Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16

by Bartholomew Gill

  In his closet he reached for a suit, shirt, and tie. Then he retrieved socks, underwear, and shoes, placing all on the bed.

  “Well, go on. You can tell me. Me eyes aren’t what they once were.”

  “They’re skulls, human heads. Nailed through the forehead to the wall with spikes maybe eighteen inches long.”

  “Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph—you don’t say.”

  “But I do. Now, d’you suspect they’d wrussle up human heads just for a fi?ddle?”

  Closing the door, he heard her talking to herself as she moved down the stairs. “The enormity of it, the obscenity. I wonder if Grainne is at home at this hour.”

  Driving into Dublin, McGarr began sifting through his phone messages, more than half of which were from Jack Sheard.

  Beginning with a friendly bureaucratic mumble— “Peter, Jack Sheard here. We should communicate some time tonight to make sure our pins are in place. At your convenience, of course”—to “Where in hell are you, McGarr? You’re making a balls of this thing. What in Christ’s name was that second fi?asco out at CU headquarters? You’re to keep a low profi?le, do you hear me? This is a Code Four investigation, and the bloody taoiseach wants you...us to report to his offi?ce in the Dail immediately.”

  Which was pronounced “eee-mee-jit-ly,” as, Mc-Garr supposed, Sheard had been taught at Trinity. Mc-Garr had no idea what Code Four meant, but it sounded serious, like something out of the movies.

  He checked the time of the call, which had come in only twenty or so minutes earlier. Ringing up his headquarters at Dublin Castle, McGarr asked Swords to phone Sheard and say he was going directly to Taoiseach Kehoe’s offi?ce.

  “The man has been roaring at me all morning. Says he’s fi?ling papers to have my job.”

  “Not to worry—I’ll take care of that. Any luck on the whereabouts of”—McGarr had to pause to remember the names—“Mide, Morrigan, or Ray-Boy?”

  “No, but with Sloane’s car—the big blue BMW?”

  McGarr grunted.

  “Bloodstains and threads of clothing were found on the right front bumper and grill.”

  As though it might have been the car that had bumped off Derek Greene, the Trinity security guard who had died a fortnight before, freeing up Raymond Sloane to walk the rounds. “What about the fella behind the wheel?”

  “Kevin Carney by name. Sheet runs to two pages. New Druid enforcer, it’s said. Caught somebody’s bullet in the back of the head. Large caliber, fi?red from a rifl?e.”

  Which none of McGarr’s team had been carrying.

  “Speculation is—there was a sniper somewhere abouts. The only other thing we have is Sloane’s widow and two daughters, who went straight to the Bank of Ireland on College Green this morning. They were there when the doors opened. We’re trying to run down why.”

  “I gave Bernie a videotape last night. Tell him he can take it over to the Tech Squad lab and wait for the results. He’s to call me the moment they come in.” McGarr rang off and moved through the rest of his calls.

  A message from Ward said, “Pape’s house on the Morehampton Road is mortgaged to the eaves. His credit is stretched with maxed-out cards and zero sums in bank accounts with formerly sizable balances.

  “Travels extensively—Turkey, Malta, Thailand, and Myanmar recently. Likes women, the younger the better. He was arrested in Malta in 1969 for hashish possession. Four years ago, something in Spain. Ten years earlier it was LSD at Heathrow. Some more drug possessions, then only traffi?c offenses.

  “Nothing unusual on the Kennedy woman that we could fi?nd. Yet. But it’s not as if she fl?oated up the Liffey in a bubble.”

  Pulling into the security checkpoint at Leinster House, the imposing Georgian-inspired buildings that were the seat of the Irish government, McGarr wondered if the Trevor Pape whom he had attempted to interview on the night before could possibly be capable of the theft of the books and Sloane’s murder.

  Drugs, he knew, sometimes caused otherwise sane and intelligent people to attempt foolish things, but Pape had seemed too...scattered both at Trinity and later for the complexity of the theft. And even if tall, he was a slight man, surely not the hulking, black-hooded fi?gure in the video.

  Nor could Kara be involved, McGarr was convinced. She was just too much the committed academic and too altogether...fragile for anything like that.

  Everything pointed all too obviously to the New Druids and Celtic United. Yet Sloane’s car might have been responsible for the death of Derek Greene, the Trinity security guard—whose corpse was now headless.

  Finally, there was Sweeney, who claimed to be merely the messenger of the videotape. But who said he had watched it. And Sweeney was another animal altogether, McGarr knew all too well.

  Why would the New Druids have chosen Chazz Sweeney, an avowed member of the archconservative Catholic sect Opus Dei, to be their messenger? If indeed they had made the video. To ride herd on the police and government? To make sure through Ath Cliath that a ransom was paid and the sacred books were secured?

  A uniformed valet was waiting to take the car. But before McGarr got out, he rang up Ward, who said, “I know what you’re going to say, and I agree. Sweeney. Maybe it’s just our experience with him, but anything he’s involved in...” Ward let his voice trail off.

  Manpower was the problem. Because of budget cuts, McGarr had only a handful of available staffers to put on the case. He could ask Sheard for help, but at the price of confi?dentiality. All his own people were rock solid.

  “How could we follow Sweeney and not be known to be following him?” McGarr asked.

  “I have an idea.”

  “Discreet, I hope.”

  “That, and electronic too.”

  They did not need any further publicity, especially involving Sweeney with the forum of Ath Cliath at his

  disposal.

  “Hear from Ruthie?”

  “She said the woman—” Ward responded before being cut off.

  “Morrigan.”

  “Spent the night at the second address near the North Wall.”

  “She going in?”

  “Last night the place was locked tight, and it has alarms everywhere. This morning, when the building opened to let in the employees on the fi?rst two fl?oors, they posted a guard on the door.”

  “They?”

  “The New Druids. See the papers?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t.” Ward rang off.

  But all three newspapers were laid out on a table in the anteroom of the taoiseach’s offi?ce. Whoever had taken the picture of Kevin Carney, the driver of the wrecked and shot-up BMW, spilling from the car had sold the roll of fi?lm to Reuters, who had in turn shopped it to all three of the morning papers.

  Ath Cliath’s banner headline said COP-OUTING,below which was MCGARR AMOK. Two paragraphs of story said McGarr had begun a “spree of violence not witnessed from a senior Garda offi?cer in decades with a temper tantrum at the home of the victim in the Trinity theft” and then continued on to Glasnevin, where “either his staff or two of his disgraced former Garda followers shot and killed the driver of the car, causing a near riot in the Celtic United stronghold.”

  Orla Bannon’s column, “Trinity and CU Deaths Linked,” was teased onto the centerfold jump and surrounded by more car photos. Mainly she repeated what McGarr had leaked to her regarding the ransom tape and its supposed New Druid connection with the addition of three CU offi?cials confi?rming that Raymond “Ray-Boy” Sloane Jr. was a CU adherent.

  Stories by other reporters sampled “Celtic United Outrage” from its Dail delegation to the party faithful to rank-and-fi?le stalwarts, who were pictured shaking fi?sts with tattooed and well-muscled arms exposed.

  The other papers, while more restrained in their criticism, still ran several photos of both events.

  “Proud of yourself?” a low voice asked through a chuckle quite close to McGarr’s ear. “You’re one of a kind, really. Little wonder you never called in�
�off beating the piss out of the press and shooting up a neighborhood. You should read the Times. Could it be they’re right and you didn’t remain long enough at the scene to fi?nd out if your victim was dead?”

  Sheard would not be speaking in an undertone unless somebody else had entered the room, and in turning he stiffened an elbow and brushed by him. “Ah, Jack—I didn’t know you were there.” McGarr moved toward the taoiseach, who was standing in back of the commissioner. “The other is me good ear.”

  “Peter.” The commissioner—a former politician by the name of Sean O’Rourke—only nodded, but Brendan Kehoe, the taoiseach, stepped around him to offer his hand.

  “Good to see you again, Chief Superintendent. I understand you’ve been busy since the event. Does all of that”—Kehoe swept his hand at the newspaper on the table—“mean you’re making progress?”

  “Perhaps.” Taking Kehoe’s hand, he made sure their eyes met. “You’re to judge. It could be we have a ransom demand.” From his jacket he took out a copy of the videotape.

  “What?” Chuckling, Sheard’s smile lit up his handsome face, apart from his eyes, which were icy and focused on McGarr. Otherwise tanned, the knob of fl?esh on his square jaw—formed by the smile—was nearly the color of his blond hair. “You’re unique, McGarr. Full of ”—there was a pause—“surprises.”

  “Is there a tape player about?”

  “Did they send you a video?” Sheard asked. “Kind of them and right up to the moment. Curious, I didn’t get one.”

  “Perhaps they thought you too busy cutting your own footage.”

  “This way.” Kehoe led them out of the anteroom and down a hall to a wing of the building that was obviously used for communications. “Could you leave us, please?” he said to two young men who were huddled over a newspaper.

  Eyes moving from Sheard to McGarr and the tape in his hands, they complied. O’Rourke closed the door behind them.

  “Before this goes any further, I wonder if Peter could bring us up to speed on his investigation.” Sheard’s smile was still broad. “As I mentioned earlier, we seemed to be suffering from a communications glitch.”

  “I think we should watch this fi?rst, Jack. Then, if you have questions...” McGarr shoved the tape into the receptacle of the player and hit the play button, adding, “The intro is a bit much, but the message is clear.”

  Once the music came on, he leaned back against a desk and slipped his hands in his jacket pockets, reminding himself that Sheard had the ear of Kehoe and was certain to have fi?lled it with every doubt before McGarr’s arrival. And then there were the newspapers.

  “Can you tell us how we know this is genuine?” Sheard asked before the fi?lm had ended. But Kehoe shot him a glance, and McGarr waited until the picture had faded out.

  The three men glanced up at him.

  “Credibility?” he asked Kehoe, who nodded. “Well, there’s the delivery the very day—or at least the night after the day—of the theft and murder in Trinity. I don’t know how long it would take to produce such a thing, but it has the look of having been devised rather earlier.

  “Second, there’s the disguised voice of the fi?gure who makes the demand. It’s similar to one of the two scrambled voices on the Trinity library security tape. Presently, the Tech Squad, which has the original, is making a comparison and also analyzing other aspects of the tape, such as the color of the fl?ame from the burning page.”

  “What?” Sheard began laughing again. “You mean, this isn’t the original? Don’t you think you should have brought the taoiseach the original? You’re a rare brave man, Peter McGarr.” And stupid went without saying.

  But Kehoe remained impassive.

  “Last night I learned that a facsimile edition of the Book of Kells was produced in the early 1990s. In every way, including wormholes, it resembles the original, with the exception of having been printed on paper, not vellum, which is treated calfskin. Spectroscopic analysis might give us an idea of what’s being burned.

  “And fi?nally”—McGarr spooled back to fi?nd the length of videotape that pictured the decorations on the wall behind the hooded fi?gure—“notice the large platelike decorations on the wall behind your man with the book. Were this tape player equipped with an enlarging capability, you’d see that they’re actually human heads that have been nailed to the wall with spikes.”

  “This gets better and better,” Sheard said to O’Rourke. “You can’t make this stuff up.”

  “In fact, one of the heads may well be that of Derek Greene, the Trinity security guard who was knocked down and killed by a car in Stephen’s Green more than a fortnight ago. His death gave Sloane, who was in league with the thieves before they murdered him, the excuse of walking Greene’s beat in Trinity without exposing himself to further scrutiny.

  “Yesterday, Greene’s family reported that his grave has been disturbed. His corpse has been decapitated, and the head is missing.

  “As for the car that killed him, witnesses described it as a large midnight-blue BMW with gold wheel covers.

  “We believe that the same car, a large midnight-blue BMW with gold wheel covers, was parked behind Sloane’s house yesterday and was driven away by his son, Raymond. It’s also the car with the driver who refused to stop and fi?red at us in front of CU headquarters on the Glasnevin Road.”

  “Where the lad was killed?” Sheard asked in an insouciant tone.

  “Aye—killed by a rifl?e bullet. Took off half his head. The slug is presently being examined by ballistics. Or are you ignorant of that as well?”

  Sheard’s smile fell, his jaw fi?rmed.

  “Fired by whom?” Kehoe asked.

  McGarr shook his head. “But not any of my people. We fi?red handguns and a shotgun only.

  “The right front headlamp and grill of the car appear to have been damaged in an earlier accident, with remnants of clothing and blood found there as well.”

  “What about Sloane’s son?” It was still Sheard.

  “Nowhere to be found. He got away.”

  “Ah.”

  McGarr switched off the television and turned to the other men. “As for the possibility that the tape is a fraud, I’d say it exists. Chazz Sweeney hand-delivered it to me, saying it came to him by motorbike messenger.”

  “The Chazz Sweeney?” O’Rourke asked.

  McGarr tried to smile. “I hope there’s not another.”

  “And he delivered it to you and not Jack?”

  McGarr did not reply. The tape ejected automatically, and he tried to hand it to Sheard.

  “I’d prefer the original.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear me—you have it in the Tech Squad lab.” Where it belongs, went unsaid. Mc-Garr was being as petty as Sheard, but it felt good.

  “So, Sweeney had this fi?rst?” O’Rourke asked. “I’m surprised he didn’t run the image of the page from the book being burnt. I can’t imagine him fi?nally stumbling over a bit of discretion.”

  “Don’t discount the man.” Kehoe reached for the tape. “Sweeney may be a world-class chancer in some matters, but there’s his special brand of Catholicism, of which the Book of Kells and the two others are icons.”

  That had been exhibited in a secular—and formerly Protestant—institution, it occurred to McGarr.

  Turning with video in hand, Kehoe moved out of the room and back into the corridor where, at the desk of his receptionist, he asked for a television and video player to be brought into his offi?ce immediately.

  There he closed the door behind them and asked the others to take seats. From behind his desk, Kehoe said, “Jack and Peter—I won’t take up more of your precious time beyond asking you this question. Then I’ll let you go on about your important business.

  “From a police perspective, what should happen now?”

  Sheard began, “Why don’t we begin with what should have happened beginning last night when—”

  But Kehoe was shaking his head. “I don’t think you heard me, Jack. That’
s water over the weir. What comes next?” He turned to McGarr. “Peter?”

  McGarr would have preferred to speak last. “If the objective is to get the books back and also collar the murderers of Greene, Sloane, and the driver of the BMW, then we should tell them we will meet their terms. We should encourage them to come forward and name the place of the exchange.

  “Murderers and thieves always make mistakes of one sort or other, and all that money—if it comes to that—will only make them incautious. Sooner rather than later, they’ll supply us with some idea of who and where they are.”

  “But don’t we know who they are?” Sheard asked. “I think their identity is plain.”

  McGarr’s eyes met Kehoe’s before both looked away. Could Sheard be that gullible?

  “Hear me out. I know what you’re thinking, which was my fi?rst thought as well. It’s all too obvious. But look at it this way—who’s their audience, who are they playing to? Their electorate and the other unemployed native Irish who feel themselves challenged by technology or have had their neighborhoods changed by immigrants and other outsiders.”

  Sheard got to his feet and, slipping his hands in his pockets in a way that was characteristic of Kehoe himself, moved toward the window in the large corner offi?ce. “I wonder if it matters that they’re ever paid. Actually it’s probably better for them if the perpetrators of these crimes are caught and killed.

  “Like the early IRA, what they’re creating are martyrs to be continually revered and waked in ballad and verse. The theft of the Book of Kells is tantamount to the IRA blowing up Wellington’s bloody monument on O’Connell Street in 1966 or the hunger strikes of Bobby Sands in 1981. Their leader, this Mide—he was with Sands. This is his generation’s thing, and he’ll play it to the max, if we let him. His intent is to propel his band of hooligans into a potent cultural/political force in this country. That’s the purpose of the preamble to the demand.

  “Taoiseach Kehoe”—pivoting, Sheard swung his powerful body around and began moving back toward them, his eyes on the carpet and the high gloss of his black bluchers—“if you don’t show the nation this tape and any others this Mide sends us, he will, mark my words. And they’ll be shown to the cheers and approbation of every poor punk, thug, and body-pierced rocker in the country, to say nothing of the other young who’ll adopt their vestments and stance just to set themselves apart and piss off their parents.