The Death of an Irish Lover Read Online Free

requested a medical examiner to certify the deaths, a team from the Technical Squad to go over the room and seal any evidence, and an ambulance to transport the corpses to Dublin for postmortem exams.
    In no way would McGarr compromise his office where a double murder of two law officers was concerned, “old friend” or not. And Tallon’s fixation with publicizing the matter, which was inevitable, rather interested him.
    If most of Tallon’s guests in the inn half of the hostelry were foreign fishermen or even Irish fishermen, how much would the report of any crime that happened over the pub, which was physically—and seemed to be treated by Tallon—as a separate operation, matter to them? McGarr himself was a longtime fisherman, and what concerned him was the availability of fish, a good meal, and a better bed at day’s end.
    “Connect me to the Leixleap barracks, please.” When the sergeant answered, McGarr asked him to come to the room. “I need your help.”
    “Can I ask what it’s about, Chief Superintendent?”
    “How soon can you get here?”
    “In a wink. The inn is just around the corner.”
    “I’ll be expecting you.” McGarr rang off.
    Moving out into the hall, McGarr carried two of the chairs from the hall into the room and placed them together at the side of the bed.

4
Sylvie Zeebruge
    “Know them?” McGarr asked the Garda sergeant when he arrived. An older man with a scrupulously shaven face and a neat blue Garda uniform, Declan Riley looked more like a bank guard than the commander of the local barracks. He nodded.
    “Well?”
    From the hall they heard a door open.
    Riley dipped his head to one side to mean “quite well”; his face was grave, his eyes somber. “Pascal Burke is his name. Another sergeant, like meself, and her boss.” He shook his head, plainly disturbed at what he was seeing.
    “A bachelor Burke was. And very much the Dubliner.” Riley’s eyes rose to McGarr, who was another. “That’s to say—”
    McGarr waved Riley off, knowing what he meant: city man among country folk.
    “He always seemed to have the readies to splasharound,” Riley continued. “Drank. And ate well, usually across the way on the other side of the inn. Stayed here though, because—I’d hazard—it was easier to come and go than a room there or in somebody’s house.” Like a B&B.
    “He had the reputation of being a…swordsman, if you know what I mean. Come down from town once a fortnight on an ‘inspection tour,’ like. To visit the three other fisheries police, get their reports, look things over.
    “Widows, spinsters, married women. He preferred them, he once told me over a pint, since any little problem that arose would be cared for in her house, not his.
    “This, though”—Riley raised his prominent chin, as though pointing to the bed—“is… was an outrage, with him the boss and her not even half his age and coming from one of the best families in the county. They’ll be devastated. Destroyed.” He shook his head. “They’ll never get over it, to say nothing of her young husband.”
    “Name?”
    “Ellen Gilday. Or at least it was Gilday up until last year when she married Quintan Finn, a fine local lad.” Riley closed his eyes and let some breath pass between his lips, before glancing at McGarr. “I wonder if there’s any way we could keep this part of it quiet? The way they are now?”
    This second call for confidentiality rather surprised McGarr, coming from a man that Tallon had characterized as the town crier. He waited. Riley had more to say.
    “This is a small town, a village. But a good place to live. And Tallon—gobshite that he is—runs a fine inn and pub here, even if it’s on his wife’s back.
    “She had the money and…you know, the Continental touch. And it’s her who makes it work while he plays at—what?—public relations, I think you’d call it.
    “The ‘Laird,’ the locals call him, adding ‘arse’ behind a hand. Sure, it’s part