The Death of an Irish Sinner by Bartholomew Gill Read Free Book Online

vision. Already his left eye was puffing, and only now did he feel the pain in his temple, cheek, and the side of his head.
    Having come away without handcuffs, McGarr snapped off the chord from the wall connection and then a phone. After turning the unconscious woman over, he slipped the heavy six- or seven-foot stick between her arms and body and tied her hands in front of her. Even if she came to and gained her feet, she would never get through a door.
    McGarr found Father Fred where he had asked the priest to remain—at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the dead woman’s quarters. “Who went by here?”
    “Nobody that I saw. But then I had to leave to let your people in the front gate. I’ve only just returned.”
    “Is there another way down from here?”
    Father Fred nodded. “The servants’ stairs. But again, you’d need Mary-Jo’s pass card to open the door.”
    “To go out?”
    The priest shrugged. “After the break-in, it’s the way she wanted it.”
    “Show me, please.”
    As the priest led him down the hallway, McGarr asked, “How often were you up here?”
    “Every now and then, when Mary-Jo wished me to help her with something—a sticking drawer, to get a book from a high shelf, that class of thing. But never”—his head turned to McGarr—“at night.”
    “Who cleaned this place?” As the pain rose, so too did McGarr’s anger.
    “She does. Geraldine.”
    They had come to the woman, who was still down on her back on the carpet, the baton protruding from under her arms. McGarr played the beam of his pocket torch on her face.
    “She’s the…manager here—of the house, the grounds, security. She holds black belts in several of the martial arts. Did she do that to your face?”
    The woman’s head was moving as she began to come around, and McGarr hoped she too was in pain. Her body weight on the stick behind her arms could not be comfortable, he imagined, noting through the blood that was flowing from her nose that she had a long, shiny scar on one cheek. A woman in her late forties or early fifties, she kept her hair, which was grayish blond, cut short. “Show me the stairs.”
    The door there was closed, and the small monitoring light on the yoke for the pass card was green. “Meaning that if whoever was up here went down those stairs, they did it either with Mary-Jo’s pass card or yours?”
    The priest nodded, before opening his black jacket and displaying a plastic card attached to an elasticized lanyard.
    “Could there be a third or more such cards?”
    “I don’t believe so. They’re issued by Avco, the security agency, only to us two, and when a card is lost or damaged, they come here and change the codes.”
    “Downstairs on the computer?”
    “I believe so, but I don’t actually know how it’s done.”
    Could McGarr conclude that whoever had been in the library/study had Mary-Jo’s card? No, not if the priest had been fully away from the door and was telling the truth.
    Turning away, he again heard footsteps on the carpet and caught sight of a figure rushing at them. “Look out,” he warned the priest, even as he crouched down to lower his center of gravity.
    With her head down and her arms still bound in over the long baton, she was running at them while screaming, “Has it happened? Did it happen? Is that what this is all about?” She struck the two men at speed, knocking the priest off his feet.
    Rising from his crouch, McGarr used his arms and shoulders to block her body to one side, where she tripped, slammed into the wall, and fell hard. With the barrel of the recovered Walther pressed to her temple, he asked, “Is there some reason why it had to happen?”
    Sobbing now, she said nothing.
    “Mary-Jo was murdered tonight. You seem to know why.”
    Still nothing.
    McGarr stood. “If you get up again, I’ll shoot you. Am I understood?” He prodded her ribs with the toe of his shoe, and she let out a wail.
    “Am I?”
    She cried out again.
    “I’ll