The Death of an Irish Politician

by Bartholomew Gill

  McGarr nodded and sipped from his whiskey.

  “In any case, my copy of the report is missing.”

  McGarr looked up. To his knowledge, the report was still most secret and political dynamite of the worst sort, since it blamed the IRA for the blast. And for the government it was a no-win situation: they had seemed to sit idly by while this organization, or some part of it, bombed downtown Dublin during rush hour.

  Horrigan continued, “It was a question of degrees—how much of the report we were going to release, how much innuendo we might have been able to create.”

  McGarr furrowed his brow. He didn’t care for politics or politicians one bit. He had seen too many competent policemen become patsies for wily politicians.

  “You know, we could go to the IRA and say, look, we know some part of your outfit did it, but there’s no reason to bring down the government too. We’ve been good to you. The arrests we’ve made, as you well know, have been pro forma. Here are your options or we’ll round up and intern every single IRA suspect we can find and then release the whole report: one, give us the names of the bunch of bastards who did it along with the evidence to hang them; two, give us some evidence to blame it on a British provocateur or any other organization but the IRA and its affiliates. Of course, we’ll hope they don’t just laugh at us. Mass arrests and internment would bring this government down in days. The people wouldn’t stand for it.”

  McGarr felt very uncomfortable and needed another whiskey badly. Politics blurred things so. He had been one of the first to arrive in Nassau Street after the blast. He had found a little girl with a leg and a hand blown off. That was wrong, no two ways about it. He wanted to get back to the facts. “Was there another copy?”

  “Not in this form. I was going to go over it Thursday night one final time before we retyped it and sent it to the Taoseaich. This was the unedited version.”

  “Where was it?”

  “In the sideboard under lock and key, of course.”

  McGarr could have gotten into that sideboard with a toothpick. His glance was more toward the whiskey decanter than the door lock. A person who didn’t drink had no idea of the timing necessary to be a successful host. McGarr imagined one whiskey might last Horrigan an eternity.

  “You see, this is most embarrassing to me. In order to get elected I had to support the violence in the North. Now, when it happens here in my own electorate and I’m in charge of the investigation and it seems like the IRA might get blamed, I suddenly dispose of the report. Or, just as bad, I release only a part of the report and the whole thing then turns up in the press.”

  “So somebody wants to get you and not necessarily the government.”

  “That’s why I called you. It seems to be some sort of private vendetta. I believe firmly that if I were to resign today, the report would either be returned or the parts that this government would doubtless eliminate or obscure will never surface.” McGarr said nothing, only looked at the minister, who added, “But I don’t want to resign voluntarily. I’ve waited a dozen years to get here. And where I’m headed I’ve wanted all of my life.”

  “No forced entry. You must suspect somebody and not just the”—he waved his hand—“IRA. Who else knew you had the report with you?”

  “My secretary, my first assistant, and”—Horrigan raised his glass to his mouth; he said over the surface of the liquor—“my wife.” He wet his upper lip. “My secretary is a widow near retirement who lives in Dublin. Both of her brothers died in the Troubles, both with the IRA.”

  “Name?”

  “Neila Monahan, two eighty-three North Circular Road.”

  “Your first assistant?”

  “A literary man. Sometimes submits poems in Irish to the Times.” Horrigan watched McGarr finish the whiskey in his tumbler. “Aren’t you going to take any of this down?”

  “No.” McGarr never took notes, he simply concentrated all his intelligence on the vital details of every case. He could summon from memory the names, addresses, and distinguishing characteristics of all persons he had arrested and many of the others who had figured in his investigations.

  “His name is Carleton Driver and he lives on Fitzwilliam Square.”

  “Age?”

  “Mid-forties.”

  “Married?”

  “To literature and the great Celtic oral tradition, if you know what I mean.”

  “How is his office work?”

  “Phenomenal, when he’s there. If I only had half his brains and he half my sense!”

  “Political leanings?”

  “Definitely left.”

  “Temperamental?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where does he drink?”

  “McDaid’s.”

  “Why do you think your wife stole the report?”

  This took Horrigan by surprise.

  “Would you mind if—” McGarr began to stand. He wanted another drink, even if he had to extort it. He had the feeling that much more information than what the minister had offered was yet to come.

  “Oh, please do. Excuse me.”

  McGarr poured himself a very sufficient drink.

  “Have you people been conducting your own investigation?”

  “No.”

  “Then how—?”

  “Call it a leap of faith.” McGarr offered him a Woodbine.

  Horrigan accepted, saying, “I haven’t had one of these for years.”

  “Don’t make it a habit. They tell me they’re a force more lethal than the IRA. You don’t live together?” In spite of the care taken with the details of the room, there was not one feminine touch anywhere. Everything was too ordered, nothing placed by whimsy.

  Horrigan looked askance at McGarr. “Has another minister asked you to—”

  McGarr shook his head. “You obviously credit me with knowing my profession, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked me here.”

  Horrigan stood and walked to the window as if he wished to heighten the confessional nature of the exchange. He drew on the cigarette and blew out the smoke immediately. “What can I tell you about Leona?”

  McGarr, perhaps because of the Ovens case, had not quite understood the minister’s pronunciation of the name. “Excuse me, what is her name?”

  Horrigan turned to him. “Leona. Do you know her?”

  McGarr shook his head.

  The minister turned back to the view of the courtyard. It had begun to rain and the sky was slate. “When we first married, we were poor but plucky. Both fresh out of university—she teaching national school here in Dublin for money that wouldn’t keep a friar in holy water, me trying to scrounge up legal work. I prosecuted my first case against the Dublin County Council when my maiden aunt slipped on a puddle of ice in front of her flat and broke her hip.”

  “Children?”

  “Three and grown. The youngest is a senior sophister at Trinity, of all places.”

  “When did you begin living apart?”

  Horrigan turned his head sharply to him. He honestly couldn’t remember. He walked to the table, picked up his glass, and then went to the sideboard. “Maybe fifteen years ago. The youngest was walking, I remember, and just about to enter kindergarten. We never talked about her leaving me, mind you, or about separation, living apart, or divorce. I had begun to make big money a few years before that, and we started adding a place here, a suite of rooms in London. We bought a boat.”

  “What kind?”

  “All kinds. She traded boats, bought, sold, rented, leased them in such multiplicity I don’t know what we own right now myself.”

  “You don’t sail yourself?” McGarr was now fitting the pieces of what the minister was telling him into the Ovens case. He wondered why the man had really called him here like this. Could it be that he had attacked Ovens and, definitely a nervous type, couldn’t wait for the investigation to uncover his wife’s involvement with the man?

  Horrigan chuckled into the whiskey glass. “I would have liked to sail and now re
alize that for the sake of my marriage I should have, but I either told myself I didn’t have the time or really didn’t have it. Another thing is the training. I tried it once, but I was born a Dublin guttersnipe. Do you know the sort of person who sails in Ireland, Peter?”

  “I know the sort of person who sails.” McGarr thought briefly of Ovens, who was an American, and then Horace C. K. Hubbard. McGarr had tried unsuccessfully to know some of the people who had sailed on the Riviera. To him they were different—ignorantly exclusive, inveterately romantic, eccentric.

  “They’re born to it. In her own way, my wife was too. Her father used to build boats for them at Cobh, and because of that they accepted her in a patronizing way, if you know what I mean. Later”—Horrigan raised his voice—“they accepted her because she could buy and sell the lot of them with the small change in her checkbook!” Merely talking about this situation seemed to anger Horrigan, but McGarr wished he knew the man better. There seemed to be just the slightest bit of affectation in his speech, a small touch of the histrionic in his gestures.

  McGarr sipped from his whiskey.

  Now Horrigan was leaning against the sideboard. “And so ours became one of the first of what they now call an ‘open’ marriage. She did her thing, as the saying goes, and I mine. Hers included several downright rotters. I hired Hugh Madigan—do you know him?”

  McGarr nodded. Madigan was a private detective with offices in London.

  “He told me that much. Along the way, about the time our oldest son became a research student in London, it became fashionable for certain ‘Anglo-Irish’ intellectuals—and I use both terms advisedly, Inspector McGarr—to champion the causes of the Bernadette Devlins of the North. Leona had money, you see, and Eoin—that’s our son—was just at the age when a party with free booze would invariably draw a bunch of freeloading blowhards he thought brilliant. So Leona gave parties.” Horrigan stubbed the cigarette butt into the ashtray. “She never seemed able to discriminate about people who weren’t exactly Irish, exactly her age, and exactly from her station in life.”

  “But about you?”

  “Yes, goddammit! About me she could give you a litany of my personal failings that would run to volumes, but about that collection of fairies and sycophants, moochers, drunks, and plain old con men she couldn’t learn a thing. She became embroiled in some organization that had its base in the Bogside and its financial support in London. From the money she spent, I would believe she alone was its backer.”

  “How much?”

  “Forty-seven thousand pounds! You could buy a bloody tank for that much! I often wonder how much of it was pissed over bars on its way from Euston Station to Belfast.”

  “Much of it, no doubt,” McGarr said. He was acquainted with the habits of professional quasi-revolutionaries. It was a bunko game much practiced by a certain type of Irishman in London.

  Horrigan poured himself another drink. “You know, she was always swinging between feeling guilty for having so much money to feeling inadequate that she hadn’t had the money for very long at all. I told her that if the money bothered her so much I’d put some in a blind bank trust and she could go back to Cork and live the simple life.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, Christ! It’s gotten so I can’t open my mouth in her presence. She called me a cheap bastard who with ill-gotten millions would deny her and her children the necessities of life.”

  McGarr stood, walked to the sideboard, poured himself another drink, and raising the glass to his mouth, looked directly into Horrigan’s eyes. He asked, “Did you try to murder Bobby Ovens? Is that why you called me here? I’ll find your fingerprints on that winch handle, blood spatters on your clothes, you know.”

  Again Horrigan was surprised that McGarr had jumped ahead of him. He looked away, out the French windows, into the courtyard below. “No, I didn’t. Of all her…‘flings,’ I think I liked him the best. At least he was genuine and not interested in her money.”

  “I understand she’s a beautiful woman.”

  “Yes, she is that. Perhaps too beautiful.”

  “Younger than you?”

  Horrigan was now becoming drunk. His eyes were filling. “Not in years.”

  “Do you think she tried to murder Ovens?”

  Horrigan tried to take a big sip from the tumbler. The fluid splashed on his upper lip. He coughed. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he explained, “I got a telephone call from her Friday night. She wanted to know what I could do to hush up the whole thing. She told me she didn’t do it but said the whole situation would prove terribly embarrassing for all of us, me included, should all the facts be known. I told her I couldn’t do a thing. She berated me, as usual, for being spineless and, you know, ‘bourgeois.’”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know. I had the call traced and the operator told me it came from a coin box in Dublin.”

  “Do you know about the flat in Ballsbridge?”

  “I do now.”

  “You mean since you checked the running log in my office. That’s what you were doing in the Castle, wasn’t it?”

  Sheepishly, Horrigan nodded his head.

  “Then your telling me that somebody stole the report was phony.”

  “No. Somebody stole it.”

  “But not the IRA. What reason would they have for wanting to ruin you? When you come right down to it, you’re their best friend in the present government. Already some of the investigating officers have leaked enough information to the press to implicate them. When the report comes out, they’ll just say some fanatic did it.”

  Horrigan shook his head. “No, not the IRA, at least from what I can learn from the sources I have in the official wing.”

  “May I use your phone?”

  “Certainly.”

  McGarr finished his drink and dialed his office. “Bernie, please.” When McKeon came on, he said, “I want you to pick up Carleton Driver at the Department of Justice and get a statement about his activities Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Then put a tail on him.”

  “What’s it about, chief?”

  “It’s better that you don’t know.”

  “Hush-hush?” McKeon was from a small village in Leitrim and had a love of intrigue, especially in high places.

  “Also, put a tail on Neila Monahan, who works in the same office. I want discreet questions asked her neighbors about her activities Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Lastly, when Liam O’Shaughnessy arrives, I want him to go to the Department of Justice in his plain clothes and take a statement from the minister for justice himself.” Cupping the receiver with his hand, he asked Horrigan, “When will you be there?”

  “I’d prefer him to come here.”

  “I wouldn’t, if you don’t mind.”

  “Two o’clock.”

  “At two.” McGarr listened for a moment. McKeon thought he heard O’Shaughnessy coming down the hall. The huge man was a favorite in the Castle, his step and greeting unmistakable. When he got to the phone, McGarr said to him, “Bernie will tell you what I want, Liam. The statement you take from the minister will give you an idea of how important the situation is. I want you to put all your other work aside and concentrate on this investigation alone.”

  O’Shaughnessy began to complain. He had details to gather, reports to write.

  “Put it all on my desk. I’ll get Delaney to handle the paper and Boyle the leg work. Now—listen to me: you are in charge of this investigation entirely. I don’t want to hear from you again until you’ve got things sorted out. Let me speak to Bernie.”

  Horrigan was agitated.

  McGarr explained. “I’m not passing the buck. When the investigation begins to take shape, I’ll take over. What I’m doing is institutionalizing the search, so that if the public prosecutor, the press, your political party, anybody wants to know what you or I or the department did once you found the papers missing, we can show them the record or present them with a battery of wit
nesses to prove this was no clandestine operation.” McGarr resituated the phone. “Bernie? Who’s waiting for me?”

  “Just about everybody. What’s all this about a ‘clandestine operation,’ boss? What’s O’Shaughnessy got that I don’t have? Mary and me were talking this over last night. Why is it you never give me the interesting assignments and always have me covering for you around here or shagging bird watchers out on Killiney Bay or tracking down shutterbugs in photography stores or speaking to a passel of Krauts in the Agfa-Gavaert factory, and just generally—”

  “Bernie,” McGarr cut in, “it’s because you’re a good detail man.”

  “Details, my arse!” McKeon roared.

  “We’ll settle this in an hour.” McGarr glanced down at his fisherman’s sweater. “And a half.” It would be very pleasant to take a shower and change clothes. By the time he got to the office, McKeon would be so immersed in the details of this and other assignments he wouldn’t even remember the outburst.

  As McGarr made for the door, Horrigan said, “Wait—there’s something I’ve got to ask you. How do you feel about the IRA?”

  Now it was McGarr who was taken by surprise. He wondered why this question, why now. “I don’t understand.”

  “You see, if you do manage to find the report before it’s released to the press, then—well—I must know if—”

  In that light, the question seemed innocent enough. After all, Horrigan had his entire public career on the line. As Horrigan himself had said, McGarr repeated, “I support the IRA.”

  “Well—how much, you know, theoretically?”

  “Right down the line. Some tactics, of course, I deplore. For instance, the bombing of any target other than military. Cops are paid to take their chances. But as for the violence itself, have they any option?”

  Horrigan smiled and nodded. “Oh, and here.” He reached into his suit-coat pocket and drew out what looked like a bank cashier’s check. Face side down he held it out to McGarr. “Just to reimburse you and your wife for having gone out of your way to meet me here today, and for whatever additional burden my wife and family will put on you during the course of this thing. Please don’t mistake me, it’s only a harmless gesture.”