Peeler (13 page)

He pushed the young woman’s image from his mind; the image of the last time he had seen the girl before today. Then, the girl had been lively, laughing. He pressed closed his eyes and steadied himself. Opening his eyes again, he looked on as the parents followed Mathew-Pare across the yard and entered the barracks on the floor below him. Mathew-Pare would make them tea and ask them questions. District Inspector Masterson wondered what the old couple could tell him. And then he wondered what Mathew-Pare would want to know.

***

O’Keefe recalled the incident as he walked the curfew-quiet streets back to the barracks.

Edward Ryan had met the woman through a lonely hearts’ advertisement in the back of a ‘journal of men’s affairs’. It was an under-the-counter publication reputedly printed in Paris but more likely grafted together on a cellar press in Putney or Preston. Only Jim Daly could help him, Ryan had explained. As a distant cousin by marriage to Jim’s wife Muireann, he considered Daly family and believed he would be sympathetic. A delicate matter. Off the books, of course. A generous fee. Blushing, Ryan had shown Daly the torn copy of the lonely hearts ad. ‘
Strict lady wishes to meet generous gentleman for gentle guidance.
’

Daly had agreed to clean up Ryan’s mess and enlisted O’Keefe to help. ‘Sure,’ Daly had said to O’Keefe at the time, handing him the photographs that had arrived at Ryan’s creamery by post, ‘if that’s “gentle guidance”, I’m not sure I’d want to see the rough.’

In the pictures, Ryan was nude and tied to a four-poster bed. In each of the photographs he was in a different position: hands and feet spread and bound to each bedpost in one; feet drawn back and tied to the same posts as his hands, exposing his privates in another. In one photo, there was a shiny, black object inserted in his rectum. In another, the woman – whose face never appeared in any of the prints – was nude from the waist down and squatting over Ryan, appearing to urinate on him.

The thing that struck both Daly and O’Keefe as odd was that Ryan’s face was unmasked and perfectly identifiable in each photo. When they asked him about it, Ryan told them that he had no idea how he’d been photographed because there had only ever been himself and the ‘lady’ in the room.

The pictures had shocked O’Keefe at the time. He supposed now that he had been a naïve lad, the same as most young Peelers. But the most notable thing for him by far was the look on Ryan’s face. His was a visage of such pure rapture as he’d never seen before or since. On his face in each of those photographs was a smile that was profoundly different from the one he wore in public. O’Keefe would bet a year’s wages that it was a smile Ryan’s wife had never seen.

Daly and O’Keefe went first to the room where the pictures had been taken, the master bedroom of a brothel in Queenstown. They questioned the madam of the house at length, but ultimately believed her story that the woman and her fiancé had merely rented the room from her on several occasions. They had not wanted any of her girls and had paid a more than reasonable rate for the room in what were generally off hours for the brothel.

Asked why they wanted the room, the madam had replied that the woman’s fiancé enjoyed watching her
frolic
with other men. Inspecting the room, Daly and O’Keefe found the means by which the photographs had been taken – a floor to ceiling false mirror that was accessed via the wardrobe. It was a popular room, the madam said, though if she had known the kind of carry-on she had seen in the pictures had been taking place, she would never have rented it to them.
Watching an old frolic is one thing, but that
– the woman had pointed to a photograph –
bless us and save us, that’s just not hygienic, now, is it?

Daly had instructed Ryan to respond to the letter included with the pictures. He did as they told him, replying to a numbered box in Cork general post office, asking the blackmailers to meet him in person since he was afraid to send such a great sum of cash through the post and, to be fair, he didn’t trust the woman and her fiancé to send on the photographs as they had promised.

The couple were greedy amateurs and took the bait. Daly and O’Keefe met them and took them for a spin in Ryan’s Talbot motor car. Stopping at the Old Head of Kinsale, they left the car and walked the couple to the edge of the cliffs at revolver point. It was then that the couple admitted the scam and told Daly and O’Keefe where they could find the copies of the photographs in their rented room near the harbour in Queenstown. When Daly and O’Keefe had gone there with the couple, they had found many more than the four that had been sent, but they were all of a kind.

After putting the two on the mailboat, they took the pictures back to Ryan, who burnt them, one by one, looking at each of them in a private way so that O’Keefe thought he might just be a bit sorry to be destroying them. When he had finished, Ryan asked Daly if there were any more of them, anywhere, and Daly had acted surprised, saddened by the question. How could he imagine something so low of a man who was nearly his own blood? Had he not gone to great risk to keep Mr Ryan’s reputation, his marriage and possibly life from the most savage of tarnishes? Hadn’t he? Daly could lay it on. Ryan apologised for the question.

O’Keefe received ten pounds for his help, with which he bought his Box Brownie. He liked the irony of it at the time, being paid to reclaim photographs and using the money to buy a camera. It was the same camera he had taken with him to the war. He still had it, though he used it now only at crime scenes. He sometimes wondered if he would ever be able to look through the lens of a camera again and see anything but death.

***

Mathew-Pare was leaning in the lit doorway of the cottage, smoking and smiling blandly. O’Keefe had a flashing sense of danger from that smile. It passed quickly enough. Mathew-Pare called him over across the barrack yard.

‘Enjoy your chat with the Major, Sergeant?’

O’Keefe shrugged, non-committal. ‘Never hurts to keep the medics sweet, Detective. Never know when you might need one.’

Mathew-Pare tossed his cigarette onto the cobbles. ‘Never a truer word.’

O’Keefe could see one of Mathew-Pare’s men moving about in the cottage. The man seemed to be cleaning weapons. O’Keefe nodded towards the interior. ‘You fellas seem fairly well geared-up.’

Mathew-Pare nodded. ‘
Si vis pacem, para bellum
.’

O’Keefe translated using his schoolboy Latin.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
Used, he remembered, by Georg Luger in the naming of the parabellum pistol he had invented.

‘Can’t be too careful,’ Mathew-Pare continued. ‘You heard about the ambush up the road? Kil-something? Pack of Auxies, fifteen, twenty of the fellows in two Tenders, gunned down. Not a single survivor, so the word is.’

‘I heard. Wells was taken away from his whiskey to attend. Sounds bloody.’

‘Collins and his lads, two weeks ago up in Dublin and now this?’ Mathew-Pare shook his head, lit another cigarette and held the packet out to O’Keefe, who took one.

‘Some say there’s a war on, Detective. Bad things happen in wars.’

Mathew-Pare smiled. ‘A war? This?’ He held his hands out as if to take in the whole of West Cork. ‘No, this isn’t a war. Cushy number, this.’ He sucked hard on his Gold Flake.

‘You sound like the DI. “
This is not a war. This is nothing but a collection of criminals intent on levelling anarchy on the emerald jewel of the Empire!
” ’

Mathew-Pare laughed through his nose. ‘I suppose you’re right, but that’s not how I meant it. I didn’t say the IRA weren’t an army and that they didn’t
want
a war. I only said this wasn’t it.’

‘What’s a war then?’

Exhaling smoke, Mathew-Pare said, ‘A war today in-volves distance. Industrial production of armaments, mass destruction. A war eats economies. Requires the devastation of the landscape and every bloody living thing in it. You were there.’

‘Dardanelles,’ O’Keefe said.

‘Same as the Western Front, I’d think. And yet look at this place. Most beautiful place on earth, County Cork. Landscape as rich and green as ever and the place crawling with my fellow man just going about his business, paying no heed to the few idiots like ourselves and the great republican army.’

‘Tell that to those Auxies. Or those lads dead in their beds in Dublin.’

A shadow crossed Mathew-Pare’s eyes. O’Keefe could see it even in the half-light that came from inside the cottage. Almost before he was aware of it, the shadow was gone.

‘You’re right, of course, Sergeant. You could tell it to the young woman we looked at today, as well. She might think differently.’

O’Keefe nodded.

‘Deirdre Costelloe,’ Mathew-Pare said.

‘What?’

‘Why I called you over, Sergeant. I’ve been working while you were away. That girl in there,’ he pointed to the cold storage shed, ‘her name is Deirdre Costelloe.’

Mathew-Pare had even thought to hold the body for another day in case the surgeon wanted further access to it, telling the parents to return for it the next morning. He had told them that O’Keefe, as the lead investigator, might have questions for them as well. O’Keefe asked him had the undertaker done his work before the parents had come and was told that he had. A small mercy, he thought. He hoped Casey would not get shot for his troubles but it had been the right thing to do. Besides, O’Keefe needed a photograph of the victim’s
–
Deirdre’s – face, without evidence of the ravages of the violence done to it, to show potential witnesses, though perhaps now he could get one from her parents.

It was a clever move, O’Keefe was forced to admit, to keep the body for another night as a means of having the parents return for questioning in the morning. Whatever Mathew-Pare’s reasons for being in County Cork, he thought, the man had done well by the case.

‘I appreciate your help, Detective.’

Mathew-Pare tipped an imaginary cap. ‘Think nothing of it, Sergeant.’

Turning to go back inside the cottage, the Detective stopped and looked back at O’Keefe, ‘You know another reason why I think this is no war, Sergeant?’

‘No.’

‘Because in a proper war, someone’s always willing to bury the dead. Maybe not right away, but eventually. We buried Boche. They buried our lads. Civilised behaviour all round. Cricket, real war. But here? Here, the parents of a dead girl have to take away their daughter’s body on an ass cart because even the undertakers are afraid to lay out the bodies of informers. Imagine that.’

Again O’Keefe shrugged. ‘Laying out is still done at home here. Maybe …’ But he was too tired to argue the point.

Mathew-Pare shook his head and smiled as if he were remembering a joke. ‘No, this isn’t war, Sergeant. This is something worse. Can’t have a war without rules. Then you have anarchy, like your DI says.’

O’Keefe smiled wearily back at him. ‘Oh, there are rules to this war. It’s just a matter of working out what they are.’

***

Liam Farrell arrived in Drumdoolin after dark, clutching his bag of legal
papers
as a cover against any Tan or Tommy who might question his presence on the streets. The documents were a convincing collection of legal briefs and contracts drafted by his contact and employer in Ballycarleton, given to him the previous evening by Seán Brennan. The documents would work with both the Peelers and the regular army. With the Auxiliaries, you took your chances. They were just as likely to shoot you as waste time checking credentials.
The bloody bastards
.

Soon after thinking this, on turning a corner into the village square, he was forced to duck into a doorway and press himself close to the frame – where to his disgust, he found himself praying – as a patrol of soldiers accompanied by two constables passed, their bootsteps and clanking equipment heralding menace, like thunder from an approaching storm. He was still shaking minutes after the patrol had departed from the village, equal parts fear and anger at his own cowardice rattling his slender body.

The low rumble of conversation stopped when Farrell entered the low-ceilinged pub. Farrell smiled nervously, his face reddening, tipping his cap to the gathering. He received no response from any of the drinkers and made his way to the bar.

‘Fine evening,’ he said to the bartender, a balding man with a florid face and a filthy collar worn over a threadbare shirt. The man’s eyes were deep-set, pinpricks of mean light in a fleshy, drinker’s face. Farrell instantly dismissed him as a drunkard. Like his own father, he thought, and then felt shame in the thinking.

The bartender nodded. ‘What can I get you, boy?’ His face remained unmoved.

Farrell felt his face burn.
Boy.
The word was a common, meaningless end to many sentences in Cork, but in the bar-man’s usage Farrell felt a rebuke, a judgement. Unconsciously he shot a look at his reflection in the tarnished mirror behind the bar. His face was young and smooth-skinned, even to his own eyes, the lenses of his spectacles thick and smudged. He looked a student, and maybe not a college one at that. ‘Pint of Murphy’s, please,’ he said, his voice sounding as young to his own ears as his face looked. He cleared his throat and lowered his voice an octave. ‘A sup would do me nicely so it would. Long walk I’ve had today. All the way from …’

He was about to say Inchigeela, but stopped himself. He realised he was speaking to cover his nervousness, but still had the presence of mind to catch himself before he let slip operational details. Already the dictates of intelligence work had started to take hold. It occurred to Farrell that perhaps Hurley had seen this in him. Had been shrewd enough to spot a talent for the combat of smoke and mirrors Farrell himself had never known he possessed. On thinking this, he became convinced of it and felt a certain pride.

The barman set the pint in front of him and made to turn away.

‘Sorry,’ Farrell said, ‘I couldn’t have a word with you, could I?’ He smiled in what he thought was an ingratiating manner.

The barman made it clear with a dismissive wave of his hand that he was not interested in any kind of chat. Farrell was stumped. He needed to find a man called O’Higgins, the officer-in-charge of the Drumdoolin Company, but assumed he should be circumspect in his use of the name. But the barman’s lack of co-operation was making this difficult.