The Death of an Irish Tradition (13 page)

“I’ll count on it.”

Do that, McKeon thought.

They arrived at the Matthews’s farm outside Drogheda late in the afternoon, and Noreen remarked on the little boy they could see sitting on the stairs leading to the front door, head on his hands. The door beyond him had been broken open. It was swaying on one hinge in the slight breeze off the front lawn, its glass stove in.

The farmhouse was an old, two-story affair that had recently been modernized, the narrow windows enlarged, the stucco touched up and painted a light-blue color little different from the summer sky. The slanting sun made it seem brilliant, and the grass of the front lawn, which grazing animals had cropped, had a bushy summer appearance, as though nothing could keep it back, tufts and sprays burgeoning here and there.

Off one side of the house a kennel had been added, a long, shedlike structure with a corrugated metal roof. From it they could hear the muffled barking of many dogs.

McGarr swung the car around, heading it back down the drive. “Perhaps you’d better wait here. And—”

But she had already reached below the seat for the Walther that he kept in a holster there.

McGarr checked the clip and placed the automatic under his belt. Stepping out, he tugged at the brim of his panama to shade his eyes. A flock of corncrakes, black and raucous, passed overhead, and the sun was hot on his back.

The little boy did not look up at him, only stared at McGarr’s bluchers, his eyes again filling with tears. His cheeks were stained from crying. “Pegeen,” was all he said.

“Where is she?” McGarr stared down at the tousled head, the sunlight so bright there he could have counted the strands.

The boy stood and they walked through an anteroom to an office, the floor of which was covered with broken glass. Other doors had been smashed open, and McGarr could see an operating table for animals, surgical cabinets, and sinks. Yet another burst door led into the house proper. A radio was playing in the sitting room, one light by a chair left on.

But the boy led him through the house, out to the back where, in a pen, an aged donkey was lying in a pool of blood, wheezing, her old eyes glassy. She shied as McGarr approached her, fearful but complacent too.

She had been pulled or had dragged herself into the shade at the side of the house. There was a horse blanket over her and something that looked like a compress on her head.

The boy stooped and pulled back the blanket to reveal a gunshot wound in her rib cage. “And here,” he sniffled, gently lifting the compress away.

The blood there was dark, almost black, but the bullet seemed to have passed through the fleshy part at the back of the neck.

“Who done it, Mister? Not Doctor Matt.”

McGarr reached down for his hand. “It happened some time ago and she’s still with us. Maybe she’s not as bad as she appears. We’ll see what we can do, straightaway.”

The boy slid his small, limp hand into McGarr’s, and they moved back into the house.

“Anybody else about?”

“The dogs.”

“When did you last see Doctor Matt?” From the doorway McGarr signaled to Noreen.

“Yesterday.”

“What time yesterday?”

Seeing Noreen step from the car, the boy began crying harder, and he walked out onto the stair, toward her.

In the sitting room McGarr found the phone and, grasping the cord of the receiver, lifted it off its cradle. With the end of his fountain pen he dialed the Castle and then, after having consulted the directory, the closest vet.

In the kitchen Noreen washed the boy’s face and hands and found him something to eat.

He lived down the road and had a small job with Matthews, cleaning the kennels and feeding the animals.

Upstairs in one of the bedrooms, McGarr found a window open and spent casings from some sort of machine pistol scattered over the carpet in front of it. A burst had caught the roof at the side of the house and had smashed the slates. There was blood too, on the carpet and leading into the hall. In the bathroom there was a towel smeared with blood and the medicine cabinet had been rifled, bottles tossed about, some broken.

Down below in the backyard he found footprints of many men—four or five at least—leading toward the marsh at the end of the property. The Boyne lay beyond, black and tranquil, and in one spot the reeds had been trampled down.

McGarr turned and considered the house and kennel. It was quiet there, with Noreen and the child having now fed the dogs. He remembered the letter he’d found in Margaret Kathleen Caughey’s apron. “Sis, Get out. He’s onto me. Jimmy-Joe.”

Back inside, in the office, McGarr discovered that the desk and files had been ransacked, the contents strewn about the tile floor. On the desk were two manila folders, both empty. The label of one read, “Bechel-Gore,” the other, “M. K. Keegan-Caughey.” From the bent and rumpled edges he supposed each had been long-standing and substantial.

The medical supplies in the office had been used as well, gauze and bandages and adhesive tape.

“What does it mean?” Noreen asked him after the others had arrived.

McGarr glanced down at the empty folders. He wondered why they had been left behind. “That we know far too little about the Caugheys, the Keegans, and Bechel-Gore, I suspect.”

“Does that mean Galway?”

“It does.”

She smiled. They had yet to take their holiday and soon the fair, summer weather would be over.

In the car again, she smacked his thigh. “Where shall we eat?”

McGarr hadn’t thought about food since the rectory, and he was suddenly ravenous.

But he glanced at her—her ringlets of copper-colored hair, her green eyes, which were bright, the slight tan she’d gotten from noontime tennis at the college. She was wearing a turquoise jersey and a white dress. “An outing, is it?”

“Certainly, Chief Inspector. It’s the weekend, it’s summer, and you’ll never see this day again. Where’s your joie de vivre, your éclat, your…” she gave him a sidelong glance, “youth?”

McGarr looked away and slid the gearshift into first.

“We could start with a good, stiff drink.”

McGarr blinked.

“I know just the place.”

She would, he thought.

“The chef is Italian, the real McCoetaneo. He serves a
fagiano arrosto alla ricca
that’s unbeatable, especially considering the birds we have here.”

It was a pheasant entree that McGarr particularly enjoyed. Sage leaves and juniper berries were rubbed inside, then it was barded with bacon and browned in oil and butter. Grappa and black olives were added, and, after turning it into a hot oven and basting frequently, hot stock was added to the pan. And then a tablespoon of butter and a few drops of lemon—the final and perfecting touch. It was one of McGarr’s favorite dishes.

“They serve a light red wine that the owner says his brother sends him straight from his villa in San Gimignano.”

McGarr’s stare at her was sidelong and sustained. Perhaps she knew him too well.

MATTHEWS COULD DISTINCTLY
remember the radio having been on—the late news in Irish—and he had given it half an ear and considered whether he should pour himself another tot of brandy, just enough to color the soda in the glass. And it was only that gesture—looking up from the government report on the alarming upsurge of brucellosis in dairy cattle—that saved him.

He remembered turning his head to the radio and wondering if the sound had come from the cabinet with the dim yellow light, dusty, its top heaped with magazines and other reports long dated.

It was a soft, spongy sound, like a boot being tugged out of wet earth, and it had carried across the garden from the marsh and through the window, which he had opened upon returning from the pub several hours earlier.

And he had even glanced at the clock. Half twelve and late. He had a foaling due sometime in the morning, and the mare had a history of breech presentations.

Then Pegeen had begun braying, her raucous cries spreading out through the darkness and frightening a flock of mallards in the reeds. They rose, flapping and complaining, and with one motion Matthews was on his feet and had his hand on the chain of the lamp.

Outside from the front where his office was he heard a curse and the slam of a car door and other footsteps, many of them running toward the buildings.

The dogs in the kennels were alerted now and began the barking that Matthews had listened to so carefully so many times before; the din they sent up at night whenever somebody passed by on the road, the sound that had always brought him to the window, his hand groping in the darkness for the drawer and the weapon he kept in the desk close by.

But it was too late for that. Something heavy struck the front door and glass showered the tiles in the reception room, striking the wall, the interior door, and skittering under it.

He only just made the landing when the door was kicked open and the beam from the torch, a brilliant funnel of bluish light, flooded the hall.

And then nothing for a moment, as the light flashed up the stairs, down the length of the passageway toward the back door, and then into the now-dark sitting room where the radio was still playing.

From the backyard he heard a shot, and Pegeen’s braying stopped suddenly. He then heard her wheeze pitiably. Another shot. The dogs were quieting now, and low voices came to him from the kennels. The murmur of several men.

The light moved into the sitting room, and Matthews eased himself along the wall toward the bedroom and its window that gave onto the roof of the kennels.

How had they quieted the dogs and with what? Mince—it had to be. Could he drop down over them without setting them off again?

Pegeen, he thought. The bastards. He’d had her for twenty-three years, off and on. She had come with him there from Leenane, after the farm had been taken from him and he had needed the new identity. She had been all that he’d had left from the other life, the sole thing that had tied him to his family and his past.

He opened the drawer of the nightstand and slid out the silver automatic, thumbing off the safety and shoving it under his belt.

It had been hot during the day and the window was open, and down in the yard he could see other lights being played around the verges of the marsh.

And a flash in the doorway and feet on the stairs.

He slid his leg out, eased his body under the window, and then tried to lower himself down, but the drop was farther than he had thought and his fingers couldn’t hold the sill. One hand slipped, then the other, a fingernail breaking and his fingers scraping down the masonry, catching at last on the hard stone of the house itself.

The flash of light out the window above him was almost tangible, freighted and lethal and blinding, like the blast of a bomb.

But he couldn’t hold on and he heard steps approaching and smelled the scorch of a cigar, rank and acrid and strong.

In one motion he let go and grabbed for the weapon.

His heels struck the roof of the kennel, which roared like a drum, and he jerked the barrel at the window and fired.

The blast snapped back his arm, and he rolled over and skidded, face first, down the sheet-metal roof into the darkness, falling heavily onto a stack of turf.

The dogs were roaring again, and he heard shouts from the sides of the house.

And in the window a gun opened up—something big and quick, like a sten, cutting down into the darkness and through the overhang.

Matthews scrambled to his feet and began running in a low crouch, using the side of the house to shield himself from the fire above.

But lights splashed over the grass of the lawn and caught him halfway to the marsh, and the gun rapped out once more, spattering the ground around him.

The bullet slammed into his lower back and hurled him into the reeds. And then something went wrong with his hand as well. Was he still holding the gun? He wasn’t, he didn’t think, but it didn’t matter, now.

The tide was in and he was up to his neck in water. He pulled in a breath and went under, down to the mucky bottom where he thought he could feel the firm roots of the reeds. He tried to pull himself forward, out into the Boyne, but he couldn’t tell if he was moving. His entire back was a burning, searing center of pain, and below that he couldn’t feel anything. But he crawled on or thought he did, scratching and tearing at the muddy bottom, trying to keep himself down and moving forward. Until he began to feel himself fading and could no longer find reeds or make his arms move and he had to come up.

Matthews broke into clear water beyond the reeds where a three-quarter moon made the river seem silver and as tranquil as any placid lake. And he was concealed from the shore. He could hear the dogs and the men, but only now and again did the lights wink at him through gaps in the reeds or pass overhead in shafts that were subsumed by the darkness.

The water was cold there, out where the current flowed, and it seemed to soothe his back like two cooling hands. He tilted back his neck, the better to float. The sky was limpid and bright, stars stacked to eternity, it seemed, and whatever had driven him to flee from the house and into the water seemed to leave him. He no longer cared if he lived or died, and suddenly he was very tired. He seemed to be leaving his body—his arms and legs, even his face and head—and retreating to someplace as distant and small as the stars above him.

He couldn’t remember how long he had remained like that, uncaring, inert, simply drifting with the incoming tide, but it had to have been several hours at least, for he remembered only the sky suddenly becoming black and his head and shoulders knocking up against something hard.

The quayside or a pier. And his shoe was on something too. A footing. Slane. He had the right kind of friends there, ones who’d understand that he’d been wronged and what he’d have to do. If only he could recover.

And now, there in the van with the night coming on, he had only his pain for company and his hate, and he cozened and saved every galling throb against the moment when he’d take his revenge. And it would be sweet and he wouldn’t care what happened to him after.

The door opened, but he did not turn to it. “How is it now, Jimmy?” the other man asked, bending over him. “Will I call the doctor?”

“Better, Mick,” he lied. “Much better. Let’s not bother him further. I’m beholden enough.”

Horses—Murray thought, looking up from the computer’s printouts that were heaped on the desk in his study—they’d be the ruin of him yet. Not a person or a thing that he’d encountered in the venture had proved rewarding in any…well, that wasn’t exactly true. He tossed the pencil down on the stack and stood. But maybe about even that he was codding himself. It depended on how he handled it, especially now.

He removed the cigar from his mouth and stepped closer to the window, peering through the gap in the heavy, velveteen drapes, out at the tree-shaded street and the yellow convertible that he’d heard pull up many minutes before.

Maybe he’d wanted too much for Sean, and for himself too. Maybe there really was a born, a genetic aristocracy, people who were just naturally better and finer, and who knew and could handle, buy, sell, and enjoy things like horses and yachts, and who had that certain, sure touch with people that put them in their place.

But no, look at the girl Mairead, the child of a simple country woman, and she had that ease of manner, taste and talent too. She was like those others—content in her abilities and her…inabilities as well, not always blundering off after this and that, trying to be something she was not. Like him and like Sean. Not knowing why but simply grasping, wanting what others had and for what? To show them. And what? That they weren’t common, when in fact the very effort marked them. Indelibly.

But it didn’t help, thinking like that, given their—he glanced at the desk—situation.

And the car door had opened, and Sean had stepped out.

Fool of a father, Murray thought, fool of a son. But it was too late to change that now, and it was one thing to think those thoughts in the quiet of one’s study and quite another to act them out. How often had Murray told himself he’d be one way and found himself another and always the same—the man who hankered after success, had all the trappings but none of the appreciation of money and power. And there he’d only succeeded in passing the worst parts of his personality down to his son. And none of the strength that had…saved him.

Quickly now he moved to the study door and out into the hall. From the front door he called to his son, who had been on the point of walking past the gate.

And he had the sunglasses on again. And the stiff gait, all squared shoulders with his weight on his heels, like a drunk with a jag on who was trying to conceal it. Was that what he’d been doing alone in the car?

Murray felt his gorge rising and his shoulder twitched involuntarily. “Where’re you off to?”

“Thought I’d pop down to the pub.”

“With the Show and your exams coming up?”

“I don’t see you stinting yourself.”

Murray heard a door open behind him on the landing and he glanced up.

It was his wife, dressed in a vivid red dressing-gown and looking like a successful tout’s moll in a Grade B, British movie. She too tried hard, he reminded himself, but she had even less of an idea of how it was done. Small and squat, her hair dark and curly and as well cared for as a clipped hedge—what could he tell her, what could he say? Should he try to explain, apologize for all he had brought on both of them, for their lifetime of striving? No—it was better to say nothing. Not now. Not with what was facing them.

“Could you step in here now for a moment, son? I’d like to have a word with you. Won’t take long, that’s a promise.”

And that he had to pander to the boy, the pleading note in his voice, the conciliation—it showed him all the more how he had failed, had spoiled himself by giving in so completely to his ambitions, had spoiled the boy by the example.

His wife started down the stairs, her step heavy, beefy, her seeming as out of place under the brilliant Georgian chandelier as she looked on a horse at a hunt. But then, Murray knew he himself appeared no better.

Go to bed! Murray wanted to shout. But this was important and he couldn’t afford to lose his temper, to climb into the role he affected in his offices and…in the world. “Just a little money matter, Bridie,” he said in a soothing tone. “Expenses and the Show.”

“Don’t go too hard on him now,” she said. “It won’t be long before he’s out on his own.” She turned and stepped back to her own study, her ankle still narrow even with her size. A good woman, Murray thought, and deserving of…better? No—different.

His son brushed by him, hands in pockets, his hair flopping about his shoulders, the goon’s glasses still on his face.

Murray was tempted to slam the door but he held off. And with the study door too.

“Drink?”

“No—why don’t you have mine for me? You probably could use it.”

But still Murray kept it in.

“They stop round to the garage?” the son asked in Trinity tones, nonchalantly, the final word sounding almost French. “Is that what this is all about?”

“And isn’t it enough?” Murray was tempted to fill the brandy snifter but he held off. “You handled yourself rather poorly today.”

“And you any better, drunk or whatever it was you were. Anyhow,” he sat in a cushioned chair and draped one leg over the arm, “how does it matter?”

“Matter?” Murray asked in a quiet tone, turning to the boy. “Lying under oath doesn’t matter? Do you know that they’ve picked up the garage mechanic who is supposed to have worked on your car? They’ve got him down in the Castle; they’re grilling him right now.”

The son only hunched his shoulders and looked away. “I thought you said he was dependable.”

“And he is, as much as any man, but don’t you underestimate that culchie sonofabitch, O’Shaughnessy. He’d like nothing better than to hook us on this one, with me down there representing you and all.” It was getting out of hand now—his temper, his persona.

Murray took a long drink from the snifter. “And don’t make any mistake about it. He’ll lean on that fellow, and there’s only so much—” he glanced at the desk and the computer records on it, “—input I can have in the matter. He’ll crack him, he will. And then where will you be?” He moved toward the son.

“But you were representing me,
and all
,” he replied, making fun of Murray’s thick Dublin brogue. “I didn’t sign, did I? My—” he flicked his wrist, “—memory will suddenly return.”

Christ, Murray thought, just what the hell was it he had taken that he didn’t appreciate the seriousness of his position? And Murray’s own. Something like this, a scandal, and everybody would start looking at him hard. “And what will your memory tell you, I’m after wanting to know?”

The son jerked his head to him. His lower lip, which was protrusive, jumped toward his nose. Through his bottom teeth he said, “Are you
after
, are you
after wanting
—indeed?”

Murray’s wrath rose up inside him. He felt the bitter sting in his stomach and chest. Sweat exuded from his forehead and upper lip, and his breathing was suddenly heavy. He glared down at his son, his only child, whose smile was supercilious and foppish, the sunglasses wrapping his eyes, like some guru on the cover of a rock album.