Death in Dublin

by Bartholomew Gill

  SPECIAL EDITION

  HEADHUNTER CAUGHT

  ON RANSOM TAPE

  Story and Commentary

  by Orla Bannon

  Which capsuled and satirized the earlier part of the tape about Celtic history, legend, and lore, and the supposed disastrous effect of Christianity on Ireland, “all brought to you by the people still practicing the curious Celtic tradition of the taking of heads.”

  Bannon included verbatim the demand of the black-cloaked figure shown holding the torch to a page.

  In another frame, Ath Cliath technicians had attempted to enlarge one of the human heads that were impaled on the wall. In a way, the grainy multicolor image was more ghastly because it abstracted the picture and made the blurred features and morbid shape merge.

  Bannon included the information that she had discovered about Derek Greene’s grave having been disturbed and his corpse decapitated.

  “The family is understandably distraught. But the fortnight lead between Greene’s murder, the theft that was accomplished with Sloane’s collusion, and Sloane’s own murder to keep him from grassing demonstrate the thieves’ resolve. As well, they illustrate the level of planning and coordination in this cabal.

  “Raymond Sloane Jr.—the dead security guard’s son—is wanted for questioning by the police who raided Celtic United headquarters on the Glasnevin Road last night in an effort to find him. Instead, they turned up what they suspect was the car that killed Greene, an action that resulted in the death of Kevin Carney, a CU supporter and alleged New Druid with a lengthy record of drug dealing.

  “Earlier, Chief Superintendent McGarr—while in possession of the ransom videotape—interviewed Dr. Kara Kennedy, keeper of old manuscripts at Trinity, questioning her about the authenticity of the page from the Book of Kells that is burned on the tape.

  “There is a facsimile edition of the manuscript that is similar in every way but the material on which it is rendered. The original is on vellum (a treated form of calfskin), the facsimile is printed on paper.”

  “What’s she got,” McGarr asked, “a crystal ball?”

  He wondered if she ever slept and had a life beyond her profession. One thing was certain—now that Ath Cliath had published photos of the ransom tape, Kehoe would have to deal with it publicly and make some statement about his intentions.

  “Excuse me, Chief. What Orla Bannon doesn’t—and can’t—know is what we’ve been putting together for the last two days.” Swords smoothed out the sheaf of papers in his hand. “I’d like to run it by you, so a few of us can go home for a while.”

  Leaning back in his chair, McGarr raised his head, twined his fingers around the back of his neck, and considered the cracked plaster of the ceiling covered with at least a century of urban grime. The peeling paint looked like greening lichen on yellow rock and was filled with lead, he’d been told.

  Were he Kehoe, he mused, he would pretend to deal—even if he had no intention of dealing—with the thieves. That way, he would buy time and not be seen as doing nothing. Also, a page or pages of the book might be spared.

  “First thing is the OxyContin we asked the pathologist to look for in the postmortem exam. Sloane the elder had traces in his system. Tech Squad says it was in the lining of his jacket pockets, and there was a packet of same found in the glove box of the BMW that flipped on the Glasnevin Road.

  “Speaking of probable OxyContin, your man Trevor Pape? He’s flamin’ out, it seems. Comes from a horsey Kildare family that lost everything just as he was entering Trinity.”

  “When was that?”

  “Ah…nineteen fifty-six.

  “Met a scion of the Guinness family there, married her. Hence the house on the Morehampton Road, the sweet connected life—money, drugs, women—and his post as head librarian that he wouldn’t have got without her family, who were at the time helping to support the college in a significant way.” Swords rubbed his fingers together.

  “But during his affair with Kara Kennedy, Pape’s wife left him, saying to one and all at a reception where Pape and the Kennedy woman were also in attendance, ‘It’s one thing to bed whores, tramps, prostitutes, and the shop girls you pick up in bars, Trevor. But it’s quite another thing to prey upon your staff and students.’ That or something like it has been corroborated by three sources.”

  “You missed your calling, Johnny,” said McKeon. “Ath Cliath could use you.” He glanced over at McGarr, who was not smiling and was in something like shock, he guessed. McGarr could feel that his face was red and his heart was beating faster.

  Kara with Pape? How could she? Pape was…a ruin of a human being, if there ever had been anything to ruin. Little wonder she had been so sympathetic toward and protective of him when McGarr first interviewed her.

  “Since the divorce, it’s been all downhill for Pape. Money? He’s in debt over a hundred grand. Took a second mortgage on the house to pay off the first but has missed two successive monthlies on that.

  “The building society has not only served him papers, they’ve also placed a lien on its contents, which includes supposedly one of the finest private collections of Beaker people pottery in the world and”—Swords glanced up—“a facsimile edition of the Book of Kells valued at thirty thousand.”

  “Any word on what was being burned on the tape?” McKeon asked.

  “None. As for drugs, the man has a history. He was arrested in Malta in 1969 for hashish possession—bricks that filled a locker on a boat he was skippering—but he was bailed out of that by the in-laws.

  “Ditto Heathrow in 1974 and Miami in 1981, where he was sentenced to six months in jail reduced to a twenty-eight-day stay in a rehab. Only two years ago he was arrested here in Ireland after a traffic stop for possession of a variety of substances.

  “But he was released when, it seems, Jack Sheard stepped in and convinced a judge that Pape, whose addiction was described as a health problem, had had a ‘slip,’ the court records say, and needed another go at a rehab. ‘Being a valued member of society,’ he didn’t even have to post bail.”

  Swords turned the page. “Now then, Gillian Reston—the current woman living with Pape? She’s only twenty-four but the sheet from the Yard says she’s been busted for drugs and blue movies when still a minor, prostitution, and grand larceny. But no convictions on the last two.”

  Pape, McGarr again thought, shaking his head. Certainly after one night, McGarr had no claim on Kara Kennedy’s affections, and as surely she was entitled to a sex life, especially as a single person. But…

  “Kara Kennedy?” Swords continued.

  McGarr turned his head and looked out the window at a lowering sky. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what Swords and his team had discovered about her.

  “We’re still pretty much blanked on her. She was born Kara Kennedy at Salen on Mull, went to university in Edinburgh, and on here to Trinity, where she took a Ph.D. studying under”—Swords held the word for a moment—“Pape.”

  “Which could not have been a good thing,” McKeon put in.

  It had been a mistake, McGarr decided. But one that he probably could not have helped, even though without question he should have walked away. Because he didn’t think of himself as the kind of man who did things like that lightly. In fact, to be honest with himself, he had been smitten by Kara Kennedy—her looks, her touch, who he had thought she was as a person. And now in the fifty-fifth year of his life he felt like a child at sea. Foundering in a tide of emotions.

  Truth was, he knew nothing of the etiquette of sex, the bedroom, how to judge the sincerity or the commitment of the other party to the event. Not only had he bedded a suspect, but he had bedded a suspect who had bedded a suspect. And who knew how many others she had bedded, which he also found more than simply disturbing.

  “We still have no record of Kara Kennedy having married Dan Stewart or anybody else in Ireland. If she’s married, she was married someplace else and has never declared herself to be so here in Ireland. Same thing
with taxes. She’s never filed in any way as a married person.

  “As well, there is no publicly traded Irish oil import firm or private energy broker that will admit to having an employee of Scottish birth or background who was sent to Yemen fifteen months ago, although several, fearing we were running the search for the Americans, refused to respond in any way. A search of travel records also showed no Dan or Daniel Stewart going there, at least nobody declaring they were headed there from Ireland.”

  Swords turned that page. “Raymond ‘Ray-Boy’ Sloane Junior is a known member of the New Druids—drugs, strong-arm and protection schemes all his class of thing. Again, arrests and few convictions—did forty days once—and is suspected of running a ring of younger louts like Kevin Carney, the ill-fated driver of the BMW. The bullet that killed him was fired from a thirty-ought-six rifle.

  “We visited Ath Cliath’s newsroom to see if they had retained the mailer with the videotape.” Swords shook his head. “As for tracking the delivery—the volume that hits the front desk there is staggering even in videotapes, with every TV show and movie sending copies for review.”

  “How, then, did it come to Sweeney’s attention?” McGarr asked, if only to appear to be concentrating on what the team had discovered.

  “Woman said the messenger said it’s for Mr. Chazz Sweeney. He’s expecting this and should see it immediately.”

  “She describe him? The messenger?”

  “Tall. Rigged in motorcycle leathers, helmet, tinted visor. You know the type, they’re all over Dublin.”

  “Arseholes all over the road, changing lanes. I saw one the other day go right up on the footpath on O’Connell Street at rush hour,” McGarr said.

  “Speaking of vehicles”—Sword’s looked back down at his notes—“we don’t know if Sloane was operating that BMW the night of Derek Greene’s death, but the threads of blue material found on the damaged left side match Trinity’s security uniform. DNA of the blood is still not in.”

  Maybe it was how his emotional life would proceed, McGarr continued to muse, again staring up at the ceiling—a succession of brief…congruences with no possibility of regaining the permanence and emotional stability, to say nothing of the depth of love and trust, that he had shared with Noreen.

  Up until a few minutes ago, he had hoped he would see Kara Kennedy and sleep with her again—the feel of her, her touch, the entire scene that was still at the forefront of his consciousness.

  Yet again, he reminded himself—at least on an intellectual level—that she could no more change her past with other men than he could his own with Noreen and the other women he had known before his marriage. Without question, therefore, he was being juvenile and unfair, but he could not help the feeling.

  “So, to recap—we’ve got Derek Greene bumped off by either Raymond or Ray-Boy Sloane, so the elder could have a credible alibi for walking Greene’s beat. What Sloane couldn’t have known is that his accomplices had planned to kill him.

  “We’ve also got Ray-Boy suspected of leaving his mother’s house in the BMW, fomenting the dustup with the press, and then running from us at CU headquarters, with the result being Kevin Carney’s death from a bullet fired by somebody who wanted to make us look like killers.

  “There’s Trevor Pape, who is—”

  “A disgusting piece of work,” said McGarr, and the entire staff turned their eyes to him. Never, not once, had they heard him pass a judgment like that during a staff meeting.

  “And also a probable bad man,” Swords went on blithely, burying his eyes in his report. “Apart from age, his present consort is little different. He—they—need money quickly, and he’s reputed to own a facsimile copy of the book that he claims to despise.

  “And finally, there’s Kara Kennedy.”

  “Our mystery woman,” said one of the others.

  “With her mystery husband, his mysterious disappearance, and her not-so-mysterious affair with Pape.”

  “I believe we’ve”—McKeon rolled his eyes—“covered her.”

  Swords pincered his temples in feigned distress. “Did I leave anybody out?”

  “Sweeney,” McKeon said. “Who is a—”

  “Surd,” McGarr supplied, just as his beeper and cell phone sounded simultaneously.

  Nearly an hour earlier, Hugh Ward was out of the car stretching his legs when the gray Rolls pulled up in front of the Ath Cliath newsroom building and Chazz Sweeney, moving from the shadows of the doorway, got in, accompanied by a tall man with snubbed features, a tanned complexion, and curly, graying blondish hair. Because of the tinted windows, Ward could not see the driver.

  With his back to the street, Ward allowed the car to pass before moving without haste to his Audi, which was parked down an alley about a block distant. After all, he had placed disk transmitters up under the bumpers of the three cars that Sweeney used. And Dublin traffic was…well, Dublin traffic.

  Switching on the electronic scanner that monitored the Rolls’s progress on a grid map, Ward followed the large car as it made its way out of the city along Dublin Bay past Blackrock into Dun Laoghaire.

  Several times the Rolls had pulled over—in Booters-town, on Seaport Avenue in Monkstown—and when the car cut southwest and stopped on Station Road in Dun Laoghaire across from the Dublin Area Rapid Transit station, it occurred to Ward what was happening.

  The Rolls was following the train, and all other stops had been near DART stations, as though—it also dawned on him—Sweeney himself did not know or was being directed where to stop.

  Could it be—if Sweeney were to be believed about the delivery of the first tape—that a second was coming in? After all, Sweeney was nothing if not reclusive, Ward knew, having trailed him off and on for the more than two years since the debacle that had resulted in the deaths of Noreen and Fitz and his and Bresnahan’s being sacked from the Garda. It made Sweeney’s peremptory evacuation of his Ath Cliath office unusual indeed.

  When the rear door of the Rolls opened, the other man and Sweeney got out. Sweeney held a cell phone to his ear.

  Which was when Ward called McGarr.

  “I’ll be right there,” said McGarr. “Remember—it’s not Sweeney we’re after here, it’s the messenger—who he is, where he returns to. And we’ll be there soon to give you an official presence.”

  “I’m not sure you’ll have the chance.”

  In his own shambling way, Sweeney was walking quickly toward the station, heedless of the stream of others who had just got off an outbound train. He brushed into an elderly man; a woman turned and said something to him.

  But hand to ear, with his signature rumpled mac billowing out behind him, Sweeney just kept walking, the other man in his wake.

  “He alone?”

  Fitting on an unobtrusive headset so his hands would be free, Ward got out of his car and moved toward the station. “No, he’s with somebody I’ve not seen before. Tallish, late thirties or early forties. Light curly hair going gray. Fit and quick on his feet.”

  Ward heard McGarr mumble something. Then, “Adrian Bailey?” Who was an editor at Ath Cliath, Ward remembered.

  But Sweeney had nearly reached the platform, and hearing the approach of a train, Ward broke into a run.

  With an alarm ringing, red warning lights had begun to flash and the street gate was descending.

  “We’ve got one coming in now.”

  “Which direction?”

  “From the south, headed into the city.”

  As Ward vaulted the stairs two at a time, he heard McGarr issuing further orders. “The driver of the train…phone. Close the doors, keep them closed. And keep coming right into town.”

  Which Ward now realized would be impossible.

  “The engineer, the driver, the…” was not the driver at all, but a New Druid lout with his head out the window, his braided hair flying in the breeze, a wide gap-toothed smile on his ring-spangled face. But his eyes were muddy, his nose red, and he looked drunk or drugged.

&nb
sp; As the train slowed, he shouted, “Ye’re a fookin’ bloody cunt, Sweeney. But a useful cunt.” Ducking back into the compartment, he swiped his arm and scaled a railway man’s cap out the window, which skidded across the platform and came to rest at Ward’s feet.

  Which was when Sweeney recognized him and lowered the phone, saying, “Stu!”

  Sweeney’s companion followed his gaze, then turned on heel and began making his way toward the stairs.

  The train did not stop. Instead, it began picking up speed again.

  Some in the crowd on the platform shouted; a boy kicked out at a door and was spun off his feet.

  “That’s mine,” said Sweeney, stooping.

  But Ward snatched it up. Fixed inside was a videotape.

  The gun that Sweeney pulled out of his pocket was something like a derringer—small, snub-nosed, with two over-and-under barrels. “Give me that.”

  “The train didn’t stop,” Ward said into the mouthpiece of his cell phone. “The videotape was inside a cap that the yoke who hijacked the train tossed out the window. I’ve got Sweeney pointing a gun at me. He has another man with him. His Rolls is parked on Station Road, Dun Laoghaire.”

  “McGarr!” Sweeney roared, slipping the weapon back into his mac. “I must have a copy of this tape. They rang me up and—risking life and limb—I came out here for it.”

  “Meet me at Pape’s with the tape,” McGarr said to Ward.

  Pulling the videocassette free from the liner, Ward offered the hat to Sweeney. “At least you won’t go home empty-handed.”

  “I would have fancied you’d had enough of me.”

  Ward only hoped that day would come.

  CHAPTER

  11

  THE POLICE PRESENCE AT TREVOR PAPE’S HOUSE WAS already significant by the time McGarr and several of his staff arrived. With a signal difference: The police cars, all eight of them, were parked at some distance from the old Edwardian manse, so as not to alert the neighbors, McGarr suspected.