Stone Heart

By Des Ekin

The secrets of the past have deadly consequences…As far as the police are concerned the brutal murder of Ann Kennedy is an open and shut case. The knife-wielding attacker is the dead woman's son, Fergal Kennedy. But Tara Ross is not convinced. All her instincts as an investigative journalist tell her that they are wrong. And there is an added complication-- Tara and Fergal are lovers.
Determined to find the real truth Tara sets out on the trail of the killer -- a dangerous chase which leads her from a squalid drug den in Dublin, to an artist's studio in Montmartre in Paris, and an involvement with the mysterious Estonian, Andres Talimann.
A compelling story of murder, betrayal and family secrets that will keep the reader guessing to the very end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781847178619

Des Ekin

Des Ekin is a retired journalist and the author of four books. Born in County Down, Northern Ireland, he began his career as a reporter. After spending several years covering the Ulster Troubles, he rose to become Deputy Editor of the Belfast Sunday News before moving to his current home in Dublin. He worked as a journalist, columnist, Assistant Editor and finally Political Correspondent for TheSunday World until 2012. His book The Stolen Village (2006) was shortlisted for the Argosy Irish Nonfiction Book of the Year and for Book of the Decade in the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards 2010. He is married with a son and two daughters.

Book preview

Chapter One

TARA ROSS

stirred restlessly as the midsummer sun burst over the Burren hills and forced its way through her bedroom window. She made a half-hearted attempt to straighten her tangled bed sheets and to plump up a single pillow that had been flattened by the unaccustomed weight of two heads. Then, wearily, she closed her eyes and tried to get back to sleep.

Seconds later – at least, it seemed like only seconds – she was awakened by the high-pitched piping of her mobile phone.

Tara groaned. For a moment, she wondered if she’d mistaken the day and overslept. No, it was definitely Sunday. And Sunday was her only day off.

Her groping hand knocked over a glass of water as she fumbled for the phone and picked it up on the sixth or seventh ring. ‘Hello,’ she said without enthusiasm.

But the voice on the other end was urgent.

‘Tara? Steve here. I can’t hang around, but I’ve got something you might be interested in.’

Tara sat bolt upright, fully awake now. Steve McNamara was the local garda sergeant. He was a family friend and one of her best contacts. And he wasn’t the sort to phone at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, unless he had a very good reason.

‘There’s been a murder. The detectives from Ennis are on their way.’

‘Are you serious?’ gasped Tara. Immediately she felt like kicking herself. What a stupid bloody thing to say. ‘Hang on a minute. Let me get a pen.’

She struggled out of bed and pulled back the curtains, expecting to see a frenzy of activity outside. But Claremoon Harbour looked as peaceful and calm as it always looked, Sunday or no Sunday.

It wasn’t as though murder was a regular occurrence in Claremoon Harbour. In fact, nothing was a regular occurrence in Claremoon Harbour, unless you counted the steady routine of life that ebbed and flowed as predictably as the tide over the rippled sands of nearby Trá Mór. The last time the sleepy County Clare township had hit the headlines had been over forty years ago, when a fishing boat had foundered with the loss of three crewmen. People still talked about it as though it had happened yesterday.

‘Where, Steve? Who?’ Tara was trying to hold the phone under her chin, open the clinging pages of a new notebook, and pull the top off a ballpoint pen with her teeth, all at the same time.

‘Ann Kennedy. Up at Barnabo. I found her just after seven this morning. Stabbed with a kitchen knife or something. Over and over again, dozens of times. Jesus, what a mess.’

His throat seemed to catch on the last few words.

Tara lowered the notebook as an icy numbness spread through her limbs. She sat down unsteadily on the side of the bed.

‘Ann Kennedy?’ she repeated, hoping he wouldn’t notice the shaking in her own voice. ‘But she didn’t have an enemy in the world.’ She took a deep breath. ‘What was it, a burglary or something?’

‘No, domestic killing. It was the son. We’re taking him in this afternoon under Section Four.’ He was whispering now. ‘But for God’s sake don’t quote me on that. At the moment, the official line is that we’re keeping an open mind.’

‘But Steve…’

‘Listen, kid, I’ve got to go. Just thought I’d give you the chance to get in there ahead of the posse. Talk to you later.’

Tara sat staring at the tiny black phone, long after the line had gone dead, as though it held the answers to the questions that raced through her mind. She just couldn’t bring herself to believe Ann was dead. Ann Kennedy, the farmer’s widow who had achieved national status as a women’s rights campaigner. She had been a familiar face on TV discussion programmes, a recognisable voice on morning radio. She was a legend. She was her friend. And now she was dead.

Tara rubbed her eyes and forced herself to concentrate. She realised she was just erecting mental barriers, preventing another, even more disturbing, thought from entering her mind. The other vital bit of information that Steve had given her.

It was the son. We’re taking him in.

Not Fergal. It couldn’t be. Wasn’t he…

Tara stood up and savagely punched numbers on her mobile phone. She couldn’t hang around. She had work to do.

Now it was afternoon, and the little twisting road that led up from the village to the townland of Barnabo was congested with garda cars and the Dublin-registered Toyotas of the national press. After forty years, Claremoon Harbour had finally hit the headlines again.

Tara sat on a warm dry-stone wall, just outside the perimeter of the police warning tape that sealed off the house and its grounds, and waited for Fergal Kennedy to be escorted from the old farmhouse and into the waiting patrol car. Would he have a coat or a blanket over his head? she wondered. Or would he be able to look at her as he walked down the potholed laneway towards the aluminium gate where the car waited with its engine already running?

In the surrounding fields, police wearing blue boiler suits and gumboots were combing every single inch of turf and mud, raking grass, sifting weeds, sorting litter and farm debris into sealed evidence bags. There were more officers examining the barn, the outhouses and the charred framework of what had once, years ago, been a sizeable cowshed. Grim-faced forensic experts from the Garda Technical Bureau, dressed head to toe in sterile white coveralls, wandered in and out of the house where, Tara reminded herself with a shudder, the body of Ann Kennedy would stay in the kitchen until the pathologist arrived.

In the meantime, Tara had done all she could. All her phone calls had been made, and now there was nothing to do but wait.

And there could be worse places to wait. Behind her rose the hills that led towards the Burren, a bleak and eerily beautiful moonscape of snow-white limestone slabs and fissures where fully mature thorn trees grew hand-high like natural bonsais, and where lakes would appear and vanish as though by act of sorcery.

Tara strained her eyes to look out over the sea, now a sparkling blue-green with only tiny specks of white. Force four or five, she guessed expertly, and unlikely to change much today; but you could never tell with the Atlantic Ocean. And yes, there were a couple of fishing-craft about a mile out to sea. She thought she could make out the outline of the Róisín Dubh, her father’s fishing boat, but at this distance it was impossible to tell.

On any other day, Fergal might have been out there with him, helping to bring in the silver catch of salmon. On any other day, things might have been so different…

‘And who might you be, love?’

Tara looked up. At first she thought the man in the blue suit was a detective, but he didn’t have that cop air about him and, anyway, not many gardaí could afford Comme des Garçons suits. He carried a state-of-the-art laptop computer which had probably cost more than Tara’s car, and a mobile phone – the latest model, with so many features that it could probably do your Christmas shopping for you. Nearby was a new-reg blue Mazda sports car, abandoned beside a police no-parking cone, its door left carelessly ajar.

Tara took an instant dislike to the man’s fixed sneer and his patronising tone, but she smiled back and answered politely enough.

‘Tara Ross,’ she said, stretching out her hand. ‘And who might you be?’

Uninvited, the man sat down close beside her on the sun-warmed dry stones – too close – and waited just a little too long before accepting her outstretched hand.

‘Gerry Gellick,’ he introduced himself, before handing over a business card. It identified him simply as a freelance journalist.

Tara knew she’d recognised him from somewhere – the arrogant face, the pug nose and the carrot-red, painstakingly gelled hair. The photo regularly accompanied his byline in several newspapers. He had a reputation for getting the interviews nobody else could get. He also had a reputation for getting interviews that the interviewees could not remember giving. He quoted cops, priests, housewives, politicians and prostitutes, but somehow they all sounded exactly alike.

Tara dug into her jeans pocket and produced her own card.

Gellick looked critically at her photo and then at Tara’s face, comparing the two.

‘You don’t look like your photo,’ he said at last. He tossed a lit cigarette-end into the dry bracken of the hillside.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ she said absently, pointing to the bracken. ‘You could easily start a fire.’

‘No, you’re much prettier.’ He edged closer, and the smell of expensive aftershave couldn’t disguise the wine he’d had with lunch. She realised with irritation that he was half-smashed. He wasn’t drunk, as the police witnesses would say in court cases around these parts, but he had drink taken.

In any other circumstances, she might have been pleased with the compliment. She couldn’t resist glancing at the photo and then at her reflection in the window of the Mazda. She looked quickly away again, because she’d always been sensitive about her own appearance and the way it set her apart from most of the other women in her village – the ones with reddish brown hair and pale Celtic skin.

(‘You’re more Spic than Mick,’ Steve McNamara, who wasn’t above a bit of racism now and again, used to tease her. ‘That jet-black hair, that lovely olive skin, those big brown eyes and that classic nose. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were descended from the Spaniards who were washed ashore with the Armada.’)

Now, Tara realised with annoyance that Gerry Gellick was edging closer still, his twisted slit of a mouth distorted in what he no doubt took to be a disarming smile.

‘What did you do to get sent to this dump on a nice Sunday afternoon?’ he asked.

Tara followed his contemptuous stare down to the pretty little village.

‘Well, nobody actually sent me to this dump, Gerry,’ she said slowly. ‘I was born and brought up in Claremoon Harbour. This dump happens to be my home.’

But the irony in her voice was wasted on him.

‘Oh. Then you might be useful.’ He said it as though it would be her privilege to help him. ‘Do you know anything about the guy they’re questioning?’

Tara shifted uncomfortably. ‘A bit.’

‘What’s his story? Do you know whether he’s got an alibi?’

‘An alibi?’ To her intense annoyance, she felt her face begin to redden.

Gellick gave an exaggerated sigh of frustration. ‘I mean, what does he claim he was doing at the time of the murder?’

Her stomach tightened.

‘Look, Gerry.’ No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘He’s been locked in there all morning with two detectives from Ennis. How should I know what he’s said?’

‘Okay, okay.’ Her answer seemed to satisfy him. She relaxed again.

Gerry Gellick lit a cigarette thoughtfully. ‘You shouldn’t be stuck down here in the bogs, a nice girl like you,’ he said at last. ‘I know a lot of the right people in Dublin journalism. I could get you a job in the big smoke if you play your cards right. You might have to start at the bottom and work your way up, though. Where are you working at the moment? A firelighter?’

‘Firelighter?’

‘A little paper in the sticks?’ He grinned and waved his open hand as though explaining a joke to a backward child.

Tara smiled thinly. ‘No, I’m not employed by the local paper. But I do work as a stringer for them from time to time.’

‘Well, what do you do?’

‘I’m a cyberhack.’

‘A what?’

‘I edit my own online newspaper, the Clare Electronic News. It’s on the Internet. I’ve got thousands of readers all over the world.’

‘Jaze, that’s a good one. Where did you learn to do that?’

‘I taught myself all about computers. And I learned journalism at college and later at the Evening Mercury in Dublin. I was features editor there for two years.’

His eyes widened. He was impressed. ‘So why the heck did you return to Bally-go-backwards?’

Oh, God, she thought. Here we go again. How many times would she have to answer that question? She could have told Gerry Gellick all about her messy break-up with Chris Calder in Dublin. She could have explained how she’d decided, in a sudden rush of bravado and defiance, to start afresh by launching her own business in her home town. (After all, she kept telling herself, this was the age of the global village, wasn’t it?) And how, after a few months, she’d decided that Claremoon Harbour was really the only place in the world she wanted to be.

But the last thing she felt like doing was to open her heart to this man Gellick – especially at this time.

‘Because I like it here,’ she replied at last. It was the truth.

Gellick shook his head. ‘Come on, love, nobody in her right mind likes it here. It’s a crappy little pit in the arse-end of nowhere.’ He pointed disdainfully down at the tiny village as though it were self-evident. ‘Listen. I can put in a word with the right people and get you back to the real centre of things. I don’t know what you did to get the boot from the Evening Mercury, but I could fix it for you to get back in there, if you like.’

He was absolutely serious, but when he saw her angry reaction, he changed tack. His face crumpled in a grotesque caricature of a backwoods politician on the election trail. ‘I can fix anything, love,’ he said, mimicking a music-hall west-of-Ireland accent. ‘Whether it’s a drink-driving charge or a job in the civil service or just a pothole in the road, I can fix it for you, if you just be nice to me, pet…’

The mimicry was perfect. He leaned towards her, grinning evilly in character, and his hand began stroking the leg of her jeans, up and down from knee to thigh. ‘Just you be nice to me…’

Tara knew the technique. It was common in Ireland – the grope disguised as a joke. If you objected to it, you were a humourless killjoy who couldn’t take a bit of fun. If you submitted to it, you were still getting someone’s hands all over you. A grope in quotation marks was still a grope.

‘Take your hand away,’ she warned icily.

‘I’ll even get you a council house, pet.’ The mock-leer remained and the spidery fingers were edging towards her inner-thigh.

‘Look! Someone’s coming out of the house,’ Tara said abruptly. Rising, she leaned on the largest and wobbliest rock on the dry-stone wall and sent it tumbling down to smash painfully on the toe of Gellick’s brightly-buffed shoe. ‘Oops, sorry,’ she said, eyes still glued to the house. ‘False alarm.’

She noticed with satisfaction that the sharp granite stone had cut a gash in the leather toecap of what was obviously an expensive piece of footwear. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ she said, moving off.

But Gellick’s face was a mask of black fury. ‘You did that deliberately, you culchie bitch,’ he shouted. ‘Hey! Come back here. You don’t just walk away from me like that!’

He had grabbed her arm. Even through the thick material of her jacket, the grip hurt and was obviously meant to. Gellick wasn’t particularly well-built, but he was wiry and he had a streetfighter’s strength.

She stood stock-still, looking him directly in the eye. ‘Let me go,’ she said quietly.

He hesitated for a few moments, weighing her up, then slowly released her arm.

Tara shook herself free and walked over to the blue and white boundary tape, where a heavily built man in garda uniform was helping a squad car to execute a twelve-point turn in the narrow laneway.

‘Steve. I need to talk to you.’

Steve McNamara pulled off his police cap and wiped his brow. ‘That’s it, you’re clear now. Work away,’ he called out to the squad car driver, banging twice on the roof with a fist the size of a bowling ball. The driver winced and drove off.

‘Are you all right, Tara?’ Steve turned around to face her. ‘I was watching you out of the corner of my eye and you seemed to be having a bit of trouble with that fella. If you want, I’ll go over there and soften his cough for him.’

‘It’s okay, Steve. I can look after myself.’ She glanced around at Gellick, who was examining his mutilated shoe and glaring balefully at her, resentful as a poker player who’s just folded without calling his opponent’s bluff. ‘Listen, I really need to talk to you. About the murder.’

Steve replaced his cap. ‘I can’t talk now, Tara. I’m really up to my tonsils. How about if I call round to your house tonight, after I get off duty? Things should have quietened down by then.’

Tara bit her lip tensely. ‘Yes. I suppose that’ll be okay.’

‘Tara.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘You already know everything I know about this case.’

‘It’s not what you know, Steve,’ she said. ‘It’s what…’

Her voice tailed off as she realised he wasn’t listening. Following his eyes, she understood why. There had been a sudden explosion of activity outside the Kennedy home. Two bulky detectives were emerging from the farmhouse, a third figure sandwiched awkwardly between them.

Tara turned back to the sergeant. But he’d already gone.

‘A 29-year-old man has been arrested under Section Four of the 1984 Criminal Justice Act in relation to the murder of women’s rights campaigner Ann Kennedy…’

It was seven-thirty, and Tara had finished for the day. Taking longer than usual to decipher her pages of shorthand notes, she had typed up the news story and sent it down the computer line to the national paper which employed her as part-time stringer.

Then she’d turned her attention to her own Internet newspaper. The Clare Electronic News had been Tara’s own brainchild. Working with a single computer in the cramped conditions of her own bedroom, she had created a full-scale Web publication that looked and read exactly like a local newspaper, complete with ornate Victorian masthead.

She designed a new front page, making the Kennedy murder the main story. From her library of archive photos, she selected a picture of Ann Kennedy and placed it top-centre of the page. Ann’s clear blue eyes looked out at her, almost in amusement, as Tara typed up a brief tribute to the work of this extraordinary campaigner and launched it into cyberspace. Satisfied, Tara switched off the computer, popped open a can of chilled Perrier and used the cold metal to massage her aching temples.

A 29-year-old man has been arrested…

For legal reasons, the man could not be identified. But everyone in County Clare would know it was Fergal Kennedy, Ann Kennedy’s elder son.

She sat back and closed her eyes. The thirty seconds that it had taken Fergal to walk down the muddy driveway, escorted by the two grim-faced detectives, were burned on to her mind’s eye like a bare lightbulb burns into the retina. The scene played and replayed in her consciousness like a loop of film, until the sequence of frames was as familiar as the footage of the first moonwalk, or the ambush of that presidential limousine in Dallas.

Fergal looked much the same as he’d always looked. That was the surprising thing. For some reason she’d expected a haggard, red-eyed figure with a heavy growth of stubble. But he looked so ordinary – his solid frame dressed in his usual checked workshirt and jeans, his bewildered face partly hidden by the downward flop from his mass of unruly brown hair.

As the cameras flashed and the photographers jostled for position, Fergal had paused for a second at the gate. Then he’d spotted her face among the crowd.

And he’d winked.

She had anticipated an apprehensive look, an expression of anguish, maybe even a hint of tears. What she didn’t expect was that rapid flick of the eyelid, so virtually imperceptible that she was sure no one else had even noticed.

It was a wink. Definitely a wink.

It was a wink that said: ‘Don’t worry. I’m innocent.’

A few seconds later, he was pushed into the garda car, and he was gone. For a while she’d watched the flashing lights disappear down the road towards Ennis and listened to the roar of the motorcycle escort. And then she’d taken a short-cut along a sheep-track through the bracken, and walked slowly home.

Her copy filed, her job done, she looked back at those shorthand notes which had taken so long to decipher. The pages were dotted with random marks, odd little circles that had smudged the ink and soaked through the paper like raindrops.

That was nothing extraordinary. Her notebooks had lots of pages that looked like that. It usually happened when she conducted interviews outside in the rain.

Only today it hadn’t rained at all.

Chapter Two

IT HAD

rained the first day she met Fergal.

Lord, how it had rained.

It wasn’t just the usual rainfall you get around the west coast of Ireland, the constant mizzle of shower and mist that folk describe euphemistically as ‘a soft day’. This was a lashing downpour, flogged into a frenzy by a March storm somewhere out there in the slate-grey Atlantic Ocean. It was lashing hard enough to hurt. It made you feel that the whole world was made of cascading water. Even the hard granite of the paving stones became alive with thousands of liquid explosions as the rain battered mercilessly against the stone.

Running from her rusted, leaking old Fiat into Claremoon courthouse, Tara was soaked in seconds. Her navy woollen overcoat repelled some of the rain, but her legs were spattered with mud, and her flimsy shoes seemed to suck up the water underfoot like blotting paper.

‘Waterworld!’ she shouted as she burst through the door in a flurry of flying moisture.

‘Rain Man,’ responded Pat McEndle.

‘Splash.’

‘Singing in the Rain.’

‘Okay, you win.’

Tara grinned back at Pat McEndle, the middle-aged court clerk, as they played their familiar game. Every month for the past two years she’d covered this same court in Claremoon Harbour, and every time they met they played the same game of wits and movie-buff skills.

It had begun as a joke about the courthouse, which was actually a courthouse in name only. Claremoon District Court was held in the local cinema, a run-down fleapit that looked grim even by the romantic glow of the silver screen at night. In the harsh light of day, it was even more shoddy and dilapidated. But it had been the only building available after the old church hall had been condemned as unsafe.

Claremoon Harbour was so far away from anywhere else that it had its own district court session. The judge would travel all the way from Ennis and spend the morning dealing with traffic cases, agricultural infringements and minor drink-related offences while grumbling publicly about the courtroom conditions in the hope that someone in authority would one day take heed. No one ever did.

So once a month the long-suffering judge would take his seat at a table just under the moth-eaten screen, while the solicitors and garda witnesses would crowd into the front rows of red velveteen tip-up seats. The only people who got any fun out of the arrangement were Tara and Pat McEndle, who would vie with each other to dream up the most likely feature film to suit the weather conditions.

Tara shook out her sodden overcoat and hung it over the back of her metal chair. She shared a table with Pat, which suited her fine because she could easily get names and addresses from the charge-sheets. ‘Anyone due to be sent to Devil’s Island this morning?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Not unless they shoot the judge. We’ve just got the usual minor stuff – speeding, parking, thumping, peeing in the street and drinking after hours. Want a look?’

‘Thanks.’ She accepted the thick sheaf of charge-sheets and began flicking through it.

‘There’s one case you might be interested in,’ mused Pat. ‘Francie Mahony, up on six charges of receiving stolen goods, namely one gate.’

‘A gate?’

‘Yes. One of those big country-and-western jobs. You know – two giant cartwheels and a big pair of cow-horns and lots of brasswork, the sort of thing that self-made businessmen like to put up in front of their Dallas-style bungalows. Francie stole one of them somewhere around Kilkenny last year and he’s sold it six times since. Here we are.’ Pat pointed to the relevant summons. ‘In Carlow, Kildare, Meath, Westmeath, Galway and finally in Clare. What he’d do was, he’d offer it around the bungalows and sell it to some sucker for two hundred cash. No questions asked. Then he’d come back at three in the morning with his van and his screwdriver and steal it right back again.’

‘That’s a nice one. You’re sure it’s going ahead today?’

‘No doubt about it. Francie isn’t turning up, but we’re holding the party without him.’

Tara took down the details and then sifted rapidly through the rest of the summonses. One name leaped out at her – Fergal Kennedy, Barnabo, due up on a charge of driving without due care and attention on the main Ennis road.

Pat pointed to the summons sheet. ‘Know him?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Well…yes and no.’

She’d known Fergal since childhood, but there were more than three full years between them, and at that stage he had seemed almost like a member of an older generation. When she was still climbing trees and raiding orchards, he was already learning to drive and dating the sixth-year convent girls who seemed to her to be the epitome of bored, worldly-wise sophistication.

Even as a child, she had heard the rumours about Fergal. How those cuts and bruises that he seemed to carry like permanent tattoos were not, as he claimed, the result of schoolyard tussles or falls downstairs. How on a still night the neighbours could almost time their watches by the interval between the moment his morose, embittered father Martin Kennedy left Breadon’s pub, and the moment the first young voice would cry with sudden pain and terror from their hillside farmhouse.

And even at that early stage, while chattering childishly behind the red brick buildings of the tiny school, Tara had encountered the most potent rumour of all – that the Kennedy farmhouse on the hill concealed some shameful secret which even the grown-ups in the village talked about only in the most guarded whispers.

‘That’s him over there,’ said Pat. ‘The one who looks like a character out of a Monty Python sketch. He’s a lumberjack, and he’s okay.’

She glanced around the threadbare seats. They were rapidly filling up with defendants, witnesses, and curious spectators waiting to see the most interesting entertainment Claremoon Harbour had to offer on a wet Wednesday.

Finally her eye settled on a tall figure at the back. He was wearing a heavy red-checked lumbershirt, open necked with a white T-shirt underneath. A brown leather jacket, spattered black with raindrops, lay across his lap.

At first she didn’t recognise him as the spidery, underdeveloped lad who’d left Claremoon Harbour when she was barely out of her teens. The years in Canada had been good to him. He was heavier-built and his skinny face had rounded out and matured, but the green eyes remained the same – bright and alert, like those of some watchful bird of prey. They seemed to flicker around the room, eager for challenge, missing nothing.

The unruly dark brown hair still looked as though it refused to submit to the control of brush or comb, but he now wore a neatly-trimmed moustache. It suited him, she thought casually, as she returned to her work and moved on to the next case on the list.

‘Poor old Fergal,’ mused Pat. ‘Just back from Canada the two months, and he’s in trouble already.’

‘Why? Has he been in trouble before?’

‘Fergal? No, he’s a good lad. Never had much of a chance, that’s all. His da, now…that was a different story. He was a regular customer of ours. In and out so often we practically had to give him a season ticket. Drunk and disorderly, the odd assault. And all down to the same old problem. John Barleycorn.’ Pat raised an imaginary bottle to his lips. ‘Sober, he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But once he’d had a jar, there was no living with him. I don’t know how Ann Kennedy put up with it all those years.’

Tara gave a token tut-tut of concern and got back to work. She liked Pat, but she sometimes wished he wouldn’t talk so much when she was trying to take notes.

The task of copying details from the charge-sheets had to be done quickly, before the judge finished his morning cup of tea, otherwise her job of reporting the often-chaotic courtroom proceedings would be very difficult indeed.

‘I could never stand a man who beats up his kids,’ Pat was saying. ‘I mean, the odd swipe at the wife is okay – only joking, Tara – but children. My God. They say that as soon as he got back from the pub every night, he’d wake up his two young lads, Fergal and Manus, and make them perform for him.’

‘Perform?’ That got Tara’s full attention.

‘Yes, perform. Recite their Catechism, do their twelve-times tables, sing a song they’d learned at school, whatever. Then, at the first slip they made, out would come the blackthorn stick from the cupboard.’ Pat shook his head. ‘It was almost as though, in his poor whiskey-fuddled mind, he was getting revenge for everything that had gone wrong in his own miserable life.’

Tara had almost finished. ‘Well, he can’t hurt them any more, can he?’ she said distantly.

‘That’s true. He’s been dead, what? Five years now. And Fergal didn’t even bother coming home for his funeral.’

Tara finally reached the end of the list. She handed the batch of summonses back to Pat with relief. ‘Yes, I remember. There was a big scandal in the village over that,’ she said. ‘Everyone expected Fergal to take over the family farm after Martin died. But he just ignored the whole business and stayed put in Canada.’

Pat checked his watch. The judge was taking longer than usual over his morning cuppa.

‘Well, you can’t blame young Fergal,’ he said. ‘He hated the whole idea of becoming a farmer. As soon as he finished art college, he was out of Ireland like a shot. He had big ideas about making a name for himself as an artist in Vancouver, but from what I hear, it didn’t work out and he ended up working in the forestry service or something. Then he got fed up with that, and came home again with his tail between his legs.’

Tara nodded. The story of Fergal’s six-year exile and his eventual homecoming had been thoroughly discussed in a community where most emigrants never came back at all.

‘I heard there was another reason,’ she told Pat. ‘A more personal one.’

‘What was that?’

‘They say there was a woman,’ she said. ‘And when they broke up, he was so devastated that…’

But Pat wasn’t listening. He’d sprung to his feet in deference to a small, rotund figure who was walking towards his allotted place under the silver screen and trying his best to look dignified in circumstances which he knew quite well were utterly ridiculous.

‘All rise,’ Pat shouted.

Fergal’s case, like most of the others, seemed routine and almost boring until the arresting officer gave evidence. It appeared that Fergal had been driving his imported 1966 Corvette at seventy miles per hour on an open stretch of road, ignoring the fact that there was an overall speed limit of sixty, when he rounded a corner and rear-ended a vehicle that was parked by the side of the road about fifty yards past the bend.

‘What sort of vehicle?’ yawned the judge.

‘An ambulance, Judge.’

A titter of laughter rippled through the sodden ranks of the spectators. This was more like it.

‘An ambulance?’

‘Yes, Judge. A local resident had fallen off his roof and was being removed to hospital.’

‘Was anyone injured in the crash?’

‘Only Mr Kennedy himself, Judge. He was knocked temporarily unconscious. They just lifted him out of his car and straight into the ambulance, and took the two of them to hospital together.’

‘Forty pounds,’ said the judge, trying to keep his face straight.

An hour later the court ended and the disappointed spectators filed out of the cinema, once again cheated of any sex, violence or major scandals in the village.

Tara stood up and tried to brush the dried mud from her legs. At least the rest of her navy suit seemed to have dried out. Now for a bite of lunch and on to the town commissioners’ meeting at two thirty…

‘You from the local paper?’

She sighed inwardly, half in embarrassment and half in irritation. She’d been finding it impossible to scrape off a particularly stubborn spat of mud. And she was used to people approaching her after court cases, asking her, in effect, to censor their names from her report of the court proceedings.

In a small community like this, publicity in the local paper was more of a punishment than any penalty imposed by the court. Over the years, she had become hardened to tales of fathers with weak hearts who would drop dead at the shock of seeing their son’s or daughter’s name in print for double-parking.

‘Yes, I’m working for the Clare Independent today,’ she replied without looking up.

‘I’m Fergal Kennedy.’

She glanced up for the first time. The green eyes were direct and serious.

‘Hello, Fergal. I’m Tara Ross.’

He laughed. ‘Not Tara Ross from Rathmitchel? John Ross’s little daughter? Well, I’ll be damned.’

In Claremoon Harbour, you always remained somebody’s daughter or somebody’s son. Tara closed her notebook and forced a smile. ‘Not so little any more, Mr Kennedy. Now what can I do for you?’

‘You can keep this damnfool case out of your bloody paper.’

The accent was an attractive mixture of Clare and Canada, but the phraseology and the direct approach was purely transatlantic. An Irishman would have made the same request obliquely, putting on what locals called ‘the poor mouth’, wheedling, coaxing, and asking her if she could see her way clear to letting the hare sit.

They left the cinema together, Tara delivering her well-practised speech almost automatically.

‘Look, I’m really sorry, but my job is to report all the cases. The editor of the Clare Independent decides whether or not they’re published.’

‘What a load of bull, Tara. You know as well as I do that he hasn’t a clue which cases are going on. You could drop one without him even knowing.’

She laughed in spite of herself. It made a refreshing change from the tales of woe she normally had to endure.

‘What’s so funny?’ His eyes were fixed on her, bright and wary as a falcon’s. He couldn’t see the joke. His muscles tensed and, just a fleeting instant, she had the ridiculous impression that he was about to hit her.

‘I’m sorry, Fergal, but that’s the way it is,’ she said, turning serious. ‘Really.’

He snorted. ‘I’m having enough trouble trying to insure the goddam ’vette in this country as it is.’

She spun around and confronted him. ‘So that’s what it’s all about – saving money on your insurance?’ she challenged.

A typical Irishman would have been offended. But Fergal just nodded. ‘Sure it is. Can you think of a better reason?’

By this time they were out in the street. The torrential rain had eased off, and a pale yellow sun was trying desperately to break through the mist.

‘Can’t do it. Sorry,’ Tara shouted over her shoulder as she dashed between a tractor and a filthy delivery van to get to her ancient Fiat. Claremoon Harbour was unusually busy today. However, once the court traffic had dispersed it would return to its usual state of contented sleepiness. The most exciting thing about the afternoon would be pick-up time at the tiny national school; three hours later there would be evening Mass at the old Victorian church; then a bit of lively craic in Breadon’s pub. That was how it was; that was how it had always been, for as long as Tara could remember.

She opened the car door quickly – there was never any reason to lock it in Claremoon Harbour – and tried to start the car. The tiny electric motor whirred gallantly but nothing happened. Wait, she reminded herself. Pause for five seconds. Try again. Wait five seconds.

Whirr, clunk, silence.

Damn it, she thought. It’s finally kicked the bucket.

‘Damp plugs,’ said a familiar voice. ‘I’ll fix it for you…if you keep that case out.’

She looked around furiously. His head was halfway through her driver’s window, grinning insolently.

‘You go to hell,’ she shouted. And for the next ten minutes she worked in the misty drizzle, head halfway into the rear engine compartment, replacing the spark-plugs with spares and trying to dry out the distributor.

Her fury grew as she watched him lounge against his shiny red Corvette, judging all her efforts with a critical smile. But finally she finished the job. Jumping triumphantly into the driver’s seat, she turned the ignition key…only to find that the battery had gone flat.

‘Well?’ she said at last. ‘Aren’t you going to laugh?’

He shook his head, the grin temporarily gone.

‘Nope. Not at all. You did everything right. Where did you learn to be such a good mechanic? Here,’ he offered, ‘I’ll start it from the Corvette’s battery with these jump-leads. No charge, no conditions, no hidden agenda. Honest.’

She looked at him and saw he was serious. ‘Okay. Thanks,’ she said, watching carefully as he attached the leads to the battery with crocodile clips. If he put them on the wrong terminals, they’d both be in trouble. ‘I learned a bit about motor maintenance with the diesel on the Róisín Dubh,’ she explained. ‘If you could keep that old engine going, you could fix anything.’

As Fergal opened the hood of his American car, Tara contrasted its sleek, shiny paintwork with the pitted surface of her own rust-bucket. ‘Mind you, this old Fiat is something of a special challenge,’ she admitted. ‘It was a great car in its day. But it