Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  She nodded.

  “Walk along with me so we won’t fall behind.” She fell in step with him. “A craven lot pounced on me as soon as I was alone and took the tape off me. Look.” He turned his head so that she could see the purple lump at his hairline.

  “Do you know who they were?”

  “They didn’t identify themselves, but I’d say they were part of a breakaway lot of extremists—the ONI—One Nation Indivisible. Next to them the Provos are as mild as Quakers.”

  One nation indivisible: they’d have one foot in America, Julie thought. “Are they for Quinlan or against him?” she asked.

  “They’re for themselves and whoever’s useful. I’ll publish the interview, bedamned to them. I’m not lost without the tape. It was only that I wanted his voice saying what he had to say.” As they passed through the cemetery gates, Irwin took her arm and tried to hurry her past the crowd. “I want to get up front.”

  She disengaged her arm, but gently. “You go on ahead. I won’t be going back to Dublin with you, Roy. I’m going on to Donegal.”

  “Are you so?” he said as though she had betrayed him.

  “I’m very grateful to you and I’ll call you as soon as I get back to Dublin. Okay?”

  He shook off his pique and gave her his hand. “Good luck to you, then. I hope you find the old boy.” When he had strode a few feet, he turned back. “I saw the Gray Man in the hotel last night. And while I was looking round for you, didn’t he link up and go off with one of the bastards who roughed me up? I’ve no idea what it means. But take care of yourself.”

  “You too.”

  The best care she could take would be to leave town now, to get her things from the hotel and find the earliest transportation to Donegal. But she stayed.

  Tributes and reminiscences, on and on, while the cold wind plucked at the women’s veils and children tried to wrap themselves in their mother’s skirts. Quinlan spoke at last. He belittled the accord signed between the British prime minister and the president of the Irish Republic. “Consultation,” he mocked, throwing back his mane of gray hair. He had the flamboyance of an evangelist. “What is consultation to the party without the means to implement their position? When the lamb teams up with the lion, I ask you, which comes out the goat?” He spoke for over an hour, and amazingly, only the children were restive; a mixture of politics and economics, a course in Irish revolutionary history. He gave chapter and verse of the church interference, bowing deeply to the assorted clergy present with every ironic reference. Julie suddenly wondered if Quinlan might know her father, who shared his historical interests. The thought did not thrill her. Too many things were tightening, as though she were in the embrace of an octopus. As soon as Quinlan stepped down, she turned back toward the town.

  A volley of shots rang out behind her, then the bugle and the priestly voice leading the crowd in prayer. Intermittently, as the wind willed, she heard a high tenor voice singing “The Minstrel Boy.” She was well into the deserted town when she heard the roar of a motor that soon struck a rhythmic acceleration; a helicopter rose from near the cemetery and soared overhead on its way, she supposed, to an airport. Was Joseph Quinlan on his way back to New York?

  A porter unlocked the hotel door to let her in. She asked if someone could give her her bill.

  He looked at his watch. “Within the hour, say, one o’clock.”

  Julie looked at hers. Three hours had been a lot of funeral. The urge to get on with her journey was very strong. Closely examined, it might reveal itself as the urge to go home. Then she stopped to think what home was like these days. She went behind the desk and took her own key from the hook. A choice of any number was available, and they all looked suspiciously alike. She went upstairs, where the carpeting was so thin and the quiet of the hallways so pronounced she could hear the little thuds of her own footfalls. She thought of the night in Dublin when she’d asked the porter to go to her room door with her. She had not seen the Gray Man at the funeral. Would he show up in Donegal? If he did, she resolved, she would go to the police.

  The stillness of the hallway seemed even deeper with the rattle of her key in the lock. A waste hamper stood nearby, as did a laundry cart stacked with clean linens. The smell of the room hit her first—as though exhaust fumes from a car had floated up from the courtyard and got locked in along with something foul like a plumbing backup. The maid had not been in, the bolster still lay where Julie had pushed it onto the floor during the night. The room was in near darkness, the heavy window shade and drapes drawn. The last thing she had done before leaving the room was to open them and let in the daylight. It was the first thing she did now. Next she tried to open the window. It would not budge. She turned back and saw a man stretched his full length on the bed—clothed, even with his shoes on. Stiff with shock, she edged toward the door. Within reach of it, she looked back and shouted, “You!” as though the man were merely sleeping.

  The only sound was a slow drip of water in the sink. She had first thought—hoped—the darkness on the pillow was hair, the back of the man’s head. But she knew: what she saw on the pillow was all that remained of the head itself, with no shape to it at all. She heard her own moan and managed to get out of the room. She stood a couple of minutes and breathed deeply. Everything of value to her was in the room, including her shoulder bag, which she had put down on a chair when she tried to open the window. As soon as she knew she wasn’t going to faint, she went back.

  There was no way of knowing by sight who the man was, but she felt it was the Gray Man. Why hadn’t the maid discovered—or witnessed—such a noisy crime? Or had she witnessed it and fled? Or had she merely left the laundry cart where it was when it came time for the funeral and now intended to come back and resume her chores? Julie felt the nausea returning and the cold, dank sweat of fear. Nothing of hers looked to have been disturbed. Her notebooks lay on the top of her packed but open suitcase … the clock on the bedside table she must not forget … and the panty hose hung to dry on a hanger over the sink. She touched nothing—not even the hose—only snatching up her shoulder bag from the chair.

  When she reached the lobby, the street doors were open wide, the guests returning. Light streamed in through the windows where the drapes had been opened. The staff were at their posts. The scene seemed even more surreal than the abandoned lobby of a few minutes before when the porter had let her in; it was as though she had run downstairs to another facet of the same nightmare.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THREE HOURS LATER JULIE and Roy Irwin were with the young Gardai sergeant in the hotel office awaiting the arrival by air of the Murder Team from Dublin. All that was known at that point was the virtual certainty that the victim was indeed Edward Donavan, their so-called Gray Man. There had been no identification on the body, and Donavan’s car was gone from where it had been parked in the courtyard until at least six o’clock the night before. At that time an assistant chef, out for a quick cigarette, had seen him put his bag into the boot and go off toward the town center. Tentative identification came from the observation by the registration clerk that Donavan was missing half of the forefinger of his right hand. As was the murder victim. The desk man had registered “Edward Donavan” but had no other address than Dublin.

  Roy Irwin seemed beside himself, impatient with the restraints the district Gardai put on themselves waiting for the experts. “God’s teeth!” he exploded finally. “I swear to you he was a security operative, private or government. Isn’t there a license board of some sort you can get onto?”

  “Mr. Irwin,” the sergeant said, “in the case of murder I am no more than a caretaker government until the central authorities arrive. I’m at a loss to know why they’re delayed, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”

  “I can tell you why they’re delayed,” Irwin ranted. “They’re keeping clear until Joe Quinlan can get out of the country.”

  “Have you ever thought of trying out yourself for law enforcement, Mr. Irwin?” the yo
ung officer said blandly.

  Both Irwin’s and Julie’s statements concerning their previous encounters with the Gray Man had been taken, processed and signed. The murder scene, except for the search of the victim for identification, remained undisturbed; her panty hose, Julie assumed, still hung over the wash basin, surely dry by now. Irwin was allowed to file his story on the Roger Casey funeral. He might fume at being detained, but it was mere bombast. He was a newsman, and murder was bigger news than a natural death, even that of a hero. But to keep him otherwise occupied, the sergeant agreed to Julie’s suggestion that he be allowed to drive her to Drumcliffe so that she could visit Yeats’s grave. They made their way through a few restive newsmen still on hand when the murder story broke, who waited without even the solace of the bar: afternoon closing.

  THE POET WAS BURIED in a bleak little churchyard cemetery where the wind flattened the uncut grass and whistled through a few lonely pine trees. An ancient high cross rose among the withered bracken and weeds, and across the road was the formidable ruin of a round tower. Not a living creature in sight. Julie stood by the pebbled grave site of Yeats and his wife, George, and read aloud the epitaph he had composed for himself and ordered carved on local stone:

  Cast a cold eye

  On Life, on Death.

  Horseman, pass by.

  “What does it mean?” Irwin wanted to know.

  Julie shook her head. She was not going to interpret Yeats. She took a long look at the mountain, Ben Bulben, and thought it resembled a lurching beast against the sky.

  On the way back to the car she thanked Irwin.

  “For what?”

  “Everything. For bringing me here. I feel better now. Stronger.”

  “You’ve had a hard life, haven’t you?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Could we find a place and talk for a piece?”

  “How about the Lake Isle of Innisfree?”

  “Oh, God love you. You are a romantic. That’d be Lough Gill, and I’ll have to have a look at my road book.”

  He had no sooner got out the book than a patrol car pulled up, the garda asking if he could assist. “It must wait another time,” he said when he heard where they wanted to go. “You’ll soon be needed back at the hotel.”

  Irwin turned the car around. “I’ll drive slow and give you the main points of my interview with Quinlan. I want to know who snatched my tape and why. And something else now: does it connect up with the murder of the Gray Man?”

  Neither he nor Julie could find anything remarkable in the interview. “He follows the straight IRA position,” Irwin summed up.

  “But you said they were something else, not IRA,” she reminded him.

  “I said, but I couldn’t prove. I’m pretty sure that lot was the ONI, and they’re to the left of the Provos. Or to the right, if you see it that way. Extremists, in any case. Ah, now, wait. You may have something: they were afraid of what Quinlan might have said to further discredit them. There was a confrontation of some sort at the meeting. That has to be it: what he might have said. Don’t I wish he had said it—a Roy Irwin exclusive.”

  As though all the world was waiting for it, Julie thought: he was like an actor who had come within tasting distance of the part of a lifetime. “How did you get to him in the first place?”

  “Ah, now. Whenever I go to a strange town, I go first to the local bookshop to find out what’s going on. There’s a grand woman there in a shop called Greely’s—you’d take to her yourself in a minute—and you’d have seen her in the funeral cortege, marching with the boys of yesterday. When I told her I was the Irish correspondent for the New York Daily, she set up the interview for me.”

  “Maisie Craig,” Julie said.

  “Did you meet her?”

  Julie shook her head. “But I was in the bookshop.” She thought about Garvy’s grandmother sending her to Maisie Craig and then her niece saying she needn’t say who sent her. A house divided? And the old woman’s presentiment of death. Which had not taken long to follow. “So where are we with the Gray Man?” she asked. “Is there a connection?”

  Irwin glanced at her and then back at the road. He took his time before saying, “Sometimes I wonder if you’ve been entirely honest with me, Julie. Isn’t there some reason you’re in Ireland besides the quest of your father? Or is the father search a ruse altogether? You wouldn’t be CIA, would you?”

  “You are wrong on all counts,” she said.

  “What about Seamus McNally? Isn’t he on your agenda, you going north? That’s his territory.”

  “Roy, I’m an entertainment columnist. Richard Garvy is going to do The Far, Far Hills of Home on Broadway. That puts the author on my agenda. Yes.” Entirely honest … oh, yes.

  “You don’t need to bridle,” Irwin said. “McNally doesn’t write the kind of poetic propaganda that lot likes exported.”

  “I understand,” Julie said. On the instant she realized that something was missing from her hotel room: she had left the copy of McNally’s play alongside the clock on her bedside table. She’d been aware of the clock after she discovered the dead man. But she was sure now the book wasn’t there.

  When, within the hour, she was called before Inspector Superintendent Alec Fitzgerald in the private-party room the hotel had provided him, the book was the first thing that caught her eye: To Spite the Devil lay before him, the solitary object on the polished table.

  THIRTY-TWO

  INSPECTOR SUPERINTENDENT: THE TOP man in Irish homicide investigation. He rose from behind the table long enough to give a courtly little bow and to indicate the chair alongside the table; a stocky and hard-jawed man with a halo of rusty red hair and peaked eyebrows and very blue eyes that seemed to have needlepoints of light in them.

  “Is it yours?” he said of the book on the table.

  “It could be mine. I bought a copy at Greely’s bookstore yesterday.”

  Other men of the team were coming and going in the room, soft-footed. Fitzgerald took a pen from his pocket and poked at the book until it fell apart where it had been torn into three parts. “And would this be your doing, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “No, sir.”

  At his signal a younger detective came and with a pair of pincers gathered the book into a plastic bag. Fitzgerald bade him come back and sit in on the interrogation. After he dispatched “that desecration.” He introduced Sergeant Detective Lawrence Carr to Julie. Carr was bright-eyed and ruddy-cheeked and far more given to smiling than his chief.

  “Are you an actress, Mrs. Hayes?” Fitzgerald asked.

  “No, sir, but I write about theater. I work for the newspaper the New York Daily.”

  “Ah-ha. And are you working for them now? What I’m asking is, are you here on assignment or on holiday?”

  “I’m on my own time, Inspector Superintendent. I may do a couple of interviews for my column, but the reason I’m in Ireland is to try to find my father. I’m not sure he’s here. I’m not sure he’s alive even. But I came to try to find out.”

  She waited then with Carr’s return until he had sat down at the opposite end to her of the table. Fitzgerald soon moved him. “Bring your chair to the middle, so I won’t have to swivel my head like a whirligig. You were saying, Mrs. Hayes … are you at the beginning or near the end of the trail?”

  Julie was soon telling of her visit to Sally O’Rourke and her trip to Wicklow and Ballina, making the account as brief as possible.

  “Take your time,” Fitzgerald said. “After all, dead is dead, isn’t it? We cannot hurry the man upstairs back to life. What is your father’s name, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “Thomas Francis Mooney.”

  Did he react to the name? He was too experienced a man to show reaction, but some small change occurred, although she could not define it. “And where will you go from here in your search?” he asked.

  “A place called Ballymahon in Donegal. I’ve learned that he was—or is—married to an artist who lives there, Edna O’Shea.”
>
  He looked at the younger detective and repeated, “An artist named Edna O’Shea.”

  Julie chanced his displeasure and turned her chair so that she could see both men. Carr was making a note of the name.

  Fitzgerald smiled slightly at her move, a mere downward pull at the corners of his mouth. “I’d like you now to tell us in your own words, Mrs. Hayes, all you can about Edward Donavan. I understand you and your Irish colleague called him the Gray Man for your own convenience.” He reached to the chair behind him for a file. It was the transcript of the preliminary questioning by the local police. Julie had been told before she entered the room that her evidence would be recorded. It was one of the quiet activities going on in the background. She described her experience of the Gray Man from his appearance and disappearance in the lobby of the Greer Hotel, to the disco dance, to the National Gallery, to this hotel in Sligo, where she had confronted him yesterday afternoon and where he had denied having ever seen her before.

  “Why did you not go to the police, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “I intended to if he showed up in Donegal, where I’d be going alone. There was some doubt in my mind—Roy Irwin once suggested that he might be the one the Gray Man was interested in.”

  “And it’s only natural that you would want to agree with him. Go on.”

  Julie had the feeling of being led. The tone was of fatherly concern. Either that or he was setting a trap on the assumption that she was not telling the whole truth. “There was doubt in my mind, Inspector,” she said again, “and I did challenge him when we came face to face.”

  “So you did. So you did.” And without pause: “Can we talk for a moment about the telephone call you received from New York at your Dublin hotel? Would there be anything in that to throw light on the situation?”

  A soft zinger. Soft was a great word with the Irish. She could understand now why the Murder Team was delayed in arrival: they had done their Dublin homework before setting out. “The call was from my partner on the New York Daily.” She went on to explain the Garvy-McNally association and that she had come along to Sligo primarily to see Richard Garvy’s grandmother.