Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

How would it feel to have taken the great chance, killed for someone, only to find out that she still loved the bastard? How had Mairéad Broome put it, only a short while ago? I did love my husband. Past tense, Stella noted. As difficult as he tried to make it sometimes.

What had Benedict Kavanagh done to try his wife’s affections? It wasn’t hard to imagine. The possibilities were endless, actually. There was the old standby, apparently true in this case, getting off with other women—or even other men. Such things happened, and Healy hadn’t mentioned whether the interns on Kavanagh’s program were male or female. Not to mention all the countless ways he might have found to humiliate his wife, in public or in private, especially given her reaction to the body just now. What was Mairéad Broome looking for under that sheet?

Or was all her sudden anger directed at Benedict Kavanagh for getting himself killed and leaving her hanging all these months? Just because you didn’t love your husband any longer, that didn’t mean you stopped worrying about him. If Kavanagh had been getting a leg over, they’d know soon enough. How did these eejits not realize that they couldn’t keep their affairs completely secret?

Mairéad Broome had admitted that her marriage was in tatters when she spoke in that careful code about the pair of them being busy with their own work. Bollocks. She probably knew about her husband’s bits on the side, and if she did, what would have moved her to do something about it? She’d said she didn’t care about money, but as soon as someone made a claim like that, you were almost assured that the opposite was true. Stella made a mental note to check the terms of the family trust, whether it specified what would happen in the event of a divorce or a childless marriage. If leaving Benedict Kavanagh was out of the question, how long before the constant weight of indignity forced his wife’s hand? Time to start asking those questions. Stella pretended to ring off the mobile and made her way down to where Mairéad Broome sat.

“I’m all right now, Detective. It was just the shock.”

Stella said nothing but reached into her pocket for the bag containing the pods from the dead man’s mouth. She held them out to Mairéad Broome, who took the bag and peered at the blackened knobs through the polythene.

“Am I meant to know what these are? Because I don’t.”

Beside her, Graham Healy shook his head as well, blank. “Not a clue.”

“Are they something to do with my husband’s death?”

Stella wasn’t prepared to part with that information at the moment; instead she tucked the bag back into her pocket and decided on another approach. “When you reported your husband missing, you said you couldn’t think of any particular enemies he might have had, but you admitted that he sometimes rubbed people the wrong way—”

Graham Healy exploded: “He was a fucking bollocks!”

“Graham!”

“He ought to have kissed the ground you walked on, Mairéad, with all that you did, all you sacrificed for him and his brilliant fucking career. But no, he was far too busy poncing about on television, stirring the shit and dragging people down. That’s all he ever did—”

“Graham, stop it!”

“I’m only speaking the truth, Mairéad, and you know it.” He turned to Stella. “She should have walked out years ago. All the international recognition she’s been getting, it’s only happened since he’s been out of her life—”

“Graham, stop it, that’s enough!”

He threw up his hands and walked away. They’d clearly had this conversation before.

“I’ve already told you, Detective, my husband was not an easy man. He was impatient with people who weren’t as clever as he was, and that included me. But there were other sides to him, certain aspects that were so… well, so simple, in a way. Despite all his intellectual gifts, there were ways he was still a child, emotionally. It turned out that his philosophical high-wire act was just that—an act. All my husband’s theories about the nature of the divine, the existence of good and evil, all that bore no connection at all to the way he lived his life.”

“Are you trying to say that your husband was a hypocrite?”

“I’m saying that he delighted in the abstract and abhorred the specific, especially when it came to examination of his own behavior. So why don’t you just come out and ask me what you want to know, what everyone’s dying to know: whether I, or Graham, or Graham and I together killed my husband. The answer is no. And yes, for the record, Graham and I are lovers, and have been ever since the day he came to work for me—”

“Mairéad—”

She silenced him with a look. “Why waste any more of this woman’s time, Graham? I’m so tired of pretending. I can’t be bothered to keep up appearances. I really can’t. If this woman is a proper detective, she’ll know everything soon enough. How I was a child when I married Benedict, how he grew bored with me before I’d reached the ripe old age of twenty, and about all the years I’ve spent since then trying to regain any scrap of dignity and self-respect. And now he’s back from his grave, trying to take it all away from me again. Well, he’s not going to succeed. This time I’m going to beat Benedict Kavanagh at his own bloody game.”

“Why did you stay married, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Mairéad Broome looked at the floor. “Cowardice, I suppose. I’m not proud of it. I would have been alone, and my husband had money, he had status and connections. For most of the time we were married, I was just a struggling painter. In some ways, I think he enjoyed having me beside him, all part of the Benedict Kavanagh show. But the threat was always there, under the surface, that he could make my life miserable if I left him, and I had no doubt that he would.”

“And yet he tolerated your relationship with Mr. Healy, presuming he knew about it.”

“Oh, he knew. But it happened to serve his purposes—let him feel magnanimous, I suppose. And letting me have Graham meant he could do whatever he liked.”

“And what was it your husband liked?”

Mairéad Broome raised her weary eyes to Stella. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you, Detective. I couldn’t bring myself to find out. There are some things even a wife is better off not knowing.”

Stella felt the words like a knife. Denial was the default. In a world filled with all manner of bad behavior, why did society insist upon a façade of normality, tidy exteriors that masked the messes inside? How many women knew the truth about their husbands but refused to acknowledge it, because doing so would raise the possibility of more than one reality within themselves?

“Thank you for coming,” Stella said. “I’ll be in touch if I have any more questions. When will you be heading back to Dublin?”

“We’re going to stay on for a day or two,” Healy answered. “Mairéad has friends who run an artists’ retreat not far from here. A place called Killowen.”

Cormac rose from his crouch and stood by as Niall Dawson directed the workmen out on the bog. After hours of clearing peat, they’d finally removed enough weight that the buried car could be lifted. A flatbed lorry was in place, waiting to transport the vehicle to the crime lab in Dublin. Cormac watched as the car slowly ascended, pulled upward out of the muck by the arm of the huge digger. The mud-caked vehicle swayed briefly, still dripping, before the machine operator set it down gently on the back of the lorry.

In addition to himself and Niall and the removal workers, the scene-of-crime officers were still on-site, searching for any useful evidence in the apparent murder of Benedict Kavanagh. No one had yet advanced any theories about what Kavanagh was doing out here in the back of beyond, or who might have had reason to wish him dead. Nor had Niall Dawson said a word about his own acquaintance with Kavanagh. Strange.