The Death of an Irish Politician

by Bartholomew Gill

  McGarr carried a chair over to the table and placed it alongside Leona’s. He then helped O’Brugha into it. The old man kept patting her hands until she withdrew them.

  Out in the office, McGarr said to Liam O’Shaughnessy, “I can’t sit around here and wait for her to crack.”

  “She’s a hard case. You’d be older than O’Brugha before that happened.”

  “So it’s time for us to be as devious as Horrigan, Liam. Have Slattery type up a report of this case. Use the interrogation log right up until that last bit where she denied him a second time. Then put in something like, ‘I tried to murder Bobby Ovens because he told me everything he ever had to do with me was foul—the guns, the bombs, my money, everything, including the way I paid his boatyard bill without asking him. And he was so damnably professional in his innocence, so American and officiously upright.’ That should do it. That’s what she wanted to say.

  “Then take the report over to the Taoseaich’s office. Tell his secretary you want to make an appointment for me for”—McGarr checked his wristwatch; it was 2:10 in the afternoon—“say four-thirty. Leave nothing out about the Bombing Report or anything else. Then wait for me there.” McGarr turned as though he would walk away. “Oh”—he turned back—”one other thing. Please make sure you don’t leave the office for any reason. When that phone call comes, you’ve got to be there.”

  O’Shaughnessy didn’t understand and was worried. “Just the one false note?” He’d have to sign the report himself.

  “Don’t worry, Liam. I’ll say I misinformed you on purpose, if it comes to that.”

  O’Shaughnessy was only somewhat relieved. Dishonesty of any sort bothered him terribly. “Where are you going?”

  “Has Hubbard been released?”

  “He got himself a solicitor—we had to let him go.”

  McGarr could see Ward and Sinclair waiting for him in his cubicle. “Then I’m off to play poker.”

  O’Shaughnessy looked down at McGarr in astonishment. “Not at a time like—” He was a gullible man for all his police experience.

  “Two hands only. One with Hubbard and the other with Horrigan. They’ve got all the cards and I’ve got no choice but to try to bluff my way through.” McGarr didn’t add that the stakes he was gambling with were his reputation, career, and spotless criminal record. If he lost he’d have to buy a farm with his small savings and work it, because nobody would hire him after being sacked and jailed for high treason.

  In his cubicle Ward said, “It’s like you guessed, chief. Your fingerprints are on that check.” Ward looked at McGarr as though he wanted him to give a plausible explanation.

  “Any latents?”

  “No, just several good impressions of Driver’s.”

  “What about him, Paul?”

  “Well, when I gave him a complete search at the hospital, I found this in his back pocket. He was sitting on it all the time we were at O’Donahue’s.” Sinclair handed McGarr a legal-size sheet of paper that had at one time been folded down to a three-inch square.

  It was a confession, stating that Driver had delivered the Bombing Report to McGarr in two parts, one on the night of the twenty-third of October, 1975, at the Royal Hotel in Glendalough, and the second on the morning of the twenty-fifth at the Dolphin in Dun Laoghaire. There McGarr had paid him ten thousand pounds in the form of a cashier’s check.

  “May I have a photocopy of these?” If McGarr was going to play poker, he at least needed a hand, even if all his cards were valueless.

  While Hughie ran the documents through the machine, McGarr put on his hat and coat, then asked McKeon to accompany him. “Make sure you have a fresh pad, Bernie. I’m going to ask you to take a statement that I hope we can get signed.”

  Next, they stopped at Will Hare’s Internal Security office. Will himself came out of his cubicle to greet them. “Going somewhere?” he asked. He was worried. “Things look mighty bad, Peter. Awful.”

  “Talk to Ward and Sinclair and they’ll look worse,” said McGarr. “Look, Will—you wouldn’t just happen to have a copy of that Bombing Report hanging about that I could borrow, would you?”

  “You must be mad. Is he right?” Hare asked McKeon.

  “Not the real thing, just, say, the cover, the introduction, and then a number of filler pages so that it looks thick and important.”

  Hare began shaking his head. He was a thin man with a beard so heavy and a face so creased he could not manage to shave properly. Thus he always looked rough and countryish. “I can’t do that, Peter. I’ve got to answer for those things. It’s impossible.”

  “Even if, in so doing, you might clear up the whole messy business?”

  “How?”

  McKeon turned to McGarr as well. He too was interested in knowing what McGarr had in mind.

  “Trust me.”

  “That I can’t do.”

  “Where’s the stuff?”

  Hare’s eyes jerked involuntarily toward a walk-in safe at the back of the Internal Security office. The door was open.

  McGarr started for it.

  “Well—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Hare. “Stay out of there, Peter. Stop. You don’t have a security clearance.” He ran after McGarr.

  “I don’t want the report, I just want a dummy. Something that looks like it.”

  “Je-sus! You’ll get me fired. Aren’t you in enough trouble already?”

  Now inside the vault, McGarr found the Bombing Report among a stack of most-secret documents. “Now watch.” He picked up the black leather notebook and consulted the index. The report was thick, over a thousand pages, and listed every detail of every injury, damage suit, police lead, and allegation uncovered in a two-and-one-half-month investigation.

  McGarr slapped it down on a carton, unclasped its binder, and removed all but the forty-seven-page introduction. He then reached onto another shelf containing less secret information and pulled out an equally thick volume that was called “Postal Authority Maintenance Concerns in Nineteenth-Century Structures.” McGarr removed the pages and carefully fitted those into the Bombing Report binder. “There now, does that satisfy you?” he asked Hare. He turned and started out of the vault.

  “No! No, it doesn’t at all. I’ll have to report you. I should try to stop you.”

  McGarr turned to Hare. “I’ll have it back by sundown. That’s a promise.”

  Hare sighed. “All right—sundown. I’ll be waiting.”

  It was the first time that McGarr had ever seen McKeon at a loss for words.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE CEILING OF McDaid’s pub was sheathed in ornate tin and painted, like the walls, a glossy cream color. Tall, arched windows made it perhaps the brightest barroom in the country. The bar itself was small. Men three deep were standing by it, reaching for the glasses that they kept on its top. The atmosphere was thick with smoke, voices, and the cheers of the hurling crowd on the television.

  Hubbard was sitting alone with his back to the screen.

  Seeing McGarr, the barman picked a newspaper off the counter behind him, opened it to an inside page, and showed it to several men with whom he had been talking. It was a picture of McGarr and O’Shaughnessy walking O’Brugha into the Castle. The caption read: “Chief Inspector McGarr solves another crime that might have gone unnoticed, story, Chapter 1.” How much of what is printed in the newspapers, McGarr mused, is the whole truth? “Not a bad likeness, what?” he asked the barman, who was mixing a gin and tonic for Hubbard. The drinks were on the house.

  McGarr touched the brim of his hat to thank the man, and McKeon carried the glasses over to Hubbard’s table.

  McGarr was very weary now. When he sat and removed his derby, he realized that most conversation in the tavern had ceased. How small his country was, the people as gossipy here in Dublin as in any small town in the West.

  Hubbard had drained his glass and now began drinking from the one McGarr had brought him. The fat young man was drunk, his face puffy, eyes red-rimmed
. Several shreds of tobacco from the pipe he was smoking had snagged in his beard.

  McGarr said, “She has confessed.”

  Hubbard only shook his head, then sipped from the glass.

  “She said, ‘I tried to kill Bobby Ovens because he told me everything he ever had to do with me was foul—the guns, the bombs, my money, everything, including the way I paid his boatyard bill without asking him. And he was so damnably professional in his innocence, so American and so officiously upright.’” McGarr had said the statement offhandedly, as if it were a fact and rather uninteresting. Little could Hubbard have known how important the ploy was to McGarr.

  Hubbard lowered the glass and stared into it. He held it in both hands. “Well,” he said after some time, “It’s true that Ovens was the only man who ever abandoned her. After he found out what the cargo really contained, after she tried to meddle in the relationship Ovens has with that boat of his, he cut her off. She couldn’t stand it. She focused all her hatred for—” Hubbard raised the glass and said “men” into it, drank the liquor, and then added, “on him.” Hubbard set the nearly empty glass down. “Does this mean you’re here to arrest me?”

  “Yes. We’ll arrest Ovens too. Both of you conspired with Leona Horrigan to conceal evidence. And both of you joined David Horrigan in an attempt to falsify the theft of most-secret government documents and to propagate a conspiracy involving charges of high treason, the attempted calumny of a public official—namely me—and blackmail.” McGarr, picking the copy of the Bombing Report off the floor and slapping it down on the table, added, “Here’s the high treason.”

  Hubbard picked up the binder and turned to the title page, which had MOST SECRET stamped across it in red.

  “And here”—McGarr slapped the photocopy of the ten-thousand-pound check and the other one of Driver’s confession in front of Hubbard—“is the calumny of a public official and the blackmail.”

  Hubbard picked up the check and stared blankly at the ten-thousand-pound figure. He then glanced through Driver’s confession. After he put it down, he said, “Oh no—there you are very wrong, McGarr. That’s not me, and certainly not Ovens. I had nothing to do with that piece of oak tag you found in my study nor any of this stuff here. That sounds like Horrigan. We—and by that I mean Leona and Ovens too; the man, no matter how repugnant, has character—we would never attack a person for the simple reason of personal expediency.” He was shaking his head. “No—that’s not us.”

  “Why did she hit him?”

  “Who knows?” Hubbard was looking toward the barman, who was watching the television.

  McKeon had his pen poised on a sheet of his pad.

  “They had their usual spat on the dock. It was as you said, but he was dirty drunk and didn’t even wait for her to start beating him.” Again Hubbard craned his neck toward the barman. “You know, ever since he delivered that shipment of arms, which was, when all was said and done, more of a token gesture—given the diminutive size of his boat—than an important contribution to our needs in the North, he’s been an unmitigated ass. But she didn’t seem to want to let him go. She kept plaguing him, buying him things, paying his bills, slipping money in his wallet. All he did was drink. The more he drank the more he withdrew into himself. And that just made her more desperate to get a rise out of him.”

  McGarr signaled for another round, then said, “She’s a big, powerful woman. Why didn’t the blows kill Ovens?”

  “We all—O’Brugha, Leona, and I—had our hands on the winch handle. No matter how much Ovens might have discomfited us—me because of Leona, O’Brugha because of Ovens’ curious behavior—neither of us would have consented to killing him. After his own fashion, Ovens is something of a gentleman. He has his own odd sort of—style. And he certainly is not untalented.”

  “You mean, she just grabbed the handle on impulse and bashed him?”

  Hubbard looked up from the fresh drink, which McGarr had just paid for with a crisp five-pound note. “I thought you said she confessed.”

  McGarr nodded. “But I lied. I only said it for the effect, which I’m enjoying thoroughly.” He took a sip from the porter.

  Hubbard raised the fresh gin and tonic to his lips and drained it right down. “Horse show,” he said in a voice that the liquor made high. “She had just come from the one in Ballsbridge. She had gloves on.”

  “Ovens didn’t fall in the water right off. How’d that happen?”

  “Does this all come under the heading of cooperation?”

  McGarr shrugged, “That’s for the prosecutor to decide, but I’ll be sure to tell him.”

  “Well, we didn’t push him in, let me assure you. After he went down on the deck, he lay there for a time. Meanwhile, I went to call an ambulance and Mairtín went for a first-aid kit and a litter. We hadn’t gotten halfway down the dock when he suddenly scrambled to his feet, fell once more, got up, and tripped over the hatch to his ice chest. He fell into the slip. The moment Mairtín got the boat hook on him, the bloody horn went off on the hill. If it hadn’t been for that horn—”

  McGarr stared into the amber head of the stout in the pint glass, watching the rainbow surfaces of the bubbles burst. “I can understand why O’Brugha wanted to cover up this thing—he didn’t want to see his daughter go to prison. In part, I can understand why Horrigan went to such lengths—she is his wife, her IRA involvement would damage his chances to become Taoseaich in the near future, and he saw an opportunity to compromise the independence of the Garda and name his own successor to me. Ovens himself well may have had many reasons for not saying anything—he was drunk and doesn’t remember, the trauma eradicated his memory of the event, or the whole thing was only an argument that snowballed and he prefers now to forget it. But you, Hubbard, stump me. Other than her being an extraordinarily beautiful woman, what were your reasons for going along with the cover-up?”

  Hubbard reached over and picked up McGarr’s second pint of stout. The chief inspector hadn’t touched it. Hubbard raised it in a salute, then drank down half. The foam clung to his moustache, making his lips seem very red. “I don’t know, to be honest. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Both McGarr and McKeon looked up at him.

  Hubbard smiled. “That she’s an extraordinarily beautiful woman. As Eochu said when he first saw Etain, ‘I would leave all the world’s women for her sake.’”

  “Consider it done,” said McKeon.

  “What time would you like to report to my office in the Castle tomorrow?” McGarr didn’t want to disturb Hubbard in his present state. He had gotten from him what he wanted. Certainly, the fat young man wouldn’t get very far in his present condition.

  “What time do you suggest?”

  “Whenever it’s convenient to you.”

  “That’s very good of you, old man.”

  “It’s the least I can do for you. In time you’ll realize how important this conversation was to my career.” McGarr stood.

  McKeon slid the pad toward Hubbard and handed him his pen.

  “Do I have to?”

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?” McKeon demanded.

  Hubbard nodded.

  “Then what are you afraid of?”

  Hubbard signed the pad. Tomorrow, after McKeon had typed up a formal statement, Hubbard would be asked to sign that as well. “It’s just what you okayed last night, sir. If it was the truth then, it’s got to be the truth now,” McKeon would say. That way the question of the drinks and McGarr’s little lie could be avoided in court.

  McKeon flipped the pad shut, retrieved his pen, and stood.

  “Where are you going?” Hubbard asked them.

  “To speak to Horrigan and then to Ovens.”

  Hubbard snorted drunkenly into the pint glass. “And good luck to you, Inspector.”

  On the way to the door, McGarr called the Taoseaich’s office to add Hubbard’s admissions to the report of the Ovens attack investigation. O’Shaughnessy was there.

  McGarr dropped Be
rnie McKeon and the dummy Bombing Report off at the Castle and turned back toward St. Stephen’s Green and the Shelbourne Hotel. In the poker hand he was about to play with Horrigan, he needed no other cards than the information Hubbard had just given him and Liam O’Shaughnessy’s presence in the Taoseaich’s office.

  It had stopped raining and a brisk wind was driving the storm clouds from the sky. Every so often the sun broke through and cast a pale light on the narrow streets and faded brick buildings of Georgian Dublin.

  McGarr noted that the trees on the Green had already turned, and, as he parked his car across from the Shelbourne, a leaf storm swirled over the walk and eddied in the quiet air by the side of the Cooper.

  This afternoon the Shelbourne did not seem the comfortable city abode of the Irish Ascendancy that McGarr had always thought it. This afternoon the hotel was dark, too hot, its hallways timeworn and cramped.

  He knocked on the door of Horrigan’s suite, then turned the knob.

  David Horrigan was sitting at a towering escritoire, the shelves and nooks of which were crammed with papers. It was obviously an antique, many of the perpendiculars warped with age. Several long tables were covered with files. Horrigan obviously did much of his work here. He had his back to McGarr and was bent over a pad, on which he was writing with great speed. “Peter? I’ve been expecting you. Is this going to be our showdown? If so, here’s my case.” He ripped the sheet off his pad and handed it to McGarr. It read:

  Alleged: that Peter McGarr was involved in the theft of the Bombing Report. That on two occasions the Report was passed by Carleton Driver, the confessed thief, to McGarr: 1) the Royal Hotel, Glendalough, the night of 23rd October, 1975; 2) the Dolphin Lounge Bar or Dalton’s Turf Accountant’s shop on the morning of 25th October, 1975. That McGarr was found to be in possession of the stolen Report which was discovered in the trunk of his automobile in the courtyard of Dublin Castle 28th October, 1975. That McGarr paid £10,000 to Carleton Driver for the receipt of the Report.