“She can’t be serious. She’s not a lick of authority here,” Cahal protested.
“But she can cause right shite now, can she not? Your job is to find her when she arrives and kill her. This time don’t muck about. Do it right. If you cock it up, you know the consequences. You won’t wake up next time.”
“I understand, I’ll make sure she’s dead,” Cahal said.
“Yes, you will. Now, here’s a phone. Make whatever calls you need, but make sure it’s done.”
John Dunne left the room. Cahal sighed and got out of bed. He found a teakettle on the table. He plugged it in, waited until the water boiled, and made a strong cup of tea.
He almost burnt his tongue on the hot tea as he dialed a number.
“Who’s this?” a voice asked on the end of the line.
“Cahal here, don’t ask questions, we got a job to do.”
37
The next day was a blur of activity. Bernadette was up at five, ran with Sprocket, showered, and packed a bag. Chris took her to the Calgary airport with Sprocket in the back of the Jeep.
They left at eight for the hour and a half drive. The sun rose in the brilliant blue sky. The outside temperature gauge read a frigid minus twenty centigrade. The Rocky Mountains were encased in a blanket of snow as they got closer to Calgary. They looked like sentinels guarding the way to the western ocean.
There was so much Bernadette loved about moments like these—the silence of the morning, the hum of the tires on the road, the feeling of just being with Chris.
There were things tugging at her brain, it was the last phone call with Grandma Moses. She called to tell her she was going to Ireland and Grandma Moses had said, “You remember that dream I told you about? I had it again last night.”
Bernadette had to think about it for a second, it had been last week. So much had happened since then. It was something about a castle and the ocean. She promised her grandma she would avoid both places, told her she loved her, and got off the phone.
The airport was busy when they arrived; she hugged Chris gently due to his ribs, wrapped her arms around Sprocket, and headed for her plane.
She had only a carry-on bag that contained two pairs of jeans, t-shirts, a couple of sweaters and a rain jacket along with underwear and some makeup.
The flight to Toronto was three hours and forty-five minutes. Every seat was packed with businesspeople and those trying to get to Toronto for a long weekend of theater and music.
The two women sitting beside her were doing just that. They talked incessantly about the shows they were going to see and all the shopping they were going to do. Bernadette put in her ear buds and watched reruns of Cagney and Lacey on her IPad.
The Toronto airport was busy. She wondered just where the hell everyone was going in February in Canada, but the answer was easy. South. Canadians flocked south to the beaches of the Caribbean, Mexico, and the U.S. that earned them the name snowbirds.
Bernadette found a bookstore, wandered in, and browsed the aisle on history. There was a book on Ireland, called Voices from the Grave. She leafed through it and found it to be a biography of two dead men. One had been in the IRA, the other on the Loyalist side in Northern Ireland.
She bought the book and headed into the international boarding area to board the Air Canada Airbus. The plane was half full as this was not tourist season in Ireland.
Most of the passengers looked to Bernadette like business types, some in suits, some in expensive jeans and designer sweatshirts and wearing shoes that had been in the last issue of Vogue magazine. They were either some kind of new techie entrepreneur or had figured out a way to run another scam on bitcoin.
She took a window seat in an unoccupied row and opened her book. The plane took off at 8:45 p.m. The flight was six hours and forty-five minutes and she doubted she would sleep.
The cabin personnel helped in that. They brought by coffee, and then drinks, then food followed by duty free items for people to make purchases of things they never knew they wanted. By the time they’d finished and shut off the lights so people could sleep it was well past midnight Toronto time.
Bernadette hit the call button for a coffee and kept reading her book. She got to the part when the Troubles started. They’d decided that marches no longer worked. They, being the IRA, decided violence was the answer.
She sipped her coffee and kept reading. There was a place in Belfast called Shankill Road where some of the violence started, then it spread throughout the city until people were hiding behind barricades or in their houses from snipers and firebombs.
After several hours of reading, Bernadette got a sense of her ancestry. Ireland, this lovely ancient land of myths and legends, had become a pawn of kings and queens. The planting of English Protestants in the North to act as a buttress against a possible invasion of England in the sixteenth century had set a smoldering ember of resentment that would erupt in violence on a regular basis.
As the big plane droned its way to the little island, Bernadette hoped that this place would never erupt in violence again. She felt her eyes droop. Putting her book on the seat next to her, she stuffed her jacket against the window and fell asleep.
The lights came on in the cabin, the flight attendants announcing the plane was landing in twenty minutes. Bernadette rubbed her eyes. She’d been asleep for fifteen minutes.
She made her way to the toilets, washed her face, and looked at her herself in the mirror. “Wow, you look awful,” she told herself with a laugh. She brushed her hair and put on a bit of makeup, so she didn’t look like a character in the Day of the Dead.
The plane landed in Dublin in a rainstorm. As the big plane taxied to the terminal, the rain pounded the runway making it look like a sea had taken it over.
Bernadette got through customs easily. She claimed on her entry form that she was visiting family. She even put her aunt’s name as her contact in Ireland. She planned on meeting her in the next twenty-four hours to hunt for Cahal.
When she discovered her car, she had a realization. This was the smallest car she’d ever seen. She drove a Jeep back home. She’d grown up driving trucks on the reservation in the north; the cars the Canadian police used were big Fords. This was smaller than small.
She opened the back hatch and dumped her bag in. Then she went to get into the driver’s door and realized it was the wrong door. “Okay, Bernadette, wrap your head around it, think left. They drive on the left,” she said aloud with a laugh.
An Irish couple was getting into a car beside her; they looked at her only briefly wondering who the crazy lady was talking to.
She got into the driver’s side and the reality sunk in; she would be managing a four-speed stick with her left hand. How weird was that? She’d driven her grandma’s old Ford that had a three on the column shift and some water trucks for an oil rig to make money before college, but this would be different.
She put the car in reverse and backed out, instantly realizing she was headed the wrong way. Left, everything is left. Pulling out of the parking garage she almost ran into a bus as she’d slipped into the right lane on her exit.
The bus sounded a loud horn that woke her up. Left, think left.
She used her cell phone GPS on maps to locate Annie’s Place.
“Okay, turn right,” Bernadette said as the GPS voice told her to enter the motorway.
Her hand grabbed the gearshift. Her foot hit the clutch and the gears made a grinding sound.
“Wrong!” She said.
Her foot pressed the clutch in again. She looked at the gearshift; she’d gone the wrong way by dropping the gear into second instead of third. This time she went from second, pushed it up to third and let out the clutch while hitting the gas.
The little car lurched forward.
A horn sounded behind her. A massive truck was coming behind her fast hitting its horn and brakes at the same time.
She pushed in the clutch, popped the gear into fourth and hit the gas. The little car
’s tires squealed as it lurched forward. In seconds the car put distance between the big truck and impending doom.
“Holy crap, girl. You need to wake up.”
She found the turnoff to Blanchardstown and made the exit by threading the car between two large trucks and not hitting anyone. Moments later, she parked the car in front of Annie’s Café and turned off the engine.
The café was packed. A sea of fully awake people huddled over piles of toast, eggs, bacon, and beans.
Bernadette was instantly hungry. She’d pecked at the airline food that consisted of a sandwich wrap and salad with an unidentifiable dressing.
A man waved at her from a table by the window, and as she approached, he stood up. “Good morning, I’m Detective Patrick Sullivan. I recognized you from your detective photo. I hope you had a good trip over.”
Bernadette shook his hand, and t sat at the table. “It was fine.” She didn’t want to give him the long details of lack of sleep and bad food. That was a given in air travel.
A waitress with purple hair and a tattoo of three roses on her arm dropped menus and water on the table.
“The full breakfast is what you want if you’ve just had a sleepless night on a plane,” Sullivan said.
Bernadette sipped her water. “It’s that obvious?”
“The transatlantic crossing can be a bit much with the time change. How much is it for you?”
Bernadette looked at her watch. “It’s midnight in Calgary where I left from. So, an eight-hour time difference. I think the full breakfast might be needed.”
Sullivan ordered tea and Bernadette coffee with breakfast. There may be something to the Irish breakfast tea, but she was having nothing to do with it.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t meet at the station,” Sullivan said.
“I totally get it. I’m a Canadian tourist as far as your force is concerned, no badge and no authority.”
“Well, yes, and my boss doesn’t take well to other detectives dropping in to try to find an escapee from our jail.”
“Ah, a stickler for regulations, is he?”
Sullivan leaned forward. “Well, yes a bit, but we are under a lot of pressure. Two murders in the past week and several bomb threats with a bank robbery. I think we’re about over our quota for the year.”
“Any leads on the murders? Sorry to ask, but it’s my detective on vacation speaking. I hope you don’t mind,” Bernadette said.
“I don’t mind at all. The two victims were both retired IRA men. We have no leads to go one other than two children saw their grandfather being led away by two young men in a small blue car. The only thing the children gave us was the hair color of the men, red and black. No number plates and no other description.”
“What was the murder weapon?” Bernadette asked.
“The ballistics figures it’s a Smith and Wesson center model. Both nine millimeters bullets, standard load, not hollow point. As I say we’re stumped by this.”
“Do you think that your murders and the ones in Canada are connected in some way?”
“That’s a good thought, but why? Who would want to start killing off old IRA members? The Troubles have been over for some five years, but there’s been rumors of a resurgence throughout the country.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“A group calling themselves the New IRA have been planting bombs and
doing robberies. But the word we get from our informants is these aren’t the IRA at all. They are making themselves look like it to scare people.”
“Are they the same group that did the recent murders?”
“We think so, but we can’t put our finger on it. We’ve had no informers about that, which is strange. By now I’d have a dozen suspects. Right now, I have nothing.”
“I hate to mention it,” Bernadette said sipping her coffee, “but could this be the work of that ancient clan, of whatever you call it…?”
“Ah, the Tuata De’ Danann. I hope it isn’t something as crazy as that. Cults are hard to deal with. I can deal with criminals. They are selfish and lazy without morals. The cults I’ve dealt with have ideals that can make them unpredictable.”
The waitress arrived with their breakfast and set it before them. Bernadette looked down at a pile of food. Two sausages, a large chunk of bacon with French fries piled onto baked beans swimming in sauce with a fried egg on top. It made her lose her train of thought.
“The Irish know how make a good breakfast,” Sullivan said. “Now, tuck into that and I’ll give you a run down on where you might find Cahal.”
Bernadette needed little encouragement; she cut off some of the sausage, slid it through the bean sauce and chewed. It tasted fantastic.
Sullivan brought out a piece of paper. “Here are the pubs that your uncle would be getting into if he wanted to find people to hide him in Dublin.”
“What about out of Dublin? Do you think he’d be going to Kildare?” Bernadette asked between bites.
“Why Kildare?”
“I saw a picture of my Uncle Cahal outside the John Nolan Pub; the picture was supposedly from there.”
“I think I’ve seen such a place. There are a lot of pubs in Ireland.”
“I also have a lead of my Aunt Aideen. I spoke to her from Canada. She says she lives in a town called Kilmeague. I was going to see her after I leave here. I don’t think it’s too far.”
“Nothing’s far in Ireland,” Sullivan said. “The whole place is two hundred miles long and you can drive the width of it in day.”
“That’s where I’ll start then,” Bernadette said
Sullivan took a sip of his tea. “Look, I know my people can’t give you much support, but the moment you need some backup or you run into anything that you think is suspicious, I want you to call me.”
“I will, you can bet on it,” Bernadette said.
“And be very careful. These are troubling times here right now. We’re not sure who’s behind the killings and the bombings, but they are serious.”
“So am I,” Bernadette said as she paid the bill for both of them and got up to leave.
38
Bernadette got in her mini Ford and headed south on the M50. She’d put the town of Kildare and Kilmeague into her GPS and let the lady’s voice on her phone give her directions.
This time she took extra care to ensure she was in the right gear as she shifted. The clutch felt funny, it was small for her feet that were encased in her boots. The clutch was also quick. It wasn’t like that big ones on a truck, where you punched it down with your foot and did a slow release. This thing was fast.
She got the feel of the little car. The model had pep. Before long she was zipping in and out of traffic and passing all the large transports. She found the N4 turnoff that took her out of Dublin and then onto the small roads of the R403. She breathed a sigh of relief. She was now in the Irish countryside.
Even in February with rain pelting down it was green. Most of the trees were bare, but the grass, it was that emerald green that had given the island its name. She felt instantly comfortable here. It was as if she’d found the other half of herself, the Irish half that her father had given her.
She opened the window a crack and let the cool air flow in. The air smelled clean. All of her senses woke up and she felt refreshed.
As she gazed around the countryside, she almost giggled. Here she was playing tourist on the island, looking for her uncle who was wanted for aiding in a murder. How freaking odd was this.
A half hour later, she took the R415 and came upon the town of Kildare. She drove slowly by John Nolan Pub. The sign on the door stated it opened at ten-thirty in the morning. Her watch read nine-thirty. She stepped on the gas and headed for her Aunt Aideen’s place.
In another forty-five minutes she drove into the village of Kilmeague, population of 947. There wasn’t much there: a large church, a pub, and few small stores.
She found the address of a small, isolated house on a street that was almost out
of town. It was stone with a steep tile roof and wooden shutters. It looked like it hadn’t been taken care of in some time.
Knocking on the door, she heard shuffling of feet inside. The door opened slowly revealing an elderly woman with a wrinkled face underneath a cascade of gray curls. “Yes, who is it?”
“It’s Bernadette Callahan. Is this the home of Aideen Callahan?”
The door opened wide to reveal a little wiry body attached to the wrinkled face. “Why, Bernadette, what a joy to see you. Yes, it’s me, your Aunt Aideen. Come in, come in.”
Bernadette walked into the little house. The rugs on the floor were threadbare. There were few pieces of furniture in the home. A small sofa with a wavy surface that showed its lack of springs sat in the living room with two bentwood chairs. A small coffee table occupied the center of the room that looked like it had been in the midst of a battle that had been lost.
Aideen disappeared into the tiny kitchen and made tea. A moment later she shuffled out with a tray with teacups and biscuits.
“I had no idea you were coming, Bernadette, I would have gone ’round to the shops and bought some proper scones.”
Bernadette sat in one of the bentwood chairs, not wanting to chance a stray spring in the sofa. “This is fine. I should have called first, but I just got into Dublin this morning. I thought I’d surprise you.”
“Well, my dear, you have done that.”
Bernadette watched Aideen’s eyes as she placed the tray on the table. Was there something more to that statement?
“Do you take sugar?”
“Yes, two please.”
“A bit of a sweet tooth, like your father,” Aideen said as she dropped two cubes of sugar into her cup. “Do you take milk?”
“Yes, a large splash if you please.”
“Again, just like your father. I used to say he wasn’t having tea; it was a milk shake I was making for him.”
Bernadette stirred her tea and regarded her aunt. She looked barely five feet tall. She wore a wool dress, heavy stockings, and a cable knit sweater. The heat was barely on in the house, if at all. No wonder she had to wear so many cloths. A small fire burned in the hearth, throwing a bit of warmth in the air.
Deadly Ancestors: A Bernadette Callahan Mystery (Bernadette Callahan Detective Series Book 5) Page 19
