‘We’ve got to get the pictures, Hetty,’ the man mumbled, hushing the words beneath his breath so that the McDowds wouldn’t hear. But they guessed the nature of his protest, for it showed in his pink face. The woman snapped something at him.
‘If you don’t leave us alone we’ll have to get the Guards,’ McDowd said. ‘You’re trespassing on this land.’
‘Is it fair on your daughter’s memory that the truth should be hidden, Mr McDowd?’
‘Another thing is, those dogs can be fierce if they want to be.’
‘It isn’t hidden,’ Mrs McDowd said. ‘We all know what happened. Detectives worked it out, but sure anyone could have told them.’
‘No, Mrs McDowd, nothing was properly worked out at all. That’s what I’m saying to you. The surface was scarcely disturbed. What seemed to be the truth wasn’t.’
McDowd told his wife to lock the door. They would drive over to Mountcroe and get a Guard to come back with them. ‘We don’t want any truck with you,’ he harshly informed their visitors. ‘If the dogs eat the limbs off you after we’ve gone don’t say it wasn’t mentioned.’
Unmoved by these threats, her voice losing none of its confidence, the woman said that what was available was something in the region of three thousand pounds. ‘For a conversation of brief duration you would naturally have to be correctly reimbursed. Already we have taken up your-working time, and of course we’re not happy about that. The photograph mentioned by Mr Tyler would naturally have the attachment of a fee. We’re talking at the end of the day of something above a round three thousand.’
Afterwards the McDowds remembered that moment. They remembered the feeling they shared, that this was no kind of trick, that the money spoken of would be honestly paid. They remembered thinking that the sum was large, that they could do with thirty pounds never mind three thousand. Rain had destroyed the barley; they missed their daughter’s help on the farm; the tragedy had aged and weakened them. If three thousand pounds could come out of it, they’d maybe think of selling up and buying a bungalow.
‘Let them in,’ McDowd said, and his wife led the way into the kitchen.
The scene of the mystery is repeated all over rural Ireland. From Cork to Cavan, from Roscommon to Rosslare you will come across small, tucked-away farms like the Butlers’ and the McDowds’. Maureen McDowd had been gentle-natured and gentle-tempered. The sins of sloth and greed had not been hers; her parents called her a perfect daughter, close to a saint. A photograph, taken when Maureen McDowd was five, showed a smiling, freckled child; another showed her in her First Communion dress; a third, taken at the wedding of her brother, was of a healthy-looking girl, her face creased up in laughter, a cup of tea in her right hand. There was a photograph of her mother and father, standing in their kitchen. Italicized beneath it was the information that it had been taken by Jeremiah Tyler. The Saint of Drimaghleen, Hetty Fortune had written, never once missed Mass in all her twenty-five years.
The story was told in fashionably faded pictures. ‘You know our Sunday supplement?’ Hetty Fortune had said in the McDowds’ kitchen, but they hadn’t: newspapers from England had never played a part in their lives. They read the Sunday Independent themselves.
The Butlers’ yard was brownly bleak in the pages of the supplement; the pump had acquired a quality not ordinarily noticed. A bicycle similar to Maureen’s had been placed on the ground, a sheepdog similar to the Butlers’ nosed about the doors of the cowshed. But the absence of the three bodies in the photographed yard, the dust still rising where the bicycle had fallen, the sniffing dog, lent the composition an eerie quality – horror conveyed without horror’s presence. ‘You used a local man?’ the supplement’s assistant editor inquired, and when informed that Jeremiah Tyler was a Dublin man he requested that a note be kept of the photographer’s particulars.
The gardai – in particular Superintendent O’Kelly – saw only what was convenient to see. Of the three bodies that lay that morning in the May sunshine they chose that of Lancy Butler to become the victim of their sluggish imagination. Mrs Butler, answering her notoriously uncontrollable jealousy, shot her son’s sweetheart rather than have him marry her. Her son, so Superintendent O’Kelly infers from no circumstantial evidence whatsoever, wrenched the shotgun out of her hands and fired on her in furious confusion. He then, within seconds, took his own life. The shotgun bore the fingerprints of all three victims: what O’Kelly has signally failed to explain is why this should be so. Why should the Butlers’ shotgun bear the fingerprints of Maureen McDowd? O’Kelly declares that ‘in the natural course of events’ Maureen McDowd would have handled the shotgun, being a frequent visitor to the farm. Frequent visitors, in our experience, do not, ‘in the natural course of events’ or otherwise, meddle with a household’s firearms. The Superintendent hedges the issue because he is himself bewildered. The shotgun was used for keeping down rabbits, he states, knowing that the shotgun’s previous deployment by the Butlers is neither here nor there. He mentions rabbits because he still can offer no reasonable explanation why Maureen McDowd should ever have handled the death weapon. The fingerprints of all three victims were blurred and ‘difficult’, and had been found on several different areas of the weapon. Take it or leave it is what the Superintendent is saying. And wearily he is saying: does it matter?
We maintain it does matter. We maintain that this extraordinary crime – following, as it does, hard on the heels of the renowned Kerry Babies mystery, and the Flynn case – has not been investigated, but callously shelved. The people of Drimaghleen will tell you everything that O’Kelly laboured over in his reports: the two accounts are identical. Everyone knows that Lancy Butler’s mother was a sharp-tongued, possessive woman. Everyone knows that Lancy was a ne’er-do-well. Everyone knows that Maureen McDowd was a deeply religious girl. Naturally it was the mother who sought to end an intrusion she could not bear. Naturally it was slow, stupid Lancy who didn’t pause to think what the consequences would be after he’d turned the gun on his mother. Naturally it was he who could think of no more imaginative way out of his dilemma than to join the two women who had dominated his life.
The scenario that neither O’Kelly nor the Butlers’ neighbours paused to consider is a vastly different one. A letter, apparently – and astonishingly – overlooked by the police, was discovered behind the drawer of a table which was once part of the furniture of Lancy Butler’s bedroom and which was sold in the general auction after the tragedy – land, farmhouse and contents having by this time become the property of Allied Irish Banks, who held the mortgage on the Butlers’ possessions. This letter, written by Maureen McDowd a week before the tragedy, reads:
Dear Lancy, Unless she stops I can’t see any chance of marrying you. I want to, Lancy, but she never can let us alone. What would it be like for me in your place, and if I didn’t come to you where would we be able to go because you know my father wouldn’t accept you here. She has ruined the chance we had, Lancy, she’ll never let go of you. I am always cycling over to face her insults and the way she has of looking at me. I think we have reached the end of it.
This being a direct admission by Maureen McDowd that the conclusion of the romance had been arrived at, why would the perceptive Mrs Butler – a woman who was said to ‘know your thoughts before you knew them yourself’ – decide to kill Lancy’s girl? And the more the mental make-up of that old woman is dwelt upon the more absurd it seems that she would have destroyed everything she had by committing a wholly unnecessary murder. Mrs Butler was not the kind to act blindly, in the fury of the moment. Her jealousy and the anger that protected it smouldered cruelly within her, always present, never varying.
