The Lazarus Bell, an Irish Murder Mystery

by Patrick Dunne

  ‘No. But there is a copy of a letter to her from the parish priest, in which he says he is only too happy – in return for her generosity – to grant her request to be buried in the cathedral at Oldbridge when she dies.’

  ‘Really?’ I felt a flutter of excitement. ‘What does the letter say, exactly?’

  ‘No more than that, I’m afraid. Sorry to disappoint you. Anyway, I’m sure you have more serious matters to think about.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘I also rang to say – and forgive me for being so blunt – but if the worst comes to the worst, and this quarantine is still in place, I take it your mother would like to wait until it’s lifted before we have the funeral.’

  I said I thought that would be the case, since my father wanted to be buried in Castleboyne. I put down the phone with my emotions in turmoil again, stirred by the word ‘funeral’ – Father Burke might have meant well, but by mentioning it he had somehow pushed me prematurely into having to deal with a concept at which my mind had not yet arrived. My father might be dying, but I had to come to grips with that before thinking of him inside a coffin being lowered into the earth.

  The doorbell rang. I checked the time on the office clock – 6.30. Finian would assume I was in the house, to which he had a key. Unless he had rushed out and taken the wrong set with him.

  I went through to the front of the house and opened the door. Darren Byrne was standing there. His hair had that artificially tousled look, as if it had been scribbled onto his head with a black marker – a style I had hoped would go away quickly when it first emerged, but which had proved annoyingly persistent. His face was deathly pale and pitted like a pumice stone; his small eyes were grey, his lips colourless and his mouth about to sneer at me.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ I said.

  ‘I hear your father’s on the way out. I’d like to offer you the opportunity to say a few words about him.’ His breath smelled strongly of cigarettes.

  I began to close the door.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he said, planting his foot on the step. ‘You hardly want your dad portrayed as anything other than a good family man.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘P.V. Bowe used to play a very popular TV character; there’ll be a lot of public interest in his death. Pictures will be taken at the funeral – other actors from the series, various celebrities, his grieving family. But we could take – and publish – a certain photograph, and not the grieving widow, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘How dare you!’

  ‘It’s up to you. You bring me in, we chat about your fond memories of your famous dad, and we’ll run the interview as soon as the sad news is announced – or we do it the other way and follow it up with a feature on “women who weep but cannot mourn”. Yeah, I like the sound of that.’ He started moving into the hall.

  ‘Get the hell out of my house,’ I shouted, pushing him in the chest.

  ‘Take your fucking hands off me,’ he snarled, slapping down on my arms. It hurt. He kept coming.

  At that moment, Finian drove up to the house in his Range Rover. Byrne retreated from the hall and walked briskly to his car.

  I ran to Finian as he jumped from the cab. He knew there was something wrong.

  ‘Byrne’s been trying to blackmail me,’ I rasped, my mouth dry from anger.

  Finian moved out in front of Byrne’s car as he reversed; Byrne drove at him but had to brake as Finian refused to step aside. Finian ran around and grabbed the driver’s door through the open window, but Byrne drove off again, dragging Finian along until his momentum made him stumble and he had to let go.

  Byrne raced out onto the road and turned left, in the direction of Dublin. Only then did I notice he was driving a black Honda Civic with alloy wheels.

  I ran and helped Finian to his feet. ‘Let’s go after him,’ I said. ‘He can’t get past the roadblock.’

  ‘Yes, he can,’ he said. ‘The quarantine’s just been lifted.’

  We went inside, and I put Finian’s hand under the tap to clean out some grit that was scored into his palm. As he dabbed it dry, we agreed on the registration number and I wrote it down on a Post-it sticker. Then I tried to get in touch with Gallagher, but his mobile was out of range.

  ‘The Gardaí are searching an area upstream from Brookfield; maybe he went to see how they’re getting on,’ said Finian. ‘It’s a blind spot for phone coverage.’

  ‘Of course. He told me he was going there.’ The events of the past hour had knocked it out of my head. ‘Where is it, exactly?’

  ‘In the grounds of what used to be an old demesne. They asked me for permission for some of the search team to go through the garden to the other bank.’

  ‘Let’s just go to the nursing home. I’ll send Gallagher a text on the way. Will you drive?’

  ‘Sure. But I know a way to Summerhill that will take us past the demesne, if you want to see Gallagher for a few minutes.’

  ‘Hmm… OK, let’s do that first.’

  Thinking about it later, I wondered why I put off going to see my father straight away. I think that, having become used to visiting a non-person for so long, I needed a little time to – paradoxically – bring back to life, in my head, the father I was about to lose.

  We found Gallagher in an untended pocket of parkland, where some fine old trees were being crowded in by bramble bushes, saplings and clumps of nettles. Gardaí from the Technical Bureau, in white forensic overalls and blue shoe-covers, were combing through the brambles and poking the undergrowth along the bank of a stream, while a couple of local Gardaí in shirtsleeves and waders were walking the stream’s bed, heads bent as they scrutinised the bottom. Midges were dancing above their heads in the evening light.

  ‘The wee lad found the cleaver hidden in the bole of that tree,’ said Gallagher. ‘The handle was just visible sticking out of a knot-hole – where the ladder is…’ The Gardaí had positioned a ladder to one side of a swollen-lipped cavity about two metres up the trunk. ‘If he hadn’t been hanging out of the branch above it, it wouldn’t have come to light.’

  ‘Why did the killer not throw it in the stream?’ Finian asked.

  ‘He didn’t want it found with his victim, I guess. And he couldn’t be sure that the body would float very far. We’re looking for anything else we can find, although if the butchering was carried out around here, the chances are that the heavy rain will have washed away any blood…’ He noticed me looking at a clear plastic bag beside him, filled with what looked like litter. ‘Just what you’ll find at any Irish beauty spot: beer cans, used condoms and disposable nappies. Life’s rich pageant, eh? What will the archaeologists of the future make of it?’ He smacked himself on the neck. ‘Damn clegs. So – what brings you here?’

  We explained what had happened.

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear about your father, Illaun. He was a great actor, and a very nice man by all accounts.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘A Honda Civic, you say? That rings a bell.’

  ‘It was the same one I saw being driven away from my house the night the petrol was poured into my living room, the same one that tried to knock me down yesterday.’

  ‘But that was reported stolen – Eamon!’

  Sergeant Doyle, in blue shirt and peaked cap, came out from behind the bushes.

  ‘Darren Byrne’s car, a Civic. Was it the one reported stolen on Monday night?’

  Doyle pushed back his cap and scratched his neck. ‘That’s right. We found it abandoned in a field yesterday afternoon, shortly after it had been involved in the incident with Miss Bowe here. We’re keeping an open mind on who they were.’

  ‘They?’ Gallagher queried.

  ‘The joyriders. That particular make of car is a favourite target of theirs.’

  ‘Well, he was certainly driving it himself tonight,’ said Finian. ‘I should know. He nearly ran over me.’

  ‘And I think we can take it he was driving it on the pr
evious occasions as well,’ I added. ‘When he stole the key to the Heritage Centre, and when he tried to run me down because I’d spilled the beans on him to Daisy McKeever.’

  Doyle looked perplexed.

  ‘I’m with Miss Bowe on this, Eamon,’ said Gallagher. ‘I think you should get the registration number and put out a call.’

  ‘We took a note of it,’ said Finian. ‘It’s in the car; I’ll go and get it.’

  ‘Thanks. And when you come back, I’d like a word with you about the murder case,’ said Gallagher, rather pointedly.

  Finian was taken aback. ‘A word with me – about what?’

  ‘To try and jog your memory in case you saw something unusual or suspicious in the past week or so. This seems to be where the body was dismembered, possibly even where the murder took place, so we’ll be interviewing everyone living in the vicinity. Might as well start with yourself.’

  Finian glanced at me, shrugged his shoulders and went to get the number. Gallagher was no doubt employing standard procedure, even making it easy for Finian by getting it over and done with, but I could tell he wasn’t best pleased.

  One of the forensic team, a woman, called to the two officers to come see something she had extracted from a bramble bush. It was a sheet of paper – it looked like the faded, snail-eaten page of a newspaper. Doyle and Gallagher went to join her, and I took the opportunity to wander over to the stream, my thoughts turning to my father.

  Beneath the quivering leaves, where shelter comes at last…

  For some reason, it was his singing voice that entered my head – a Victorian cradle song he liked to sing in his strong tenor voice, as he went about the house. I knew he had also sung the achingly beautiful melody to me when I was a baby, but softly, intimately. Why did it appeal to him so much? I wondered.

  All sadness sinks to rest, or glides into the past…

  It had that sense of escaping from this waking world of woe into the healing embrace of sleep – or was it death? My father was not beyond entertaining these notions simultaneously, and smiling to himself at the ambiguity. He would have found the Middle Ages congenial.

  My mind skipped the chorus, on to the start of the next verse.

  Far from the noisy throng, by songbirds lulled to rest,

  Where rock the branches high, by breezes soft caressed,

  Softly the days go on. By sorrow all unharmed,

  Thus may life be to thee: a sweet existence, charmed…

  Now that the words were clear in my memory, isolated in a way I had never thought of them before, I could see how, singing them to his little girl in her cot, he had been able to invest them with such emotion. It was what he genuinely wished for me, while knowing full well it was a poetic conceit. Like toughened glass, my father’s sentimentality was tempered by an existentialist perception of the utter absurdity of human life.

  I heard the whine of a midge close by my ear and flicked at it. They were massing in a dense cloud above the water. Others were buzzing my face and biting my neck, so I moved away from the stream in the hopes of avoiding them.

  No sooner had I escaped the swarm of midges than I felt the unique sensation of a horsefly’s serrated mandibles cutting into my calf, and I bent to swipe it away. The shattered trunk of a once-great beech tree stood nearby; the upper half had been snapped off in a storm at some time in the past, leaving a jagged stump that resembled an upturned molar. I leaned one hand against the smooth grey bark of the trunk as I hooked my leg up with the other. I could see a drop of blood budding from where the fly had bitten me. ‘It’s the female that sucks our blood,’ I remembered my father saying. ‘Males feed on nectar.’

  As if in response, there was a humming sound just above my head. I looked up and saw there were bees wafting up out of the hollow trunk – the heartwood had rotted away. It seemed as if there was no escaping the attentions of flying, biting things. With a memory of not only being stung on the head as a child, but being even more terrified by the buzzing of the panicked insect trapped in my curly hair, I set off to rejoin Finian, who I could see was back in the field talking to Gallagher. Then one of the bees landed on the back of my hand. Except it wasn’t a bee – it was a blowfly.

  With an instinctive tremor of repugnance, I flicked it off my hand and looked back at the insects exiting from the top of the stump. They were flies, all right. But I knew blowflies didn’t nest in trees. There could be only one reason why they were hatching from one.

  ‘Matt!’ I bleated, my throat closing in to prevent me getting sick. ‘Down here…’ I waved them in my direction.

  Ten minutes later, Gallagher strolled over to me and Finian where we stood together on the bank of the stream. A Garda officer, flashlight in hand, had just climbed back down the ladder they had leaned against the massive stump.

  ‘The tree’s hollow inside,’ said Gallagher. ‘There’s rainwater at the bottom, but there’s enough tissue and bone still visible to verify there’s a human skull – and more – in there. I think we can take it as final proof that Latifah Hassan’s death was staged to look like a muti killing – if it were, there’s no way they would have left the head behind. She was probably raped and strangled, and maybe her killer began with the idea of cutting off her head and hands to make it impossible to connect her to him; but then he came up with the idea of making it look like a ritual murder, knowing that would lead the investigation in an entirely different direction.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘Were you able to tell Gallagher anything?’ I asked Finian on the way to the nursing home.

  ‘Of course not. If I’d seen anything suspicious, I would have told them already. It annoyed me – there I was, being questioned, while they had done practically nothing to investigate Darren Byrne’s threats to you. As well as which, Gallagher was delegating him to Doyle, which doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.’

  ‘Matt’s in charge of the murder inquiry, and now that there’ve been important developments he has to concentrate on it.’ I told Finian what had transpired at St Loman’s.

  ‘So you think Adelola is hiding something.’

  ‘Yes. And, unfortunately, lying seems to be second nature to him. It probably has to do with being an illegal immigrant and trying to keep his identity secret. He denied being friendly with Terry Johnston, whereas Gayle told me he was one of Johnston’s few buddies. He claimed he got drunk on Saturday, but he also said he’s a practising Muslim. And the same afternoon he said he was drinking in Navan, I saw him talking to Darren Byrne out at Oldbridge.’

  ‘Byrne again, eh?’

  Yes, Byrne again. Byrne. Adelola. Johnston. Mortimer.

  I had already considered the possibility that they were operating together in a hunt for the treasure hidden by Mortimer’s ancestor. Now Ben Adelola, and possibly Terry Johnston – could Latifah have been his ‘Hottentot Venus’? – were connected with the dead woman. What about the remaining two? For a fleeting moment, the possibility that they could all be involved in the murder occurred to me. But if coming up with two conspiracy theories was the sign of a fevered imagination, casting the same conspirators in each suggested an imagination in a state of paralysis.

  My mother and Aunt Betty were in the dining room, having a cup of tea with Deirdre Lysaght, when we arrived. Tears welled up in my eyes as I gave my mother a hug where she sat. Her own eyes were red-rimmed from crying. ‘There, there, dear,’ she said, feeling me tremble in her arms. She was trying to be the strong one.

  Finian shook her hand sympathetically as Betty and I embraced. ‘How is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Very peaceful,’ Betty replied.

  My mother wept silently.

  ‘Go and see him,’ said Deirdre. ‘I’ll have a cup of tea ready for you when you come back.’

  Finian came along with me, but stayed just long enough to tell my father that Arthur sent his regards. Finian always spoke to him as if he were capable of understanding, which was as valid a way as any other of communicating with
him, and certainly better than sitting there in silence.

  Finian then left me on my own, which was what I wanted.

  The room was lit only by a night-light. I sat beside the bed, observing my father. He was sleeping quietly, a transparent, straw-thin oxygen tube in his nose. His hair was thin and colourless, his waxen face shrunk to the contours of his skull, making him look much older than his sixty-seven years. He had been ill on several occasions in recent months, but this was different.

  He’s not coming back this time, Illaun.

  In a way, my father had departed long ago. Inside, he was a blank. In archaeological terms, his mind was like a featureless landscape devoid of any signs of human presence above or below ground; emptier than a desert, more barren than an ice-field. Not for the first time, I wondered if, apart from the familiar-looking, still-living shell of his body, he could even be said to exist. Without a personality, could there still be a soul?

  And was that the thing that neither illness nor injury but only death could destroy? And did it evaporate when you died, or was it launched into another world? At that moment, like my father simultaneously subscribing to opposite sides of an argument, I believed both to be true.

  I bowed my head for a moment and prayed that the ‘blessed release’, as Father Burke called it, would come soon. I looked at my father again. The chorus of the cradle song that had been going around in my head earlier seemed appropriate now. So I sang it to him.

  Awake not yet from thy repose;

  A fair dream-spirit hovers near thee,

  Weaving a web of gold and rose

  Through dreamland’s happy isles to bear thee.

  Sleep, love, it is not yet the dawn.

  Angels guard thee, sweet love, till morn.

  Richard rang just after 2.00 a.m. and said he was already making arrangements to fly home, but he would not be getting in until Saturday: a premature baby had just been brought to his clinic, and he was anxious to give that case his attention. Richard was a paediatrician who specialised in helping pre-term infants to survive. Like me, he had inherited from our father the ethic of ‘the show must go on’, and he would feel duty-bound to do his job despite the circumstances. It would not have escaped his notice, either, that he was attempting to tether one life firmly to the world while probably being grateful, like me, that another one was soon to be set adrift.