The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell

there could be no doubt. And something between Tovey and Lolly. But now no one would speak. He could ask questions. But he was not at all sure he would want what answer might be given. He tried to shiver, to retreat back to a time before these latest complications had asserted themselves, but the best he could do was jerk his head and twitch his arms.
    â€œYou can keep silent for as long as you like, but it won’t change the truth of what I’ve said.” Kitty’s tone managed to be both airy and severe at the same time.
    Lolly kept her eyes on the hand that was holding the sheet. “Don’t you have some better cloth than this for the poor man? He is dead, you know.” She let go of the sheet, and Declan Tovey’s hand slipped onto his groin.
    â€œI know he’s dead,” said Kitty. “And now it’s known who killed him.”
    Lolly moved the hand farther up onto his stomach, nearer the man’s waist, then reached over and brought the other arm up to restore the symmetry unfailingly imposed upon the dead. It gave him the gesture of a man satisfied by a good meal. “Kieran Sweeney,” Lolly said, “was driven mad. Let that be said in his defense.” The time had come for another of the woman’s Irish monologues, and she proceeded with all the eloquence at her considerable command. “The very idea that Declan Tovey would set his eyes on me sent him to a frenzy. And when he saw that the man was allowed into my house to perform intimate acts like scraping my drains and patching my walls where the rot came through, sense left him and his jaw was set. The very notion that the words of this man should slip their way into my ears, that the sight of him should sink in through my eyes, sent him daft. And when Tovey confessed the truth about how he was feeling, about his striving for me alone, about his plans for glory, Sweeney went mad all over himself. Free liquor he gave him, and poor man, Declan that is, that was, his head on the table far past all protest, and what does he do but do him in? When Declan’s head is bending low and he’s slurring my name with his liquefied tongue, in goes the poison and the drink is drunk. To whose health Declan drank only Kieran can tell us, but down again goes Declan’s head on the table, the glass toppled and the dregs running out, and the arms gone limp for good. He’s done in. He’s dead. And that is when he, when Kieran Sweeney, up and plowed your garden, Kitty McCloud. Digs up your ground. And in goes Declan Tovey for all time until today. Now let the deed be known, and Sweeney can stop going to church and doing other sanctified acts not fit for a saint.” Three times Lolly had changed the position of Declan’s arms, first crossing them on the chest, then moving them back down so the fingers were approaching the crotch, then back to the stomach where they’d started. “Dear Declan,” she said, touching the peak of his cap, “I could have saved you, I suppose. I could have denied to Sweeney all the things you said, and only I was supposed to hear. I could have let someone else patch my walls and mend my roof. I could have given to others what was rightly yours, but forgive me if I couldn’t, as much as they wanted it and as much as they kept pleading for it. Even to save you from this I couldn’t do it, and you’ve got to forgive me now because I’m asking for it, for to be forgiven.” She took her fingers from the top of the cap and put them to her lips, then to her cheek, then let them slide down her chest, something of a secular sign of the cross. When the fingers got to her waist, she hooked them inside her belt buckle and let them stay. Kitty had tilted her head as she gazed, blank eyed, at Lolly, as if only from an odd angle could she properly view the woman as she spoke. Slowly Kitty straightened her head. No emotion showed on her face. It seemed to have shed