The closer we got to the friary, the more ragged it looked. The walls were broken off at random heights and the stones they were built from were quite irregular, gathered rather than quarried. Only around the surviving door and window openings was the gray stone finished. Some of these pieces were carved quite elaborately, with twisting vines and flowers.
Garvey guided me into the maze of broken walls, eventually taking me down a little passageway that ended in a cul-de-sac. Here the walls were fairly tall, a dozen feet or more, except for one spot that looked like it had been cleaved by a giant ax, the fissure running almost to the ground.
“He was found right here in this dead end, facing outward.” The policeman positioned himself in the exact spot. “The stone fell from up there behind me; you can still see the gap.”
I looked around for its final resting place, but there was nothing on the ground bigger than gravel.
“We took it away,” Garvey explained. “As evidence, of course, but also to keep it from becoming some ghoul’s souvenir or a tourist attraction in its own right. It’s the size of a small satchel. Small enough for one man to move and big enough to move one man to the next life.”
6
Garvey and I poked around for a time. I even went so far as to climb up to examine the spot where the fatal stone had rested. I was able to do that because of the rough construction of the wall’s back side, which provided a wealth of hand- and footholds. I couldn’t see any indication that the murder stone had been jimmied free, but several in the top course were dangerously loose, the lichen-covered mortar having been worn to powder in places by rain and wind.
“I checked the ground carefully for some sign that a ladder had been set there,” Garvey observed as I climbed down. “I found none, but then, as you’ve demonstrated, a reasonably active man wouldn’t need a ladder.
“Still, as tempting as it is to treat this as a murder, I just can’t bring myself to do it. How could the murderer have known exactly where McKinney would be standing? He had to know that or else scramble along the top of the wall like a squirrel, watching McKinney and waiting for his chance. The thing’s impossible.”
We were walking back down the hill by then, our view the beautiful farmland of the gently sloping valley.
Garvey was lecturing on: “You could say that little passage was where McKinney and his girl, Maggie or whoever, always had their sex, that he’d naturally wait for her there, but that doesn’t really answer. McKinney might have stood anywhere in that alleyway waiting. Or he might have paced. And neither of those would have served. The stone could only have hit him in one spot, and there was no way for any murderer to know that McKinney would stand there, no way for an accomplice to maneuver him into position without giving the game away or being in deadly danger herself when the stone came crashing down.”
We paused at the gate to take a last look up the hill. I said, “Three months ago it was March. Not the best time of year for having outdoor sex.”
Garvey laughed his tenor laugh. “Our Junes may be cooler than yours are in America, but our Marches are milder. And our facilities for conducting illicit affairs are less numerous. But I see your point. For me, though, a greater objection is that the whole hill is sacred ground.”
“That didn’t stop the friars in the old days, from what I’ve been told.”
“Oh yes? Is that something else you picked up in the pub?”
We started down the road toward town.
“No. I heard it on my way home last night. From an unfriendly guy big enough to juggle satchel-sized stones.”
“That could only be Jimmy Kerrigan. He’s another one who’s been acting strangely since McKinney’s death. And, though it’s a sin to repeat gossip, his name was once linked with Breda McKinney’s.”
“Once?”
“They’ve not been seen so much as smiling at one another since her husband died.”
Three months is a long time to fast, I heard Breda say. Makes a woman less choosy.
We paused at the crossroads to let a tour bus roar past. When the noise died away, I asked, “Who around here would know the old stories about the friary, the history and the legends?”
“Once upon a time, I would have recommended the dead Timothy. Now he’s part of the history of the place himself, poor man. Try Sean O’Rooney.”
“Little guy who smokes a pipe?”
“The same. He owns an antique shop, The Cobwebs, it’s called, on down the road here almost to the bottom of the hill.”
The front doors of the pub burst open before we were halfway across the road. Mullin charged out and headed straight for me, spitting his words out ahead of him.
“Bastard! Bastard! What did you do to my little girl? What did you say to her? What do you mean, stirring up things you don’t understand? You bastard!”
Most of that speech was delivered over Garvey’s broad shoulder. If it hadn’t been for him, Mullin would have had me under the wheels of the next tour bus.
The breeze was blowing the Mullin comb-over straight up like an open lid, exposing his pink scalp and making him look more pathetic than threatening. And suddenly he was sounding pathetic, all his anger spent, the small, ice-blue eyes he’d passed on to his daughter welling up with tears.
“How long does she have to be punished for one mistake? For a mistake of the heart? For a simple human weakness? Tell me that.”
“Nobody’s punishing her,” Garvey crooned. He’d gone from blocking the pub owner to propping him up.
“I’m taking her away. To my sister’s in Kilkenny. I should have done that months ago. I see that now.”
“That’s probably for the best,” Garvey said, still using his nursery voice. He looked over his shoulder at me, then jerked his head in the direction of the High Street.
I took the hint and hurried down the hill.
7
Though he’d caused my heart rate to spike, I was in Mullin’s debt. The sobbing father had moved a rumor into the fact column: his daughter and McKinney had been lovers. Breda had told me that she would have preferred a skirt-chasing husband to a ghost-chasing one. That she could handle the former. I wondered now how she had handled him.
I was also thinking of something Garvey had said. That the killing couldn’t have been murder because there was no way a murderer could know exactly where McKinney would stand during his last moment on earth. It was the same point the man I was hurrying to see, Sean O’Rooney, the little antiques dealer, had made during the bull session in the pub.
Now I was twisting that idea around, or rather, standing it on its head. Given as a working premise that McKinney’s death had been murder, it followed that the murderer had somehow lured him to an exact spot in the old friary. The thing couldn’t have worked any other way. So my job was to figure out exactly how it had been done.
If I was lucky, figuring out how would also tell me who. The reason real murderers seldom used the kind of elaborate murder method that Dorothy Sayers had delighted in dreaming up, besides the fact that most murderers were too stoned or drunk or mad with rage, was that a complicated scheme, once figured out, could point the way back to the murderer as effectively as any blood trail.
I found O’Rooney’s little house very near the River Boyne. The Cobwebs took up the whole first story, though it might only have counted as half a story, the ceiling of the shop was that low. Low and heavily beamed, the black hand-hewn timbers making me bob my head repeatedly as the proud owner showed me around the place.