The Death of an Irish Sinner

by Bartholomew Gill

  “But you’ll look after it for them, won’t you?”

  “Of course. Now, are you coming up to town with me, or do I take you back to the house?”

  With real joy at having been asked, Fitz reached for the truck door. “Cripes—I’m coming, of course. Wait—I don’t have me billfold.”

  “What do you need that for?”

  “Aren’t we stopping at Floods for a pint?” His doctor had restricted his drink intake, and Nuala was making sure he kept to the regimen.

  “You’re all right,” McGarr assured him, wondering if there would come a day that he himself would have to sneak off for a jar. “But I hope you know Floods has changed.”

  “In what way?”

  “These days it’s filled with mots and bowsies from who knows where.”

  “Ah, shit—haven’t I drunk with politicians and solicitors most of me grown life? A few mere chancers won’t bother me much.”

  Seven hours later—after completing the delivery with the requisite stop at Floods—the two men returned to Dunlavin. With the days still short, the sun was just setting as McGarr turned the truck into the avenue of beeches that lined the drive of Ilnacullin. A number of cars were parked near the well-lighted house.

  McGarr knew what had happened. The inevitable houseguests from Dublin had arrived, and a neighbor or two—after having stopped in to say hello—had been invited to dinner.

  Pulling the battered heap into the stable yard, McGarr had to nudge his father-in-law, who had slept through the return trip.

  “What—here already? Amn’t I a brilliant traveling companion? I hope I didn’t snore.”

  “You okay?” McGarr worried that the older man—who had once been famous for his stamina—was beginning to wane.

  “Tip-top. Nothing like a pint and a snooze to pick you up. Nuala have the usual suspects aboard?”

  “It would seem so, from the cars in the drive.”

  “Good—we’ll have a long pleasant evening with some old friends. It’s what life’s all about.”

  McGarr was unsure of how long the evening would last for him, since after a hot bath, a big meal, and all the physical labor he had put in, he would quickly nod off, especially if seated by the wood fire that Fitz kept crackling in the den.

  It was there four hours later, after McGarr had “napped” for some time, that Fitz appeared by his side to whisper that he was wanted on the phone.

  McGarr could not imagine who it could be, since an official call would have come through his cell phone or beeper, both of which—as always—he kept on his person. “Who is it?”

  “One of our neighbors.”

  McGarr waited.

  “Fred.”

  “The priest over at Stanton’s?”

  “He says it’s imperative he speak with you yourself, nobody else. He wouldn’t say what, but it sounds serious. You know Fred.”

  Indeed, McGarr did. While an affable dinner guest with many interesting stories about his days as a missionary in South America, the cleric was the soul of discretion.

  Having to shake off his drowsiness, McGarr lumbered out to the phone in the hallway. “Fred—how can I help you?”

  “Could you come over here?”

  “Why? What gives?”

  “A…catastrophe.”

  McGarr waited before asking, “Of what sort?”

  “A catastrophe,” the man repeated. “Please meet me at the gate.” And he rang off.

  Reaching for his cap and jacket, McGarr discovered that it was almost cold when he stepped outside. A brilliant half-moon lit the drive, and overhead banks of stars were layered so deep that the sky seemed opaque in patches.

  CHAPTER 4

  LIKE ILNACULLIN, BARBASTRO—as a brass nameplate declared—was a walled holding. The difference was that its gate was two solid doors of what looked like bronze that were always closed.

  “To keep passersby from peering in at our bestselling author,” McGarr had once heard Father Fred say during a dinner. “It’s not so much her admirers who wish to contact Mary-Jo. We deal with rafts of fan letters each week. But the type of person who would drive out here just to peer in. Not everybody cares for the truth that M. J. writes in her pages, and some, I fear, are envious of her success.”

  In the beams of the Rover’s headlamps, McGarr scanned the coffered panels in the door, which presented the fourteen stations of the cross. The metal had recently been cleaned.

  Instead of finials, small monitoring cameras had been positioned on the capstones of the gate, two beaming down on McGarr, two others focused on the interior drive. As though weighing tons, the gates now opened slowly. Father Fred was standing in the drive with something like a television remote device in one hand.

  McGarr pulled in, and the priest aimed the gadget at the gate. Reaching over the gearshift, McGarr opened the passenger door.

  “Thank you for coming,” the man said, sliding in.

  “I’m glad you were here in Dunlavin. Alone. I wouldn’t want…” His voice trailed off.

  “Can you tell me what this is about?”

  “Better I show you.” He closed the car door.

  Although nearing sixty, McGarr judged, the priest had a full shock of glossy black hair. He was a big man with wide shoulders who kept himself fit by bicycling in the Wicklow Mountains.

  More than a few times McGarr had passed him either pumping up hills that seemed impossibly steep for a bicycle or catapulting down the other side at speeds that could prove fatal were a tire to puncture.

  He turned to McGarr. “Straight ahead. At the house, take the lane into the garden.” With a long straight nose, pale blue eyes, and a dimpled chin, he was a handsome man, and McGarr remembered some woman friend of the Frenches’ dubbing him “the matinee idol of the Catholic Church” and adding, “It’s a pity he doesn’t take confessions.” In the glow of the green lights on the dashboard, his shaven cheeks appeared flinty blue.

  Again like the Frenches’ estate, the drive at Barbastro was lined with towering beech trees, but the approach was much longer, with a series of graceful switchbacks, to a house that in every way justified the word mansion. Positioned on a knoll, the Georgian structure looked more like the main building of a college or a seat of government. Yet from afar, bathed in floodlights, the building did not seem outsized.

  Serpentine walls compressed its apparent size, McGarr decided, as the headlamps of the Rover, following the sinuous drive, played over the facade. Surely it was one of Ireland’s great houses, with wide lawns, a woodland park, and a formal garden where Father Fred now asked McGarr to stop.

  “She’s in here,” he said, climbing out.

  “Who is?”

  But the priest had already passed beyond the car.

  McGarr removed the pocket torch that Noreen kept in the glove box and followed the man down a pathway that repeated the serpentine motif of the drive and house.

  In the achromatic light of the half-moon, the garden looked chalky and unreal. A rime of silvery frost had gathered on the shrubs and greensward.

  They came upon her at the third turn of the pathway. Mary-Jo Stanton was down in a patch of daffodils, as though she had been on her knees gardening when she died. Her body was slumped on her legs with her forehead touching the dirt, the long white ponytail that she always wore having spilled forward onto the plants.

  She was wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and an old twill shirt that was several sizes too large. With both arms splayed out behind her—one still grasping a garden trowel, the other wrapped in a glove—she looked almost as though she had assumed some position of supplication in her last moments of life. Like drawings McGarr had seen from Mandarin China, of the condemned offering their necks to the ax.

  Because what struck him most about her corpse was the balance that it had achieved in death. He tried to remember when he had last viewed a body that had managed to remain even somewhat upright without the aid of a chair, car seat, or the like. He could not; for him, it was a first
.

  Nor was there any indication in the soft soil around her that she had struggled—attempted to rise up or flee—even though it was plain she had been murdered.

  “What’s that around her neck?” McGarr asked, pointing to a barbed metal…necklace, it looked like, that had been tightened around her neck with a large wing screw. Blood had flowed from where the points had bitten into her neck. But from the darkened color of her face, McGarr assumed the instrument had strangled her.

  “A cilicio,” said the priest. “Or at least, a type of cilicio.”

  “Which is?”

  “Oh…I suppose it’s an instrument of bodily mortification, a way of resisting the temptations of the flesh.”

  “Like a hair shirt?”

  “Exactly. Cilicios, in fact, are hair shirts and were used rather commonly during the early ages of Christianity. Some orders—the Carthusians and Carmelites—still employ them by rule.”

  “Hair shirts,” McGarr said again, because he had heard of the practice. But this was no hair shirt.

  “Later on, I’m afraid, the practice was adopted by most of the religious orders, in imitation of the early ascetics, you know.” The priest glanced over at McGarr. “Other devices were employed to increase the discomfort. That’s where barbaric things such as that come from. Screw and all.”

  “I don’t understand where it would fit. On one’s body.”

  “Oh, the thigh, I would think. It would be applied at such times as when one was experiencing impure thoughts, the screw being tightened down as required.”

  “Could it be Mary-Jo’s?” McGarr remembered that she had been a collector of unusual items—chains, whips, manacles, and the like. There was an entire large room in the house, where McGarr had once been a guest, devoted to the display of candelabra.

  “I think this could be from her collection, although she kept the cilicios under lock and key on her floor.”

  “Which is where?”

  “The top floor of the house. She alone lived there. Exclusively.”

  Exclusively of him, McGarr believed the point was, again studying the corpse with its curious balance. The frost had gathered on her body; it spangled her hair.

  Half tempted to give the body a shove, just to test how stable it was, McGarr instead played the beam of the torch on the ground to either side. The dirt was patterned with a number of footprints, the most dominant having been made by a large foot that had been wearing cleats or toeplates.

  “I’m afraid those are mine,” Father Fred explained.

  “I was out wheeling well after dark. When I got back and couldn’t find M. J., I looked to see if her car was gone, then searched the house and finally the grounds.”

  McGarr glanced at the priest, noticing that he had changed into his usual black attire, including the clerical collar.

  “Between trying to find you—at your headquarters, your home, and finally at Noreen’s parents’—I changed,” Father Fred explained, as though having read McGarr’s thoughts. And dispensing guilt, which ruled all in Catholic Ireland.

  Had the man left a message at either Dublin location, McGarr would have been notified. He tried to remember just how long Father Fred had been Mary-Jo Stanton’s…what? Confessor? Confidant? Companion? Years, ten at least that McGarr knew about. Certainly he had been her companion all of that time.

  And didn’t Father Fred, as a priest, have an “office”? as McGarr believed specific priestly vocations were called. Something to do? Work? If McGarr knew one thing about the Catholic Church, service was primary. Those who could serve, would.

  As well—where were the man’s feelings? Mary-Jo had obviously been…assassinated seemed the appropriate term, given her notoriety. The story of her murder would involve the world press.

  “May I say something?” Father Fred now asked.

  “Everything I know, everything I’ve been taught and have believed all my life as a Christian, a Catholic, and most particularly as a priest tells me that this is the act of a madman. It has to be. Who would want, who would even conceive of murdering Mary-Jo, who was—in everything she said, did, wrote—a veritable saint?”

  McGarr waited, now watching the larger man, whose features were shadowed in the moonlight.

  “I can understand that there’s no possibility of keeping this quiet, a matter between you and me.” Father Fred let that sit.

  As did McGarr. In the distant wood, an owl was hooting its plaintive oo-oo-oo.

  “Consider, for a moment, the…travail this will cause, the pain for those who loved her—her friends, acquaintances, and her readers, even. Gone will be the remembrance of her accomplishments, all the charitable works that she was most proud of in her life. What people will remember is this…tragedy.

  “Do you suppose that she could have done this to herself?”

  What? How?

  “You know—slipped it around her neck and tightened the screw quickly, then waited for the effect to take its course. In recent months, her health was not good.”

  Then why the gardening trowel in one hand, the glove on the other?

  “I mean, academically speaking.”

  The school being murder. McGarr continued to wait. Beyond his thoughts, which were bizarre for a priest, the man had something to tell him.

  “I don’t imagine we could keep this between ourselves.”

  The warm west wind that McGarr had noticed the night before had returned. A jet bound for Dublin Airport was tracing the sky, its landing lights brilliant cones of luminescence in the distant heavens.

  “I could have phoned a sympathetic doctor who would have ignored the cilicio and labeled this a death from natural causes.”

  Really? McGarr would like to know the name of such a caring person, although he understood that more than a few suspicious deaths of older people were simply attributed to age by inattentive physicians. The marks on her neck, however, could not have been ignored.

  “I might still, without your ceasing your investigation.”

  There it was—why the priest had donned his clerical garb, why he had searched out McGarr and not phoned the local Guards or alerted McGarr’s headquarters.

  “You want to know who did this?” McGarr asked.

  “Unquestionably.”

  “But at the same time, you don’t want her murder to be reported.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you—to keep this…event from sullying her memory.”

  “How do you suppose I could go about that without involving my office?”

  “I could help you. I have a cadre of acolytes at my service.”

  “And when and if we discovered Mary-Jo’s murderer—what then?”

  The priest only regarded him for a long moment before saying, “By which you mean, you can’t do that.”

  Be a party to the cover-up of a murder, an illegal investigation, and the probable murder of an uncharged, untried suspected killer? With a priest as the literal vice in the plot?

  McGarr would not acknowledge the possibility with a reply.

  “You’re sure.”

  McGarr ignored that as well.

  The priest nodded once. “All right, that said—and forgotten, I hope—perhaps you’d like to examine the house and speak with the others who are here. Today only I left the premises, and we had but one visitor, who is staying the night. Or so say the log and the transcripts.”

  “Transcripts?” McGarr asked. It was a curious word.

  “The logs we keep of comings and goings, the tapes that are made of various parts of the property.”

  “You mean there are more cameras than those at the gate?”

  “Yes, of course. You don’t know how many times Mary-Jo was threatened. Attempts were even made to blackmail her.” The priest turned, as though to walk away.

  “Why would anybody have threatened Mary-Jo? Or blackmailed her?” Pulling out his mobile phone, McGarr speed-dialed his headquarters in Dublin.

  “Beca
use of her notoriety, because she wrote the truth. I’m sure that’s who’s to blame for this. Some…crazy who wished to settle scores.”

  “Were the police informed of the threats?”

  “No—any publicity of that sort would just have encouraged others, I’m sure. And tipped off the press.”

  “Blackmail presupposes a cause for blackmail. What would that have been?”

  “Oh”—the priest looked away—“scurrilous things really. I’m afraid I can’t remember exactly what. Something to do with her mother, I believe, who was rather a free spirit.”

  When a voice came over the phone, McGarr explained where he was, what had happened, and then asked for the Technical Squad, who would secure the body and examine the crime scene.

  Slipping the phone back into his pocket, he took a long last look at Mary-Jo Stanton, down on her knees, her forehead touching the ground in supplication, her long white mane now riffling in the wind, her arms splayed to either side, the curious cilicio around her neck.

  To have grown so old and accomplished so much, he thought, only to have died in such a strange way for…words, as the priest had suggested? The very métier that she had practiced.

  Seldom in McGarr’s experience had he investigated murders that had been committed for words, unless the words had involved love, money, sex, or religion.

  Surely the context of Mary-Jo Stanton’s life had been religious, given the presence of the priest and her literary preoccupation with the lives of saints and religious scholars.

  But what of love and money? Or sex? Who had loved her and how? And who would inherit her great fortune, the house and property?

  McGarr stepped up the path. “The ‘transcripts,’ please. Would you show me the way?”

  CHAPTER 5

  CLIMBING OUT of the Rover in front of the house, McGarr removed the Walther PPK that he kept in a holster that was fixed beneath the driver’s seat. He inserted a clip of seven cartridges into the butt.

  “Do you think you’ll need that?” the priest asked.