Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16 (3 page)

“Were there students resident in college last night?”

Pape shook his head. “During the day, yes. But only this morning were they allowed to move back in.”

Planning, McGarr thought. The theft had been eng
i
neered to a fare-thee-well. Then why murder Sloane in such a dramatic way? Why not simply disable him, even with some violence, as they had the other guard?

“What about here, the library—how do you get in?”

Pape ran through the procedure: electronic and deadbolt keys to the gift shop, then electronic hand recognition to open the cases.

“Whose hands?”

“Mine, Miss Kennedy’s, and Raymond’s alone.”

Could Sloane have refused, McGarr wondered, so they beat and murdered him? Why, then, was the sap still in his hand? Why hadn’t he used it to defend hi
m
self? There was blood on the fl?ags around the display cases.

And surely, knowing about the hand-recognition d
e
vice with only three hands keyed suggested—no, d
e
clared—in
v
olvement by some insider.

“Who knows—knew—about the hands?”

“We three, of course. And, I’d hazard, staff who’d observed us performing the...maneuver.”

“What about the security fi?rm that deployed it?”

“They were not present in the building when we in
i
tialized the system. By policy.”

“Could somebody on your staff or some other Tri
n
ity employee be responsible for this crime?”

Pape shrugged.

McGarr waited, noting that Pape had averted his eyes. “You seem unsure.”

“Do I?” The eyes returned with anger. “Truth is—I don’t know, and frankly I don’t much care. Possessing that damn book”—he waved a hand at the display cases—“has been a double-edged sword for this inst
i
tution.

“Yes, it brought the college notoriety, and it was a mighty cash cow. But”—Pape’s voice had risen— “hordes, veritable legions of patent fools and ignor
a
muses pile off tour buses and troop through the college in their Aran caps and jumpers to ogle the bloody thing. Which was, mind you, in its own time designed to be ostentatious. No, garish! The ‘Oh-wow!’ of the ninth century.

“It’s...i
t
’s”—he wagged his head, his mane tos
s
ing from shoulder to shoulder—“the bloody Blarney Stone of academia and banal.
Très
ban-al!”

Even the Tech Squad had now stopped to watch him.

“And I’ll confess something else. This theft and Raymond Sloane’s murder would not have occurred had Trinity remained the college fi?rst intended by its founders. Now that it’s been turned into a bloody diploma factory, I call it immanent justice that its tali
s
man has been stolen.”

A curious opinion for a man charged with preser
v
ing and protecting books, thought McGarr.

“That said”—Pape paused, fl?aring his nostrils and
pulling in a chestful of air, as though to get hold of himself—“a true loss is Durrow and Armagh, which in their time had more than simply liturgical value. But I have every confi?dence that Chief Superintendent Sheard will get them back.

“You’re done with me, I assume.”

McGarr only regarded the man, who turned and walked out of the room as though conscious of his heels ringing on the stone.

Turning to McKeon and the woman, McGarr raised a hand and fl?icked his fi?ngers into his palm, a gesture redolent of both veteran police practice and his gloom, he realized as she moved toward him.

Here he was involved in perhaps the most important murder/theft of his career, and he felt as though he were just going through the motions. Maybe he should retire and try something different like ...well, there was the rub. He couldn’t think of anything he really wanted to do, and police work was really all he knew.

Yet he managed a smile for the woman. “This must be diffi?cult for you,” he said, noticing her unusual jade-colored eyes. Contacts, perhaps? “Obviously, it’s been trying for Dr. Pape.”

“Please excuse him,” said Kara Kennedy. “Trinity— the college and the library are his life. He’s been here . . . well, I’d say the better part of forty years, counting his student days, and I’m certain this is a greater blow to him than—”

Glancing at the corpse, which was now being li
t
tered from the room, she lowered her head and tears splatted on the stones by her feet. Her shoulders shook, and her body moved into McGarr.

He raised a hand to her back. Close, like that, he
breathed in the warmth of her body and the complex scent of whatever shampoos or perfumes or emollients she used. And he was disturbed by what he felt, not having been so close to a woman such as she, in more than two years.

She moved her head, and her hair brushed against his face. “Why don’t we sit down for a moment? Out there would be better.”

Taking her elbow, he drew her into the exhibition room, where at least the lighting was less funereal. They sat on a bench against the wall.

“Did you hear what Dr. Pape just said? The bit about Trinity being a diploma factory and better off with the Book of Kells being gone?”

She shook her head and blotted her eyes. “That’s just anger and frustration. Trevor’s an antiquarian who loathes change, and his world—like the rest of the world—is marked by change these days. It’s the one constant, isn’t it?”

Sobbing now and then, she explained that there r
e
mained a few on the Trinity faculty who had never a
c
cepted the “democratization” of the college in the early seventies, when the Catholic Church lifted its ban on attendance and enrollment surged from twenty-fi?ve hundred to close to fourteen thousand students, mostly of Catholic background.

“No longer was it a sleepy, insular place, its faculty riddled with dilettantes and academic eccentrics pr
o
tected by tenure. Trinity stepped into the twentieth century, acquiring true scholars and exploiting the r
e
sources at its command.” Her hand moved toward the door of the Treasury.

“It became what it should have been all along—the
oldest and best university in the country. But there were—and, I’m afraid, still are—those who are averse to change.”

With cupped shoulders, Kara Kennedy leaned fo
r
ward, elbows on her thighs, and McGarr noticed for the fi?rst time that her hair had begun to gray. He also glanced at the smooth slope of a breast that could be seen between the plackets of her pearl-colored silk blouse.

And a pang of longing seized him—for warmth and the perfumey aroma that he could still detect and for other comforts as well. Up until that moment, he had kept himself from remembering what being with a woman could be like, knowing how disconcerting the remembrance would be. And was.

“Unfortunately, Trevor is one of those who fought and still fi?ghts the change, not—please don’t misu
n
derstand me”—her fi?ngers touched his knee—“not b
e
cause he is in any way incompetent. It’s just that not everything was awry in the old Trinity College, which was collegial in many of the best ways. I think he still harbors fond thoughts of those years.”

Her hands were long, gracefully formed, and well tanned, as though she’d spent the summer outdoors. Also, McGarr was hearing the hint of a Scottish burr in her voice.

“I’m certain he’ll think better of what he said. The Book of Kells is truly a treasure of ”—she had to pause again—“a treasure of inestimable value both intrins
i
cally and to the Irish people, and I’ll never forgive m
y
self that this... this debacle occurred on my watch.”

McGarr frowned. “Are you in charge of security?”

“What?” Her head swung up to him, and it was as though he plunged into the jade pools of her eyes.

“Were you Raymond Sloane’s superior?”

“No, of course not. I’m...an academic.” She looked back toward the Treasury.

A handsome, if not a pretty, woman with a long, thinly bridged nose, a strong chin, and high cheekbones. Her dark hair, which was a chestnut color, formed a deep widow’s peak, and the skin on her neck had begun to take on the wrinkles of age.

McGarr glanced at the backs of her hands, which she had clasped in front of her—forty-fi?ve, he guessed, from the sheen and wrinkle of her skin. He was seldom wrong.

“But I should have made it my business.”

Guilt—it ruled the culture. It ruled McGarr.

“Apart from you, Dr. Pape, and Raymond Sloane, who else knew of the hand-recognition device beneath the cases?”

She swung her head to him, and he noted how her hair grew deep on the sides of her forehead and rather complemented her widow’s peak. And as had been Noreen’s, her upper lip was noticeably protrusive.

McGarr looked away; he was feeling uncomfortable.

“Cleaning people, I should imagine, if they knew what they were seeing.”

Kara Kennedy fl?icked a hand to clear the hair from her face, and McGarr again smelled—what was it?— chamomile, vanilla, and verbena?

She had crossed her legs toward him, and he fo
l
lowed the gentle line of her calf to a narrow ankle, b
e
fore looking off into the gift shop.

“Also, there’s the security fi?rm who set the device up, perhaps some other library staff. No, surely some other library staff who have been present when we’ve turned the pages.

“To answer your question, Chief Superintendent”— she waited until their eyes met—“I suppose our sec
u
rity measures were rather common knowledge to those of us who work here. But I hope you don’t suspect—”

McGarr shook his head. “I don’t suspect anything yet. I’m just gathering information. What can you tell me about Raymond Sloane? Personally.”

“Apart from here in Trinity...” She shook her head before pulling her eyes from his.

Or did he imagine that? He stood. He was so em
o
tionally at sea it rather frightened him. “Do you have any idea who might have done this?”

There were no rings on her fi?ngers.

“No. Some madman. Ma
d
men
to get Raymond into...” Again she could not continue.

“What about the possibility that whoever did this was in league with somebody here in Trinity, som
e
body who knew the security precautions, somebody who—out of disaffection with the college or the book itself—”

“I hope you don’t mean Trevor Pape.” Leaning back against the wall, she placed her palms on the bench in a way that spread the plackets of her suit coat. “Trevor has spent his life—literally, spent it—working here for little or nothing, preserving and protecting books. Why would he throw all that away?”

She smiled slightly, exposing a single dimple. “It’s refreshing that you didn’t mention greed. Disaffection was a nice touch.”

Pulling a card from his pocket, he extended it toward her. “Scots, are you?”

“Kennedy can be a Scottish name as well, I’ll have you know.”

“And how do I reach you?” It was said without thin
k
ing, which was doubly distressing to McGarr, since he knew that with every waking moment he had not yet got over—and he sometimes thought he would never get over—the presence of Noreen in his thoughts. And her absence in his life.

“Oh—I’ve got a card.” She fumbled in her purse and came up with a card and a smile, which quickly faded. “Who’s going to inform Raymond’s wife? I mean, how is it handled?”

“We’ll take care of it.”

Her brow furrowed. “Oh, yes—I suppose you have to do this regularly.”

And it was never easy. “Many thanks.” McGarr turned toward a kind of clamor outside of the gift shop.

“Will you catch who did this?”

“I suspect we’ll be hearing from them rather soon.”

The noise was coming from what looked like an i
m
promptu news conference that was being held on the gift shop steps.

There stood Trinity grad Chief Superintendent Jack Sheard, answering questions from the press. About what, McGarr could not guess, since they knew only that the books were missing and Sloane was dead. But not even his name could be given out until the family was notifi?ed.

But there Sheard stood, resplendent in a navy blue pinstriped suit that had been tailored to his at least six-foot-four frame. His tie was pearl colored, like the handkerchief sprouting from his breast pocket.

In his early forties, Sheard was a handsome man with sandy hair and a rugger’s angular body. With shoulders squared and hands clasped at his waist, he looked like a Janus fi?gure—a bigger, better guard at the portals—but too late.

Over his—how many?—fi?fteen or so years with the Garda, Sheard was periodically the darling of Sunday news features both on television and in print. Early on, he was billed as “the new face of the police” and pi
c
tured with his blond young wife and three towheaded children on the lawn in front of their rambling subu
r
ban home on the fl?anks of the Dublin Mountains.