Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 123, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 751 & 752, March/April 2004

The Private Eye Writers of America recently awarded Terence Faherty the 2002 Shamus Award for Best Short Story for his EQMM tale “The Second Coming” (11/02). The story belongs to a series about post-World War II Hollywood P.I. Scott Elliott, and EQMM has more in the series coming up later this year. This time out, Mr. Faherty returns to his earlier creation, Owen Keane. Keane is on vacation in Ireland, but murder follows him there...

1

“It can never have been murder. Never in life. You don’t murder a man by dropping a stone on his head. It’s too uncertain. You can’t aim an awful great stone. It was an accident, surely. A freak accident. That stone’s been teetering up there since Cromwell’s men burned the friary. And three months ago this very night it fell. It fell and hit poor Timothy McKinney on the head.”

The speaker was a tiny man in tweeds of muted colors and sharp aromas, one of which was pipe tobacco. He tapped out his briar into an empty glass and repeated, “It hit poor Timothy McKinney on the head.”

“God rest his soul,” said the passing bartender, a very busy man. “And use the damn ashtray.”

A second man at the crowded bar, this one standing to my right, observed, “Sure, it would have been like a bad mystery novel, where the victim has to do exactly what the murderer wants him to do, where he wants him to do it and when, for the plot to work.”

The tweedy man snatched this up. “I know the very one you mean. By Dorothy something Sayers. Man killed by a swinging weight, a booby trap he trips himself at the appointed place and hour. Stage business. Not real life. Not real murder.”

I was familiar with the book in question, though my tastes ran to more worldly investigators than Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. I was even familiar with the criticism of the murder method used in that book, and I’d always considered that criticism to be nine-tenths carping. The act the murder victim had to perform at a specific time and place for the booby trap to work was switching on a big console radio for the evening news, a perfectly ordinary thing, and one that could only be done at a specific time and place.

The tweedy man’s dismissal of the murder technique as stage business was truer than he seemed to know. Sayers had based her book — murder weapon and all — on a successful stage play. Observing that aloud would have been a way to inject myself into the conversation, but I didn’t do it. I was feeling a little too dizzy.

It wasn’t alcohol, either, though I had a pint glass before me on the bar. It was the unreality of the moment. Of being in Ireland, a country I’d always dreamt of visiting without ever expecting I would. It was the coincidence of hearing Dorothy Sayers discussed while I was sipping a Guinness, a product she’d helped to advertise as a young copywriter. It was the further coincidence of hearing a discussion of an unsolved mystery. I’d sworn off mysteries almost as often as I’d sworn off drinking.

“The coincidence, though,” the man on my right said, yanking me out of my reverie by seeming to read my thoughts. “The coincidence of Tim’s being in that spot when the stone fell. It’s too much entirely.” He was a tall man with a nose like the dorsal fin of a shark, the prominence topped by tiny steel-framed glasses. “Much too much. Whatever was Tim doing up there in the middle of the night?”

“What we all of us hope to be doing in the middle of the night,” the tweedy man said, raising a general laugh. “The question is, who was he doing it with? And who found out about it?”

“That’s enough,” the bartender said, slapping the bar top with a hand that seemed used to the job. He was a big man, though not young, not even by my middle-aged standards, and his name was Mullin. He had a prizefighter’s battered face and a comb-over that was plastered to his scalp by perspiration.

“Tim McKinney was a good lad. He’d be working the sticks here tonight, drawing your precious weekly pint for you, O’Rooney” — he glared at the tweedy man — “if he hadn’t been taken in his prime. Didn’t I plan for him to run this place for my Margaret when I’m gone myself? I won’t have any loose talk about him. Nor about Breda, the widow.”

“The black widow,” someone behind me muttered.

The big hand came down on the bar again. “That’s enough, I said. What must our American, Mr. Keane, be thinking?” he asked, nodding toward me. “And him sleeping under the widow’s roof.”

I was actually sleeping in the widow’s bed. As conversation material went, that would have beaten senseless any observations I might have made on Dorothy Sayers’s technique. But still I played mum, unwilling to brag at the expense of Breda’s reputation. Even if I hadn’t been, I would have feared the scowling Mullin’s displeasure.

The beaky man, perhaps counting on his eyeglasses to save his remarkable nose, showed no such concern. “She hasn’t an alibi for that night, Mr. Mullin. The night Tim died. I heard that myself from Constable Garvey.”

“And what alibi would you expect a respectable woman to have at midnight when her husband’s away?” the exasperated pub owner demanded. “Do you expect signed affidavits? Why should Breda McKinney produce an alibi at all?”

“She shouldn’t,” O’Rooney of the tweeds cut in. “For it can’t have been murder. I’ve reasoned that right off the list. You don’t murder a man by dropping a stone on his head.”

2

I was in Ireland in the first place, in the village of Slane in the county of Meath, on a whim. I’d been on my way from Nairobi, Kenya, to New York, stopping over in Heathrow, outside London. It would take a book to explain the Africa trip, so I’ll just say that I was sent there by a friend to help another friend. At Heathrow I’d seen a poster for Ireland and decided on the spot to treat myself to a side trip, to spend money I really couldn’t afford to spend on a few days in the land of my ancestors.

My first glimpse of Ireland had been through the crazed window of a turboprop and a layer of patchy clouds as we’d descended to land at Dublin. Even that suburban landscape had been so green and lush after the dry brown of Kenya that I’d stared on and on, forgetting for once to be afraid of the business of landing. I’d rented a car and driven north into the Boyne Valley, where my mother’s people had lived. I’d ended up in the crossroads town of Slane because it had a ruined friary and because it was close to Newgrange and its massive Celtic burial mound.

I’d stayed on in Slane for a second night because of Breda McKinney, who owned and ran the Hill of Slane Bed and Breakfast. How it had ended up being bed, breakfast, and sex for me, I still didn’t quite understand.

I was considering the question as I left Mullin’s Pub and started down the hill to Breda’s. Though the June night was mild, the air was damp. I turned the collar of my navy blazer up and held its lapels flat against my chest with one hand.

I guessed Breda to be in her thirties, young to be a widow. She looked younger still despite her hard-luck life. She was a very petite woman whose pale skin was set off by almost black hair, the darkest I’d seen in Ireland. Her eyes were also very dark, very round, and very large. A child’s eyes, when they were happy. A doll’s dead eyes at other times. Her mouth was tiny and thin-lipped, with a tendency toward wry smiles.

She’d greeted me with one of those smiles when I’d shown up late, with no reservation, the prior evening. She’d shown me to her best room — all of them being empty — and then invited me to share her peat fire in the parlor. That invitation had been stretched to include a whiskey and then another, and we’d sat talking together for hours.

We hadn’t talked much of personal things, I now realized. My head had been full of Africa, and I’d shared a little of that story, of the mystery I’d solved there, with this safe stranger. Breda had talked more of the Boyne Valley than herself, of her love for it and of its long history. She’d only touched on her dead husband in passing, never mentioning how he’d died.

As she’d been describing the legendary signal fire St. Patrick had built on the hill where the friary now stood, the fire that had been a challenge to the pagan Irish nobility on the Hill of Tara across the valley, it had occurred to me that the parlor’s simple peat fire, when reflected in the dark eyes of a beautiful woman, was as wonderful as any lit by a saint.

Shortly after that, she’d taken my hand and said, “I’ve one more bed to show you.”

Mullin’s place was on the Newgrange Road — the High Street, the locals called it — and Breda’s stone house on a crooked little lane well down the hill. As I made the left from the street to the lane, a man stepped from a shadowy shop door and said, “We’re a priest tonight, are we?”

Anyone surprised like that on a dark corner in a strange town might have jumped, as I did. Anyone might have been disoriented by the nonsensical question, as I was. But only someone who had studied for the priesthood, as I had once done, could really savor the full potential of the moment.

“I said, we’re a priest tonight, are we?”

The speaker was a big man who seemed huge just then, an ashen-faced man whose skin seemed to glow. He was dressed as most of the men in the pub had been dressed, in a farmer’s version of business casual: a shapeless woolen suit coat over a rumpled, open-neck shirt and baggy pants. The flat cap on his head was pulled low, keeping what light there was from reaching his eyes.

“I bet you treat your vows no better than the old friars did, the lechers.”

Though I couldn’t see his eyes, I somehow knew they were fixed on my chest. And I realized that I was still holding my lapels shut against the damp, making a Nehru jacket of my blazer and creating the illusion of a Roman collar around my neck.

I took my hand away, and my coat fell open. “I’m not a priest, I’m a tourist,” I said, surprised to hear more Guinness than fear in my voice.

“Staying at the Hill of Slane?” the roadblock asked. “Keeping the lady of the house up all night, are you? With your comings and goings?”

Either this stranger had a gift for firing blind or he was unusually well-informed. Supernaturally well-informed, perhaps. Though I was no great believer in ghosts, I found myself wishing I’d asked for a physical description of Tim McKinney back at the bar.

“The thing about tourists is,” the stranger observed, “they move on. Try the west. Try it first light.”

3

My new acquaintance left me then, not dematerializing but simply brushing past me and stomping off into the High Street. I listened to the sound of his angry steps for a time. Then I made my way down the lane to a stone house whose front windows illuminated the sign for the Hill of Slane Bed and Breakfast.

Breda was sitting up for me, as I’d expected. She had some expectations of her own, which a single glance at me confirmed.

“They told you then, did they, Owen? The Mullin’s Pub oral-history society? Told you the whole wonderful story?”

“Not the whole story,” I said.

“Enough, though. More than enough, I can see that. You’re white underneath your African tan.”

She was seated on the little sofa near the peat fire where we’d had our marathon talk. She was barefoot, oddly, since in addition to jeans she was wearing a cardigan sweater as long as a bathrobe, which she held tight around her. The long black hair that had been loose and flowing when I’d left her was now pulled back tight and largely hidden by the sweater’s heavy collar. It was her dead husband’s sweater, I realized with a little shudder.

“If I’m pale,” I said, “it’s the work of a guy I bumped into up the block. You might know him. Size of a small house.”

Breda considered this while staring into the fire. There was nothing childlike about her eyes tonight.

“But they did tell you,” she said. “The drunks in the pub. All about how Tim died. About what he was doing up at the old friary at midnight. And who found out about it and what she did to him. They mentioned the name ‘black widow,’ I’m sure.”

I was still standing one step into the room. Now I crossed to the little sofa and sat down unbidden. Breda made me feel welcome by drawing her sweater tighter around herself and whispering, “The black widow of Slane.”

“What was your husband doing up at the friary the night he died?”

“God knows. He was fascinated by the place. By any old ruins. By any old legend. By ghost stories, especially. He was a ghost chaser, I guess you’d say. It was his great dream to see one. I would much rather he’d been a skirt chaser. I could have dealt with that.”

She looked from the fire to me. “You have the same something in your eyes; I saw it when you came in last night. The same as Tim, I mean. The look of a man who sees things that aren’t there. Who looks for things that aren’t there. Mystical things. That’s what killed Tim: some mystical thing.”

“I heard it was a big rock.”

Breda responded to my bluntness with her wry smile. “There’s nothing more mystical in Ireland than the rocks. The stones. You went to Newgrange today. You took the guided tour. You went down into the heart of that great pile of stone. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel anything, any vibrations.”

“Only claustrophobia.” I was hoping for another smile, however wry. What I got was another question.

“What else did the drinkers say about me, Owen?”

“Nothing. Mullin put a lid on it.”

“The least he could do,” Breda said bitterly, “for the widow of his pet employee. Three months Tim’s been gone and the talking hasn’t stopped. Oh me, oh me.”

She couldn’t expect gossip like that to die in three months. Not in a town without a sports franchise. But I didn’t point that out. I’d been struck by another thought.

“It was your suggestion that I go up to Mullin’s and get a pint. Did you send me there as a scout, to see if they were still talking about you?”

Breda’s pale cheeks flushed. “Maybe I wanted you to hear the gossip so you’d be easier to get rid of. Maybe I wanted to scare you off. Have you figured out yet what your great attraction is for me? Could it be that you’re a stranger with a perfectly innocent reason for being in my house? The only man I could take into my bed without starting the tongues wagging, without bringing the constable and his notebook around? Three months is a long time to fast. A woman gets less choosy.”

Now we were both flushed. “And here I thought it was the mystical look in my eyes,” I said as I stood up.

From the parlor doorway, I added, “I was told something else at the pub. You don’t have an alibi for the night your husband died.”

“Oh, I have an alibi,” Breda replied. She was staring into the turf fire again. “You met him just now in the lane. Checkout is eleven sharp, Mr. Keane.”

4

I slept alone that second night at the Hill of Slane Bed and Breakfast, but I didn’t check out the next morning. I snuck out instead. While Breda was busy in the kitchen, I slipped into the lane and made my way up to the High Street.

It was going to be a beautiful June day in Ireland, which meant that a sweater would be optional. After noon, that is. Noon was hours away and I had no sweater, so I turned up my collar and tugged my lapels together, joining the priesthood again. The irregular priesthood.

My very vague plan was to chat up Mullin the pub owner, to get an unbiased version of Timothy McKinney’s death. But when I neared the crossroads where the pub sat, I smelled bacon frying and coffee and added them to my list of goals.

Unfortunately, the front door of the pub was locked. I went around to the side door, following the breakfast smells. My knock was answered by a woman who identified herself as Mullin’s cook and looked like she might be his sister. His older, burlier sister. She told me that the owner was off to market, asked me if I’d had my breakfast, and invited me in.

I decided that the cook might do as well or better than Mullin as a source of information, but she didn’t give me a chance to start the interview. She sat me and a mug of coffee at a round table in a very small dining room, asked me how I liked my eggs, and bustled out.

The little room was decorated with photographs. Family photographs, I saw when I got up to look them over. Mullin appeared in most of them, recognizable at any age due to his mashed nose. He appeared in one with a woman and a young girl and in many of the others with the girl alone. I decided that she was the daughter he’d mentioned — Margaret — and that her mother had either died or taken off. In one shot, Mullin was standing with his arm around a white-haired man. Behind them was the familiar pub, but the name above the door was Carlin and Mullin’s.

While I was studying this picture, I heard a foot scuff behind me. A young woman was standing in the kitchen doorway, a thin woman a head taller than Breda McKinney, very delicately featured and lightly freckled. Her long brown hair had a frazzled, overcooked quality, which didn’t keep her from chewing on a strand of it.

For a second I thought I’d guessed wrong about Mullin being wifeless, for this was surely the woman in the group photo, Margaret’s mother. Then I realized that it was Margaret herself, grown up. Or almost so.

“Morning,” I said. “You’re Margaret, right? Your dad told me about you. My name’s Owen. I’m from America.”

Only the last part of that interested her. She gave off the hair chewing to ask, “Where in America?”

“New Jersey, the Garden State.” The odds were she’d never find out how inaccurate that nickname was.

“That’s near New York,” she said.

“Yes. I’ve lived there, too.”

Another layer of her many-layered shyness dropped away. “I’m going to New York someday. To live.”

“You’ll like it.” Actually I thought she’d have her hair chewed down to the roots in a week. But I wanted to stay on her good side. She was another potential source of information about the dead McKinney. He’d worked in her father’s bar, after all. And Mullin had planned for McKinney to run the place for Margaret when he was gone, according to what he’d told his customers last night. Now that I’d met her, I understood why Mullin would want to make that kind of provision.

It seemed to me that Margaret and I were as friendly as we were going to get, so I said, “I guess you knew Timothy McKinney pretty well.”

She stood there frozen for a second, only her small blue eyes — very small compared with Breda’s — moving. They darted back and forth, scanning the air between us as though she were reading and rereading my words.

Then she was gone, slamming the door behind her.

5

I didn’t get any more out of the cook than I’d gotten out of Margaret. The big woman had observed the girl’s flight and blamed me for it, not unreasonably. I was shown out without so much as a burnt piece of toast.

That concluded the planned portion of my day. I was standing in the crossroads before the pub, trying to regroup, when a man rode up on a bicycle. He was wearing the dark blue uniform of the Irish police, the Guarda.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Morning,” I said. “Constable Garvey?”

“However did you know my name?”

“I heard it last night in the pub.”

Garvey stopped his bike, still eyeing me closely. He was a solidly built young man, not overly tall. His teeth were crooked and prematurely yellow, but his smile looked genuine.

“Heard my name in the pub? Taken in vain, I’m sure.”

“Mentioned in connection with Timothy McKinney’s death,” I said. “With the investigation of it.”

“A sad business.”

“I’d like to hear more about it.”

Garvey had been straddling his bike. He stepped off it now. “Perhaps you’d better put us on an equal footing first, by introducing yourself.”

I did, explaining that I was stopping over at the Hill of Slane Bed and Breakfast. I didn’t mention having once had my breakfast in bed with my landlady, but something of my concern for Breda must have come through. The constable was nodding before I’d finished.

“I feel for her situation. She’s in limbo, you know. True limbo. If only I could have brought the thing to a satisfactory conclusion. Worked out an answer.”

He was looking up the hill toward the ruined friary, gray and stark against the morning sky. “Would you care to see where it happened? I have to go up there and unlock the tourist gate.”

He stashed his bike in the pub’s alley and we started up the road on foot, Garvey explaining that the bike was his doctor’s idea and not his regulation ride. Cycling seemed to be working out for him. He spoke without effort as we climbed, while I was breathing seriously by the time we reached the iron gate in the wall that surrounded the ruins. A rusted tin sign informed me that the gate was locked each night at eight.

I said, “Tim McKinney died around midnight, didn’t he?”

“As near as anyone can tell. His body wasn’t found until the next morning — by a couple from your St. Paul, Minnesota, by the way. Certainly the last anyone saw of Tim alive was when he locked up the pub a little after eleven.”

“The sign says the gate’s locked at eight. How did he get in?”

Garvey’s laugh was in the tenor range. “The sign is for you tourists. We try to scare you out of here at a decent hour so you don’t get hurt climbing around in the dark. Any local knows a dozen different ways to get inside. The perimeter wall’s only a few stones high in places. The old friary’s always been a popular spot for kids learning to smoke and drink and for couples. Courting couples, you might call them.”

We started up the hill to the ruins, a much steeper climb than the one we’d made from the pub. There was no path, just very lush grass, well dotted with cow patties though no perpetrators were visible. At this range the jumbled ruins had resolved themselves into two main structures and a fringe of minor ones. An almost intact square tower dominated the ruin on the left, identifying it as a former church. The structure to our right must have been the friary. It looked to have a bigger footprint than the church’s, and one or two of its surviving walls were almost as tall as the square tower.

“Speaking of courting couples,” I said between breaths, “was there any talk about Tim McKinney and Margaret Mullin?”

It was an idea I’d been kicking around since the girl had bolted at the mention of McKinney’s name.

“Not before his death,” Garvey said. “But afterwards, yes. Maggie Mullin’s always been a quiet girl, a fey girl. But since Tim died she’s gotten almost strange with it. That started people asking themselves whether she hadn’t been sweet on Tim. If she had been, it could answer another big question, of course, which is who Tim was hoping to see that night, if in fact he was up here for a tryst.”

“Was he — was the body clothed?”

“Completely. Which ought to put the lie to the story that someone caught him in the act, so to speak. That and the fact that he was struck on the crown of his head, proving he was on his feet at the fatal moment.”

When we finally reached the top of the hill, I was surprised to see graves around the ruined church, some of which looked quite new.

“Tim’s not buried up here if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Garvey, who had followed my gaze. “He’s in his family’s plot over in Navin. But this cemetery is still used. You’ll see that often in Ireland: new graves around an ancient church. Makes for a peaceful resting place, I always think. The spot you want to see is over there, in the old friary.”

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.

O’Rooney remembered me from Mullin’s, though we hadn’t exchanged a word there. “Mr. Keane from America,” he said when he was back in his Windsor chair behind his workbench counter. “Your name in the Gaelic would be O’Cathain, roughly, ‘son of battle.’ It was anglicized first as O’Cahan, later as Kane and Keane.”

“How do you happen to know that?”

“It’s one of my hobbies, genealogy.” As near as I could tell, he was dressed in the very tweeds he’d worn the night before, though his flat cap was missing, revealing him to be as bald as the sobbing pub owner. “And heraldry, too, you know. It’s good for business. Americans especially are always wonderfully impressed when I rattle off a little of their family history. If you don’t mind my saying so, you Yanks are a woefully uninformed group.”

He had a pipe filled by then, a well-browned meerschaum. While he was lighting it, I started in.

“I came by to ask you about another of your interests. I’m told you’re an expert on local folklore.”

“So I am. But it’s a broad topic. Is there something particular you’re interested in? I can see there is by the light in your eyes. If you were as keen on antiques, I’d have a banner day.”

“I’m interested in any ghost stories connected with the old friary.”

“Are you now? Why would that be?”

“I’m a ghost chaser.” I tried to remember the exact words Breda had used to describe her husband. “It’s my great dream to see one.”

I was curious to know whether Breda had told me the truth, whether O’Rooney would pick up on the echo of McKinney’s reputation. He did.

“A dangerous thing to want, Mr. Keane, if you’ll pardon the impertinence. The dead past is a dangerous thing to poke at generally.”

I knew that from bitter experience, but I didn’t say so. I wondered instead about O’Rooney’s free advice. Thanks to Mullin, he knew that I was staying with Breda. So he might have understood my real interest in the friary. He might even have guessed the secret intent of my question. If he had, he kept his guess to himself.

“Two stories come to mind,” he said. “One involves a headless abbot, the other a poor murdered girl.”

“I’ll take the murdered girl.”

O’Rooney puffed on his pipe for a time. I had an idea by then how the ceiling beams had gotten black. Judging by his expression, the smoke signals meant “I thought you might.”

“She’s a legend only, not an historical fact. According to this tale, a beautiful local girl named Catriona caught the eye of one of the friars in the abbey. This was way back in the fourteenth century, when many of the religious weren’t as chaste as we expect them to be today.

“The friar was so besotted with Catriona that he lured the girl into the friary after Mass one day and had his way with her. Then, fearing exposure, for Catriona was no girl to be threatened into silence, he killed her and buried her under the friary’s stone floor.

“But his secret came out in the end, as murder always will. Catriona’s ghost saw to that. It walked the halls of the friary until the bloody friar went mad and confessed.”

“And the ghost still walks?”

“Not that I’ve ever heard. So it would be a real feather in your cap, were you to be the one to see her. The making of your reputation as a ghost chaser.”

8

On my way back to the haunted friary, I looked in at the tiny Guarda station and was told that Constable Garvey was off taking a report on a missing horse. I decided I wouldn’t wait for him to get back, that I couldn’t wait for him, in fact. I was too excited to even take my time as I made my way up the hill to the friary’s entrance gate. Before I’d reached it, my double-time pace had reopened half-healed blisters from my African campaign.

I’d seen how the thing had been worked, and I was in a lather to verify my guess. Garvey had said that there was no way an accomplice could have lured McKinney to the murder spot without exposing herself to danger when the stone fell. But there was a way. The killer had used Tim McKinney’s well-known passion for ghosts as bait, if I was right, if something about the passageway in which McKinney had died was true.

A half-dozen laughing German tourists were coming down the grassy hill as I went up. I was alone on the summit, but down the far slope a farmer was letting a herd of black cows through a second gate in the perimeter wall. He waved to me, and I waved back.

Then I hurried to the spot where Breda’s husband had died. I stood there, as Garvey had done an hour earlier, and took in the view. There was nothing very interesting down the passage and no view at all to my right, thanks to the intact wall. The wall on my left had a break I’d noted on my first visit, when the cleft had suggested the handiwork of a giant ax. That cleft afforded a very narrow view of the interior of the friary, specifically of a fairly intact wall supported in part by the remains of a chimney. This wall also had a gap, a square one near the top. Through it I could see a second interior wall. Set high in that second wall was a narrow doorway. At one time, it must have connected two second-story rooms, but the rooms were gone, leaving only this headstone-shaped hole as their memorial. The doorway was perfectly aligned with the square gap in the chimney wall, the cleft in the passage wall, and the spot where I stood. If I moved a foot in any direction, I lost sight of it.

I left the passageway at a run and scrambled all over the ruins, looking for a spot where I could get a better view of the floating doorway. It couldn’t be seen at all from outside the friary, the exterior walls being too well preserved in that part of the structure. I was able to reach the narrow ground-floor rooms on either side of the wall that held the doorway. In either room I could crane my neck and see the opening, but it was badly foreshortened. Certainly neither room offered as complete a view as the one I’d had in McKinney’s passage.

Which was exactly the result I wanted, the result I needed to verify my theory. The end of the passage offered the only clear view of a precise spot in the ruin. McKinney had been drawn to the end of the passage because of that view, because someone had told him that at a certain hour — midnight, probably — the view would include a ghost. And not just any ghost. The spirit of Catriona the fair, not seen in five hundred years.

Examining the floating doorway presented something of a challenge. I tried a little rock scaling, as I’d done on the passage wall under Garvey’s supervision, but the interior walls had been built with more care and offered fewer handholds.

After two unsuccessful assaults, I was ready for another approach, and I remembered the farmer who’d been letting his cows in to eat the friary grass. He was still at the gate, urging along some stragglers.

I ran down the hill to him, getting his full attention and then some. Still, I was polite enough to introduce myself and ask his name — Tutty — before I popped my question: “Do you have a ladder I might borrow?”

Tutty did, a fine aluminum one parked next to a stone barn just beyond the gate. He didn’t ask why I wanted it; the fact that I was an American seemed to be a carte blanche explanation for eccentricity. Nevertheless, I babbled something about wanting to check some stone carving. In exchange for that lie, Tutty — a man whose skin had been reddened extremely by the same weather that was eroding the friary — offered to help me carry the ladder up the hill. Together we placed it beneath the vestigial doorway. With the farmer securing the ladder’s footing, I started up.

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.”

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.”