Peeler (24 page)

***

The night air was cold and damp but the wind had kept the frost at bay. O’Keefe wore gloves, a neck scarf and a woollen watch cap. His uniform-issue greatcoat in standard bottle green was warmer than his trenchcoat and he shrugged it on as he headed for the row of barracks’ bicycles, protected from the weather under their oiled canvas covers. A curious Logan followed.

‘You put this little trip into the Occ Book, Seán?’

Every RIC barracks in Ireland had an Occurrence Book, in which were logged the events of each day as they affected the local constabulary. In it were transcribed the most minor details of barracks life – including the weather and the phase of moon, much like a ship’s log – up to the most grievous of crimes committed in the district. The comings and goings of every constable and officer were to be logged as well, though this had slackened a great deal with the advent of the Troubles. Still, O’Keefe knew how old cons like Logan were sticklers about the ledger. To some of them, he thought, it was as if the weather outside didn’t really exist until it had been logged in the Occ Book.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t log it. This is private business I’ve to take care of, Logan. I wouldn’t want the DI finding out about it, right?’

The older man didn’t appear too happy about O’Keefe’s disregard for RIC regulations, but his disdain for ranking officers – Masterson in particular – was stronger than his objection. ‘Problem with a lady friend, Seán?’

O’Keefe removed the cover from one of the bicycles, checked the tyres for air and mounted. ‘Sure, y’know yerself.’

Soon, the sound of the wind was in his ears and the crunching of the bicycle’s tyres on the crushed gravel road. The surface was compacted, but beginning to soften with the early winter’s rain.

As his right leg came up and around, propelling him towards the crossroads three miles away from the barracks, he patted at his ankle and felt the small .32 automatic he had fitted into his loosened boot, held safe with a wrap of bandage. Seven rounds in the small pistol. Enough to stop your average assassin, O’Keefe reckoned, if he was standing stock still less than twenty feet away, in good light. In his shoulder holster, he carried a Colt .45 automatic with a bent hammer. From any distance, it wouldn’t stop anyone, a fact he was counting on.

As he neared the crossroads, he coasted to a stop and dismounted, his eyes scanning the darkness. Ten yards from where the sign pointing towards Kinsale had once stood – the IRA had removed it – he stopped and listened, straining to hear any sound. His heartbeat sounded faintly in his ears. The dying wind. A dry-stone wall marking the border of a farmer’s field on his right and he propped the bicycle against it. On the other side of the road was a low ditch rising to a scrabbly whitethorn hedge, the wind nudging its branches, whispering in the grass. He sensed a presence behind him.

‘Put your fucking hands up, Peeler.’

O’Keefe raised his arms slowly, keeping his eyes forward. If the man behind him wanted to be seen, he’d let him know. Rough hands went to work, patting down his waist, his shoulders, under his arms.

‘What’s this?’ the voice said, feigning surprise.

O’Keefe felt the .45 slide from its holster. ‘Christmas come early for you lads,’ O’Keefe said, before he could stop himself. He expected a blow in response to his sarcasm. Instead he heard laughter, low and confident. The man had done this before.

‘Happy Christmas to you too, Peeler.’

A second voice from behind, this one nervous, edgy. ‘What is it?’

O’Keefe heard the slide go back on the Colt and then snap back into place. ‘Donation to the arms fund, courtesy of the RIC.’

Then he felt the barrel of a gun at the back of his neck and hoped it was the disabled Colt. The barrel shoved him forward. ‘Move,’ the second voice said.

‘Lemme put on my shoes, boy. Fuck sake …’ It was the first voice and his words explained the silence of their approach. O’Keefe waited while they pulled on their boots.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see soon enough, Peeler.’

Peeler
. The way the Volunteer said it made it sound like
Traitor
, and O’Keefe thought of the sign hung round Deirdre Costelloe’s neck.

‘Over the wall there, boy, and keep it steady. I’ll give you a bullet here as soon as any place, ye Tan bastard.’

O’Keefe climbed over the wall, his movements slow and deliberate. ‘I’m no Tan, if it matters any.
Peeler
I’ll take, but –’

‘Shut up and walk. Mind your step. You break an ankle, I’ll shoot you, boy. You’ll not be a weight on my back.’

The terrain was soft underfoot. In the intermittent moonlight O’Keefe could make out that they were following the course of a long, dry-stone wall separating two fields, and were hiking steadily away from the crossroads, north towards the mountains. He stumbled occasionally and was wrenched roughly back to his feet.

‘Keep it steady.’

Soon, they crossed over the wall and were on wet, boggy ground. The land was rising and the terrain tougher to cross. O’Keefe’s boots made a sucking sound in the earth. Once, they disturbed a nesting bird and heard the flapping of wings, the rasping, frightened caw.

The climb levelled off at the top of a low hill and they began to descend along an established path through a steep ravine. O’Keefe could hear running water – a small stream probably – working its way down from the mountains.

They came to the water and splashed through it, icy cold seeping into O’Keefe’s boots. He thought of the loaded .32 and prayed it hadn’t become fouled in the stream.

Minutes later O’Keefe felt the gun barrel on his neck again.

‘Stop.’

The other voice now, louder. ‘It’s us, boys. We’ve got him with us.’

A voice came from behind the rocks. It was a cave of some sort, the entrance hidden behind a boulder, reminding O’Keefe of Christ’s tomb as depicted in the stations of the cross. From behind the boulder came a Volunteer, an Enfield rifle over his shoulder.

O’Keefe suffered his first burn of real fear and wondered whether he would come out of the cave alive if he entered. He doused the fear with resignation. Done was done. He had gone and threatened Ryan, hoping the Councillor would come up trumps with the men who had harmed Katherine Sheehan. He’d given up on them as suspects in Deirdre Costelloe’s killing, but there was always the possibility that they might know something. In for a penny, in for the hard road. He preceded his guards into the cave.

The interior of the cave had the dimensions of a small public house. A paraffin lamp hung from a hook drilled into the low ceiling and along the walls were several men, their faces covered with scarves or handkerchiefs, two holding lanterns. One of them stepped forward. A working man wearing rough corduroy trousers, hobnailed boots and an oversized, mushroom-shaped cap. Covering his mouth and nose was a white handkerchief. His eyebrows, thick and brown, met in the centre of his brow. When he spoke, it was with a local accent, perhaps Ballycarleton, Bandon or Drumdoolin – all towns with active IRA units.

‘Bring them over,’ the man ordered.

Another Volunteer, his face hidden by a woollen scarf, shoved forward two young men into the circle of light, their faces bare. The Skelly brothers. O’Keefe recognised them from their photographs in the file he had been sent from Bandon barracks. A third man – young, slender, blue eyes nervously flickering above his mask – hovered behind the brothers. O’Keefe noted the soft hands, the cut of his jacket and cashmere scarf. Though he was obviously a Volunteer, he looked as if he had unwillingly fallen in with rough company.

The man in the mushroom cap spoke first. ‘You asked Mr Ryan to help locate these men. He done it. These men were involved in an act that the IRA had given no sanction to. We’ll deal with that. You’ve five minutes to ask these fools what you want to know. They’ll answer your questions.’

The Skelly brothers were a desperate pair from a long line of miscreants. The family was well known in West Cork. O’Keefe recalled that their father and uncles had all spent time in Cork prison for various offences. It was rumoured that, in the Skelly family, sisters did for wives when there were no women about. William Skelly, the elder, looked as if he’d been beaten. His eye was swelling shut and there was a smear on his chin as if blood had been hastily wiped away with a sleeve. Both had dark brown hair and dark, close-set eyes. The younger brother’s hair was wild, long, and he had a dusty fuzz of whiskers on his face, making him appear younger than the nineteen years old O’Keefe knew him to be. The elder Skelly’s hair had been recently cut and oiled, and he was clean-shaven.

O’Keefe felt a brief flash of pity for them. Poor sods
.
And then he remembered what the two were assumed to have done. Both were big and strong enough to hold down a woman like Katherine Sheehan. Like Deirdre Costelloe.

The Volunteers who had brought O’Keefe to the cave stepped back and the gun was lowered from his neck.

O’Keefe nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the mushroom-capped man and sensed the smile behind the handkerchief.

‘Don’t be thanking me, Sergeant. I’d shoot you down as soon as look at ye but orders is orders. Right, lads?’ He directed the question to the two prisoners, slapping the younger Skelly brother hard on the back. Neither of them looked at him, but both nodded.

Taking a photograph of Deirdre Costelloe laid out on the butcher’s table from inside his coat, O’Keefe handed the picture to the younger brother and watched for his reaction. It wasn’t long in coming.

‘Jesus Christ have mercy, Sergeant. You think I done … we done that? You’re mad, you are.’ He looked away sharply from the gruesome image. His reaction was convincing.

‘Give it to your brother.’

‘I needn’t look at no fucking photograph of no dead girl to tell you I didn’t do nothing to her. I been in Millstreet barracks these past days and only raised my head out of it yesterday. Even these know that. Ask fucking them, boy, if you don’t believe me.’ He held O’Keefe’s gaze as he spoke.

O’Keefe turned to the Volunteer in the expensive scarf. ‘Is he telling the truth?’

The young man nodded. His voice was cultured, the accent different from the other men in the cave. ‘It’s true, we checked.’

O’Keefe held the Volunteer’s gaze until he looked away.

‘Why’d they let him out of Millstreet? He’s up for enough to fill a cabinet back in barracks. Surely someone would have notified Ballycarleton or Bandon …’ Realisation dawned slowly.

The well-dressed Volunteer didn’t look at O’Keefe as he spoke. ‘We’ve to assume that he was informing. Or that he had offered to inform, in order to secure his release.’

O’Keefe sensed uncertainty in the Volunteer. Saw it in his eyes. Not every IRA man was as committed to bloodshed as Division and RIC Intelligence believed. Or maybe this man, this boy, was new to the game.

O’Keefe turned to the younger Skelly brother. ‘Look, if you know anything about this, you’d better tell me now. God won’t look kindly on the killing of a young woman.’

‘I swear on me dead baby sister gone these nine years, I never killed no girl. I swear to Jesus and all the saints, so help me God.’ A sob broke his voice and he scrubbed the welling tears in his eyes with the back of his hand.

The Volunteer with the mushroom cap spoke up. ‘There’s no need to be calling on God, Mutton. Sure, when’s the last time he helped the likes of ye?’

The other Volunteers laughed, though some of the laughter sounded forced.

O’Keefe ignored the banter. ‘But you assaulted the egg woman on the Timoleague Road, didn’t you? Put a pig ring in her backside?’

The boy hung his head.

‘And did you do other things to her, Thomas?’ He remembered the boy’s Christian name was Thomas, though he seemed to go by Mutton. ‘Did you?’

‘We was told do it –’

Mushroom cap cut in. ‘You were to fuck told do what you done to her, ye lying cunt. You were ordered to warn her off. That’s all.’

‘Who ordered you to do it, young Thomas?’ O’Keefe asked.

‘Don’t answer that!’ mushroom cap ordered.

O’Keefe turned to William Skelly, his voice raised. ‘Who ordered you to do it?’ A gun barrel dug into his back.

‘You want to know who ordered it, Peeler?’ The voice under the white handkerchief was hard. ‘The Irish Republican Army ordered it. The woman was a traitor, aiding the enemies of Ireland, providing sustenance to the Crown. The IRA ordered her to be
warned
. These two ingrates took things too far. That’s war for you. People make a balls of things sometimes, boy.’ He pointed at the brothers. ‘They’ll fucking pay for it. Understand, Peeler. Just like you’ll pay, one of these days.’

‘And did the Irish Republican Army order that the girl left up on the hillside get a warning, as well? Did someone take things too far with her too, did they?’

The barrel pressed harder into his back and O’Keefe recognised the voice of the first man who had collected him at the crossroads. ‘Easy, boy. Go easy now.’

The eyes over the white handkerchief looked away from O’Keefe. ‘We’d nothing to do with that. No one here did. No one in the IRA had a thing to do with that … that
yoke
on the hillside. You take that back with ye, boy, and tell your bosses the IRA had nothing to do with that business. I’m letting you walk out of here alive; that’s as good as my word on anything. Not one thing did the Volunteers have to do with that girl and neither did these two fucking
dahs
.’ He turned his eyes back to O’Keefe.

‘You believe them?’ O’Keefe asked.

‘Course I believe them. Sure, what have they to gain by lying?’

‘Their lives?’

‘Their lives aren’t worth the bullets, don’t you think, Sergeant?’

O’Keefe shrugged, feeling cold, beginning to shake with it.

‘Now,’ the Volunteer said, taking off his cap and scratching his thick head of brown hair. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve some photographs for me?’

His bluff called, O’Keefe swallowed. ‘I’ve no photos for you. There never were any.’

The Volunteer laughed. ‘No photographs.
Never were any.
You know something, Peeler?’