The Death of an Irish Sinner Read Free Page A

and an aquiline nose that had been broken more than a few times and now angled slightly off to one side.
    He was balding, but the hair that remained was curly and a rich red color that had only begun to gray at the tips. But it was the contrast between his still-vibrant hair and the pallor of his skin that disturbed McGarr. He looked pasty, winter-worn, and gray.
    Although an avid fisherman and gardener, he asked himself when he had last spent a full day out of doors. Sure, there was the weather to blame, and the caseload of the “Murder Squad”—as the press had dubbed his agency—had never been more onerous.
    But how many more truly active springs did he have? In the last few years McGarr had found himself going to funeral after funeral, with not all of the deceased older than he.
    Topping up his drink, he called out to his wife, Noreen, saying that it was time to take their annual spring pilgrimage to her parents’ country house in Dunlavin.
    “You mean it’s that day again?” she said from theAga, where she had been readying dinner—a piquant osso bucco, McGarr could tell from the aroma. While they had been at work, it had bubbled in the least-hot oven of the ornate stove that dominated one wall of their kitchen.
    “I’ve already spoken to Bernie about the truck,” McGarr continued, carrying his drink out into the kitchen.
    “You two can take the car.”
    Turning from the cutting board where she was slicing greens, Noreen pointed her chef’s knife at him. “This year, I want you to remember—none of that stuff comes into this house in any way, shape, or form, no matter the excuse.
    “Everything from your boots to that coverall thing you wear—hat, gloves, the works—gets left in the shed at the end of the garden. I won’t have Maddie and me sneezing for months because of your…preoccupation.” She turned back to the cutting board.
    A trim woman nearly twenty years younger than McGarr, Noreen had removed her skirt—so as not to spot it while cooking, he assumed—and had donned a bib apron over her slip. From the back, like this, the angular flow of her body with her good shoulders and legs but narrow waist appealed to McGarr in a way that was beyond words. Her stockings were turquoise in color, her hair a tangle of copper-colored curls.
    “You don’t seem to mind what my preoccupation yields,” he complained.
    “That’s different. I love the vegetables. But can you tell me one other gardener in the entire city who has to resort to such a vile substance to make his gardengrow? Dermot across the square seems to do just fine with whatever he can find at the garden shop.”
    Ach, Dermot D’Arcy’s vegetables couldn’t hold a candle to the plump juicy tomatoes or big glossy eggplants that McGarr grew yearly in a climate that was usually inhospitable to such species, he thought, taking a sip of malt. All the aptly named D’Arse-y could raise were spring lettuce, radishes, and ground vegetables. Turnips were his specialty, and in a sunny year he might come up with the odd zucchini courgettes.
    Yet McGarr held his tongue, knowing that it was wiser to engage his young wife in debate only after she had eaten.
    Also, she had a point about the “vile substance” that would be the object of McGarr’s quest on the morrow—rare, aged chicken manure mined from a former commercial poultry farm that Noreen’s father had purchased and appended to his country estate.
    Having deteriorated to a near powder, the chicken droppings were so ammoniacal that McGarr was forced to wear a breathing mask when shoveling it out of the former chicken coops. Even so, the very odor of the stuff stung his eyes and burned his lungs.
    But there was a payoff to his madness. Combined in the proportion one part manure to two parts of composted earth, the stuff was magic—the very secret to his garden—and proved such a fillip to growth that his garden flourished like none other in the neighborhood. Or perhaps even the