Death in Dublin

by Bartholomew Gill

  During what came to be known as the Barbastro Affair, Sweeney was convicted only of possessing an illegal handgun. Sentenced to six months in prison commuted because of time served, he walked out of court the day of the decision.

  The following Monday he sued the government for “a consistent pattern of police harassment” and was awarded 2.7 million pounds.

  Yet for all his millions, Sweeney was wearing his signature wrinkled and soiled, if expensive, mac, a rumpled shirt, and a patterned red tie. His cordovan bluchers were in need of polish. There would be a navy blazer the size of a small sail beneath the mac.

  “Yes?” McGarr asked.

  “I’ve come for a wee chat. About the book.” He was sweating, in need of a shave, and his skin as always looked sickly and gray.

  Turning to the bar, Sweeney raised a finger and swirled it. There was a drink in his other hand.

  “Which book?”

  “Sure—is there any other at the moment?”

  “How did you know I’d be here?” Certainly Nuala, who loathed the man, would not have told him.

  “How did I not? What’s the phrase—to be predictable is to be controllable. But you can risk that, not being controllable in any way that’s been determined thus far. Which is your great strength, McGarr. And don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise.”

  A barman, whom Sweeney had obviously tipped handily, now appeared with a tray of drinks.

  “Not to worry—I won’t interrupt your cozy fireside chat for long. Fancy how convenient it is, given what went on last night—yous two living so nearby. Curious how life throws people together, is it not?”

  Sweeney raised the drink in the maw of his left hand, drank it off, and set down the empty glass. From under his mac he then brought out what looked like a videotape in a clear plastic sleeve. “My purpose in coming—to give you this.” He held it out to McGarr, who only regarded the object.

  “Right enough.” Sweeney set the box on the table and picked up a full glass. “I’m no part of this. I don’t know why they chose me to be the messenger. Did I look at it? Of course I did, curiosity as always getting the better of me. And then, amn’t I a publisher these days?” His slight smile was rueful and exposed a clutch of yellowing teeth.

  “But I’m passing it on to you and not that gobshite Sheard out of concern for the cultural heritage of the country. He’s no real cop and will just make a balls of the situation.

  “Look, McGarr.” Because of his height, which had to be all of six-five, he had to bend to pick up the fresh drink. “To put it mildly, we’ve had our differences over the years, and I know you think I’m in some way responsible for your wife and Fitz, which I’m not.”

  Tilting back his head, he opened his mouth and tossed off the second drink in one swallow. As Sweeney set the glass back down, McGarr noticed that the rough contours of his face were now running with sweat.

  “But after you watch what’s in here, you’ll see that these motherless pricks aren’t bluffing. Sure, the urge is to bring all the force possible down on them, which will not change one thing—they’ve got the bloody books, and we don’t.”

  “It’s a ransom demand?” asked McGarr.

  Sweeney nodded.

  “How did it come to you?”

  “Motorcycle messenger—dropped it on the desk in the newsroom and said it should be brought to me immediately.”

  “Messenger?”

  “Standard-issue leathers, boots, helmet, and goggles—I checked. No different from any other.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe two hours ago. I gave it a gander and thought it should be passed along to you pronto.”

  “How did you view it?”

  Sweeney’s massive head moved to Kara and back to McGarr. “How else? In a feckin’ videotape player.” There was a pause, and then, “Ooops—fingerprints. I never thought of that. Did I chuck a spanner in the works?”

  Sweeney touched his index finger to his lips, as though cogitating. Then, “No, not likely. You’ll see—they’re professionals. The entire shenanigan has been thought out to a sweet good-bye. I’m sure they considered everything. Why, even in the burn sequence, the bastards are wearing black gloves.”

  He pulled back a cuff to check a large gold watch nestled in the bramble of hair on his wrist. “Shite and double shite. I’ve got to run. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to give me a shout. I’m still at the old stand, when not at the paper. You know where it is.

  “Ms. Kennedy.” Sweeney touched a hand to his brow.

  Pivoting, as though to leave, he then careened back. “By the by, how be young Ward and his mot, Rut’ie? Thriving, I’m told. Don’t tell them but I myself—Chazz, the Terrible—contracts with them through a brace of dummy corporations, of course. I only ever hire the best, and don’t I know their quality firsthand. Ouch.

  “Give them my regards on their next stop by your shop, the whole magilla between yiz all and me being just part of life. And profitable. But I’m happy for them they landed on their feet.

  “Remember, I’m only the messenger. Just the messenger.”

  In arresting Sweeney two-plus years past, Ward—a former All-Ireland and European boxing champ—had give Sweeney a thorough beating, which had cost the country an additional 500,000 quid. And, in part, had cost Ward his job.

  “Somehow, he seems larger and more ominous in person,” Kara observed.

  Watching as Sweeney stopped at the bar for another quick drink and to pay his tab—his broad but shapeless back and bent head looming like a kind of carrion bird—McGarr remembered that Flood, the publican, had an office in the cellar with a television and video player for taping World Cup matches.

  He turned to Kara Kennedy. “Would you mind if I took a look at this?”

  “How would you do that?”

  “In the pub office. I’m sure it won’t take long.”

  “You mean, you’re not inviting me?”

  “Think of this as my work. I’ll be back shortly.” Ransom demands almost always being brief. “If you have to leave, I understand. Perhaps we might do this again. Or dinner.”

  “I understand as well. You don’t trust me. I’m just another suspect. And you couldn’t have it said you allowed a suspect to view evidence.”

  Turning her head, she raised her glass. In profile, he decided, she was truly beautiful, given her long, slightly aquiline nose, the rake of her forehead, thick darkish eyebrows, and a definite widow’s peak.

  Moving down the stairs into the cellar of the pub, McGarr remembered how miraculously Sweeney had appeared at McGarr’s father-in-law’s door in Kildare two years earlier, just as McGarr was beginning his investigation into the murder of Mary-Jo Stanton.

  At the time, she was perhaps the wealthiest woman in the country and, like Sweeney, an adherent of the secretive and reactionary Catholic sect Opus Dei.

  Having enjoyed McGarr’s parents-in-law’s vaunted hospitality and knowing the doors were never locked, Sweeney had entered the house whole hours—it was later determined—before any of the family had returned and was found sitting in the very room where Fitz’s and Noreen’s guns were kept unlocked.

  Others, including Delia Manahan, the woman who actually murdered Mary-Jo Stanton and her gardener, had also spent time in the house alone. But whoever had spiked Noreen’s favorite shotgun—inserting a 21-gauge shell into the 12-gauge chamber so that it would block the barrel and explode when the larger shell was fired—knew guns.

  And Sweeney did much more than Manahan, whose death—McGarr suspected—Sweeney later arranged.

  In the darkness of the stairwell, McGarr stopped. He could not go on. His eyes had yet to accustom themselves to the dim light, and behind his eyelids the death scene was unfolding again.

  McGarr had not been far away—down in the sleepy Kildare village near Fitz’s estate—when Noreen rang up his cell phone, asking him to come home. The gun had exploded, Fitz was down, and it was an emergency.

  Commandeering
a car, McGarr caught sight of them in the distance by the shooting blinds: Noreen down on her knees with her father’s head—looking like a bright red berry—in her lap. His arms were stretched out, his legs splayed.

  She did not rise to meet him, and once out of the car, he could see it was serious. It seemed as though the older man no longer had half of his face. One eye was untouched. It was open and staring up at her. But his brow, his other eye, his cheek, and even most of his left ear looked like it had been wiped away with one pass of something sharp.

  There was blood everywhere—on Fitz, on Noreen, in a puddle on the ground around her knees. She looked up at McGarr, her green eyes glassy. “Is he gone?” she asked in a strange, disembodied voice.

  McGarr then noticed a black and cratered spot the size of a 10P coin just behind her right ear. It looked like a splotch of dried blood, although he knew it couldn’t be.

  He was hearing the steady, distant thump of rotors from the emergency helicopter that he’d called in while driving there. He rose to direct it in.

  “Oh—where are you going, Peter? I’m not sure I can support his head much longer.”

  When McGarr glanced back at Noreen, he saw she was not speaking toward him, as though she could neither turn her head nor follow him with her eyes.

  Fitz died first, Noreen several days later.

  In a coma.

  CHAPTER

  6

  MCGARR FOUND NIALL FLOOD IN THE PUB OFFICE, going through a stack of delivery invoices.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Peter. The police is just what I need. Fookin’ help’ll steal you blind, if you let them. Look at this—charged for two dozen cases of Saxenbrau, twenty came over the threshold. Here, a dozen bottles of Black Bush with a bottle missing.

  “But it’s nothing compared with the two chancers I had in here Monday week.” A tall, thin man with silver hair, a bright red bow tie, and blue straps over a white shirt, Flood had taken over from his father, who had taken over from his father, and so forth. “Since before the flood,” the chuckle went.

  “One says to me, says he, ‘None of the theft, nor the rash of broken windows, nor the trashing of the jakes will continue,’ if I ‘bring them on board,’ says he.

  “‘In what capacity?’ says I.

  “‘Protectors,’ says he. ‘People do stuff, you tell us, we fix ’em.’

  “Says I, ‘More easily said than done.’ No geniuses, they were at a loss. ‘For you to fix yourselves.’ I threw them out and rang up your cohorts over at the substation.”

  “Immigrants?”

  “Nothing of the kind. Irish as you and me, apart from the bangles and rings in their ears and noses. The one had a bloody big stud—like a tie tack—through his tongue. Made him lisp.”

  “Tall fella? Blond with broad shoulders?”

  “Nah. More like a midget, he was. Dark. The one with him was blond with broad shoulders, though he didn’t open his mouth.”

  “Anything in his nose?”

  “Snot, I should imagine. But I didn’t check.”

  McGarr explained what he wanted, and that it was official. “Won’t take but a sec.”

  “I’ll go up, then, and see who’s stealing from me aboveground.”

  McGarr thumbed on the machine and took Flood’s chair, wishing he’d thought to carry a drink down with him.

  The video began with a blank screen and pipe-and-fiddle music, some traditional tune McGarr had heard before but couldn’t name.

  As the screen brightened, Newgrange—the ancient passage grave on the banks of the Boyne near Slane—appeared, and the voice-over declared:

  “This is what the Irish were capable of building without metal tools or the wheel five hundred years before the oldest pyramids were constructed in Egypt. The structure is so perfectly aligned with the sun that only on one day per year does sunlight strike the central altar—on winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. In more than fifty-three hundred years, never has the massive corbeled stone roof allowed a drop of water to penetrate the sanctum.”

  In travelogue fashion, the video went on to describe the high points of Celtic civilization: brehon law, Beaker people pottery, La Tène design, the “proto-Arthurian values of chivalry and gentilesse, as developed within the Fianna, which was the group of legendary heroes who were said to have ruled the Ireland of Celtic myth.

  “Also democracy—rule by the consensus of the clan. The Celts had a way of dealing with each other on a daily basis that was based on warmth, clan solidarity, and trust. The most extreme punishment that could be meted out to an offender was not death. It was expulsion from the community—to be declared pariah.”

  The voice was what McGarr thought of as “mid-Atlantic,” one that could not be identified as demonstrably Irish, British, or North American. It was, however, surely urbane, and McGarr wondered if the entire piece had been lifted from some television show run on the BBC.

  “But Christianity, which arrived in the latter part of the fifth century, proved disastrous to Ireland,” the voice continued, noting that early Christian converts were encouraged to renounce the world and retreat to abbeys, monasteries, and other sanctuaries. “This alien movement not only usurped and supplanted the ancient religion of Ireland’s native Celts, it also led to the central religious division of the country that obtains to this day.

  “The most immediate deleterious effect was the escapist teachings of early missionaries, their advocacy of converts becoming ‘exiles for Christ.’”

  Family, clan, and nonreligious community ties suffered—the video continued—such that 350 years later, when Vikings began raiding the Irish coast, there was no effective militia in place to defend the country.

  “Abbeys, monasteries, and churches had waxed fat, amassing great wealth, while secular institutions, which might have countered the Viking threat, were all but absent.

  “Even after seventy years of sustained Viking pillaging, Christianity with its otherworldly ethos could not bring forth a common defense. In A.D. 863, Christian Ireland allowed a Viking force to sack Newgrange and other nearby megalithic tombs in the Boyne Valley.

  “For over thirty-five hundred years, those tombs and religious relics of former greatness—the very gateways to the Celtic Otherworld—had been revered by the Irish people and kept sacrosanct. Having withdrawn to its many stone keeps with its own booty, Christianity simply allowed those treasures of Ireland’s ancient past to be plundered.

  “The remains and artifacts interred there were not relics of the Christian past—the past of their prophet from the deserts of the Middle East. No. Oenghus, to whom the site was sacred, was an indigenous god of the older religion. Therefore, Newgrange was deemed expendable and valueless.”

  After showing photos of Newgrange before its restoration in the 1990s—when it was a near ruin in a wet pasture with boulders strewn about—the screen presented a collage of the tall medieval keeps that monastic communities had built as sanctuaries. During Viking raids, the monks had retreated there with whatever precious objects they could carry or had stored there, drawing up the ladder after them.

  “Even more than four hundred years after the initial Viking attacks, Christian Ireland remained so weak that the country was easily overrun by their coreligionists, the Normans, beginning in A.D. 1169. It ushered in over eight hundred years of foreign domination that has not ceased to this day.

  “Question—what is the most divisive and destructive issue in this country today?”

  A pastiche of rioting crowds, bomb-related destruction, and corpses appeared, along with clips of grieving families at funeral processions and gravesides.

  “What might Ireland have become, had she cleaved to her culture? Had Christianity not displaced the older Celtic verities of life and Druidism?”

  Suddenly, the picture on the screen began rotating and diminishing in a spin-fade, as though being drawn down a drain.

  The drain—replete with circular drain holes—reappeared, glowing and reddish as
though made from some fiery chrome. “Which makes this book what?” a deep, gravelly, and disembodied voice asked.

  As the camera panned back, it revealed that the drainlike covering was obscuring the mouth of a person dressed in black with a black balaclava over a hooded face and what looked like blue-tinted welder’s goggles wrapped around his eyes. Strapped to his forehead was a bright red light that cast a film of red glare over the lens of the camera, further obscuring the image of the figure and book.

  “A Judas book.” The figure was holding up a book with the pages turned to the camera. The voice was one of the voices from the Trinity security tape, one of Raymond Sloane’s killers. “And expendable.”

  The picture on the screen then broke to a shot of the same black-gloved hands in some other setting, holding the blue flame of a gas torch to what appeared to be a page of the Kells book. After only a few seconds of smoldering, it burst into flame, curling up into a roll as it was consumed.

  “Like your fookin’ Christ, you have three days to come up with fifty million Euros. On the fourth, we’ll contact you with the drop. If you balk, on the fifth we burn a page and another every day until you do. Publicly.” The screen went black.

  McGarr’s first thought: Was it genuine? Or a ruse by Sweeney to…what? To enrich himself by 50 million. Why had the thieves chosen to go through him? Because they knew Sweeney was certain to copy it and make the entire matter public if the government were to balk?

  And how could its authenticity be established? McGarr thought of Kara Kennedy upstairs in the lounge—perhaps she could tell from the look of it on the screen. Or the way it burned. While the tape was rewinding, he climbed the stairs two at a time, but she seemed to be gone. “She still here?” he asked the barman who had served him. “The woman I was with.” He pointed toward the hearth.

  “Told me to tell you she was tired of waiting. And just tired. She gave me this to give you.”