I wasn’t really looking for physical evidence, though I badly needed some. I wanted to verify that it had really taken two people to work the murder scheme, one to dislodge the stone that had killed McKinney and one to distract the victim by appearing in the doorway as the ghost of Catriona. Actually, I was secretly hoping that I was wrong, that no one, not even a woman as petite as Breda McKinney, could have found a footing in the old wall, that her husband had been distracted by the promise of a ghost only and not by the appearance of one.
But when I reached the top of the ladder, I found that there was ample footing in the doorway, which was floored with broad, almost-green stones. I also found the physical evidence that I hadn’t been expecting to find. The green stones in the base of the doorway, the stones on which the false Catriona had to have stood, had been secured with a grouting of very modern cement, which had barely begun to weather in the three months it had been in place.
I was yanked from my thoughts by the sight of a man hurrying across the gravel space directly beneath the ledge I was studying. It was Tutty, the farmer who was supposed to be holding my ladder. He glanced over his shoulder just before he disappeared around a corner, and his expression suggested that he’d just seen Catriona herself, or perhaps the headless abbot.
I looked down the ladder and saw someone very alive and very large. It was Breda McKinney’s one-time beau, Jimmy Kerrigan.
9
Kerrigan shook the ladder. “Come along down now. We’ve a visit to make.”
I considered scrambling up into the old doorway and pushing the ladder away. But there was no telling when the next load of tourists would happen by. And no way to stop Kerrigan from replacing the ladder and coming up to get me.
So I started down, the ladder rock-steady under the big man’s hands.
“That’s fine now,” he said when I was on the ground. He wasn’t gigantic in the full daylight, but he was big enough, his face broad and heavy-jawed but not unhandsome, the eyes I hadn’t been able to make out at our first meeting a brownish green.
He took the ladder down and held it easily at his side with one hand. “Don’t want anyone getting hurt, do we?” he asked.
I was thinking about making a run for it when he reached out and grabbed my arm, saying, “We’re off, then.”
Once we were outside the friary, he tossed the ladder onto the ground. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had tied it into a bow first, my fear having granted him such epic qualities. In reality, his grip on my arm was almost gentle. All the same, I didn’t see me shrugging it off.
When we reached the gate at the bottom of the grassy slope, Kerrigan released my arm and put his massive one around my shoulders. We were two pals then, out for a stroll. That disguise would only work on people who didn’t come within earshot, since I planned to yell for help to the first passerby we met in town.
Kerrigan countered that by not taking us through town. We struck off across the field opposite the friary. There were cows in this field, too, but they wisely made way for my guide, who chatted as we walked.
“Didn’t take my advice about the west, did you, Mr. Keane? You missed some sights, let me tell you. The Cliffs of Mohr, say. You not being afraid of heights, you could have done some fine scampering on those. And the Connemara Peninsula. They’ve whole mountains of stone out there, and the ground around them so rough and wild it makes this little valley of ours look like a doily some grandmother needled up.”
“If we’re going that far,” I said, “we should stop for my car.”
I felt Kerrigan’s booming laugh through my shoulder, which was jammed against his chest.
“We’re not going that far. We’ve a visit to make, as I said. A meeting to attend. You have, that is.”
“Who am I meeting? Tim McKinney?”
Neither of us laughed at that or spoke again for a time. I could see by then that we were circling the town, Kerrigan’s intention evidently being to approach it from a safer side. Sure enough, shortly after we’d crossed the Newgrange road, we headed up into Slane, into a crooked lane I knew fairly well, the lane that held Breda McKinney’s house.
Outside her door, Kerrigan released my shoulders and seized my arm again. This time there was nothing gentle about his grip.
“Listen,” he said. In the filtered light of the lane, his eyes had lost their brownish shading and looked quite green. As green and as hard as the stones of the haunted doorway. “You’re going inside to talk with herself. I’m staying out here, but don’t even think about slipping out the back. I’ll be watching through the window. If I see you leave the parlor, I’ll be on you faster than the next lie can come to your lips.
“First, though, there’s something I want to say. I love Breda. I loved her when she was married to my friend Tim, though it damned my soul to do it. Tim’s death should have freed us, freed Breda and me, but it didn’t. Breda could only see our sin after that, not our love. She’s been punishing herself for that sin ever since. And me with her. You’re the latest punishment for me. The only reason you have a tooth left in your head is that I intend to stand my punishment like a man, to say every Ave of my penance and so get through to the end of it.
“Now go in there and talk to her. And mind what I said about bolting.”
10
Breda was dressed like a widow today, in a black sweater and slacks. At her neck was a circular silver pin that bore the spiral design I’d seen over and over again at the Celtic tomb in Newgrange. Her black hair was flowing freely again and looked like a nun’s veil against her very pale face.
“It’s nearly eleven, Owen,” she said. We were standing on opposite ends of her hooked rug, facing each other like fighters before the bell. “Time to check out.”
“So to speak.”
She let that one pass. “Whatever have you been up to this morning?”
She had to know the answer to that, since she’d known where to send her trained ape to nab me. But I played along. “I’ve been solving your husband’s murder. It was murder, by the way. Tim was lured up to the old friary by the promise of a ghost, so you were right about the murder weapon being something mystical. And it wasn’t just any ghost. It was one so rare that it would have established his reputation as a ghost chaser.”
“Lured by who?”
I shrugged. “Some drinking buddy.” I had a candidate in mind: the man whose grip I could still feel around my left biceps. I could easily picture Kerrigan slipping McKinney the tall tale, explaining that he’d been up to the ruins with some willing girl when Catriona had appeared and scared them both out of the mood. If McKinney had even needed that much convincing.
“And your husband didn’t die disappointed. He saw his ghost just before he was killed. That is, he saw his murderer’s accomplice, a woman, maybe done up in white, floating in an old doorway twenty feet above the ground.”
“You surely don’t suspect me of that, Owen? You of all people.”
“Me of all people.”
“Why? Why would I do it?”
I started to glance toward the window Kerrigan was steaming up and checked myself, afraid that even a stray glance might draw him inside. “To be free of McKinney,” I said.
“We’ve divorce now in Ireland. We don’t need to kill our spouses to be free of them. And don’t say it was for money. There was no money. Tim’s uncle’s illness saw to that. This house has always been mine, a legacy from my mother. And don’t say it was for the insurance, either, for there wasn’t any of that. Though Tim spoke of insurance often over those last few days. The idea of it seemed to be haunting him. I’ve wondered since if he hadn’t had some premonition of his death. But he took none out, I checked.”