MICK BOURKE WAS sitting in the waiting room when I arrived in the next morning.
“I thought he was coming in this afternoon after the funeral,” I whispered.
“He asked if you’d mind seeing him now instead,” Leah explained. “You don’t have anything else on. I cleared your diary for the funeral.”
I checked my watch. “Okay, give me two minutes to get myself organized and then send him up.”
Bourke was formally dressed for the funeral in black suit and tie, which did nothing to camouflage his ruddy, outdoorsy complexion. He took the seat I offered him and immediately started to deliver what sounded like a prepared speech, concentrating hard on the desk in front of him as he did so.
“I’m sorry for coming early. When I thought on it again, I realized I wouldn’t be in the humor for doing this after the funeral. I thought I’d be better doing it when I’d made up my mind to.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant that he would be drinking after the funeral or that the funeral would weaken his resolve.
“What is it that you have decided to do, Mr. Bourke?”
He sat up in his seat. “I’ve decided to try and get my money back.”
“What money would that be?”
He looked me in the eye for the first time. “Lisa said she was going to come and see you yesterday.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bourke, I don’t follow. You’ll have to explain things to me. Start at the beginning.”
He took a deep breath. “It’s Conor Devitt, you see.”
“Yes?”
“Conor was taking money from me for a long time. I didn’t know it until after he disappeared, but he was. A lot of money.”
“I see. How do you know?”
“Well, he was working for me for years. Since he was a schoolboy. I took him on after his father died. And the wife, well, she always did the books, you see.”
“Your wife?”
“Aye. Until her sight got bad there a few years back. She had to have a cataract removed y’see. Wild nasty things, cataracts. Three months she was, on a waiting list to get them removed in Letterkenny. Bloody health service.”
My patience was wearing a little thin.
“Conor, Mr. Bourke?”
“Oh, aye. Well, when she couldn’t do the books no more, I got Eithne to do them.”
“Eithne?”
“Aye, Eithne. The chemist. She volunteered, you see. Eithne’s my sister.”
“Oh yes, she said that.”
“Well, she does her own books and she said it’d be no trouble to do mine, too. So, when she got a look at them, didn’t she discover that there was money missing. That money had been taken for years.”
“By Conor?”
“It had to be. He was the only one working for me apart from the wife.” He smiled. “And it wouldn’t do her much good to take it. She’d be stealing from herself. There’d be no more meals out, so there wouldn’t. Or shopping trips to Derry. Or foreign holidays.”
“Okay, Mr. Bourke. So, you didn’t get a chance to challenge him about it? Conor, I mean.”
“I didn’t find out about it until a good while after he was gone. A few months, I think it was.”
“Did you tell anyone else about it?”
“Not at the time. I didn’t want to upset the family. I knew I’d be able to sort it out eventually, some way or other. Then I told Lisa.”
“When did you tell Lisa?”
“Ah, not so long ago. I thought she might know what to do.”
No wonder Lisa had given me the impression that she thought Conor had left of his own accord, if she knew he had been taking money from his employer. What else had she not told me? But I could think of only one reason that Bourke would tell Lisa about the missing money. I voiced it.
“Did you think maybe she might pay you back herself, Mr. Bourke, out of guilt?”
He shook his head vehemently. “No, no. I wouldn’t have wanted that. Poor wee girl, she’s been through enough.”
“Or maybe you thought she might have access to his bank accounts, working in the bank?”
His eyes widened. “Nothing like that, I swear. I wanted it all above board, so I did. She told me what she was going to do, that she wanted to have him declared legally dead. And I wondered if maybe there was some way of getting my money back – from his estate or something.”
“I see.”
“So, what do you think?” He screwed his eyes up as if he were looking at the sun.
“Well, Mr. Bourke. I really think it’s something you should go to the guards with. Probably something you should have gone to the guards with a long time ago, as a matter of fact. It could be relevant to his disappearance, you know.”
“No. I don’t want to involve the guards. I wouldn’t want to upset his poor mother. That’d be a terrible thing to do.”
“Well, I think you might have to – if you want to have any chance at all of getting your money back.”
Bourke’s expression changed to one of alarm. He got up out of his seat and started to back out through the door, as if he was afraid that I might be tempted to call the guards any second myself.
“I’ll think about it and get back to you. Is that all right?”
“That’s fine, Mr. Bourke.”
At a quarter to eleven we closed the office, and Leah and I made our way across the square to the church. February or not, spring still felt a hell of a long way off this morning. Despite my boots and heavy socks, my toes were numb, and I pulled my coat tighter around me as we walked up the steps to the churchyard. A crowd had gathered at the entrance of the church, huddled together for warmth like penguins, their faces contorted against the stabbing cold. There was very little chat, as if it was too cold for people to think of anything to say, or make the effort to say it.
Phyllis was closest to the door. She was whispering into the ear of a tall man in an anorak and woolly hat. It took me a few seconds to recognize McFadden out of uniform. Lisa Crane stood a few feet away from Phyllis, clinging as usual to her husband’s hand.
A car’s engine sounded faintly in the distance, barely audible above the wail of the wind. A few seconds later, Hal’s large black hearse came into view, proceding in dignified fashion up the driveway, followed closely by a second large black car. The hearse came to a halt in front of the church door. Hal walked slowly towards the back of the hearse, opened the door, and stood there silently, hands clasped, eyes downcast.
The second car drove around the side of the church and parked there. The driver’s door opened and Mick Bourke emerged wearing a heavy black coat and scarf. He opened one of the rear doors and Claire climbed out, followed by her mother. Mick took one of Mrs. Devitt’s arms and Claire the other, and they made their way slowly towards the hearse. The crowd watched silently as the coffin was carefully unloaded and carried into the church. The pallbearers were Bourke, Tony Craig, and two other men I had never seen before.
“Cousins,” Leah whispered.
Claire and her mother walked behind carrying wreaths, supporting each other. With Bourke carrying the coffin, they looked very alone. The absence of the one remaining brother and son seemed unnecessarily cruel. As Leah and I joined the crowd and followed the procession inside, grateful at last for the warmth of the church, I noticed Eithne playing the organ in the gallery. By the time we found seats, the church was almost full – and Glendara is a huge church.
An hour later we emerged from the church to driving icy rain.
“I’ll go back and open up the office,” Leah said, as we huddled on the porch along with about forty other people.
“Don’t you want to come to the burial?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ll leave it, I think. That’ll take a while. He’ll be buried up at Whitewater. The family plot is in the old graveyard up there.”
I had a flashback of seeing Jack Devitt’s grave after I had stumbled in the snowdrift on Saturday morning. As I watched Leah make a dash for it down the steps, Phyllis appeared beside me.
“Going up to the graveyard?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Any chance of a lift? No point in both of us driving.”
“’Course,” I said, wondering how on earth Phyllis was going to fit in the Mini’s tiny passenger seat.
I can’t pretend it was easy; the top of her head grazed the roof, and there were some interesting contortions required to allow me to reach the gearstick, but we managed it.
“God, he didn’t get very far really, did he, poor man?” Phyllis said sadly as she rubbed vigorously at the condensation on the passenger window. “When you think he was born less than a mile from here, and he lived most of his life just there.”
We were passing Danny’s cottage. It was tiny, probably only three rooms. I imagined that whatever happened with the church, this old cottage’s chances of revival, now that Danny Devitt was gone, were pretty slim.
“It’s lonely up here, isn’t it?” I said.
“Wasn’t always, you know,” Phyllis told me. “You go back twenty-five years or so and this was a vibrant little community. There was the church and the primary school and a community hall, and a shop. I think there was even a post office in the shop. And the pilot station, of course. There were a good few families living up here once upon a time.”
“Did they just die out? Or emigrate?”
“Work dried up; people had to leave. A few things happened that didn’t help, of course.”
“That ship being blown up?”
She nodded. “If you asked me, I’d say the Sadie was the final nail in the coffin for Whitewater as a community. Not only were there men lost, but the big cargo ships stopped coming this way after that. They’re back now, of course, but it came too late for Whitewater. The pilot station hasn’t been used since.”
I pulled into the narrow road leading to Whitewater Church.
“It had a big effect on employment at the time – the men had to go elsewhere. It meant there were women left on their own up here with small children, and I dare say it became too remote for them. Some of them didn’t even drive. They all moved into town eventually.”
“Wouldn’t Danny’s mother have been one of them?”
“She would, I suppose,” Phyllis agreed. “Jack was as much a victim of that day as if he had been blown up with the ship. He was nothing but a wreck of a man after it.”
“But she stuck it out, stayed here even though she was left alone with three children?”
“It must have been awful for her.”
“Aye.” Phyllis tutted at the memory. “But Mary had two big strapping sons – Conor to bring in a wage and Danny to keep the wee farm going. She was lucky in that way.”
The car bumped along the last couple of yards as Whitewater Church came into view. It made a striking sight, its dark gray shape silhouetted against the turbulent sky.
“Was that why the church was deconsecrated and sold, because nearly everyone left?”
“I suppose so. There weren’t enough people to justify keeping it going. Sad, I always thought. I liked coming here. I used to come up here the odd time when that bloody priest in Glendara was driving me nuts.” She shot me a sly grin.
I pulled in tight behind the line of cars outside the graveyard, and we wrapped up and made our way in through the gate. Thankfully, it had stopped raining, but the wind-chill factor on this exposed hill was ratcheted up to the highest level. I was pathetically grateful for the woolly hat Phyllis found in my glove compartment when she was doing her usual nosy ferreting about.
Walking along the narrow pathway towards the Devitt family plot, I noticed an area that had been cordoned off and covered with a waterproof sheet a little to the left of the path, underneath the trees. I wondered if this was where the soil samples had been taken. I hadn’t noticed it before when I had been along this section of path, but of course the ground had been covered in snow then.
I tore my eyes away and followed Phyllis. The group gathered around the grave was small and the few words from the priest were mercifully short. When he had finished, a little queue formed to pay condolences to Claire and her mother, who were standing beside the grave. Bourke had moved next to a woman with dyed blond hair in a heavy, fur-collared brown coat.
Claire’s high-pitched voice carried on the wind as she greeted people. Mrs. Devitt looked particularly frail beside her. I wondered if it would be so awful if the two women were excused this ritual just this once. I recalled my own graveside experience, and I don’t remember it helping much. But then everyone is different. For some, rituals are part of the healing.
I found myself in the queue behind Lisa Crane and her husband. Neither acknowledged me. When I reached Claire, I thought she looked exhausted. In fact, she stumbled as she took a step towards me. I caught her arm, noticing that her eyes were glassy.
“You’re wonderful to come,” she said. “Do you know my mother?”
I looked at the woman standing beside her. There was no way around it this time. I had to face her. Mary Devitt looked at the ground as I delivered the standard platitudes about how sorry I was, and she thanked me graciously. I was about to move away when I realized that I was the last in the line; people were leaving the graveyard. If I walked away, I would have left her alone. Claire had moved into a huddle with Phyllis and Eithne. It was clear she hadn’t noticed that her mother was on her own, with only me for company.