The Death of an Irish Politician

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Then Billy Martin did it?”

  She didn’t reply.

  McGarr smirked. “What reason would Martin have for wanting to kill Ovens? They drank together. Martin couldn’t have felt himself a rival for your affections, since he’s old enough to be your father.”

  She looked up at McGarr, stared at him for a moment, and then said, “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Don’t know what?” Bernie asked from the corner. “That one of your boyfriends is a fairy, the other a mouse, that you have to try to hurt the only strong man in your life, your husband? Eoin, your oldest son, told us the truth about you. He thinks you’re strange.”

  She really was an intelligent woman and now realized what McKeon was doing. She said in a calm voice, “I’m not going to say any more. All these people are friends of mine.”

  “Even Bobby Ovens?”

  “Especially Bobby Ovens.”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  Her head jerked up. With jaw firmly set, she said, “Yes. Often. Do you want to hear the details?”

  “You slept with Carleton Driver.”

  “Yes—with him and with Bumpy Hubbard, and, if you like, I’ll sleep with you too.”

  Noreen looked up from her pad.

  “Do you—did you love all these men?”

  “I don’t know what that word means.”

  “Are you a nymphomaniac?”

  “Yes!” She shook her head. “No. I don’t know what that means either. That’s none of your business.”

  “Do you drink?”

  She lifted her head. “Do I want a beer? Yes—I want a beer.”

  McKeon stood, pried a cap off a bottle, and handed it to her.

  “What’s your opinion of Leona Horrigan?” McGarr asked her. He walked behind her chair to the door that opened into his office.

  “Not much right now, if you must know.” She sipped from the bottle.

  McGarr opened the door. Ward wheeled Bobby Ovens into the room and positioned him right behind her.

  McGarr said nothing, merely walked to the table and uncapped a lager. He wanted to see the expression on her face when she saw Ovens, whom she thought was dead.

  After a while, she looked up from the table. A funnel of light shone on her limp hands. The rest of the room was in darkness. She glanced up at Noreen, who was staring beyond her shoulders, then at McGarr. He too was staring in back of her.

  She turned. Ovens’ head was still swathed in bandages, but he had a fresh cigarette in his mouth.

  Her face softened dramatically. “Bobby!” she said and threw the chair back so it fell to the floor. She then fell to her knees and put her head in his lap. “They told me you were dead!”

  Ovens merely drew on the cigarette and removed it from his month, staring at the wall over Noreen’s head.

  McGarr walked out of the room.

  Five minutes later he sent Leona Horrigan back to her cell and tried to question Ovens. The man just smoked steadily, staring blankly off into space as though not hearing him. But McGarr was certain he did. McGarr didn’t understand this curious character. He knew he could make use of the man’s inscrutability, however.

  He sent McKeon to fetch Hubbard from the detention block and sat him in front of Ovens, not more than six feet away. Ovens’ haunting eyes, what Hubbard himself had described as “that damnable way of smoking and staring,” began to work on the yacht-club steward. Even before McGarr had left the room, the bloated man had begun to squirm in his seat. “What’s this all about?” he shouted after McGarr, as the chief inspector walked to his cubicle. “I want to call a solicitor.”

  “They tell me your credit isn’t so good,” said McKeon. “Whom do you suggest, Prince Hal? I’ll only be too happy to call him. Or would you like to check with your comptroller first? We just returned her to her jail cell a moment ago. Beer?”

  “Yes.”

  “How very Irish of you. Mr. Ovens, sad to relate, has requested the last bottle.” McKeon uncapped the final two bottles. He handed one to Ovens, drank from the other himself quietly. The plan was to let Hubbard stew in Ovens’ eyes.

  CHAPTER 5

  MCGARR DIALED HUBBARD’S home phone and O’Shaughnessy answered. “Find anything?”

  “Yup—in his study, third floor front.”

  McGarr waited. “Well?”

  “Are you all tied up there, chief?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then perhaps you’d better come down here alone. I don’t quite know what to make of this.”

  “What is it?”

  “A chart of some sort. And it’s got names and places on it that have to do with both the Ovens and the Bombing Report cases. Murphy from Inishmore is on it, a fellow from Dun Laoghaire named Dalton. I don’t exactly remember what your movements were over the weekend, Peter, but you had better take a look at it yourself. I don’t like this thing one bit. It sort of smacks of a setup, if you know what I mean. It was left right out here in plain sight. He must have known we’d be looking the place over, so why didn’t he destroy it? He’s a weird bird, this Hubbard.

  “Got a call from Sinclair. He’s out in Naas now. A Trinity student gave Driver a lift out there very late Thursday night or early Friday morning. Driver made the kid wait outside the hotel where Horrigan lives. Fifteen minutes later he rushed outside with two quarts of Bushmills. He thrust them at the kid, saying, ‘One for either hand,’ and then—get this—hopped in the minister’s Bentley and drove off.”

  “How did the kid know it was the minister’s Bentley?”

  “That’s a cute one, that is. The kid was the minister’s son Owen. His father wasn’t home but the door to the suite was open. The kid locked the door by pressing the button as he left. He said nothing seemed out of place, and it wasn’t like his old man to leave the door unlocked or his car unlocked or his keys in the switch, so he started after the Bentley, since there was only one direction it could be headed on the road he had seen it take—over the Wicklow Hills toward Bray. But it had too much of a jump or turned off to Glendalough when young Horrigan chose the road toward the city. Didn’t you have dinner with Noreen at the Royal Hotel in Glendalough on Thursday night?”

  “Yes, we stayed late. Some of my mother’s people live in Glen MacNass.” It was the only public accommodation in the little village.

  “That’s what I thought. I don’t care for this too much at all.” O’Shaughnessy paused for a moment. “And then didn’t you and Hughie Ward talk to a man at the Dolphin in Dun Laoghaire Saturday morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you go in there?”

  “Yes. Why all the questions?”

  “Only because the names on this list seem to follow your itinerary over the weekend. The name of the bookie shop next door to the Dolphin comes after that, then Murphy follows, then some Muldoon fellow in Belfast. You’d better come see this thing.”

  “Was Driver carrying anything other than the booze when he came out of the hotel in Naas? What did you say he looks like? Do you know if he always drinks Bushmills?” The stuff Horrigan had served McGarr had had a Bushmills smokiness about it, but McGarr couldn’t be sure. Also, a tall man so skinny his shoulders had seemed mere hanging points for a drab raincoat had been drinking Bushmills at the bar of the Glendalough hotel. When McGarr had approached the bar to order a round they had swapped small talk about the weather. McGarr had taken only slight notice of the man except for the fact that he had specifically ordered Bushmills, a Northern drink not in great favor around Dublin. McGarr seemed to remember the man having a large blonding moustache and a face like Lytton Strachey, this is to say, like that of a malnourished horse.

  O’Shaughnessy said, “The report is only ninety typewritten pages, small enough to fit under your belt. In his statement, the minister didn’t say anything was missing but the report. It had been taken out of a briefcase that he had put in the sideboard. Driver is a tall man, slight, with a moustache. He’s b—, ah…”

 
“Bald, go ahead.”

  “And has a limp.”

  The description fit the man at the Glendalough hotel perfectly.

  “I don’t know what he drinks besides quantities.”

  “Be there in ten minutes.”

  In passing, McGarr peeked into the day room. Ovens was still staring at Hubbard, who was now sweating copiously. McKeon had begun an explanation to Hubbard. “You see, you’re the one being interrogated, so no brew for you, Hubbah. You might say you got jarred, then told us a pack of lies.”

  “Hubbard,” Hubbard said. “I don’t get ‘jarred.’”

  Noreen said to McKeon, “Give us a piece of the paper, Bernie.” She switched on a light overhead.

  “Tonight—you can count on it, Hubbah,” McKeon said to Hubbard. And then, skidding the front page of the paper across to Noreen, he added in a mock brogue, “’Twas only an honest mistake. Muscha, the way the man pronounces his own name is meant for an Anglo-Irish ear alone, one that’s within lip range, I should think.”

  McGarr decided to walk over to Fitzwilliam Square. There was something about a cold and wet fall night in Dublin that made the many pubs he passed seem inviting. Rainwater trickled icily through the chinks in the cobblestone streets and the brickwork sidewalks underfoot. The city’s ancient stone had turned black, so that the yellow glow of the pub lights through leaded glass windows, some brightly colored, beckoned the passerby. When McGarr was astride a pub in King Street South, the door burst open as two patrons left and the sounds of the publican bidding them adieu, his other customers wrangling in low Dublinese, the heat, the tawdry odors of smoke and drink beckoned the chief inspector. He was half tempted to turn in for a pint. The barman had a face so creased and warted he looked like a reptile.

  Hubbard’s house, although one of the grandest in the entire town, was in surprising disrepair for the neighborhood. The brick façade badly needed painting. The mortar lines seemed to heave every which way, more like a fortuitous heap of rubble than a planned structure. The sashing needed replacement by a joiner experienced in fitting windows to old houses. On the third floor one pane was missing, a piece of cardboard having been taped over the aperture.

  When O’Shaughnessy opened the door, McGarr said, “I wonder if the Gypsy lady is at home. I didn’t see the red light out front, as described in your brochure, but I’m certain this is the place.”

  O’Shaughnessy shouted up the stairs, “A five-guinea high-roller coming up!”

  McGarr saw a light go on in the house across the square. If Ireland could be said to have an upper middle class in an urban setting, here they resided. He began to sympathize with Hubbard somewhat, for he speculated this sempiternal graduate student was thoroughly hated by the denizens of Fitzwilliam Square.

  And surely the house was just as McGarr had imagined it: an intellectual’s lair. Columns of books snaked toward the ceilings as though Hubbard expected them to shore the crumbling edifice. He used paper plates in the kitchen and then burnt them in the fireplace, although his tastes ran to Continental delicacies—escargots, salsiccia di cinghiale, café nero, bouillabaisse, smoked herring and pickled onions from Holland. McGarr was pleased to see that he did indeed drink beer, Kirin from Japan. This made the chief inspector smirk and shake his head, for it was plainly an affectation. The rest of the world may have developed cuisines that surpassed Ireland’s barely palatable cooking, but in McGarr’s opinion, which he had garnered by means of the empirical method, the country produced some of the world’s best beers.

  He popped open a bottle of Kirin beer and immediately became yet more sympathetic to this fat, affected fairy. Kirin was smooth and bitter. The chief inspector had no qualms about nicking a drink from any house he was searching when the residents were away. He had early learned that the police would be blamed for taking something, so it was better to take something he liked. The cellar, O’Shaughnessy told him, was loaded with wines and brandies. Hubbard was not a property bourgeois, but rather a belly bourgeois, which made him only slightly more acceptable to McGarr.

  For instance, upstairs, on the way to the study O’Shaughnessy had spoken of on the phone, McGarr looked in at the man’s bedroom. It had a huge water bed that intrigued the chief inspector, since in the Dublin scheme of things bed was the place that the closing of the pubs forced a person to assume, and one’s luck in the former institution directly influenced one’s luck in the latter. Irish bedrooms were cold and a person needed all the heat he could muster for whatever purposes struck him.

  O’Shaughnessy pointed to the top of a desk near the window with the pane missing. Under the glass surface protector was a chart, meticulously inscribed in india ink on oak tag. It read:

  Driver

  Horrigan—Naas, 24th Oct., ’74

  Dalton’s for drop.

  Murphy—Inishmore, 26th Oct., ’74

  Muldoon—Belfast, 27th Oct., ’74

  The Orangeman—(When required.).

  The first thing that disturbed McGarr was the penmanship, the niggling way the serifs had been inscribed. This was not characteristic of the postgraduate scrawl he could see in the notebooks that covered the desk top. A man who undertook voluminous research and wrote long, complex books did not have time for the niceties of letter design.

  McGarr picked up the phone and dialed his office. McKeon answered. “Give Slattery the assignment of learning who purchased oak tag—let’s see, sheets about thirty-six inches by thirty-two inches—in the last week.” There were only two shops in the city that sold oak tag. “In particular, have him take along photos of Hubbard, Leona Horrigan, Horrigan himself, and Driver, if you can find one. Maybe the clerks might recognize one of them. He can ignore any sales to the students of the College of Art.”

  “What are you onto?”

  “I’ll explain it afterwards. Call Spud Murphy’s girl Eileen. Noreen will remember her last name. You can only rouse her on the wireless. The file in O’Shaughnessy’s desk will tell you the call signals. Ask her to have Murphy get in touch with me by telephone. Insist upon that and tell her it’s urgent. How’s Hubbard?”

  “We’ve had to call in some reinforcements to keep the lug on the hot seat. He tried to attack Ovens.”

  “Ovens all right?”

  “He’s a cool customer, that one. For all his inexpression, he evidently saw the attack coming and lashed out with his foot. Once—if you know what I mean. By the time I could react, Hubbard was on the floor rolling in pain and the Yank was still staring off into space, smoking his cigarette, drinking his beer.”

  McGarr was pleased to have his feeling corroborated that Ovens was indeed as fully conscious as he had ever been. From the way he had handled Hubbard he was obviously a man who must have been taken by surprise when he was attacked. If he had felt as much enmity for Hubbard as Hubbard for him, then he would have been wary of the yacht-club steward. Not so of Leona Horrigan, however, whose fingerprints weren’t on the winch handle, or of Billy Martin, who seemed so ancient and harmless.

  McGarr called McKeon back and told him to assign Harry Greaves the task of assembling a dossier on Billy Martin. Greaves was from Dun Laoghaire and his father, Harry, Sr., a retired foreman from the Port and Docks Authority. The older Greaves probably knew Martin personally.

  O’Shaughnessy signaled McGarr over to the desk lamp. “Am I mistaken, or is this your home phone number?” On a scratch pad a near-dozen phone numbers had been scrawled. In fact, McGarr’s was one. “Do you know this bird?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever have occasion to call you?” The Galwayman looked at McGarr suspiciously. “After all, it’s no secret how you feel about the North and even the IRA.” The Garda superintendent had served through the period when the IRA had sent roving assassination squads against the government police.

  “You wore a sweater bulky enough to conceal the report, then stayed alone in Eileen’s place, where you could have passed it to her or Murphy. Muldoon is probably Murphy’s contact in Ulster.” O�
��Shaughnessy did not make this statement in an accusatory way. He was just playing devil’s advocate. Plainly, he was worried. This concatenation of near meetings, brushes in the night, phone calls, and so forth was too regular to be the work of McGarr. If the chief inspector had been a party to such a theft, certainly he would have taken pains to eliminate any trace of its disappearance. This was an inept trap that was being set for McGarr, but to those not acquainted with him and the worlds of police work and politics—say, for instance, a jury—a few more circumstances would make sufficient cause to press charges, if not convict. And charges alone would be enough to make McGarr’s chief inspectorship, which he had held for a mere two years, untenable. McGarr may have been a fixture in international police work, but he wasn’t as yet firmly established in Dublin.

  The phone rang. It was Sinclair. He told McGarr he was in Glendalough. The barman at the Royal Hotel distinctly remembered McGarr standing alongside a man much taller than the chief inspector. “You see, the juxtaposition in your sizes was so comical.”

  “Your stint in Australia has given you such a way with words, Paul.”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t like the look of the Irish situation right now. Driver left a packet of matches on the bar that advertises a bookie shop in Dun Laoghaire.”

  “Dalton’s?”

  “The same. Something stinks here. I went to this Driver’s flat. It’s too neat for a drinking man, like somebody had just cleaned the place top to bottom, so I started searching the building. I found it strange that the trash bins were absolutely empty, this being a Tuesday before the Wednesday that the landlady said was collection day. She was sure she was full up, and when she took a look at the empty bins, she blew her top. They didn’t belong to the premises at all, but she said she recognized their brown lids as those that belonged to a fish-and-chip shop down the street. There we found her barrels and in them I picked out a leather case. She swears it’s Driver’s. It’s empty, but I called in a lab man and he believes it’s got traces of greasepaint inside, you know, the kind actors wear. He won’t know for sure until he gets it back to his microscope.