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was laughing. “Or the priesthood.”
    “Are you a solicitor or a politician this morning?” O’Shaughnessy asked Murray from the doorway.
    McGarr, who had begun to climb the first flight of stairs to his offices on the second floor, turned and saw Murray slide his bulk out of the limousine. Suddenly Murray’s face was suffused with his most practiced smile. “A solicitor and a friend…Liam, isn’t it?”
    “It is, it is that, sir. Representing?” O’Shaughnessy took the portly man’s hand in his own and steered him to the side, as the girl and the younger Murray entered the building.
    “My son. I thought I’d just come along for the ride.” He began to chuckle. “Miss Caughey doesn’t believe she requires counsel,” he said in an undertone. “Poor girl.”
    O’Shaughnessy tipped his hat to her. “Then you won’t mind waiting down here, I trust.”
    Ward opened a door and O’Shaughnessy ushered father and son into a room.
    “You—” Murray Sr. glanced at the long, battered table and the several hard-back chairs, “—you won’t be long?”
    The tall Garda superintendent shook his head. “We’ll try to hurry. For you, sir. But it could be a while.” He closed the door.
    McGarr smiled and continued up the second flight of stairs, from the landing to the offices.
    He heard Ward saying, “Do you smoke? You may smoke if you like. Tea, coffee. I’d like to offer you something stronger but it’s prohibited, of course.”
    “Tea. I’d love a cup of tea. With lemon.”
    McGarr shook his head. They’d have to send somebody out for a lemon.
    “Of course. We’ll get somebody right on it.”
    “I was hoping you’d be here,” she said in a strange nearly disembodied voice, her words measured, her tone soft and musical. “Yesterday you were so kind and understanding. I thank you, Inspector…. It’s curious but I can’t remember your last name. Isn’t that strange? Hugh is your first, is that not so? My father’s name, but that’s not why I remembered it.”
    McGarr leaned over the rail. He saw Ward turn his face to hers and peer into those large black eyes.
    “Ward. Hughie Ward. My people are from the West, like yours.”
    O’Shaughnessy had looked away. At the crack in the wall that followed the stairs to the landing.
     
    McGarr did not sit at the desk in his cubicle, only placed the boxed canister of video tape to the right and then skimmed the sheaf of memos that Ban Gharda Bresnahan, McKeon’s new assistant, had placed there for him.
    Only three sets of prints had been found in the house: the victim’s, the daughter’s, and some others around the piano that belonged to a male. The victim’s larynx had indeed been damaged. Neither theft nor forcible entry had been noted, although both front and back doors had always been kept locked and the old woman had been a cautious sort. And finally no Garda official, uniformed or otherwise, could be placed at the scene of the crime or even in the immediate neighborhood at about a quarter past four, the estimated time of the murder.
    McGarr turned and stepped to the window, which he opened. Somewhere down in Dame Street a jackhammer was blatting away at concrete, and he could see men up in the girders of a new office building, slapping red-hot rivets into sockets and flattening them home with pneumatic tamps. Higher still, through the orange structure of the tall building, McGarr could see a patch of azure sky, covered only by a thin veil of cirrus clouds. Muggy summer weather with neither sun nor rain, just a damp, hot, nettling flux, but—he glanced up once again—a hope, a promise of relief.
    What did he know about the Caughey murder? Little, as yet. But the murderer had been known to the victim, that much was plain. She had either let him in or he’d had a key. And the murderer had been strong—no, no; that was wrong: the murderer had had strong hands. McGarr remembered the rug he had examined and the swirls in the nap where her feet had