Death in Dublin

by Bartholomew Gill

  The swish of one silky thigh gliding over the other caused McGarr to turn and look out the sooty window. He removed his hat and placed it on the filing cabinet.

  She—Bresnahan—was a tall woman with an angular—no, a spectacularly angular—build. In her mid-thirties now, she reminded McGarr of a larger, better-looking Rita Hayworth, if that were possible.

  In his youth, McGarr had been entranced by Rita Hayworth. She had been his first love, he had more than once thought. Even Noreen, his wife, had looked like a diminutive, finer version of Rita Hayworth, and here was Bresnahan—Rita gone large and in the shape of her face prettier.

  Rita Hayworth, McGarr had decided when watching Pal Joey for the umpteenth time, was only pretty in the pose of command—head tilted back and slightly to the side, staring down her rather ordinary nose at some hapless sap as though to say, “Grovel, swine.”

  Bresnahan, on the other hand, always looked markedly handsome from every angle, with a long, straight nose, high cheekbones, and a dimpled chin. Her eyes were the color of dark smoke; her hair was auburn.

  But not only was she decades younger than McGarr, she had also worked for him too long for anything other than friendship. Add to that, she was the common-law wife of Hugh Ward, McGarr’s erstwhile second in command and good friend.

  Nevertheless, he wondered—not for the first time—how it would be to have Bresnahan in bed. The touch of her, the heft of her body.

  Reaching for the bottle on the desk, he squeaked the cork into the top and slid it into the drawer. He turned to Ward. “Got something?”

  Ward hunched his shoulders. “Maybe. But first you should see this.”

  Dark, with matinee-idol good looks and an athletic build, Hugh Ward tapped a few keys and turned the screen of the large laptop so the others could see. Ward had been touted as McGarr’s successor before the debacle that led to Noreen’s and Fitz’s deaths and resulted, later, in Bresnahan and Ward being drummed out of the Garda.

  The screen brightened, and a voice said, “Mr. Brendan Kehoe, taoiseach, will now make a statement about recent events at Trinity College.”

  Kehoe was to McGarr’s mind the consummate down-country politician. A small, wiry man with an unruly tangle of blondish hair, he maintained a perpetual slight smile, as though to say, no matter the situation—some reversal of progress toward a settlement in the North; the malfeasance of a minister in his government; or here the theft of perhaps the chief treasure of the country—all was right with the world. Or could be made right, if we just keep our aplomb. Or cool.

  At first Kehoe’s smile had been the subject of derision in the press, with columnists lampooning it as “daffy,” “imbecilic,” and “ga-ga.” Cartoonists had a field day, picturing him as a pukka or Lilliputian among a forest of Brobdingnagians. But as his leadership matured, all learned that the bemused smile was balanced by a political deftness and savvy that had been missing from Irish politics in recent years.

  A barrister and legal scholar, Kehoe still spoke in the broad tones of his native West Cork, and along with the smile, he maintained an avuncular manner, like some poor country farmer you might meet in a pub or hear phoning in one of the chat shows that were a feature of rural Irish radio—at once garrulously good-humored, folksy but sly.

  Surrounded by taller men at the microphone, Kehoe studied his notes and shook his head before speaking. Then:

  “’Tis a sad, sorrowful day for the Irish people and the world. Our greatest national treasure has been stolen, one brave man murdered egregiously and seemingly to no purpose, and another is seriously ill in the hospital.

  “The Book of Kells, along with the books of Durrow and Armagh, are collectively a trinity which represents the highest form of Celtic-Christian art that the world possesses, and are a testament to the cultural preeminence of Celtic peoples during a period in Europe that was otherwise turbulent, benighted, and militaristic.

  “The manuscripts are also holy objects, divine talismans of the Christian faith.

  “That said, we who are gathered here represent all political parties but one. And we are united in our resolve to get the books back undamaged in any way. We will also see those cultural terrorists who perpetuated these several crimes apprehended and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

  “Every resource of the government and Garda will be brought to bear on this effort, which will be led by Chief Superintendent Jack Sheard.”

  The camera swung to Sheard, the largest and certainly the most striking-looking man there. His expression was bathetically grave, McGarr judged—hands clasped at waist, eyes down, brow glowering. A knob of flesh on his wide jaw had blanched from compressed concern.

  “The government has also established a reward of thirty thousand Euros for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators and the return of the treasures. Needless to say, the identities of all patriots willing to come forward to help the police in this matter will be kept strictly confidential. You need not fear reprisals.”

  A graphic with a telephone number now appeared on the screen. It was the public information number of Sheard’s office.

  “Which political party is absent?” McGarr asked.

  “Celtic United,” said Bresnahan.

  “The who?” Swords asked. He was standing in the opening of the cubicle, pad and Biro in hand to take McGarr’s orders.

  “What rock have you been skulking under, boyo?” McKeon asked.

  “It’s the political party of the New Druids,” Ward explained. “The gang from the North Side.”

  Who were responsible for much of the organized crime and drug dealing in the working-class sections of the city, McGarr well knew.

  The New Druids were a group of former IRA thugs and anti–organized religion zealots who were suspected of torching churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, on both sides of the border—and of other crimes, such as bank holdups, protection schemes, car thefts, and drug dealing.

  Particularly they preyed upon Ireland’s growing immigrant population and thus appealed to the young native Irish who were either unemployed or unemployable, along with the marginally or downright poor who had watched their neighborhoods become Moroccan, Nigerian, or Slavic.

  Taoiseach Kehoe did not take questions. Instead, for the third time that day, Jack Sheard stepped before the cameras to field questions from the media.

  He reprised what was known: the theft, security guard Raymond Sloane’s murder, the probability that more than one thief/murderer was involved, and the injured security guard.

  McGarr could only admire the panache with which Sheard rephrased his answers to make what was essentially only a few details seem like further information. In all, with wide shoulders, the big knobby chin, and youthful blond hair, he looked stalwart and competent.

  “Then there’s Orla Bannon,” said Bresnahan. “The Ath Cliath reporter with my ID. Turns out she was snooping into the hit-and-run death of Derek Greene a fortnight ago, mind you, before what happened last night in the Old Library. My source at Ath Cliath tells me she’s doing a big story on the New Druids.”

  “Who’s Derek bloody Greene?” McKeon asked.

  As one, the others turned their heads his way to assess his level of sobriety.

  “How’rya getting home?” Bresnahan asked.

  “On me pins.”

  “Which will needle you, if you drink any more of that.” She pointed to the cup.

  “Oh, really now—I’ll tell you who Derek Greene is. He’s”—McKeon looked off, his dark eyes glassy, features knitted before breaking into a sly smile—“the bloody security guard. The one what et the bumper of a BMW, the one who wasn’t there, which forced poor Sloane to walk the beat.

  “By choice, of course, Sloane having been bought. Witness the big car and the payback of the money he’d filched from his family’s savings to feed his drug habit.” McKeon looked down into the cup. “My prediction?”

  “Delivered by himself, the new druid of Dublin Castle,” Bresna
han quipped.

  “The postmortem will confirm that.”

  “Confirm what?”

  “Oxy-effing-Contin.”

  “This Orla Bannon knew what was about to go down,” said Ward, if only to keep them on course. “Just like she knew the details of what had happened in the Treasury—case and point of how Sloane was murdered. How could she have known that and not been in on it?”

  Pape, the head librarian, McGarr thought. If Orla Bannon wasn’t in on it, then she could only have got the information from Pape, who had viewed the crime scene and had left the Old Library while McGarr was still interviewing Kara Kennedy. A skilled and fetching younger woman reporter with an angry old man—she probably now knew the brand of his jockey shorts.

  “Ach, forget about her,” said Bresnahan, flapping a hand dismissively. “She’s only looking for a scoop. It’s her MO.”

  “Yah—scooping up your credentials and representing herself as a Garda senior officer,” put in McKeon. “Both are crimes.”

  But crimes that were best ignored, given how foolish Bresnahan and the Garda would look. And how resourceful Orla Bannon would appear. McGarr reached into his jacket pocket and felt for the cards that the two women—Orla Bannon and Kara Kennedy—had given him.

  “All right—what do we know?” Ward asked, as he had for years when he’d been McGarr’s second in command.

  McGarr and McKeon supplied most of the synopsis:

  That Derek Greene, a security guard, was knocked down in the street and killed a fortnight ago by a hit-and-run driver, freeing up the chief guard, Raymond Sloane, to walk Greene’s beat. It might be a coincidence, but why had Orla Bannon been investigating the death?

  That Sloane, who had a drug problem, made some kind of deal with either the two people who met him in Foyle’s or some others that resulted in a windfall right before the event at Trinity College.

  Sloane also probably assaulted his colleague, the guard at the Pearse Street gate, rendering him unconscious before opening the gate for the thieves who would also become his murderers. The sap that was found in Sloane’s hand would produce evidence of that, McGarr was certain.

  That there were at least two thieves was apparent from the voice transcription of their garbled voices. Near the end of the heist Sloane dropped any pretense of objecting to the theft and began objecting to their treatment of him.

  As well, Sloane had not known that they had planned to steal the books of Durrow and Armagh in addition to Kells.

  They murdered Sloane to send the message that they were “serious.” About what? The ransom demand that was coming; there could be nothing else.

  That Trevor Pape, the head librarian, and Kara Kennedy, the keeper of old manuscripts, were the only other two people who knew definitively how the cases could be opened and by whom—Sloane and each other alone. No others.

  “Which leaves us?” Ward asked.

  “Waiting for the demand,” Bresnahan concluded.

  “Anything else?” Ward asked.

  Swords cleared his throat, stepped fully into the cubicle, and reached a printout toward McGarr.

  The E-mail message was from the commissioner, repeating what they had heard the taoiseach announce on the television: the 30,000-Euro reward and that Jack Sheard would head up the investigation. With a final remark that cut McGarr to the quick.

  “Jack’s expertise is theft. He’s studied these things, Peter. He knows how thieves think.”

  As if McGarr, with more than thirty years of police work both in Ireland and on the Continent, did not.

  Turning to Swords but actually speaking to Bresnahan and Ward, McGarr said, “I want to martial the staff. They’re to drop everything else and concentrate on Trevor Pape, Kara Kennedy, the victim Sloane, this Derek Greene, and Orla Bannon. I want to know every little thing about them, from their last phone calls to bank balances, mortgages, liaisons, what programming they watch, how many fillings in their molars, the works.”

  Still smarting from the commissioner’s message, McGarr tugged on his hat. “Finally, send an artist over to Foyle’s in the Liberties. I want a mock-up of an upmarket man and woman who met with Sloane two weeks or so ago.”

  “Look at that big pumped-up pussy,” McKeon was muttering, as he stared at Sheard on the computer screen. “He can yap more nothing about nothing much than any man alive.”

  Among his handful of admirers within the Garda, Sheard was known as “The Communicator,” McGarr now remembered it said.

  They would now see how potent an investigator he was.

  “By when, Chief?” Swords asked to McGarr’s back.

  “Ten. Tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  GOING HOME, BEING HOME, ENJOYING THE HOME HE once loved was a trial for McGarr, filled as it was with so many memories of Noreen.

  A detached Georgian house made of brick and stone, it occupied a corner on Belgrave Square in Rathmines, a suburb of the city that was now also filled out with recent immigrants, students, pensioners, and the working poor. It had not always been so.

  McGarr parked his Mini-Cooper down a narrow cul-de-sac that bordered one side of his property and got out.

  The night, like the day had been, was fair, and even with the ambient light of the city and a quarter moon, the stars were myriad and deep.

  Instead of walking round to the front door as he usually did, McGarr moved toward the laneway and the low door that opened into his back garden.

  There in the dim chalky light, striped with brighter luminescence from the kitchen windows, he surveyed his garden, which he had all but abandoned for three entire summers.

  But in hopes of carrying on in the coming spring, he had planted a bit of winter wheat that would add nutrients to the now-well-rested soil, when he turned it under before planting.

  There had been a time when gardening had been a passion for McGarr, a way of truly re-creating himself while producing a satisfying variety of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. When engaged in gardening, he had no thoughts other than those related to the pastime, which were few since he’d been gardening for decades. It was like second nature to him.

  McGarr knew other people who had suffered losses as great as he had but whose hobbies had given them succor and solace.

  Well—he glanced up at the house where he could see Nuala’s head moving to and from the stove—maybe in the coming year. A light was on in Maddie’s room, where she would be doing her sums.

  He should go in and find out how she was and how her work was progressing, make small talk with Nuala, who would be interested in the trouble at Trinity, maybe pour himself an aperitif and make a few phone calls about other cases that would now go ignored.

  And yet McGarr removed his jacket and began pulling up dead plants and tossing them on the compost heap. He worked steadily but without passion for perhaps a half hour, before he heard the back door open.

  “Peter—is that you out there?” Nuala asked, squinting into the darkness. “I thought I saw you. Put that down now. And come in. Your tea is ready.”

  Climbing the back stairs, he caught the aroma of baking plaice with black olives and mild peppers, some fresh tarragon, and butter. Less apparent were the odors of parsleyed potatoes and hot bread.

  Like her daughter had been, Nuala was an excellent cook. And yet he who had eaten next to nothing the day long had little appetite for the food. He reached for a glass of wine, which was white, cold, and calming, he hoped.

  “Maddie tells me you were on the teley today.”

  McGarr nodded and glanced over at Maddie, who had brought a book to the table in spite of his having asked her not to do so some weeks earlier.

  But he could hardly blame her, dinner conversation usually taking the form of “How was your day?” “Grand.” “And yours?” A nod. “The same.” This, in spite of Nuala’s having once been accounted as one of the notable conversationalists in Dublin society.

  “The Kells affair, now—will you catch the blighters who
killed that poor watchman?”

  Eating the dinner if only to respect the effort, McGarr glanced up at Nuala. In all but coloring she resembled Noreen—dark where Noreen had been fair. But now in her early seventies, she was gray; her skin had grown slack and her hips wide.

  “Yes. Surely. We will. Eventually, I suppose.” There would be money involved, which always left a trail in some way or other.

  “But will you get the books back?”

  “Yah. It’s why they were stolen.”

  “For a ransom.”

  “Yah.”

  Maddie’s head came up from the book. “How much?”

  “We haven’t heard from them yet.” Unless, of course, Jack Sheard had, and McGarr and the Murder Squad were being kept out of the loop.

  He thought of the taoiseach’s press conference, the commissioner’s note, and he placed his fork on the plate. He knew why Sheard brought out all his insecurities and fears.

  Younger, taller, handsome, well-spoken, with the picture-perfect family and legal background, Sheard was the future of the Garda.

  As for McGarr…well, he had no university degrees, no other training, and apart from Maddie and Nuala, his work was all he had in life. All he knew.

  “But how much do you think?”

  Pushing back his chair, he stood and moved toward the pantry where he kept the malt. “Millions, I’m certain. Why murder for less?”

  “How many?” Nuala paused. “What’s wrong—don’t you fancy your dinner?”

  “It’s grand. I’ll be right out.” Pouring himself a stiff drink and then adding to it, McGarr knocked it back, set down the glass, considered another but instead corked the bottle and returned to the table.

  “I’ve no idea how many millions,” he continued when he could, as though he had not left. Through his watering eyes, Maddie’s image was distorted. “But they’re obviously professional thieves.” And killers, he did not add. “So the sum could be high.”

  “Millions and millions?”