The Death of a Joyce Scholar by Bartholomew Gill Read Free Book Online Page B

imagined was Kevin Coyle’s blood. He noted hoofprints and the track of a narrow rubber tire in the soft ground.
    “His glasses were there beside him, and I could tell fromhis”—it took some time for her to get it out—“stare that he was dead. Even before I noticed his chest.” Her body spasmed suddenly, as though she would retch, and a hand moved to her mouth.
    McGarr looked around and above them. Because of the high walls on both sides of the lane, the site was visible only from either end, and at night—had Kevin Coyle been murdered then—only from the nearer gate, where McGarr could see the top of a streetlight.
    “But exactly,” he insisted. “It’s important that I know how you found him. How he was positioned.”
    “Why?”
    Perhaps to catch you in a lie, McGarr thought, but it was more complex than that. A man who had been stabbed once cleanly through the heart would have gone down limp, like a rag doll, and what she had told him so far did not support that assumption.
    With a trembling chin and bleary eyes she tried to look up at him and then at her wristwatch.
    “The sooner you show me, the sooner you can get back to your guests.”
    She pointed at the spot as though to ask if he actually meant that she should. “You mean?”
    “There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a place like any other. Sure, the ground doesn’t remember, nor the wall. And the blood”—he reached down and felt the brown area that now looked like nothing more than some large spot of grease—“is dried. And here…” From a pocket he pulled out a handkerchief which he unfolded and spread a few inches from the wall. Fortunately, it was clean. “For those dainty skivvies that match your eyes. We wouldn’t want them ruined, sure we wouldn’t.”
    She blinked away the tears and regarded him. “You’re not serious.”
    McGarr kept himself from saying, “Deadly.” He smiled slightly and nodded.
    “But, I won’t.”
    “Sure you will. You’re a lovely young woman who doesn’t wish to become involved with the police, unfanciable chaps that we are. Need I remind you that you and nobody else failed to report this murder. That you and—Mary Sittonn and Katie Coyle, was it?—decided to ignore what all three of you knew was the law and the only proper thing to do. Need I say that you compromised this investigation or that I’m struggling desperately—with my conscience, with what I know is my responsibility under the law—not to make any of this public. You’re a professional woman, you know how things proceed. Others might see you as an accessory to murder.”
    When she still did not move, he added, “At the very least it could put your name in the papers. RTE.” He meant Radio Telefis Eireann, the state-supported Irish radio and television network. “I should imagine that the murder of Kevin Coyle virtually in your back garden almost”—McGarr had to reach for a word—“contemporaneous with your firm’s release of Phon/Antiphon, might be construed by some as more than simple coincidence. And then I wonder how it would be taken in London, your involvement in a thing such as this.”
    He had been guessing, but the flash of her eyes told him he was right. “Who else could publish Kevin’s book, I’d like to know,” she said flatly, and drawing in a breath, she advanced upon the spot and lowered herself onto the handkerchief. Her back jerked as it touched the wall. She cocked one knee and placed a wrist on that thigh. Gingerly she stretched the other leg out straight and then raised her head until it touched the wall, her eyes looking up over the roofline of the row houses on the other side of the wall. “Like so.”
    “You’re sure.”
    “As sure as I am of myself,” she said defiantly. “I’ll never forget it. Never ever. Nor your making me do this.”
    “His glasses. Where were they?”
    “Here—by this hand.” She meant the right hand.
    “As though he had removed them himself.”
    “Now