Stone Heart Read online

  STONE HEART

  ‘Stone Heart is a polished, sparkling debut from an expert storyteller. It is a gripping, beautifully written thriller that will have you reading deep into the night…Des Ekin weaves a tangled, complex web of deception and intrigue in a modern Irish novel that captures the savagery of murder and the poignancy of a love struggling to survive against the backdrop of a brutal killing. It makes for marvellous reading and I loved it.’

  Cathy Kelly, author of Woman to Woman and She’s The One.

  ‘This is a powerful piece of work and a brilliant first from Ireland’s finest new novelist. Ekin has an inimitable ability to combine tension with emotion against a compelling backdrop of death and intrigue. Read it.’

  Paul Williams, author of The General and Gangland!

  ‘Des Ekin just keeps twisting the knife, a thrilling debut from a born storyteller.’

  Colin Bateman

  To Sally

  Acknowledgements

  Michael O’Brien of The O’Brien Press knew I was capable of writing a book long before I did. I hope this first novel vindicates his confidence in me.

  It owes its present form to Íde ní Laoghaire and Alison Walsh, both brilliant editors whose unerring eye identified its key weaknesses and built upon its strengths. Their suggestions for its improvement were inspired. Thanks also to Mary Webb, Chenile Keogh and all the staff at O’Brien, who helped shape it and whose contributions were invaluable.

  I was lucky to be surrounded at my workplace by talented people whose positive attitudes were a huge help. Eddie Rowley, Cathy Kelly, Paul Williams, Sean Boyne and Dave Mullins – all authors themselves – gave me constant morale-boosting encouragement, and it meant more to me than they’ll ever know.

  Thanks to the gardaí who helped me with background, and to Sean Lavelle of Achill Island, County Mayo, for his help and advice on the fishing-boat sequences. If any mistakes slipped through the net, they are my own.

  I’m indebted to Colm MacGinty, editor of the Sunday World, for his support and for helping me rediscover my lifelong pleasure in writing.

  Thanks also to Jo Keating, Colin McClelland, Alwyn James, Sarah Hamilton and to countless others who helped me along the way – you know who you are. To my mother, brother and sister for their support; and to my good friends Peter and Marian Humphries, who provided the haven of peace and tranquillity in County Kerry where the best parts of this book were written.

  To Christopher, Sarah and Gráinne for putting up with a dad who often seemed bionically joined to a word-processor.

  And above all, heartfelt thanks to my wife, Sally. We planned all this out together, teasing out the plots and characters during long walks in the County Wicklow hills. If the clichéd phrase ‘the better half’ leaps to mind, it’s only because half of this book is rightfully hers and it is, of course, the better half.

  D.E.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  TARA ROSS stirred restlessly as the midsummer sun burst over the Burren hills and forced its way through her bedroom window. She made a half-hearted attempt to straighten her tangled bed sheets and to plump up a single pillow that had been flattened by the unaccustomed weight of two heads. Then, wearily, she closed her eyes and tried to get back to sleep.

  Seconds later – at least, it seemed like only seconds – she was awakened by the high-pitched piping of her mobile phone.

  Tara groaned. For a moment, she wondered if she’d mistaken the day and overslept. No, it was definitely Sunday. And Sunday was her only day off.

  Her groping hand knocked over a glass of water as she fumbled for the phone and picked it up on the sixth or seventh ring. ‘Hello,’ she said without enthusiasm.

  But the voice on the other end was urgent.

  ‘Tara? Steve here. I can’t hang around, but I’ve got something you might be interested in.’

  Tara sat bolt upright, fully awake now. Steve McNamara was the local garda sergeant. He was a family friend and one of her best contacts. And he wasn’t the sort to phone at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, unless he had a very good reason.

  ‘There’s been a murder. The detectives from Ennis are on their way.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ gasped Tara. Immediately she felt like kicking herself. What a stupid bloody thing to say. ‘Hang on a minute. Let me get a pen.’

  She struggled out of bed and pulled back the curtains, expecting to see a frenzy of activity outside. But Claremoon Harbour looked as peaceful and calm as it always looked, Sunday or no Sunday.

  It wasn’t as though murder was a regular occurrence in Claremoon Harbour. In fact, nothing was a regular occurrence in Claremoon Harbour, unless you counted the steady routine of life that ebbed and flowed as predictably as the tide over the rippled sands of nearby Trá Mór. The last time the sleepy County Clare township had hit the headlines had been over forty years ago, when a fishing boat had foundered with the loss of three crewmen. People still talked about it as though it had happened yesterday.

  ‘Where, Steve? Who?’ Tara was trying to hold the phone under her chin, open the clinging pages of a new notebook, and pull the top off a ballpoint pen with her teeth, all at the same time.

  ‘Ann Kennedy. Up at Barnabo. I found her just after seven this morning. Stabbed with a kitchen knife or something. Over and over again, dozens of times. Jesus, what a mess.’

  His throat seemed to catch on the last few words.

  Tara lowered the notebook as an icy numbness spread through her limbs. She sat down unsteadily on the side of the bed.

  ‘Ann Kennedy?’ she repeated, hoping he wouldn’t notice the shaking in her own voice. ‘But she didn’t have an enemy in the world.’ She took a deep breath. ‘What was it, a burglary or something?’

  ‘No, domestic killing. It was the son. We’re taking him in this afternoon under Section Four.’ He was whispering now. ‘But for God’s sake don’t quote me on that. At the moment, the official line is that we’re keeping an open mind.’

  ‘But Steve…’

  ‘Listen, kid, I’ve got to go. Just thought I’d give you the chance to get in there ahead of the posse. Talk to you later.’

  Tara sat staring at the tiny black phone, long after the line had gone dead, as though it held the answers to the questions that raced through her mind. She just couldn’t bring herself to believe Ann was dead. Ann Kennedy, the farmer’s widow who had achieved national status as a women’s rights campaigner. She had been a familiar face on TV discussion programmes, a recognisable voice on morning radio. She was a legend. She was her f
riend. And now she was dead.

  Tara rubbed her eyes and forced herself to concentrate. She realised she was just erecting mental barriers, preventing another, even more disturbing, thought from entering her mind. The other vital bit of information that Steve had given her.

  It was the son. We’re taking him in.

  Not Fergal. It couldn’t be. Wasn’t he…

  Tara stood up and savagely punched numbers on her mobile phone. She couldn’t hang around. She had work to do.

  Now it was afternoon, and the little twisting road that led up from the village to the townland of Barnabo was congested with garda cars and the Dublin-registered Toyotas of the national press. After forty years, Claremoon Harbour had finally hit the headlines again.

  Tara sat on a warm dry-stone wall, just outside the perimeter of the police warning tape that sealed off the house and its grounds, and waited for Fergal Kennedy to be escorted from the old farmhouse and into the waiting patrol car. Would he have a coat or a blanket over his head? she wondered. Or would he be able to look at her as he walked down the potholed laneway towards the aluminium gate where the car waited with its engine already running?

  In the surrounding fields, police wearing blue boiler suits and gumboots were combing every single inch of turf and mud, raking grass, sifting weeds, sorting litter and farm debris into sealed evidence bags. There were more officers examining the barn, the outhouses and the charred framework of what had once, years ago, been a sizeable cowshed. Grim-faced forensic experts from the Garda Technical Bureau, dressed head to toe in sterile white coveralls, wandered in and out of the house where, Tara reminded herself with a shudder, the body of Ann Kennedy would stay in the kitchen until the pathologist arrived.

  In the meantime, Tara had done all she could. All her phone calls had been made, and now there was nothing to do but wait.

  And there could be worse places to wait. Behind her rose the hills that led towards the Burren, a bleak and eerily beautiful moonscape of snow-white limestone slabs and fissures where fully mature thorn trees grew hand-high like natural bonsais, and where lakes would appear and vanish as though by act of sorcery.

  Tara strained her eyes to look out over the sea, now a sparkling blue-green with only tiny specks of white. Force four or five, she guessed expertly, and unlikely to change much today; but you could never tell with the Atlantic Ocean. And yes, there were a couple of fishing-craft about a mile out to sea. She thought she could make out the outline of the Róisín Dubh, her father’s fishing boat, but at this distance it was impossible to tell.

  On any other day, Fergal might have been out there with him, helping to bring in the silver catch of salmon. On any other day, things might have been so different…

  ‘And who might you be, love?’

  Tara looked up. At first she thought the man in the blue suit was a detective, but he didn’t have that cop air about him and, anyway, not many gardaí could afford Comme des Garçons suits. He carried a state-of-the-art laptop computer which had probably cost more than Tara’s car, and a mobile phone – the latest model, with so many features that it could probably do your Christmas shopping for you. Nearby was a new-reg blue Mazda sports car, abandoned beside a police no-parking cone, its door left carelessly ajar.

  Tara took an instant dislike to the man’s fixed sneer and his patronising tone, but she smiled back and answered politely enough.

  ‘Tara Ross,’ she said, stretching out her hand. ‘And who might you be?’

  Uninvited, the man sat down close beside her on the sun-warmed dry stones – too close – and waited just a little too long before accepting her outstretched hand.

  ‘Gerry Gellick,’ he introduced himself, before handing over a business card. It identified him simply as a freelance journalist.

  Tara knew she’d recognised him from somewhere – the arrogant face, the pug nose and the carrot-red, painstakingly gelled hair. The photo regularly accompanied his byline in several newspapers. He had a reputation for getting the interviews nobody else could get. He also had a reputation for getting interviews that the interviewees could not remember giving. He quoted cops, priests, housewives, politicians and prostitutes, but somehow they all sounded exactly alike.

  Tara dug into her jeans pocket and produced her own card.

  Gellick looked critically at her photo and then at Tara’s face, comparing the two.

  ‘You don’t look like your photo,’ he said at last. He tossed a lit cigarette-end into the dry bracken of the hillside.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ she said absently, pointing to the bracken. ‘You could easily start a fire.’

  ‘No, you’re much prettier.’ He edged closer, and the smell of expensive aftershave couldn’t disguise the wine he’d had with lunch. She realised with irritation that he was half-smashed. He wasn’t drunk, as the police witnesses would say in court cases around these parts, but he had drink taken.

  In any other circumstances, she might have been pleased with the compliment. She couldn’t resist glancing at the photo and then at her reflection in the window of the Mazda. She looked quickly away again, because she’d always been sensitive about her own appearance and the way it set her apart from most of the other women in her village – the ones with reddish brown hair and pale Celtic skin.

  (‘You’re more Spic than Mick,’ Steve McNamara, who wasn’t above a bit of racism now and again, used to tease her. ‘That jet-black hair, that lovely olive skin, those big brown eyes and that classic nose. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were descended from the Spaniards who were washed ashore with the Armada.’)

  Now, Tara realised with annoyance that Gerry Gellick was edging closer still, his twisted slit of a mouth distorted in what he no doubt took to be a disarming smile.

  ‘What did you do to get sent to this dump on a nice Sunday afternoon?’ he asked.

  Tara followed his contemptuous stare down to the pretty little village.

  ‘Well, nobody actually sent me to this dump, Gerry,’ she said slowly. ‘I was born and brought up in Claremoon Harbour. This dump happens to be my home.’

  But the irony in her voice was wasted on him.

  ‘Oh. Then you might be useful.’ He said it as though it would be her privilege to help him. ‘Do you know anything about the guy they’re questioning?’

  Tara shifted uncomfortably. ‘A bit.’

  ‘What’s his story? Do you know whether he’s got an alibi?’

  ‘An alibi?’ To her intense annoyance, she felt her face begin to redden.

  Gellick gave an exaggerated sigh of frustration. ‘I mean, what does he claim he was doing at the time of the murder?’

  Her stomach tightened.

  ‘Look, Gerry.’ No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘He’s been locked in there all morning with two detectives from Ennis. How should I know what he’s said?’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Her answer seemed to satisfy him. She relaxed again.

  Gerry Gellick lit a cigarette thoughtfully. ‘You shouldn’t be stuck down here in the bogs, a nice girl like you,’ he said at last. ‘I know a lot of the right people in Dublin journalism. I could get you a job in the big smoke if you play your cards right. You might have to start at the bottom and work your way up, though. Where are you working at the moment? A firelighter?’

  ‘Firelighter?’

  ‘A little paper in the sticks?’ He grinned and waved his open hand as though explaining a joke to a backward child.

  Tara smiled thinly. ‘No, I’m not employed by the local paper. But I do work as a stringer for them from time to time.’

  ‘Well, what do you do?’

  ‘I’m a cyberhack.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘I edit my own online newspaper, the Clare Electronic News. It’s on the Internet. I’ve got thousands of readers all over the world.’

  ‘Jaze, that’s a good one. Where did you learn to do that?’

  ‘I taught myself all about computers. And I learned journalism at c
ollege and later at the Evening Mercury in Dublin. I was features editor there for two years.’

  His eyes widened. He was impressed. ‘So why the heck did you return to Bally-go-backwards?’

  Oh, God, she thought. Here we go again. How many times would she have to answer that question? She could have told Gerry Gellick all about her messy break-up with Chris Calder in Dublin. She could have explained how she’d decided, in a sudden rush of bravado and defiance, to start afresh by launching her own business in her home town. (After all, she kept telling herself, this was the age of the global village, wasn’t it?) And how, after a few months, she’d decided that Claremoon Harbour was really the only place in the world she wanted to be.

  But the last thing she felt like doing was to open her heart to this man Gellick – especially at this time.

  ‘Because I like it here,’ she replied at last. It was the truth.

  Gellick shook his head. ‘Come on, love, nobody in her right mind likes it here. It’s a crappy little pit in the arse-end of nowhere.’ He pointed disdainfully down at the tiny village as though it were self-evident. ‘Listen. I can put in a word with the right people and get you back to the real centre of things. I don’t know what you did to get the boot from the Evening Mercury, but I could fix it for you to get back in there, if you like.’

  He was absolutely serious, but when he saw her angry reaction, he changed tack. His face crumpled in a grotesque caricature of a backwoods politician on the election trail. ‘I can fix anything, love,’ he said, mimicking a music-hall west-of-Ireland accent. ‘Whether it’s a drink-driving charge or a job in the civil service or just a pothole in the road, I can fix it for you, if you just be nice to me, pet…’

  The mimicry was perfect. He leaned towards her, grinning evilly in character, and his hand began stroking the leg of her jeans, up and down from knee to thigh. ‘Just you be nice to me…’

  Tara knew the technique. It was common in Ireland – the grope disguised as a joke. If you objected to it, you were a humourless killjoy who couldn’t take a bit of fun. If you submitted to it, you were still getting someone’s hands all over you. A grope in quotation marks was still a grope.