“Peter—tell me this before you leave. Have you read Power’s note cards?”
McGarr stepped out into the darkness, where he saw that it had begun to snow.
“What’s in them? Is it the—right stuff?”
It was that all right, Dublin style: filled with all the revealing, quiet detail that could bring charges, ruin careers and perhaps even lives.
“And not a morsel will you let drop to me, your friend, neighbor, and confidant—a man of the cloth, for Jimminy sake—at two in the bloody morning with no bloody body about. You’ll get no points with ‘Yer Mahn’ for this night’s work.”
But McGarr kept walking.
Maisie Edgerton-Jones, McGarr’s other contiguous neighbor, came next. A woman well past seventy, she slept poorly, and her light was often on at this late hour. Knowing that her back garden would be a soup of partially frozen water and ice, McGarr walked round to the front of the house to pass under the bows of yews that bordered the side of the house. They had not been cut in a decade and had attained the height of small trees. In such a way McGarr arrived at the old woman’s back door.
Through the lace curtains covering the back door, he could see that her kitchen table was already set, until he knocked and the pleasant scene of hot toast, tea, and a few sausages set on a warming tray was replaced by the wolfish head of a large Alsatian dog. Recognizing McGarr, the dog backed away from the door and sat, his bushy tail sweeping the tiles by the stove.
“If it isn’t the Chief Superintendent. We’ve just been hearing about you. Over the wireless.” She pointed to an ancient radio set with a dim yellow dial and a carved oak cabinet. “You’re just in time. I’ve got everything laid out, and you can have the lad’s portion of sausages.”
McGarr glanced down at the dog, which had seemed to understand what she had said.
“He likes them just as well raw.”
Or any way he can get them, McGarr judged. Did the dog smile, watching her shuffle toward the fridge? McGarr thought it did.
Miss M. E.-J., as she was known to the neighborhood, was a tall woman with a long, haughty face and snow-white hair that had been gathered into a braid that flowed down her back. Tonight she was wearing a crimson velvet housecoat, buttoned to the throat, and what looked like Christmas stockings stuffed with felt that made her old legs appear birdlike and frail.
Apart from the dog, the kitchen was presided over by an ancient coal stove with crazed green porcelain griffin’s feet that always caught McGarr’s eye. It kept the room torrid in every season, and McGarr, taking a seat at the table, settled into the comforting warmth.
The dog was a Bomb Squad veteran that McGarr had given to the old woman for companionship and mutual assistance. After having been injured in a blast, it limped noticeably and could barely hear; but, unlike the old woman’s sight, the dog’s was excellent and they complemented each other well.
Apart from scenting, the dog had been trained in perimeter security and personal protection; it had also been praised by its trainer as “a dog in a thousand. A kind of dog genius. A big, gentle brute of a fella that should not be put down.” Which would have been its fate had a collection not been taken up and a home found.
In a kind of soldierly salute the dog—called “Wellington,” by Miss M. E.-J.; the “P.M.” (of Belgrave Square) by Square residents—nuzzled McGarr’s wrist, then sat far enough from the table not to appear to beg.
Which was genius enough for any nine-stone Alsatian, McGarr imagined, reaching for the tea that the old woman now poured.
“So, tell me,—how’s the wee bairn and our darling Noreen?” In spite of the continuing radio updates, she would ask no direct question about what had happened in Sneem, which was the reason McGarr had settled at her table so readily. It was the way her people, who were decidedly West British, comported themselves, and not for the first time McGarr thought there might be some basis for Maisie Edgerton-Jones’s assumption of superiority.
Thus they ate virtually in silence, discussing only the weather and the snow, which, they could see through a kitchen window, was not falling heavily, and the differences between city and country, which neither McGarr nor the old woman cared much about. “I hear Noreen lost her lovely big car.”
McGarr nodded; the early reports were more detailed than he had expected. “We’ll get her another.” How, he did not know, but they would.
It was her only reference to McGarr’s situation, and he followed her suggestion to take his toddy and smoke to the Morris chair. There, before nodding off, he heard the solemn music interrupted; the voice of a newscaster then announced that a car, answering the description of the Ford Granada that McGarr had glimpsed in an outbuilding of Gladden’s mountain farm, had been found in Carlow. “It’s believed that the car has been there since sundown.”
“Goodness,” said Miss M. E.-J. as she washed the dishes, “that’s more than halfway across the country.” Her tone was vexed and supportive of McGarr, as though to suggest that the police without him were surely incompetent.
Granted Gladden had had a jump on them, but he was either lucky or—
“I imagine he’s had help.”
McGarr nodded, thinking that he’d sleep an hour. Two, at most. But when he awoke, it was first light. A blanket had been snugged over him, and the P.M. was lying on a pallet by his feet, its eyes half-open.
McGarr decided to let him out and keep him there for perimeter security. “Ready to be reactivated?” he asked, fetching the plastic sacks and opening the door. “Cold, dark duty, but we haven’t long to wait, I suspect.”
The snow had changed to sleet, and McGarr’s brogues bit through the glittering crust. On top of the stile in the wall that separated their properties, McGarr stopped to survey his back garden. When the new day dawned in an hour or so, rain would turn the three or four inches on the ground into an ankle-biting bog of frigid slush that would linger for weeks and was the worst feature of a Dublin winter. Seldom was it cold long enough for snow to remain snow, or warm enough for the city to be spared an icy cover.
There were no footprints leading from the laneway to the back door, nor—on the other side—up the tall staircase to the first floor of his Georgian house. Feeling refreshed by his sleep and invigorated by the nip of the cold, icy wind, McGarr carefully lowered himself down onto his narrow side lawn and walked round to the garden basement door. Saying, “Watch,” to the P.M., he let himself into the warmth of the room that he used as a kind of hothouse to germinate seeds and grow shoots for spring planting. He flicked on a light.
Everything seemed in place, and he climbed the stairs to the kitchen, where he put on a pot for coffee, then moved into his study to switch on a radio. But the telephone began ringing at—he checked his watch—7:10 in the morning. Who could it be? He had instructed Noreen not to call him, and, like many senior policemens’, his home phone was unlisted. Only staff and close personal friends knew the number. Gladden maybe, ringing to see if he had reached home? How would Gladden have gotten his phone number? How would anybody else?
Deciding it had to be staff at such an early hour, he picked it up and listened. It was a reporter from Minister for Justice Harney’s father’s newspaper, wondering if McGarr would answer a few questions. He hung up and switched on Noreen’s answering machine.
Next came the box that was attached to the back of the front door and was crammed with mail, old newspapers and, felicitously, the morning Times. It was the only morning paper that was delivered to the house, mainly for Noreen, and was still spangled with sleet, obviously having just been dropped off. The other three morning newspapers McGarr read at work.
The phone rang again, and on the fourth double-jingle McGarr heard Noreen’s recorded voice mixing with the voice from the radio, saying that she couldn’t come to the phone at the moment and—McGarr waited until he heard the same reporter say, “Aw, c’mon McGarr. Give us a break. You playin’ favorites with the Times, or what?”
Or what, exactly.
“Dr. Maurice J. Gladden, a former T.D. and a longtime political foe of Taosieach O’Duffy is suspected…” the deep, disembodied voice of a Radio Telefis Eireann newsman droned on, recapitulating the events of the day before. McGarr kept half an ear on that, waiting for any details that he had not heard before.
Back in the kitchen he poured the now-boiling water into a plunger-type coffee maker, and turned to consider his strategy for the blank note cards while the coffee steeped. He would hang one sack on the back of the door to the basement where there was little light and the landing creaked. He would cram another into the mailbox on the front door, leaving the hatch open, as if the sack had been squeezed through from the outside and its bulk had forced the clasp. Another he would place on the long table in front of the windows in the study where if Gladden got that far, he would have his back to the door while he examined it. The other two he would put someplace upstairs; once Gladden got that far, he would leave the house either disarmed or feet first.
McGarr poured himself a cup of coffee, then carried the paper into the study to learn how much time he had. He opened his jacket and rearranged the weight of the Walther that he had slipped under the waistband of his trousers hours before and was now chafing his paunch.
“…all ports and airports have been closed indefinitely by the minister for Transportation, stranding thousands of travelers….”
McGarr turned down the volume and spread the newspaper on the table in front of the windows there. It was growing light now, and he could just see the figure of the P.M. making a transit of the side lawn, its head raised as though looking up at the house.
McGarr’s eyes lit on the front page of the Times that was filled with a blaze of banner headlines:
O’DUFFY ASSASSINATED
QUINN DEAD
FOUR OTHERS KILLED
WHEN MAD DOCTOR RUNS AMOK
SEVEN CRITICAL
He scanned those articles that capsuled the events of yesterday in Sneem. To prove its claim of assassination, the newspaper detailed the evident planning involved in cutting and fitting the steel plates that Gladden had fixed to the Land Rover, in the fact that he had not once tried to change direction to spite of Ward’s efforts, and in the corpse of the other man found in the truck, who had died of traumatic injuries a day earlier. “The premeditated murder of a political leader is called an assassination. Taosieach Sean Dermot O’Duffy was assassinated by Dr. Maurice Gladden. Would that Dr. Gladden could tell us why.”
The headline lower on the page said:
GARDA CHIEF FIRED
WORLDWIDE MANHUNT LAUNCHED
It was Farrell’s version of McGarr’s suspension. Ward’s heroics were again mentioned, but nothing of McGarr’s own chase. “Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr was suspended without pay for two violations of Garda Siochana procedures, which Commissioner Farrell refused to discuss publicly beyond stating that the matter will be dealt with in an administrative hearing. ‘Criminal charges may be brought,’ said Farrell.”
In parentheses the reader was directed, on which one Moira O’Boyle—bless her hazel eyes and quick hand—rendered without flaw or favor the reportable parts of dialogue in which McGarr had engaged Farrell. And unlike Farrell, she understood the concept of bait. The article closed with:
McGarr stated he was in possession of note cards that Paddy Power, a former O’Duffy insider whose death he was investigating, had amassed for a planned memoir. When asked to surrender the cards as evidence, he refused, saying that he had not yet completed his investigation of Paddy Power’s murder. It is to be supposed that McGarr’s failure to arrest Dr. Gladden for presumed cause two days earlier was the second reason for his suspension.
Prologue also contained editorials, the last of which asked if the government was already engaged in a cover-up of the events leading up to the slaughter in Sneem and why McGarr,
…one of the Garda’s most senior and certainly most respected officers, has been summarily dismissed during such extraordinary circumstances without an official Garda statement of cause. If the byplay witnessed between the Commissioner and his Chief Superintendent is accurate, much needs to be explained, both by the Garda Siochana and now-suspended Chief Superintendent McGarr.
The Times was not the newspaper owned by Minister for Justice Harney’s father, and McGarr had his supporters too.
McGarr’s eyes worked down the rest of the page, which was filled with eyewitness descriptions of the disaster, follow-up stories on victims and survivors, and a list of the injured. He kept turning the pages, looking for any report of O’Duffy’s having announced the Eire Bank sale, wondering if a multimillion-pound sale to the Japanese of an institution that had been so favored by successive O’Duffy governments and so controversial throughout its existence could have gotten lost.
No, there it was at the top of the Financial Section. “ONCE RUMORED SALE ASSASSINATION-DAY ACTUALITY, the headline said. The article went on, “In an intriguing about-face which occurred moments before the calamity in Sneem, County Kerry, Taosieach O’Duffy announced the sale of Eire Bank to Nomura Bank of Kyoto for an undisclosed price.” There followed a brief history of Nomura Bank’s interest in Eire Bank, which dated back five years.
Beneath it was another small story about O’Duffy’s having “…endorsed Paddy Power’s call for a debt-for-equity swap of the national debt under the rubric of ‘internationalizing the burden of past, public borrowing.’”
McGarr began turning the pages back toward the beginning of the paper. Preoccupied with finding the Eire Bank story, he had seen but had passed over something else of interest. But what and where?
It was growing lighter outside, and again he saw the P.M. pass by the window, limping on its one gamy leg. Its head was lifted toward the windows, its wet, gleaming nose pulsing as it scented the air.
The phone rang again, but once only, before Noreen’s voice intervened and the same reporter—who judiciously had yet to give himself a name—came on to harangue McGarr about his duty to the reading public and the nation. Before hanging up, he added, “I’m going to keep ringing this fecker until you pick up. You’re gonna need us, you bastard. Every miserable line you can get.”
There was a time a mere day ago, McGarr thought, when no reporter would dare speak to him like that. Under the pain of being ignored for whole years, which made him think of Gladden, who had not been able to endure such a fate. What about himself? After years in the public eye, could he suffer being just another ordinary citizen? Or, worse, an outcast citizen who would be forced to live under an extraordinary dark cloud of suspicion and supposed guilt? He thought of Maddie and how cruel children could be to pariahs, or, rather, to the child of a pariah.
His eye then caught and riveted on one name in the list of those who had been injured at the bridge. “T. Bresnahan, Sneem. Critical.” Among the dead was a Mrs. Agnes O’Suilleabhain.
The radio was saying, “The manhunt has shifted to the Dublin Metropolitan Area where, it is suspected, Dr. Gladden has arrived with the help of Northern elements of the IRA. A Garda spokesman in Phoenix Park has reported the theft of an…” McGarr switched off the radio and reached for the phone before it could ring again. In the directory he found the hospital in Tralee where T. Bresnahan would have been taken. He dialed the number.
Not knowing if the call would still be put through under his own name, McGarr began to say, “This is Superintendent Liam O’—No,” he corrected, “This is Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr of the Murder Squad of the Garda Siochana. Please put me through to Detective Inspector Ruth Bresnahan. Her father, Tom, is a patient of yours, and she’s probably with him now.”
There was the slightest pause, then: “Yes, Chief Superintendent, I’ll ring the floor directly.” There was a long wait in which McGarr listened to the static crackling over the line and wished he had thought to get himself another cup of coffee.
There went the P.M. again, now lifting his entire body onto his haunches as he limped by, as in
a strange, spastic dance. Why? McGarr wondered. Some effect of his injuries, no doubt. He had never seen the beast so curiously…animated, and he speculated that perhaps animals knew more than humans gave them credit for, and he was merely responding to challenge of the command McGarr had issued. Watch!
“Chief?” Bresnahan asked.
“Is it your father?”
“Yah.”
McGarr waited, but when she offered no more, he asked, “How is he?”
Bresnahan didn’t know what to say. She had been on her feet for nearly twenty-four hours, having to deal with her father, which had been easy enough physically, and her mother, who had gone to bits entirely, and O’Suilleabhain, who had maintained a grim smile through it all but was in a kind of emotional shock, she could tell—because of his mother.
All he had said was, “You know, my father died so early in my life that she was the only parent I actually had. Apart from your father, of course. But—” He would not survive either, and neither the doctors nor Bresnahan knew exactly why, which troubled her most.
When the speeding Land Rover, driven by Gladden, had breached the line of soldiers and bore down on them, Bresnahan had pushed her mother away from it and had then reached for her father, who had been standing on her other side. But he had ahold of Agnes O’Suilleabhain, who had stumbled.
It was then that Bresnahan glanced up and saw Ward hurl himself at the truck where, had he not turned the wheel, they all—Rory and herself included—would have been killed outright, caught flat-footed in the direct path of the maverick machine.
Instead the headlamp and bumper struck Agnes in the head and shoulders, and her body was shot, like a bail from a binder, into Bresnahan’s father, who also went down. He got up—too quickly, Bresnahan now suspected—clasped his neighbor to his bosom, and took a half-dozen faltering steps away from the horrible scene toward the church where they had parked. But there were too many bodies and too much blood; his legs were weak, and he finally stumbled and fell.
The Death of Love Page 29
