1
“It can never have been murder. Never in life. You don’t murder a man by dropping a stone on his head. It’s too uncertain. You can’t aim an awful great stone. It was an accident, surely. A freak accident. That stone’s been teetering up there since Cromwell’s men burned the friary. And three months ago this very night it fell. It fell and hit poor Timothy McKinney on the head.”
The speaker was a tiny man in tweeds of muted colors and sharp aromas, one of which was pipe tobacco. He tapped out his briar into an empty glass and repeated, “It hit poor Timothy McKinney on the head.”
“God rest his soul,” said the passing bartender, a very busy man. “And use the damn ashtray.”
A second man at the crowded bar, this one standing to my right, observed, “Sure, it would have been like a bad mystery novel, where the victim has to do exactly what the murderer wants him to do, where he wants him to do it and when, for the plot to work.”
The tweedy man snatched this up. “I know the very one you mean. By Dorothy something Sayers. Man killed by a swinging weight, a booby trap he trips himself at the appointed place and hour. Stage business. Not real life. Not real murder.”
I was familiar with the book in question, though my tastes ran to more worldly investigators than Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. I was even familiar with the criticism of the murder method used in that book, and I’d always considered that criticism to be nine-tenths carping. The act the murder victim had to perform at a specific time and place for the booby trap to work was switching on a big console radio for the evening news, a perfectly ordinary thing, and one that could only be done at a specific time and place.
The tweedy man’s dismissal of the murder technique as stage business was truer than he seemed to know. Sayers had based her book — murder weapon and all — on a successful stage play. Observing that aloud would have been a way to inject myself into the conversation, but I didn’t do it. I was feeling a little too dizzy.
It wasn’t alcohol, either, though I had a pint glass before me on the bar. It was the unreality of the moment. Of being in Ireland, a country I’d always dreamt of visiting without ever expecting I would. It was the coincidence of hearing Dorothy Sayers discussed while I was sipping a Guinness, a product she’d helped to advertise as a young copywriter. It was the further coincidence of hearing a discussion of an unsolved mystery. I’d sworn off mysteries almost as often as I’d sworn off drinking.
“The coincidence, though,” the man on my right said, yanking me out of my reverie by seeming to read my thoughts. “The coincidence of Tim’s being in that spot when the stone fell. It’s too much entirely.” He was a tall man with a nose like the dorsal fin of a shark, the prominence topped by tiny steel-framed glasses. “Much too much. Whatever was Tim doing up there in the middle of the night?”
“What we all of us hope to be doing in the middle of the night,” the tweedy man said, raising a general laugh. “The question is, who was he doing it with? And who found out about it?”
“That’s enough,” the bartender said, slapping the bar top with a hand that seemed used to the job. He was a big man, though not young, not even by my middle-aged standards, and his name was Mullin. He had a prizefighter’s battered face and a comb-over that was plastered to his scalp by perspiration.
“Tim McKinney was a good lad. He’d be working the sticks here tonight, drawing your precious weekly pint for you, O’Rooney” — he glared at the tweedy man — “if he hadn’t been taken in his prime. Didn’t I plan for him to run this place for my Margaret when I’m gone myself? I won’t have any loose talk about him. Nor about Breda, the widow.”
“The black widow,” someone behind me muttered.
The big hand came down on the bar again. “That’s enough, I said. What must our American, Mr. Keane, be thinking?” he asked, nodding toward me. “And him sleeping under the widow’s roof.”
I was actually sleeping in the widow’s bed. As conversation material went, that would have beaten senseless any observations I might have made on Dorothy Sayers’s technique. But still I played mum, unwilling to brag at the expense of Breda’s reputation. Even if I hadn’t been, I would have feared the scowling Mullin’s displeasure.
The beaky man, perhaps counting on his eyeglasses to save his remarkable nose, showed no such concern. “She hasn’t an alibi for that night, Mr. Mullin. The night Tim died. I heard that myself from Constable Garvey.”
“And what alibi would you expect a respectable woman to have at midnight when her husband’s away?” the exasperated pub owner demanded. “Do you expect signed affidavits? Why should Breda McKinney produce an alibi at all?”
“She shouldn’t,” O’Rooney of the tweeds cut in. “For it can’t have been murder. I’ve reasoned that right off the list. You don’t murder a man by dropping a stone on his head.”
2
I was in Ireland in the first place, in the village of Slane in the county of Meath, on a whim. I’d been on my way from Nairobi, Kenya, to New York, stopping over in Heathrow, outside London. It would take a book to explain the Africa trip, so I’ll just say that I was sent there by a friend to help another friend. At Heathrow I’d seen a poster for Ireland and decided on the spot to treat myself to a side trip, to spend money I really couldn’t afford to spend on a few days in the land of my ancestors.
My first glimpse of Ireland had been through the crazed window of a turboprop and a layer of patchy clouds as we’d descended to land at Dublin. Even that suburban landscape had been so green and lush after the dry brown of Kenya that I’d stared on and on, forgetting for once to be afraid of the business of landing. I’d rented a car and driven north into the Boyne Valley, where my mother’s people had lived. I’d ended up in the crossroads town of Slane because it had a ruined friary and because it was close to Newgrange and its massive Celtic burial mound.
I’d stayed on in Slane for a second night because of Breda McKinney, who owned and ran the Hill of Slane Bed and Breakfast. How it had ended up being bed, breakfast, and sex for me, I still didn’t quite understand.
I was considering the question as I left Mullin’s Pub and started down the hill to Breda’s. Though the June night was mild, the air was damp. I turned the collar of my navy blazer up and held its lapels flat against my chest with one hand.
I guessed Breda to be in her thirties, young to be a widow. She looked younger still despite her hard-luck life. She was a very petite woman whose pale skin was set off by almost black hair, the darkest I’d seen in Ireland. Her eyes were also very dark, very round, and very large. A child’s eyes, when they were happy. A doll’s dead eyes at other times. Her mouth was tiny and thin-lipped, with a tendency toward wry smiles.
She’d greeted me with one of those smiles when I’d shown up late, with no reservation, the prior evening. She’d shown me to her best room — all of them being empty — and then invited me to share her peat fire in the parlor. That invitation had been stretched to include a whiskey and then another, and we’d sat talking together for hours.
We hadn’t talked much of personal things, I now realized. My head had been full of Africa, and I’d shared a little of that story, of the mystery I’d solved there, with this safe stranger. Breda had talked more of the Boyne Valley than herself, of her love for it and of its long history. She’d only touched on her dead husband in passing, never mentioning how he’d died.