Death on the Curlews

By Declan Duignan

A fishing holiday on Lough Arrow outside of Boyle, in Co.Roscommon turns into a murder investigation. A car crash which the authorities claim is a suicide, attracts the attention of a retired Irish army special forces officer. Pat Farrell starts to dig deep into a billion euro financial scam, which takes him from his holiday home overlooking beautiful Lough Key, to many parts of Europe. As he tries to unravel the scam, he finds himself falling for the widow of the murder victim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Declan Duignan
• Release date: Nov 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310053986

Declan Duignan

I have written some short stories over the years, but this is my first full length novel. I own my own driving school in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co.Leitrim. I love hill walking and I have travelled to a number of different countries mainly in Europe. I have visited Australia and New Zealand, and hope to visit the USA shortly. Maybe if I make some money from my book. I like to write about things that I am familiar with, and what I don't know I will spend time researching. I am now ready to start putting pen to paper for my next novel, I have been holding off until I had Death in the Curlews published.I have often sat on top of a mountain with pen in hand and the ideas just seem to flow in those surroundings, so I will have to keep hill climbing.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Crystal clear waters, sun shining and glistening on the water, temperature is in the low twenties. What more could a person ask for when they are on their holidays in early May. Sitting in a boat on Lough Arrow I really could do with less sun and a drop in temperature so that the trout might start biting at the mayfly. I have spent the last four hours trying to catch my supper without success. This is now Wednesday and I have only caught one trout since arriving on my fishing holiday on Monday.

I decide to call it a day at about five fifteen so I come ashore to where I have my car parked. I pull my boat partly into the bushes just left of the little car-park, and secure it to a tree with a chain and padlock.

I turn left onto the N4 heading for Boyle and stop off at a car-park which has stunning views across Lough Key, and to the mountains beyond. On a clear day like today I should be able to see the Arigna Mountains, and Sliabh an Iarann. This car-park is where the Gaelic Chieftain stands proud on his horse overlooking the N4, Dublin to Sligo road.

This brilliant piece of sculpture is to commemorate the battle of the Curlews between Red Hugh O Donnell and Sir Conyers Clifford, in which Red Hugh routed the English forces.

The view from here is so breath-taking and at the same time so relaxing. I love stopping off here whenever I am in the area especially when the weather is good. I can sit on one of the benches, or in my car depending on how many people are already here. If I am walking in the area it is a brilliant place for a picnic.

It can have a strange hypnotic effect, and at the same time can be so exciting. Looking around I can see the lakes and mountains still the same as they were when the great battle was fought. Nothing would really have changed with nature, except for the trees. And then we have the modern: new roads, modern houses, buses, cars and trucks.

There is also a white straight plume of smoke rising in the distance from the Masonite factory, on the Longford side of Carrick-on-Shannon.

Today there are quite a few people here, having picnics on the benches, and some children trying to see if they can get up on to the horse. Two tour buses are parked and at least fifty people are standing taking photos of each other at the sculpture.

I can see all this as I drive up the hill to the car-park. As I bring my car to a stop on the top left side where I can get an uninterrupted view of the lake, in its dazzling blue, a well-dressed middle aged man gets out of silver BMW and approaches me.

He is dressed in a navy suit with a white shirt, the top button of the shirt is open and he is not wearing a tie. He is holding a mobile phone as he approaches.

He approaches me in a rogatory way, by this I mean he has his hands facing up and slightly open as if requesting information.

He asks ‘are you Vincent?’ and when I say I am not he hurries back to his car again.

That question only seems like part of what he wants to know, but our meeting ends at that. He seemed very nervous, and yet I thought that he was glad when I said I wasn’t who he expected.

My business partner has been teaching me to read the signs and hidden signals that people make on an everyday basis.

I have been trained to read danger signals and can spot a potential threat to myself in a split second. I can walk into a room full of people and assess who is a potential threat within two seconds, and believe me this has saved my life on more than one occasion; it has also saved my clients lives as well.

Jim, who is my business partner, has always insisted that I already read people, but that I skip over the subtle signs. He insists that it would work wonders for my relationships with the opposite sex. I am happily single at the moment.

It is great to stretch your legs when you have been sitting in a row boat for a few hours, so I walk to the timber fence which looks grey and drab even on this beautiful afternoon. A coat of wood stain or paint would give it a new lease of life. A good mix of accents here today, I can hear American, British and even Russian.

Ahead of me is a vista of long green grass, and after the grass the trees seem to merge with the lake beyond. I stand with the warm sun on my back, and I try to visualize what it must have been like during the Battle of the Curlews. Red Hugh was way ahead of his time when he set up this ambush. Modern armies still use the tactics he used so successfully back in 1599.

White wispy clouds are beginning to appear over the mountains in the far distance, and for the first time I think I see the Cuilcagh Mountains in the very far distance. I am not sure if this is correct, I must check this out at some stage. I would have liked to sit on a seat, but this evening they are all taken up with families. Some people say that this spot is where UFO’s are frequently seen. Some claim it is on a flight path for alien spacecraft. I can’t comment on this as I have never witnessed any such sightings.

Chapter 2

Never fully leaving work even when on holidays, I am intrigued by the man in the BMW. He has approached nearly every car when they stopped. The only ones he didn’t go to were the ones with families in them. If he hadn’t mentioned a man’s name I would have thought he was on a blind date. Ok! I know it would be a strange place to be meeting a potential partner, but people meet up for the first time in stranger places.

He seems to be trying to contact someone with his phone, as he is continually dialling. I decide to forget about this man and the mystery surrounding him, and head back towards the town. Little did I realize that he would be involved in a part of my life for quite some time after this chance meeting.

There is a slight breeze as I head back to my car; but when I open the door I am met with a gush of heat, as if I had just entered a sauna. The temperature gauge is reading twenty five degrees as I start the engine. I hope we get this weather in July and August.

I drive back out to the N4 and turn right heading back towards Sligo. My intention is to turn left before I reach Ballinafad, and join what was the main Dublin to Sligo road, before this new road was opened. This road will bring me over the Curlews and back into Boyle. After a couple of miles I turn left onto the old Dublin - Sligo road. This road has a large number of dangerous bends and hills with very few straight stretches. It used to be nightmare if you came up behind a truck or tractor, as there was very little opportunity to overtake; but now this road is virtually deserted. The only people who use it now are locals, and tourists like myself.

Chapter 3

This brings back memories as I had travelled this road with my parents when they brought us on holidays to Boyle.

The Friday evening and the start of the school holidays was spent filling the green Army bags with our belongings. Dad would have the Hillman Hunter serviced and washed the week before. The bags were placed in the boat, and covered with tarpaulin. The boat was locked in the garage on that Friday night.

Saturday morning after an early breakfast we were on the road. We entered the town of Naas, and the villages of Sallins, and then Clane. After we passed through Clane and before we came to Kilcock, we passed a big building on our right. If we were misbehaving in the car my mother would always say she was going to send us there to boarding school. We later discovered it was called Clongowes Wood College, and she never did send us there. It did kind of look foreboding, so we kept quiet until we got onto the Dublin to Sligo road.

Every year we spent two months of the summer in our summer house on the Doon road. The first week we visited relations and friends, and the second week was spent fishing. Dad always brought his own boat and we covered all the main lakes in the area before we headed home at the end of the summer holidays. Lough Arrow was our favourite even back then. The third week was usually spent exploring. This was always as a family, though mother didn’t always come along.

After the third week we were on our own until the weekend, when Dad would return after his weeks work. Looking back on those times, I remember they went so fast. We didn’t have a television, and only in later years did we acquire a transistor radio.

We went to bed most nights exhausted, but we were rejuvenated by the next morning. We played football with the locals, went swimming in the lake, and explored every nook and cranny of the local area.

We mostly kept to the countryside when we went exploring, but we found ourselves in villages like Corrigeenroe, and the town of Boyle, on some occasions. I think that this is where my career started; I loved the outdoors, and the sense of adventure.

Chapter 4

Of all the adventures that we completed over the years, one sticks out in my mind more than all the rest. I think I was about fourteen or fifteen at the time, most likely fifteen as I think the next year I started working in the restaurant in Lough Key Forest Park.

As my father and his family were Volunteers and members of the IRA during the War of Independence they had knowledge of a hide-out in Cloontykilla Woods, just a few miles from Knockvicar.

After the troubles, it was reported that a large consignment of weapons was uncovered in the woods by the Free State Army, but no mention of any hideout. So this is what we were after.

Cloontykilla Wood and Castle are situated just off the Road from Boyle to Knockvicar. It is also accessible from Lough Key by boat. That is how we arrived at the woods, on this particular adventure. The castle was not really a big castle. It looked like a castle but was extremely small. It was more like a summer residence.

This particular year my father decided that we would search and try to find the hideout. After an unsuccessful first day it was decided that we would camp out in the woods until we found it. This was our first time to live outdoors in the wild. We dug out a pit in the ground, which was away from the trees on a grassy area. We lined the bottom of the pit with some flat stones, and lit our fire on top of the stones. We filled a tin pot with water and placed a lid on it: this was then suspended across a long piece of timber that was resting on two forked uprights. This boiled the water for the tea. We had homemade soda bread and cheese, and boy! It did taste delicious.

The next morning we were all awake early, from the sounds of the woodlands. We had built a shelter with the tarpaulin from the boat. A simple, yet very clever way to keep us dries during the night. We tied a light rope from the ground up about one metre on a tree, and hung the cover over the rope. We then tied the ends of the tarpaulin out from the centre which gave us a tent shape. The angle was great enough for any rain to run off easily. We used some branches to cover the entrance.

When I pulled back the branches the next morning a sight awaited me that I still retain in my memory. At least a half a dozen deer were grazing on a grassy patch downwind of our camp. We all had a rare chance to see them before they became aware of us and fled into the trees. We never did see them again over the next two days. As we ate our breakfast of boiled eggs, and soda bread, with freshly brewed tea, a light fog came in low over the ground. It was just about a metre high, and everything over the fog was bright and colourful. My sister Fiona said she had seen photos and it reminded her of Manna from Heaven.

By midday rain was coming in over the lake. It came in sideways and was so heavy at times that we would need to huddle together beside a big tree and throw the sheet over us. At other times the rain slackened to a slight drizzle and we could see beautiful white wisps of cloud as they filtered between the trees. Even when it stopped raining the mist clung to the branches, and then dripped down on us in big globules.

That evening we adjourned to live like lords in the now near derelict Cloontykilla castle. Stephen was nominated to go fishing for an hour to see if he could catch any fish. The rest of us had to organize getting the fire wood and lighting a fire. When Fiona and I were heading off to collect the firewood, Dad explained what we were looking for. ‘If you can get what looks like dry timber great. But if not, timber that looks like it has been lying on the ground for some time will also do. Do not bring back fresh cut or recently broken timber.’

He added, ‘check to see if it will snap, it if won’t snap leave it behind.’ Shortly after the fire was lit, Stephen arrived back with a pike. It was about eighteen inches long with a long looking tapered body. A pike when looked at close up is an awesome sight. It has very wicked looking top teeth which resemble a crocodile. It had a glossy skin, with slight green and gold coloured marbling. Down by the lake the fish was gutted and cleaned, and the head removed. We had found some wild garlic and I think some wild thyme, and this was placed inside the fish.