The Death of an Irish Tradition (19 page)

There, seated in a tall, wingback chair—smoke rising through a shaft of early evening sunlight and seeming very blue—was Sean Murray.

“A police escort, no less. How nice of you, Inspector, or are you off-duty now, on another sort of chase?”

The girl’s expression was pained. She tossed her jacket and handbag into the mother’s chair. “Oh, Sean—don’t be a boor, and put that thing out.” She moved to the bay windows and opened the tops and bottoms of those on either end. Silhouetted against the direct sunlight, her dress became almost transparent, and Ward caught a glimpse of her body—trim but full enough, lithe in an athletic way, tall and thin and balanced.

“Ah, have a toke and relax.” Murray’s speech was a bit slurred, and he seemed to be shaking or moving slightly, the ankle of one leg, which was crossed over the other, spinning quick circles, jerking, like a pendulum marking some internal time.

He was wearing a white linen suit, a violet shirt that was open at the neck, heavy-framed sunglasses, and shoes, which seemed to be made of plastic, that matched. In all, he looked like a clown. “Or one of your pills,” Murray went on. “You’re too tight—I’ve told you before. Learn to live.

“Inspector—” On a bent wrist he offered Ward the cigarette, the smell from which Ward couldn’t place. Hashish? No, something sweet and not as scorched. Cocaine? Ward wondered if Sean would have enough money and the access to cocaine in such quantities that he would consider smoking it, even if it only laced some other substance. Perhaps it was just a variety of marijuana he had never smelled before. “A hit? Hell, I won’t tell. Not me.” He began laughing foolishly.

Ward only stared at him.

“I’m going to get us some wine,” she said, hands on her hips, looking down at him. “When I return, I expect you to be gone.” Her pose was interesting, Ward thought, militant and poised and almost like a boxer’s with one foot forward, one fist in the palm of the other hand.

“Oh, be nice. Be nice, now, or I won’t let you near me pretty horses.

“Do you know she’s going to ride for us in the Show? Papa’s orders. She’s got a line on him too, you see. I’d watch yourself, if I were you, Inspector. Got some witch in her, she does.”

At the fridge, she became suddenly furious—with Sean, with being suddenly thwarted in her intention to play while the mood was on her. She grasped the neck of the wine bottle and slammed it down on the counter. And, dammit, there was hardly any left. She stormed into the pantry and tossed things around until she found the case, down below where the pots were, and another bottle.

“Temper, temper—” Sean shouted to her. “And she’s got one, you know. Mairead gets what Mairead wants, if not—” he smiled foolishly at Ward, “—she could strangle you. I think Mammy,” he said derisively, “spoiled the bitch. Poor, dear,
dead
, darling Mammy.”

Ward himself now felt his gall rising. He wanted to snatch the butt out of the young man’s hands and haul him outside, seeing to it he had a rough trip down the stairs, but he was interested in what was being said too, in a professional way.

Still he said nothing, only stared.

“A shame, isn’t it?” Murray went on. “That only now can I sit here with you, of all people, relaxing like it was home.” There was an off note in that too. “A pity. I bleed for her, honestly I do.”

And he had for somebody else as well, Ward thought. There was a stitch in his upper lip.

“Yes, Papa thinks Mairead’s just the cat’s pajamas, as he puts it. Or maybe it’s just that he prefers her
in
pajamas.”

She moved back into the sitting room quickly, carrying a tray with two glasses and a bottle of red wine.

“Quaint expression, isn’t it? Dates him, so it does. But Mairead isn’t anybody to hold age against a person. How old was that lover of yours, Meg? The randy old one in Rome? You know, Giuseppi di Pizza Pie.”

She set the tray down on the back of the piano and turned on him. “Get out!”

“Well—maybe he wasn’t exactly your lover, but you can dream, can’t you?” He turned his head to Ward. “Lots of imagination in Meg. She pictures herself with some Prince Valiant type, or at least a prince of something or other—older, loaded, somebody who can launch her ‘career,’ and she’s got several in mind.” He turned to her. “An ambitious girl. Imaginative, as I was saying. But don’t touch her, don’t
dare
touch her. Oh, no—”

The girl took a step toward him, but Ward reached out and pulled her close. To Murray, he said, “Go. Now. No talk. Just go.”

The ankle stopped spinning. The hand with the cigarette came down. The head quivered and the stitched mouth opened.

Ward only shook his head.

Murray stood, unsteadily at first, buttoned his jacket and stepped toward the door, Ward behind him.

At the door he turned and opened his mouth but thought better of it.

Ward followed him down and examined the catch, which was on.

She was waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

“Wasn’t that door locked?” he asked her.

“I don’t know, I can’t remember. Is it important?” Her smile was strange, heightened, her eyes slightly glassy.

“And this one?”

She didn’t move out of his way, only stared down at him, as though she expected something from him. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

She played for him for nearly two hours, mostly pieces that he didn’t know and hadn’t heard before, but she had a command over the large, black instrument that could not be denied, driving and checking it, making it sing at one moment and whisper the next, but never letting it get out of her grasp. In hand, he thought, remembering how she had treated a horse that had refused a gate at the jumping ring earlier, staying with it firmly until she bent it to her will. Her fine features, the wispy clothes she wore, her almost too feminine demeanor were deceiving. There was iron in her touch. It was well concealed, but it was there.

Afterward, she went into her bedroom and changed into a lounging outfit that reminded Ward most of pajamas, but special pajamas made of dull gold that clung to her hips and made them seem fuller than she had felt under his hands when he had pulled her to him. Only one button closed the jacket under her breasts, which were emblazoned in the light from the lamp on top of the piano.

She waited. Ward could see her heart pounding, sending tremors down the taut shape of her golden, shimmering chest. It wasn’t that he was calm himself, but he had been in situations like this before, and he knew what was expected of him and what he wanted to do, but he was torn between that urge and his duty. Granted they were alone, but he had met her in official circumstances and the investigation was continuing.

But perhaps—he told himself as he placed his arm behind her and turned on the couch so he was facing her—it would be worse to disappoint her, and what harm could one kiss do?

She looked up at him, her eyes dark and glassy and not just from the wine, and he lowered his face to hers, slowly, watching her lips tremble and then open to accept his.

She wasn’t practiced at kissing, of that he was sure, but it was as though their touching set off something uncontrollable in her. Her body rose up into his—her chest, the small area at the base of her spine that he could feel under his hand—and she was suddenly torrid. The skin on her cheeks, her forehead, her neck was hot to his touch. “Stay with me tonight,” she said into his ear, pulling his head down on her chest where the tan line stopped and the skin was smoother on his lips than Ward had ever felt. Already his hand had slipped beneath the waistband of her slacks and he could feel her hand on his thigh.

But he broke from her. “I can’t and you know why and you don’t want that either.” He turned her and rested her head in his lap. He brushed back the hair on her temples and stroked her forehead, which was damp.

And tears. She felt angry and frustrated, but she felt like a savage too, a beast; her personality was so…furious there was no controlling it, sometimes. And her mother—.

She closed her eyes.

Later, when he suspected she had fallen asleep, Ward heard a noise on the stairs. The door opened and the priest, Father Menahan, stepped in.

What he saw at first startled him, but he composed himself, smiled, and left as quietly as he had come.

MCGARR WAS THE LAST
to arrive in his office at Dublin Castle, well past ten, which was unusual.

The others turned to him.

One stopped in the act of slipping a sheet of paper into a typewriter. Another scanned McGarr’s face—the puffed eye, the large bruise that had turned a mottled blue-green, the scowl. His ears pulled back and he looked away.

It was McKeon, however, who summed up their sentiments. He wrinkled up his nose and let out a little howl, high-pitched and humorous, but McGarr wasn’t having any of it.

He had a newspaper rolled up in the fist of his right hand. He slapped it on Ban Gharda Bresnahan’s desk and said, “Coffee.” He then trudged through the rows of old wooden desks into his cubicle, where he flicked the door shut behind him.

A patch of red had appeared under each of the woman’s cheekbones, and she turned to McKeon, who had recruited her as his assistant only a month before. She was handling the job and well, as far as he was concerned, and he wanted to keep her.

“Whoy,” she aspirated in the distinctive brogue of her native Kerry, “—who the hell does he t’ink—”

“Ah now, Ruthie—” McKeon began, trying to calm her, noticing the flush that had spread to her broad forehead, her ears.

She was a big, red-haired woman, and the dark-blue uniform, buttoned across her chest, made her seem even sturdier. “Imposing” was the word McKeon himself had used after they had settled an interoffice jurisdictional dispute and not to his favor.

She stood and leaned toward Delaney. “Why didn’t he ask you, mister?”

She turned on Greaves, jamming her hands on her hips. “Or you, mister?”

Greaves cocked his head, as though to say it was a good question.

But Bresnahan was not in a mood to listen. “It’s because I’m a woman, that’s why.

“Well, we’ll soon see about this, we will. Whomiliatin’ me in my work place.”

McKeon stood, but she brushed past him and reached for the knob on McGarr’s cubicle door.

Greaves lowered his head, as if ducking. Delaney slipped the piece of paper into the machine and pretended to busy himself with a report. Even Ward turned his back and looked out the window. There had been a time, and not long before, when on such a morning it had been he who had been sent to the tea station up the hall, but that was when he had been the most recent appointee to McGarr’s staff.

McGarr thought he had never felt worse. He wasn’t injured enough to remain in bed, but he didn’t feel capable of being up and about either. It had most to do with his vision, which was still only partial on the left side, and made it seem as though he was looking out through a slit in a bunker.

He hadn’t even glanced at O’Shaughnessy, who was sitting in a chair to the side of his desk, a pearl-gray homburg on his head, the
Press
in front of his face. McGarr had opened the lower right-hand drawer of his desk for the bottle he kept there.

He had then raised the window and looked out, hands in his pants pockets. He hoped the fresh air would partially revive him before his coffee arrived, but he knew the overall ache in his arms and legs—somebody rapped on the door—and his chest and back wouldn’t leave him for days.

Again the rap.

“Yeah?” Out of the corner of his eye he saw only the bright-red hair and the general shape of the woman, before he turned back to the window. “Put it on the desk.” A moment passed and then he remembered. “Please.”

O’Shaughnessy hadn’t lowered the paper.

“I—if I could have a word—”

Oh, Christ, McGarr thought, noting the militancy of her tone, having heard it before when she’d had a bone to pick with McKeon. McKeon—it was the last personnel decision he’d ever handle.

McGarr drew in a deep breath. Every aching muscle in his body, every iota of his flesh hoped that she had brought him the large Styrofoam cup of thick, black coffee with the plastic lid on the top to keep it piping hot. He exhaled and turned around slowly, both hands still in his pockets, where he was jiggling some coins.

There she was, he thought, that mountain of red flesh and—he glanced at the desk—
without
the coffee.

O’Shaughnessy lowered the paper. Only the creased crown of the light-gray hat, then the brim, and finally the eyes appeared. They glanced from her to McGarr. O’Shaughnessy raised the paper again.

She opened her mouth, but before she could speak the door popped open and McKeon appeared, craning his neck around her to see McGarr. He had something in either hand. “Coffee,” he said, “and tea.” He jerked a thumb at the newspaper.

O’Shaughnessy mumbled something, and McKeon, without glancing at McGarr again, closed the door.

McGarr moved toward the desk. He prised off the lid, raised the cup, and took a long, slow sip, closing his eyes. The coffee had been on the burner all night, and it tasted like thick, bitter, and delicious mud. He put down the cup, pulled the cork from the bottle, and topped it up. Only then did he glance at her.

At the sight of McGarr’s face—swollen, the one eye seeming to be locked in a pugnacious, brutish squint—her features softened. She had enjoyed Fogarty’s description of the bungled arrest attempt and the theft of his car, and perhaps all the more for having spoken to the journalist only the day before. His plain, hard-hitting style had made it clear what had gone on, but maybe he hadn’t told all.

McGarr placed the bottle back on the blotter of his desk, but he did not recork it. He glanced at her again, picked up the coffee, and carried it to the window.

There he drank for a good long time, letting the hot liquor burn down his throat. The effect was almost immediate. He set the cup on the sill.

Again the azure skies with only fine, cirrus clouds high above, looking like the mottled highlights in a turquoise stone. Yet another hot day. An eighth floor of girders had been added to the office building since he had last looked. Somebody in an old biplane, the engine of which blatted when it dived, was up over the Bay. The plane was bright yellow and glinted as it bellied over and climbed past Howth Head.

When McGarr turned around, Bresnahan was gone.

Keegan placed the
Times
down on the one dry area of the narrow table. On it were four pint glasses and fresh, the yellow, creamy collars hardly touched. He glanced up at the others. Lag mates—he had helped them all at one time or another, but what was it he read in their faces? Consternation, indecision, fear? “What’s this lot then?”

“Ah, Jimmy—this thing,” with two stiff fingers he tapped the newspaper, his voice hardly a whisper, “it’s as good as dashed, the whole bloody business, and make no mistake about that.”

Keegan tried to ease his back against the cushions in the snug, but even the slightest pressure made it hurt too much. The antibiotics had arrested the infection and the drugs helped too, but he knew he’d need further medical attention and soon. And he was getting weak.

“They’ll have every feckin’ bluecoat in Dublin on him now. We’re not trying to break on you, mind—it’s all equal to us—, but they’ll make a show of us, so they will.”

Another said, “Are you sure you didn’t set him up, before you got hit and all? I remember, before the raid on—”

Keegan only shook his head and considered them—all old men, like himself, who belonged here amid the noise and clutter of the pub, knocking back a few jars and reminiscing, not out on the job and a hard one at that. And this was a private matter, his own.

Hadn’t the bastard as much as tried to annihilate his family? First he’d tried for the land with a lawyer’s trick, the business about no proper deed, and when that didn’t work somebody had shopped him, Keegan, even told them where he could be found and at what hours and how he should be taken. They caught him like this, having a pint in a snug. Ryan’s, it was, in Kingsbridge.

Keegan now looked out and caught the barman’s eye. The man raised his brows; the bar was packed, but there was a certain deference to age and Keegan knew he looked ancient—without the mustache and tweeds, but with the sallow, sickly complexion and the old coat and cloth cap.

He held up finger and thumb, measuring off the size of a ball of malt, then indicated he wanted one for each of them. The others would wonder where he’d gotten the readies, but he was beyond caring. He went back to reminiscing.

And then—when he was gone—getting Grainne, who was young and simple and was home alone with Maggie Kate (another innocent), fat with child, and then swearing her to secrecy so that he, Keegan, had had to beat the truth out of her…he could hardly bear to think of it to this day.

By then the farm had been all but abandoned and Maggie Kate and Grainne’s child had to be provided for, and Grainne herself, who’d gone daft because of it. The offer was there, a low offer. Through a solicitor Keegan had accepted. He’d been in Birmingham, having been fingered again and having gone to ground.

He’d gotten drunk for three days. His farm, the family’s land—it wasn’t much by any standard, but it had been theirs, and to sell it for next to nothing was anathema to Keegan. And it had been then, on the jag, that he had thought of the way he could make Bechel-Gore pay. And he had gotten support too, from the people who knew how to do things. His people, after a fashion.

But now, should he ask them again? He didn’t think so. They’d walked the extra mile already. And there were young ones who’d do what he wanted for a few quid and a chance to use a weapon.

The malts were delivered.

“Lovely chat, this,” one of them said, raising his glass. He looked this way and that, bending close to them. “To the bloke and his mates who tried it. May their aim improve betimes.”

The others muttered and they all drank but Keegan. He had taken the drugs and didn’t want to chance it, not while he still had things to do.

“But then, Jimmy—if it wasn’t you, who was it?”

“Sure, he’s got a Republic full of enemies,” another said.

“Yes—but in particular.”

Keegan kept still, looking up at the three dull globes that shone over the bar.

“There’s Murray. No love lost there, I’ve heard it told. Both into the big foreign sales market, you know, and Butcher-bleeding-Gore having the lead and all. Way out in front, it’s said, and gaining all the time.”

“And the army too. Something like that would put all the horsey set on notice—that we haven’t forgotten, that they’ve been allowed to remain here at our sufferance.

“Well—wasn’t he from the North, your man? Didn’t he have a history and all? Not a proud thing, I grant you, but all the same it’s there and definite.” The man tapped the newspaper again. The sniper was a known Provo and suspected of several bombings in the North.

Keegan placed his hand on the table and tried to stand. The large man to his right helped him.

“Off now.”

“What—so soon? Ya haven’t even touched—”

“The back. I’ve some pain-killers in me. Have it yourselves.” He’d left the change on the table too, and the paper. He couldn’t bear to look at it.

“How is it now?”

“On the mend, thanks.”

“If there’s anything—”

“No, no—you’re right. I’ll bide my time awhile.”

“Do that and we’ll settle him, the lot of us, when everything sorts itself out. Quiet like.”

As he departed, Keegan heard one of them say, “He’s a generous bugger and always was. I wonder who put the bend on him.”

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face. Bechel-Gore’s got money, and money is power, and there are those of us with short memories and long thirsts.”

“Why you filthy son of a…”

Drunk on a couple of rounds, Keegan thought. He was better off without them.

But out on the hot pavement, waiting for a break in the traffic, he felt a hand on his arm.

“You’re going through with it, aren’t you?”

He looked up. Dick, the big man who’d kept with him from the start of his trouble out in Slane. His face was battered and scarred from boxing and stints in British nicks where being large and rebellious didn’t count for much. He looked away, down the Merrion Road, where a long line of cars was queuing up to pull into the Show Ground parking areas. “There’s only so much of that,” he motioned to the bar, “I can take, and what’s left for us now?”

He was a bachelor. He had a small horse farm, raised some donkeys, but his heart wasn’t in it anymore.

Keegan knew how it was and he was better off. He had Mairead…after a fashion.

“Will we lift him?” McKeon asked McGarr, cupping his hand over the phone. “He’s just left the Horse and Hound with the other bloke, Boland. The other two they met are still inside.”

McGarr thought for a moment, looking down at his desk. On it was a cheese Danish, the shiny, nut-brown crust hot to his touch. He broke it open just to see what was inside. The golden dough was rich and the sour-sweet cheese steamed up. Bresnahan had gone out for it herself, and it was a vapor that he couldn’t resist. He cut a slice and pushed it across to the others who were sitting on chairs or leaning against the cubicle walls around his desk.

The fingerprints that the sniper had left in Fogarty’s car matched those on the handle of the screwdriver that McGarr had found under Keegan’s Daimler at the garage in Ballsbridge. They belonged to a certain Jack B. Frayne of Armagh, a Provo activist.

But what interested McGarr most about the man’s dossier, a copy of which had been rushed down by the constabulary in the North, was his earlier training in the British army. He had become expert with four types of weapons, including a target rifle of the sort he had struck McGarr with. Then why had he missed Bechel-Gore? Although a good shot, McGarr was no expert, and he was willing to bet he could have placed a slug in Bechel-Gore’s heart at twice the distance. Of course, the wind had to be a factor, and it hadn’t been steady, rather blustery and changing. And one of the grooms might have been in the sniper’s line of sight.

But after what had happened to Keegan—the raid, Maggie Kate’s murder, Pegeen, the lot—could Bechel-Gore have thought it wisest to foment an incident in order to surround himself with police protection? The apples and the horse and walking her in the stable yard, the sniping—it went awry, of course, but he could easily have heard that McGarr was staying down at the inn in Leenane. It was a small country place and people talked.