Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

“No. Just get me down.”

“Say you pushed Anca Popescu down the side of that mountain, or I swear to God I’ll call off the uniforms and leave you there to rot!” He would recant as soon as he was free, she had no doubt, but she needed to hear him admit his guilt. “Say it!”

“All right, all right! But you can’t put any of the rest of it on me, Stella. Claffey was dead when I got to him. I may have… rearranged the body, but I didn’t kill him. And I never laid a hand on Kavanagh, I swear. I knew nothing about him. You have to believe me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “I don’t have to believe anything you say ever again.”

She hailed the uniforms, and in a few seconds the officers were down the hill and stood gaping at the strange sight of a man hanging upside down in a thorn bush. Stella kept a hand raised to hold them off. Molloy’s eyes were focused not on her but on the crimson pool gathering on the ground below his head. “Christ, Stella, I’m bleeding to death here. You’ve got to help me, please!” The last word faded away into a whimper.

Stella moved deliberately, wrapping the golden shrine again in its canvas shroud. She looked into Molloy’s face, upside down, twisted in agony, and felt nothing but a cold, dead spot in the center of her chest as she recited the words of the caution and arrested her partner for the murder of Anca Popescu. When she had finished, Stella turned to the nearest uniform. “All right, call the paramedics and get him out of there. Don’t feel you have to rush.”

It was after three in the afternoon when Stella Cusack finished writing up her report on Molloy and all she knew about his involvement in the treasure-hunting ring and Anca Popescu’s death. He wasn’t badly hurt from the thorn bush but remained under arrest and under guard in hospital. How could she have been so blind and stupid? She desperately wanted to go home and have a shower, to wash off any particle of him that might remain upon her skin.

For some reason, she believed Molloy when he said he’d had nothing to do with Kavanagh’s death. No, for that piece of the puzzle, she’d reluctantly returned to her original theory, that Mairéad Broome and Graham Healy were somehow involved. There was the liar’s forked tongue for a start, not to mention the gallnuts and the burial in a protected bog, both elements they would know about from staying at Killowen. But Vincent Claffey couldn’t provide a witness statement about what he knew, and Anca Popescu’s lips were also closed forever. That left as her possible witness pool only the people at Killowen, all friends of Mairéad Broome, and one other person—Deirdre Claffey.

Stella thought back to the shock on Deirdre’s face when she’d seen Kavanagh’s photo. Flipping open her notebook, Stella found the number for Child Protection Services.

Fifteen minutes later, she was on her way to meet Noreen Kilpatrick, the specialist victim interviewer. The timing of the call was fortunate. The SVI was also on her way to interview Deirdre Claffey at one of their designated interview locations, a nondescript building in Limerick. Stella hadn’t undergone training to become an SVI, so she’d remain in the other room, but she would be able to watch Deirdre via camera and monitor system, and communicate with Kilpatrick through an earpiece.

The interview unfolded according to the prescribed protocols. Stella found herself only half listening, watching Deirdre Claffey’s body language as she answered questions about her family, the daily routines at home. Part of the process of the stripping away of ordinary, habitual behavior that trained interviewers used to get at the truth. The first speed bump was the girl’s mother. She’d left when Deirdre was only six.

“That must have been difficult,” Noreen Kilpatrick said. “Not having your mum around.”

“She didn’t love me,” Deirdre said. “If she loved me, she wouldn’t have gone away, would she?”

“What were things like for you, after your mum left?”

“All right,” Deirdre said. “My da and me, we managed. He never bothered me—that’s what you want to know, isn’t it? Well, he didn’t. I could see the way people looked at us, but it’s not true, any of it.” She began to cry. “My da loved me, he was looking out for me. Maybe he was rubbish at it, but at least he never ran away.”

The interviewer tried several different gambits, but Deirdre Claffey was steadfast and resolute in her denials. Stella had to admit she wasn’t surprised. A nasty rumor is a nasty rumor, as Deirdre herself had pointed out. But the girl was playing with a gold cross that hung on a slender chain around her neck. Stella hadn’t noticed it when she’d spoken to Deirdre before. She spoke into her tiny mike: “Can you ask her where she got that cross?”

“Did someone give you that necklace?” Kilpatrick asked.

Deirdre nodded. “Da gave me it. I had another one, a First Communion one from mum, but I lost it.”

Stella’s memory traveled back to the items in Kavanagh’s overnight case. The small gold cross with the engraved message, From Mum.

“Can you ask her about the child’s father?” Stella said quietly into her headpiece, and received a minute glance in response from inside the interview room.

“You were close to someone once, Deirdre,” Kilpatrick continued. “I’m talking about your child’s father. Where did you meet him? Does he know he has a son?”

The girl looked miserable. “I met him at our chapel. It’s not really ours, doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s out in a field beside the bog.”

“Was this chapel someplace you went often?”

Deirdre nodded.

Stella remembered with a pang her own desperate need for solitude at that age, and the field where she used to go, to lie down in the grass and feel the vast vault of heaven above her.

Deirdre continued, “One time I went there, and I met this man…”

“Can you tell me what happened, Deirdre? Just as much as you can remember.”

“He asked if I knew about the funny little picture of a man beside the doorway. And he showed me some letters. They weren’t ordinary letters—alpha and omega, he said they were called. The first and the last. I didn’t know what he meant.”

The girl’s voice had turned a bit dreamy as she remembered. “He was standing behind me, pointing to the letters, and then”—she closed her eyes, and her breathing changed as she remembered—“he said I had beautiful skin, and he put his fingers here.” She touched the side of her neck. “I remember he was shaking. And he asked if he could kiss me and I said yes. And then he asked if I would lie down in the grass with him, and I said yes to that, too. I wasn’t scared. I let him do everything. I wanted him to do it.”

“And that was the first time you met, at the chapel?”

Deirdre’s eyes were downcast. “The only time,” she whispered.

“And after that, Deirdre, how long was it before you realized that you’d fallen pregnant?” Kilpatrick asked gently.

“I just started feeling ill. I don’t really remember when it was.”

“Did you understand what was happening?”

“No. I didn’t know about any of that. Not until my da found out.”

“And what did your father say when he discovered you were going to have a child?”

Deirdre hesitated and looked up at the interviewer. Stella wanted to shake the girl and tell her: Your father is dead. There’s no need to protect him now.

“He was angry at first, but he never laid a hand on me, I swear. He just kept going on and on about this bein’ his ticket. His ticket. I don’t know what he was on about.”

“You didn’t understand what was happening?”