Murder at the Regatta

The Harbour Smelled different in regatta week. The usual salt and diesel and seaweed gave way to something sharper, more purposeful: fresh tar on hull planking, new paint on the marker buoys, and the hot-metal tang of a generator someone had wheeled onto the quay for the festival lights. Fiona Byrne stood at her shop window with a mug of tea and watched the morning take shape below. It was Thursday, late August, and the village of Duncarragh was putting on its best face for the weekend.

Two men she didn’t recognise were threading bunting between the lampposts along Harbour Street, standing on stepladders and passing the line of pennants hand over hand while a woman in a high-visibility vest directed them from the pavement with the focused authority of someone who had done this before and intended to do it properly. The bunting was the old kind, heavy canvas triangles in faded blues and reds, not the plastic sort you bought in a garden centre. Christy Lydon kept them in a tea chest in the community hall’s store cupboard, brought them out every August, and inspected each one for rot before they went up. He’d been doing it for forty-six years.

Below the quay wall, the slipway was busy. Three boats had been hauled up for last-minute attention, their hulls scraped and gleaming wetly in the early light, and a fourth sat in its cradle with a man underneath it on his back, painting the keel with the careful, unhurried strokes of someone who understood that tar could not be rushed. The sound of his brush, a soft, rhythmic scraping, carried up through the open window along with the cry of gulls and the flat slap of water against stone.

Fiona drank her tea and let the scene settle into her. She had lived above this harbour for most of her adult life, watched it through every season and every mood, and she could read its rhythms the way Tom Kavanagh read the weather forecast, not by studying it but by knowing it. The harbour in regatta week had a particular energy, something between excitement and anxiety, the look of a village that wanted to be admired and was not entirely sure it deserved to be. Stalls were going up on the quay, their frames of tubular steel and canvas rising like pale mushrooms along the waterfront. The chandlery had its doors wide open and she could see rope coiled in the window display beside a hand-lettered card that read: Duncarragh Regatta · 47th Year · All Welcome. Forty-six years. Christy’s doing, all of it.

She finished her tea, rinsed the mug, and went downstairs to open the shop.

❦

The key turned cleanly this morning, which it did when the air was dry and warm, and Fiona took it as a sign that the weather would hold. She propped the door open with the iron doorstop her grandfather had cast himself (a flat lump of pig-iron with no beauty and considerable purpose), switched on the three banks of fluorescents, and began the opening routine. Crate of milk from the step. Sell-by dates on the yoghurts. Counter wiped with the lemon cloth. Newspapers arranged on the stand by the till, their edges aligned with a care she no longer apologised for. The Irish Independent, the Connacht Tribune, two copies of the Examiner, and a stack of yesterday’s unsold tabloids that nobody had collected and that would sit there until Friday, when the wholesaler’s van took them back.

The shop was warm already. Late August in Connemara was not the tropics, but this week the wind had swung south and brought with it a softness that felt borrowed from somewhere kinder, a warmth that sat on the skin and made the harbour look almost Mediterranean in the right light. The door stood open and the morning came in with it: salt, tar, the distant ring of a hammer on steel where someone was fixing a stall frame, and beneath it all, the patient, constant sound of the water.

Tom Kavanagh appeared at ten past eight, five minutes later than his usual time, which for Tom was the equivalent of a public apology.

‘You’re late,’ Fiona said.

‘I stopped to watch them put the bunting up. Peadar Joyce’s lad was making a bags of it and I didn’t want to miss the outcome.’ He settled against the counter, waxed jacket creased at the elbows, thin as a fence post, and took his Irish Independent from her hand before she’d finished setting it down. ‘He had the line twisted. Christy was watching from across the street with his arms folded, and you could see the man dying inside. Forty-six years of putting that bunting up himself and now he has to watch someone else do it crooked.’

‘Is Christy not doing it himself this year?’

‘He’s delegating.’ Tom said the word as though it described a medical condition. ‘That’s what he told me. Delegating. I said to him, Christy, you’ve never delegated a blessed thing in your life, and he just looked at me and said, “There’s a first time for everything, Tom.”’

Fiona poured two teas and set Tom’s on the counter where he could reach it without adjusting his lean. Through the open door she could see Harbour Street filling with the morning’s early traffic: a flatbed truck loaded with trestle tables, Mick Keogh from the Harbour View carrying a sandwich board toward the B&B, Dervla Scanlon sweeping the post-office step with the same distracted energy she brought to it every morning, as though the step offended her personally and she intended to settle the matter once and for all.

‘Is Christy all right?’ Fiona asked.

Tom turned a page. ‘He says he is.’

‘But?’

‘But he’s been saying things. Odd things. He told Concepta Keogh last week that this would be his last regatta, and Concepta, who has the subtlety of a foghorn, asked him did he mean he was retiring and he said, “Something like that.” She told Mick, Mick told half the harbour, and now everyone’s either worried or pretending they’re not.’

‘“Something like that,”’ Fiona repeated.

‘His words. Not the words of a man who’s decided to take it easy and let someone younger have a go. The words of a man who’s made up his mind about something and isn’t ready to say what.’

They drank their tea. Below the shop, the harbour glittered in the strengthening light, the water a shade of grey-green that in another hour would deepen toward blue. A pair of swallows cut low across the quay, skimming the air above the lobster pots with the practised indifference of birds that had been doing the same circuit since June and would keep doing it until September told them to leave.

❦

Maura Considine arrived at half eight, which was her usual time but felt early because she came in already talking, the way she did when she had news that couldn’t wait for a conversational opening.

‘The Keoghs are booked solid,’ she announced, setting her bag on the counter (the bag, the counter, the announcement: a sequence as reliable as sunrise). ‘Every room. Concepta’s in a state. She’s got the nephew arriving this afternoon, the one Christy hasn’t spoken to in years, and she doesn’t know if he’s booked or if he’s just turning up, and on top of that there’s a man from Dublin who rang last week about a room and she can’t find his booking in the book because Mick took the call and Mick’s handwriting is a crime against legibility.’

Fiona looked at her. ‘What nephew?’

Maura pushed her reading glasses up into her hair, where they would remain, forgotten, until she needed to read the small print on a parcel label sometime after lunch. ‘Christy’s nephew. Donal. You know about him, surely. He came for the regatta once, years ago. Tall lad, dark hair, looked nothing like Christy. They had some sort of falling-out and he stopped coming. Nobody knows over what, or if they do, they’ve the good manners not to say.’

Fiona did not know about Donal, or if she had known once, the knowledge had settled into the silt of village information that accumulated over years without ever quite becoming useful. She filed the name away now with the attention she gave to any new detail that arrived attached to a person she knew: Christy Lydon, who had run the regatta for forty-six years, who was calling this one his last, and whose estranged nephew was arriving on the busiest weekend of the year.

‘And the man from Dublin?’ she asked.

‘Hartigan, Concepta said. Something to do with festivals. Events management, I think. He’s been emailing the committee about sponsorship and modern approaches, whatever that means. Christy’s been ignoring his emails, which is Christy’s way of saying no without having to say no, but the man’s coming anyway. Concepta says he sounded very sure of himself on the phone.’

‘Most people from Dublin do.’

‘Now, Fiona.’ Maura’s mouth twitched. ‘That’s uncharitable.’

‘It’s geographical.’

Maura laughed and took her tea, and they stood together at the counter in the companionable quiet that only existed between people who had known each other since the age of six and had nothing left to prove. Through the open door, the morning continued to build. The bunting was up now, slightly crooked on the third span (Peadar Joyce’s lad, presumably), and the row of pennants snapped and fluttered in a breeze that came off the water with the smell of salt and warm stone.

❦

The morning trade was brisk but scattered, the pattern of a village with its mind on something other than groceries. Mrs. Callaghan came in for a tin of biscuits and a bottle of sherry (‘for the visitors, Fiona, not for myself, I’m not that far gone yet’) and stayed for ten minutes to describe, in meticulous detail, the state of the bunting from the vantage of her cottage window. Orla Feeney bought sunscreen, which was an act of optimism that bordered on the heroic given the usual August weather on the Connemara coast. Patrick Sullivan came in for a box of nails and a roll of twine and asked if Fiona had any spare hooks for hanging lanterns, because Christy wanted the harbour wall lit up for Saturday evening and the committee had run short.

‘He’s going all out this year,’ Patrick said.

‘Tom says he’s calling it his last.’

Patrick paused with the nails in his hand, his face doing something complicated that settled into a careful neutrality. ‘Christy says a lot of things. He said last year was his last too, and the year before that. It’s his way of reminding us we should be grateful.’

‘Is that all it is?’

‘What else would it be?’

The question sat between them, unanswered, and Patrick took his nails and his twine and his careful neutrality and left. Fiona wiped the counter and thought about the difference between a man who threatens to retire as a way of fishing for compliments and a man who says ‘something like that’ when you ask if he’s stepping down. The first was performance. The second was decision.

She didn’t know which one Christy was doing. Not yet.

❦

At half eleven, during the gap between the morning rush and the lunchtime trickle, Fiona left Maura minding the counter (‘Go on, I’ll manage, though if Patsy Whelan comes in and starts about the weather I’m locking the door’) and walked down to the harbour.

The transformation was already well along. The quay, which on an ordinary Thursday would have held nothing more than lobster pots, coiled rope, and the permanent smell of brine, was lined with stall frames in various stages of construction. Canvas awnings were being stretched and pegged. A woman Fiona recognised from the craft cooperative in Roundstone was unpacking boxes of pottery onto a trestle table, arranging mugs and bowls with the focused care of someone who understood that display was half the sale. Two doors down from the chandlery, a temporary stage was going up for Saturday’s prize-giving, its plywood deck still raw and unvarnished, smelling of sawdust and the pine resin that bled from the fresh-cut joists.

Fiona walked along the quay wall and took it in. The harbour was beautiful in this light, she’d grant it that. The water was calm and green, darkening toward the mouth where the open Atlantic began, and the moored boats sat at their reflections with the stillness of objects that understood patience. The headland beyond was a deep, sun-warmed green, dotted with gorse that had flowered late this year, its yellow bright against the hillside. Even the gulls seemed less aggressive than usual, as though the festival mood had reached them too and they’d agreed to a temporary truce with the fishing boats.

She found Christy Lydon at the far end of the quay, near the steps that led down to the slipway, standing with a clipboard in one hand and a biro in the other, ticking items off a list with the slow, methodical concentration of a man who had been making lists for forty-six years and did not intend to stop making them simply because he’d told everyone this was his last time.

He was seventy-four, though he carried it lightly, the way some men did when they’d spent their lives outdoors and had never quite learned how to be still. Not tall, but upright, with a full head of white hair that curled at the collar and a weathered face that folded into lines when he smiled, which was often. His hands were large and capable, the hands of a man who’d spent decades hauling rope and mending sail, and they moved when he talked, punctuating his words with small, emphatic gestures that made you feel he was confiding in you even when he was only asking about the weather. People liked Christy. It was his defining quality, the first fact anyone offered about him before they said anything else, as though being liked were a profession he’d mastered.

‘Fiona.’ He looked up from his clipboard and his face brightened the way it always did when he saw someone he was pleased to see, a warmth that started at the eyes and worked its way outward. ‘Tell me you’ve got the extra tea urns sorted. Eithne’s been at me about the tea urns all morning and I’m running out of ways to say “I’ll see to it” without admitting I’ve forgotten.’

‘I’ve got three. Two from the shop and one from the church hall. Father Keane says the church one has a slow element but it works if you give it time.’

‘Father Keane’s the same way himself.’ Christy smiled, then caught himself, as though the joke had escaped before he’d cleared it for release. ‘Don’t tell him I said that.’