The Death of an Irish Tradition

by Bartholomew Gill

  It was only 10:00, early by Irish standards, and, chilled now, he knew Noreen would feel warm and soft and he would sink back into that pleasant, dreamless state between waking and sleeping in which he became conscious of the pleasure the body took in being inert.

  But that was cowardice, now that he was awake, and twice already a faint rapping on the door had told him that others knew of his whereabouts. There was no sense in further sequestration.

  Dressing, he peered down at his wife—the tousled red locks, the slight freckling of the skin, the thin and straight nose, and the lips that were partially open in sleep. Like that, she always seemed to him so childlike, and yet again he marveled at the abandon with which she slept, on her back or sometimes on a side, but never like McGarr, who slept on his stomach, one pillow under his chest, the other over his head. He wondered what it meant, the difference. Probably nothing.

  Downstairs was a bar and a general store, with a dining room off that.

  Seeing McGarr on the stairs, the young girl behind the counter blushed and scurried toward the note pad near the telephone. The early-rising locals, dressed for Mass, quieted, making her approach to McGarr all the more painful.

  Her voice was high and no more than a whisper. “Chief Inspector, you had several calls this morning. First, the Commissioner, Mister Farrell—”

  “That’s fine, thank you. I can take it from there. You’ve got a lovely script.”

  She was tall and full with brown hair and a milk-white complexion, and several of the men smiled to see her color even more. She turned her back to them and caught her breath. “And there’s somebody waiting for you in the dining room.”

  McGarr looked up. He wondered who it could be.

  “A man,” she went on, casting him a sidelong glance that made her brown eyes seem as big as buttons. “He was here when I opened. Bald, he is. And not young.”

  McGarr was glad he had worn his hat and would have liked to know if she considered him young or old. “What paper is he reading?”

  “The Times.”

  Fogarty, McGarr thought, his nemesis. He wondered who had sicced the man on him. It could only be Ban Gharda Bresnahan, who was new to his staff. “Is there a phone in the bar?”

  She nodded and smiled a bit.

  “I’ll take my coffee in there then, if you don’t mind, and tell the missus where I am when she comes down, please.”

  The bar was empty, a dark room with a flagstone floor and old, wooden porter barrels stacked up behind the counter as decorations. Small stools and low tables made the place seem fit for faeries or Lilliputians, but McGarr knew better. It was a sing-song pub with a dais and a mike, but anybody wanting to be heard could just stand.

  McGarr looked for the bartender and discovered, behind the bar, an open trap that led down a flight of stairs to a cellar. There a light was on. Rather than disturb the man, he poured himself a large whisky and carried the note pad to the darkest corner. He wasn’t there a moment when Fogarty poked his head in the door, glanced around, and departed.

  Striking a match to a Woodbine, he read the messages: Farrell had rung twice, each time asking that his call be returned. It was urgent. Ballydehob. McGarr’s office at the Castle twice as well, and McKeon from his home. Finally, McAnulty, chief superintendent of the Technical Bureau, had rung him only minutes before he came downstairs.

  Carrying his drink to the phone, he called the Castle and found Ban Gharda Bresnahan on the desk. “I’ve told you before,” he said, “your Sundays are your own.”

  “And your Sundays now, Chief Inspector, are they your own?” She was a massive young woman from Kerry, precise in her work and dedicated and not a little bit ambitious. She was also upright and quite religious.

  “I’m in a lounge bar this minute with a smoke in me gob and a drink in me hand. I saw the insides of a church yesterday noon and it should last me ’til I die.”

  Bresnahan got right down to business.

  O’Shaughnessy had detained a garage mechanic who had claimed to have been working on Sean Murray’s yellow MG at the time of the Caughey murder. The superintendent had met with a magistrate late yesterday afternoon and had managed to obtain a court order for the service chits of Ballsbridge Motors Ltd., the concern involved. By the time he got back to the garage the manager had dropped his opposition to the request and willingly handed them over. Delaney then spent most of the night going through them and the internal accounts of the firm, and he had determined that the mechanic, Doyle by name, would have had to be working on three cars at once to have serviced the Murray car. The bookkeeping balance was short by the very amount that Murray had been billed and had, by his own statement, paid. But Doyle had kept to his story. He had a record, and they were still sweating him.

  “A record for what?”

  “The superintendent doesn’t say here.”

  “Could you check on that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then Ward had determined that Sean Murray kept company with a group at Trinity who were suspected of using drugs. He had checked further with other of his contacts in Dublin, but it seemed that, if he was a user himself, his source of supply was not Dublin-based.

  It wouldn’t be, McGarr thought, for a young man with money and doubtless friends who left and reentered the country often. He then thought of Murray’s father’s horses and wondered if that was the means.

  Otherwise, Ward had reported, the Caughey girl’s statement had been verified except for a short period of time during which she claimed to have tried to visit the National Library that had been closed because of repairs.

  At the R. D. S. Show Ground McKeon had made contact with a man who resembled J. J. Keegan in all particulars except for the mustache he now was wearing. McKeon couldn’t be sure until he checked the man against the snaps McAnulty was developing. He wanted to know what he should do.

  McGarr thought for a moment, tasting the smoky peat flavor of the whisky there in the darkness of the empty barroom. Keegan or Matthews or whoever he was calling himself now had not really committed any major crime. He could be questioned about the discharge of firearms at his residence near Drogheda, and then there was the question of his practicing veterinary medicine. But McKeon would be wrong and collaring the man would blow his cover, and McGarr thought it best to hold off for a while. Perhaps he had some idea about who had murdered his sister and would lead them to that person, if he were kept under strict surveillance.

  “Have him continue according to my prior orders, but detail Delaney and Greaves to him. I want them to be sure of the man’s whereabouts at all times.”

  He waited while she made the notes. “Anything else?”

  “Ah—let me see—. Oh yes. Commissioner—”

  “I’ve got that.”

  “And Superintendent Mc—”

  “And that too.”

  “Well then, there’s nothing more, Chief Inspector.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well—you did have another call or two, but they weren’t strictly official nor your wife, so I did as per your instructions.”

  “Good—” McGarr hesitated, almost having said “girl,” a term which the young woman eschewed, “—job. And what did you say to Mr. Fogarty from the Times?”

  “Only that he needn’t be ringing here on the quarter hour, hour by hour, since you were on the other side of the country with the missus and wouldn’t be back ’til the morrow.”

  “And he asked if I was on holiday?”

  “His very question. The man—he’s remorseless.”

  “And you said?”

  “I said, says I, I should hope not, not with a murder investigation on his hands.”

  “I wonder,” McGarr asked, touching the Woodbine to his lips and glancing toward the bar, where the barman was stacking cases of bottled beer, “if you would know who might be sitting in the dining room of the place I’m now in?”

  She let out a short, sharp laugh. “You must be joking.”

&nbs
p; “Oh, I’m not. Not in the least.”

  She paused. “Then I haven’t the faintest.”

  For a moment McGarr considered upbraiding her, but didn’t think it would do any good. She was from the country and only constant, daily exposure to people like Fogarty would make her any wiser. “I just thought you might have a spare vision, of a Sunday morning.

  “Thank you, now.” McGarr went to ring off.

  “But wait—who?” she asked, a laugh in her voice.

  McGarr sighed. “Fogarty,” he said precisely and depressed the lever.

  McAnulty said the blood on the towels was not J. J. Keegan’s, a record of which they possessed because of his prior incarcerations. The cigar ash found near the windowsill in the upstairs bedroom was rare, from some handmade, all leaf, Cuban variety, and the bureau was still trying to identify it exactly. Given the firing-pin impression on the shell casings, the gun that had been fired most at Keegan’s was a type of machine pistol. McAnulty wasn’t sure, but he thought they might be from a Skorpion, a new and powerful weapon that had been developed as a hand gun for tankers in the Czech army. It could be fired comfortably from one hand in a single-shot manner, but could, in an emergency, supply suppressive automatic bursts as well. But it was an expensive, a rare, and also an illegal weapon. One casing, however, was from a .38. They had found it in the drain pipe of the kennel roof.

  Return fire, McGarr thought, remembering Keegan’s involvement with the I. R. A. He wondered if the “army” still meant anything to him and if he could count on support from others of them.

  They had also gathered foot and tire prints.

  About the booby-trapped car—standard gelignite that was practically untraceable. The device was artful, though, and had last been seen in the North during the spring. The prints on the screwdriver would also be hard to pin down: a partial thumb and index finger, but the left hand, which would narrow it down.

  “What about the photos?”

  There was a pause. “What photos?”

  “From the Horse Show film. And the whistle.”

  Another pause. “For chrissakes, Peter—take it easy, will ya? First you’ve got a murder, next a near bombing, then a shoot-’em-up a couple hours later. That damn case is a year old.”

  “No, it isn’t. They’re all one.”

  Yet another pause. “You’re coddin’ me.”

  “I’m not.”

  It was enough for McAnulty, but not Farrell. “I don’t know what you think you’re running up there, a bunch of Blue Shirts or an Inquisition, but it’s got to stop. I had some madwoman on the line yesterday afternoon charging you personally with harassment on two separate occasions. Then Fogarty with a complaint against Ward. And Michael Edward Murray himself wonders why you’ve unleashed O’Shaughnessy on his son.”

  McGarr only raised the glass once more and watched his wife pause in the doorway, an image—her silhouetted there against the sunlit window of the general store beyond, hand on the jamb, looking about for him, her expression expectant—that touched him. In an instant he seemed to call up all their days together from their very first meeting in her father’s gallery on Dawson Street through all the flux of their lives together, abroad and in Rathmines, their hopes and aspirations and the trying times too, and he felt a poignancy—that the moment was over, that she’d seen him and now moved forward, that all those days and years now seemed to him to have gone by so fast, were over and irrevocable and dead.

  “Well?” Farrell demanded.

  “Well what?”

  “Well—how in God’s name did they get my number? Now I’ve got to call the phone people in again.”

  Ban Gharda Bresnahan, McGarr thought. “I think I can fix that.”

  “Then do it and fast. I don’t know what the hell you’re up to and I don’t think I care.”

  “Enough said.” McGarr began to ring off.

  “But wait a minute—”

  He paused for a moment, motioning Noreen to sit on his knee, but then he completed the movement. Farrell was an administrator and the less he knew the better.

  The girl had realized that McGarr was trying to avoid Fogarty, and she carried their breakfasts in to them.

  Paying for his drink, McGarr asked the barman, “How would I get to the Keegan farm?”

  The man only eyed him knowingly.

  “Or the Menahan place. Are you from these parts?”

  “Indeed I am, Inspector.” He laid the change down. “It’s Bechel-Gore you’re wanting to see, I gather.”

  “No, not exactly. First I’d like to see the Keegan house, if there’s anything left of it.”

  The man, who was older—plump and rosy, like many in his trade—cocked his head and looked away, thinking. “A near ruin now, I believe.” And he gave the directions.

  “And the Caugheys, do they have a place around here?”

  “Now that’s a strange one, that is.” The man pointed at the whisky glass, but McGarr shook his head. “I saw the news about Maggie Kate in the papers and it stumped me, to be honest. I grew up with her and Hugh Caughey, and I’d swear that she was still unmarried when he was long dead.”

  McGarr tapped the glass, and the man reached for the bottle.

  “A sailor, he was. Lied about his age and entered the merchant marine just before the war. Ship went down somewhere in the North Atlantic. I saw in the obituary she left a daughter, nineteen. Now—that just doesn’t figure, wouldn’t you say?

  “And then, Kate didn’t turn many heads, good soul that she was.”

  “And Jimmy-Joe?”

  “Older than me by,” he raised his eyes again, “a good ten years. Wild, it was said. Trouble. But he had a kind of style about him, as I remember.”

  “Any others in the family?”

  “Only one in the country that I know of.”

  McGarr waited.

  The man’s eyes moved from McGarr’s to Noreen’s and back again. “Married to Bechel-Gore. That’s why I was saying—”

  Fogarty was waiting for them at the car.

  “But what exactly did he say to you?”

  “He insulted my person in public.” Fogarty’s thick eyebrows formed a dark, knitted line.

  “But the words, man—what did he say?” McGarr had opened the door for Noreen and now walked around the small car and got in.

  “They’re not essential.” Fogarty tugged at his hat, a tyrolean with a small spray of multicolored feathers in the band. His nose repeated the shape of the crown, a radical bend and large.

  “I’d say they were.” McGarr closed the door and rolled down the window.

  “Well—” he looked away, his lips working, “he insulted me for being bald, and I call that cheap, very cheap. And low.” He studied McGarr, waiting for a reaction.

  “That doesn’t sound like Hughie to me. And with me on the premises, it’s a wonder he had to go afield.”

  “And then—” Fogarty’s anger was nearly too much for him, “—then he called me…an innocent man.”

  McGarr placed a finger alongside of his nose and tried to keep himself from laughing. Noreen had looked out her window. “I’d say you’ll have a job of it, proving that one in court.”

  “But it was the context,” he insisted.

  “I’m sure it was. I’m only sorry I missed it.” McGarr began to edge the car forward.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “For a little spin.”

  “You are like hell, you lying bas—”

  But McGarr was away.

  Bechel-Gore had awakened with a start. Somebody had been banging on his bedroom door. Momentary anger flooded through him, but he quelled it. Only his accident had made him realize the lesson he could have learned as a young man at Sandhurst—that one needed to modulate one’s tone to command, and especially with these people. To shout, to swear, to holler elicited as much response as when one beat a balking ass.

  He collected himself. “Yes?”

  “Ah, sir—it’s Kestral. She�
��s got the colic. It’s all we can do to keep her on her feet.”

  Bechel-Gore tossed back the covers and, using the grips on the stanchion over the bed, swung his legs out and tried to stand. He managed to raise himself up and lean his back against the bed brace, but his legs, wizened and slight compared to the rest of his body, wouldn’t hold his weight, and he sank back onto the edge of the bed.

  But in spite of the activity that was strenuous for him, he said in measured tones, “How do you mean, colic?”

  The other man’s voice was rushed, urgent. “Somebody’s been feedin’ her green apples. We found the spit-outs in the stall. She’s in a bad way, sir.”

  “Has she gone down at all?” If she had, it was all over for the horse, as well as for his aspirations for the Horse Show, and perhaps even for his expectations of greater success for the farm at the bloodstock auctions there. Colic, especially from having eaten green apples, caused a horse such severe paroxysms of internal pain that it would throw itself down and writhe, thrashing about, tying its intestines in knots. The point was to keep Kestrel upright, keep her walking, and only then apply other remedies.

  “I told them not to let her.”

  “Did anybody think to drench her?” Again the even tone. Bechel-Gore meant the old and very Irish technique of trying to force a purgative down the horse’s throat by means of a solution in a long-necked, leather-covered bottle. Almost never did the gagging horse get all of it down its throat and into its stomach. Some nearly always got into its lungs and foreign-body pneumonia was the result.

  And Kestral was Bechel-Gore’s attempt to show the international horse world that horses bred and trained on his farm, even the mare who had crippled him, could be made into a first-class hunter or perhaps, as in her case, even a premier show jumper.

  “There was talk of it, but we remembered what you said, and I thought you’d want me to come get you up, beggin’ your pardon, sir.”

  At least that was something. Fed her green apples, he thought. Somebody. He might have laughed, had he not pulled himself up again. This time his legs held him, and he took several shaky steps toward the closet. “Paddy, would you come in here, please? I’d like your help.