The Death of an Irish Tradition (12 page)

But Menahan didn’t even blink. “Three-fifteen.”

“What was the victim doing when you left?”

“I don’t know. She was busy in the kitchen. I said good-bye from the hall and let myself out.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this last night?”

“Nobody asked. I didn’t think it important. I’m not a policeman, Inspector, I’m a priest. At that point I was thinking only of her soul—may God grant it peace.”

What was it—McGarr now asked himself, glancing at the contrite, almost self-satisfied purse to Menahan’s mouth—that made most priests seem…smug? Was that the word? No—patronizing, that was it. “Keegan, James Joseph. The mother’s brother, I take it. You’re from that part of the country. Tell me what you know about him.”

“Next to nothing, I’m afraid. Only rumor and innuendo and the odd allusion Margaret made about him. He’s quite a bit older than I.”

“What rumor, what innuendo?”

Menahan glanced up at the porch door of the rectory. “I. R. A. and that class of thing. I guess he was just another romantic, a dreamer. When he came back to take over the farm, it went to hell in no time. He lost it in ten years.”

“To Bechel-Gore?”

His eyes shied. “I don’t know the particulars of the sale, but I think that’s right.”

“And your own family’s property was contiguous to the Keegans?”

“Yes.”

“And you sold that property to Bechel-Gore as well?”

Menahan turned to McGarr and searched his face. “You’re not really asking me, are you, Chief Inspector?”

In fact, McGarr was not, having called the Galway Land Office earlier, he was only trying to assess the priest’s answers. “Was that the money you bought the piano with?”

Menahan nodded. “Really now—I must get in there. Monsignor Kelly—”

“Who is Doctor Malachy T. Matthews of Drogheda? He’s a vet?”

Menahan’s eyes again moved away from McGarr. “That’s J. J. Keegan, I believe.”

“You believe.”

“Yes.”

“You have good cause to believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Why, may I ask?”

Menahan glanced at his wristwatch and sighed, then looked directly at McGarr. “You may ask, certainly, and could I tell you I would. It’s no single fact, no one bit of knowledge. It’s just an…impression I put together over the years. And the Caugheys’ money had to come from someplace. They had none that I knew of before. Mairead mentioned a certain cousin in Drogheda; Margaret would say Doctor Malachy this and that, you know. I also knew Keegan was wanted by you fellows for something or other to do with the ‘army,’ which is one of the reasons the farm went down. And when I asked after the man, she’d always be evasive and…sly. It was her way, you see, but I mean not to libel the dead.”

What was the man’s tone? It had changed, but McGarr wasn’t sure how.

The priest turned and started up the stairs toward the door.

“And who was Caughey? When did he die?”

“I’m not sure he did. A bounder, I hear, but older than I, like Keegan. I know no more than that, I assure you.”

“Then who would Mairead have as a friend—a person who studies in the National Library? An older friend, she said.”

Menahan tugged open the door and stepped up onto the porch, the glass of which made the light inside pink against the brick of the rectory. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Pretty girl.”

“Not pretty. Beautiful,” said Menahan. “A goddess in every way.”

“Father!” another voice said, sternly. “You’re keeping us waiting with your talk about—what was it that I heard?”

McGarr looked up to see an older man with a boiled face and a shock of white hair. He was standing in the inner door.

“Nothing, Monsignor. Nothing at all.”

“And who is that man?”

McGarr turned and walked back the way he had come, toward the church and his car beyond.

“Nobody,” he heard Menahan say. “A parishioner, a family matter.”

McGarr had a feeling it was.

McKeon had his notebook out. He had placed it on the library table directly in front of him, as he thumbed through the
Official Catalogues
of the Horse Show, not merely five years back, as McGarr had requested, but twenty. In his neat but cramped hand he was noting entrants in the donkey classes (nos. 81 through 88 in most of the manuals), and in particular those from either Leenane, County Galway, or Drogheda, County Louth. He too had put in periodic phone calls to his desk at the Castle, which Ban Gharda Bresnahan was presently occupying.

And McKeon enjoyed the assignment, there in the long room stacked with the leather-bound proceedings of the Society dating back to 1731, the deep shadows which the little lamp with the green translucent shade cast, its circle of light, the quiet there contrasting sharply with the hubbub of the exhibitors out in the Main Hall. There carpenters and trade-show personnel were putting up booths to display their wares—equestrian equipage of every sort, tractors, stoves, prefabricated barns, new-technology silos, craft exhibits, an art show, some Finns who had brought with them a whole factory, it seemed, of stylish furniture.

At one point two men, who were arguing in the stilted accents of the old Ascendency, had entered from the Members’ Rooms and pulled down a dusty volume. One of them then proved to the other that an ancestor of his had numbered among the founders of the revered Society that had done so much for the country, more than just the Show itself. Having settled the question, they noticed McKeon writing away in his book. “Sorry, old boy,” one of them had said.

Old boy, indeed, McKeon had thought. He was as much an “old boy” as they were pedigreed asses of the sort he was reading about there in the catalogues.

J. J. Keegan had, in fact, been an exhibitor of donkeys from 1959, the year he’d been freed from a British nick, to ’69, a year which had been marked by much I. R. A. activity. In ’71, Doctor Malachy T. Matthews had begun exhibiting a number of donkeys that corresponded rather closely to those of Keegan, in particular a prize brood mare Keegan had called “Pegeen” and Matthews had called “Meg.” McKeon couldn’t be sure they were one and the same, but the prizes they gained in the category, brood mare with foal at foot, were always best of show, and he had a feeling they were. Matthews was listed as an exhibitor for the current year, although the Office said he had not as yet registered.

McKeon replaced the volumes and switched off the light. He strolled out through the Main and Industry halls to Ring 2, where the hot, late afternoon sun forced him to doff his jacket.

There gardeners were studiously clipping grass around the fence posts, while others up on ladders worked on the linden trees, rounding their bowls as a foreman shouted up at them from afar—a little here, a little there—to make them equal.

Horses passed McKeon, being led down the path of crushed cinders to the stables, which were located throughout the Show Ground. And people—busy people, expectant or anxious or simply caught up in the excitement of the impending Show—pushed by him, talking among themselves, preoccupied, carefully guiding a caravan or a horse lorry toward the quarters they had been assigned. Many—he well knew—had worked all year toward the next few days, and McKeon found the atmosphere of the place much to his liking.

After—how many years was it, now?—twenty-eight and some months as a policeman of one sort or another, strolling under the vaulted porticos of Pembroke Hall with a horse in nearly every paddock, its half-timbered façade Elizabethan and elegant, jumpers in the exercise ring even now loping over low gates, ridden by grooms or young family members, was the class of assignment that McKeon believed he deserved. The Castle and his desk, while a valuable post in regard to promotion and the like, seemed a bleak prospect to him.

Sure—he had often told himself—Commissioner Farrell would soon retire and McGarr would be given his job; O’Shaughnessy would take over the Detective Bureau for a short time and then he himself would be given the assignment with Ward as his desk man. But McKeon didn’t know how much more of it he could take himself. More outings like this, though, and he could hump it. He imagined he might even drag some of his kids along for the first day of the Show, make it look more genuine—the pose and all.

At the animal arrival and departure area McKeon managed to insinuate himself among the clatch of men who had gathered in the registrar’s office—smiling to this one, nodding to another, smoking a cigarette with his back against the wall until the man in the R. D. S. blazer moved away from the log book. McKeon then stepped toward it, as though not really interested, but his small, dark eyes had scanned all the pages but one before the registrar returned.

“Can I help you?”

“Just looking to see if a friend has arrived.”

“Name?”

“Matthews, Doctor Malachy.”

The man cocked his head. “Don’t think so. Not yet anyhow. I know him though, I think. Brood mares?”

“After a fashion. Brood-mare donkeys.”

The man nearly turned his back on him. “Try the caravan park. We’ve no stabling room for them this year.”

There McKeon found the two entrants that had attracted him in the log book—a car-towed trailer from Maam, near Leenane, and a large animal lorry from Slane, near Drogheda.

The man in the former vehicle was trying to back it into a narrow slot near the Merrion Road wall and a tree that would provide it good shade, and McKeon tossed his jacket over the hood and directed him in, then gave the man a hand with propping up the trailer and leading the animals out.

His name was Goggin, and he had his kids and his missus with him. He offered McKeon a bottle of lager, and under the shade of the tree they talked and had a smoke before McKeon departed.

“Going to be around?” the man had asked.

“Think so. I’m in the market. Retired now. Thought I’d raise a few donkeys.”

“Ah—no money in it, I’ll tell you that right now.”

“I wouldn’t be in it for that. We had five of them when I was a lad, and now I’m after wanting a few myself—for my kids.”

“Been away?”

McKeon only nodded.

“Stop back. I might be letting one or two go.”

One of his little girls had jumped up on the back of a strong young donkey stallion, and he was hopping and bucking, trying to get her off. He sprinted forward fast and then came to a sharp stop, twisting his head, but she held fast to its mane. “You’re nothing but a Tinker’s ass, hear me, Willy?” she shouted in his ear and whacked his side so he jumped and scampered around the cars, his legs strong and stiff, his lips fluttering over square, yellow teeth as he brayed and complained.

At the lorry, the side of which read, “Homewood Farms, Horses and Donkeys, Slane, County Meath,” McKeon found nobody about. It was a large Bedford truck, almost the size of a mover’s van, its lettering silver and brilliant against polished maroon lacquer. It had a sleeping cab behind the driver’s seat and a grill that was higher than McKeon was tall. Even the six lugs on each wheel had been polished, and an auxiliary engine was working to cool the inside.

There were five doors—two to the driver’s compartment, the rear bay flaps, and a small door with a window in it on one side. That a curtain nearly covered. Standing on tiptoes McKeon squinted, trying to see past the glare, and thought he caught a glimpse of a figure reclining or sleeping on a small couchlike berth.

He knocked but got no response. He knocked again, harder, then grasped the handle and found the door locked.

The van was parked near the wall, and the door was quite close to it.

McKeon glanced down both sides. There were many people close by and he could hear conversations, shouts, car and van doors being closed, but the lorry had been so positioned that the door was concealed from sight.

McKeon reached in his pocket and, with a few turns with one of the several picks on his key ring, had the door open.

He pulled it back slowly, and the figure on the bed stirred. “Dick?” His voice was muffled against the cushions. “Somebody was banging on the door a while back. Where’d you put the bottle? Christ, I’m dying.”

The man turned to McKeon.

His face was pallid and drawn, a large handlebar mustache covering his upper lip. He was wearing white coveralls, like those of the gardeners McKeon had seen earlier, and his eyes were glassy. And he was old, maybe seventy or better.

Before McKeon could speak, a hand was placed on his arm. “Can I help you?” somebody asked close to his ear.

It was a large, older man with a face like that of a professional boxer—the nose flattened off to one side, one eyebrow missing and whitish scar tissue in its place, one ear larger than the other. The grip on McKeon’s arm was firm.

“I’m after wanting a peek at your donkeys.”

“But the door was locked.”

“No, it wasn’t. I looked in and saw your man, and—” McKeon glanced down.

The man was holding a whisky bottle, like a club, in the other hand.

“What do they call you?”

“Kennedy.”

“From?”

“Leitrim.” It was McKeon’s mother’s name, the town and county where he had been born and raised.

“How’s the fishing?”

“Fine.”

“What did you catch this summer?”

“Brill. A salmon or two.”

The man released his arm. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow? We’re having a little problem here at the moment.” He raised the bottle. He smiled. Several of his front teeth were false and very white compared to the others. He was a massive man, all shoulders and chest.

“I’ll do that.”

The other man had turned his face to the cushions once more.

“Buying or selling?” the large man asked.

“Buying, and that’s a certainty.”

He twisted the cap off the bottle and discarded it roughly. He reached it out toward McKeon. “No sense in wasting all of it.” He gestured with his head toward the man in the lorry. “He won’t even taste it.”

“After having a drop?” McKeon asked, reaching for the bottle.

The man closed his eyes and shook his head. “The failing, I’m afraid. Desperate. But he’s a right bloke when he’s off it.”

McKeon drank off as much as his throat would permit. “I’ll be back.”