Death of an Irish Sinner by Bartholomew Gill

Author:Bartholomew Gill [Gill, Bartholomew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780380808649
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

It was fully night by the time Noreen and Peter McGarr arrived back at Ilnacullin. As usual there would be guests for dinner—they could tell from the array of house lights that winked at them through the avenue of beeches that lined the drive.

“Do you think my mother and father could ever live even a week without the company of others?”

“Sure, they’ll have an eternity of that soon enough,” McGarr blurted out, insensitively.

But he was tired, still sore and troubled by the events of the day—the death of Frank Mudd, or Manahan, the tape that seemed to show Mudd removing the water bottle, and finally, the way that information had been presented to him in such a…considered, no, such an orchestrated form by the two Opus Dei priests, Duggan and Sclavi.

More immediately, McGarr was hungry and in need of a drink.

“You believe that?”

He switched off the ignition and opened the door. The rich yellow house lights and the smell of burning peat beckoned.

“That in death we’ll be alone?” she continued, climbing out. “And that my parents, God bless and keep them from all harm, are going to your oblivion sometime soon?”

McGarr could tell from the tone of the remark that she was as hungry and tired as he. “I didn’t say that, did I?”

“Ah, but you did in so many words. I hope you’re not…not wishing them gone?”

“You know better than that.” But the truth was—they’d all be gone in what amounted to, and would be perceived as, a wee time.

It was as though, leaving school at eighteen, McGarr had blinked, and there he was, a fully middle-aged man, who was bald, running to fat, presently confused and out of sorts. Were he to blink again—well, he might never open his eyes.

“I don’t know how I ever got involved with anybody with so little hope or vision” were her last words as they passed through the door into the brightly lit foyer.

Beyond, in the house, they could hear voices and laughter, and Maddie was coming down the stairs. “Well, it’s about time,” she scolded, one hand on a hip and her eyes narrowed, as her mother’s would have been were the tables turned. “Nuala’s been holding dinner for”—she glanced at her wristwatch—“twenty minutes at least.”

Which was nothing in a house where entertaining was frequent and relaxed. McGarr could remember dinner being held for hours, when the conversation was lively or the guests had some pressing business.

The latter being the case, McGarr assumed, upon stepping into the sitting room.

“Well, there he is—the misnamed Peter McGarr,” said a veritable bear of a man pushing his bulk out of the wing chair by the hearth. “H’ow are yuh, Chief Superintendent?”

McGarr reached for “Chazz” Sweeney’s paw, which engulfed his own. “Misnamed in what regard?” he asked, if only to be polite.

Charles Stewart Parnell Sweeney—his complete and sardonically apt name—was a man whom McGarr thought of as more dangerous than any violent criminal in the street. Although only ever a Dail backbencher—and that time out

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