Death at Whitewater Church Page 14

“Aye, Eithne. The chemist. She volunteered, you see. Eithne’s my sister.”

  “Oh yes, she said that.”

  “Well, she does her own books and she said it’d be no trouble to do mine, too. So, when she got a look at them, didn’t she discover that there was money missing. That money had been taken for years.”

  “By Conor?”

  “It had to be. He was the only one working for me apart from the wife.” He smiled. “And it wouldn’t do her much good to take it. She’d be stealing from herself. There’d be no more meals out, so there wouldn’t. Or shopping trips to Derry. Or foreign holidays.”

  “Okay, Mr. Bourke. So, you didn’t get a chance to challenge him about it? Conor, I mean.”

  “I didn’t find out about it until a good while after he was gone. A few months, I think it was.”

  “Did you tell anyone else about it?”

  “Not at the time. I didn’t want to upset the family. I knew I’d be able to sort it out eventually, some way or other. Then I told Lisa.”

  “When did you tell Lisa?”

  “Ah, not so long ago. I thought she might know what to do.”

  No wonder Lisa had given me the impression that she thought Conor had left of his own accord, if she knew he had been taking money from his employer. What else had she not told me? But I could think of only one reason that Bourke would tell Lisa about the missing money. I voiced it.

  “Did you think maybe she might pay you back herself, Mr. Bourke, out of guilt?”

  He shook his head vehemently. “No, no. I wouldn’t have wanted that. Poor wee girl, she’s been through enough.”

  “Or maybe you thought she might have access to his bank accounts, working in the bank?”

  His eyes widened. “Nothing like that, I swear. I wanted it all above board, so I did. She told me what she was going to do, that she wanted to have him declared legally dead. And I wondered if maybe there was some way of getting my money back – from his estate or something.”

  “I see.”

  “So, what do you think?” He screwed his eyes up as if he were looking at the sun.

  “Well, Mr. Bourke. I really think it’s something you should go to the guards with. Probably something you should have gone to the guards with a long time ago, as a matter of fact. It could be relevant to his disappearance, you know.”

  “No. I don’t want to involve the guards. I wouldn’t want to upset his poor mother. That’d be a terrible thing to do.”

  “Well, I think you might have to – if you want to have any chance at all of getting your money back.”

  Bourke’s expression changed to one of alarm. He got up out of his seat and started to back out through the door, as if he was afraid that I might be tempted to call the guards any second myself.

  “I’ll think about it and get back to you. Is that all right?”

  “That’s fine, Mr. Bourke.”

  At a quarter to eleven we closed the office, and Leah and I made our way across the square to the church. February or not, spring still felt a hell of a long way off this morning. Despite my boots and heavy socks, my toes were numb, and I pulled my coat tighter around me as we walked up the steps to the churchyard. A crowd had gathered at the entrance of the church, huddled together for warmth like penguins, their faces contorted against the stabbing cold. There was very little chat, as if it was too cold for people to think of anything to say, or make the effort to say it.

  Phyllis was closest to the door. She was whispering into the ear of a tall man in an anorak and woolly hat. It took me a few seconds to recognize McFadden out of uniform. Lisa Crane stood a few feet away from Phyllis, clinging as usual to her husband’s hand.

  A car’s engine sounded faintly in the distance, barely audible above the wail of the wind. A few seconds later, Hal’s large black hearse came into view, proceding in dignified fashion up the driveway, followed closely by a second large black car. The hearse came to a halt in front of the church door. Hal walked slowly towards the back of the hearse, opened the door, and stood there silently, hands clasped, eyes downcast.

  The second car drove around the side of the church and parked there. The driver’s door opened and Mick Bourke emerged wearing a heavy black coat and scarf. He opened one of the rear doors and Claire climbed out, followed by her mother. Mick took one of Mrs. Devitt’s arms and Claire the other, and they made their way slowly towards the hearse. The crowd watched silently as the coffin was carefully unloaded and carried into the church. The pallbearers were Bourke, Tony Craig, and two other men I had never seen before.

  “Cousins,” Leah whispered.

  Claire and her mother walked behind carrying wreaths, supporting each other. With Bourke carrying the coffin, they looked very alone. The absence of the one remaining brother and son seemed unnecessarily cruel. As Leah and I joined the crowd and followed the procession inside, grateful at last for the warmth of the church, I noticed Eithne playing the organ in the gallery. By the time we found seats, the church was almost full – and Glendara is a huge church.

  An hour later we emerged from the church to driving icy rain.

  “I’ll go back and open up the office,” Leah said, as we huddled on the porch along with about forty other people.

  “Don’t you want to come to the burial?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’ll leave it, I think. That’ll take a while. He’ll be buried up at Whitewater. The family plot is in the old graveyard up there.”

  I had a flashback of seeing Jack Devitt’s grave after I had stumbled in the snowdrift on Saturday morning. As I watched Leah make a dash for it down the steps, Phyllis appeared beside me.

  “Going up to the graveyard?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Any chance of a lift? No point in both of us driving.”

  “’Course,” I said, wondering how on earth Phyllis was going to fit in the Mini’s tiny passenger seat.

  I can’t pretend it was easy; the top of her head grazed the roof, and there were some interesting contortions required to allow me to reach the gearstick, but we managed it.

  “God, he didn’t get very far really, did he, poor man?” Phyllis said sadly as she rubbed vigorously at the condensation on the passenger window. “When you think he was born less than a mile from here, and he lived most of his life just there.”

  We were passing Danny’s cottage. It was tiny, probably only three rooms. I imagined that whatever happened with the church, this old cottage’s chances of revival, now that Danny Devitt was gone, were pretty slim.

  “It’s lonely up here, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Wasn’t always, you know,” Phyllis told me. “You go back twenty-five years or so and this was a vibrant little community. There was the church and the primary school and a community hall, and a shop. I think there was even a post office in the shop. And the pilot station, of course. There were a good few families living up here once upon a time.”

  “Did they just die out? Or emigrate?”

  “Work dried up; people had to leave. A few things happened that didn’t help, of course.”

  “That ship being blown up?”

  She nodded. “If you asked me, I’d say the Sadie was the final nail in the coffin for Whitewater as a community. Not only were there men lost, but the big cargo ships stopped coming this way after that. They’re back now, of course, but it came too late for Whitewater. The pilot station hasn’t been used since.”

  I pulled into the narrow road leading to Whitewater Church.

  “It had a big effect on employment at the time – the men had to go elsewhere. It meant there were women left on their own up here with small children, and I dare say it became too remote for them. Some of them didn’t even drive. They all moved into town eventually.”

  “Wouldn’t Danny’s mother have been one of them?”

  “She would, I suppose,” Phyllis agreed. “Jack was as much a victim of that day as if he had been blown up with the ship. He was nothing but a wreck of a man
after it.”

  “But she stuck it out, stayed here even though she was left alone with three children?”

  “She did.”

  “It must have been awful for her.”

  “Aye.” Phyllis tutted at the memory. “But Mary had two big strapping sons – Conor to bring in a wage and Danny to keep the wee farm going. She was lucky in that way.”

  The car bumped along the last couple of yards as Whitewater Church came into view. It made a striking sight, its dark gray shape silhouetted against the turbulent sky.

  “Was that why the church was deconsecrated and sold, because nearly everyone left?”

  “I suppose so. There weren’t enough people to justify keeping it going. Sad, I always thought. I liked coming here. I used to come up here the odd time when that bloody priest in Glendara was driving me nuts.” She shot me a sly grin.

  I pulled in tight behind the line of cars outside the graveyard, and we wrapped up and made our way in through the gate. Thankfully, it had stopped raining, but the wind-chill factor on this exposed hill was ratcheted up to the highest level. I was pathetically grateful for the woolly hat Phyllis found in my glove compartment when she was doing her usual nosy ferreting about.

  Walking along the narrow pathway towards the Devitt family plot, I noticed an area that had been cordoned off and covered with a waterproof sheet a little to the left of the path, underneath the trees. I wondered if this was where the soil samples had been taken. I hadn’t noticed it before when I had been along this section of path, but of course the ground had been covered in snow then.

  I tore my eyes away and followed Phyllis. The group gathered around the grave was small and the few words from the priest were mercifully short. When he had finished, a little queue formed to pay condolences to Claire and her mother, who were standing beside the grave. Bourke had moved next to a woman with dyed blond hair in a heavy, fur-collared brown coat.

  Claire’s high-pitched voice carried on the wind as she greeted people. Mrs. Devitt looked particularly frail beside her. I wondered if it would be so awful if the two women were excused this ritual just this once. I recalled my own graveside experience, and I don’t remember it helping much. But then everyone is different. For some, rituals are part of the healing.

  I found myself in the queue behind Lisa Crane and her husband. Neither acknowledged me. When I reached Claire, I thought she looked exhausted. In fact, she stumbled as she took a step towards me. I caught her arm, noticing that her eyes were glassy.

  “You’re wonderful to come,” she said. “Do you know my mother?”

  I looked at the woman standing beside her. There was no way around it this time. I had to face her. Mary Devitt looked at the ground as I delivered the standard platitudes about how sorry I was, and she thanked me graciously. I was about to move away when I realized that I was the last in the line; people were leaving the graveyard. If I walked away, I would have left her alone. Claire had moved into a huddle with Phyllis and Eithne. It was clear she hadn’t noticed that her mother was on her own, with only me for company.

  Chapter 19

  I HOVERED UNCOMFORTABLY, with nowhere to go and nothing to say now that I had delivered my one useless-sounding line. Mary Devitt looked up at me and acknowledged my discomfort with a pale smile and a strong, lucid gaze. Immediately, I got the impression that she was in charge.

  There was a strength of character visible in that single look that flipped all the assumptions I had made about Mary Devitt on their heads. Here before me was a woman who had been through a lot. She had lost her husband while she was still very young, first of all to mental illness and then to suicide. She had brought up three children on her own and now she was having to cope with burying one son while the other was still missing. There had to be a resilience about her, for her to have survived at all. This was a woman who was used to having to recover quickly, to pick herself up and carry on in the face of unbearable tragedy.

  It was a resilience that was absent in Claire. I saw now that what I had witnessed earlier was mother supporting daughter, not the other way around. Maybe it was a generational thing, this stoic acceptance. Our generation has given that up; we rail against bad fortune, refuse to accept it if things don’t go our way. And it never makes one damn bit of difference, since so much is out of our control.

  Mary Devitt’s eyes were rimmed with red, but bright and alert like a bird’s. They darted around, taking in the scene. At first, all I had seen when I looked at her was an old lady in a black coat and black hat. On closer inspection I could see that the hat was a rather quirky, hand-knitted beret with an odd pattern on the side and an old cameo brooch pinned to it. The little flourish struck me as a tiny act of rebellion, of defiance against age and tragedy. I remembered her green shoes from the wake. Another little flourish.

  She seemed content to stand beside me without conversation, for a while at least. The priest was talking quietly to the gravediggers, who were standing patiently by, waiting for the stragglers to leave so they could get on with their job and then go home to something warm to eat. Claire was still deep in conversation with Phyllis and Eithne.

  “So, how did you know Danny?” Mary asked after a minute, when it became clear that her daughter’s conversation was going to carry on for some time.

  “I didn’t know him very well, I’m afraid. I only met him once.”

  “We hadn’t seen very much of him ourselves lately, sadly. He liked his own company.”

  “Yes, so I believe.”

  “And that of his animals, of course.” She paused for a moment. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?”

  “I’m Ben O’Keeffe.”

  “Ah.” She looked at me with interest. “The solicitor, O’Keeffe?”

  “Yes.”

  She lowered her voice. “Danny was going to come and see you.”

  “Yes.”

  She linked my arm and steered me slowly away from the grave, out of earshot of everyone else.

  “Did he talk to you?” she asked urgently.

  “Well, I can’t—”

  “Oh, don’t give me any of that confidentiality nonsense,” she snapped. “I was the one who told him to go and talk to you.”

  “He mentioned that.”

  “Well?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything, I’m afraid. Although he was clearly distressed about something.”

  Her narrow shoulders slumped in disappointment.

  “Did you know what he wanted to speak to me about?” I asked.

  “I thought it might have had something to do with Conor,” she said.

  “Why was that?”

  She shook her head. “Something he told me that I’m not certain I want to share with you yet. I’m sure a person like you would understand.”

  I assumed she was simply referring to my profession, but there was something about this little woman that unnerved me.

  “I was so afraid for him, you see. I was afraid he might go and do something stupid.”

  I tried not to, but I found myself looking towards the grave. “Do you think that’s what happened to him?”

  She followed my gaze and exclaimed. “Suicide? God, no! That’s not what I meant. None of them would try anything like that. Not after their father.”

  I bowed my head. “I’m sorry. I did hear what happened to your husband.”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “It was a very long time ago. My concern now is for my two boys. I’m afraid Danny might be everyone’s scapegoat now that he’s gone. It’ll be very easy to blame him for things that have occurred, now that he’s not here to defend himself. But I’m not going to let that happen.” There was an edge of determination in her voice.

  She gripped my hands with both of hers. “Danny was a kind boy, Miss O’Keeffe, but he was never the same after Conor disappeared.”

  “Claire said he disappeared himself for a while?”

  She looked away. “Yes. He was gone for a few weeks. I have no idea
where he went. He never told me and I didn’t ask.”

  “I see.”

  “It was as if he had some kind of a breakdown. And when he came back, he moved into that wee cottage by the church and we never saw him. It wasn’t even habitable really; he used to use it as a work-shed before that. But it was as if he didn’t want to be around us. It was then that he started drinking, I’m afraid.”

  She sighed. “Danny’s father left the farm to him, and he made a real go of it. But after Conor disappeared, he lost all interest in that, too. I have no idea why. And then one day, he sold it. Stock, land, machinery – the lot. Of course there was nothing wrong with that – it belonged to him, after all. Still, it did surprise me. He just landed down at the house one morning with a lot of money from the sale and insisted I take it all.”

  I couldn’t quite figure out why I was being told all of this. But I paid attention. It felt like a client handing me something for safekeeping.

  “I put it away for Conor and Claire. I didn’t need it, and Danny swore he didn’t want a cent of it. As I said, he was a kind boy, Miss O’Keeffe. But he had his problems, I do know that. I’m under no illusions.” She looked up at me. “I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to help me protect his memory somehow, but I’d be grateful if there was.”

  “I’ll do anything I can, Mrs. Devitt.”

  I realized that Phyllis and Claire were looking curiously in our direction. Mrs. Devitt saw, too, and took my arm again, walking me a little farther along the path. Her grip was surprisingly strong for someone who looked like a bird. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper.

  “I know Danny’s DNA was found with that body in the basement of the church.”

  I wasn’t sure how to react. “How do you know that?”

  “Andrew McFadden told me. That’s between ourselves, mind. I know he shouldn’t have said anything, but he thought he was doing the right thing. He wanted to warn me. He’s known the family a long time.”

  What the hell was McFadden doing? Molloy would kill him.

  “Now, Miss O’Keeffe, I don’t know who that poor wee boy in the church is, but I did know my youngest son. And I know there was no way in God’s name he would ever have hurt anyone. I’ve seen him with animals. I’ve seen him take rabbits out of traps and fix their legs. It just wouldn’t have been in him to do it.”