Peeler (33 page)

O’Keefe started with the first name on the list of players at the card game that Connolly had given him. Fintan Hanratty lived in a large, redbrick Georgian house north of the city centre on Cornmarket Street. Hanratty answered the door himself and led O’Keefe into the drawing-room. It was tastefully decorated: windows garlanded with silk tasselled curtains; overstuffed sofas and polished mahogany; Chinese porcelain on the mantelpiece and Japanese prints on the walls.

The man himself was every bit as well turned out as his rooms. He was young, in his late twenties O’Keefe imagined, and wore his blond hair carefully oiled and combed in a high side parting. He was dressed in a fitted jacket, brocade silver waistcoat and grey woollen trousers, with pleats sharp enough to slice metal. His face was as white and unmarked as fresh cream; a hint of rouge tinted his cheeks.

Without asking, Hanratty poured and handed a generous snifter of brandy to O’Keefe. He then made himself comfortable in the armchair opposite the RIC man and fitted a cigarette into a long, ivory holder. He leaned across the distance between them, holding his cigarette to his lips. It took O’Keefe a long moment to realise that he was looking for a light.

O’Keefe struck a safety match from a crushed box he found in his pocket, feeling awkward, uncouth. He was well educated, cultured enough – thanks to the money his father had spent sending him to the Jesuits and his mother’s love for art and music – to appreciate the beautiful proportions of the room, the attention to detail, but he didn’t feel comfortable in such surroundings and imagined he never would.

‘Cigarette, Sergeant?’

He took one and now Hanratty proffered a silver lighter from the side table by his chair. O’Keefe wondered why the man hadn’t lit his own smoke since he had the lighter so handy. He wrote it off to eccentricity. Hanratty raised his glass. There was a hint of amusement on his face but his words didn’t seem edged with the mockery O’Keefe expected. ‘To the brave men of the RIC, Sergeant. And to your continued health.’

O’Keefe raised his own glass. ‘And yours.’

‘Terrible business, that poor man. Seemed a genial sort, when he wasn’t holding aces and kings. He was murder with the cards.’ He smiled to himself. ‘God forgive me. No pun intended.’ He mouthed an act of contrition and made the sign of the cross with his crystal tumbler.

O’Keefe looked hard at Hanratty again, searching for sarcasm. ‘Are you much of a player yourself, Mr Hanratty?’

The man drank and gestured with the cigarette holder. ‘I’m said to be by some. A nice fat income helps, when it comes to cards. No one gets good at anything without the will and means to practice.’

‘I played enough cards in the army and I never improved. Pontoon mostly.’

‘And who did you serve with, Sergeant?’

‘Royal Dublins.’

‘The Bluecaps.’

O’Keefe must have looked surprised.

‘Royal Irish Rifles, Lance Corporal Fintan Hanratty, at your service. Three years of trench foot, bully beef and shrapnel. Made it through without a scratch.’ He smiled and drank and waited for O’Keefe’s reaction. He had done this before, O’Keefe thought. Surprised people, enjoyed the mild astonishment at the contradiction before them – the effete, mannered dandy as war veteran.

‘Surprised?’ Hanratty asked, as if reading O’Keefe’s mind.

O’Keefe shrugged. ‘Only that you weren’t an officer. A man of your means and education.’ He looked around the room as if to emphasise his point.

Hanratty drank. ‘Never. Told dear old Dad I’d only join up if I could do it as an enlisted man. I am, you see, hardly fit to lead kittens to a drowning bucket, let alone other men. I am, in fact, more easily led, truth be told.’

O’Keefe nodded. ‘Must have been bad, the trenches.’

‘The best of times, the worst of times. As you might imagine. You were where yourself, Sergeant?’

‘Dardanelles. Two weeks of fighting and a year and a half recovering.’

Hanratty smiled and pointed to the scar on O’Keefe’s face with his cigarette holder. ‘All better now?’

‘Good as new. Yourself?’

‘Like I said, never had a scratch.’

And then O’Keefe said something he hadn’t meant to. ‘You ever dream? Have dreams about the war, things you saw?’

Hanratty looked at him closely. ‘Nightmares, you mean?’

O’Keefe looked into the fire. ‘Yes, I suppose.’

‘Still have them. Waking ones. When I smell bad meat – offal – rotting in bins beside the market. The smell sets them off. I start shaking sometimes, so that I can’t fit a cigarette into its holder – people looking at me on the street as if I’m a souse on the first day of a cure.’

He continued, ‘Cards help. When I’m playing, the game consumes all thought. And then I play so long I’m exhausted, can’t dream for need of sleep.’

‘And do you often play with the gentlemen you were with last night?’

‘Ah yes,’ he said, taking a long, mannered drag on his cigarette, ‘down to brass tacks.’

‘The only kind, Mr Hanratty. Do you play often with the gentlemen from last evening?’

Hanratty considered the question. ‘No, not often. Not serious enough for my liking, most of them. Like your man, the victim. He was invited in and could play, you had to give him that. But he played a gruff, country style, as if he’d learned playing over a barrel in a pub somewhere. I was invited by the host, Bannon, I’m sure you’ll speak to him or have done. He’s a gentleman like myself, but likes the competition. Doesn’t mind taking the odd beating from a bogger like that poor fellow who was killed.’ And here he blessed himself again, this time with his ivory cigarette holder.

‘Others do mind?’

‘One or two I can think of. Don’t mind losing to their own kind, but don’t take it well when some grind of a farm-ware hawker relieves them of their hard-inherited money. Easy come, easy go, I always say.’

‘And were there any women present at the game last night?’

‘Not many women play, Sergeant.’

‘Not as players, but as entertainment perhaps?’

‘Not my kind of entertainment, you may have guessed.’

O’Keefe shrugged, indicating that Hanratty’s choice of entertainment was of no concern to him.

‘Now that you mention it, however, I have heard tell of a club, if you like. A secret society,’ Hanratty said, snickering at the notion. ‘Gentlemen officers and the like. Have you ever heard of the Hellfire Club, Sergeant?’

O’Keefe told him he hadn’t.

‘They were a private society of debauchery. Up in Dublin in the late seventeen hundreds, shortly before the Union, I think. Gambling, whoring. The whole kit and caboodle, Sergeant. Everything short of murder and sometimes not so short, so the stories go. They had, you must realise, much greater licence to pursue their pleasures than do the wealthy sons of Éire these days. Their libation of choice was a vile potion called scalpeen – hot whiskey mixed with melted butter.’

O’Keefe made the appropriate face around a mouthful of his own brandy. Something danced in the corners of his consciousness. Something pertinent but out of reach. He turned his attention back to Hanratty’s story, hoping his words might shed light upon the memory.

‘And when these boys tired of jumping their horses out of windows, it used to amuse them to douse their footmen and, so goes it, their whores, with scalpeen and set them alight. They were so wealthy, fathers so powerful, that they were virtually untouchable. Of course, now and again, there would come the need to flitter. Back home to England until things cooled down. Again, no pun intended.’

‘Forgive me Mr Hanratty, but what relevance does this have to the card game you played last night?’ The thought that had been niggling at his mind slipped away.
Something about a club?

‘Forgive me, for rambling, Sergeant. But there is talk of a similar such mob – no doubt not as rough and tumble, I imagine, as the Hellfires. A friend of mine was invited along and it was all I could do to squeeze any tattle at all out of him. It’s what made me think of it, you see. The girls. He spoke highly of them and their … talents.
Unspeakable pleasures.
His words, Sergeant. Indeed, he seemed to think the card game was of secondary concern to those present.’

O’Keefe thought about this for a moment. Deirdre didn’t fit in somehow. Or did she? ‘Your friend, Mr Hanratty – can I speak to him?’

‘Should you care to set sail for India, of course. Serving His Majesty, Sergeant. Like yourself.’

O’Keefe smiled. ‘Did your friend happen to say where this party was held?’

‘In some pile in the country, he said, and would say no more. Very hush-hush you see, Sergeant. Blood oaths and burnt offerings. The usual boarding school toss, but taken seriously by the members.’

‘But there were no women present last night?’

‘No,’ Hanratty said, disappointment on his face as if his story had led them back to nowhere. ‘There weren’t any women present, and I was there until the very end. Did quite well.’

‘At whose expense?’

The man smiled. ‘Not at our poor dead friend’s anyway. He’d the better of us all, while I had the better of most.’

‘And who got hit the worst?’

‘Well, Glendinning left early. Took a bad pasting but then he always does. I play with him from time to time, different games around town. Fine chap. Knows he’s useless and plays anyway. Good company. Little better than cannon fodder, but knows it.’

‘And the others?’

‘Well, I suppose, now that you mention it, Dickie Barton was hit badly by your man.’

O’Keefe recognised the name. Where had he heard it? He said, ‘This Mr Barton –’

‘Richard Barton. Son and heir to the tractor works.’

Of course. He’d met the man when he’d interviewed Deirdre’s friend Anne Duffy. Deirdre Costelloe’s employer. Her boss. Heat rushed to O’Keefe’s neck and his heartbeat quickened. A connection?

‘How’d he take it, Barton, losing his shirt so badly?’

‘It’s not like he hasn’t the money to burn, Sergeant.’

‘So why did he resent losing if money’s no object?’

‘As I told you. Feels men like …?’ O’Keefe gave the victim’s name, ‘… like Mr McKenna, God rest him, are beneath him. He underestimates them. Feels that they’ve no mind or right to be beating him. And quite frankly, your man gave him a bad drubbing. Maybe McKenna sensed how he was seen by Barton. Bluffed him so badly it was nearly impossible not to laugh. Impossible not to admire the way McKenna baited Dickie into throwing good money after bad hands and then leading him up paths and down valleys until he had no choice but to bow out. And to top it off, he always showed his cards, particularly the weak hands he won with. Now that I think of it, he really was an exceptional player. Got somewhat erratic in the late stages of the evening, but by then he’d enough drink taken and all were beaten. I took a few hands from him at the end which allowed me to leave with my purse and pride intact.’

O’Keefe noted that the victim had most likely been intoxicated. ‘And what time did you leave?’

‘Around eight this morning, Sergeant. Long after, I’m told, your man was dead. So there goes me as a suspect.’

‘You never were one, Mr Hanratty.’

‘Fintan, please. Now that I’m not a suspect.’

‘At least, not until I learned you fought in the war.’

‘Oh dear. And why would my days in the mud have affected your feelings towards me?’

O’Keefe decided to tell him.

‘Pig-sticking,’ Hanratty said when O’Keefe had finished. ‘I heard it called that in the trenches. Meant to be a fine, quick way to go if you’re on the wrong end of it.’

‘Can you think of anyone at the game who might have wanted McKenna pig-stuck?’

He thought about it, then shook his head. ‘No. Only Barton might have had his feelings hurt, but then you can rule him out too, Sergeant. We left together this morning and had breakfast in the market café. Barton’s an objectionable man – enough to nearly put a man off his sausage and eggs – but the war affected him badly. Physically. Mentally, I sometimes imagine. He’s forever hinting at dark deeds, secret meetings and the like, as if he’s still working behind German lines.’

‘He was Intelligence? In the war?’

‘That he was. All the messy sectors, up and down the line with the West Kents. Sadly, I feel he isn’t aware that the war has ended.’

‘Wounded? Gassed?’

‘Wounded, I’ve heard.’ Hanratty looked into the fire but couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘We boys in the mud. Always said we’d rather take one in the face than the place where Barton is said to have taken his.’

O’Keefe nodded, having felt the same himself once, and realised that if Barton’s injury was as Hanratty implied, Barton would hardly have been able to assault Deirdre sexually. And he had stayed on chasing cards until hours after McKenna had left and been murdered. Resignation washed over him. Disappointment. O’Keefe hauled himself to standing and thanked Hanratty for the drink and his time.

Hanratty rose with him. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe looked at him, unsure of what was coming. ‘What’s that?’

‘What will men like us do when the republic comes?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The men of the RIC, like yourself and, of course, men like me.’ He gestured at his surroundings as if they might indicate what kind of man he was. ‘We’ll hardly be welcome, between the gunmen and the priests who’ll be running this country when the republic comes.’

O’Keefe liked the comparison, despite himself. Peelers and Poofs. A close run, who was further exiled from the hearth of Irish society. ‘I was always a Home Ruler, Mr Hanratty.’

‘Fintan, please.’

‘Besides, it’s not my concern what happens, once the shooting stops. Getting the guns quiet, that’s my job now.’

‘There’s only one way those guns will go silent and that’s when the gunmen get the republic they’re gunning for and the priests can perch on the arms of government chairs and caw in the ears of those who matter. And then you’ll be out of a job altogether, I suspect.’

O’Keefe laughed. ‘You’re probably right, Fintan.’

Hanratty appeared delighted that O’Keefe had used his Christian name. ‘I’ve always held, Sergeant, that as bad as English rule has been for this country, it’s at least kept the priests in their place. Independence will only loose them on us like a flight of vengeful bats.’