The Death of an Irish Politician

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Who?”

  “The minister for justice’s wife, Leona Horrigan. Surely you know her. She’s a member of the club, has at least two boats moored there.”

  “I don’t think a blimp like him would stand a chance with a well-placed and luvelly lady like her.”

  “Did Bobby Ovens owe you money?”

  “Me?” Martin began to laugh.

  “Do you now or have you ever belonged to the IRA or any of its affiliate organizations?”

  “No. I once belonged to the IRB, way back when I was in my teens. But I joined the Fianna Fail early on and resigned the Brotherhood when Dev. sidestepped the Oath to the Crown and took his seat in the Dail. Dev. was the man for me, always.”

  “I can check on that.”

  “Do. How’s the poor blighter coming along anyhow?”

  “The hospital lists him as dead. I’m waiting for a report from the pathologist now.”

  “Ah, God.” And then without so much as a pause, he added, “Since you know my habits, stop around for a pint after work, sir.”

  “Perhaps one of these days, Billy. Answer me a final question—why didn’t you tell me about the siren going off right after Ovens fell into the water?”

  “Sure and I’ve worked at the club for years, Inspector, and the bloody thing goes off so often I don’t hear it much anymore. But now that you mention it, it did go off. I must have forgotten about it. A crippled chap up on the hill runs it. His name is Moran. He’s a club member too. He’s got a pair of Jap binos through which, some claim, he can see London.”

  Noreen arrived with their supper and Hughie Ward, who had nipped out for a tête-à-tête with Sheila Byrne, had returned in time to ask Leona Horrigan if she would dine with them in the day room.

  McGarr called Horrigan in Naas, then at the Shelbourne, and finally reached him at his office in the Department of Justice. He told him about his wife’s detention. The minister seemed pleased that McGarr had moved so fast. He claimed to know nothing of Hubbard, and even the name was unfamiliar to him. “Is he her latest?”

  “I don’t know.” Leona Horrigan’s social life was none of McGarr’s business.

  “Are you going to make a charge against her? Shall I contact a solicitor?”

  “I won’t press anything without contacting you first. I’m not sure of anything. They both ran, however.”

  “Please keep me informed, Peter. Your assistant, Superintendent O’Shaughnessy, would like to have a word with you.”

  “Would you have him call me in a half hour? I’m just about to eat.” McGarr preferred to speak to O’Shaughnessy beyond Horrigan’s hearing.

  Before he could walk out to the day room, where Noreen had set the center table, the laboratory called. Al McAndrew, the chief chemist, had found blood spatters of the same type as Ovens’ on the shoes McGarr had lifted from Leona Horrigan’s closet. The spots were about three days old.

  Ward returned from the detention block to say that Mrs. Horrigan had already eaten with the other prisoners and wasn’t hungry. McGarr sat and, as he ate, began leafing through the dossier Ward had compiled about Horace C. K. Hubbard.

  He had graduated from St. Columba’s College, a secondary school in Rathfarnum, and then Trinity College, Dublin, where he had read philosophy under Dr. Luce and had received first-class honors. In his final year he had published the paper “Berkelian Elements in the Epistemology of Gustave Flaubert,” which had been widely acclaimed. Twelve years later he was still listed as a research student at Trinity.

  The pilaf was a delicate mélange of wild, brown, and Italian long-grain white rices baked in chicken broth and white wine. One of Noreen’s specialties was a chutney—her grandfather served forty-seven years with the Grenadier Guards in India—the sweet and pungent spices of which made McGarr’s nose sweat. This was a sure sign the food pleased him. Dublin Bay prawns in a mild curry sauce was one of his favorite dishes.

  The phone rang. Ward got up to answer it.

  Hubbard, as he had said, did live on Fitzwilliam Square, but no thanks to his own efforts in the world. The house had been left him by his maternal grandmother, whose husband’s name had been Farrington-Smythe. The taxes had been in arrears, and the bailiff had nearly auctioned the premises when Hubbard came up with a check covering what was due as well as the current year’s assessments.

  That windfall dated from the time during which he was “reading” at the British Museum for his Ph.D. thesis, which he was calling “The Decline of Metaphysical Language in the Seventeenth Century.” His new tutor, Mr. J. P. G. Gomes, believed Hubbard to be brilliant and predicted his thesis, which Macmillan planned to issue in the spring of 1976, would be an intellectual event of no slight significance. Gomes opined that the man’s politics had a Marxist orientation, “as is often the case with people who have inherited their money.” The British Army had cashiered Hubbard for being a homosexual.

  That stopped McGarr.

  Ward entered the room. O’Shaughnessy was on the line.

  “It looks like Carleton Driver is our man. Didn’t show up at work Friday morning, which isn’t unusual when he’s on the booze, but he never put in an appearance at McDaid’s all Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and today, which is something of a record around here. No work today either.” McGarr could barely hear him above the din in the barroom. “Sinclair’s running him down right now. Brian Coffey poked around Neila Monahan’s place. The old girl hits the sack around eight and reads. An even older crone saw her in bed at fifteen-minute intervals right up until twelve-forty-five when the light went out. Shall I notify the Vice Squad?”

  “Where are you headed now?”

  “Home to bed.”

  “Could you stay there for a bit? Have a jar or two. Hughie will be by with a writ to search Hubbard’s house in Fitzwilliam Square. I want you to look for any evidence connecting him with a group that might want to lay hands on the papers. Also, keep an eye out for anything that might involve him in the Ovens affair—love letters, correspondence, personal stuff. I’m reading a report that says he’s queer, so don’t look just for female stuff.”

  “Is Ovens a fairy too?”

  “Never thought of that.”

  “What’s happening there?”

  “We collared Horrigan’s wife. She had Ovens’ blood on a pair of shoes.”

  “This Driver fellow was often seen with a tall, handsome woman who picked up his tabs. She didn’t call herself Horrigan, though. Will you be there all night?”

  “Think so. Anything else?”

  “She could and usually did drink him under the table.”

  McGarr hung up, dialed the Customs night superintendent, and rescinded Billy Martin’s travel privileges. He then called young Dr. O’Higgins and told him what he wanted. The physician objected but McGarr assured him Ward would use an ambulance and a certified police surgeon. McGarr handed Ward the writ O’Shaughnessy needed and asked him to drop it off on the way to the hospital.

  McGarr swiveled in his chair and looked outside. The sky was black and a chill north wind quivered the glass shields of the street lamps.

  Gerald, the gate guard, knocked on the door and then placed a brown bag filled with Harp lager bottles on the table. Noreen judiciously lowered it to the shadows beneath the table. Leona Horrigan was a felony suspect, but she was also the wife of the minister for justice.

  McGarr began eating his dinner once more.

  Hubbard had been engaged to be married once, but because of the discharge from the British Army, the girl’s father broke off the engagement. Hubbard was fond of Irish wolfhounds, skeet shooting, and yachts of the size he could not afford without taking a job in the glass works his mother’s side of the family ran out in Bray. Her brother—his uncle—had offered him a position on several occasions, and then, despairing, had disinherited Hubbard and offered company stock for public sale. Now Bord Failte owned a controlling interest in the business.

  While McGarr was opening a bottle of beer to complete his repast
, Bernie McKeon burst into the room flapping a large piece of photographic paper. He slapped it on the table. “Don’t touch. Don’t anybody touch that work of art, it’s still wet. In police circles you could call it a Rembrandt or at least a Reynolds.” McKeon was a small, muscular man with fair hair. Like most gentle men who join the police, his manner was self-consciously gruff. “And what have you been doing with yourself today, Chief Inspector of Detectives?” He was eyeing McGarr’s bottle of lager.

  “A little of this, a little of that,” said McGarr, baiting him.

  “And not without all the comforts of home!” McKeon lifted the lid of the chafing dish. There was still plenty left.

  Noreen spooned some rice onto a plate and then added the prawns.

  Said McGarr, “Let’s see what you’ve got here, McKeon. Perhaps it might deserve a beer.”

  It was a blowup of the dock area of the Killiney Bay Yacht Club. Both Martin and Hubbard could be seen leading a woman away from Virelay. Although the enlargement was quite grainy, she had twisted her head back to the boat, as though looking over her shoulder. Her mouth was open in anguish. Ovens was still lying on the deck, dark splotches on the sail where his head rested. This meant that in two separate actions somebody had clubbed him and then, later, dumped him into the slip.

  “Well?” McKeon demanded, hands on hips.

  “Give him a beer,” McGarr said. “But only one. He’s an inside man and I doubt he could handle more.”

  “Hand me that bag, sonny!” McKeon demanded. He was two years older than McGarr.

  After Bernie had eaten and Noreen had cleared the day-room table, a policewoman led Leona Horrigan into the room.

  “Tea?” Noreen asked her.

  She shook her head. Her eyes were worried.

  “As you can see, we’re also drinking beer. Does that bother you, Mrs. Horrigan?” McGarr asked.

  She shook her head once more.

  In a corner of the room, McKeon was sitting in one chair with his feet on another, a fat, green cigar clenched between his teeth, the beers lined up in rows not quite a reach from him. Noreen was seated at one end of the table. McGarr directed the Horrigan woman to the seat at the farther end.

  McGarr noted that Leona Horrigan was the sort of beauty Irishmen think of as particularly ethnic when away from home. Her hair was so black and fine it hardly resembled hair at all, but rather tousled black down. Her skin was very white and eyes green. And she was a big woman in every way. “Does my husband know?” she asked. In the direct light from above her head, her prominent cheekbones shadowed her face.

  McGarr nodded. “He knows you stole the Bombing Report.”

  She looked up at him. She blinked. For all McGarr could tell, she didn’t know a thing about it. The words did not seem to register.

  “You know—the little girl who had her leg blown off but she couldn’t feel it was missing because her hand was gone too. The grandmother eleven times over—they buried what they could find of her. The Bombing Report!” McGarr almost yelled. “The one that covers for your friends you spent forty-seven thousand pounds on last year. The one that’s going to hound the husband you hate right out of office!”

  His tone frightened her, he could tell, but she hadn’t stolen the report and probably didn’t know more than what he had just told her.

  For the sake of form, he said, “Shall we contact Solicitor Greaney for you, Mrs. Horrigan?” He signaled to Noreen to begin the record of their exchange at this point, since, if the woman were to be brought to trial for complicity in the Ovens attack, there was no need to have the report material available to the defense.

  “Who?”

  “Greaney, the solicitor on Leeson Street, the one who represents so many unsavory characters from North Dublin, the Vale Avoca Combine that failed, the Cornfeld mutual fund that bilked all the pensioners of their life savings, and also an outfit called the Cobh Condominia Limited of Seventeen Percy Place, Dublin. Do you understand me thoroughly now, Mrs. Horrigan? Do you want Detective Sergeant McKeon to stir Solicitor Greaney from whatever fiduciary miasma his mind is currently charting and include him among us tonight?”

  She shook her head.

  Very softly, McGarr added, “If you want a solicitor, if you believe you should have one here, tell us. We have no right to question you if you desire counsel and until he is present. That’s the law.”

  She shook her head again. A tear had formed at the corner of her eye.

  McGarr hated to admit it, but that the very sound of his voice had made such an extraordinary woman cry rather excited him. She had the sort of beauty he would like to crush.

  “Now then,” he said in the same mild voice, “I’ve read your dossier, spoken to your husband, have the reports of my staff concerning you, your activities here and in London and in the United States and on the Isle of Inishmore and with and without Bobby Ovens. You are an intelligent woman. No need—none,” he barked, “for me to storm and shout at you all night tonight and all day tomorrow, and night and day in teams”—he pointed to McKeon—“until you admit to us what we already know. No need!

  “Because I believe, Mrs. Horrigan, I can spare all of us that bother, because I believe you are, Mrs. Horrigan”—McGarr had put a foot on a chair near the one in which the minister’s wife sat and was talking directly into her face—her bottom lip, crimson in the light, was trembling; in police work it was standard operating procedure to frighten those who could be frightened, and McGarr had succeeded with her—“a woman who wants to tell the truth. Everything I can read about you, all that people have told me about you points to that. So, let me tell you what I’m going to do.” McGarr walked down to Noreen’s end of the table and picked up his file of the Ovens case. Briefly he wondered if his allowing his wife to be present at a time such as this, his obvious enjoyment in grilling this woman in a brutal fashion, was some odd psychological foible of his. “I’m going to show you the hard evidence we have, and then let you tell me about it in your own words.” He placed the still damp blowup of the photograph McKeon had found. “As you can see, that twisted bleeding man on the quarterdeck—”

  “Don’t.” She averted her head and pushed the photograph from her.

  McGarr waited for her to compose herself. “Your ‘friends,’ Horace Hubbard and the dock boy, Billy Martin, are there as well. They lied to me about you. Why would they lie to me about you? About what time was that?”

  She was sobbing now. She shook her head.

  “Now here we have a laboratory report about certain red spatters on a pair of white shoes you imprudently tried to conceal in the closet of your Seventeen Percy Place flat. Can you read it?”

  She shook her head once more. Her eyes were brimming with tears.

  “Shall I read it for you?”

  She nodded.

  “It says that’s Bobby Ovens’ blood on your shoes. Because the spotting is so regular over the surface of the shoes and the drops so tiny, it implies that you were within a foot of the man when the winch handle was being thwacked into his—”

  “Stop!”

  “Yes, stop it, Peter,” Noreen said. “You’re being barbarous.”

  “Well then, do you want to tell us about it, Mrs. Horrigan?” McGarr asked.

  She firmed her bottom lip and looked up at him. The green of her eyes was bright through her tears. She had a mole the size of a three-penny bit at the base of her neck. The odor that rose from under the collar of her blouse was moist body and that damnably corrupt aroma of gardenias, heady, cloying.

  “When did you first notice that Hubbard had the winch handle in his hand, when Ovens started up the companionway ladder? What part of it was he grasping, the arm or the handle? Did he throw it at him, or pick him up by the feet and swing his head into it?”

  She shook her head. A tear caught in her hair and she pulled it away.

  “Tell us about the sound of the blows.”

  She began sobbing.

  “What was their effect? Were things sud
denly, you know, mushy?”

  She clasped her hands over her ears.

  “And what did you do, Leona? Didn’t you try to stop him, didn’t you rush forward and grab hold of Hubbard’s right arm?”

  She was shaking her head.

  “You mean you just stood back and let him kill Bobby Ovens?”

  But again she shook her head. McGarr had gotten nowhere.

  McKeon roared from the corner, “Goddammit, McGarr, let me question the bitch! She won’t lie to me!” McKeon then knocked the accumulating empty beer bottles to the floor.

  “Hubbard hated Ovens because the Yank was a better skipper,” McGarr continued.

  She nodded, then said, “No, no.”

  “What say?”

  In a hoarse voice, Leona Horrigan said, “Yes—he hated Bobby Ovens. People will tell you that. But he didn’t try to kill him. That’s not like Horace at all. I—I realize I’ve been—incontinent with”—she glanced at Noreen, who, copying, had her gaze directed to the page of her pad—“men, but believe me, it’s not because I want them fighting over me, it’s because…”

  “Because, because, because, because—it’s because you’re lying!” McKeon roared in the corner. “Goddammit, let me at her, McGarr!” His comments never appeared in the record. He was the vice. With other suspects his voice wheedled—“You look tired. Why don’t you get it over with? A sympathetic judge and you’ll be out in a year”—or coached—“Don’t say a thing, don’t give him nothing but your name and address. What would you want one of the others to do in your shoes? Sure—clam up and take eight years in Portaloise like a man? When you get out, they’ll all have respectable businesses financed by your money and won’t give you the time of day if you pass them in the street. Ex-con, but a tight mouth. Some men would consider the knowledge compensation enough. You’ll be able to hold your head high in the place of the odd publican who’ll let you hang out waiting for whatever might drop from the sky in the way of a drink.” His advice differed with every interrogation. McGarr thought him invaluable.