The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Also, from what you’ve told me and how Clem acted about the boats and all, I should think it had something to do with the origin of all this stuff.”

  As did Mirna; it was the reason she had not read on, the reason she had closed the pouch up. She was just not being brave, and suddenly she remembered what the policeman had said to her about whoever it was—Angus Rehm—coming back on her. He had obviously killed Kevin and done whatever he had to three other Clare Islanders whom she had known all of her life.

  Mirna sighed; she was about to violate a trust. It did not come easy, but at the same time she had Karl and herself to think of. “I think it’s wrong, considering what Clem asked of me—”

  “But what he asked of you might well have been wrong in itself,” Karl quickly interjected. “Think, for a moment, what happened to them. Also, Clem told you they were coming for this, which we can well imagine.

  “Shall I?” With his other hand, Karl reached for the flap.

  Mirna hated herself, but she nodded. “Perhaps we should.”

  For about an hour they read. Rapt. Engaged. Shocked. And ultimately dismayed. After Karl folded the yellowed papers and slipped them back into the pouch, he sat back in his chair.

  Several long minutes elapsed before Mirna said, “This isn’t the Clem Ford I’ve known all my life. It can’t be. It’s like he was two different people, and the other one—” she shook her head. There was another pause. “Well, what do we do now?”

  Karl sighed. “Certainly we can’t go to the authorities, given the state of leadership in Dublin.”

  “Or even go public,” Mirna put in.

  “Who knows how much of it would disappear.”

  “Into the wrong pockets.” Mirna did not wish to sound like Fergal O’Grady, but a good bit would surely be lost to “the State.” And doubtless there would be other “States” before any individuals were even considered. What with the courts and lawyers and judges, who would steal their share legally, Mirna could imagine the entire fortune—the Trust included—being wrapped up in litigation for years. And dissipated. Ireland’s legal system was as notorious as her lawyers were clever at “making a good thing last.”

  “Tell you what—tomorrow night on the low tide I’ll go out to the cave and retrieve the other parts of Breege’s parure. In Dublin I’ll try to determine its provenance and value. I’ll also visit Monck and Neary, utter Clem’s passwords, and see what they say.

  “In the meantime, I’ll make a copy of this to take back to Dublin and see if I can learn anything more about this Angus Rehm. Then we’ll put all of it”—Karl indicated the two sheets as well as the time-yellowed memoir—“back into the packet and back under the keystone in the hearth where none of the seoinini,” he said with a smile meant to calm her, “will think to look. And we’ll pretend we never opened the blasted box.”

  Which scarcely contained hope at the bottom, thought Mirna. To her way of thinking, what she could now see in the pictures that were scattered on the table was no longer a cave of riches. It had become a cave of corruption, a contamination that Clem Ford had tried to bury and purge by establishing the Trust. But Clem had failed. And all these years later it had surfaced, more malignant still for the wait in a defenseless place like Clare Island.

  CHAPTER 20

  WITH A CRASH and a curse Colm Canning arrived at the public dock in Killala harbor. It was a few minutes past 4:00 in the morning, and the sky to the east was just growing light.

  Sixteen hours it had been since the phone call from Packy and Clem. Canning’s boat—bought with a generous stipend and a no-interest loan from the Clare Island Trust—made an easy twelve knots cruising. Granted he had had to feint into Roonagh Point, then motor due west round the island before heading north. But still the ninety-mile journey could have been covered in half the time, especially in an emergency, as Canning had known all along it was. And here he was hours late.

  Clem Ford—Canning could see from the size of his silhouette—snagged a scupper with a boat hook and pulled him back toward the dock. But Canning, trembling totally now that the boat had made the dock and he no longer had to force himself to stay awake, let his body slump down the companionway. In the fo’c’sle, he collapsed into a berth.

  Already he could hear Packy roaring. “Where’s that cunt! He skite off, or he below?”

  “Easy now, Packy. There’s nothing to be done about it now,” Ford counseled.

  “You don’t think so? I’ll moor-door the scut! I’ll have his guts for garters. He’s fecking dog’s piss, he is. Dog’s piss! What neck! I’ll put the bastard on the flat of his back, I will.”

  Unless he was already there, the last of the new jar of potín that Canning had finished a half hour earlier made him think. Without it he would now be terrified; and without it he wouldn’t be in such a spot. But Canning could not imagine himself without it. If only he could get more.

  And there Packy was, filling the hatch—short, broad, almost comically square and compact which, of course, only reinforced the sublimity of his name. But enormously powerful, even now as an old man.

  “You hoor!” The boat rocked, as he forced himself down through the narrow companionway. “D’ye’ not know what happened to Kevin and Breege? Did we not make it clear? Where the fuck have ye’ been?”

  Canning had never heard Packy utter an actual—as opposed to a euphemistic—curse, and the emphasis was not lost on him. Along with the thought, why answer? He’s going to beat me anyway, like the cop did in Packy’s house. But the difference is, this time I want it. What? another part of him asked.

  Too late.

  “Oh, aye—I see what it is.” By the craw Canning was plucked from the berth and shoved so high into the low cabin top that Packy could barely swing the stump of his mangled hand. But the arc was enough. Slaps, they were, back and forth, snapping Canning’s head from side to side.

  “Ye’ bloody deceivin’ bastard. How many times have I told ye’—drink will be your ruination!”

  And he didn’t know the half of the deception, thought Canning.

  “Ye’re a drunk, yeh fuck. First, last, and always, it’s yehrself ye’ think of, and yehr gullet. And not like some—you got your chance. You had university, all expenses paid.”

  My first mistake, thought Canning. No, not a bit of it—it was Clem Ford’s mistake, just because I could pass the exams. Him and his meddling Trust. Was I ever asked did I want to go? No. I did the subjects and passed the tests, the money was there so the parents said go. And I did, only to end up back on the island but unsuited to it because of…expectations.

  “But you failed that.”

  Writers don’t need degrees; in fact, degrees had hurt the ones Canning knew of—himself included—just going for it!

  “Then you dragged the wife out here where you no longer belonged, and you failed her and the kids and the fishin’, and now this. If we’ve missed those bastards because of you”—like a blow from a short flat bat, Packy knocked him clear across the cabin into the other berth—“I’ll feed you to the seals, piece by piece.”

  Which was when Clem Ford intervened. “Packy—check the tanks. We should cast off immediately.” Pronounced imeejitly. The British prick.

  “As a favor to me, please.”

  Having bought him too, thought Canning, who was not angry with Packy. He’d only given him what he deserved; and more, if they knew the whole of it. Drunk, staggering, hallucinating even while still on Clare Island, he had loosened his gob to Fergal O’Grady. The senachie almost seemed to have been waiting for Colm there by the bog where Packy kept the guns. As Canning had told all to O’Grady, wraiths of people he had known or partially known in his life had flitted around them, shaking their heads, condemning Canning while the words spilled out.

  Trembling more totally now, Canning tried to wipe away the blood that was tracking through his beard, but his hand flitted past his face. With a handkerchief Ford reached toward him, but Canning ripped it away. “I’ll do it my
self imeejitly.” It was a poor jibe, but that was the potín again—you had no thoughts but potín thoughts and no thoughts that the potín would not say.

  Only then did Canning notice Ford’s right arm in a sling.

  “Have you been into the potín again, Colm?” Ford’s voice was deep and the tone friendly, fatherly even, as he looked down on Canning with his hoary beard and white mane. He was a gigantic man, easily two of Canning. “Is that what happened to the wife and children? Were you drinking potín?”

  Canning had begun to shake again, and he couldn’t answer. Now that he no longer had to deal with the boat, the soul sickness—as he thought of it—had also come on. A world-darkening gloom that made him think, if he had the strength or the means, he’d kill himself there and then. It was the same self-loathing that seemed to feed upon itself, making him say and do things that caused him to hate himself all the more. Like blabbing to O’Grady. Christ—he might just as well have rung up the cop.

  “Do you think you have a drink problem?”

  Canning might have laughed, did he not feel like he was wearing every nerve in his body on the outside of his skin. Even the top of his head was burning. But the worst thing was the feeling in the pit of his stomach, the hollowness, knowing he was lost. His life was over at thirty-one. “Of course I have a drink problem,” he managed to say. “I don’t have any.” It was supposed to be a joke.

  Ford did not laugh. Instead he moved aft to his kit bag and produced a large bottle. And it was not just any bottle but a bottle of fourteen-year-old Jameson Red Breast. Like a feckin’ miracle, thought Canning.

  “I.R.A. anesthetic,” Ford explained. “The ‘doctor’ who tended my arm said it was the only prescription he could write that I could get filled.” Ford also produced a cup from the top of a thermos. “I could never drink whiskey straight, what about you?”

  Canning could not reply. He was seeing something like birds or bats or bears moving through the periphery of his vision now that his eyes were fixed on the bottle.

  “What’s the humorous line about Red Breast?” Ford asked, nearly filling the cup. “Drink too much, it’ll give you an inflammation of the chest.”

  No, it’ll give you feckin’ brucellosis, Canning’s brain was screaming. Brucellosis was the punch line, you British prick. Fifty years here and he couldn’t even get that right.

  “Water?”

  Canning wrenched the red plastic cup out of the man’s one good hand, slopping most of it onto the berth. The whiskey stung the gash in his mouth where Packy had hit him and scorched down into his empty stomach. But—and here was the sad part, Canning thought—in mere seconds it also soothed him more completely than Mother’s milk.

  “Well—that’s for now.” Ford topped it up again. “Just to get you settled. You should sleep, if you can. After this thing is over, please God, I’ll help you get your wife and children back.” Placing the bottle on the floorboards between his feet, he tamped down the cork with his good hand. “I say this not because I just lost Breege, but because I’d like you to go on as you were—how Breege and I knew you when you first came back to the island full of hope and promise. And not how you now are. Maybe you could even get back to the writing?”

  “How?”

  “Well—first we’ll get you well. Then we’ll get you over to—where is it again, California? There you’ll have to deal with the decision of what’s best for the lot of you, remaining there or coming back here. But you’ll be able to decide that all the better without this.” He pointed to the bottle.

  It sounded wonderful to Canning, in fact, too wonderful. He knew himself and knew it would never happen. Following his wife out to California would be just another admission of failure made all the worse by having to do it sober, repentent, and admitting he had “the failing.” The disease of alcoholism—Canning had read the pamphlets. And alcohol was so cheap in America; he had summered there once with some American cousins, disastrously as it had turned out.

  With the bottle in his hand Ford shuffled toward the companionway, having to stoop nearly in two before mounting the ladder. “I’ll keep this up by the wheel. You did us the favor of coming to pick us up. We’ll do that back for you. But sleep, now that you have the chance.”

  “Stuff California up your gansey!” Canning bawled, the malt now surging through him. “Money! I need money, like you promised. And whiskey! I know you have more than one!”

  Packy’s puffy, windburned face appeared in the companionway. “One more squeak out of you, and I’ll toss your sorry arse over the rail. And that’s a promise.”

  He knew Packy was serious, but Canning felt almost joyful that he was suddenly drunk. And out came “Ah, feck off, yeh big cheesy bollocks. See this?” From under his rain slicker, he pulled out a large-caliber automatic, just like the two others that he had brought along with the Armalite assault rifles. “Yeh come down here again, I’ll put a bullet through yehr big pink puss.” And he would too; it was all he could do to keep himself from pulling the trigger right then.

  But the gun drooped from Canning’s hand and fell onto his stomach, as his eyes closed.

  PART IV

  Plunder

  CHAPTER 21

  NOT MANY YEARS ago, a large new ferry had been brought to Clare Island by the owner of the Bayview Hotel. She was a spacious craft of about fifty feet and able to ride out the sudden, intense storms of Clew Bay. Painted red and white, she had a flat deck that could carry several vehicles or, say, a flock of sheep.

  But in a blow one morning shortly after she was commissioned, her engines failed. The new boat had just left the shelter of the Clare Island breakwater, and she drifted onto a rocky beach, breaking up into two large pieces that could be seen there to this day. The owner escaped uninjured.

  Now, ferrying to and from Clare Island was performed by a variety of boats large and able enough to make the sixteen-mile round trip profitably and safely. During the three-day “O’Malley Rally,” every sort of craft was pressed into service, most for profit, some others for the convenience of celebrating relatives.

  One such boat was curious. She was about forty feet long with a planing, sportfisher-type hull, a small enclosed foredeck, and only a doghouse with a canvas top shielding the control console. Today with warm and sunny weather, the canvas was rolled forward, and a tall broad young woman with white-blond hair and a deep tan was at the wheel.

  Deftly, she cut the largely open boat past the massive bulwark of the Roonagh Point breakwater that carved a small sheltered harbor from Clew Bay. Wearing only a mango orange spandex bikini, she immediately collected the eyes of the young male O’Malleys waiting at the harbor. They were already deeply involved in “spotting form”—as the phrase had it—of their felicitously distant relations of the opposite sex.

  As she spun the wheel and played one engine off against the other, the stern of the boat swung round and the name on the transom could be read plainly—Grainne Uaile. She then cut the engines and drifted toward the wall.

  Hands on the pleasant curves of her hips, she cocked her head up at the throng that had gathered on the edge to look down at her. “Any O’Malley women care for a free lift over to Cliara?” It was the Irish word for Clare and meant Island of the Clergy.

  Several of the girls swapped glances, scarcely able to believe their luck. “But what do we do with our tickets? They cost sixteen quid return.”

  “Flog them to some of the others. I’ll wait. I can take twenty of yiz tops,” she said in the pancake accent of a Dubliner. “And ’specially any women with a yen to do some divin’.” She swept a hand at the suits, flippers, tanks of air, and diving buoys that lay in the stern of the boat.

  Some one of the men muttered, “At which she’s a champ, I’d hazzard.” The male laughter was quick, deep, but diffident. And not one of them challenged her until an older man stepped out of the crowd with a towel draped over his head, like a shawl. He was visibly drunk, and had something bulky stuffed under his jumper to simulate
breasts.

  “Hold on, luveen,” he said in a high falsetto voice. “Don’t shove off without me. I’m just the diver for you.” Scuttling down the concrete stairs, he threw his kit on board, but the woman threw it back.

  He then attempted to climb on board, but she easily pushed him away with a smile, saying, “Funny—I don’t quite believe you’re for real.” She even squeezed his “breasts,” which brought shouts from the men.

  Finally, he attempted to jump on board, but she caught most of him, which she deposited gently over the rail and back onto the stairs. “I’d ask if you’ve had enough, but it’s plain from the smell of you you have.”

  “Fair play to her,” said one of the other O’Malley lads. “She could have dropped him in the drink.”

  “I’ve had me tumble with Grainne. Now I can die happy.”

  “And should have too, yah sot,” said another woman. “Great girl yah are!” And she gave the young woman a thumbs-up.

  “I’ll buy ye’ a pint on the island,” the man went on, picking himself up and pulling the towel from his head. “McCabe’s Bar. It’s right there in the harbor.”

  “You will not.” The young woman was helping her passengers aboard the lurching boat. “You’ll buy me a gallon or nothing,” which got laughs.

  “Only if you promise to be gentle.” Which got more.

  Crossing from Roonagh Point to Clare Island harbor in a converted fishing boat takes about twenty-five minutes under the best of conditions. And at least another ten when burdened with as many passengers as can safely be carried.

  Noreen McGarr with Maddie by her side watched the faster Grainne Uaile power past the corner of the breakwater and plane off across the bright turquoise water toward Clare Island. She only hoped that Ruth Bresnahan and Hugh Ward, who had arrived on a Garda launch during the night, were there to greet the boatload of young women when they arrived.