In the Morning I'll Be Gone (16 page)

“You were on the scene?”

“No, but I conducted the autopsy first thing the next morning.”

“It was impossible at that stage to be more precise about the time of death?”

“What did I write in the report?”

“Between ten p.m. and midnight.”

“Yes, that sounds about right.”

“I’ve read your findings. There was no sexual dimension to the crime, no other signs of violence. Nothing under her nails. No struggle. Does that not seem strange to you?”

“Not strange at all. Her assailant struck her from behind. She fell to the ground unconscious, and the assailant manhandled her into a position where he could break her neck. There would be no defensive wounds in such a case.”

“Well, yes, Doctor, I see that, but it poses the question why, doesn’t it? If there was no sexual motive and nothing was taken from the till . . .”

“There are other reasons to kill someone.”

“Of course, but Lizzie was well liked, she had no enemies that we know about, and there was no paramilitary dimension. And then there’s the compelling fact that the pub was locked and bolted from the inside. Does it not seem more likely that she was the victim of an accident? The light bulb was in her hand, the bulb in the socket was dead . . .”

He shook his head, stood up, and opened the window, letting in a salty breeze from the lough.

“I can’t account for any of that. All I know is that the wound on her head was consistent with a rounded, blunt piece of wood, not a flat hardwood floor, and the snapping of her neck vertebrae was more consistent with a sudden violent lateral motion—exactly the sort of damage that would be inflicted if someone (admittedly a very strong or a very angry man) grabbed her head in his hands and snapped it to the back and right.”

“Who would know how to do something like that?”

“If you were raised in the country you might have done that to a rabbit or even a lamb more than once.”

“Is it
impossible
that she fell off the bar?”

He looked at me with annoyance. “No, sonny! It’s not impossible! I never said it was impossible. I wouldn’t say that. I merely said that I think that this is the most likely explanation for her injuries. And as for that light bulb of yours. The light bulb was in her right hand, was it not?”

“I thought of that. It says in the file that she
was
right handed.”

“When you’re taking out a dead light bulb don’t you keep the new light bulb in your left hand and unscrew the dead one with your right?”

“Maybe you do, or maybe you wait until you’re balanced and then switch the bulbs.”

“Ach, well . . . The killer put it in there, that’s what I think. To fool us.”

“But with all the other circumstantial evidence, would it not seem, Dr. Kent, that the probabilities are more in favor of an accident?”

“And who would change a light bulb in the dark? All the lights were turned off.”

“As Chief Inspector Beggs pointed out to me, you have to turn the lights off if you’re going to change the light bulb, otherwise you could get electrocuted. Especially in an old pub with dodgy wiring. And there was light from the street lamp outside.”

He thought about this for a moment and fluffed the white flecks of beard under his chin. He sat down again and shook his head. “I’m not a policeman, Inspector Duffy, I’m just a country physician. Fifty years I’ve been doctoring to this parish. Since 1933. You see a lot and you hear a lot in that time. And you learn to trust your instincts.”

“I’m sure you do, Dr. Kent. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot more of life than I have.”

“Oh aye. Surely. It’s been hard out here, alone.”

“You were never married?”

“Emily went to the Lord in 1944. Not the war. Tuberculosis. It took us both but I pulled through. I must have given it to her through contact with a patient. She was never a strong lass.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Long time ago. I’ve been out here by myself since then, although I cannae say that I have never felt her spirit about me from time to time.”

I munched on the thick, delicious, obviously home-made Veda bread.

“This is good,” I told him.

“Let me ask you a question, if I may, young man,” Dr. Kent said.

“Go ahead.”

“Why do you think Lizzie Fitzpatrick locked the doors of the pub and put both bolts across if she was on her way home. She’d just sent the last of the customers packing, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, all she had to do was clean up a few glasses and turn the lights off. She wouldn’t bother to bolt the front door, would she? She’d maybe just turn the key in the lock so a passing customer wouldn’t come in. But that big heavy bolt, why would she lock the door and bolt it if she was going to be heading out in a couple of minutes?”

“Why do you think?”

“I have no idea, but I thought it was a trifle odd myself.”

“Perhaps she was nervous. Maybe she was going through the till receipts and she wanted the place locked up nice and safe.”

“Aye . . . could be, could be . . .”

“Did you happen to know her before the, uh, incident?”

“No. Not really. I know the family to see, and I believe that I drank in the pub once or twice. It was a Catholic establishment and, well . . . it wasn’t my sort of place. You’re a Catholic, aren’t you? I can tell.”

“Yes.”

“Do you not find that your religion causes problems in a largely Protestant, some would say sectarian, force like the RUC?”

“It’s all right.”

“Hmmm,” he said dubiously. “And it’s very peculiar that the RUC Special Branch would take an interest in a four-year-old case of accidental death.”

I smiled. “Aye, it is, but ‘ours is not to reason why . . .’”

He put down his teacup. “Everyone misquotes that poem. It actually goes like this: ‘Theirs not to make reply/Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die/Into the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred.’ There’s a difference of perspective between ‘our’ and ‘their.’ Tennyson would never presume to speak for the soldiers, would he? Him, a rector’s son?”

“I’m sure you’re right, Dr. Kent.”

I finished my tea.

“Shall I walk you out?” he asked me.

We went into the farmyard again. The chickens pecked at my feet and the nanny goat took an interest in the sleeve of my leather jacket.

“Someone has to speak up for that wee girl. Only I saw the truth. I’m the only one that believes she was murdered,” Dr. Kent announced.

“Not quite. You and Mrs. Fitzpatrick and the boyfriend.”

“Aye, I convinced them. A terrible thing to do, some might say. I’ve seen Mary Fitzpatrick from time to time and it’s given her nothing but torment the last few years. It’s a doctor’s job to ease the minds of those who are suffering. But he also serves truth, doesn’t he? Truth!”

“Dr. Kent, would you be offended if I got a second opinion on your physical examination of Lizzie’s body?”

“No, not at all. That’s a fine idea! I’ll look for my files and send them to you.”

I gave him my address.

“I’ll be interested to hear what your doctor has to say. I only wish we’d taken an X-ray photograph. I did some drawings for the autopsy. That’s what I was taught. That’s the old way.”

He leaned in and said in a half-whisper, “But of course, you could always exhume the body and take the photographs now if you need to. The flesh will most likely be gone but the bones will not have decayed.”

“Jesus, I can only hope it doesn’t come to that.”

I drove to a phone box and put in a call to Kate at the number she’d given me. It was an odd area code and I wasn’t sure whether I was calling her at the MI5 HQ in Bessbrook or the command headquarters in North Down. A secretary answered and when I told her who I was, she said she was putting me through to Kate Prentice. A surname at last.

“Long time, no hear,” she said with a playful but slightly annoyed tinge to her voice.

“I’ve been following leads.”

“Any promising ones?”

“Actually there might be one.”

“Really?”

“Yes. But it’s not a matter I want to discuss over a telephone. I’ll call you in a couple of days when I see how things shake out. It might be nothing, but then again it might be something. OK?”

“I knew you’d do it. I told them,” she said excitedly.

“I haven’t done anything yet. I’m just saying that I might have a lead. OK?”

“All right, Sean, keep on it.”

“If I need to, say, exhume a corpse, I’d be able to get the powers to do that, would I? Even with my unusual status?”

“Exhume a corpse? What is this lead?”

“I just want to know that I’ve got the full authority of a regular cop.”

“Of course you do, and the full backing of our department.”

“Good . . . All right, that’s all for now. I’ll talk to you about this in a couple of days.”

“Yes. And well done, Sean!”

“Save your praise. The ball hasn’t even got rolling yet.”

I hung up and drove back to Mary Fitzpatrick’s house in Ballykeel village on the east shore of Lough Neagh.

I parked the Beemer outside the coaching house. The rain had stopped and the sun was coming out now. I opened the glove compartment and took out my old Dictaphone.

“Interviews Lizzie Fitzpatrick case, day 1 . . .” I began, and made a few notes to myself. I played back the notes and tried to make sense of it all but I didn’t have it yet. I put the Dictaphone back in the glove compartment.

I walked down the drive, pushed the bell, and after a pause Annie answered it.

She’d lost none of her looks. She had her mother’s red hair, but hers corkscrewed in all directions in a way that some would find gypsy-like and charming and others a bit overboard for a woman who was inching toward the wrong side of thirty. She was pale, of course, and her striking blue eyes had lost none of their power and lustre. Her nose had the sharp angled prominence of the aristocrat’s (an O’Neill bloodline perhaps) and her lips were full. She had always smiled easily and even now, after the death of her sister and her divorce from Dermot, her expression was warm.

She was wearing jeans and an enormous home-made woolen jumper with reindeer on it.

“Hello?” she said, not recognizing me.

“It’s Sean Duffy,” I said.

“Sean Duffy!” she exclaimed, and pulled me in for a hug. She kissed me on the cheek and then stood back to look at me.

“Sean Duffy as I live and breathe. Is it really you?”

“It’s me.”

“You look thin. Police work doesn’t agree with you,” she said.

“It can be stressful,” I agreed.

She looked at me with a trace of suspicion now. “Me ma told me you’d been over.”

“Yes. I have. I work for Special Branch. I examine the cold cases. And I, uh, I came across your sister’s file. I thought I would look into it.”

“Did you know? Lizzie. Poor Lizzie. Jesus. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about her. Did you ever meet her?”

“No, I didn’t. To tell the truth, Annie, I didn’t even know you had a wee sister, or if I did I’d forgotten.”

“And you just happened upon her file?” she asked, and again there was a trace of doubt in her voice.

“It was passed on to me. They thought that I might be interested because I sort of knew the family.”

She accepted that, looked at me again, and smiled. “Dear oh dear! Sean Duffy as I live and breathe.”

“The very same.”

“What on earth possessed you to join the police?”

“It’s a long story, Annie . . . You’re not sorry I’ve come, are you?”

“No. Well, I don’t know. You heard about Dermot? Out of the Maze, I mean?”

“Of course.”

“Look at you! A policeman! And you popping up to look into Lizzie’s death after all these years. It didn’t occur to you to let sleeping dogs lie?” she said in a lilting voice that had changed little in the years since I had seen her last.

“I have to do what I’m told, Annie, and for some reason they thought that this case was still something that we should look at.”

“Me ma thinks Lizzie was murdered,” she said in an undertone.

“But not you?”

“It’s tragic. I mean, really tragic. But I mean, Sean, the facts speak for themselves . . . she fell off the bar, God love her.”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“Good luck convincing Ma. I think Harper finally believes it but not her.” She reached out and patted my arm. “Sure, why don’t you come in.”

We were sucked into the large but claustrophobic and gloomy living room.

I greeted Mrs. Fitzpatrick and we made an edgy eye contact.

“I’m sorry you’re not going to meet Jim on this visit either, Inspector Duffy. My husband is fishing,” she said.

“Or what he says is fishing,” Annie said. “Since we closed up the pub, he goes out every day. He sits by the lough with his pole. He never really catches anything although sometimes a trout will jump on to the line.”

Mary looked at Annie with a mixture of shock and dismay. How could she speak so glibly about her father in front of an outsider? In front of a policeman?

“Would you like a cup of tea, Inspector Duffy?” Mrs. Fitzpatrick asked.

“No, thank you. I was wondering actually if I could take a look at the pub today, if that would be convenient? I’ve been reading the case notes and I’ve talked to the investigating officer and I’d really like to see inside the pub, to visualize exactly what happened that night.”