Free The Death of an Irish Lover by Bartholomew Gill Page A

about your head and hand? I could have you driven to hospital.”
    “Thank you, no. I’ll ring up the local medic. He’ll come and take care of me here. It’s more my style.
    “And Superintendent,” Carson added as McGarr was nearly out the door. “Thanks for the bit at the car. It makes me grateful for my tea.” Carson raised his cup.

9
Winter Scene
    Peter McGarr awoke the next morning to a wonderful surprise. Snow.
    And not the snow that was usual to Ireland and often capped the tops of mountains during winter or coated fields with an inch or two of dampness that was gone in a morning. This was a deep abiding snow of the sort that McGarr could remember only a few times in his life.
    Looking out the windows of the suite of rooms in the inn, he could see that, sometime during the night, the sleet of the night before had turned to fluffy snow. Perhaps a foot mounded the cars in the courtyard and the walls of the formal garden. And was still falling in swirling windblown clouds.
    The white slope down to the jetty made the river look black and slick, and only the boats of two fishermen tending their eel nets near the piers of the bridge revealed that the surface was water and not dark polished stone. Gulls, looking like bright bits of kinetic snow, wheeled in their lee.
    On the bridge itself, an articulated lorry was creeping along in what had to be its lowest gear with warning lights flashing. On the far side a car had gone off the road and was abandoned. And the sky above was the color of slate. It would rain soon. Or snow more.
    And yet the sitting room of the suite that McGarr was sharing with his wife and daughter was snug and silent with the piped heat pinging in baseboard registers, the only sound at—he checked his watch—7:10.
    Picking up the phone, McGarr ordered a pot of coffee, cocoa for Maddie, and a selection of buns. He then went back to the window to survey the unusual scene again. And muse.
    After leaving Carson at Quintan Finn’s flat the night before, McGarr had found the Leixleap police barracks where Declan Riley, the sergeant, was waiting for him. Together they walked the three blocks to the house of Ellen Gilday Finn’s parents.
    “I suspect you do this more than me,” Riley said, as they were waiting for the door to open.
    McGarr only drew in a deep breath, having known from his first days as a policeman that, while every job had some challenges, there was none in any occupation as troubling as this. Even doctors seldom informed parents that their child had been taken from them by a violent act.
    “They only had the one,” Riley whispered, as the door opened.
    And like so many other parents in McGarr’s experience, Ellen’s were so shocked that they could be of no help, save to say that they had not been aware of anyproblems between their daughter and Finn. “They’d been together forever, you know. Since school. And getting married was like something they’d been waiting for all of their lives,” the mother said.
    “But did Ellen have anybody pursuing her?” McGarr asked.
    “Pursuing?”
    “Ringing her up, asking her out. That class of thing.”
    She had to think. “I can’t say. Not after she was married. But Ellen was a pretty girl, and all along there were boys wanting to take her to the ciney and all, even though she had her cap set for Quintan.”
    “What about Pascal Burke, her boss?”
    Both parents only stared, before McGarr said what he knew for them would be the hardest part. “Your daughter was found with Burke in a room in the Leixleap Inn. Both were murdered. Shot with his gun.”
    Tears burst from her father’s eyes. “The eels. The bloody eels and the bloody IRA. We never wanted her to take that job, but it was always the environment…the environment for Ellen. The kayak. The sneaking around in the dead of night. And look where it got her.
    “Do you know who Manus Frakes is?” he nearly shouted through his tears. “Find that bastard, and you’ll find