I decided that she was trying to distract me with all the talk of money and insurance. And I wouldn’t be distracted. “How about jealousy for a motive? I’ve found out that Tim was cheating on you. Suppose you found out three months back? Would that be motive enough?”
“Timmy cheating?” Breda asked, almost hopeful. “Who with?”
“Margaret Mullin.”
I thought Breda’s laugh would bring Kerrigan charging in. It was that loud and it had that much pain in it.
“Maggie? That simple thing? You must be daft. She and Tim were like cousins. Wasn’t Tim’s uncle Maggie’s godfather and her father’s partner? Weren’t Tim and Maggie raised together almost? Years back, Uncle Seamus and Mullin tried to push them together, but nothing happened. It would have been better for Tim if something had, if he had fallen in love with Maggie and married her. Then he wouldn’t have been cheated out of his share of the pub.”
“Your husband’s uncle was Mullin’s partner?”
“Yes, Seamus Carlin, Tim’s mother’s brother.”
The white-haired man in the old photo in Mullin’s house. “How was your husband cheated?”
“He wasn’t, really. That’s only my anger talking. Tim was supposed to inherit half of the pub. That’s what Uncle Seamus always said. But the poor man’s last illness left a mountain of bills and no money in the bank. Tim had no choice but to sell his interest in the pub. Mullin gave him more than a fair price and kept Tim on as barman, but it was a cruel blow still. Tim was never the same man afterward. Not to me or anyone else. Our troubles all started then.”
“That’s when you turned to Kerrigan.”
I think I hurt her worse with that than I had with the accusation of murder.
“You of all people,” she said again. “My champion. Thinking the worst of me.” She covered her face with her hands and started to sway slightly. “What have I done?”
I was asking myself the same question. I’d finally understood why Breda had taken me into her bed. It wasn’t just for company or for sex. It wasn’t even just as a penance, for herself or for Kerrigan. It was because, on that first night, during our long talk by the fire, I’d described solving a mystery in Africa. She’d set me the task of solving a mystery for her, not by asking me to do it but simply by sending me up to the pub to hear about it. And I’d ended up accusing her, as everyone else in the village had done. Me of all people, her somewhat slow champion.
I gently drew her hands away from her face. “Tell me what your husband said about insurance before he died.”
“What? Nothing really. I woke up one night and he was sitting up beside me, muttering the word insurance like it had come to him in a dream. A day or two later, I happened upon him just hanging up the phone. He’d only say he’d been talking to an insurance company, but not what they’d been talking about. After he died, I found a list of insurance companies with check marks against some of the names. I called them all, but none had issued him a policy. He must only have been after quotes or something.”
“Or something,” I repeated.
The front door opened. Through the narrow opening I could see Jimmy Kerrigan and a second man who had one of Kerrigan’s arms pinned behind his back. It was Constable Garvey.
“I heard about your little hike with Jimmy here,” the policeman said. “One of our shut-ins saw most of it through her window. I thought I’d better come down and see how you were. Will we be discussing charges at all?”
“Yes,” I said, “but not against Kerrigan. You’d better get up to the pub and stop Mullin before he takes his daughter away.”
11
As it turned out, Garvey only just made it. Mullin had his daughter packed in the car and ready to go when the constable trotted up. Mullin then tried to drag Maggie back inside the pub, but with Kerrigan as his backup, Garvey had little trouble separating the girl from her father and questioning her. I sat in.
We had our talk in the pub’s dining room and photo gallery. It wasn’t necessary for the constable to trick Maggie or break her down. Her father had frightened her thoroughly, and she was more than ready to talk.
She told us that Seamus Carlin hadn’t died deep in debt, as Tim McKinney and the rest of the village had been told. Carlin had had an insurance policy set aside to pay his last bills and secure his half of the pub for his nephew. But Carlin’s executor, Mullin, had hidden the policy away in order to swindle McKinney while pretending to be his benefactor. Somehow McKinney had gotten on the scent of that policy. When Mullin learned that the wronged man was calling insurance companies, he’d worked out a plan to kill him. The pub owner had whispered the ghost story into McKinney’s ear. Maggie herself had played Catriona, told by her father beforehand that it was a joke and afterward that it was a joke gone bad.
She’d long suspected the truth about that night, but had been afraid to speak.
Later that day Constable Garvey stopped by as I was stowing my bag in my rental car in the lane outside the Hill of Slane Bed and Breakfast.
“Leaving so soon, Mr. Keane? You solve our mystery for us, secure my promotion to sergeant, and then ride off like that masked fellow on the television?”
“Heigh-ho, Silver,” I said, slamming the trunk closed.
“You’ll be pleased to hear that Mullin has confessed. Not much point in him holding out after all Maggie told us. It was clever of her dad to pretend to admit to an affair between the girl and McKinney while he was attacking you this morning. Fooled me, I must admit.”
“He had to have an excuse for taking her away,” I said. “He couldn’t trust her any longer. She was too close to cracking.”
“Do you suppose he would have hurt Maggie? Silenced her for good, I mean, his own daughter?”
“I don’t know.”
Garvey sighed. “I don’t suppose we ever will know. I took a walk up to the friary and saw that cement work you found in the old doorway. A fine job of masonry. But why did Mullin go to that length? The promise of Catriona alone would have been enough to get Tim in the fatal spot. Mullin didn’t have to provide a show.”
“The promise would have gotten McKinney there, but would it have distracted him while Mullin was tipping the stone? That had to have made some noise, even if Mullin had had the stone propped up and ready. So Mullin needed a diversion, and to get it, he was willing to risk his daughter’s neck. To me, that suggests that she was also at risk today.”
Garvey’s yellow smile faded out for a moment and then returned. “But I’ve forgotten to tell you something else I found up there, something you missed: a fat eyebolt stuck in the stone halfway up one side of the doorway. Put there by Mullin to secure a safety line for his daughter. He was looking out for her, you see. So maybe he wouldn’t have harmed her after all.”
“You’re too sentimental to be a policeman,” I said.
He laughed. “In New York, maybe. But here...”
We looked down toward the valley Kerrigan had compared to a grandmother’s doily, to the truncated view of the valley offered by the open end of the lane. At that moment the view included a couple walking hand-in-hand, a courting couple Garvey might have called the mismatched pair, the giant man and the tiny woman.
“Things seem to have worked out for the best,” I said, managing to sound cool and indifferent to my own ear.
But not to Garvey’s. “Who’s too sentimental for this line of work? Safe home, Mr. Keane.”