Peeler (5 page)

‘I told you I’d buy you a pint, so I did …’

‘At my funeral. Give me the bloody sheet. It’ll be quicker if I do it and easier on the ears than listening to you moan about it.’

‘Well spoken, man.’ Daly slid the sheets back to O’Keefe.

O’Keefe ticked items on the list.
Bacon, corned beef, baked beans, milk, tea.
‘All these years I’ve known you, Jim, and I’m not sure you understand the concept of work at all.’

‘I understand I’m
supposed
to do it.’

Rashers, sausages, ju-jube sweets.

‘Only lazy Cavan man I’ve ever met. Who put ju-jubes on the list?’

‘The young lad, Keane. And that’s untrue and you know it, Seán, about the work. Point of fact, I spent the entire afternoon drafting letters to our fellow members of the Police Federation so that – all justice being done – you, my good man, will earn more squodge for the
work
you do.’

‘
Letters
plural? Flour? Do we need flour?’

‘All right, letter singular. And no, no flour. Reams of it, there is.’

‘So you spent the day
not
working at trying to convince the brass to pay you more money for the work you don’t do? Was the cost of living allowance we got last month not enough to keep you and yours in the style accustomed?’
Cheese, bread, stout.
O’Keefe crossed stout off the list. The men could buy beer for themselves.

‘Cost of living allowance? That’s what they called it. Nothing more than a getting-shot-at-allowance, that was. And that payment is non-pensionable, mind.’

‘You get shot at enough times, you won’t need a pension.’

‘The wife will want some reward for the work I’ve done when I’m gone.’

O’Keefe smiled and shook his head. ‘If work were in bed, you’d sleep on the floor.’
Butter, brack, eggs
.

‘Not at all. There’s more than sleeping done in bed.’

Eggs
.

O’Keefe sat up and looked at Daly. ‘Do you remember, during the summer, that case – the woman who supplied eggs to Bandon barracks?’

Daly rummaged in his pockets for his pipe, frowning in an effort to remember. Finding his pipe and plug, he said, ‘If she was selling eggs to the Bandon lads, why didn’t they take the case?’

‘Because she lives in our district. Murray worked it, I remember that. I was second on the Twoomy murder then with that chap from the Castle.’ Twoomy was an alcoholic ex-soldier from Ballycarleton who had been shot and labelled for informing. The case was still open, but nobody in the RIC had any illusions about it ever being closed.

O’Keefe stood up and crossed the hallway to Head Constable Murray’s office. Murray had been gone from the barracks for more than a fortnight – though he had only taken a week’s leave to attend his father’s funeral – and O’Keefe wondered briefly whether Murray would mind him rooting through his files for the information he needed. He didn’t imagine the man would, but resolved to brief him when he returned to duty.
If
he returned to duty. It was becoming common for RIC men to head home for leave and never return. Some felt they had to be at home to protect their families, though O’Keefe reckoned that their families were probably safer without an ex-Peeler in the house. Some had been given assurances by the IRA that they would be safe if they resigned from the constabulary. Still others never made it home and were never found.

O’Keefe located the file he was looking for in the second cabinet drawer. The egg-woman was named Katherine Sheehan. The IRA had warned her several times to stop selling eggs to Bandon RIC barracks and the British army post in the town. When she refused, two men had gone to her house and assaulted her. They had inserted a pig ring in one of her buttocks as punishment for aiding the Crown and Murray’s notes showed that he assumed, based on a doctor’s report which he had included in the file, that the woman had also been raped.

Flicking through Murray’s notes at the back of the file, he read that the woman had refused to identify the men who had assaulted her, claiming she did not know them. He made a mental note to contact Bandon barracks in case they had received any intelligence on possible suspects for the crime but doubted that they would have. He closed the file, disgust welling inside him, competing with the shame he felt for how he and his constabulary had retreated behind the steel shutters and barbed wire of the barracks and allowed terror to reign in the county. A woman – one who did business with the RIC in a time when few would – attacked and violated for the crime of trying to put bread on her table and all there was in response was a file gathering dust in the back of an absent copper’s cabinet.

He returned to his shared office and began to strip off his uniform. There was a small side room that served as a place to store files and in it O’Keefe and Daly had installed an army cot and dresser, each taking turns to sleep downstairs in one of the day rooms that served as billet for the men, while the other had the storage room cot.

O’Keefe dressed in his civilian clothes – a grey woollen suit and white shirt with a dark blue tie. Inspecting the two collars he owned, O’Keefe found them frayed and yellowing. He couldn’t remember when he’d last bought a new one; before the war probably. He found one of Daly’s ironed white collars in a dresser drawer and put it on.

‘That’s right, don’t bother asking. Poor Muireann hasn’t enough to do with five whelps under her feet but to wash and iron collars for you to wear at your leisure. Go right ahead, son.’

O’Keefe smiled. Daly’s wife was a Kerry woman he’d met when he was based in Tuckey Street barracks in Cork city. She had been caring for an invalid aunt, who had encouraged their courtship, telling Muireann she could do worse than hook a Peeler, what with the job for life, salary, pension and respectability the constabulary provided. That was in the years before the shooting started. O’Keefe wondered whether the aunt would still recommend a police constable as a husband to her niece. Given the times, a job for life in the constabulary might be a short one.

Even so, O’Keefe imagined Muireann still would have married Jim. They were made for each other. She could be as scandalous in her own comments as he could and yet was as kind and patient as any wife of Jim Daly would need to be. When O’Keefe was recovering from his wounds and the almost inevitable blood poisoning that accompanied them, it was she who had visited him every day in the Army Hospital in Cork, a child or two in tow, another in her belly. It was she who kept him from falling back into the black pit of numbness, of terrors relived. He would never be able to repay her for the kindness she had shown him and she would never want him to.

O’Keefe took his goggles from the press and hung them around his neck.

‘Bit dark for a spin,’ Daly said.

‘Just dark enough for one, you mean.’

Daly smiled around his pipe stem. ‘You still look a right Peeler even in mufti, Seán. You could kit up in one of Muireann’s frocks and you’d fool no one at all.’

O’Keefe put his arms through the leather straps of his shoulder holster, took his Webley from its belt holster and slipped it under his arm. Memory washed in. He had just joined up, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, better known to soldiers as the Bluecaps. Late winter 1915, a pal of his – a Dublin lad from the tenements of the Liberties – had said the same to him.
All copper, you are. Spot it a mile off. Feel like I’m up for something just lookin’ at you.
A young man who’d known his share of coppers, O’Keefe would have trusted him with his life if he’d ever got the chance. The Liberties lad was shot as he stepped off the pontoon bridge after the
River Clyde
had grounded at V Beach, his reed-thin body sinking like a stone under sixty pounds of kit and rifle. He had never fired a shot in anger and his war was over before it had even started. Just like O’Keefe’s own brother, Peter
.

What
was
the lad’s name? Suddenly, it seemed crucial that he recall it.
What in the name of Jesus was that fella’s name?
Unable to remember, he tried to force the other memories back down. Rising memories filled with the bodies of dead men, stray rounds, shattered bone, mangled viscera.
What was the fella’s name?
Memories now leaking forth, diffuse and murder-red, like the blood in the water off V Beach, staining the hour, washing up with tides of random thought.

Daly sensed the change in him. ‘Keep the head down, so.’

O’Keefe shrugged on his trenchcoat and leather helmet. He nodded, not wanting to catch Daly’s eye, human contact somehow anathema to him when the darkness flooded in.

Night pressed down as O’Keefe rode away from the barracks, wind battering his goggles, tugging at his scarf. His Triumph’s headlamp carved a clear path of light on the road ahead. He had bought the bike after the war with money an aunt – his father’s sister – had left him. O’Keefe had intended to use the small legacy one day as down payment for a house where he would live with a wife and children. But then the war had come and he had been foolish enough to volunteer. And so had Peter.

When he got out of the Army Hospital in Cork, all he’d wanted to do was move. The faster the better. The Triumph Type H ‘Trusty’ motorcycle had seemed the best way there was. He’d bought it from a Milltown lad who’d got his leg blown off at the Somme.

Already, the speed of the machine – the sound of the two stroke, pistons hammering, wheels spitting crushed gravel beneath him – had lifted his spirits. O’Keefe could sense more than see the sheep behind the hedges and bare stone walls. The wiry outlines of trees, shorn of leaves, bent near prostrate by westerly Atlantic winds in the glare of the half moon, now covered by cloud, now exposed. It was crisp, cold and dry. Perfect for an ambush. Too early in the evening yet, he hoped.

Suddenly, on a slow bend, the glare of headlamps. A Crossley-load of Auxiliaries, roaring towards Ballycarleton or Macroom. O’Keefe let go of the breath he’d held as he passed them. They didn’t stop. Or shoot.

All experienced combat veterans and all officers, the Auxiliaries had been brought over to Ireland on wages of a pound a day. They were to serve as an elite, anti-guerrilla force. Not for the Auxies the constraints of arrest or due process of law. They were feared and hated by republican and loyalist alike. O’Keefe assumed the lorryload that had passed was out of Macroom, billeted in the hotel there and, at present, officially running amok. Three weeks earlier the IRA had kidnapped two of their number. Their bodies had not been found. The Auxies, least of all, had no illusions as to their fate. No quarter given, none asked in return.

O’Keefe shifted gear and accelerated, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the Auxiliaries. Five miles south of Ballycarleton, on the Timoleague road, he slowed and pulled the Trusty over in front of the Sheehan place. The house was typical of the area. An isolated, whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof, tucked under the dark shadows of the hills that rose steeply behind the small farm. Light glowed from two windows on either side of the front door.

He shut down the bike and dismounted. Halfway to the woman’s door, a dog began barking. A cow lowed in its stall.

‘Who’s there? Show yourself!’

Katherine Sheehan stood framed in the doorway of the cottage, light spilling out of the open door. She held an axe. ‘Come no further!’

There was fear in her voice, but resolve too, as if she would use the axe if whoever was there came closer. O’Keefe stopped twenty feet from the house and removed his leather helmet and goggles.

‘It’s all right. Mrs Sheehan? My name is Sergeant Seán O’Keefe. I’ve come from the barracks in Ballycarleton. I got your address from Head Constable Murray’s file. I didn’t mean to –’

‘Nice of him to leave directions to my home in his papers.’ Katherine Sheehan lowered the axe.

O’Keefe had never thought his visit might frighten the woman. He suddenly felt foolish. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Sheehan. I wanted … I wonder if I could ask you a few questions?’

A young boy joined the woman at the door, wrapping his arms around her waist. She pulled the child closer to her.

‘I won’t be long, Mrs Sheehan. I know it’s a difficult –’

‘You know nothing, Sergeant.’ She set the axe inside the door and took the boy by the hand, leaving the door open behind them. ‘I’m giving the child his dinner.’

O’Keefe stood for a moment on the stone path, unsure if he should enter.

‘Were you expecting me to bring your tea outside to you then, Sergeant?’

The inside of the cottage was warm and smelled of boiled potatoes and cabbage, of lamp oil and turf smoke. The ceiling was low, inches only above O’Keefe’s head. A man of roughly O’Keefe’s own age was slumped in a chair by the fire, staring blankly at the glowing turf. Steam rose from the spout of the kettle hanging from its iron hook over the grate.

‘A fine evening,’ O’Keefe said to the man. ‘I’m Sergeant O’Keefe, out of Ballycarleton barracks. I hope I haven’t disturbed your evening, sir.’

The man didn’t move.

‘Gerard can’t hear you, Sergeant. Gone with the fairies, he is.’

The woman flashed a bitter, challenging smile, as if daring O’Keefe to mock the notion. Fairies, in this age of gunmen, motorbikes, telephones and long-range artillery shells that could blow a man into a million pieces so that his teeth became shrapnel. Fairies snatching the fit and healthy, leaving withered husks of men, women and children in their place. O’Keefe had lost his belief in most things, but he knew that farmers still ploughed wide, reverent berths round fairy rings in their fields. He had no mind to mock anything any more.

Katherine Sheehan seemed to read his thoughts and softened a little. ‘Since the war. His body’s better but his head’s not right. God help him.’ She blessed herself.

O’Keefe nodded. ‘There’s many came back like him. More than you’d think.’

He had seen them in the Army Hospital, the ambling, weeping remains of men whose heads would never again be right, no matter what the doctors did or said. The fairies would never let them go, no matter the white horses ridden round the fairy mounds or all the gallons of yearling’s milk left on the doorstep.