The Death of Love

by Bartholomew Gill

  As though speaking of an absent party or a small child, Frost said to McGarr, “Pity that Mossie stepped down from the Dail. Three years of farming haven’t hurt him a bit. His purple passages are still too good to be true.”

  A color that was close to purple rose to Gladden’s face. He opened his mouth and closed it, as though having to summon his control. He then turned to McGarr and in a small, tight voice that was trembling with anger said, “To regulate the arrythmia in Paddy’s heart and keep him from having an attack, I had put him on a strict regimen of quinidine tablets that he took religiously three times a day: when he awoke and then at four in the afternoon and at midnight. Last night at the reception that he gave for his arriving guests, somebody, who was well acquainted with his condition, slipped in here and substituted digitoxin or some digitalis-based substance for the quinidine.

  “Paddy had been tramping about the mountains. He had even called in on me, wishing to use the telephone so he could ring up the Parknasilla staff to say he’d be late. But I have none. Instead I offered him a lift back, but he declined, saying his heart had been giving him trouble and he needed more exercise to smooth it out. He always felt better after a long walk. We had tea—noncaffeine for him—and our usual talk, and he invited me round to the reception later in the afternoon. I declined, but then I got to worrying about him, and so I jumped in the car and drove down here.

  “I arrived about six. The reception had begun at four, and Paddy had got back at five. Since he was an hour late in taking his pills, I should imagine he came in here straightaway and reached for the quinidine.” Gladden pointed to the largest bottle on the topmost shelf. “Of course, he had his guests to look after, and he would have taken the pill and gone right back out through the bedroom to the sitting room and, you know, mixed.”

  And how had Gladden arrived? In his farmer’s storm coat with its old belt and rolled-down Wellies? Or in some more formal, suitable costume?

  “By the time I got here—like I said, six—I took one look at him and already I could see something was wrong, though he wasn’t letting on. His skin was gray and flaccid, the whites of his eyes had begun to yellow. There was a bead of perspiration on his forehead, but he looked like he was cold. Chilled.

  “I was worried at first that the pressure of the conference and all had gotten to him, and he was off on some sort of shaughrawn.” Gladden’s eyes rolled to McGarr. “Paddy, you see, had been a bit of a bounder and aptly named.” He meant that both Paddy and Power were names of Irish whiskeys. “In his time, sure, he’d guzzled enough whiskey to corrupt his kidneys and liver, and—story was—when ineebri-a-ted, he’d go up on a midge. And there he stood, tumbler in hand, chatting up the few women about the place. Gretta, of course, his…assistant or whatever. And then the wives who’d been brought along on the junket by some of his guests.

  “But wasn’t the drink in his hand Ballygowan Spring Water and his conversation listless. Paddy was usually wheedlin’ and needlin’ the women, and he could coax a laugh from a crumpet. But all I heard from him was a yes or a no, and him breathing through his mouth. Beset. Going through the motions. With nothing lively, like, about him. Nothing whatsoever.

  “‘What happened to you at all, Paddy, my dear man?’ says I to him. ‘Have you knocked back your tablet?’ He turned to me, and it was then I saw his eyes. ‘Janie,’ says I, ‘’tis the digitalis.’ ‘Is it that you’ve taken? By mistake maybe?’ Digitalis poisoning, you know, can kill. But somebody like Paddy, it would kill. And did.

  “Paddy shook his head and, speaking low so only I would hear, said ‘The usual,’ by which he meant his usual maintenance dose of quinidine. ‘You sure?’ He nodded, his poor sick eyes imploring me not to make too much of it there in front of his guests, and he virtually staggered away from me.”

  McGarr could imagine the difficult Dr. Mossie Gladden being just the sort of party guest who would keep others, even a host, stirring; the invitation to Gladden had most probably been perfunctory, Power never dreaming that Gladden would actually show up.

  “The conference—which, he knew, some others would try to stop or disrupt—meant so much to Paddy Power that he was willing to risk his very life for its success.”

  Frost’s nostrils flared. His eyes jumped to the translucent panes of the bathroom window, which was now filled with dun, stormy light.

  “But I was not put off that easily, sorrh. Not me,” Gladden went on, his head rising and chest inflating with what McGarr could only assume was mock-heroic exaggeration.

  Was the man entirely right? And, speaking of eyes—how had he managed to keep his own so pellucid and sparkling? Like brilliant stones polished on a winter beach, they maintained their gleaming hazel fix without blink or waver.

  “I traipsed right in here, opened this medical cabinet, and examined the contents of this very same bottle”—he pointed to the largest on the topmost shelf—“to ascertain, as well as I was able without lab analysis, that it contained quinidine, which it did. And does, I’m certain.

  “For it was only this early morning when I arrived and found Paddy murdered that it occurred to me the base tactic those vile wretches”—on the squeak of a rubber heel, Gladden spun around, a finger pointed at Frost—“had wreaked upon our guileless Paddy who had opened his trust, his hospitality, and even, as it turns out, his heart to them the eventide earlier.

  “Before—mind you, before—Paddy had even gotten back here yesterday afternoon, somebody, knowing Paddy’s medicinal needs, his schedule, and even his sensitivity to digitalis, had slipped in here to this toilet ostensibly on nature’s call and with low cunning placed a bottle of pills that looked similar to but were different from this bottle of quinidine here.

  “Paddy—unknowing, already late, anxious to get back to his guests—simply gulped one down. Thinking it quinidine, he returned to the reception room, only to feel a half hour later the first effects of digitalis poisoning. A quick, sharp headache and abdominal pain. An hour later, when I first saw him, his symptoms had escalated to nauseousness and a general feeling of total, systemic muscular weakness. His pupils were, as I had also noticed, contracted, and thus his vision had to have been distorted. But mainly he was feeling precordial distress in the form of a rapid and violent heartbeat.

  “But thinking to himself that he’d only just taken the quinidine, he must have decided that he was feeling the onset of atrial fibrillation, and if he could just hold out until his guests departed, he had the remedy for that too in the medical cabinet. The dinner hour was fast approaching, and already some of his guests had begun to leave. In the meantime the villain”—Gladden paused—“or villains had returned to the toilet and replaced the ‘doctored’ bottle with the real bottle, that one there.”

  Said Frost, “He said it, not me. I wonder, Mossie, can you type? Your explanation would make a hell of a mystery.”

  But Gladden ignored him. “When finally the last guest had gone, Paddy threw the night latch and, summoning his last ounce of strength, staggered—I can only imagine—through the sitting room, the bedroom there, and into the toilet here, where he fell against the sink. It was wet from his guests. His hands slipped off the porcelain, and his head dashed against the mirror.” Gladden pointed at the shattered glass.

  “He managed, though, to snatch down the bottle, but the effort was too great for him, and he fell that way”—the callused maw of Gladden’s large hand moved toward the steam rail, which was bent and spattered with blood—“but didn’t go down. No. Instead he pushed himself toward the bedroom, where finally he fell.” Gladden lurched around and stepped toward the door in which stood Frost, who did not move.

  They were about the same height, but Gladden, because of his stoop and his odd way of peering, had to look up at Frost. “Sorry,” he said, by which he meant, Excuse me.

  “I wonder if you are,” said Frost. “It would appear to me you’re delighting in all these details and what they might mean, say, to the press. Tell me, Mossie—have you some
thing up your sleeve?”

  “Sure, the fella without guilt has an easy pillow.”

  “Or a sheep on the mountain,” Frost supplied. It was an old country saying and the basis of what Gladden had said: The fellow without a sheep on the mountain has an easy pillow.

  “But don’t I have plenty of real sheep on my mountain, which I own without lease or favor, ridge to ridge. No bonds, no stock, no usurer’s mortgage, nor no bailout subsidies from a collusive government. Now, stand out of the doorway. I’ll have no gombeen-man blocking my path.”

  Frost’s ears pulled back. He was a big man who looked as though he had kept himself fit. His hands came up, and McGarr stepped forward.

  Said Gladden, “Try that caper and I’ll put you on the flat of your soft back.”

  Butler, the superintendent from the Kenmare Barracks, had moved toward them too.

  Gladden pushed past Frost, and in the bedroom went on with undiminished alacrity. “As I was saying, Superintendent, Paddy fell here and managed somehow to get the cap off the bottle and one in his mouth and little else.” He pointed to the spray of small yellow pills on the carpet. “The problem is that the remedy for the tachycardia he thought he was experiencing is digitoxin, and by taking that pill he as much killed himself as the person who switched bottles on him committed murder. But, of course, they—or, rather, he, the murderer—knew that.” Again with the exaggeration worthy of a character in an opéra bouffe Gladden turned and eyed Frost.

  “In some torturous way, I’m sure, Paddy got himself up on the bed,” the covers of which were wrinkled and still bore the imprint of Power’s small, squat body. “And there our poor Paddy must have tossed and turned, lying in agony as his heart beat faster and faster still. Finally the disorganization of impulses became so complete it involved the entire heart, which locked”—Gladden snapped his fist up into a tight, white ball—“in a complete, quivering, mechanical paralysis.

  “This, this”—he shook the fist, searching for a term—“heart cramp hit him with such force and produced such pain that he was literally knocked from the bed.” With his odd, pigeon-toed gait the large man shambled around the bed. “And he landed here.” Gladden pointed down at the black face of the corpse that was grinning up at him with a hilarity that seemed no less real and therefore appropriate to the bathetic dithyramb.

  “His final, desperate act was to reach for his note cards, the ones Paddy used to jot down matters of import to him. The ones he was assembling—he told me—for a memoir, and he kept under lock and key there in that case. But there again, the murderer had taken advantage of his trusting, kindly nature and had used his hospitality foully. The case was empty, the lock—see there—had been forced and the contents stolen sometime earlier in the day or afternoon.

  “Paddy had time only to snatch up one of the recent cards that bears the date of Friday, when he flew in from London.” Bending at the waist, Gladden twisted his head so he could read the handwriting on the card. “Apart from Paddy’s opinion of Chairman Frost, it’s worthless really, just some observations about life in Kerry and Ireland. This one describes how I shoot the wild jackals that prey on my sheep. Travelogue and literary stuff. Paddy always fancied becoming a writer one day when he got the time.”

  Gladden straightened up. “The others”—he pointed to the other cards scattered over the carpet and the only remaining card on the nightstand—“are mostly the same. Maybe if you conducted a search of the rooms in the hotel, Inspector, you might come up with the rest of them.” Gladden obviously meant Frost’s room. He stepped back from the corpse and folded his hands in front of him like two tanned spades.

  McGarr concluded he was finished.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sympathy

  IT WAS A demotion of several complete ranks—chief superintendent to inspector—and revealed Gladden’s opinion of McGarr’s abilities or his importance in the matter.

  McGarr glanced from the toilet to the bottle of pills that had been scattered on the floor, to the rumpled bed, to the ghastly corpse, and asked himself what he was seeing. Was it a death by natural cause, as Commissioner Farrell, Shane Frost, and (McGarr assumed) the O’Duffy government would have it? Or was it, as Gladden was charging, a classic locked-door murder with the difference that, even if unknowing, Power had died by his own hand, which made it more cunning still?

  Certainly the postmortem would substantiate or deny Gladden’s analysis, from the particles of glass in the wound on Power’s forehead to the amount and type of digitalis in his blood. A complete absence of quinidine might further support Gladden’s contention, but what was there to suggest that the man’s death was anything more tragic than the simple misadventure of his having chosen the wrong medicine bottle?

  The theft of the note cards?

  Perhaps, if in fact they had been stolen. Power might have lost the key and forced the lock himself. He might have stored the cards in some other place or have decided to abandon his memoir project and destroyed them himself. Also the theft, if that, could have been an act separate from and unrelated to the would-be murder.

  McGarr turned to Gladden. “You touched the bottle in the toilet?”

  For the first time that McGarr had noticed, Gladden’s conspicuous hazel eyes blinked.

  “Did you also touch the notecase?”

  Again.

  “What about these cards here? Did you touch those as well?”

  With wide-eyed wonderment Gladden snorted dismay. “Don’t I be the shame of the South Kerry Mountains. You mean to say I might have destroyed the, like, fingerprints of whoever—”

  And added his own, perhaps all too conveniently, thought McGarr.

  “I had to pick the thing up and turn it over in me hands to see it was empty. Same with the bottle and the cards. I held them to the light, the better to see. Murth-er was the furthest thing from my mind until it, like, struck me. The pieces, don’t you know. And the whole”—he swirled a hand—“scene. Exactly. Surely you’re the man who has experienced that, Inspector. The bolt of recognition.”

  But of what? McGarr wondered. Of opportunity? And “murther”—if “murther” indeed—was by no means exact, even were the autopsy to corroborate Gladden’s suspicions.

  Superintendent Butler cleared his throat. “May I say something, Chief Superintendent? If that happened, if Dr. Gladden touched anything here, it did not occur while I—”

  But McGarr raised a hand, quelling him. Catching sight of Jim Feeney, the Parknasilla manager, who had discreetly taken himself into the sitting room, McGarr motioned that he should join them. “Were you here when Dr. Gladden examined these objects?”

  Feeney nodded.

  “How is it that news of Mr. Power’s death reached Leinster House before the Garda was notified? Was the Garda ever notified?” By “Leinster House” McGarr meant Taosieach O’Duffy.

  Feeney turned his head to Shane Frost.

  Said Frost, “Paddy had asked me to meet him at seven in the dining room for breakfast. He wanted to review our strategy for presenting his plan to the conference, step by step.”

  “Bullshit, mister, and you know it,” Gladden interrupted. “Paddy wouldn’t have discussed the details of his conference with you!”

  Yet again Frost ignored him. “When by seven he hadn’t arrived, I decided to come up here and see what was keeping him. On the stairs I could hear Mossie here”—he nodded at Gladden—“literally raving bloody murder. I decided that in the interests of the conference, the hotel, and Paddy’s friends and relatives, I’d try to keep a lid on speculation.”

  “Will you listen to him? Shpeck-oo-lay-tion,” Gladden said in a thick brogue. “If to anybody other than me, Paddy would have revealed his plan to Gretta, and Gretta only.”

  Frost sighed. “Honestly, Mossie, you have me on the wrong foot, so you do. I have an idea what you’re up to here, and let me say this. Two years ago or five or fifteen, this country could afford to indulge you and your quaint, peculiar bombast. Not now. This is
a serious business Paddy and I were…are engaged in, where posturing and ego count for naught. ’Tis the future that’s at stake, and nowhere in it does your Twilight socialism have a place.” Frost meant the Celtic Twilight, which was a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century movement that advocated returning Ireland to an idealized notion of its ancient past.

  To McGarr, Frost said, “Gretta was there too at breakfast. I’m sure she’ll corroborate everything I’ve said.”

  “Look who’s speaking for the country now,” Gladden said. “And what country? Drogheda to Naas to Wicklow Town. Behold the Pale rider.” Gladden pointed at Frost’s silver hair and expelled a mouthful of air in a kind of sardonic laugh. The Pale had been an area around Dublin where had lived the most obdurate of early English invaders.

  “And the Guards?” McGarr prompted. “Why weren’t the police called?”

  Frost’s eyes met McGarr’s with cold, clear purpose. “It could be I acted hastily to protect a whole host of things—Paddy’s memory, his family, the conference, maybe even Ireland itself—but I think not. If his story gets out, the cry of (I hardly dare breathe the word) assassination might be raised, and word of that sort never heals, most especially in this country with its love of martyrs. That’s what I was trying to avoid by phoning Leinster House first. And that only.

  “I understand you’ve been placed on notice. I’d take it seriously, were I you. You’re to keep a low profile here. The lowest.” Frost turned, as though he would leave the room.

  Threat number three, or was it four? O’Duffy, Quinn, Harney, Frost, and company evidently had much to lose. What could Paddy Power have been about to propose that they viewed as such a threat? “Not so fast, Mr. Frost,” McGarr said. “I have a few more questions.”