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Christian Mørk
“Darling Jim”
Piper Verlag € 19.95
A solitary Irish house, three mysterious female corpses and an unscrupulous storyteller.
The residents of the small Irish village of Malahide still avoided the house for a long time after it was disinfected and made liveable again. Three dead women were found in that house, Moira Walsh and her two nieces Fiona and Róisín. They died in a horrible, unexplainable manner. The corpses were discovered by Desmond, the postman. Desmond felt something was wrong with the house. Recently it seemed to him as if he heard noises, even voices, a kind of whimpering coming from the house. When he opened the mail slot in the door and wanted to toss the mail in, he looked through the slot into the house and he first discovered Mrs. Walsh's hand, then her arm and a part of her body. Everything was black and blue and terribly bloated.
It was Niall, another curious postman, who later discovered the truth about the death of the three women. In the metal cage for "dead letters", mail that was either without a proper address or had insufficient postage, Niall finds a spotty envelope. Addressee: Someone, Post Office, Townyard Lane, Malahide. Return address: Fiona Walsh, One Strand Street, Malahide. He can't believe it. That was the name of one of the murdered girls. He hardly has time to read everything on the envelope when his boss enters the room, gives him a dressing-down for drawing comics during work and immediately sends him home. He is fired the next day.
Niall opens the envelope and finds a black book in it, which he opens at home. It is Fiona's diary. The pages are smeared with blood and tears. He begins to read and not only dives into the sisters' life story, but the horror that Fiona and Róisín have lived through is also written down here.
The nightmare started in Castletownbere, where Fiona and Róisín lived, when Jim Quick entered their lives. He slips into people's emotions in a calculating manner. Jim is not only a terrific storyteller and breathtaking lover, but the sisters discover that he is a brutal murderer. In a pub people hang on his lips while he tells the thrilling story of a prince who was attacked by a wolf and is then changed into a wolf, and then leads a new life as a roaming, murderous beast.
Fiona succumbs to Jim's charm, allows herself to be seduced by him and experiences an unbelievable night of love with him. What happens then is something she would have never imagined in her worst nightmares.
When Niall finishes the diary, he knows that there was a twin sister, Aiofe, and it is clear to him what kind of psychological stress the sisters were exposed to through Jim's atrocities. He imagines what agonies the sisters had to suffer in their aunt's house until their deaths. But he has not yet found out the entire truth. Niall decides to drive to Castletownbere, to find out the rest of the story there. He asks questions about the sisters and Jim Quick, but is met by people who are hostile to him. One day Mary Catherine comes to him and offers him Róisín's diary in exchange for Fiona's. In her diary Niall continues to read about the further atrocities the sisters lived through.
But he finds out the final answer outside of the diaries.
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