Peeler (9 page)

Stunned, O’Keefe turned to him. ‘And why would that be? What are you saying,
Constable
?’ He stressed Senior’s lower rank, but knew it counted for nothing, either within the RIC or out of it. Aaron Senior might be a constable now, but his rank in society would always count more than anything else.

Masterson asked, ‘When were you planning on informing us of your sister’s plans, Sergeant?’

O’Keefe turned back to Masterson. His sister? What were they talking about? He remembered her letter, still unread, in his desk drawer.

‘Sir?’

Masterson took a thin file from a stack on the desk and opened it. ‘I received word from “I” Division that your sister is to marry into one of the most active republican families in County Dublin and I’m left waiting for you to come to me with this intelligence. I realise we can’t but bear up to some of what our families subject us to but …’

‘My sister –’

‘You can see how it might look, O’Keefe,’ Senior joined in, deliberately not addressing him by rank. ‘This is a case that will need exceptional police work and, I might add, exceptional luck to solve and here you are rejecting expert help from a trained detective; a man with a good deal more experience in the investigation of murder than you, notwithstanding his “strange accent”.’

O’Keefe was silent for a moment, unable to respond. His sister? Getting married? To a known republican? It was too much for him to take in. ‘Sir, I want to solve this crime. How could I want to do otherwise?’

The DI leaned back in his chair. The smile threatened to return. ‘I’ve never thought differently, O’Keefe, never. I’ve specifically selected you to lead this investigation because you’ve the cut of a fine Peeler. I’ve heard grand things about your work on the bank manager’s murder in Navan some years ago. And the job you did assisting the Murder Men on the Twoomy shooting. That was good work, result or not. But you must understand my position. How it would look if we rejected the help offered by Mathew-Pare and it got out about your connection to … ’

‘
My
connection?’

‘All right, your sister’s connections to the Volunteers.’

O’Keefe swallowed his gathering rage. He’d be the first to admit he had his faults, but disloyalty was not one of them.

Senior continued. ‘Of course, we have no control over what our families do. There are many fine and honourable men with … unfortunate connections to the IRA. This in no way affects their standing in the, O’Keefe. But their work, the vigour with which they pursue the enemy, is perhaps subject to more scrutiny than that of others. For this reason we’ve decided to accept any help Mathew-Pare and his men might provide. Really, it was good of the Castle to offer his services, considering how stretched things are around the country.’

Masterson stood up and came around the desk to where O’Keefe was standing. ‘Look, Sergeant,’ O’Keefe noticed it was back to ‘Sergeant’ again, ‘I’ll tell you this and you didn’t hear it from me …’

O’Keefe nodded, his gaze set straight ahead.

‘Absolutely confidential and for high eyes only, if you get my meaning, Sergeant?’

‘Sir?’

The DI leaned towards O’Keefe, resting his hand on his shoulder. ‘The Castle has intelligence. Bloody good stuff too, the word is. The Shinners are upping their efforts. All out push in the new year. The thing is, “I” division says the boyos need to clean out the touts in advance of the big push. Loose lips sink ships they’ve realised, somewhat late in the game, what?’

‘And how does this affect my investigation, sir?’

Masterson smiled again, a cheeky, conspiratorial grin. O’Keefe could feel his breath in his ear. ‘They’re topping women now, Sergeant. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Whose lips could be looser? Tar and feathering itself won’t always do the job, but a bullet will, fairer sex be damned.’

He stood back and clapped O’Keefe on the shoulder. ‘So you see why this is important. The papers get wind of Volunteers plugging bints, Sergeant, and one front of their fight is finished.’

‘The propaganda war,’ Senior chipped in, ‘which, after the Black and Tans’ burning of Balbriggan, they are most decidedly winning. All the world’s Press is on the side of the republicans against the “savage, sanctioned outrages of Crown forces”. What the rebels did to that girl you found was savage.’

‘We don’t know who killed her,’ O’Keefe said.

The DI again clapped him on the shoulder. ‘And that’s exactly what you and Mathew-Pare are going to find out, isn’t it? Turn over every rock in this county and find her killer. For just the reasons Constable Senior has outlined for you.’

O’Keefe had an overwhelming urge to lash out at Masterson, to throw him and his fawning batman through the steel-shuttered window. He let the urge drain from him, but kept his eyes on the wall behind the DI’s desk, afraid to look at either man for fear the impulse might return.

‘Any questions, Sergeant?’

‘No, sir. Things are much clearer to me now.’

‘Shall we go then?’ It was the DI who held the door open this time.

***

Before the shooting started in 1919 and prior to the passing of the Restoration of Order Act, suspicious deaths in Ireland were subject to a coroner’s inquest, requiring the attendance of a magistrate judge and twelve civilians as witnesses. Now such deaths were investigated by British army courts-martial in Military Courts of Inquiry. It was yet another of the hazy, grey regions of the Troubles policemen were forced to operate in and O’Keefe, like many others, didn’t like it. The RIC was expected to investigate crimes in the manner in which they were trained and accustomed to and yet, when – if – a suspect was arrested in County Cork, the police were obliged to hand that suspect over to the custody of the army to be tried at court-martial. Common law, the basis on which the RIC had operated for nearly a century, had been suppressed in the name of
security.

O’Keefe didn’t object to this part of the inquiry, however – the post-mortem and death pronouncement required only that it be witnessed by five or more army or police. He had heard that the surgeon was proficient in his work and there was little way for politics to enter into a surgeon’s report on cause of death. Politics entered through other doors, which he would deal with when it happened.

The cold storage shed was twelve by sixteen feet long, lit by a single, bright, hanging electric light. Its walls were heavily insulated and lined with tin. At the back of the room, in front of the steel-boxed refrigeration unit, four meat hooks hung from a beam. Stacked against the walls were wooden crates of provisions. Someone had been thoughtful enough to remove the sides of bacon and mutton from the hooks before the young woman’s body had been placed on the waist-high butcher’s table in the centre of the floor.

The room was perfect for a post-mortem, the table having recessed troughs for fluids running along its edges, and underneath it was a slight gradient to the floor, leading to a drain. The bodies of two constables had been examined here in the last few months and O’Keefe reckoned there would be more to come before the fighting ended.

A surgeon from Cork Army Hospital, Major Giles Wells, Royal Army Medical Corps, stood at the head of the long table. He had with him a young male nurse as his assistant and a subaltern clerk to minute the post-mortem. The latter sat at a portable camp desk of a type O’Keefe hadn’t seen since the war, a typewriter and pot of ink in front of him, pen and notebook in his hands.

With O’Keefe were District Inspector Masterson, Detective Sergeant Thomas Mathew-Pare and two court-martial officers. These had been introduced to O’Keefe as Lieutenants Wiley and Lambert. It occurred to O’Keefe that they were hardly the type of officers sent to a case of any importance. He would have expected the presence of a court-martial judge or a captain attached to division staff at least. But the road from Cork to Ballycarleton was dangerous and perhaps a decision had been made not to risk the lives of any high hats. Or maybe the case mattered less than Masterson thought it did.

He choked back the anger he still felt after his conversation with Masterson and Senior, and counted those present in the room, noting in his diary their names and ranks and the fact that there was a quorum for a pronouncement on cause of death.

The young woman’s body was covered with a sheet, preserving whatever modesty was left after the invasion of the surgeon’s knives. O’Keefe felt sadness surge through him, replacing the anger he felt at his own predicament. This had been someone’s daughter, he thought. Wife perhaps. Sister. Left naked on a hillside, mutilated, tarred and feathered; now laid out on a butcher’s table like a side of beef among crates of tinned stew and beans.

The men circled the table and the surgeon folded down the sheet, exposing the young woman’s head and shoulders. It was cold in the room and their breath streamed out in lazy billows. There was a faint, almost sweet, odour of putrefaction, but the refrigeration had reduced the rate of decomposition as well as could have been expected. O’Keefe turned the pages in his diary to a list of questions he had drawn up earlier.

‘Gentlemen,’ the surgeon began, and it struck O’Keefe how much like a play a post-mortem and inquest was, the surgeon narrating, the sheet covering the body to be swept back like a stage curtain, revealing to the gathered audience the tragedy befallen. The victim was one of two leads in the play. Offstage, somewhere, there was another player. Waiting.

‘We have here the body of a well-nourished young female, aged in her late teens or early twenties. There is no evidence of the victim having borne any children and she was in average to good health at the time of her death. Time of death has been estimated, based on average air temperature in the region of the body’s discovery and progress of decay, to have been some time between the twenty-second and twenty-fourth of November.’

O’Keefe noted this. Roughly five days earlier. Six at the most. Four at the least. Sunday to Tuesday at the latest.

‘Gentlemen,’ the surgeon said again, looking at each of the men around the table, ‘it is my strong belief, as to be recorded by this Military Court of Inquiry, that the subject we have before us was murdered.’

O’Keefe noted the time and date of the announcement.

‘And the cause of death, Major?’ the DI asked.

The surgeon gave Masterson a sharp look. O’Keefe thought of the DI as a heckler shouting out lines from the stalls. Wells answered Masterson, however, turning to O’Keefe as he did.

‘Sergeant O’Keefe’s preliminary report and photographs, of which I have copies, recorded extensive bruising around the neck,’ the surgeon pointed to the young woman’s neck and the two court-martial officers leaned in to take a closer look, ‘indicating attempted strangulation to be the cause of the bruising.’ He gestured to the nurse to assist him. ‘Initially, I also assumed manual strangulation to be the cause of death.’

‘However?’ Masterson again.

The surgeon had moved to the side of the table and begun to raise the victim’s shoulders as if to turn her. Now he stopped and looked at the DI. O’Keefe studied the surgeon’s face. Wells’ eyes were deeply inset in his skull and were cast in shadow by the hanging bulb above him. His gaunt, angular features were a florid collection of burst capillaries and deep ridges carved, O’Keefe assumed, by excessive consumption of alcohol and tobacco and regular proximity to death. O’Keefe put him at about forty years of age, but he could have passed for fifty or more.

‘Are you in a hurry, District Inspector?’

Masterson mumbled his apologies. Standing behind and to his left, O’Keefe could see the back of Masterson’s neck redden.

‘You said you
initially
assumed death was caused by strangulation?’ O’Keefe said now, surprising himself, his voice sounding loud in the small room. He had been impressed by Wells’ preliminary questions when he had met him earlier, and the surgeon had in turn complimented O’Keefe on his photographs of the scene and body. O’Keefe was aware, however, that he was speaking up so as to further drive the knife into the DI’s wounded pride.

The surgeon nodded at O’Keefe and then to his assistant. The two turned the young woman onto her side, the sheet slipping and exposing her back, mottled purple with lividity. The assistant adjusted the sheet to cover the buttocks.

‘Yes Sergeant, I did think so at first. She was, I believe, throttled to the point of grave injury prior to but not, in fact, to the point of death. Despite the bruising and soft tissue damage to the throat and neck, the hyoid bone is intact and the trachea shows none of the heavy internal injury we might expect to see with strangulation. Her death was, in fact, caused by this.’

Wells lifted up the victim’s long, limp, brown hair. Underneath the hair at the back of her head, a patch had been shaved away. O’Keefe stepped forward and leaned in to get a closer look, noticing the thin line of stitching that circled her head just below the hairline, where the surgeon had cut and peeled back the scalp and then – sawing a planar cut into the casing of bone – had removed the top of the young woman’s cranium. His eyes followed the surgeon’s pointing finger. There was a puncture mark at the base of the girl’s skull and surrounding the puncture wound was more livid bruising.

‘Cause of death,’ Wells said, ‘was subdural haematoma caused by a blow from a thin, sharp object of approximately six inches in length. Something like an ice pick, gentlemen, or a stiletto of some sort. This is only speculation, however. I nearly missed it, but after determining that death was not caused by strangulation or the lacerations on the chest – committed post-mortem, incidentally – I looked her over more closely and found this. I’ve estimated the length of the weapon based on the bruising around the wound and the channel of the internal injury to the brain, which suggests that the weapon was inserted – thrust – violently up to its hilt or handle.’

O’Keefe’s mind flashed to Katherine Sheehan and her description of the needle used to pierce a pig’s or bull’s nose. ‘Could the wound have been made by a needle of some sort? A knitting needle or some type of livestock tool?’ he asked.