In Dublin's Fair City (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #6)

“That's right.”


“He told you she was dead, did he? Yes, that sounds like him. That Rory and his wretched, stubborn pride. She's not dead at all, you know. She left him years ago. Ran off with the local schoolteacher, Terrence Moynihan. He was a gifted man right enough—poet, playwright, orator, passionate about all things Irish was our Terry. Wasted in a backwater like this, of course. No wonder Mary Ann preferred him to that drunken lout. I can’t say I blamed her for running off, even though as her priest I should have condemned it. But they upped and went to Dublin together, twenty years ago it would have been. I haven’t heard word of either of them since.”

“Dublin, you say?” I felt the surge of excitement as I said the words. In my youth I had dreamed of going to Dublin, of strolling down those wide streets like a fine lady. Now it seemed that at last this dream was going to come true. If Inspector Harris would let me go, I’d be off to Dublin in the morning.





Seventeen


Inspector Harris had no objection to my leaving for Dublin. The murder inquiry had stalled, and he was waiting for the Majestic to come back to Queenstown so that he could interview the stewards again. His current theory was that Rose might have had a flirtation going on with one of the ship's crew and invited him to Miss Sheehan's cabin when she knew it would be unoccupied. He then demanded more sexual favors from her than she was prepared to give and suffocated her by accident. That would explain the strange steward encountered by both Henry and myself. More believable than a passenger managing to obtain a steward's uniform and using it to gain access to a cabin. Also I got the feeling that this scenario suited him better than an unknown assailant sneaking in to kill Miss Sheehan. Servant girls are ten a penny, and a murder in the course of a rough sexual encounter would hardly be unknown among their class.

I didn’t go along with this theory myself. What steward would risk his job by meeting a servant girl in a first-class cabin? I still felt in my gut that the intended victim had been Oona Sheehan herself. If I’d been conducting the investigation, I would have had the New York police find out who might have posed any kind of threat to her and why she got off that ship in such a hurry. That, to me, was the key to the whole thing. She had all those trunks with her. She had clearly planned to travel, but aborted the trip at the last moment. Maybe the police were pursuing this approach and just not keeping me informed. At any rate, Iwasn’t about to challenge Inspector Harris's latest theory because it meant that I was no longer a suspect and free to travel.

I packed up my things and departed on the express train for Dublin. Even the fact that it was a gray and drizzly day did not dampen my spirits as the train pulled into Kingsbridge Station. I could scarcely contain my excitement as I came out of the station and found myself on the banks of the river Liffy. A strong wind was blowing in from the North Sea and I had a bag to carry, but I set off anyway on foot, keeping to the south bank of the river. I wasn’t about to be denied this first walk through the city of my dreams. I had decided that my first port of call should be the Shelbourne Hotel, to make sure that the trunks sent there in my name had been picked up. I didn’t want to find that I was liable for storage costs for such a massive amount of baggage, and, in truth, I wanted to have a peek at the place for myself. I knew it was one of Dublin's grand hotels where the rich and famous stayed. Naturally I didn’t think that such an establishment would be within my budget, but it would be exciting just to experience sweeping in through those doors and mingling with the fashionable set.

I started to walk along Victoria Quay. In fact I almost skipped, brimming over with excitement like a small child who can’t wait to get to a party. I was here, alone, in the city I had dreamed of visiting, with money in my pocket and the chance to track down my quarry and return home a heroine. The first building I passed was a disappointment, I must say. Behind a high wall loomed a monstrosity with chimneys belching out smoke. Not the elegant Dublin I had imagined, to be sure. An ironwork sign over the main gate announced it to be the Guinness Brewery. But it turned out to be the one eyesore, and after it the city that unfolded before me was the Dublin of my fantasies. Across the river a magnificent building with a great green dome of copper and columns like a Roman temple sat on the quayside. I had seen pictures of it and recognized it as the Four Courts, where English justice was handed out to Irish miscreants.