The Death of an Irish Sinner (8 page)

“Magnificent, aren’t they?” Noreen said, as though reading his thoughts. Which she could, she sometimes insisted and McGarr always denied adamantly on the grounds that there had to be some limit to intimacy.

“That must be the gardener there,” she added.

Before them was a tall, thin man loading sacks of fertilizer onto the bed of a wagon yoked to a tractor. Catching sight of the car, he moved toward an outbuilding, which was where McGarr found him on the phone.

The man covered the mouthpiece with a hand. “Moment, please. I’m on the phone.”

McGarr nodded but did not move, Noreen now entering the small office behind him.

“I said—I’m on the phone. It’s personal and private.”

So is murder, McGarr thought.

“I’ll be out in a moment.”

McGarr scanned the cramped room, which had one small window and an interior door leading farther into the building. It was open.

The desk was heaped with bills and brochures from gardening suppliers; sacks of grass and other seed sat
on a pallet in one corner. Not cleaned in years, the floor was caked with a meringue of dried mud from the door to the desk, and the tight space reeked of both the barnyard and the ashtray in front of Frank Mudd, McGarr assumed, the more than aptly named gardener, who was an old thirty-five.

A rather ordinary man with a bulbous nose and a windburned face, Mudd had not shaved recently, and his face was stubbled with a reddish beard. A battered fedora shadowed his brow.

Removing his hand from the phone, Mudd said, “They’re here right now.” He listened, then, “Oh, aye. Aye. I will. Be sure of it.” His eyes, which were some unlikely shade of blue, flashed up at McGarr, taking in—McGarr could tell—the swelling on the side of his face, the eye that was turning black-and-blue from the blow he had received the night before. “He’ll not railroad me.”

Which was a term McGarr had not heard in some time.
Railroad,
the verb, was an American term and at one time prison slang, he believed. Otherwise, Mudd’s voice was deep and raspy, because of the cigarettes, and carried a slight Northern burr.

Mudd slid the receiver into its yoke. “You’re Peter McGarr?”

McGarr nodded.

“That was my solicitor. He’ll be right over, and he says I’m not to speak to you until then.” Mudd reached into his jacket and took out a packet of smokes.

“Really? Why?” McGarr pulled back the only chair, so Noreen could sit. “I’m interested.” Easing himself onto a corner of the desk, McGarr watched the man
light the cigarette—the fine blue smoke jetting toward the ceiling—and he could feel a kind of anger welling up. “Are you afraid you’ll tell us the part you played in Mary-Jo’s death?”

Mudd’s head jerked back slightly, and he opened his mouth, but he said nothing. Surely a gaunt man, Frank Mudd nevertheless had wide, well-muscled shoulders, and his hands—now cupping the cigarette that was snaking smoke toward the ceiling—were large and gnarled from work. One thumbnail had been injured sometime in the past and was black and cracked right down to the cuticle.

“I said, I’m not to say nuttin’.”

“Have you something to hide?”

The hand with the cigarette came up to his mouth.

“Me? No.”

“Perhaps you’ve been to prison.”

As though needing something for the other hand to hold, Mudd now reached for the stub of a pencil, and his eyes, which seemed almost purple in the shadowed light, snapped toward the window. Body language, telling all.

“Of course we’ll check,” McGarr continued in an easy, confidential tone of voice. “Today. Count on it. Here, the Continent, over in the States. Mudd your real name or just something…generic, I’m betting. Know what?”

The man’s eyes returned to him. “I’m also betting Mary-Jo gave you this job when nobody else would—here behind the walls and gates of this place where few would ever see you.”

McGarr let that sit for a moment. Above Mudd’s
head, an old clock in a wooden case was ticking loudly. Silk Cut, the face said. It was a brand of cigarettes. McGarr slipped a hand into his jacket pocket where his own were kept. But for Noreen, he would have lit one up.

“And here she’s been murdered in her old age, and you’ve got nothing to say.”

Mudd again drew on the cigarette and looked down at the pencil in the other hand. The tiny office was now a fug of smoke. “Aye, but she’s dead and I’m here. Like I told yous last night, like my solicitor just said—it’s time to think of meself.”

McGarr had suffered through this conversation countless times in the past but seldom with so much gorge rising—he could feel it—because of his need. For what? A cigarette, of course. “Think of yourself and what’s in it for you?”

Mudd—or whatever his name was—only eyed him.

“Apart from a clean conscience and knowing you’ve done the right thing, perhaps a little sympathy, although”—McGarr raised a hand—“I promise nothing. If it’s murder or kidnap you’ve done—over there, here—I can’t help you. Bank robbery, felonious assault, anything with a gun.” McGarr shook his head. “Was it any of that?”

Mudd said nothing, but he looked suddenly relieved.

Turning over the cigarette packet in his coat pocket, McGarr noticed the rime of dried salt around the band of Mudd’s fedora. “Tell me, now—you work hard around here. Maybe too hard. Because mainly you’re alone. Sure, Fred lets you hire in some help now and
again when a big tree comes down or there’s a washout or to cut all the lawns in summer. But—”

Stubbing out the cigarette, Mudd shook his head. “No, not the lawns—I do the lawns myself.”

“What about the gardens?”

“Them too.”

“And yesterday you were doing the gardens.”

Mudd shook his head. “Like I told yous, I’ll not say a word about that. My solicitor—”

“What else would you be doing now in spring?” As a stratagem, McGarr told himself, he pulled out his packet of cigarettes and offered one to Mudd, who took it. McGarr lit his own and slid his gold lighter, which had been a present from Noreen, across the desk.

Breathing out the blessed smoke that tasted—as only the first cigarette of the day always did—of fresh fields, toast, and taffy. “And then, of course, your solicitor’s right—you don’t have to say anything. Not a word. Since we have it all on camera.”

McGarr watched as Mudd’s head went back and his eye again shied toward the window.

“So, after you took care of the animals, you went up to the garden where Mary-Jo had asked you to meet her.” Here McGarr was guessing, but in spite of her good health, he could not imagine a woman of her age having turned over the soil in the large patch of garden where she had been found. “You carried up the flat of peonies, you tickled the beds, then smoothed them for her.”

Now smoking steadily, Mudd only regarded him.

“An hour went by, maybe two, while she made steady but slow progress planting the bed. She asked you for this or that, but mainly you busied yourself with other work—pruning rosebushes or pottering around in the haggard there.

“Did you break for lunch?”

Mudd closed his eyes, as though agreeing.

“When did you see her next?”

The eyes opened. “You’ll remember this?”

McGarr’s hand—the one with the cigarette—swung to Noreen. “With a witness.”

Shaking his head, Mudd began: “I had no lunch, none at all. I had to go hunt up some mulch. Sure, we’ve got plenty of perfectly good mulch here, but for the Miss it had to be peat mixed with vermiculite and nothing else. And I had a hell of a time finding the premix, since she wanted it now, ‘With no excuses,’ says she to me. ‘We’ve got to get the annuals in the ground.’

“So, I got back around…three, I’d put it.” His eyes met McGarr’s. “And haven’t I been thinking about it ever since? I covered what she’d planted and then came back down here for a quick bite and a cuppa. I’d a few calls to answer.” Mudd pointed to an old dust-laden answering machine by the phone. “And”—he pulled on the cigarette until the head glowed—“when I got back up there, maybe three-thirty, there she was down where she was found, dead.”

“How’d you know she was dead.”

“I just knew it from the way she was bowed down. Nobody Miss Jo’s age could lay like that.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I went right up to her, of course. I says, says
I, ‘Miss Jo, you okay?’ a coupla times. And I think I was a bit scared, like—you know how you get when something’s happened, and you’ve got to do something, got to help, got to decide what to do?

“I crouched down and gave her a shove, like. ‘Miss Jo?’ says I again. But even though I couldn’t see her eyes, I knew she was dead from the blue color of her arms.”

“Then what?”

“Oh”—Mudd’s eyes came back to McGarr—“I came back here as quick as I could to ring up Father Fred.”

“You didn’t go straight to the house?”

Mudd shook his head. “I been told…I can’t count the times, not to go into the house. ‘It’s a holy place, and you’re a heathen,’ says she.”

“Mary-Jo?”

“No, no—not Mary-Jo. Not her. She told me to disregard the bitch.” Mudd swung his head to Noreen.

“Sorry, ma’am. It’s just—” Then to McGarr, “Gerry Breen, the housekeeper.”

“Who answered the phone?”

“Father Sclavi, the other collar there. I told him what I thought had happened, but he didn’t cop on, I don’t think, even when he had me repeat it slowly. He’s”—Mudd looked off—“Spanish or Italian, I think, and his English isn’t good. And then”—he shrugged—“he just rang off.

“I figured I’d got the message across, and I’d better get back up to Mary-Jo, to keep her company, like. So I rushed back up there to find Father Fred crouched down by her side. And him and me…well, we don’t
get on. Haven’t ever. I don’t care to deal with him under the best of circumstances, so I just watched until he left, and came back here. Broke up, don’t you know. Mary-Jo”—as Mudd reached to stub out the cigarette, his eyes met McGarr’s—“was everything for me here. And without her I’m…” Mudd shook his head.

Back in the drum, McGarr imagined, wherever it was he was on the lam from. Which could be the reason he thought he needed a solicitor. “What was Father Fred doing when he was kneeling beside Mary-Jo?”

Mudd shook his head. “Dunno. Seeing if she was dead or alive, I guess, although…”

“How was he dressed?”

“The bike togs. Just got back, I’d say. Goes to hell-and-gone, he does, pumping up and down the mountains.” Again Mudd shook his head as though disapproving of the practice.

“Then what?”

“He jumps up and runs toward the house. He can do that too, despite his age.”

“And you?”

“I kept my vigil, there in the copse. Wonderin’, like.”

“Wondering what?”

“Ah, well…you know”—Mudd’s hand moved toward his packet of cigarettes but he thought better of it—“what was going to become of me. Selfish?” He nodded. “Yah. I figured Mary-Jo had a long life, but me? Without her, well, I’m…”

“Was there anything around Mary-Jo’s neck when you found her?”

“Like what?”

“Like…a kind of necklace.”

“Mary-Jo didn’t wear necklaces. Nor jewelry. She was very plain and simple. A saint.”

“You didn’t see something that looked like barbed wire around her neck?”

Mudd suddenly looked puzzled.

“Or blood?”

“I don’t get it. Is that the reason you’re here?” His eyes moved from McGarr to Noreen and back again.

McGarr stood. “Show me the path to the garden.”

“Through the wood?”

Passing by the cottage, Noreen asked Mudd if she might use the facilities. “Too much coffee, don’t you know.” Of course, she drank only tea, and her eyes met McGarr’s when Mudd pointed to the door.

The distance between the cottage and the patch of garden where the corpse had been found was a good three hundred yards, McGarr guessed. Paved with wood chips, it was a direct line, sheltered by towering beech trees, from Mudd’s dwelling amid the compound of maintenance buildings to the garden haggard near where the corpse had been found.

“It’s my daily commute,” Mudd said, attempting a semblance of levity.

“And a tough go, what with all the birdsong,” McGarr replied, playing along. “But somebody’s got to do it.”

Which opened the interview to chat mostly about gardening, with Mudd knowing more about horticulture than the average gardener, McGarr judged.

At the haggard, McGarr pointed to the surveillance camera at the corner of the fence. “What do you do with that when nature calls? I suppose you’re the porn star of Barbastro.”

“Not a bit of it. I duck behind a tree”—Mudd pointed to the big trees at the beginning of the path in the copse—“or I do this when I can’t.”

Pulling off his hat, Mudd, who was a tall man, hung it over the barrel of the camera. “Ta-dah! And I’ll tell you this—sometimes I do it just to send a bit of wind up Fred’s shorts. He’ll come out here huffing and puffing, saying, ‘Don’t you know that we’ve paid thousands of pounds for security here, and you’re defeating our measures?

“And I say to him, says I, ‘What do you mean, defeating your measures, your honor?’ ‘Your blasted hat, you oaf,’ he’ll say, or something like that. And he’ll pluck it off and chuck it down.

“‘I had no idea, sir,’ says I to his back as he tromps off.

“‘The hell you didn’t, you bloody thug,’ says he.”

Bloody? McGarr rather doubted that Duggan—the consummate priest—would use the word.

“This is the good part—because then I shouts to him, I shouts, ‘Please, your honor—please don’t tell Mary-Jo.’ Because, you see”—Mudd lifted his hat off the camera—“she
hated
them things worse than me.

“We’d be out here or some other part of the garden working away, and she’d notice one was on us. ‘Francie’—it’s what she called me—‘where’s your jacket?’ she’d say. I’d cover it up, and we’d wait for Fred to come storming down on us.”

“How long would that take?”

“Sometimes right way, like he really had been watching us. Other times, an hour or so, I’d say. But Mary-Jo would let the bastard…you know, the man speak. And then she’d say something like, ‘I’d like to remind you whose premises these are. Now, go back to your prayers, we’ve work to do.’ Which drove him crazy.”