Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Give me a hand with him,” said the deep voice.

  Sloane felt himself being seized under the arms; the other one had him by the ankles. “Right enough—up he goes.”

  Opening his eyes, he could see enough to know what they were doing—stuffi?ng him into the large Kells display case, which could be hermetically sealed by switching on a motor that sucked out the oxygen.

  “No!” Sloane roared, pushing himself up.

  But a fi?st slammed into his nose, again and again and again. “Blood enough for you?” he thought he heard, as the top of the case was closing.

  “Enough to be taken seriously,” said the higher voice. “Pity is—there’s not enough. A man like that deserves all this and more.”

  And then the top was forced down, squeezing his shoulder, arm, hip, and head into the small space. It clumped shut, and the lock snapped.

  “Serious,” said I.V. “That’s just the word. This is very serious.”

  Panicked, terrifi?ed, Sloane tried to force his legs, shoulder, and hip up against the glass top and sides of the display case. And then, twisting around, his back and buttocks.

  “Which are the strongest muscles in the body,” said

  I.V. But not strong enough. His feet—maybe if he banged them against the glass

  he could shatter it. But his sponge-rubber security-guard soles only thudded against the thick surface, which was slick now with his blood.

  Only then did he remember the sap, the sock of coins that he had thumped the gate guard with.

  “Too-da-loo,” said one of the voices, rapping on the glass.

  “Ta,” said the other.

  Sloane then heard the motor switch on, the one that

  sucked out the air, and suddenly he became hysterical. “That won’t help,” I.V. remarked. “Not one bit.”

  CHAPTER

  1

  PETER MCGARR STEPPED OUT OF THE LANEWAY INTO Dame Street, at the end of which stood the granite eminence of Trinity College about a quarter mile distant.

  It was early morning—half 8:00—and the street was thronged with automobile commuters creeping to work. Cars rolled on a few paces, stopped, and their drivers looked away blankly, used to delay. Faces of passengers in double-deck buses, through windows streaked with urban grime, were careworn and bored.

  A solitary articulated lorry appeared lost amid the clamor, its wide headlamps searching for a street that might lead to a highway and freedom.

  Like Trinity itself, where McGarr was headed, the early traffi?c on Dame Street was a given of his day, something he seldom noticed.

  But since the murder of his wife, Noreen, more than two years earlier, McGarr had gone from being an acute observer of the city to being necessarily blind to its changes and nuances. Save those, of course, that concerned his family, who had been reduced to his daughter, Maddie, and his mother-in-law, Nuala. She now cared for the child while he worked.

  Trinity, which he was now approaching, was a case in point, he realized. Back when he’d been a student, the bastion of Protestantism and privilege had been declared off limits to Catholics by the bishop of Dublin. Of course, as the seventh of nine children of a Guinness brewery worker, it was no place he could have had hopes of attending, anyhow.

  And yet in his own way, McGarr had coveted Trinity’s complex of mainly Georgian and Victorian buildings that walled off traffi?c and noise and provided a quiet haven of wide lawns, cobbled footpaths, and civility in the heart of the city. It was a gem of a place, a kind of urban diadem. But for the nearly twenty years of his marriage, he had associated the college with Noreen, who had studied there.

  The arched entranceway was crowded with returning students, and across a wide courtyard, he could see uniformed police cordoning off the Old Library. In front of the barrier stood press and television crews— details that he’d sooner forget, if he could.

  But Peter McGarr was chief superintendent of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Garda Siochana, the Irish police, and since the tragedy, his work had become the sole sustaining element in his life, the one constant activity that helped him forget.

  Also, there was the chance—however slight—that he might discover who exactly had murdered his people. And why.

  At the corner of the Old Library, McGarr paused for a few tugs on a cigarette before running the gauntlet in front of the police line, even though he’d promised his daughter he’d quit.

  More guilt. How could he have failed to recognize the danger that his occupation posed to his family? How could he have allowed the tragedy to occur?

  Feeling as he did most waking hours—that his life was effectively over in his fi?fty-fi?fth year—McGarr dropped the butt into a storm drain and stepped toward the reporters.

  A somewhat short man with gray eyes and an aquiline nose bent slightly to one side, he still presented a rather formidable appearance with wide, well-muscled shoulders and little paunch.

  Courtesy of Nuala, who had taken charge of his appearance, he was well turned out in a heather-colored tweed overcoat, razor creases in his tan trousers and cordovan half-cut boots polished to a high gloss.

  “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself and get on with life, Peter,” she had told him going out the door. “If only for Maddie. And forget the bastards what done it. They’re a sly and craven lot, not at all like your common run of criminal, and more than a few, I’m thinking. And if they thought you were onto them...”

  Unless, of course, they didn’t know he was before he struck. The niceties of the law being dispensed with. Revenge was what McGarr sought, not justice.

  As he waded through the clutch of reporters, whose questions McGarr fended off with his eyes, all that hinted at his inner turmoil was a certain drawn look and his deep red hair that tufted out under the brim of his fedora. He’d been too distracted for barbers.

  While waiting for the door to the gift shop to be unlocked, McGarr glanced up at a sky freighted with clouds moving in from the east. Although it was only early October, the wind carried an edge. The fair weather would not hold much longer, he could tell.

  Bernie McKeon—McGarr’s chief of staff—had already arrived, along with a pathologist and several members of the Tech Squad.

  A man and a woman, who McGarr supposed were library offi?cials, were standing off from the others.

  McKeon handed McGarr the notes he’d taken since arriving.

  “You’ve heard of squab under glass. It’s served at the fi?nest restaurants, I’m told. And duck too. But blue-d uniform security cop is a new one on me,” McKeon said in an undertone.

  McGarr glanced at his colleague, whose dark eyes were bright with the grisly irony that passed for humor in the Murder Squad.

  The victim was encased, literally, under thick glass or high-quality Plexiglas. Not only was his security uniform a deep, midnight blue, but his face was some lighter shade of the color, rather like cornfl?ower blue, except for where it was covered in blood, which had also smeared the glass.

  “To control the deterioration of the manuscripts, the cases are hermetically sealed and the atmosphere’s withdrawn. Or so says your man,” McKeon continued. “He’s the head librarian and she’s the keeper of old manuscripts.”

  “Trevor Pape?” asked McGarr, glancing over at the two. Pape was a well-known fi?gure in academic and arts circles and had attended openings at the picture gallery that Noreen had owned.

  “Aye. She gave her name as Kara Kennedy. She found the victim, after getting a call from Pape about another guard at the Pearse Street gate. He’s in the hospital with a fractured skull.”

  McGarr pointed to the victim, who, although a

  rather large man, had been stuffed down into a quasi-fetal position in the narrow space. Alive. He had struggled for any air he could fi?nd; his mouth was open and his eyes—blue, as well—were swollen and protrusive. “Raymond Sloane, head guard here for decades.”

  “What’s that in his hand?”

  “Hard to tell through the blood. There
’s more over here.” With a penlight, McKeon fl?ashed the beam over the fl?ooring stones that were splashed with drying blood. “Looks like he put up a fi?ght, he did. One hell of a way to cap off a career.”

  “Know him?”

  “Not well. Started out with me in the army. I’d see him now and then. Around town.” Before joining the Garda decades ago, McKeon had been a drill instructor in the Irish army.

  It was Dublin again. In spite of the population explosion and recent infl?ux of immigration, in many ways it remained a small town.

  “What’s missing?”

  “The books, of course—two of four Kells books, also Durrow and Armagh,” McKeon said.

  There lay Raymond Sloane, devoid of life and spirit and now merely a subject for a pathologist’s scalpel.

  “Let’s see what’s in his hand.”

  McKeon waved the librarians over and explained what was needed. Reaching under the case, Pape threw a switch and the case hissed as air entered the chamber.

  Suddenly the lid sprang open, with Sloane’s arm and shoulder rising up. The woman gasped and jumped back, sobbing.

  A forensic photographer aimed his camera, and cold achromatic lightning raked the room. Closing his eyes, McGarr watched the light burst red through his eyelids as the camera continued to fl?ash.

  With surgical gloves, a tech sergeant removed the object from Sloane’s right hand—a thick black sock that was fi?lled with a stack of maybe thirty 50P coins.

  “Because he didn’t carry a weapon?” McKeon asked.

  McGarr shrugged. Nevertheless, it had proved useless against the glass.

  “Couldn’t swing it.”

  Shattered capillaries in the man’s protrusive eyes swirled down, like tiny red worms, into his sclerae. McGarr thought of the small red wet hole in the back of Noreen’s ear. It was all the damage she had suffered, but enough to kill her.

  “You, I know,” he said to Pape, who with hands clasped behind his back only nodded. “And you are?”

  Her hand came forward. “Kara Kennedy. I’m in charge of the stolen books. I mean, the books that were stolen. Or, at least, I was. In charge, that is.” Her eyes strayed to Pape, who only maintained his stony consideration of McGarr.

  A woman in her early to mid-forties, she had brown hair, pleasant features, good shoulders. “Tell me everything you can about this. Who the victim is. How the theft could have happened. Impressions.” McGarr swirled a hand.

  “Well, I think—”

  “When I am present, I speak to the public about library matters,” said Pape.

  “We’re the police,” McKeon objected, “not the public. And that man over there”—he jabbed a fi?nger at the display case—“is dead. Murdered.”

  McGarr touched McKeon’s arm. “Perhaps I might speak to you alone, Doctor—it is Doctor, isn’t it?”

  The man nodded.

  “Dr. Pape. And, really, we should make some room.”

  Tall lights on stanchions were being set up around the display case. With halogen torches, others were searching for evidence on the fl?oor, while another team lifted prints from the cases.

  The pathologist, Dr. Henry—a blowsy woman McGarr’s own age—was leaning over the case with a kind of loupe held to one eye.

  Pointing the way, McGarr led Pape in one direction, while McKeon took the Kennedy woman in another.

  “What were the security precautions?”

  “I’ve already explained that as well. To the police.”

  McGarr cocked his head; if so, McKeon would have fi?lled him in.

  “To Jack Sheard, your superior.”

  Younger than McGarr by an easy dozen years, Sheard held the same rank, chief superintendent, but had far less seniority. Money laundering, major thefts, and frauds were his area of responsibility.

  “When?”

  “Earlier.”

  “Here?”

  “No—over the phone. Jack’s a graduate, you know.”

  And proud of it, McGarr remembered, Sheard one night having arrived at a Garda banquet wearing a tie emblazoned with the Trinity College crest. Few high-ranking Garda offi?cers had attended university, much less a college with such cachet.

  “Well, Jack is otherwise occupied, and you may have left something out.”

  After a sigh, Pape explained that at night the college posted a guard at each of four gates, with a fi?fth guard patrolling the grounds and buildings. Sloane himself maintained a command post at security headquarters, monitoring a bank of surveillance cameras. “Here in the Treasury and gift shop, surveillance also included voice and movement sensors.

  “Unfortunately, we’ve been one guard shy since the recent death of a member of the security detail, and Sloane was performing both functions.”

  “Death, how?”

  “Motorcar. He was knocked down in the street.”

  “How recent a death?”

  “A fortnight ago.”

  If the gates could be locked and monitored, why had Sloane not taken a guard off a gate for foot patrol? Mc-Garr reasoned. “In other words, when Sloane was on patrol, there was nobody back at security headquarters.”

  “There you have it.” Pape’s smile was slight and superior.

  At least sixty-fi?ve, he was nearly gaunt with a long face and light brown hair that was thin on top but swept back in a gray-streaked mane that hung to his shoulders. His nose was thin, hawkish, and lined with crimson veins; his eyes were blue but ruddy.

  Without question donnish-looking, Pape was wearing a muted green-checked jacket over a beige shirt and dun tie.

  “While on patrol, would Mr. Sloane have entered the building?”

  Pape shook his head. “Not unless the sensors or cameras detected something.”

  “What about an alarm system or a silent alarm connected to the Garda barracks in Pearse Street?” It was just across from an entrance to the college.

  “It was disabled.”

  McGarr waited.

  Pape raised his head and looked down his nose at McGarr. “I’m afraid we’re the library that cried wolf, Inspector. Every time a student or visitor rattled the door after hours, wanting in, the alarms went off. With students now returning to campus, I imagine Sloane decided to take a hiatus from alarms.”

  “Were there students resident in college last night?”

  Pape shook his head. “During the day, yes. But only this morning were they allowed to move back in.”

  Planning, McGarr thought. The theft had been engineered to a fare-thee-well. Then why murder Sloane in such a dramatic way? Why not simply disable him, even with some violence, as they had the other guard?

  “What about here, the library—how do you get in?”

  Pape ran through the procedure: electronic and deadbolt keys to the gift shop, then electronic hand recognition to open the cases.

  “Whose hands?”

  “Mine, Miss Kennedy’s, and Raymond’s alone.”

  Could Sloane have refused, McGarr wondered, so they beat and murdered him? Why, then, was the sap still in his hand? Why hadn’t he used it to defend himself? There was blood on the fl?ags around the display cases.

  And surely, knowing about the hand-recognition device with only three hands keyed suggested—no, declared—involvement by some insider.

  “Who knows—knew—about the hands?”

  “We three, of course. And, I’d hazard, staff who’d observed us performing the...maneuver.”

  “What about the security fi?rm that deployed it?”

  “They were not present in the building when we initialized the system. By policy.”

  “Could somebody on your staff or some other Trinity employee be responsible for this crime?”

  Pape shrugged.

  McGarr waited, noting that Pape had averted his eyes. “You seem unsure.”

  “Do I?” The eyes returned with anger. “Truth is—I don’t know, and frankly I don’t much care. Possessing that damn book”—he waved a hand at the display cases—“has been a
double-edged sword for this institution.

  “Yes, it brought the college notoriety, and it was a mighty cash cow. But”—Pape’s voice had risen— “hordes, veritable legions of patent fools and ignoramuses pile off tour buses and troop through the college in their Aran caps and jumpers to ogle the bloody thing. Which was, mind you, in its own time designed to be ostentatious. No, garish! The ‘Oh-wow!’ of the ninth century.

  “It’s...it’s”—he wagged his head, his mane tossing from shoulder to shoulder—“the bloody Blarney Stone of academia and banal. Très ban-al!”

  Even the Tech Squad had now stopped to watch him.

  “And I’ll confess something else. This theft and Raymond Sloane’s murder would not have occurred had Trinity remained the college fi?rst intended by its founders. Now that it’s been turned into a bloody diploma factory, I call it immanent justice that its talisman has been stolen.”

  A curious opinion for a man charged with preserving and protecting books, thought McGarr.

  “That said”—Pape paused, fl?aring his nostrils and pulling in a chestful of air, as though to get hold of himself—“a true loss is Durrow and Armagh, which in their time had more than simply liturgical value. But I have every confi?dence that Chief Superintendent Sheard will get them back.

  “You’re done with me, I assume.”

  McGarr only regarded the man, who turned and walked out of the room as though conscious of his heels ringing on the stone.

  Turning to McKeon and the woman, McGarr raised a hand and fl?icked his fi?ngers into his palm, a gesture redolent of both veteran police practice and his gloom, he realized as she moved toward him.

  Here he was involved in perhaps the most important murder/theft of his career, and he felt as though he were just going through the motions. Maybe he should retire and try something different like ...well, there was the rub. He couldn’t think of anything he really wanted to do, and police work was really all he knew.

  Yet he managed a smile for the woman. “This must be diffi?cult for you,” he said, noticing her unusual jade-colored eyes. Contacts, perhaps? “Obviously, it’s been trying for Dr. Pape.”

  “Please excuse him,” said Kara Kennedy. “Trinity— the college and the library are his life. He’s been here . . . well, I’d say the better part of forty years, counting his student days, and I’m certain this is a greater blow to him than—”