PJ hesitated. He mustn’t give anything away. Jesus, if it ever got out what had happened, he’d be finished.
‘Well, there’s a lot of bad blood between them, that’s for sure. Evelyn Ross thinks Brid Riordan killed him, but I’d doubt that very much. If anything, I’d say Brid has managed to move on with her life. It’s still very raw, like shockingly raw, for Evelyn Ross. Would I think either of them could murder someone? I’d say no, but then God knows who those women were twenty-five years ago.’
‘Any contact with Burke over the years?’
‘No. Just the same story about him getting on the bus to Cork.’
‘And have we anyone who actually saw that happen?’
‘Not yet, but I was thinking of going down to the pubs tonight and asking around. You know how a drop taken can help.’
Linus raised his eyebrows in mild surprise.
‘Good man. Yes, do that and call me if you get anything.’
As PJ nodded, it struck him that this conversation hadn’t been as hellish as he’d been expecting. He had to concede the prick was fairly good at his job, and for the first time in days, he felt like they might actually solve this case.
‘Now, a bit of homework, and I’m happy to help. I want to go through the files and see if any of our key players – the Ross sisters, the Riordan woman or Burke – have had any other run-ins with the law.’
PJ beamed. ‘I’ve done it!’
The detective smiled back. ‘And?’
‘Nothing. The eldest Ross girl has a few points on her licence for speeding, Brid Riordan has a DUI, and Tommy Burke complained about some farm diesel being stolen but no one was ever charged. That’s it.’
‘Well, I’ve got to hand it to you, Sergeant, I’m impressed.’
PJ hated how pleased he was to hear those words out of the prick’s mouth.
‘Turns out it’s all fucking useless, but I’m impressed.’
He got up from the table.
‘I’ll head away. Let you get on with your breakfast.’ A wide and knowing smile spread across his face.
PJ felt himself turning a deep red, but kept silent.
After two fried eggs, a bit of black pudding, two rashers and a sausage, the sergeant was contemplating heading back to bed for a short nap. He hadn’t got much sleep the night before and knew it might be a late one if he was heading down to the pubs later. He was just putting his plate in the sink when there was a knock on the front door. Odd. He hadn’t heard a car.
He opened the door and was confronted by a smiling Evelyn Ross. Her cheeks were flushed pink after her walk and she was carrying a basket.
‘Sergeant!’
‘Evelyn. How can I … What can I … Is everything all right?’
PJ felt as if a naked Brid Riordan was at that very moment spread-eagled on his duvet in his bedroom. This was ridiculous.
Evelyn held out her basket.
‘I was baking some loaves this morning and I made a couple extra. I just wanted to thank you for your kindness yesterday. I was being a bit foolish and it was good of you to indulge me.’ Their eyes met. ‘Oh, and from what Abigail told me, I gather she was less than friendly when you called back. Sorry about that.’
‘She was just being a big sister, don’t worry about it.’
‘What did you want me for, by the way?’
For a second PJ couldn’t remember, and then it came back to him. He blurted out, ‘Brid Riordan.’ Just saying her name aloud and he felt like he’d made a sex tape that had gone viral.
‘I just wanted to let you know that I still haven’t interviewed her properly. I mean, it will happen, but I’m not sure when. Please know I was taking what you told me seriously.’ They exchanged a quick smile.
‘Will you come in?’ PJ took a step back from the door.
‘No. No, I’d better get back.’ She turned to leave and then as an afterthought said, ‘My sisters and I are going to the music by candlelight event up in the chapel on Tuesday night. If you wanted to come with us, you’d be more than welcome.’ She spoke quickly but without blushing. She even managed to catch PJ’s eye once or twice.
The sergeant was at a loss. Was she asking him out on a date? Had the sisters taken pity on him and decided to include him in their night out? He searched Evelyn’s face for clues, but her passive expression gave nothing away. He decided he needed more time.
‘That sounds lovely, though I’ll have to check with the bigwigs in Cork to see if they’ll be needing me. Can I let you know?’ He was pleased with himself. He had sounded calm and unflustered.
‘Of course. Well, fingers crossed.’ She stepped down from the porch and raised a hand in farewell. ‘Goodbye … Oh, the bread!’ She laughed. ‘I’m a fool!’ She held out the two loaves and PJ took them.
‘Still warm,’ he remarked, cupping a loaf in each hand. Jesus, he thought to himself, had that sounded a bit sexual? Evelyn was still smiling, so he assumed she hadn’t thought so. ‘Thank you very much. They’ll be grand.’
‘Not at all,’ replied Evelyn, walking back towards the road. ‘Let us know about Tuesday,’ she called over her shoulder.
‘Will do!’ PJ called back.
After he shut the front door, he looked down at the crusty loaves. Was it possible that he, PJ Collins, at the age of fifty-three and for the first time in his life, had not one, but two women who were interested in him? He gently squeezed the bread. Still warm.
13
The chapel was not a pretty building. It stood squat and square on the brow of a hill. There was no spire reaching towards God, just a raised enclosure on the westerly gable end that housed a bell. Grey stone walls led to a grey slate roof, which in turn, on this morning, led to great high banks of heavy grey clouds that promised rain before too long. A ridge of overgrown leylandii trees separated the priest’s house from the graveyard, and on the other side of the chapel was a lone monkey puzzle tree. The only splash of colour was the vibrant yellow of the small mechanical digger working in the cemetery.
The priest was standing to one side along with Linus Dunne and a man and a woman from the technical bureau, fully suited in their white overalls. PJ had stationed himself at the top of the steps to prevent anyone from the village getting too close, or any of the journalists who had been asking questions outside O’Driscoll’s showing up with a photographer. As it turned out, nobody had any appetite to come and watch the Burkes being returned to the light of day. Susan Hickey had slowed to a near stop when she had driven by earlier, but even she didn’t want a closer look.
An abrupt silence prompted PJ to look over towards the grave. The engine of the excavator had been turned off and the small group of bystanders had huddled closer to the mound of earth. PJ didn’t want to abandon his post, yet he felt he should be closer to the action than this. Dunne had begun to treat him like a colleague, and he was keen to be at the heart of this investigation. He shuffled a few feet forward but his view wasn’t much improved. Were the technical team in the grave? He glanced behind him to check no one was coming up the steps and took a few more paces forward. This was better. He could see the woman in her white overalls kneeling down fiddling with something. It must be the lid of the coffin. No, that would be gone. Was she just tugging at a bit of bone? Was the wife nearer the surface or were they side by side? His face crumpled into an involuntary grimace at the thought of it all and he turned back to his post.
What was that? Something had moved. He thought he had caught a glimpse of colour – had it been green? – at the far corner of the chapel. He hesitated. His eyes could have been deceiving him, but no, he had seen something, something green, and it had moved. PJ did his version of a run that was really more of a low fast stride towards the end of the chapel wall. As he came to the corner, he caught another glimpse of the green coat as it disappeared past the leylandii down the path that led to the priest’s house. He also saw the grey hair and the red-and-white-striped shopping bag. There was no doubt in his mind. The figure in the gree
n coat scuttling away was his own Mrs Meany.
In her heart she knew the sergeant had seen her. She made her way as quickly as she could down the path, shoulders hunched and head bowed forward, willing herself to become invisible. Of course she shouldn’t have come. It had been a stupid idea, but when the sergeant had told her what was happening, she felt so sorry for … well, Mrs Burke really, but they had both been good to her in their own way. Maybe he wouldn’t say anything to her. Oh but he would. She had to come up with some story. Parish business? She had been looking for the priest. That would put him off. The sergeant was always terrified she was going to try and get him involved in something.
Looking down, Mrs Meany saw the hardened soil of the path with its thin carpet of dead pine needles and moss. She wanted to run but her feet picked their way carefully, afraid of a fall. When she got beyond the trees, she paused to catch her breath and thought of the girl who had dashed up and down this path forty years before. That was when she had been the priest’s housekeeper, after the Burkes had given her a second chance at life. How was it that all these years later here she was again, still frightened, still hiding? She looked at girls now and was amazed at all the choices they had. They could go anywhere and do anything. Sometimes she was eaten away by jealousy, but on other days as she watched them with their long hair and short skirts laughing and pushing each other as they waited for the school buses in Ballytorne, she wondered if even now her younger self would have had the courage to step away from Duneen.
There had never been a Mr Meany. After Father Mulcahy had left, the new priest had been an elderly Jesuit called Father Carter. One afternoon the young girl had been scrubbing the tiled floor behind the stairs when she heard the bell ring, summoning her. She stood up quickly, drying her red hands on her apron. When she knocked on the door of the priest’s study, a voice that sounded like it was deep inside a velvet-lined box had intoned, ‘Come in.’ Father Carter was seated behind his desk, the lamplight reflected in his small round glasses. It had always felt like night in that room. She approached the desk, and since the priest didn’t invite her to sit down, she simply stood before him with her hands behind her back.
After a bit of throat-clearing, Father Carter slowly explained that he had been thinking. He felt it was inappropriate to have such a young unmarried girl working in the house, so in the future she would be referred to as Mrs Meany. She had bowed her head in acquiescence and made her way back to the kitchen, but in her mind she had been incredulous. Sure, everyone knew she wasn’t married. What was the point of calling herself Mrs? But such was the power of suggestion and the implied papal seal of approval that after a few months there were no more raised eyebrows or questions. She had become the wife of a mysterious Mr Meany, and then, as the years passed by, his widow, but the important fact was that she had been a married woman. Sometimes even she herself forgot that she wasn’t single out of a sense of duty to her dead husband. She had learnt to embrace the fiction, not wishing to dwell on the truth that she had always been alone.
Creeping down the side of the priest’s house, Mrs Meany checked her hair and coat before stepping out into the road to continue her walk into the village.
The chapel fared slightly better by night, largely because you could see less of it. In the early nineties there had been a great fundraising effort led by Susan Hickey to provide floodlighting. Initially the effect was a little strong and gave the impression to the unfamiliar nocturnal visitor that Duneen was now the home of a nuclear reactor, but twenty years later, lack of maintenance meant there was just an uneven orange glow that highlighted random parts of the building.
A large group of shadows gathered by the door, twenty people or more talking quietly in the darkness, their breath riding on the light that was spilling from the wide stone porch. Evelyn Ross was making her way carefully up the steps, flanked by her two sisters. This was a rare outing for the three of them, and rarer still given that it was Evelyn who had suggested that they attend the music by candlelight event. Neither Florence nor Abigail had been keen when Evelyn produced the thin pamphlet printed on mint-green paper with its wispy illustration of a burning candle set below a few notes of music, but they both in their different ways felt a certain guilt about their sister, so here they were.
The three women were about halfway up the steps when they heard a strange wheezing behind them. Florence looked over her shoulder and called out, ‘Sergeant Collins!’
Evelyn chimed in with ‘You found us!’ and Abigail, albeit with a smile, simply said, ‘We meet again.’
All three women attempted and failed to hide their looks of astonishment at the sight of the sergeant in his ‘casual wear’. On his feet were heavy-soled brown canvas shoes that were somewhere between a sneaker and an orthopaedic boot. The jeans were a pristine navy with a severe Mrs Meany crease ironed into each leg. The crotch seemed to start somewhere around the knee. A green-and-beige-striped collared T-shirt was stretched across his stomach, and over that he wore a navy anorak that revealed that PJ’s shoulders were in fact just an illusion created by his uniform.
The outfit had been purchased on the internet. As he left the barracks, PJ had glanced in the mirror and decided that he looked casual and relaxed, but now the faces of the Ross sisters told him that he resembled an overinflated schoolboy. He swallowed hard, planted a smile on his face and half-heartedly raised his right hand into something resembling a wave.
He was immediately filled with a paralysing doubt. Why on earth had he accepted this strange invitation? He had made enquiries in O’Driscoll’s and the evening had been described as a mixture of opera arias and harp music. It had been organised by Mairead Gallagher, who was studying in the Cork school of music. No one seemed very clear why it was by candlelight; it wasn’t Christmas yet. PJ took comfort in the thought that at least the musicians mightn’t notice when he fell asleep.
The weekend had been quiet, too quiet. There had been far too much time for thinking and rethinking. Sleep had not come easily, even after the skinful he had had in the pub on Saturday night. At least the hangover he had nursed on Sunday morning had distracted him from what was going on in his personal life. His personal life! The very idea appalled him. Since when did he have one of those? He had managed to get through decades of adulthood without emotional attachment, and now, without intending to, he felt embroiled in … he didn’t know what. When he was calm and rational, he reasoned with himself that Evelyn was just being polite and taking pity on a lonely man, and Brid had simply been a drunk, unhappy woman who had made a mistake. Somehow, no matter how much he told himself these facts, it didn’t alter what he was feeling. How drawn he was to both these women in their different ways. He felt unnerved and uneasy. This was not a man he knew.
‘I’m so glad you decided to come,’ Evelyn said as the unlikely quartet continued up the steps. ‘Young Mairead sang a solo last Christmas, and she has a marvellous voice.’
‘I taught her and she has always been a great singer. Terrific that she’s making use of it,’ Florence added.
‘Yes, yes,’ the others concurred. This was followed by an awkward silence.
‘It’s chilly enough.’ This was PJ’s attempt to break the ice, but the atmosphere remained frozen. They walked towards the lit porch in silence.
Evelyn knew she should speak, but her mind was a blank. This man was an oaf. If someone had shown her a photograph of him, she would have recoiled, but in the flesh he emanated a kind of heat. It confused her. She found that she wanted to touch his skin, stroke the side of his face, maybe press her lips against his. It was madness. Since Tommy had left her broken-hearted, she had shut down that side of her life. For a quarter of a century she had not allowed herself to feel anything for a man; indeed, she had met scarcely any. But now it was as if her heart had been rediscovered along with those bones. Was all of this simply because Sergeant Collins was the first man she saw after her long flight from the world? Was she like one of those silly deluded girls in fair
y tales who had been given a love potion? She didn’t know, but nor did she hate how any of this was making her feel.
As the Ross sisters took their seats in a pew halfway down the church, another car was being parked on the street below. The Riordans were both wearing variations on their Christmas mass outfits, Anthony in a dark suit with a white shirt but no tie, and Brid in her best coat buttoned to the neck, the amber brooch Anthony had given her for their tenth wedding anniversary on the collar, and wearing the sort of red lipstick that no woman would wear to confession. She took a couple of steps away from the car, but then paused while Anthony turned back to lock the doors. The lights flashed and it gave a small beep. The two of them exchanged weak smiles and headed towards the stone steps.
After PJ had made his discreet departure on Saturday morning, Brid had sat at the kitchen table and tried to figure out what to do next. It felt overwhelming. There didn’t seem to be a single thing in her life that she didn’t want to change. The enormity of the task loomed so large before her that it hardly seemed worth starting, but then she thought about Carmel and Cathal. She wanted her children back. She wanted to bury her face in their clean hair and wrap her arms around them. If she could rescue them, then maybe she could rescue herself. She had stood up and started cleaning the kitchen.
That afternoon, freshly showered and without even half a glass of courage inside her, she had driven to her mother-in-law’s bungalow. She had gone to the back door and after a brief knock let herself in. She would not ring the front doorbell like some visitor. This was her family.
When she saw the children, she opened her arms wide as if she’d just been away for the night. Carmel came to her at once, but as subtle as he tried to be, Brid saw Cathal give a glance to his father for a nod of approval before he crossed the room and kissed her on the cheek. Her heart was fluttering like a small bird, but she was being the best version of herself she could manage. She asked the kids if they had been good for their granny. Did they eat everything they were given? Had they slept well? Anthony and his mother, after an initial awkwardness, had joined in with the forced impression of a happy family.
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