VENGEANCE IS MINE

by Marie Rowan

  “It’s Kevin Lally. He was in The Clew Bay when I left. He’s a Mayo man and the landlord is his cousin.” Jacobstein made a note of it as McLean rose to leave.

  “Thanks very much for your co-operation, sir, it’s much appreciated. Now I think I can put your mind at rest about something close to your heart. That note Sergeant Manley just handed to me informed me that the caretaker of Tara’s Halls, a Mr Dorman, took exception to your banners cluttering up the back corridors and put them into one of the small outbuildings. He had just finished doing that when the fire was spotted. He’s been waiting downstairs for me to interview him and so has been unable to inform you that the banners are quite safe. He, therefore, not only saved your banners, but by ensuring free access to outside doors, he saved a lot of lives.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned! It’s a great night right enough in a manner of speaking. Send him round to The Clew Bay when he’s finished here, will you, Mr Pollock?” McLean then ran out of the police station in his haste to break the good news to the depressed supporters. Pollock and Jacobstein exchanged smiles of satisfaction and Quigley cut a sticky gingerbread cake he produced from nowhere. Jacobstein headed out to fill the kettle and Pollock began buttering the cake.

  “I think that might just be a very essential piece of information your uncle has just given us, Austin, and we’ll leave the caretaker for a bit. We’ll see Kevin Lally before the beer gets to him. Have you had a quick word with the caretaker, Austin?” Quigley nodded and chewed.

  “He heard nothing, saw nothing and says even less. It seems he’s in shock at the moment, sir.”

  “Alright, he’ll keep.” Pollock turned to Jacobstein as he returned with a full kettle of boiling water which he poured into the old teapot. “Right now, Jake, I’d like you to oversee the questioning of the supporters. Go a little deeper. You heard what John McLean had to say about the man who might just have exited from the lavatory. See if anybody else struck gold there. Austin, you come with me to The Clew Bay for you know some of those boys. Just watch while I talk to a few of them in passing and Lally in particular. See what your gut instinct tells you. If it’s really important, take over. Jake, when you’ve finished organising, meet us at the crime scene. The whole thing shouldn’t take longer than half an hour.” The door was opened suddenly.

  “The father-in-law has arrived, Inspector Pollock. It seems he’s still the legal owner and he says he’s keeping the insurance money. Jerry Allison passed out when he heard that, his wife recovered quickly and has dealt her father several hefty blows which he’s not likely to forget. She then proceeded to threaten him with the income tax people regarding his other businesses.” Manley managed it all with a straight face. None of the detectives listened without grinning.

  “Thanks, Roddy. Arrived at Tara’s Halls?” Manley nodded and left.

  “Hope some folk are still in the pub. I hate conducting interviews while all the action and spectators are outdoors,” said Jacobstein.

  “I know,” said his boss, “there’s a lack of dignity about pavement interviews, too. Right, let’s go then. Bundle the mugs in the sink outside and I’ll slip Manley a few bob for the turnkey to wash up.”

  The Clew Bay was surprisingly modern and seemed well-run. The polished, wooden floor was devoid of sawdust. He let his gaze run over the crowd squeezed into the saloon bar. The glass mirrors on all four walls gleamed, the patrons all contributing to the loud talk at the same time. The barmen were supplemented by a lady whom Pollock was assured was the landlord’s wife and she was easily the most efficient person there although the others were no slouches. The cash register rang incessantly. The talk comprised of one topic, the fire.

  Pollock and Quigley had stepped right inside the pub and the usual silence when detectives appeared, failed to materialise. They did not get as much as a sideways glance. Pollock edged his way through the milling crowd till he reached the far end of the bar, and finally managed to attract one of the barmen’s attention.

  “Be right with you, sir,” the overstretched young man called without even looking up as he filled another pint glass. Pollock leaned right across and his warrant card came between the barman’s eyes and the beer. The glass was finally full, money and beer were exchanged, the till rang yet again, and Pollock and Quigley were finally waved through the now-open hatch and into the back parlour.

  “Chris Kelly,” said the landlord, pointing to a chair by the dinner table. Mrs Kelly appeared, was introduced and promptly took a chair opposite Pollock. Quigley stood by the sideboard.

  “Hello, Austin, how’s your mother?” she said eyeing his newly-produced notebook with a frown. Pollock was quick to pick up on this.

  “This is nothing to concern yourselves about folks. We’re here to have a word or two with one of your regulars, a Mr Kevin Lally.”

  “About the fire?” asked the Kelly family spokeswoman.

  “About the fire, Mrs Kelly, that’s right. We’re just trying to build up a picture of what happened before, during and after the conflagration. Two mutilated bodies were found so it’s important that we source every avenue of information we possibly can.”

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” drawled Kelly mournfully. “Inevitable,” he declared.

  “Talk sense, Chris. The inspector knows what we all know, bodies and heads in two different places, neat as you like. If they’d been upstairs and collapsed with the floor onto the ground below there’s no way they’d be laid out nice and pretty. So, Chris, shut up if you can’t talk sense.” Chris shut up.

  “We’d really like to have a word with Mr Lally,” said Pollock. “I think Mr McLean.”

  “Austin’s uncle?”

  “Austin’s uncle, DC Quigley’s uncle, has probably already told Mr Lally we’d be calling. Is he in the pub, Mrs Kelly?” The lady nodded and rose.

  “Wait here. I’ll get him. C’mon, Chris, the inspector will want to speak to Lally in private.” The landlord went back to pulling pints.

  “Take down everything Lally says, Austin,” said Pollock quietly when they were alone in the parlour, “for I’ve a feeling a few gems might be coming our way. This one’s nobody’s fool and what’s more, he’s observant even in a crisis. Do you know anything at all about him?” Quigley was now seated in a chair by the window so as not to make the interview look exactly what it was, an interview.

  “Can’t remember when I didn’t know him, sir. Hair as black as night and some temper on him. But he uses his gift of the gab more than he does his fists, which is just as well for, by the size of them, the Royal Infirmary along the road would never be short of customers. Three great loves in Lally’s life; Celtic, poetry and his wife’s sister. Fortunately, so to speak, that lady died ten years ago. It seems distance and time lend enchantment as the lady in question was a shrew of the first water. All that was before he met and married his wife.”

  “And what does his wife think of him eulogising her sister?”

  “Nora says all his poetry’s tripe and her sister thought him a fool.”

  “Still, if he’s happy and she rules the roost, he’s almost a lucky man. I think this might be Mr Lally now. Hello Mr Lally,” said Pollock showing his warrant card.

  “From Roscommon.” Lally waved Quigley’s card away. “No need for formalities, Austin. I’m his second cousin, inspector. So, what would you like to know?” Lally asked sitting himself in Mrs Kelly’s chair. Pollock had never seen hair so meticulously groomed before, even in the army. Short, it was, and swept to one side, above a pair of startingly green eyes. His six feet three was lean and muscled, his face clean-shaven, his skin pale and flawless. Kevin Lally exuded good health and intelligence.

  “Your observations mainly, Mr Lally, of what went on in Tara’s Halls tonight.”

  “Beautiful name that,” commented the poet smiling, “isn’t it, Inspector Pollock? But now, it’s like its predecessor, that throne and Hall of our beloved Erin’s culture, is no more.” Pollock allowed a moment or two to allow the keeper
of Irish history time to mourn.

  “Quite so, sir, and more’s the pity. But my job concerning the one in the East End of Glasgow, East Nelson Street to be exact, is to discover how that happened and who dismembered the two bodies found within. If I remember rightly, sir,” said Pollock, “the High King abandoned the original one in a much more peaceful way.”

  “You’re right there, sir. No longer does the harp of the Gael sound there.” Pollock allowed a short silence to permeate the room before waking the muse and his DC to the sordid deeds of the present. He wondered if Quigley was a secret admirer of Kevin Lally’s poetic abilities.

  “But, Mr Lally, if we could just concentrate on more immediate matters for the moment. You were one of over three hundred people in the Halls earlier this evening, I’m told.”

  “You were told correctly. John McLean was telling me he had related some of my words to you.”

  “If we could just hear you relating everything you did, saw or even just thought you saw since you first arrived in Tara’s Halls, it would be a great help to us. Perhaps clear up a few blanks in our information.” Pollock had virtually no information so there were no blanks to fill in, but that was simply due to the time factor, he hoped. Ben Pollock braced himself for another piece of longing for times in the distant past from the bard before him, but it did not come. Lally was also an eminently practical man whose longing for social justice outweighed his poetic dalliance for the moment.

  “A warped, twisted bastard put a match to that place from the way it escalated. That’s my opinion. The fire authorities and the insurance assessors will spot that in no time. You might have been investigating the deaths of hundreds, Inspector Pollock. It’s as well there were double doors throughout and so the chances of crushing were reduced to a minimum.”

  “Could you talk us through it, Mr Lally, right from when you entered the Halls.”

  “I will, sir, if you’ll wait a minute till I marshall my thoughts.” Pollock nodded slightly to Quigley who looked round for a teapot, saw none and quietly left the room. A few minutes later, he reappeared with a pint of Guinness.

  “I prefer Murphy’s meself, but it’ll do. Thank you, Austin. Did you say how your mother was?” Lally drank slowly while Quigley informed him his mother was well but her varicose veins were playing her up. Pollock waited patiently.

  “You were saying, Mr Lally,” he said.

  “I was. Let me see now. I’d met up with John and four of the boys at Parkhead Cross. We’d all gone up to John’s house to collect our own club’s banner. The meeting was to decide the order in which the brake clubs in the east of the city would travel in procession to Hampden Park on Saturday for the Scottish Cup Final.” The poet turned to Quigley. “Can’t see us losing. My victory poem has already been accepted by Observer.” He turned his attention back to Pollock. “It had been agreed that we’d all bring our banners – make a big show of it, ramp up the excitement. There was to be no actual marching, on foot, that is. We were all to get there by charabanc, so to speak. Well, when we got the banner.”

  “When was that?” interrupted Pollock.

  “About seven o’ clock. The hall was already full as most of the men had come straight from work. Obviously we’d arranged to provide them with something to eat. Filled rolls, tea and biscuits and plenty of it. Most of it came from businesses who cater for us on a regular basis. Donations, they were. We’d also had a levy amongst the brake clubs in case we looked like running out of food and we could send out for more. Just as well because the kitchen we were to use for that particular part of Tara’s Halls had a notice pinned on the door that it was out of order. We just used the kitchen in the Lesser Hall to make the tea and spread the food out ready to serve. No problem.”

  “And was the toilet out of order, too?” asked Pollock. Lally took a draught from his beer before answering.

  “It was, but our catering lads had everything under control. They had arrived before 6pm to lay out the tables and crockery at the back of the hall and the notice was up then. Kitchen and lavatory assigned to us were not in use. Both doors were locked. I know that for a fact because I tried them myself to make sure. We’ve been had by notices like that in the past. It wouldn’t be the first time Andrew Dorman had forgotten to remove a notice once the problem had been fixed.

  “And by what time had everyone checked in?”

  “7.20pm. Food on the go makes good timekeepers of us all. Dough Frae Me had donated hot pies unknown to most and they were all snapped up by 7.30pm, five minutes after they had arrived.”

  “So, it was a case of men just moving to and fro as usual?”

  “Exactly,” Lally agreed, “nothing out of the ordinary. A few quarrels that came to nothing, a lot of banter. All was as normal. The volume of noise was almost deafening but that’s quite common when us Irishmen get together. No singing allowed, though, as this was primarily a business meeting.”

  “And then the vote?” asked Pollock. Lally shook his head.

  “Speeches, first the speeches, the attempts at persuasion that, as always, change nothing. I, myself, opted out of it, the talk part that is, as someone, when my name was called as the next speaker, remarked that we didn’t have a lot of time as the game was being played on Saturday.” Lally wore a sour expression but drowned his negative thoughts in his Guinness. No doubt similar situations had befallen the bards of old. “We were to have voted on the order in which the various clubs would proceed. Sounds easy to decide but it isn’t. Finally, we managed to hold that vote after a long drawn-out argument about numbers, the result was contested and we finally all simmered down and decided to just pull the names out of a hat or, to be more precise, a tin.”

  “But did it actually happen?” asked Pollock. Lally shook his head with an air of resignation.

  “The tin had held sausage rolls, another surprise gift from Dough Frae Me’s bakery, and some of the names stuck to the bottom. In the middle of the uproar somebody shouted that the building was on fire. I was at the back of the hall and was pushed into the corridor, in fact, almost outside the locked kitchen. It was complete mayhem. People were running around shouting names trying to find friends, others were just barging past trying to find a way out, determined to save themselves at all costs. I saw the best and worst of human nature as that fire just exploded into an uncontrollable inferno and destroyed all in its wake.”

  “It must have been a terrible and frightening situation to find yourself in, Mr Lally.”

  “Me and over three hundred others.”

  “Mr McLean said that something that happened in the corridor struck you as being unusual. Do you feel up to talking about it, sir?” Lally sat back in his chair and folded his arms.

  “Might be nothing in it, inspector.”

  “But it seemed unusual at the time?”

  “Yes it did. I was crushed against the wall in that corridor. There was no fire to be seen anywhere, not in the hall, not in the main corridor, but there was the distinct smell of smoke. The very shout of fire is enough to put everybody into a state of blind panic. Men were dashing about, climbing through windows, rushing up the stairs to try the skylight, loads of them crashing through the doors when suddenly, above all the panicking heads, I saw somebody coming out of the lavatory, the locked door opened. I don’t know why it annoyed me so much, but I yelled at him to explain what he’d meant by locking the door. In the middle of it all, the noise, the screams, the yells just seemed to die away in my mind and I just saw him turn towards me and smile. At that moment, the kitchen and toilet doors blew out, there was an explosion or two I think, and God only knows what happened to that man. The noise had kicked in again and I headed for the front entrance as the whole place went up like a tinder box. As I said before, there were enough exits and everybody seems to have made it out one way or another.”

  “So our man must be a brake club member?” Pollock suggested.

  “It would seem like it. But, maybe I was wrong, maybe the door was just jammed
and not locked when I tried it. Andrew Dorman should know. Maybe the man I saw had run in and then was running out.”

  “He would possibly have seen the heads in the toilet, Mr Lally. He would have come to us by now.” Lally nodded in agreement.

  “I expect so. I don’t know. Maybe he’s a bit shocked right now, maybe he’ll come to you in time.”

  “What did he look like? A physical description would at least eliminate some men. Height? Colour of hair? Shape of his face?“

  “Sorry, too many folk running between us and it was all over in a few seconds. Medium height, I think. Couldn’t see his face for a white scarf or something. Oh,” Lally added suddenly, “as he turned to head for the back door, he caught hold of the man in front’s jacket to help himself through the crowd, I suppose. That man is big and brawny and built like an ox. Unfortunately, the jacket was a working one and had seen much better days, so one pull on it and it ripped. The sleeve parted company with the jacket. I rather think that fire saved the smaller man from a bit of a beating.”

  “Any idea who owns the jacket?” asked Pollock hopefully.

  “Aye, Gavin Tierney.”

  Chapter 3

  Pollock saw Jake Jacobstein waiting for him, standing beside the old building as it stood alone, untouched by the fire. There was now feverish activity amongst the flattened ruins as he came out of The Clew Bay. Jerry Allison was standing, stoney-faced, beside his father-in-law Pollock could only assume, as the older man had his arm around a young woman who bore him some passing resemblance.

  “Who’s that?”

  “James Watson. He’s just announced he’s still the owner of Tara’s Halls and outbuildings and soon to be the recipient of the insurance money. Jerry and Janet Allison have worked themselves to a standstill for nothing, it seems. Watson has no intentions of using the money to rebuild, as he’s just announced to all and sundry. Fancies a restaurant, he says, and a small hotel. Absolutely no halls. He’s going to call it Watson’s Wayside Inn. Got some imagination. He’s getting very odd looks from the insurance assessors who’re still doing their preliminary checks and the Fire Brigade folk have their eye on him, too.”