work.’

  Marcus blocked his way, hands held out in front of him. Redmond, still trembling from the fit of rage that had overcome him, found it hard to take in what was being said.

  ‘… This isn’t a social call, Marcus.’

  ‘Get the hell away, I said, you’re the fucking lawbreakers around here.’

  ‘Listen to me, Marcus, because we haven’t a second to spare. We’re looking for your cousin, Darina O’Sullivan, and for Sal Latif. It’s a matter of life and death, and what’s more, it relates to the murder of Oscar Malden. So just tell us straight – who’s down below on your boat and what’s going on?’

  ‘Jesus, dude, is this some sick joke or what?’