Collected Stories

Events at Drimaghleen

Nothing as appalling had happened before at Drimaghleen; its people had never been as shocked. They’d had their share of distress, like any people; there were memories of dramatic occurrences; stories from a more distant past were told. In the 1880s a woman known as the Captain’s wife had run away with a hunchbacked pedlar. In 1798 there’d been resistance in the hills and fighting in Drimaghleen itself. During the Troubles a local man had been executed in a field by the Black and Tans. But no story, and no long memory, could match the horror of the tragedy that awaited the people of Drimaghleen on 22 May 1985, a Wednesday morning.

The McDowds, that morning, awoke in their farmhouse and began the day as they always did, McDowd pulling on his shirt and trousers and lifting down a black overcoat from the pegs beside the kitchen door. He fastened it with a length of string which he kept in one of its pockets, found his socks in his gum-boots and went out with his two sheepdogs to drive the cows in for milking. His wife washed herself, put the kettle on the stove, and knocked on her daughter’s door. ‘Maureen!’ she called. ‘Come on now, Maureen!’

It was not unusual that Maureen failed to reply. Mrs McDowd re-entered her bedroom and dressed herself. ‘Get up out of that, Maureen!’ she shouted, banging again on her daughter’s door. ‘Are you sick?’ she inquired, puzzled now by the lack of movement from within the room: always at this second rousing Maureen yawned or spoke. ‘Maureen!’ she shouted again, and then opened the door.

McDowd, calling in the cattle, was aware that there had been something wrong in the yard as he’d passed through it, but an early-morning torpor hindered the progression of his thoughts when he endeavoured to establish what it was. His wife’s voice shouting across the field at him, and his daughter’s name used repeatedly in the information that was being inadequately conveyed to him, jolted him into an awareness that what had been wrong was that Maureen’s bicycle had not been leaning against the kitchen window-sill. ‘Maureen hasn’t come back,’ his wife repeated again when he was close enough to hear her. ‘She’s not been in her bed.’

The cows were milked because no matter what the reason for Maureen’s absence they had to be. The breakfast was placed on the kitchen table because no good would come of not taking food. McDowd, in silence, ate with an appetite that was unaffected; his wife consumed less than usual. ‘We will drive over,’ he said when they had finished, anger thickening his voice.

She nodded. She’d known as soon as she’d seen the unused bed that they would have to do something. They could not just wait for a letter to arrive, or a telegram, or whatever it was their daughter had planned. They would drive over to the house where Lancy Butler lived with his mother, the house to which their daughter had cycled the evening before. They did not share the thought that possessed both of them: that their, daughter had taken the law into her own hands and gone off with Lancy Butler, a spoilt and useless man.

McDowd was a tallish, spare man of sixty-two, his face almost gaunt, grey hair ragged on his head. His wife, two years younger, was thin also, with gnarled features and the hands of a woman who all her life had worked in the fields. They did not say much to one another, and never had; but they did not quarrel either. On the farm, discussion was rarely apt, there being no profit in it; it followed naturally that grounds for disagreement were limited. Five children had been born to the McDowds; Maureen was the youngest and the only one who had remained at home. Without a show of celebration, for that was not the family way, her twenty-fifth birthday had passed by a month ago.

‘Put your decent trousers on,’ Mrs McDowd urged. ‘You can’t go like that.’

‘I’m all right the way I am.’

She knew he would not be persuaded and did not try, but instead hurried back to her bedroom to change her shoes. At least he wouldn’t drive over in the overcoat with the string round it: that was only for getting the cows in from the field when the mornings were cold. He’d taken it off before he’d sat down to his breakfast and there would be no cause to put it on again. She covered up her own old skirt and jumper with her waterproof.

‘The little bitch,’ he said in the car, and she said nothing.

They both felt the same, anxious and cross at the same time, not wanting to believe the apparent truth. Their daughter had ungratefully deceived them: again in silence the thought was shared while he drove the four miles to the Butlers’ house. When they turned off the tarred road into a lane, already passing between the Butlers’ fields, they heard the dog barking. The window of the Volkswagen on Mrs McDowd’s side wouldn’t wind up, due to a defect that had developed a month ago: the shrill barking easily carried above the rattle of the engine.

That was that, they thought, listening to the dog. Maureen and Lancy had gone the night before, and Mrs Butler couldn’t manage the cows on her own. No wonder the old dog was beside himself. Bitterly, McDowd called his daughter a bitch again, though only to himself. Lancy Butler, he thought, my God! Lancy Butler would lead her a dance, and lead her astray, and lead her down into the gutters of some town. He’d warned her a thousand times about Lancy Butler. He’d told her the kind of fool he was.

‘His father was a decent man,’ he said, breaking at last the long silence. ‘Never touched a drop.’

‘The old mother ruined him.’

It wouldn’t last long, they both thought. Lancy Butler might marry her, or he might wriggle out of it. But however it turned out she’d be back in six months’ time or at any rate a year’s. There’d probably be a baby to bring up.

The car turned into the yard, and neither McDowd nor his wife immediately saw their daughter lying beside the pump. For the first few moments of their arrival their attention was claimed by the distressed dog, a black-and-white sheepdog like their own two. Dust had risen from beneath the Volkswagen’s wheels and was still thick in the air as they stepped from the car. The dog was running wildly across a corner of the yard, back and forth, and back and forth again. The dog’s gone mad, Mrs McDowd thought, something’s after affecting it. Then she saw her daughter’s body lying by the pump, and a yard or so away her daughter’s bicycle lying on its side, as if she had fallen from it. Beside the bicycle were two dead rabbits.

‘My God,’ McDowd said, and his wife knew from his voice that he hadn’t seen his daughter yet but was looking at something else. He had walked to another part of the yard, where the dog was. He had gone there instinctively, to try to calm the animal.

She knelt down, whispering to Maureen, thinking in her confusion that her daughter had just this minute fallen off her bicycle. But Maureen’s face was as cold as stone, and her flesh had already stiffened. Mrs McDowd screamed, and then she was aware that she was lying down herself, clasping Maureen’s dead body. A moment later she was aware that her husband was weeping piteously, unable to control himself, that he was kneeling down, his hands on the body also.

Mrs McDowd did not remember rising to her feet, or finding the energy and the will to do so. ‘Don’t go over there,’ she heard her husband saying to her, and saw him wiping at his eyes with the arm of his jersey. But he didn’t try to stop her when she went to where the dog was; he remained on his knees beside their daughter, calling out to her between his sobs, asking her not to be dead.

The dog was crouched in a doorway, not barking any more. A yard or so away Mrs Butler lay with one of her legs twisted under her, blood on the ground already turned brown, a pool of it still scarlet. Looking down at her, Mrs McDowd thought with abrupt lucidity: Maureen did not fall off her bicycle. She went back to where her daughter lay and behind the two tin barrels that stood by the pump she saw the body of Lancy Butler, and on the ground not far from it the shotgun that must have blown off Mrs Butler’s face.

O’Kelly of the Garda arrived at a swift conclusion. Old Mrs Butler had been as adamant as the McDowds in her opposition to the match that her son and Maureen McDowd had planned for themselves. And there was more to it than that: Mrs Butler had been obsessively possessive, hiding from no one her determination that no other woman should ever take her son away from her. Lancy was her only child, the single one to survive years of miscarrying. His father had died when Lancy was two years old, leaving mother and child to lead a lonely life on a farm that was remote. O’Kelly knew that Mrs Butler had been reputed to be strange in the head, and given to furious jealousies where Lancy was concerned. In the kind of rage that people who’d known her were familiar with she had shot her son’s sweetheart rather than suffer the theft of him. He had wrenched the shotgun from her and by accident or otherwise it had exploded. A weak man at the best of times, he had turned it upon himself rather than face the reality of what had happened. This deduction, borne out by the details in the yard, satisfied O’Kelly of the Garda; the people of Drimaghleen arrived themselves at the same conclusion. ‘It was always trouble,’ McDowd said on the day of the funerals. ‘The minute she went out with Lancy Butler it was trouble written down for poor Maureen.’

Drimaghleen was a townland, with nothing to mark it except a crossroads that was known as Drimaghleen Crossroads. The modest farms that comprised it, each of thirty or so acres, were scattered among bogland, one separated from the next by several miles, as the McDowds’ and the Butlers’ were. The village of Kilmona was where the people of Drimaghleen went to Mass, and where they confessed to Father Sallins. The children of the farms went to school in the small town of Mountcroe, driven each morning in a yellow bus that drove them back to the end of their lanes or farm tracks in the afternoon. Milk churns were collected in much the same way by the creamery lorry. Bread and groceries were bought in the village; fresh meat in Mountcroe. When the men of Drimaghleen got drunk they did so in Mountcroe, never in the village, although often they took a few bottles of stout there, in the bar beside the grocery counter. Hardware and clothes were bought in Mountcroe, which had had a cinema called the Abbey Picture House until the advent of television closed it in the early 1960s. Drimaghleen, Kilmona and Mountcroe formed a world that bounded the lives of the people of the Drimaghleen farms. Rarely was there occasion to venture beyond it to the facilities of a town that was larger – unless the purpose happened to be a search for work or the first step on the way to exile.

The children of the McDowds, whose search for such work had taken them far from the townland, returned heartbroken for their sister’s Mass. All four of them came, two with husbands, one with a wife, one on her own. The weddings which had taken place had been the last family occasions, two of them in Kilmona, the third in distant Skibbereen, the home of the girl whom the McDowds’ son had married a year ago. That wedding was on their minds at Maureen’s Mass – the long journey there had been in the Volkswagen, the night they had spent in Tierney’s Hotel, the farewells the next day. Not in the wildest horror of a nightmare could any of the McDowds have guessed the nature of the occasion destined to bring them together next.

After the funeral the family returned to the farm. The younger McDowds had known of Maureen’s and Lancy Butler’s attachment, and of their parents’ opposition to it. They had known as well of Mrs Butler’s possessive affection for her son, having grown up with stories of this maternal eccentricity, and having witnessed Lancy himself, as a child and as a boy, affected by her indulgence. ‘Oh, it can wait, Lancy, it can wait,’ she would say a dozen times an hour, referring to some necessary chore on the farm. ‘Ah, sure, we won’t bother with school today,’ she had said before that, when Lancy had complained of a difficulty he was experiencing with the seven-times table or Brother Martin’s twenty weekend spellings. The people of Drimaghleen used to wonder whether the farm or Lancy would suffer more in the end.

‘What did she see in him?’ Mrs McDowd mused sadly at the funeral meal. ‘Will anyone ever tell me what she saw in him?’

They shook their heads. The cheeks of all of them were still smeared with the tears they had shed at the service. Conversation was difficult.

‘We will never recover from it,’ the father said, with finality in his voice. It was all that could be said, it was all they knew with certainty: for as long as the older McDowds remained in this farmhouse – which would be until their own deaths – the vicious, ugly tragedy would haunt them. They knew that if Maureen had been knocked from her bicycle by a passing motor-car they could have borne her death with greater fortitude; or if she had died of an illness, or been the victim of incurable disease. The knife that turned in their pain was their memory of the Butlers’ farmyard, the barking dog running back and forth, the three still bodies. There was nothing but the waste of a life to contemplate, and the cruelty of chance – for why should it have been simple, pretty Maureen whose fate it was to become mixed up with so peculiar a couple as that mother and son? There were other girls in the neighbourhood – underhand girls and girls of doubtful character – who somehow more readily belonged with the Butlers: anyone would tell you that.

‘Why don’t you drive over and see us?’ one of the daughters invited. ‘Can’t we persuade you?’

Her father stared into the table without trying to reply. It was unnecessary to say that a drive of such a distance could only be contemplated when there was a wedding or a funeral. Such journeys had not been undertaken during Maureen’s lifetime, when she might have looked after the farm for a day; in no way could they be considered now. Mrs McDowd tried to smile, making an effort to acknowledge the concern that had inspired the suggestion, but no smile came.

Being of a nature that might interest strangers, the deaths were reported in the newspapers. They were mentioned on the radio, and on the television news. Then everything became quiet again at Drimaghleen, and in the village and in the town. People wrote letters to the McDowds, expressing their sorrow. People came to see them but did not stay long. ‘I am always there,’ Father Sallins said. ‘Kilmona 23. You have only to summon me. Or call up at the rectory.’

The McDowds didn’t. They watched the summer going by, taking in their hay during the warm spell in June, keeping an eye on the field of potatoes and the ripening barley. It began to rain more than usual; they worried about the barley.

‘Excuse me,’ a man said in the yard one afternoon in October. ‘Are you Mr McDowd?’

McDowd said he was, shouting at the dogs to behave themselves. The stranger would be a traveller in fertilizers, he said to himself, a replacement for Donoghue, who had been coming to the farm for years. Then he realized that it was the wrong time of year for Donoghue.

‘Would it be possible to have a word, Mr McDowd?’

McDowd’s scrawny features slowly puckered; slowly he frowned. He lifted a hand and scratched at his grey, ragged hair, which was a way he had when he wished to disguise bewilderment. Part of his countryman’s wiliness was that he preferred outsiders not to know, or deduce, what was occurring in his mind.

‘A word?’ he said.

‘Could we maybe step inside, sir?’

McDowd saw no reason to step inside his own house with this man. The visitor was florid-faced, untidily dressed in dark corduroy trousers and a gaberdine jacket. His hair was long and black, and grew coarsely down the sides of his face in two brushlike panels. He had a city voice; it wasn’t difficult to guess he came from Dublin.

‘What d’you want with me?’

‘I was sorry to hear that thing about your daughter, Mr McDowd. That was a terrible business.’

‘It’s over and done with.’

‘It is, sir. Over and done with.’

The red bonnet of a car edged its way into the yard. McDowd watched it, reminded of some cautious animal by the slow, creeping movement, the engine purring so lightly you could hardly hear it. When the car stopped by the milking shed nobody got out of it, but McDowd could see a figure wearing sunglasses at the wheel. This was a woman, with black hair also, smoking a cigarette.

‘It could be to your advantage, Mr McDowd.’

‘What could be? Does that car belong to you?’

‘We drove down to see you, sir. That lady’s a friend of mine, a colleague by the name of Hetty Fortune.’

The woman stepped out of the car. She was taller than the man, with a sombre face and blue trousers that matched her blue shirt. She dropped her cigarette on to the ground and carefully stubbed it out with the toe of her shoe. As slowly as she had driven the car she walked across the yard to where the two men were standing. The dogs growled at her, but she took no notice. ‘I’m Hetty Fortune,’ she said in an English accent.

‘I didn’t tell you my own name, Mr McDowd,’ the man said. ‘It’s Jeremiah Tyler.’

‘I hope Jeremiah has offered you our condolences, Mr McDowd. I hope both you and your wife will accept our deepest sympathy.’

‘What do you want here?’

‘We’ve been over at the Butlers’ place, Mr McDowd. We spent a long time there. We’ve been talking to a few people. Could we talk to you, d’you think?’

‘Are you the newspapers?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Yes, in a manner of speaking we represent the media. And I’m perfectly sure,’ the woman added hastily, ‘you’ve had more than enough of all that. I believe you’ll find what we have to say to you is different, Mr McDowd.’

‘The wife and myself have nothing to say to the newspapers. We didn’t say anything at the time, and we have nothing to say since. I have things to do about the place.’

‘Mr McDowd, would you be good enough to give us five minutes of your time? Five minutes in your kitchen, talking to yourself and your wife? Would you give us an opportunity to explain?’

Attracted by the sound by voices, Mrs McDowd came out of the house. She stood in the doorway, not quite emerging from the kitchen porch, regarding the strangers even more distrustfully than her husband had. She didn’t say anything when the woman approached her and held out a hand which she was obliged to shake.

‘We are sorry to obtrude on your grief, Mrs McDowd. Mr Tyler and I have been keen to make that clear to your husband.’

Mrs McDowd did not acknowledge this. She didn’t like the look of the sombre-faced woman or her unkempt companion. There was a seediness about him, a quality that city people seemed often to exude if they weren’t smartly attired. The woman wasn’t seedy but you could see she was insincere from the way her mouth was. You could hear the insincerity when she spoke.

‘The full truth has not been established, Mrs McDowd. It is that we would like to discuss with you.’

‘I’ve told you no,’ McDowd said. ‘I’ve told them to go away,’ he said to his wife.

Mrs McDowd’s eyes stared at the woman’s sunglasses. She remained where she was, not quite coming into the yard. The man said:

‘Would it break the ice if I took a snap? Would you mind that, sir? If I was to take a few snaps of yourself and the wife?’

He had spoken out of turn. A shadow of anger passed over the woman’s face. The fingers of her left hand moved in an irritated wriggle. She said quickly:

‘That’s not necessary at this stage.’

‘We’ve got to get the pictures, Hetty,’ the man mumbled, hushing the words beneath his breath so that the McDowds wouldn’t hear. But they guessed the nature of his protest, for it showed in his pink face. The woman snapped something at him.

‘If you don’t leave us alone we’ll have to get the Guards,’ McDowd said. ‘You’re trespassing on this land.’

‘Is it fair on your daughter’s memory that the truth should be hidden, Mr McDowd?’

‘Another thing is, those dogs can be fierce if they want to be.’

‘It isn’t hidden,’ Mrs McDowd said. ‘We all know what happened. Detectives worked it out, but sure anyone could have told them.’

‘No, Mrs McDowd, nothing was properly worked out at all. That’s what I’m saying to you. The surface was scarcely disturbed. What seemed to be the truth wasn’t.’

McDowd told his wife to lock the door. They would drive over to Mountcroe and get a Guard to come back with them. ‘We don’t want any truck with you,’ he harshly informed their visitors. ‘If the dogs eat the limbs off you after we’ve gone don’t say it wasn’t mentioned.’

Unmoved by these threats, her voice losing none of its confidence, the woman said that what was available was something in the region of three thousand pounds. ‘For a conversation of brief duration you would naturally have to be correctly reimbursed. Already we have taken up your-working time, and of course we’re not happy about that. The photograph mentioned by Mr Tyler would naturally have the attachment of a fee. We’re talking at the end of the day of something above a round three thousand.’

Afterwards the McDowds remembered that moment. They remembered the feeling they shared, that this was no kind of trick, that the money spoken of would be honestly paid. They remembered thinking that the sum was large, that they could do with thirty pounds never mind three thousand. Rain had destroyed the barley; they missed their daughter’s help on the farm; the tragedy had aged and weakened them. If three thousand pounds could come out of it, they’d maybe think of selling up and buying a bungalow.

‘Let them in,’ McDowd said, and his wife led the way into the kitchen.

The scene of the mystery is repeated all over rural Ireland. From Cork to Cavan, from Roscommon to Rosslare you will come across small, tucked-away farms like the Butlers’ and the McDowds’. Maureen McDowd had been gentle-natured and gentle-tempered. The sins of sloth and greed had not been hers; her parents called her a perfect daughter, close to a saint. A photograph, taken when Maureen McDowd was five, showed a smiling, freckled child; another showed her in her First Communion dress; a third, taken at the wedding of her brother, was of a healthy-looking girl, her face creased up in laughter, a cup of tea in her right hand. There was a photograph of her mother and father, standing in their kitchen. Italicized beneath it was the information that it had been taken by Jeremiah Tyler. The Saint of Drimaghleen, Hetty Fortune had written, never once missed Mass in all her twenty-five years.

The story was told in fashionably faded pictures. ‘You know our Sunday supplement?’ Hetty Fortune had said in the McDowds’ kitchen, but they hadn’t: newspapers from England had never played a part in their lives. They read the Sunday Independent themselves.

The Butlers’ yard was brownly bleak in the pages of the supplement; the pump had acquired a quality not ordinarily noticed. A bicycle similar to Maureen’s had been placed on the ground, a sheepdog similar to the Butlers’ nosed about the doors of the cowshed. But the absence of the three bodies in the photographed yard, the dust still rising where the bicycle had fallen, the sniffing dog, lent the composition an eerie quality – horror conveyed without horror’s presence. ‘You used a local man?’ the supplement’s assistant editor inquired, and when informed that Jeremiah Tyler was a Dublin man he requested that a note be kept of the photographer’s particulars.

The gardai – in particular Superintendent O’Kelly – saw only what was convenient to see. Of the three bodies that lay that morning in the May sunshine they chose that of Lancy Butler to become the victim of their sluggish imagination. Mrs Butler, answering her notoriously uncontrollable jealousy, shot her son’s sweetheart rather than have him marry her. Her son, so Superintendent O’Kelly infers from no circumstantial evidence whatsoever, wrenched the shotgun out of her hands and fired on her in furious confusion. He then, within seconds, took his own life. The shotgun bore the fingerprints of all three victims: what O’Kelly has signally failed to explain is why this should be so. Why should the Butlers’ shotgun bear the fingerprints of Maureen McDowd? O’Kelly declares that ‘in the natural course of events’ Maureen McDowd would have handled the shotgun, being a frequent visitor to the farm. Frequent visitors, in our experience, do not, ‘in the natural course of events’ or otherwise, meddle with a household’s firearms. The Superintendent hedges the issue because he is himself bewildered. The shotgun was used for keeping down rabbits, he states, knowing that the shotgun’s previous deployment by the Butlers is neither here nor there. He mentions rabbits because he still can offer no reasonable explanation why Maureen McDowd should ever have handled the death weapon. The fingerprints of all three victims were blurred and ‘difficult’, and had been found on several different areas of the weapon. Take it or leave it is what the Superintendent is saying. And wearily he is saying: does it matter?

We maintain it does matter. We maintain that this extraordinary crime – following, as it does, hard on the heels of the renowned Kerry Babies mystery, and the Flynn case – has not been investigated, but callously shelved. The people of Drimaghleen will tell you everything that O’Kelly laboured over in his reports: the two accounts are identical. Everyone knows that Lancy Butler’s mother was a sharp-tongued, possessive woman. Everyone knows that Lancy was a ne’er-do-well. Everyone knows that Maureen McDowd was a deeply religious girl. Naturally it was the mother who sought to end an intrusion she could not bear. Naturally it was slow, stupid Lancy who didn’t pause to think what the consequences would be after he’d turned the gun on his mother. Naturally it was he who could think of no more imaginative way out of his dilemma than to join the two women who had dominated his life.

The scenario that neither O’Kelly nor the Butlers’ neighbours paused to consider is a vastly different one. A letter, apparently – and astonishingly – overlooked by the police, was discovered behind the drawer of a table which was once part of the furniture of Lancy Butler’s bedroom and which was sold in the general auction after the tragedy – land, farmhouse and contents having by this time become the property of Allied Irish Banks, who held the mortgage on the Butlers’ possessions. This letter, written by Maureen McDowd a week before the tragedy, reads:

Dear Lancy, Unless she stops I can’t see any chance of marrying you. I want to, Lancy, but she never can let us alone. What would it be like for me in your place, and if I didn’t come to you where would we be able to go because you know my father wouldn’t accept you here. She has ruined the chance we had, Lancy, she’ll never let go of you. I am always cycling over to face her insults and the way she has of looking at me. I think we have reached the end of it.

This being a direct admission by Maureen McDowd that the conclusion of the romance had been arrived at, why would the perceptive Mrs Butler – a woman who was said to ‘know your thoughts before you knew them yourself’ – decide to kill Lancy’s girl? And the more the mental make-up of that old woman is dwelt upon the more absurd it seems that she would have destroyed everything she had by committing a wholly unnecessary murder. Mrs Butler was not the kind to act blindly, in the fury of the moment. Her jealousy and the anger that protected it smouldered cruelly within her, always present, never varying.

But Maureen McDowd – young, impetuous, bitterly deprived of the man she loved – a saint by nature and possessing a saint’s fervour, on that fatal evening made up for all the sins she had ever resisted. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – except perhaps a woman unfairly defeated. The old woman turned the screw, aware that victory was in sight. The insults and ‘the way of looking’ became more open and more arrogant; Mrs Butler wanted Maureen McDowd out, she wanted her gone for ever, never to dare to return.

It is known that Lancy Butler found two rabbits in his snares that night. It is known that he and Maureen often made the rounds of the snares when she visited him in the evenings. He would ride her bicycle to the field where they were, Maureen sitting side-saddle on the carrier at the back. Lancy had no bicycle of his own. It is our deduction that the reason the shotgun bore Maureen’s fingerprints is because they had gone on a shooting expedition as well and when they returned to the yard she was carrying both the shotgun and the snared rabbits. It is known that Maureen McDowd wept shortly before her death. In the fields, as they stalked their prey, Lancy comforted her but Maureen knew that never again would they walk here together, that never again would she come over to see him in the evening. The hatred his mother bore her, and Lancy’s weakness, had combined to destroy what most of all she wanted. Mrs Butler was standing in the yard shouting her usual abuse and Maureen shot her. The rabbits fell to the ground as she jumped off the bicycle, and her unexpectedly sudden movement caused the bicycle itself, and Lancy on it, to turn over. He called out to her when it was too late, and she realized she could never have him now. She blamed him for never once standing up to his mother, for never making it easier. If she couldn’t have this weak man whom she so passionately loved no one else would either. She shot her lover, knowing that within seconds she must take her own life too. And that, of course, she did.

There was more about Maureen. In the pages of the colour supplement Mrs McDowd said her daughter had been a helpful child. Her father said she’d been his special child. When she was small she used to go out with him to the fields, watching how he planted the seed-potatoes. Later on, she would carry out his tea to him, and later still she would assist with whatever task he was engaged in. Father Sallins gave it as his opinion that she had been specially chosen. A nun at the convent in Mountcroe remembered her with lasting affection.

O’Kelly fell prey to this local feeling. Whether they knew what they were doing or not, the people of Drimaghleen were protecting the memory of Maureen McDowd, and the Superintendent went along with the tide. She was a local girl of unblemished virtue, who had been ‘specially chosen’. Had he publicly arrived at any other conclusion Superintendent O’Kelly might never safely have set foot in the neighbourhood of Drimaghleen again, nor the village of Kilmona, nor the town of Mountcroe. The Irish do not easily forgive the purloining of their latter-day saints.

‘I wanted to tell you this stuff had been written,’ Father Sallins said. ‘I wanted it to be myself that informed you before you’d get a shock from hearing it elsewhere.’

He’d driven over specially. As soon as the story in the paper had been brought to his own notice he’d felt it his duty to sit down with the McDowds. In his own opinion, what had been printed was nearly as bad as the tragedy itself, his whole parish maligned, a police superintendent made out to be no better than the criminals he daily pursued. He’d read the thing through twice; he’d looked at the photographs in astonishment. Hetty Fortune and Jeremiah Tyler had come to see him, but he’d advised them against poking about in what was over and done with. He’d explained that people wanted to try to forget the explosion of violence that had so suddenly occurred in their midst, that he himself still prayed for the souls of the Butlers and Maureen McDowd. The woman had nodded her head, as though persuaded by what he said. ‘I have the camera here, Father,’ the man had remarked as they were leaving. ‘Will I take a snap of you?’ Father Sallins had stood by the fuchsias, seeing no harm in having his photograph taken. ‘I’ll send it down to you when it’s developed,’ the man said, but the photograph had never arrived. The first he saw of it was in the Sunday magazine, a poor likeness of himself, eyelids drooped as though he had drink taken, dark stubble on his chin.

‘This is a terrible thing,’ he said in the McDowds’ kitchen, remembering the photograph of that also: the cream-enamelled electric cooker, the Holy Child on the green-painted dresser, beside the alarm clock and the stack of clothes-pegs, the floor carpeted for cosiness, the blue, formica-topped table, the radio, the television set. In the photograph the kitchen had acquired an extraneous quality, just as the photograph of the Butlers’ yard had. The harsh, ordinary colours, the soiled edges of the curtains, the chipped paintwork, seemed like part of a meticulous composition: the photograph was so much a picture that it invited questioning as a record.

‘We never thought she was going to say that about Maureen,’ Mrs McDowd said. ‘It’s lies, Father.’

‘Of course it is, Mrs McDowd.’

‘We all know what happened that night.’

‘Of course we do.’

McDowd said nothing. They had taken the money. It was he who had said that the people should be allowed into the house. Three thousand, one hundred and fifty pounds was the sum the woman had written the cheque for, insisting that the extra money was owed.

‘You never said she’d been specially chosen, Father?’

‘Of course I didn’t, Mrs McDowd.’

He’d heard that Superintendent O’Kelly had gone to see a solicitor to inquire if he’d been libelled, and although he was told he probably had been he was advised that recourse in the courts would be costly arid might not be successful. The simple explanation of what had happened at the Butlers’ farm had been easy for the people of Drimaghleen and for the police to accept because they had known Mrs Butler and they had known her son. There’d been no mystery, there’d been no doubt.

‘Will we say a prayer together?’ the priest suggested.

They knelt, and when they rose again Mrs McDowd began to cry. Everyone would know about it, she said, as if the priest had neither prayed nor spoken. The story would get about and people would believe it. ‘Disadvantaged people’, she quoted from the newspaper. She frowned, still sobbing, over the words. ‘It says the Butlers were disadvantaged people. It says we are disadvantaged ourselves.’

‘That’s only the way that woman has of writing it down, Mrs McDowd. It doesn’t mean much.’

‘These simple farm folk,’ Mrs McDowd read, ‘of Europe’s most western island form limited rural communities that all too often turn in on themselves.’

‘Don’t pay attention,’ Father Sallins advised.

‘Does disadvantaged mean we’re poor?’

‘The way that woman would see it, Mrs McDowd.’

There was confusion now in Drimaghleen, in Kilmona and Mountcroe; and confusion, Father Sallins believed, was insidious. People had been separated from their instinct, and other newspaper articles would follow upon this one. More strangers would come. Father Sallins imagined a film being made about Maureen McDowd, and the mystery that had been created becoming a legend. The nature of Maureen McDowd would be argued over, books would be written because all of it was fascinating. For ever until they died her mother and her father would blame themselves for taking the money their poverty had been unable to turn away.

‘The family’ll see the pictures.’

‘Don’t upset yourself, Mrs McDowd.’

‘No one ever said she was close to being a saint. That was never said, Father.’

‘I know, I know.’

Mrs McDowd covered her face with her hands. Her thin shoulders heaved beneath the pain of her distress; sobs wrenched at her body. Too much had happened to her, the priest thought; it was too much for any mother that her murdered daughter should be accused of murder herself in order to give newspaper-readers something to think about. Her husband had turned away from the table she sat at. He stood with his back to her, looking out into the yard. In a low, exhausted voice he said:

‘What kind of people are they?’

The priest slowly shook his head, unable to answer that, and in the kitchen that looked different in Jeremiah Tyler’s photograph Mrs McDowd screamed. She sat at the blue-topped table with her lips drawn back from her teeth, one short, shrill scream following fast upon another. Father Sallins did not again attempt to comfort her. McDowd remained by the window.