Peeler

Word of the body had come from the wife of a shopkeeper in Ballycarleton. It was only a rumour, she had told the young RIC constable as he collected the barracks’ newspapers from the rear of her husband’s newsagents. But she hadn’t the heart not to pass it on. Imagine, she had said. Some poor soul lying alone in the gorse and the heather, in the wind and rain of late autumn. Unclaimed. A young woman, she had told the constable, her hand resting on his forearm, speaking quickly in a breathless whisper, eyes darting left and right lest someone should see her speaking to a Peeler. Just a rumour, mind. Passed on by the friend of a cousin who grazed sheep in the hills.

The same hills where they were now searching. Eleven cold, wet men in the open back of a Crossley Tender. Acting Sergeant Seán O’Keefe of the Royal Irish Constabulary bumped shoulders with a Private from his escort of eight Essex Regiment soldiers out of Bandon. With him from the barracks were Constables Logan and Keane, O’Keefe only bringing the recently sworn-in Keane because it was he who had been given the tip on the body by the newsagent’s wife.

The Crossley’s engine strained, gears grinding as it climbed a rutted boreen used by farmers and their livestock. O’Keefe scanned the landscape for any sign of the body. The squaddies scanned the sky for rain through the chicken wire mesh that shrouded the back of the Crossley. The chicken wire kept out grenades, but not the weather.

O’Keefe knew the soldiers resented being there; dragged away from a warm fire to run escort for three Peelers searching for a body that probably didn’t exist. They smoked, cupping cigarettes in down-turned hands, their Lee-Enfield rifles resting between their knees. O’Keefe considered ordering a pair of the men to stand watch to the front and rear of the lorry bed, arms at the ready, but didn’t have the heart. He wasn’t sure the soldiers would obey a Peeler’s order
anyway.

Fifty-five policemen killed in the previous four months in Ireland. Forty-nine disarmed and countless others wounded, shot at and beaten. West Cork had been the worst affected in the country. The constabulary needed army escorts to move around the county and the army relied on the constabulary for local intelligence, but neither was willing to cede authority until something went sour. Until someone was killed on patrol or a shop was looted and torched, when suddenly it was the other lot who had been in charge. O’Keefe remained silent.

Hills of deep green, mottled with rusty patches of dying bracken, clumps of spiny gorse and rock, and studded with grazing sheep, rose gently on both sides of the boreen. Halfway up the hill to the west were the abandoned remains of a small cottage, most of the structure’s rotting thatched roof collapsed inwards.

‘There! Down from the cottage, there.’

O’Keefe saw it a second after Keane did. Rumour become truth, some two hundred yards up the hill to the west, to the left of the ruin. The sheer, fleshy whiteness of it. The black, rifling attention of crows.

The soldiers followed Keane’s pointed finger, one or two taking up their rifles, assuming the young constable had spotted a sniper or party of ambushers. O’Keefe reached over into the cab, tapped the Crossley driver’s shoulder and the Tender squeaked to a halt. The men jumped off the tailgate, leaping over the ditch at the edge of the narrow track, fanning out in rough, defensive positions.

O’Keefe followed them down from the Crossley and paused behind it, studying the landscape. It was an odd place to dump a body, he thought, even if it was left as bait for an ambush. The only places an attack could come from were the ruined cottage or the hilltop, where there was a ruck of wind-worn boulders that could act as a firing position. He would be exposed while he did his examination of the scene, but O’Keefe had seen far better ambush sites: bodies laid at bends in roads bordered by high blackthorn hedges and dry-stone walls; bodies left in front of derelict buildings, darkened windows nesting snipers. This felt different. He waved over the Essex Lance Corporal in charge of the escort. The man came slowly, ducking low in the ditch but in no hurry. He was a hard-looking man, a tracery of fine white scarring on one side of his face. O’Keefe guessed this wasn’t his first war.

‘The boulders there, and the ruins …’ O’Keefe pointed. ‘Can you send a few lads up to clear them? Maybe leave two in wide positions and a couple with the Lewis gun on the Tender. Doesn’t feel like an ambush, but …’ he felt a fool saying it, ‘better safe than sorry.’

The Lance Corporal looked as if he might disagree, then shrugged and bellowed four names. The men received their orders and began to trudge up the hill while the Corporal set his remaining squad in positions facing north and south, up and down the boreen, with two men manning a Lewis machine-gun on the Crossley’s bonnet.

A breeze cooled the damp wool of O’Keefe’s bottle-green uniform. Gooseflesh dimpled his back. Constable Keane jogged over and squatted beside him, gently setting an oiled leather camera case on the grass at the ditch’s rim. Not every murder scene in Ireland was photographed, but it was becoming increasingly common. Juries and coroner’s courts were requesting photographic evidence on a regular basis and O’Keefe, a keen amateur photographer, could not imagine examining a crime scene – particularly a murder – without his Kodak Box Brownie.

‘Will we head up, Sergeant?’

‘No,’ O’Keefe said. ‘Wait ’til those boys clear the area. The body’s not going anywhere.’

Keane nodded, rummaging in his trouser pocket for a tattered paper bag of sweets. He held it out to O’Keefe, who shook his head.

‘Queer spot to leave it, all the same,’ the young constable said, palming sweets into his mouth and returning the bag to his pocket. ‘Have to lug the body a fair stretch to get it up there. And left in full view of the whole valley.’

‘No sense plugging someone if others can’t learn from it.’

O’Keefe watched as the Essex scouts disappeared into the derelict cottage halfway up the hill. Moments later they re-emerged, signalling an all clear and O’Keefe continued to track them as they climbed towards the boulders at the hilltop, the soldiers moving in a loose group of four instead of spreading out and working around from each side of the crest. They ambled, upright, Enfields held loosely at their hips. Like Sunday hillwalkers, O’Keefe thought. Too young to have fought in the war or they’d know better. ‘Where’s Logan?’ he asked.

Keane nodded back towards the Crossley. Constable Logan was leaning up against the lorry’s bonnet, pipe stem wedged in his mouth under the cover of a thick, white moustache. O’Keefe didn’t need to see his mouth to know that he was yarning to the soldiers. It was what Logan did. The man could talk paint off walls.

O’Keefe could hardly believe the old constable hadn’t taken a bullet since the Troubles had started. Logan was from a different age of policing in Ireland. A time when a constable stopped for a natter with the people he served, for a hand or two of cards with the bachelor farmer, a short whiskey on a cold night patrol, a mug of tea and a look-in at the dairyman’s newborn calf. Now, O’Keefe reflected, we travel in packs and kick in the dairymen’s doors and hunt down their sons, while their sons hunt us. Logan had taught O’Keefe a lot of what had been good about the job in the days before the killing had started. He decided to leave him where he was, hoping that Logan would hear the shooting, if there was any, over the sound of his own voice.

The four Essexes reappeared from behind the boulders and again signalled the all clear.

‘Right so, Constable.’ O’Keefe rose stiffly from the ditch.

Keane picked up the camera case and took long strides up the hill, boots pressing a trail in the damp grass for O’Keefe to follow. As they climbed, O’Keefe took note of the ascent and estimated the distance from the Crossley to the body. The gradient of the hillside was enough to make a reasonably fit man break into a sweat. A fitter man than himself, he thought, the scar on his face tensing with the effort of the climb. He rubbed it with his palm. Like the Lance Corporal, O’Keefe had his own curio from the war: a dark-pink rope of knotted tissue, from under his right eye down to his neck. It played up when he was under physical or mental strain. If RIC regulations had permitted, he would have grown a beard to cover as much of it as he could. Instead, he wore a thick brown moustache, in a vain attempt to distract from what the war had left etched into his skin.

‘It’s a fair climb, Sergeant.’

Keane was only twenty-two years old, a Donegal lad, six months in the police. He had sharp blue eyes, sandy blond hair under his peaked uniform cap and the wispy beginnings of his own
de rigueur
RIC moustache. He was an athletic, handsome, if shorter, version of the thousands of men who had clamoured to join the RIC for over a century. When the IRA had begun shooting RIC men, recruitment to the constabulary had understandably dropped. Out of necessity, age-old standards for height, girth, reading, writing and arithmetic had been relaxed, allowing men under five foot nine, such as Keane, to enlist.

‘It is,’ O’Keefe answered. ‘You’d reckon more than one to do the job – to haul it up there.’

‘And a motor,’ Keane said, ‘or an ass and cart to get the body up the boreen
.
Sure, the village there …’ the constable turned back from his climbing and pointed south-eastwards, ‘must be a mile or more away.’

O’Keefe stopped and looked. The hamlet was clearly visible from where they stood on the hill.

‘Drumdoolin,’ he said. ‘Two of our lads were killed just outside it on cycle patrol last summer. O’Rourke and Cotton – good Cons, God rest them.’
Con
. RIC slang for constable. O’Keefe had heard that
con
was short for convict in America. He enjoyed the irony. ‘They boarded up Drumdoolin barracks shortly after. Divvied up the men between Bandon barracks and ourselves. IRA burned the shell of it last Easter.’

Keane shook his head but wasn’t surprised. It was all in the run of things for new RIC men and the rabble of Black and Tans brought in from across the water. Barrack mates shot in the face from behind stone walls, their guns and ammunition taken while they lay twitching and bleeding on the road. Men kidnapped from dance halls and executed by moonlight, their bodies dumped in bog holes or left on the wet cobbles of town squares as a warning to prospective recruits to the constabulary. Keane had never known West Cork when it wasn’t a place hated and feared by police-men.

‘You think the body had anything to do with the village?’ Keane asked, turning back and continuing to climb.

O’Keefe shrugged and followed. ‘If it did, we’ll probably never find out. Sure, murder’s as common as rain round here these days. And no one knows anything about it, even when they do.’

They reached the body and several crows flapped and rose from it, angry at the intrusion. Even then, it appeared as if one had refused to flee its roost on the body’s mid-section.
Odd colouring for a crow
, O’Keefe thought, or maybe it was a different bird altogether. Only as he moved closer could he see that it was not a bird covering the young girl’s hips and thighs.

Keane blessed himself. ‘Jesus
wept
. Look at her …’ He swallowed. ‘Are those … feathers?’ The young constable turned then and vomited into a scrag of heather.

While Keane finished retching, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his tunic, O’Keefe reflected on his own reaction to the body. He felt a general, detached sense of sorrow and with this, a rising anger at the way the body of the young woman had been abandoned to the elements, but none of the horror he knew he should feel. In the war he had seen so much death in so many of its manifestations that it had ceased to shock him. Bodies turning to mush at his feet. Bits of shattered bodies leathering under a relentless Turkish sun. The body of his own brother floating face down in the water of a Turkish tide.

But Keane hadn’t been to the war and O’Keefe wasn’t sure if the lad had been present at any of the recent shootings in the district. It was possibly the first time Keane had been close to a life destroyed by violence.

‘Are you all right?’

Keane nodded and spat, turning away from the body.

‘If you feel poorly again, just head back down the hill. I can’t have the area disturbed by outside elements. Understood, Constable?’

‘I’m all right, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe turned his focus to the victim. She lay on her back, naked and white against the grass, arms out as if awaiting an embrace, her legs spread wide, bent at the knees. Across her chest a crude sign on a piece of plank read
TRATOR
, the letters rendered in what appeared to be tar or black paint. O’Keefe crouched down and carefully lifted the plank. Under it, the right breast was missing. There was a similar gaping wound where the left breast should have been, but there was no blood on the body, almost as if it had been washed. Probably by the rain, O’Keefe reckoned and wondered how long it had been on the hill. There didn’t appear to be too much bloating, in the abdomen in particular, indicating sluggish decomposition or recent death. However, it had been cold the past few days, particularly at night. On the hillside, here, it would be colder again. There was no way of estimating time of death, O’Keefe realised, until the surgeon did the post-mortem. He lowered the sign and took in the girl’s face.

The crows had been at her eyes and there was a pulpy mess around the sockets. There was also some wounding to the lips which O’Keefe assumed the birds had done, but could have happened during the violence that led to her death. Despite the injuries to the face, O’Keefe could tell that this had once been a beautiful young woman. She had a full mouth, straight white teeth, an upturned nose, long, dark lashes on her one undamaged eyelid, and a smattering of dark freckles on her high cheekbones. Her thick, brown hair was spread out around her head, a few stray strands around her forehead shifting in the gentle wind. He estimated her age to be late teens or early twenties.

There was no sign of discarded clothing in the immediate area and it struck O’Keefe that the body had been deliberately arranged this way. Too much care had been taken in the positioning to be the random work of gravity or rigor mortis. The pose reminded him of the French picture postcards of whores or North African harem girls that soldiers had bought and traded during the war.