The Death of a Joyce Scholar Read online

  “Not to worry, ma’am,” Ward said in an undertone, passing the artist.

  “Mind yourself,” she replied. “They do it everyday, the bastards.”

  Contained behind a thick stand of shrubs and fence, the garden was a still, sultry vessel of bright sunlight and mounded, fusty beds patterned with bright flowers. At one corner two attendants were at work on a ladder, clipping hedges. Several people occupied benches around the center oval pathway; others strolled the narrow walkways.

  Ward decided to act. Here, at least, his advantage in speed could be employed to run down the tall one, the one with the stick; perhaps he might even nab a second, though he knew his chances of that were slight. Slowly he moved his fingers to the button of his taupe linen suit coat and slipped it free. Raising then letting fall his right shoulder, he felt the comforting weight of the Beretta in the holster near his right bicep. Small and light, yet not lacking punch, it allowed the line of his suit coat to remain undisturbed, and was to Ward a kind of equivalent of what he viewed as his own capabilities both in and out of the ring.

  He increased his speed as the three approached the oval, where he judged it best to take them. It was the deepest part of the square, with at least a seventy-yard dash to any exit. He flexed the fingers of his left hand and, though still walking, glided now quickly toward them as they approached the widest arc of the central flower bed.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Excuse me.” His left hand darted between the plackets of the suit coat and snatched out the Beretta, which he raised to the level of his left ear, the barrel pointed at the sky. “Hello.”

  With his right hand he reached out to touch a shoulder of the tall one and then spring back, but, as though on cue, his sidekicks suddenly dropped down on their haunches and, whipping the ashplant off his shoulder, the tall one struck out at the wrist that held the Beretta, which fired before it was slammed into the side of Ward’s head, his temple and his ear.

  Ward saw stars and went suddenly deaf on one side. Then something was wrong with his wrist; he could no longer hold the automatic. It slipped from his grasp and fell to the footpath as he watched the tall one pivot around, the stick flashing in the sun.

  It caught him this time solidly in the ear, which seemed to explode, filling his mind with the whitest light he had ever seen; suddenly he was down on the pavement. The light then took on the color of blood and the shape of a grainy sluggish whirlpool, down which he felt himself slipping.

  Fighting it, he forced his eyes open and saw the big one stuffing the Beretta under his belt before they dispersed, each in a different direction. He saw the attendants at the ladder, shouting and shaking fists, begin moving toward him. He saw a woman gaping down, her mouth open in horror.

  And he felt his own blood, hot and oily, seeping out of his ear and down his neck along the line of the collar of his shirt.

  NINE

  FOXROCK, though now somewhat passé as a fashionable address, still had its prestigious neighborhoods. Professor Fergus Flood’s was one.

  Here the houses were self-contained, set well back from the road, and stylish. With arches over inset doors and windows, and palm trees of two types in the front yard, the house appeared slightly Moorish or Iberian. A Fiat 500 was parked under a narrow car port that looked to have been built especially for it and was attached to the side of a single-bay garage.

  There the shadows were deep and cool and the white enamel was pitted and dingy, as though the car had sat long without much care. There was a red L learner’s sticker fixed to the rear window.

  “As I said, it’s my wife’s machine. But mostly my daughter drives it. I prefer…” Flood motioned to the garage. Through a window McGarr could see a later-model Rover, midnight blue. “When I drive, which is seldom. You’ve got to be a bit coordinated in this banger. Your arm could fall off, all the shifting that’s needed.” He reached for the door handle, but McGarr stopped him.

  “Please—allow me.”

  The air inside the car was stale and stank of hot plastic and petrol. Once on assignment while with Interpol, McGarr had been forced to rent a Cinque Cento, and now the tiny interior and the stiff bracing of the seat against his back was enough to bring back the stunning headache the machine had given him on the bianco mountain roads of the Abruzzi.

  He noted the lipstick-stained cigarette butts in the ashtray—Rothman’s and some others, which on first glance looked like Disc Blues—the pair of men’s mud-stained Wellies below the passenger seat, and the pile of books and papers on the jump seat behind.

  “As I was saying, Hiliary’s a third-year student,” Flood explained to Sinclaire as McGarr continued to examine the car, pushing open the latch of the tiny glove box with the barrel of his pen, flicking up the insurance card and the single road map that it contained. “Literature. Actually, Kevin was her tutor. I’m afraid she’s taken all of this rather hard.”

  A red, felt marker had mapped a route to Dunlavin in Kildare. A curve on a byroad was circled with the advisory, “David’s parents’ demesne.” There was a St. Christopher medal over the rearview mirror, and a sticker of the Sandinista flag and the exhortation NICARAGUA LIBRE affixed to the metallic surface of the dash.

  “Maura, my wife’s,” Flood said, of the medal. “Hiliary’s,” he indicated the sticker. “Neither of which I support, mind, but the generational disjunction—in belief, in focus—is revealing, wouldn’t you say?”

  Climbing fully out of the car, McGarr tilted back the seat, all of which rose in a unit to expose a thin-bladed, blue-steel kitchen knife on the rubber mat below. It was something used for specialty filleting—fish, McGarr guessed—and was, with its pale wooden handle, clearly new. With the barrel of the pen, McGarr flipped it over. The stain on the other side of the handle was rust-colored, deeper on the periphery where the blood had clotted. Near the heel was a stamp that said it had been hand-forged by Everdur, Gottingen.

  McGarr drew in a breath and let it out slowly, then raised his head to Flood. “Yours?”

  Flood’s jowls again appeared blue in the shadowed light, and shivered as he shook his head. “I mean, it could be. But—” His head swung to the house.

  “Again—tell us who would have used this car Bloomsday night?” Sinclaire asked.

  Flood hunched his shoulders and McGarr eased the seat back in place. Without closing the door, he stepped back from the car and glanced at Sinclaire, who turned toward McGarr’s Mini-Cooper.

  “Perhaps we should go into the house,” McGarr suggested. “Would your wife and daughter be at home?”

  “Wife,” said Flood.

  Maura, thought McGarr. Of the medal.

  Maura Flood was a large woman whose surplus of flesh appeared to have pooled in the proper places. With wide shoulders, her upper chest—exposed in a flower-print summer dress—was a tanned expanse of smooth skin that attracted McGarr’s eye and looked—in the shade of a back garden wall where wrought-iron furniture painted white had been grouped—cool to the touch. Yet when she stood to draw a chair for him, he noted that her waist was still thin; the pleats of the skirt fanned over the radical arcs of her hips.

  On one was a palm frond, on the other a red shape that suggested some large tropical fruit. Sitting again, she crossed her legs, and McGarr believed he heard the lubricious glide of thigh across thigh. There was a cigarette between the fingers of her right hand; a crystal tumbler with ice and a slice of lime sat on the table before her. A dark, handsome woman of at least forty, her eyes were deeply circled, as though she had been crying, or had not slept well recently.

  Flood insisted on remaining in their company. “Maura is my wife,” he explained when Sinclaire said that they would prefer to interview her alone. “I won’t abandon her.”

  To what or whom, McGarr wondered, watching her draw deeply on the cigarette, her dark eyes drifting up to the scuds of cloud that were drifting across the summer sky.

  “It’s either I’m allowed to remain by her side or I forbid this to continue with
out our solicitor being present.”

  Said Sinclaire, “You mentioned that before. Is it a threat? If you think you need a solicitor, Mr. Flood, it’s your option.”

  Maura Flood allowed her gaze to rest on her husband for a bitter moment before moving off. “And you are…again…?” she asked McGarr, who repeated his name and title. “You’ve come about Kevin?”

  McGarr nodded.

  With the nail of her middle finger she flicked the cigarette butt deep onto the grass of the back garden.

  “How many times—” Flood began, but broke off, and, like an oversize retriever, plodded out into the sun to search for the cigarette. He found several and ponderously began collecting them.

  His wife raised the glass and drained it. They heard a sound from the house, and Sinclaire pushed himself out of the chair. It couldn’t be the Tech Squad yet, their having only just been alerted.

  “Bloomsday night. When Kevin Coyle was murdered. Can you tell me where you were?”

  “Here.”

  “With your daughter?”

  “For a while. Hiliary left around seven for the cinema.”

  Flood, still out in the grass, now noticed that Sinclaire had left, and holding what he had found in a cupped hand, moved toward the house.

  “And you?”

  In a movement that reminded McGarr of the swing of a gun carriage, she redirected her shoulders and eyes. She was a pretty woman with a long, slightly retroussé nose and a delicate chin that made her wide, well-formed mouth seem pensive. “Me?” There was surprise in that. “Why me?”

  McGarr hunched his shoulders, and suddenly tiring of the—was it?—preciousness of nearly everybody he had dealt with in the previous two days, said, “Yes, you. Did you know Kevin Coyle, and how well? Did you see him”—again he checked her eyes and her upper chest and the ankle of the leg that was crossed over the other and was tanned and shapely. And he thought of what Flood himself had said of Coyle: his talent, his youth, his charisma and taste for women—“on the night he was murdered? Were you perhaps his lover? Did he return here for a little tête-à-tête? Were your husband and he at each other’s throats—for business reasons, for professional reasons, for reasons of the heart, or at least of the body?”

  Her eyes widened. McGarr leaned forward in the seat and twined his fingers. “You or your husband or—am I guessing, here?—your daughter, or all three of you, are in this thing right up to your necks. Your car, the Fiat Five hundred out there in the garage…” He waited until she nodded. He wanted to make sure he was understood. “It has been placed at the murder scene, at the time of Kevin Coyle’s death, with Kevin Coyle in it coming, and out of it going. And the murder weapon—a filleting knife—happens to have been found under its seat.

  “Now, tell me, Mrs. Flood—do you cook? May I see your kitchen? Do you own such a knife?”

  She held his gaze for a moment before reaching for the packet of Rothman’s on the table before her. There was a tremor in the hand that snapped the lighter. Blowing out the smoke, she looked away toward the farther end of the garden.

  McGarr could hear voices in the house: Sinclaire’s, which was angry, and then Flood’s in an angrier response. “…My daughter!”

  Said Maura Flood, “Yes, I know Kevin Coyle. And, yes, I suppose he was my lover, or rather, I was one of his several. And, yes, he wanted to return here or someplace Thursday night. He phoned me from McGarrity’s in Foley Street said he would meet me anywhere I liked. He said Fergus”—her eyes flickered toward the house where an argument was continuing—“had told him that he was coming straight home and that, if I were to leave then, I could be gone before Fergus got home. We agreed to meet at the Drumcondra Inn. The owner is—was—a friend of Kevin’s and made a room available to us whenever—

  “I bathed and dressed quickly, but not quickly enough. Stepping out the door, I saw lights swinging down the wall of the house across the street. At that hour it could only have been Fergus, and I tried to”—she turned her head away from her husband and Sinclaire, who now entered the garden together from the house—“steal out here and out into the alley. I thought I could walk ’round to the street and get into the car and away before he—

  “But then,” she lowered her voice, “I realized that he would have already seen the car and…I decided instead to walk out to the Stillorgan Road. Perhaps the odd cab might be returning to the city, but after fifteen or twenty minutes I tired of waiting. And then the…moment had passed. I only wish—”

  Now joining them, Flood asked, “You only wish what, dearest?”

  Said Sinclaire in a firm tone, “Keep your counsel, Mr. Flood. The Chief Superintendent is asking the questions.”

  And to McGarr, “The daughter was in the house. When I asked her to join us here, she bolted and yer man here prevented me from detaining her. In the car.”

  “The Fiat?”

  “The same.”

  McGarr’s head went back. He flushed with shame and anger. “Christ!”

  Said Sinclaire, “I’ve already got on to Metro and the Tech Squad, so…”

  At least their embarrassment would be contained.

  “Sure, she’s just a wee girl,” said Flood. “She’s got nothing to do with any of this.”

  But he did, and the wife too. And why, then, did the daughter run? McGarr struggled to contain his emotions. How far could she get in an automobile that could top fifty miles per hour flat out? And which was conspicuous: There probably weren’t a handful of Cinque Centi in the entire country.

  He drew in a breath and reached for his shirt pocket and a cigarette, which was also a Rothman’s. “When you returned, was the car in the drive? The Fiat Five hundred?”

  She thought for a moment. “I honestly can’t tell you. By that time I was resigned to another stimulating evening.” Her eyes flashed up at Flood. “I poured myself a stiff drink and went up to my room.”

  “And your husband, Mr. Flood here. What was he about?”

  On a raised arm, the hand with the cigarette waved dismissively. “I couldn’t tell you. Fortunately I neither saw nor heard him.”

  McGarr turned to Flood. “Did you leave the house after you returned from Foley Street?”

  Flood nodded. “I did. When I discovered that my darling wife wasn’t in, I went looking for her. It was a wild night”—he raised an eyebrow—“and I was worried about her.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, different venues. Jury’s, the Burlington, Sachs Hotel.”

  McGarr watched Maura Flood turn to her husband for the first time.

  “Then you know she was having an affair with Kevin Coyle.”

  “Affair is hardly the word, sir.”

  Their eyes were fused now, and McGarr waited. At length he asked, “What is the word, then?”

  “Well, affair suggests affaire de coeur. But knowing both parties intimately as I do and did, I would characterize it more as a brief, pointed congruence. Or, rather, a spate of brief and—here I’m only guessing—ultimately unsatisfying congruences. More in the nature of appetite gratification, I should imagine. Something like smoking or drinking.” A finger motioned to the glass on the metal table—

  McGarr studied Flood’s saturnine face and the glint of amusement in his eye, and he decided that he did not much care for the man. He wondered if, after having been Coyle’s tutor, he had attempted to direct him as well, and if the “congruence” between his wife and colleague had been spiced by a kind of retribution. “Which car did you use?”

  Flood looked away. “The Rover, of course.”

  “And the Fiat. Where was that?”

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t notice it at all.”

  McGarr struggled to conceal his disbelief. “Certainly you must have checked to see if it was there when you went out to look for your wife. And when you returned. Wouldn’t that have been the first thing you would have looked for?”

  The slight smile was back on Flood’s soft lips. “As I stated, I didn’t not
ice it at all.”

  In patent disgust Maura Flood turned her head away.

  Was it a test of semantics that Flood now desired? McGarr wondered. It was the first love of Sergeant McKeon, McGarr’s resident interrogator. Slowly and with infinite impatience, with bullying and wheedling and sly confidentiality, McKeon would discover just what Flood did and did not notice Bloomsday night. In scrupulous detail. “For the moment, Professor Flood, you’re charged with impeding the investigation of a capital crime, which is a felony.” McGarr stood and turned to Sinclaire. “Who’d be on the desk of the Irish Times now?”

  “Nolan, perhaps. Or O’Malley.”

  Flood’s smile collapsed. “It’d ruin me, it would.”

  McGarr pointed toward the door into the house. “Somewhat less than Kevin Coyle, I’m sure.”

  TEN

  BAN GHARDA RUTH Honora Ann Bresnahan felt huge and ungainly and more than a little foolish. She was a large woman with broad, strong shoulders and full breasts. She was also thin of hips and at once a bit bow-legged and pigeon-toed. Thus her feet, constrained in low-heeled shoes that she inevitably bought too small in an attempt to conceal their size, made her rock as she walked; they did so especially here in the warren of small shops and lanes in the Liberties known as the Coombe.

  The ancient surface of the footpath was pitched and heaved and made her feel almost drunk, a condition that a vow of abstention, taken in her youth, had never allowed her to achieve. And she blushed with mortification to find herself staggering all the same. One shoulder brushed against a lamppost, a foot missed a step, and a knee buckled slightly as she hurried along.

  And to think, she thought, people willingly submitted to such conditions, and even—she glanced into a window of one of the several antique shops she was passing—prized the dirt and grime of the city, with its sagging roofs and buckled walls and things old, like that miserable, frayed chintz ottoman. She stopped to consider who or what it could possibly accommodate—a child or a dog or a cat, but certainly not a decently constructed human being. It was something that in the country she had seen chucked out for the tinkers, but there it stood all cracked veneer and splaying legs with an eighty-pound price on it. EMPIRE, the tag said. Roman, she thought.