Deadly Intent (14 page)

She thought back over the conversation she had finally had with Patrick on Monday morning. He was very upset, having just left his aunt's bedside. Esther was slipping away, he told her, and preparations were already being discussed for her funeral, to bring her to her home village almost two hundred miles from the city. Patrick was also involved in financial and legal arrangements for four of her grandchildren, whom Esther had looked after since their parents died from AIDS years earlier.

When he finally got around to asking Nessa how she was, she kept to a very limited version of the turmoil at home, having decided to tell him the full story if Esther rallied, or as soon as the funeral was over. She explained that Oscar Malden had died suddenly and tragically after his departure from Beara, and that the circumstances were being investigated. Gardai had taken statements from herself and others, and would have to speak to Patrick in due course. He commiserated with her on the phone, but it was clear to Nessa that his mind was elsewhere.

The next morning, on Tuesday, she got a text from him announcing Esther's death and plans for the funeral on Thursday. Nessa sent him all her love and condolences, and then phoned Superintendent Devane. She had told him at the weekend that Patrick lost his mobile phone en route to Malawi and as a result, that it was difficult to contact him; now she said apologetically that her husband had to go to a remote part of the country for a family funeral, and that it would be best if gardai could wait until Friday to speak to him. Devane was very sympathetic and, contrary to the impression given by Jack Talbot, simply added that gardai would be very glad to talk to him as soon as that could be arranged.

As she hunched in the car on Wednesday morning, Nessa decided to phone Superintendent Devane again, to check whether Talbot's story had changed things. She wished, of course, that she had been able to share the whole story with Patrick as soon as she knew of Oscar's murder, but there was no point in going back over that ground again. What's more, currying sympathy from Talbot by telling him about Esther would probably have made no difference. He was out to make life hard for Cnoc Meala's owners, and to cast a malicious cloak on any version of the truth.

Caitlín turned on the car radio as they headed out of Derryowen. Before long, they heard Jack's smooth voice gliding through an interview on a leading current affairs' programme. He was clearly enjoying himself to the full.

‘As we understand only too well,' he said, ‘the Garda Síochána are doing their utmost to solve this heinous crime. Indeed, Interpol and police forces in several countries are also cooperating fully with those efforts.'

‘Have you reason to believe, then, that Interpol or Russian police officers are investigating the kinds of links you make in your story today?'

‘I regret that I cannot disclose the precise lines of enquiry being followed, but I am certainly confident that my own researches are of relevance, yes, and that the authorities will pursue every possible avenue in their search for this coldblooded killer.'

‘You're so sly!' said Nessa under her breath. ‘Saying everything and nothing in one breath.'

‘And the witness you name in your story today, how might he be able to assist the investigation?' asked the interviewer.

‘As we know,' Talbot intoned solemnly, ‘Oscar Malden had several companies in Russia. We also know that a Russian ship has been stranded in Castletownbere harbour for some weeks, amid competing claims of responsibility for the welfare of its crew. What I have now established is that Patrick Latif, who is normally resident in Beara, also has close links with Russia, and appears to have been in contact with the abandoned ship's crew. Indeed, he travelled to Moscow less than a year ago with a group of people from Ireland whose mission was shadowy to say the least.'

‘And you say he met with Malden on the day of the murder?'

‘He is believed to have spoken to him on the phone, yes, and may well have met him shortly afterwards. But I would like to assure your listeners that there is no suggestion that such a meeting was anything but lawful and innocent.'

‘Christ Almighty!' said Caitlín, turning down the sound as the interview came to an end. ‘What is all that about, tell me? Jack makes it sound like a James Bond film, doesn't he?'

Nessa looked out the window. Streaks of light were breaking through the eastern sky, the colour of blood oranges. She tried to assemble her fragmented thoughts.

‘I've no idea where this stuff came from,' she said, ‘about Patrick meeting Oscar on Thursday. He was in a fluster getting ready to leave, but for all I know, the pair of them just passed each other on the road and were seen having a friendly chat.'

‘Fair enough, that sounds plausible, but what about Russia? Are these so-called shadowy connections a figment of Jack's fevered imagination?'

‘Well, not completely, but it's the way he describes it.'

‘I remember Patrick going off on that trip last year, and I know he speaks Russian fluently, but that hardly counts as a crime, does it?'

‘I think it's a case of putting a few unrelated facts on the same page and hoping they look like cause and effect, as if Patrick being in Moscow proves he plotted with Oscar's enemies to kill him. But having said that, there was some trouble during the trip, so there's material there to exploit. As for the Russian ship, it's also true that Patrick met with two of the crew last Wednesday. It wasn't his idea, he did it because a trade unionist he knows in Cork asked him to help out with translation, and naturally enough, Patrick didn't like to say no.'

Nessa felt exhausted. If she could rewind her life just one week, there were so many details she would change. But self-pity made her cross too, and she tried to remind herself that her biggest regret should be for Oscar Malden's sake.

Caitlín's tone was careful when she next spoke. ‘So even if the facts are being totally manipulated, you're saying there's something in Talbot's story? If that's the case, it doesn't look good for Patrick, does it, as far as explaining himself goes?'

‘It looks grim at this moment.' Nessa looked at her friend anxiously. ‘And I'd imagine there's a lot of talk around the area already – for example, that Patrick and I are outsiders to Derryowen who've brought a whole lot of trouble to the place?'

Caitlín's voice was very gentle when she replied, after paying great attention to the next bend in the road.

‘Don't torment yourself, Nessa, about that sort of idle backchat. You've enough to worry about, especially while Patrick's not here to defend himself.'

Nessa held her face in her hands. Her skin felt as brittle as her feelings. ‘After that night with Dominic … It's hard to describe, but half the time I'm just boiling mad, like a pressure cooker without a vent, and then all of a sudden I feel helpless, as if I've no say anymore over what happens in my life, which makes me angry too.'

‘Shush now, it's terribly hard on you.' Caitlín fiddled with the radio again. ‘Why don't you take a rest and we'll listen to a bit of music for a while? We could pull in at the Healy Pass, how about that? And if you feel like telling me more about Patrick's Russian adventures, I promise to keep my mouth shut and let you talk.'

Caitlín had decided not to drive through Castletownbere on their way to her cousin's house, but instead to take the longer Kenmare road on the north side of Beara, and to cross the mountain road in the middle of the peninsula. That way, they would be less likely to meet roving journalists. Nessa looked out the window at the wide waters of the bay to her left. She felt as if her teeth had been clenched tightly all night long, but as the notes of a piano sonata rippled from the radio, she allowed her eyelids to drop and her breathing to ease. When the car jolted on a pothole a while later, she was surprised to see that they were on a steep road above a valley, surrounded by purple-grey mountains.

It took her a few minutes to remember where they were going and why. Then she became aware of a sharp new realisation. She had to stop simply reacting to events, and to channel her frustration and anger instead of being overcome by them. She was only as helpless as she would allow herself to be.

It was bad enough that a man she and Patrick had welcomed into their house was dead, and that Cnoc Meala's reputation would suffer in the aftermath. Local gossip and stares were unpleasant too, and now the whole family would have to bear up to Talbot's smearing insinuations, and the possibility that gardai might take them seriously enough to suspect him of murder. But the dart that pierced Nessa most deeply was the hint of doubt she heard in Caitlín's voice. How could Patrick hold up his head if their closest friends wondered whether his actions had been honest and totally innocent of all violent intent?

His reputation and his liberty were both at risk. Meanwhile, the garda investigation seemed to be grinding on without a breakthrough. Waiting passively for good news was no longer enough, and Nessa would have to figure out what on earth she could do to help unearth the truth.

‘I haven't been up here for years!' Caitlín manouevred the car into a parking space by the roadside. ‘I should be ashamed of myself, forever spouting to our tourists in the pub about the fantastic views they'll get from the Healy Pass and not bothering to make the trip myself. I even give the tourists a bit of history, you know, about the pass being named after Beara's own Tim Healy, the first governor of the Irish Free State.'

Nessa was happy to let her friend chatter on for a while. Things were stressful for Caitlín too. Her shop and pub got plenty of new business during the media invasion, but many locals stayed away, avoiding the glare of public attention. Indeed, some of her older customers were now afraid to go out at night, in case the killer was lying in wait for more victims. Others talked about the case all the time, elbows propped on the bar while they grumbled about the gardai's ceaseless questions. Where did you spend last Thursday and Friday? How can you be sure you remember the time you saw this person or that? If you met Oscar Malden, how did he look? What did you eat for breakfast the day before yesterday?

The women clambered over a low wall to a patch of grass and heather. Behind them, Beara's great backbone of the Caha mountains stretched along the peninsula. Ahead of them, they gazed out at an enticing vista: the dark waters of Lake Glanmore in the embrace of shapely hills; beyond it, a soft quilted blanket of fertile farmland and abundant hedges; and on neighbouring Iveragh peninsula across the slender rim of the bay, the tip of Carrantouhil, the country's highest mountain, rising up to the clouds above the muscular shoulders of the Reeks.

‘Here we are,' said Caitlín quietly, ‘saluting the sunrise in this earthly paradise, while the shadows of death pursue us.'

Nessa listened to the silence of the place before she spoke in her turn. ‘It's terrible to remember too that Oscar's murderer drove along at least a part of this road, to leave his body by the little bridge on the far side of the pass.'

‘Did you ever hear about the funeral processions up here long ago, where the ridge marks the boundary of the two counties?' Caitlín gestured in both directions. ‘Cork is behind us and Kerry is on this side of the Healy Pass, as you know. So let's say that two people from Beara got married, a Corkman and a Kerrywoman, and they lived on his patch but had no children. Well, when the woman died, it seems that the man's people would carry the coffin up to the mountain pass, and leave it on a slab of rock right at the boundary; and her people had to come from the Kerry side to take it away and bury it in their own graveyard.'

‘What was the reason for that?'

‘I presume it had something to do with the fact that she hadn't produced children, which meant that she was useless in the eyes of some.'

‘So you mean she hadn't earned the privilege of burial with her husband? And maybe it was also a show of rivalry between the two counties?'

‘It was probably both. I suppose the rituals of death express a lot about the culture we live in.'

Nessa pulled a woollen cap down over her ears. She could feel a chill wind ascending from the valley, but the image that came to her was of a funeral in a warmer country. Esther's coffin would be carried to her native place on the back of a truck, accompanied by relatives singing hymns and songs of lament as they made the journey along the shore of Lake Malawi. Nessa could remember vividly making the same long journey for Patrick's mother's funeral, when Ronan was still a toddler, and the crowds greeting them outside the thatched huts of the village as they arrived in the sweltering heat. She wished she could be there with Patrick this time, slipping her hand into his.

Caitlín sat on a low rock to read a printout of Jack Talbot's articles and Nessa looked over her shoulder, imagining thousands of people around the country reading them too. When she looked up again, she saw that large clouds had gathered in the distance, smothering the Reeks in a dense white fog.

‘So explain to me,' said Caitlín in a light voice. She swept her long hair back into the collar of her jacket. ‘How did Patrick come to be a commie-loving student who has maintained close links with business and security types in Russia for the past few decades?'

‘He got a scholarship to Moscow when he was aged about twenty, that was how it started. He was living in Mozambique then, after his family had fled from Malawi, and a lot of students from Africa and Asia went to university in the Soviet Union on scholarships of the same kind. I suppose it was all part of the Cold War battle for hearts and minds.'

‘And then?'

‘And then he moved elsewhere, and ended up working as a tour guide and translator in a number of countries. But he returned to Moscow around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, mainly out of curiosity.'