Corrigan held a wallet open to his credentials. ‘I hardly recognized you out of your collar, Reverend. Guess you don’t need to see this.’ He closed the wallet.
‘You gave me a start.’ Pud still barking.
‘May I ask what brought you into the woods?’
‘Looking for a Mass rock on the other side of the wall. Anna Conor gave me directions.’
‘My grandfather had a Mass rock on his place, called it an altar rock. ’t is sometimes found in a pair with a hollowed-out stone for a font. Do you know the history?’
‘Not entirely, no.’ He squatted and gave Pud a rub behind the ears.
‘Our priests used them in secret to conduct Mass. When th’ English were after exterminatin’ th’ Catholic church altogether, there was a price on the head of every priest-they were hunted like fox.’
‘How may I help you, Detective Corrigan?’
‘Merely wondering what you were about, Reverend. It seems all this began the night after you and Mrs. Kav’na arrived at Broughadoon.’
‘Correct.’ The poker club had done their own arriving before things began-but he said nothing.
‘Seen anyone about the place on a bicycle?’
‘Only the bicycle on the main road which we discussed earlier.’
‘Would you call yourself an art lover?’
He stood again. ‘Most definitely. My wife is an artist.’
‘Do you collect art?’
‘Hers.’
The fiddle keening in the long distance…
Corrigan smiled, ironic. ‘Were you familiar with the work of the senior George Barret before coming to Ireland?’
‘Enough to know his importance in Irish art history.’
‘Exiled himself to England.’
‘Yes.’
‘What are your plans for the remainder of your holiday?’ Corrigan had closed his wallet, was kneading the leather between his fingers as if by long habit.
‘We’re leaving tomorrow.’
‘I believe you were booked for several days yet.’
‘We were. But the recent business of the man in the armoire followed by last night’s distressing episode is hardly fodder for a pleasant holiday.’
‘Most unfortunate. And where would you and th’ missus be headed tomorrow?’
‘To Strandhill, I can’t recall the name of the place.’
‘I’ll get the name from you before we leave. You’ll be around?’
‘I will. Anything else, then?’
‘Not at the moment.’ Corrigan wiped his face with a handkerchief. ‘Close.’
Was there no seersucker to be had in the Eire, nor open collars? ‘If you’ve done with me…’ He headed for the wall.
‘No one over the wall, I’m afraid, ’til the Garda have a chance to get in and make a sweep. Cheerio, then.’ The ironic smile, and over the wall went Corrigan himself, as if he owned the place.
He retraced his passage through the woods and up to the lodge, then showered, dressed, and went downstairs, hearing in some distant quarter an electric drill. He poked around the library until he found a volume of Synge’s plays, and soon after sitting in the wing chair fell soundly asleep.
He heard the crunch of gravel in the car park, the slamming of the Fiat’s doors, voices. Thirty minutes of shut-eye had helped.
‘Did I snore?’ he asked Pud.
Cynthia careened in on her crutches. ‘We need to talk,’ she said. Through the open front door, he saw Katherine digging around in the trunk of their rental car.
From the throne of her chair, his wife told him everything.
‘I cannot believe, not even in my wildest imagination, that you would ever, I repeat, ever have allowed me to ride in the same car with your so-called Stirling Moss. It is a grave discredit to the memory of Mr. Moss to compare him with a perfectly crazed, lawless, and out-of-control imposter.’
‘Okay, okay,’ he said, holding up a hand in surrender. ‘Your hair looks great.’
‘My hair,’ she said, ‘is standing on end. Why did you ever, I repeat, ever think I’d be willing to tool around an entire country with this person at the wheel?’
He knew the feeling.
‘Are you out of your mind?’
‘A perfectly good question,’ he said.
‘As for the jolly plan for us to travel together in the same vehicle when my ankle is knit-never. You should have seen the face of the shop owner when she opened the door and Stirling pulled the car practically up to the washbasin.’
What could he say?
At six-thirty, Katherine appeared at their door in her bathrobe, pleading sudden and utter exhaustion, and reporting Walter still incoherent. They wouldn’t be down for dinner, they were having it in their room, please forgive-but they’d be up at the crack, ready for a lovely long chat at breakfast before heading over to the ruin of the family castle and off to the cemetery for a gravestone rubbing and then down to Connemara, though heaven knows they’d love to stay and help the Garda solve the mystery of the missing painting, and what a scramble their long-awaited trip to Ireland had turned out to be for all concerned, proving once again that truth is immensely stranger than fiction.
On Katherine’s heels had come Corrigan, nosing out the name of the inn at Strandhill, and then Feeney, on his way home from the free clinic he’d pulled together two years ago.
Feeney showered praise on the patient who had obviously resisted every temptation to rile the ankle by witless conduct.
Following dinner, they declined the trifle or chocolate torte and opted for coffee at their table.
‘I can’t do it,’ she said.
‘Can’t do what?’
‘I can’t leave.’
‘Can’t leave?’
‘Because these people mean something to me. They need us.’
‘But we can’t be providence for other people, Kav’na. Oswald Chambers says that’s one of our hardest lessons-learning that we mustn’t interfere in other people’s lives.’ There wouldn’t, after all, be a checkers game with William…
‘I’m not trying to be their providence, I’m their friend. Bella needs someone, Timothy-someone who isn’t her overworked mother or Maureen. It’s not that I’m in any way better than these two good women, not at all, it’s that I was once as frightened and frozen as she is.’
‘But this is a vacation,’ he said in something akin to his pulpit voice. He’d never see the Mass rock or finish Fintan O’Donnell’s journal or row her to the forested island in the middle of the lough, but so be it.
‘What is a vacation, anyway? Two or three weeks of sucking up every good thing for yourself? And even with all that’s happened, I love it here. It feels in a way like home, like family. You know I never really had a family. Just my parents and myself in this sealed envelope, each of us desperate to break the seal. I don’t feel our stay is over yet, something isn’t right about leaving.’
‘But what can you do if we stay?’
‘About what?’
‘About anything.’
‘I don’t think I’m needed to do anything except be here.’
He said to her what Anna had said to him. ‘You’re very unusual, Kavanagh.’
She shrugged, laughed a little. ‘I remember sitting on the big stone in the schoolyard with my teacher one day, it was fifth grade. Everyone had gone and we were waiting yet again for Mother to come for me. Miss Collins asked if it made me sad for my mother to forget me. I said it made me sad that Mother herself felt forgotten.
‘She looked at me and touched my hair and said, Cynthia, you are most unusual. I was afraid that being unusual wasn’t good, then she said, And that’s a good thing. Sometimes I think Miss Collins might have been my first taste of God.’
She sipped her coffee. ‘Besides, I’m not interfering any more than you interfered by hearing Anna’s testimony.’
‘She asked me to hear it.’
‘And in a way, they’ve asked me to be here, to stand with them… though of course they haven’t said that in so many words.’