The Celtic Riddle

He looked suspiciously at me. "And you have not even once worried just a little about the shop while we've been here? I did notice you eyeing the pay phones in Shannon Airport the moment we got off the plane, did I not?"

"I'm not worried at all," I replied. That was patently untrue, and both of us knew it. I had indeed been eyeing the telephones at the airport. I did realize, however, that it was the middle of the night back home, and had managed to restrain myself.

Normally there are always two people in the shop, one to be at the cash, one to help the customers. When I'm off on buying trips, Alex stays in the shop with Sarah; when she's on holiday, it's Alex and I, and so on. But with two of us away, that left Sarah on her own, and Sarah, who's a whiz on the business and financial side of things, but not comfortable on the sales side, was a bit nervous about it all. For a while, I found myself with competing loyalties: looking after Alex or minding the store.

In the end I asked my ex-husband Clive Swain, who had the supremely bad taste to open an antiques store right across the road from Greenhalgh McClintoch, to keep an eye on the place for me, and give Sarah a hand if she needed it. This is much akin to Custer asking Crazy Horse to hold the fort while he goes off for a little RR, of course, but Clive, the rotter, had also dumped his second wife and, when I wasn't looking, taken up with my best friend, Moira, a very successful businesswoman who, I reasoned, was not so far gone in her affection for Clive that she would allow him to ruin my store. I just tried not to think too much about it.

Rob and I were quiet for a minute or two, sipping our beer. I sat admiring our surroundings, the somewhat prosaically named Hunt Room, with glowing fireplace, nicely worn green, gold and red-striped sofas and chairs, the dark green walls lined with prints of English hunting scenes, and a rather valuable, if not to my taste, oil painting of a stag cornered by a pack of hounds, over the mantelpiece. I knew what would happen next, and right on cue, Rob sighed theatrically. "Okay, so after almost twenty-five years in law enforcement, I can't help myself. What makes you so sure that fellow Herlihy just fell?"

"Well it was slippery enough. I should know. I took this something less than graceful tumble down the hill myself, did Alex tell you?"

"He did. He was obviously being very tactful, though. He didn't mention anything about lack of grace."

"It was quite undignified, I assure you. I was lucky to fall on mud and wet grass. It made a mess of my clothes, but I wasn't hurt. The slope was not all that steep, and there were no rocks at the bottom. A few yards either way, though, and I'd have ended up like Herlihy. On top of that, I'd only sipped a small whiskey. And Herlihy, as I mentioned, not only had a reputation for drinking regularly, if Deirdre's comments are anything to go by, but I noticed he kept nipping out of the room for a few seconds at a time. At the time it was quite clear to me that he was sneaking out for a swig or two of something or other."

"Maybe he was going to check the door, or he had a bladder problem, or didn't want the others to see he was overcome with grief or something," Rob interjected.

"I don't think so. His shoes squeaked, and he stopped after a few steps, just about as far as a sideboard in the hall on which there were several bottles of booze, I'd noticed. He had another drink, a rather large one, when Tweedledum or Tweedledee, whichever it was, said how much he'd get. It was about fifteen thousand Irish punt, by the way, which these days is worth more than twenty-five thousand dollars. That should rule out suicide. Why kill yourself the day you come into some money? When Alex and I left to go to the car, he was helping himself again, quite liberally, to the drinks on the sideboard in the hall. It's a wonder he could even stagger to the edge of the cliff!" I concluded.

"There!" Rob exclaimed. "What did I tell you? You've just added an element of doubt to your own theory."

I glared at him. "My point, if only you would allow me to get back to it, is that we're here for a while, pending the results of the autopsy, so why not look for the treasure?"

"But why would you want to?"

"Well, for one thing it wouldn't bother me a bit to beat those po-faced women to it," I replied.

Rob winced. "Aren't you being a little hasty in your judgment of them? What did they do to deserve that?"