Fine Distinctions

Book 233: Murder Room

by Deborah Valentine

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'A touch of Margaret Millar . . . worth watching' Sunday Telegraph Ex-cop turned author Kevin Bryce and sculptress Katharine Craig now live in rural Ireland. After a row Katherine disappears and the next Bryce hears is that her car has been found, with bloodstains on the seat. With a psychopathic IRA renegade on the loose, Bryce and the Gardai embark on a desperate search for the missing woman. Meanwhile, in Dublin, Mick Cronin ponders the miseries of his existence. Embittered by life and love he is an unstable man with a grudge against women...

Release date: November 14, 2013

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 190

Sample

He stepped out of the dark into the light without being aware of the change. The driveway was without obstruction, its surrounding walls high, topped with a snaking
coil of barbed wire. The structure beyond was of a severe design, and the drive curled past it, allowing one-way entry, one-way exit, under the conspicuous eyes of video cameras. Stoop-shouldered,
he trudged, hands at his sides in uneasy fists. His brief spell of euphoria was giving way to a familiar sense of doom, and it was as if he were trying to hold on to the good, keep his sense of
satisfaction clutched closely to his side like the hands of untrustworthy children.

One curious fellow, alerted by those manning the cameras, came outside and stood watching his progress, troubled by his peculiar stance.

Sweat met clammy, cold air and he began to shake. The pressure just below his breastbone was tight, getting tighter. He gasped. Only by some stubborn impetus of will did he manage to keep
moving.

The man watching him was joined by another. This younger man was as thickset as the first and dressed in a corresponding uniform, considered young only by comparison. “Merciful hour,
Dick,” he said.

As he reached the main entrance, the pain penetrated. It started slowly, then shot up like mercury in hot water. He staggered, dizzy and sick. When he hit the ground, he put his hand in hot
vomit and realized dimly it was his own.

Waving a hand, the older man sprinted lightly down the entrance steps. He had to move speedily lest Fergus, his partner, always the pushy fellow, make an effort to usurp his senior authority.
“Here now, lad, what’s the problem?”

Fergus tagged after, and having reached the man lying prone on the pavement, lifted his sharp nose disappointedly. “He’s locked,” he said. “Shitfaced.”

His companion was doubtful. In any case, it was common for these men to spend their time together in the giving of opinions and counteropinions. “Looks funny, if you ask me. And he’s
slippery as a babe purged fresh from the womb.”

“Ah, come on, Dick, smell him, if ye can over the muck. Do ye think he uses Jameson as perfume?” He gave the foot of the fallen man a shove with his own. “Ye can’t be
sicking up here. There’s a proper place for that kind o’ thing. Find yerself a bush, will ye? No point in the partaking of spirits if ye can’t hold ’em down.” Fergus
was a teetotaler, a less forgivable folly than his know-it-all attitude.

The man on the ground rolled on his back, stared into lamplight that made the heads above him look like black spots on the sun. He blinked hard. His whole life was not passing before him as he
might have expected. No, only the last hour, as if in that hour were condensed the total of his thought and experience; the highlight, the fall. He groaned.

“Look at him, grabbing his chest, he is,” Dick observed, triumphantly.

“Probably hunting up another bottle under his coat—”

“Must have been in a bit of a scrape. His shoes are muddied something terrible, and look at the buttons ripped off his shirt. The back of his hands are bleeding, if you’ll notice,
and he’s got a nasty cut on his chin.”

“Probably took more than one tumble in his shameful state.”

. . . had to hold on to your anger, elsewise you were nothing . . . nothing at all . . . sure, it was a true statement . . . had it coming, she did . . . bloody American . . . her fault . .
. had it coming . . .

“Needs a doctor” was Dick’s pronouncement.

“Needs to bloody sleep it off somewhere other than here” was Fergus’s.

And while the watchmen at the Berkeley Court Hotel debated his sobriety, he died.

“She was a fine-looking young woman, wasn’t she? A kinder man could have chosen an uglier specimen, certainly,” observed a fresh-faced member of the Garda
Siochana murder squad to his superintendent.

The technicians had finished their duties, and the body was about to be removed. The two men gazed down at where it rested among the mist-soaked grass and sodden leaves. She had, indeed, been a
fine-looking woman, and the strangulation had not marred her much. There was but a crust of blood about the nose, a slight red mottling of her fair complexion. With her eyes closed, she resembled a
sleeping baby with a bit of heat rash on her face. But it was cold where she lay, and her body was cold to the touch. The terrible red ring around her neck indicated she would not wake up and
reassure them all by crying. The superintendent sighed. They were joined by the detective sergeant, a scrappy little man of fifty.

“Never got to her knickers,” he told them.

“Looks like just the thought of it killed him,” said the young inspector.

“Did a bit more than think, lad.”

“Oh, sure,” said the lad, agreeably.

The new inspector was getting on the superintendent’s nerves. Morning was never his best time, and this hour, so early, when night had not quite allowed itself to slip irrevocably into
day, was particularly hard on his fragile disposition. He would have preferred to be in bed, cuddling the wife, steeling himself against the first assault on his ears of the Dublin rock and roll
group his son played loudly on cassette upon arising. It was a group the super pretended to dislike but was secretly proud of, same as he was his son. He looked sadly away from the body before him.
Over the hedge he could catch a glimpse of the walls surrounding the Berkeley Court Hotel. Finding this view as grating as the last, he turned to the detective sergeant, who said, “It looks
like the hair threaded between the fingers of the Berkeley corpse is probably hers. Under her fingernails we’ll probably find a piece o’ him.”

“Ah, well,” said the super, as if it went without saying. A passing car slowed, the driver indulging his curiosity at the plethora of police vehicles. The super glanced at his watch.
Must be an American on the way to work at the embassy nearby. Americans had peculiarly early habits. Dublin was hardly waking yet; by the time it did, the crew would be mostly cleared away. That
was something to be thankful for, he thought.

“She had no identification on her, did she?”

“Ah, no, sir. The lads have been searching the area for a handbag or some such, but they’ve come up with nothing yet.”

“Well, no doubt she won’t be too much trouble to identify.”

“She would have made an impression on the community, certainly.”

“If she came from around here,” said the inspector, as if it were impossible for her to have lived in Dublin and escaped his notice, her being such a beauty, and him the notable lad
on the prowl. The super raised his eyes to the sky. In seconds it had lightened to the color of stone, and like stone it would probably remain all day.

“I’m supposing it’s time for us to start knocking on doors, sir?”

“Ah, well,” he said, which they all knew meant yes. Yet they didn’t move, maintaining a respectful silence as she was covered and slowly lifted away, toward the waiting
van.

The inspector cleared his throat. “Where do you suppose he thought he was going, sir? Walking the direction he was.”

A curtain twitched in an upstairs window across the street, catching the super’s notice. Early as it was, the neighborhood was hungry for the giving and getting of information.

“Home,” the super replied absently. “That’s where they’ve always a mind to go. Home.” And with that, he walked straightaway toward the first door, thinking,
as he had so often in the past, this a shitty way to start the day.

Events had been set into play a week before. The day had begun quietly. Kevin Bryce, having finished his breakfast, stood at the window of the house he shared with
Katharine Craig and placed his dirty plate in the sink. The radio blared news of a former IRA man newly arrived back in the country. A man so indiscriminate in his violence that even the most rabid
members of that group were no longer disposed in his favor. Katharine pulled the plug on the electric kettle. She was wearing a red tartan bathrobe, and her dark brown hair, which had the kind of
fullness that comes from a lifetime of proper haircuts, looked particularly rich against it. Her complexion was clear enough to forgo makeup, but she rarely did and hadn’t that morning. She
wore just enough to accentuate the strong-boned construction of her face. If pictures were any indication, there had never been any little-girl prettiness about Katharine, even as a child. The nose
was too pronounced, too crooked, the eyebrows too dark, her eyes an unsettling shade of gray. She had broad shoulders and was tall for a woman. Barrel-chested and solid, Bryce was a tad short for a
man. They met at eye level.

“Let’s go to Cork,” Katharine said. No mere suggestion, but a subtle warning.

If Bryce read it as such, it did not show. His voice was soft, possessing a timbre as beautiful as any stage actor’s, and he answered, sociably enough, “Sure. It’s Thursday,
isn’t it? So the shops here will be closed this afternoon. I’d like to get a pheasant. One of the whole ones, complete with feathers.”

“A pheasant with feathers,” she repeated clearly and without indulgence.

Psychologists maintain that, in the relationship between a husband and wife, a power struggle is often played out over the comparatively minor issue of driving. Who should give
suggestions (turn here, park there, Look out!), the manner in which these small helps are proposed and accepted, the way they might be timed, are all part of the foreplay of conflict.
Kevin Bryce and Katharine Craig were not married, but for the last three years, their companionship had been constant. And despite the unpromising circumstance of having come together during a
murder investigation, they were, in many respects, well suited. They were both creative and solitary. They were both, to varying degrees, selfish.

Eleven years older, Bryce had been married once. At age fifteen he had fathered a son. No, not married then, he wasn’t so precocious as that, but he had been held accountable for the baby,
Steven. The mother had died a few months after the birth, and Bryce’s parents had taken the baby in. As soon as Bryce was of age, the fiscal burden of caring for Steven had been his. Steven
was an adult now, doing well on his own, but during his growing years, Bryce had carved out a career as a California deputy sheriff. It was a career he might have continued if the serious novels he
coauthored with his friend James Parnismus had not actually sold and eventually sold well. He was slightly more used to restriction, so his manner of keeping his distance from people was different,
if no less effective, than Katharine’s.

Katharine had never lived with a man before. Working consistently, single-mindedly, at the art of sculpture, she had obtained a fair amount of positive recognition while still quite young.
Collecting no cumbersome ties, moving rapidly from place to place, she had been master of her own fate, if she remembered correctly. Unfettered and self-sufficient.

Sitting on the passenger side of their Renault, Bryce put his foot on the brake. Katharine downshifted, glancing at the foot on the imaginary pedal.

“Did you say something, Katharine?”

She shook her head.

“My mistake. I could have sworn I heard you say something.”

He drummed his fingers on the armrest. She gave him one shrewd glance. This was, she was sure, an oblique reference to a conversation they’d had the week before. And the week before that.
And a month or so before that. It was a topic that was showing up with amazing, if one-sided, regularity.

“The fact of the matter is, Katharine, I’ve never met anyone less willing to talk, more fucking perverse, than you are” was what he’d told her.

This from a man whose books projected such a kind, uncanny understanding of human frailty. This from an articulate man, precise and accurate in his assessments. Unwilling? Perverse? Was he
completely blind? She honestly couldn’t talk. Oh, she could handle simple things like pass the salt, please. Or at a party she could smile, hold a cocktail, and make her
observations on the weather. But beyond this, words had always seemed to her to be incendiary things, dangerous as nitroglycerin in clumsy hands. In awkward situations, she never responded verbally
when a shrug or a lift of an eyebrow would do. Had learned to smile and look absently away when the question posed appeared difficult. Never apologized, or spoke an endearment, when she could
simply touch. Why cloud the issue with inadequate vocabulary, bad timing, or poor delivery? Besides, she wisely concluded, your own words could always be used against you. Unwilling? Perverse? She
was, to borrow one of Kevin’s words (a word, by the way, he could utter with such calm diction, it had the air of an acceptable adjective), fucking terrified.

She ground gears. He grimaced.

“Something wrong, Kat?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

She put her foot on the accelerator.

A crooked two-lane road connected their village with Cork City. Twenty miles of usually wet rolling hills quilted by fences of stone or bramble. The landscape was divided into
distinct colors. Dark brown where the soil had been overturned, where shrubbery, now in November stripped of summer colors, bared its basic anatomy: trunks, twigs, woody vines. Blue sky if it was
sunny, as it was that day. Gray if it were cloudy. Grass provided the ever-present green. As a rule houses were white, but like any rule, there were exceptions. Cottages butted firmly and evenly
one against another made a continuous stream save for one shockingly pink front. In another hamlet, a chartreuse pub stood out, a proud black sheep among the white. On the rivers, wild swans glided
serenely by mud flats.

His own serenity ruffled, Bryce said: “Is this how I’m going to die? A head-on collision with a trunckload of sugar beets?”

Easing back to the left, she responded tightly: “I had room.”

Bryce made a low whistle.

On the edge of Cork, where the road grew wide, was a garbage dump. There white and black birds sprang up, up out of the heap at the approach of a tractor, a long, ragged line of flight. They
made a graceful swoop around a group of telephone wires, light and dark as photograph negatives, then doubled back to once again delicately pursue their lunch among the rubble.

“Pretty,” she said, not realizing she had done so aloud.

Bryce peered across her toward the dump, then granted her the same kindly, exasperated gaze he had reserved as a rookie cop for the wandering patients of a local nursing home.

Katharine sailed down the road without noticing.

Patrick Street is a short, congested thoroughfare through Cork City’s downtown shopping district. On it, the eternal fight for a parking spot goes on, booby-trapped by
jaywalkers quick and unpredictable as rabbits, double-parked delivery lorries narrowing space already at a premium, bicyclists weaving unsteadily through traffic, and taxi drivers pulling out of
their designated center-lane parking, sure and unyielding. Headway is further complicated by a baffling, ill-marked series of one-way side streets jutting unexpectedly off the main.

Bryce pointed mutely.

Katharine, distracted by the blast of a horn behind her, struggled doggedly past.

“And there—”

“Where?”

“Too late.” He went on, bemused. “You know, I’ve never been able to work out the correlation between the accelerator and the pressure you apply to it when you’re
looking for a parking space. Now, logically—at least to my way of thinking—it would seem sensible to apply less pressure, in other words, to go slower, in order not to
inadvertently miss an opportunity to park. However, your theory appears to be precisely the opposite. Could you explain—”

Katharine turned sharply down an alleyway, faced on either side by cars, half on the street, half on the sidewalk. Minimal space was left for moving vehicles. She stepped on the gas. Bryce
remained admirably silent for a moment before stating quietly, “This is a one-way street.”

“I know.”

“But you’re going the wrong way!”

The car screeched to a halt. She shoved the stick into reverse, put an arm on the back of her seat and, eye on the road, moved backward with a speed that made the transmission scream. An
elderly, white-haired lady crossed the alley using careful, arthritic steps. Shriveled to the point she stood hardly taller than the cars, she was a short, no-shit personality. Raising her cane,
she thumped the Renault bumper smartly just as Katharine came to a stop. Bryce jumped and stared. Katharine turned left into one driveway, backed into another, set herself properly in the street,
and stopped for the lady, who gave her a sour nod. Katharine then fit the car neatly into a newly vacated spot.

“Happy?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Delighted,” said he.

Brick, brick, brick. The alley was paved with it. The buildings were built with it. Dark red and sturdy, rising three or four stories overhead, effectively blocking
the sun. Yes, the shops were nice, their storefronts carefully chosen for this pedestrian byway. Boutiques, bookstalls, wine bars.

I should be pleased, she thought.

B. . .