Unfortunately, the front door of the pub was locked. I went around to the side door, following the breakfast smells. My knock was answered by a woman who identified herself as Mullin’s cook and looked like she might be his sister. His older, burlier sister. She told me that the owner was off to market, asked me if I’d had my breakfast, and invited me in.
I decided that the cook might do as well or better than Mullin as a source of information, but she didn’t give me a chance to start the interview. She sat me and a mug of coffee at a round table in a very small dining room, asked me how I liked my eggs, and bustled out.
The little room was decorated with photographs. Family photographs, I saw when I got up to look them over. Mullin appeared in most of them, recognizable at any age due to his mashed nose. He appeared in one with a woman and a young girl and in many of the others with the girl alone. I decided that she was the daughter he’d mentioned — Margaret — and that her mother had either died or taken off. In one shot, Mullin was standing with his arm around a white-haired man. Behind them was the familiar pub, but the name above the door was Carlin and Mullin’s.
While I was studying this picture, I heard a foot scuff behind me. A young woman was standing in the kitchen doorway, a thin woman a head taller than Breda McKinney, very delicately featured and lightly freckled. Her long brown hair had a frazzled, overcooked quality, which didn’t keep her from chewing on a strand of it.
For a second I thought I’d guessed wrong about Mullin being wifeless, for this was surely the woman in the group photo, Margaret’s mother. Then I realized that it was Margaret herself, grown up. Or almost so.
“Morning,” I said. “You’re Margaret, right? Your dad told me about you. My name’s Owen. I’m from America.”
Only the last part of that interested her. She gave off the hair chewing to ask, “Where in America?”
“New Jersey, the Garden State.” The odds were she’d never find out how inaccurate that nickname was.
“That’s near New York,” she said.
“Yes. I’ve lived there, too.”
Another layer of her many-layered shyness dropped away. “I’m going to New York someday. To live.”
“You’ll like it.” Actually I thought she’d have her hair chewed down to the roots in a week. But I wanted to stay on her good side. She was another potential source of information about the dead McKinney. He’d worked in her father’s bar, after all. And Mullin had planned for McKinney to run the place for Margaret when he was gone, according to what he’d told his customers last night. Now that I’d met her, I understood why Mullin would want to make that kind of provision.
It seemed to me that Margaret and I were as friendly as we were going to get, so I said, “I guess you knew Timothy McKinney pretty well.”
She stood there frozen for a second, only her small blue eyes — very small compared with Breda’s — moving. They darted back and forth, scanning the air between us as though she were reading and rereading my words.
Then she was gone, slamming the door behind her.
5
I didn’t get any more out of the cook than I’d gotten out of Margaret. The big woman had observed the girl’s flight and blamed me for it, not unreasonably. I was shown out without so much as a burnt piece of toast.
That concluded the planned portion of my day. I was standing in the crossroads before the pub, trying to regroup, when a man rode up on a bicycle. He was wearing the dark blue uniform of the Irish police, the Guarda.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Morning,” I said. “Constable Garvey?”
“However did you know my name?”
“I heard it last night in the pub.”
Garvey stopped his bike, still eyeing me closely. He was a solidly built young man, not overly tall. His teeth were crooked and prematurely yellow, but his smile looked genuine.
“Heard my name in the pub? Taken in vain, I’m sure.”
“Mentioned in connection with Timothy McKinney’s death,” I said. “With the investigation of it.”
“A sad business.”
“I’d like to hear more about it.”
Garvey had been straddling his bike. He stepped off it now. “Perhaps you’d better put us on an equal footing first, by introducing yourself.”
I did, explaining that I was stopping over at the Hill of Slane Bed and Breakfast. I didn’t mention having once had my breakfast in bed with my landlady, but something of my concern for Breda must have come through. The constable was nodding before I’d finished.
“I feel for her situation. She’s in limbo, you know. True limbo. If only I could have brought the thing to a satisfactory conclusion. Worked out an answer.”
He was looking up the hill toward the ruined friary, gray and stark against the morning sky. “Would you care to see where it happened? I have to go up there and unlock the tourist gate.”
He stashed his bike in the pub’s alley and we started up the road on foot, Garvey explaining that the bike was his doctor’s idea and not his regulation ride. Cycling seemed to be working out for him. He spoke without effort as we climbed, while I was breathing seriously by the time we reached the iron gate in the wall that surrounded the ruins. A rusted tin sign informed me that the gate was locked each night at eight.
I said, “Tim McKinney died around midnight, didn’t he?”
“As near as anyone can tell. His body wasn’t found until the next morning — by a couple from your St. Paul, Minnesota, by the way. Certainly the last anyone saw of Tim alive was when he locked up the pub a little after eleven.”
“The sign says the gate’s locked at eight. How did he get in?”
Garvey’s laugh was in the tenor range. “The sign is for you tourists. We try to scare you out of here at a decent hour so you don’t get hurt climbing around in the dark. Any local knows a dozen different ways to get inside. The perimeter wall’s only a few stones high in places. The old friary’s always been a popular spot for kids learning to smoke and drink and for couples. Courting couples, you might call them.”
We started up the hill to the ruins, a much steeper climb than the one we’d made from the pub. There was no path, just very lush grass, well dotted with cow patties though no perpetrators were visible. At this range the jumbled ruins had resolved themselves into two main structures and a fringe of minor ones. An almost intact square tower dominated the ruin on the left, identifying it as a former church. The structure to our right must have been the friary. It looked to have a bigger footprint than the church’s, and one or two of its surviving walls were almost as tall as the square tower.
“Speaking of courting couples,” I said between breaths, “was there any talk about Tim McKinney and Margaret Mullin?”
It was an idea I’d been kicking around since the girl had bolted at the mention of McKinney’s name.
“Not before his death,” Garvey said. “But afterwards, yes. Maggie Mullin’s always been a quiet girl, a fey girl. But since Tim died she’s gotten almost strange with it. That started people asking themselves whether she hadn’t been sweet on Tim. If she had been, it could answer another big question, of course, which is who Tim was hoping to see that night, if in fact he was up here for a tryst.”
“Was he — was the body clothed?”
“Completely. Which ought to put the lie to the story that someone caught him in the act, so to speak. That and the fact that he was struck on the crown of his head, proving he was on his feet at the fatal moment.”
When we finally reached the top of the hill, I was surprised to see graves around the ruined church, some of which looked quite new.
“Tim’s not buried up here if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Garvey, who had followed my gaze. “He’s in his family’s plot over in Navin. But this cemetery is still used. You’ll see that often in Ireland: new graves around an ancient church. Makes for a peaceful resting place, I always think. The spot you want to see is over there, in the old friary.”