St Ernan's Blues: An Inspector Starrett Mystery Read online

  St Ernan's Blues

  by Paul Charles

  Published by Dufour Editions

  First published in the United States of America, 2016

  by Dufour Editions Inc., Chester Springs, Pennsylvania 19425

  © Paul Charles, 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Except for public figures, all characters in this story are fictional, and any resemblance to anyone else living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover photo by John McIvor

  E-Book ISBN 978-0-8023-6031-1 (MOBI)

  E-Book ISBN 978-0-8023-6032-8 (EPUB)

  Thanks are due and offered to: Andrew my father,

  Christopher, Duncan, Larisa, Brad, Christina, Clair, Lucy,

  The James Gang (John & James) Lindsey and Donegal’s

  fab four: Carmel, Maeve, Laura and Catherine.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Mr. S. Graham

  a great man in a world of few great men.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter One

  Day One: the 2nd Wednesday in October

  It started, as the majority of Starrett’s cases did, with a knocking on a door.

  This door, in itself, was strange. That perhaps should have been a tip-off to Starrett. Well, it wasn’t really the door that was strange; it was more where it led you, or, perhaps even more intriguing, how it led you to where it led you.

  The door was accessed by climbing fourteen heavily weathered concrete steps, passing through a deep arch, which Starrett noticed supported an overhead pathway. At the end of the darkened, murky, six-foot, damp-smelling vestibule was the wood-panelled, windowless door. The peeling and blistered, painted-white wood was broken only by a large black metallic handle, which also served as a knocker. Starrett’s trio of loud knocks echoed off the water of the nearby Donegal Bay. The door was eventually opened by Garda Sgt Packie Garvey. Wordlessly, Garvey turned and led his superior up another fourteen steps. From the amount of autumn light beaming down, Starrett assumed they were entering a courtyard. Instead they ascended into a conservatory housing little more than the staircase exit and a passage to an open doorway, which he assessed to be the original external door to the house.

  In the distance Inspector Starrett could hear members of his Gardaí Serious Crimes Unit, normally based a seventy-minute drive away at Ramelton Gardaí Station, efficiently going about their work. He assumed from the lack of banter that there was a corpse not too far away. If further proof were needed, his permanently bent right-hand forefinger was involuntarily twitching furiously away.

  Starrett nodded silently to the left and right as he passed various members of his team. He proceeded down a narrow hallway that seemed to run the full length of the long house. The original architect of the grand building, the solitary house on St Ernan’s Island, just outside Donegal Town, had cleverly disguised the need for a long corridor running the length of the house. He had prevented the corridor from appearing either too tall on one hand, or too claustrophobic on the other, by incorporating a catacomb effect to the passageway ceiling, which, at the same time, made it appear neither too low nor too high. Starrett clocked it as a very clever solution to an age-old problem.

  As Garvey mutedly led him on and on, the eight rooms he passed – four on either side of the corridor – appeared, on brief glances, to be quite airy, furnished with antiques and smelling of fresh flowers and wood polish. The floor of the hallway was covered with a quilt of carpets, runners and rugs, all of which successfully served to dampen the sound of their shoes. At the far end, just beyond a grand wooden staircase, the hallway opened out, again on the right, into a book and painting-lined, panelled room with one of the most magnificent fireplaces Starrett had ever set his baby blues upon. If this was the anteroom, Starrett couldn’t wait to see the main event.

  His disappointment was obvious the second he looked to his left. The smaller part of the open-plan room was decorated and furnished like a kitchen-cum-dining room; the kitchen-cum-dining room of a beach bungalow. Just under the window, was a scene even more unsettling.

  Slumped in a chair – matching the leather ones around the dining table – and the centre of attention for Dr Samantha Aljoe and two of her team was a man, who to Starrett’s eyes looked too young to be the priest that his black clothes and white collar attested to.

  So engrossed in her work was Dr Aljoe that she still hadn’t acknowledged Starrett.

  ‘What’s all the commotion at the top of the staircase?’ he asked, directing his question at Garvey.

  Starrett’s dulcet Donegal tones were enough to distract Aljoe, who turned from the corpse to face him. In one gloved hand she had a set of tweezers with what looked like a long strand of blond hair, and in the other a translucent evidence bag where she deposited the hair.

  ‘Ah, Inspector Starrett,’ she began, in her soft Home Counties voice and raising her eyes to the ceiling, ‘that would be my fault. I’m afraid – in your absence and until as such times you arrived – I instructed your team to keep everyone upstairs and off the ground floor. I have to admit that I find Garda Romany Browne to be ever so cooperative these days.’

  Then she rolled her eyes at him.

  ‘Packie,’ Starrett started, his eyes still fixed on the provocative Dr Aljoe, ‘could you nip upstairs and offer young Garda Browne some of your own cooperation in helping him keep everyone quiet? I can’t hear myself think with all this racket.’

  Starrett was used to Samantha Aljoe’s frivolous ways at the scenes of crimes. He knew it was her way of getting through it; only with such humour could she fully concentrate on her work.

  ‘Who’s your man?’ he asked, nodding at the young priest
in the chair.

  ‘Ah, that would be Father Matthew,’ a baritone voice behind him boomed in reply.

  Alarm bells deep in Starrett’s memory were now making an even bigger racket in his brain than the commotion upstairs. He involuntarily swung around in the direction of the voice only to discover the glaring bullfrog eyes that matched the perfect RTÉ delivery.

  ‘Freeman…’ he spluttered.

  ‘And that would be Bishop Cormac Freeman to you, Inspector Starrett,’ the white-haired, purple-robed Bishop replied curtly.

  Dr Aljoe, her two assistants and Sgt Packie Garvey were glued to the floor in total disbelief as Starrett tore towards the portly member of the clergy.

  He had only made it as far as securing two thumbs, seven perfect fingers and one bent one around the bishop’s throat by the time Garvey and Aljoe were trying desperately to pull him off. They eventually succeeded, but only after Starrett had managed to rip Bishop Freeman’s clerical collar from his neck and hurl it at his face in utter disgust.

  Chapter Two

  As the badly shaken Bishop was led to safety by Garvey, Aljoe’s eyes betrayed the ‘what?’ and the ‘why?’ in her mind.

  Starrett muttered something that sounded like, ‘What? Nothing…must have been a case of mistaken identity.’

  ‘If that was mistaken identity, I’d hate to be around if you ever do meet the person you thought you were meeting.’

  Starrett tried unsuccessfully to laugh it off and offered only, ‘I’ll let you finish up here, give me a shout when you’re ready for me to take a look around.’

  Aljoe continued to stare at him in disbelief before going back to her work, occasionally looking around and shaking her head.

  Starrett left her to it and followed after Garvey’s footsteps, which were heading in the direction of the racket upstairs.

  He was worried that if he didn’t get his emotions under control immediately he’d be tempted to break his one and only golden rule: never try to figure out who’s committed the crime until you’ve first had a good look at all the evidence. He needed to avoid going down the ‘who murdered Father Matthew’ route, or, maybe more importantly, the, ‘How did Father Freeman murder Father Matthew?’ route.

  He knew he needed to stop all such nonsense, especially now that Father Freeman was apparently Bishop Freeman. No, Starrett should be amassing as much information as possible and then following the evidence rather than allowing the evidence to follow his suspicions.

  First to consider was Father Matthew. There was a fair to middling chance that somewhere in Matthew’s past, in his life, there was a clue, a reason, a motive. So, Starrett thought, here we go, I’ll make a start and go right back to the beginning and begin by questioning the available witnesses.

  With every weary step up the circular oak stairs, the racket grew louder. But Starrett wasn’t prepared for what was at the top of the staircase.

  There, he was greeted by several priests; their long cassocks making them look more like penguins on speed than elite members of the clergy. On the other hand, the members of his gardai team seemed incapable of either controlling their wayward waddle or getting down to the work in hand – which was to start questioning these clergymen.

  ‘Divide and conquer!’ Starrett screamed internally. He wasn’t sure if it was directed at himself and his threatening thoughts of Bishop Freeman, or the waddle of priests in front of him. Divide and conquer, indeed.

  He pushed into the middle of them and held up his right hand. He didn’t say a word, just held up his hand. Bit by bit the hustle and bustle died down. Starrett waited until there was complete silence before he dropped his hand again.

  ‘Okay,’ he announced, ‘I’m sorry for your loss and I’m sorry for this disruption to your daily routine but I’m afraid you’re going to have to bear with us as we go about our work.’

  No audible response.

  ‘What I need you to do now is to return to your rooms; one of my colleagues will accompany you and note your location. Then we’ll come and get you when we’re ready to talk to you.’

  The detective wondered if his lack of energy had to do with it being September and the recent excuse for a summer hastily disappearing into the past.

  ‘Okay,’ he said at last, snapping himself into gear, ‘who found the body?’

  ‘That would have been Father Fergus Mulligan,’ Sgt Packie Garvey volunteered, ‘he’s an Ulsterman, from the rich hills of Desertmartin.’

  ‘Good on you Packie. Right, that’s where I’ll start then,’ Starrett declared, as much to himself as anyone else. ‘Please lead me to him.’

  Chapter Three

  The first thing that shocked Starrett about Father Mulligan was how comfortable his rooms were. It wasn’t exactly that he’d been expecting cold stone floors (very difficult to achieve on the first floor, as proven at the nearby Donegal Castle), white-washed walls, stained roll-out mattresses with horse-hair blankets and a tin plate in the corner with the remains of yesterday’s bread and water. No, it wasn’t that he was expecting exactly that, but at the same time, if that was what the Donegal detective had discovered he would have been less surprised than he currently was.

  ‘Very comfortable quarters here, Father,’ Starrett offered after Garvey made the introductions and left them. ‘Bejeepers, sure this is as grand as any of the suites in Rathmullan House.’

  ‘Yes I’d agree, detective,’ Mulligan replied, looking around his room. ‘Story has it that the previous owner, in order to pay for the upkeep and refurbishment, splashed out by converting St Ernan’s to an upmarket hotel-cum-retreat. They even went as far as adding en suite bathrooms to each of the guest bedrooms. An earlier but inevitable recession put an end to his grand plan and the Church bought it from the bank.’

  The priest looked like an overage choir boy and spoke like his voice had not long since broken. His thinning grey hair, reddish cheeks, lack of top gear in the movement department and the slight stooping of his tall, slim frame testified to the idea that he was most likely in his late sixties, maybe even early seventies. But he still had the number one quality present in all the better priests: a twinkle sparkling in his brown eyes.

  ‘And what exactly is it that you do here?’ Starrett asked, hoping to develop a conversational tone to the interview.

  ‘Well, you’ve probably noticed that, with the exception of Father Matthew, God rest his soul,’ the priest offered, pausing to cross himself, ‘we’re all, shall we say, past our prime. Maybe I’d also have to admit that we are, none of us, in the very best of health.’

  ‘So St Ernan’s is like a retirement home for the clergy?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ admitted Mulligan, if seemingly a little reluctantly, before continuing with further explanation. ‘Those of us who have served God and the Church all our lives and have no remaining family members need to go somewhere when we can no longer serve our parish. I think, without exception, we’d all prefer to remain and serve in whatever way possible in our parishes but, shall we say, sadly the accommodation and resources are required for our replacements.’

  ‘And Father Matthew?’

  ‘Well, Father Matthew McKaye, God rest his soul, was sent here to look after us before being sent to his first parish.’

  ‘How many of you live here?’

  ‘Eleven, including Father Matthew,’ the priest replied without hesitation, ‘we can accommodate fourteen souls, the house has fourteen bedrooms in total. That’s fourteen rooms and sixty sashed windows. I know this fact only because they all have to be cleaned.’

  Starrett doubted if Father Mulligan cleaned even one of them.

  ‘Including the bishop?’

  ‘Why yes,” the priest started, sounding unsure of himself. “Bishop Freeman is here infrequently.’

  ‘So he’s retired as well?’ Starrett asked.

  ‘No, no, he’s ah, well, shall we say, he’s still in active service for God but he keeps rooms here as a retreat.’

  ‘Does he now,’ S
tarrett said, not bothering to hide the fact that he wasn’t asking a question and using the opportunity to take out his notebook. He scribbled down a few points before passing the notebook to the priest.

  ‘Would you mind just jotting down the names of the residents here at St Ernan’s please?’

  The priest willingly obliged and a few minutes later returned the book with a list duly printed, rather than written, in neat, perfectly formed letters.

  The full list read:

  Father McIntyre

  Father Gene McCafferty

  Father Robert O’Leary

  Father Edward McKenzie

  Father Matthew McKaye (deceased)

  Father Patrick O’Connell

  Bishop Cormac Freeman (not a permanent resident)

  Father Fergus Mulligan (author of list)

  Father Peter Casey

  Father Peregrine Dugan

  Father Michael Clerkin

  Mrs Eimear Robinson (housekeeper and cook, a Donegal Town resident)

  ‘How long have you been here Father?’ Starrett asked as he studied the list.

  ‘I’m here six years in the middle of this October.’

  ‘And the rest of the residents?’

  ‘Father O’Leary would be here the longest. He moved in just over twelve years ago and oversaw the conversion of the property to our needs. Father Gene McCafferty would be our most recent resident, he moved in nearly two years ago in December. I remember it well because, shall I say, I felt very sad that he should have to leave his home in his parish coming up to Christmas.’

  ‘I see from your list you also have a housekeeper and cook, a Mrs Eimear Robinson?’

  ‘Yes, she’s really the housekeeper and cleaner and she helps Father Matthew…sorry…of course, I should have said she helped Father Matthew with the cooking.’

  ‘Was she helping him today?’

  ‘No. Wednesday she’s never in, she takes Wednesdays and Sundays off.’