The Celtic Riddle Read online

  “Is there another way in here?” I asked looking about me. “Another road?”

  “No,” Michael replied. “Although you could put a lane in from the main road up there,” he said pointing toward something I couldn’t see. “You’d have to do a bit of clearing though,” he added gesturing toward brush and rocks. “Set you back a few punt, that’s for certain.

  “The easiest thing to do is to come in the way we did. Park your car out at the road near the gate to Second Chance and walk in. They can’t stop you from crossing the property,” he added. “There’s a right of way.”

  But they could make it pretty miserable for us, I thought to myself. Michael watched my face. “I’d want to put a road in, too,” he said, smiling slightly.

  Inside, I collected up the glasses and went over to the sink to rinse them out, Alex right behind me with a towel, ready to dry. Michael turned his attention to dousing the fire. As we worked, I sensed rather than saw Breeta get out of her chair and go over to the table on the other side of the room. The three of us, coming to the same realization, all quietly turned to watch as she picked up a book, leafed through its pages, then with one arm, held it to her chest. With the other hand, oblivious to our glances, she reached slowly for the sweater on the back of the chair. After studying it for a few seconds she brought it up to her nose and breathed deeply, then held it against the side of her face, a large tear rolling down her cheek. It’s her father’s, I thought, her father’s sweater. His smell would still be on it, would remind her of him. Missing him terrible, indeed.

  She noticed us watching her at last. She looked directly at Alex. “I know the Will says the house and its contents,” she said, her voice breaking, “but would it be all right, would you mind, if I kept the sweater?”

  “Of course you may, my dear,” Alex said softly. “Keep the book too. Please take anything you like.”

  “Just the book, and the sweater,” she said, holding both tight.

  We were a subdued group as Michael locked up, handing Alex the key, and we began our trek back to the big house, each lost in our own thoughts. Breeta would not let go of the book and sweater, so Michael took Vigs and went on ahead. I rather pensively watched as the rays of the late afternoon sun caught drops of rain on the leaves and blossoms of the gorse and heather, transforming them to glittering amethysts and citrines. It was late afternoon by now, and gulls circled offshore looking for dinner, or bobbed on the surface of the waves, slashes of white against the dark water. “Take care,” Michael, ahead of us, yelled. “It’s really slippery here.” It was indeed. The rain had made the path very slick and more than once I caught myself sliding down the incline. I made my way carefully along the edge of the cliffs, turning back from time to time to see how Alex and Breeta were faring.

  Although I was trying not to look down, something below caught my eye and I stopped. “Alex,” I called back to him, several yards away. “What was that clue of yours again?”

  “I am the sea-swell,” he called to me. “Why?”

  “Hang on a sec,” I said. I was standing over a small cove at the foot of the cliffs. While on either side of me there was a sheer drop, in front of me there was a steep pathway, part grass, part mud, that lead down to the water. Gingerly, considering my choice of footwear, I began to pick my way down, slipping and sliding on the wet earth and grass. I was two-thirds of the way down when I lost first a shoe, then my footing, and rolled down the grassy slope, gathering momentum as I went. I heard the others shouting above me. For some reason, I wasn’t afraid. I knew, somehow, I would stop in time, and was rather more worried by how undignified I must look, rolling ass-end over tea-kettle, than by the possibility I’d be dashed to smithereens on the rocks. And indeed, the ground soon levelled out a little on a sandy dune, and I rolled to a stop.

  I was lying on sand, or rather pebbles, on a rocky beach at the foot of the cliffs, a few feet away from the water where a little rowboat, a skiff, was anchored, bobbing in the surf. The boat was white, where the paint hadn’t peeled away, and the gunwales were blue. It had, as I had suspected from the top of the cliff, the name Ocean Crest painted on its prow.

  Michael started down the path after me, slipping and sliding as I had, but so far still on his feet. “Stay there,” he shouted. “I’ll come down and help you back up.”

  “It’s called Ocean Crest,” I yelled up to him and the others. “Do you think it has anything to do with the clue?”

  I looked about me. The boat’s owner was nowhere to be seen. I found my shoe and carefully picked my way across the rocky shore toward the skiff, which was just offshore under a large underhang of rock. The boat, as far as I could see from land, was absolutely empty. I thought I should take a better look. After all, if this was the answer to the first clue, there might be something in it that would lead us on, a note stuck in a fishing basket or something. A little voice was telling me that I was forgetting my resolve to stay out of this game, but I ignored it, the tumble down the hill having robbed me of good sense.

  The water was too deep and the boat a little too far out for me to wade out to it, so I thought I’d try something else. I carefully scrambled up a large rock on the shore, hoping from its height to have a better view of the inside of the boat. It was, as I’d thought, completely empty, without so much as an oar to be seen.

  As I looked about me from the vantage point of the big rock, I saw at the foot of a steep rocky cliff toward the end of the cove, what looked to be a shoe, partially hidden by a large rock. Perhaps it’s floated ashore, I thought, lost overboard on a yacht, or something. But as I climbed down the rock and moved toward it, I had a flash of recognition, followed by a sense of being in the grip of a terrible dream that I couldn’t stop, a dream that impelled me, slowly, unwillingly, toward the shoe. When I got there, I saw the shoe was attached to a leg. And the leg belonged to the broken body of John Herlihy.

  Chapter Three

  THE ROAR OF THE SEA

  “I’VE been thinking,” I said. This was cause for deep relief for me, thinking again I mean, after a couple of days of walking around in a kind of shocked and vacuous haze in which even the slightest mental effort seemed beyond me. I was still feeling a little shaky, as if I’d seriously overdosed on caffeine or adrenaline, and jumped at every loud noise. But I felt at last as if I was starting to come around, all things considered, the shock of finding John Herlihy gradually fading. Apparently, however, Rob was not as keen as I was on my return to relative mental acuity.

  “Why do I think this is going to be trouble?” he groaned, setting two foaming pints of Kilkenny cream ale in front of us on the small glass-topped table in the bar in the inn where we were all staying. “We’re on vacation, remember.”

  “I know,” I replied, thinking that this was not exactly the vacation I’d been hoping for, thanks to John Herlihy’s unfortunate demise. “But we came over here to keep Alex company, and this is about Alex. What I’ve been thinking,” I continued before Rob could stop me, “is that it might be kind of fun to look for this treasure, this item of great value that Eamon Byrne talked about.”

  Rob made a face. “Bad idea,” he said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “You have a rather short memory,” he said. “Shock, I suppose, although imminent middle age can do that to you too. John Herlihy. Dead. Cause of death still under investigation.”

  “But he fell,” I said. “Drunk as a skunk, if you ask me.”

  “Something of a tippler, you think?”

  “It went way beyond tippling,” I replied. “I overheard Deirdre of the Sorrows refer to Herlihy as the old souse.”

  “Am I safe in assuming that you are referring to someone other than the Deirdre of J. M. Synge’s unfinished play by that name?”

  “Deirdre, the morose-looking maid,” I said, “and don’t try to distract me with your erudition.” Although I have known Rob for a few years now, comments such as these never fail to amaze me. I know I’m guilty of a gross and unfair gener
alization when I assume policemen don’t read playwrights like John Millington Synge, particularly when the only policeman I know, at all well, does.

  “So you’re assuming he just fell over the edge in a drunken stupor, are you?” Rob asked. There was a tone in his voice that meant I was in for a bit of a lecture. “You can’t just assume that, you know,” he went on, launching himself fully into the topic. “You have to investigate it thoroughly. Did he just fall, or is there any evidence to support a suspicion that he was pushed, or even that he threw himself over the edge? Footprints, signs of a struggle, marks on the body, that kind of thing.”

  “I thought you said we were on vacation,” I interjected.

  He laughed. “Hard to get out of the work mode, isn’t it?”

  “Not for me,” I replied blithely.

  “So you weren’t eyeing any of the furniture in that fellow Byrne’s manor house, thinking you just might pick up a piece or two if they were auctioning any of it off now that he’s gone?”

  “Nope,” I replied.

  “Didn’t you say he was something of a collector? You didn’t think a few items in his collection might find a home in your shop?”

  “Not at all,” I replied. “Objects of destruction on red velvet are not quite the look we strive for at Greenhalgh & McClintoch.” Well, maybe one or two of those maps, I thought to myself.

  He looked suspiciously at me. “And you have not even once worried just a little about the shop while we’ve been here? I did notice you eyeing the pay phones in Shannon Airport the moment we got off the plane, did I not?”

  “I’m not worried at all,” I replied. That was patently untrue, and both of us knew it. I had indeed been eyeing the telephones at the airport. I did realize, however, that it was the middle of the night back home, and had managed to restrain myself.

  Normally there are always two people in the shop, one to be at the cash, one to help the customers. When I’m off on buying trips, Alex stays in the shop with Sarah; when she’s on holiday, it’s Alex and I, and so on. But with two of us away, that left Sarah on her own, and Sarah, who’s a whiz on the business and financial side of things, but not comfortable on the sales side, was a bit nervous about it all. For a while, I found myself with competing loyalties: looking after Alex or minding the store.

  In the end I asked my ex-husband Clive Swain, who had the supremely bad taste to open an antiques store right across the road from Greenhalgh & McClintoch, to keep an eye on the place for me, and give Sarah a hand if she needed it. This is much akin to Custer asking Crazy Horse to hold the fort while he goes off for a little R&R, of course, but Clive, the rotter, had also dumped his second wife and, when I wasn’t looking, taken up with my best friend, Moira, a very successful businesswoman who, I reasoned, was not so far gone in her affection for Clive that she would allow him to ruin my store. I just tried not to think too much about it.

  Rob and I were quiet for a minute or two, sipping our beer. I sat admiring our surroundings, the somewhat prosaically named Hunt Room, with glowing fireplace, nicely worn green, gold and red-striped sofas and chairs, the dark green walls lined with prints of English hunting scenes, and a rather valuable, if not to my taste, oil painting of a stag cornered by a pack of hounds, over the mantelpiece. I knew what would happen next, and right on cue, Rob sighed theatrically. “Okay, so after almost twenty-five years in law enforcement, I can’t help myself. What makes you so sure that fellow Herlihy just fell?”

  “Well it was slippery enough. I should know. I took this something less than graceful tumble down the hill myself, did Alex tell you?”

  “He did. He was obviously being very tactful, though. He didn’t mention anything about lack of grace.”

  “It was quite undignified, I assure you. I was lucky to fall on mud and wet grass. It made a mess of my clothes, but I wasn’t hurt. The slope was not all that steep, and there were no rocks at the bottom. A few yards either way, though, and I’d have ended up like Herlihy. On top of that, I’d only sipped a small whiskey. And Herlihy, as I mentioned, not only had a reputation for drinking regularly, if Deirdre’s comments are anything to go by, but I noticed he kept nipping out of the room for a few seconds at a time. At the time it was quite clear to me that he was sneaking out for a swig or two of something or other.”

  “Maybe he was going to check the door, or he had a bladder problem, or didn’t want the others to see he was overcome with grief or something,” Rob interjected.

  “I don’t think so. His shoes squeaked, and he stopped after a few steps, just about as far as a sideboard in the hall on which there were several bottles of booze, I’d noticed. He had another drink, a rather large one, when Tweedledum or Tweedledee, whichever it was, said how much he’d get. It was about fifteen thousand Irish punt, by the way, which these days is worth more than twenty-five thousand dollars. That should rule out suicide. Why kill yourself the day you come into some money? When Alex and I left to go to the car, he was helping himself again, quite liberally, to the drinks on the sideboard in the hall. It’s a wonder he could even stagger to the edge of the cliff!” I concluded.

  “There!” Rob exclaimed. “What did I tell you? You’ve just added an element of doubt to your own theory.”

  I glared at him. “My point, if only you would allow me to get back to it, is that we’re here for a while, pending the results of the autopsy, so why not look for the treasure?”

  “But why would you want to?”

  “Well, for one thing it wouldn’t bother me a bit to beat those po-faced women to it,” I replied.

  Rob winced. “Aren’t you being a little hasty in your judgment of them? What did they do to deserve that?”

  “Since you ask, they were horrible to Alex,” I said. “When we first arrived, we were left hanging about the front hall for ages, and I overheard Byrne’s wife Margaret telling Tweedledum or Tweedledee—those are the lawyers—that she wouldn’t have that man in her house. I assumed she was talking about Alex, although come to think about it, it could have been the other lawyer, or Padraig Gilhooly, whoever he is. In any event, Alex went over and introduced himself when we were finally allowed in, and they wouldn’t even shake his hand when he offered it.”

  “It was a bad time for them, don’t forget,” Rob interjected. Sometimes the man is way too nice.

  “I know. But Margaret and the two daughters all have the same expression on their faces, like they’ve just encountered a bad smell, or something.” I paused. “And there’s another reason.”

  “I thought there must be. The real one, this time, I hope,” Rob said.

  “Alex just loved the cottage. I could tell, without him having to say a word. It’s a dream come true for him.”

  “I’m very glad of that. But he has the cottage. What’s your point?”

  “My point is, now what? How is he going to look after it? Pay the taxes or water bills? Put in some electricity? Make repairs? Those old places need a lot of upkeep. And unless he wants to keep crossing the property in front of the house, which heaven knows, I wouldn’t, he’s going to have to put a road in that will cost more than a penny or two, I can assure you. He’s on a pension, Rob! If we could find the treasure for him, and it really is worth something as Byrne said it is, Alex could really retire, not just sort of retire and work part time in the store the way he is now.

  “We’re here now, aren’t we?” I wheedled. “And we’re not going too far until the police conclude their investigation into John Herlihy’s death, although what could take them so long, I can’t imagine. Anyway, we’d get to see a little of the countryside around here, while we looked, and we might just have some fun.”

  “I do understand how you feel about Alex, and maybe he does need the money, but what makes you think we could find it? We don’t know the place at all, or the people.”

  “Piece of cake,” I replied. “After all, you are a policeman. You’re accustomed to tracking down clues. Already we have two of them, and we know they come from a poem call
ed the ‘Song of Amairgen.’ ”

  Rob looked baffled and I felt mildly triumphant, having produced the name of a poem he didn’t know. As rare as the occasion might be, I tried not to gloat. “Michael Davis is going to try to persuade Breeta to get her clue out of the safe at the house, and tell us what it is. We’ll then have three of the clues. I think there were seven—the mother and three daughters, three more counting Michael, Alex, and someone by the name of Padraig Gilhooly, who incidentally would be about as welcome in that house as a rattlesnake at a garden party, should he choose to show his face there—so we’re almost halfway there.”

  “Halfway where?” Jennifer said, sliding into a chair beside her father. She tossed her windbreaker, a pinky-purple number with the words “Take no Prisoners” emblazoned across the back.

  “Half the clues handed out to Eamon Byrne’s family yesterday. I’m trying to persuade your father that we should look for the treasure in the Will.”

  “Brilliant!” Jennifer exclaimed, having managed to pick up the local slang within minutes of our touchdown at Shannon Airport. Or rather, she said something that sounded like ten-ale-erb. Jennifer had taken a class in what was called creative thinking in her last term, in which the teacher had encouraged them to free their minds to think outside the box, to use that odious expression beloved of management consultants, by speaking backward. Jennifer had readily taken to this suggestion, a development her father found intensely irritating. I, however, had a dim memory of school chums doing the same thing, secret societies and the like, and I assumed this was a stage that would pass. I did not wish to stunt her creative thinking, of course, but I hoped it would be soon. “Tiod stel, Dad,” she added.

  “Not both of you,” Rob grumped.

  “Have you seen Alex?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “He’s down at the docks renting a boat. I’ve come to ask you both if you’d like to go sailing with us.”