The Death of an Irish Politician

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Can he speak?”

  “I don’t think he’ll come around completely for another forty-eight or so hours. That’s the usual time in such cases. He’s probably very groggy or confused or in shock.”

  Ovens’ eyes, however, seemed to contradict the assessment of the insouciant young doctor. Dark brown, almost black, they told McGarr that Ovens knew the score: that his was not merely a medical problem that a favorable prognosis could eliminate, that whoever had done this to him had a very good reason, and those eyes, suddenly seeming very old, realized his troubles weren’t over.

  “Can you hear me?” McGarr asked him.

  Nothing, not even his eyes, moved.

  McGarr began twirling the key on the float that they had found aboard the Virelay. “I know you can. You heard what the doctor said, I saw your eyes following the conversation. I’m Inspector McGarr and this is my wife, Noreen.”

  Still Ovens’ eyes didn’t even blink. “No need for you to acknowledge what I’m saying. We’ll get around to that a little later. Let me tell you what we know. Horace Hubbard, the yacht-club steward, attacked you.”

  Ovens’ eyes didn’t move.

  “Because he’s in love with your girl, the one with the flat in Ballsbridge.” McGarr was bending over him now, nearly whispering into his ear.

  “Right after hitting you, the two of them disappeared. We’ve learned they plan to get married.”

  Noreen moved toward McGarr as though wanting to stop him.

  Still nothing.

  “He pulled the sea cock and Virelay sank.”

  Nothing again.

  McGarr straightened up and asked the doctor, “Forty-eight hours?”

  “Maybe more, maybe less. It may well be that he does not remember the incident and will not for whole years. Perhaps only psychoanalysis will allow the man to recover the details in all their particularity.”

  That still wasn’t what McGarr believed. The young doctor sounded like a textbook. McGarr had gained his experience firsthand, and he had the feeling that this man had understood all and had chosen not to talk. If so, from the little that McGarr already knew about Ovens, he would be a tough, if not impossible, nut to crack.

  “Is he under sedation?” Noreen asked.

  “A morphine base for pain. I’m sure he has a massive headache.”

  McGarr took the young doctor’s elbow and began walking him down the ward toward the stairwell. He was a tall, thick-set, and healthy-looking—pink complexion, bushy blond hair—Irishman who, McGarr speculated, in other times and without the advantages of his education, would have become a policeman. “You and I will probably find ourselves working together on many cases in the next twenty years. I’m a man with a good memory and I’m grateful. I’m wondering,” said McGarr in a low voice, “could you move him to a private room?”

  “Who would pay?” O’Higgins asked.

  “Ah”—McGarr didn’t have the vaguest idea who would pay and speculated Ovens or his wealthy female friend would eventually have to bear the expense—“we’ll work something out. In spite of his appearance, he comes from a wealthy background”—which wasn’t far from the truth. “Also, young man, I have a favor to ask.” McGarr stopped him on the stairwell. “I’m going to tell the paper Ovens died.”

  O’Higgins looked down at McGarr with profound incredulity. “You can’t do that.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because it’s a lie. It’s just not true.”

  Noreen had walked to the window where, smiling, she looked out on the lawn and the stretch of dual carriageway that ran past the hospital.

  “Not really, when you consider it’ll help us catch the person who did this to Ovens, probably prevent the deranged person from doing this to others. Right? And don’t worry. I’ll take the full responsibility. It’s the only way I know of popping the bugger who did this in the jug. You just make yourself unavailable for comment, if somebody should ask, which they won’t. The death of a Yank from seemingly accidental causes isn’t the sort of scoop any reporter used to the blood bath in the North would pursue. Are you the only doctor on the case now?”

  “Yes—I cover postoperative and mild traumatic care. Only in severe cases do I consult the…” O’Higgins smiled slightly. “…older doctors.” Younger Irish doctors were better trained than the older generations, and there was a certain amount of professional enmity between the groups. “I can’t envision any complications with Ovens’ recuperation. Even his liver may recover here.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “I don’t know. Are you the Peter McGarr, the one who worked for Criminal Justice in Paris?”

  “Yes.”

  Noreen turned to hear the exchange.

  “I was studying in Paris at the time. Do you remember the editorial in Le Monde that said the only reason you kept making all the big arrests was that, being Irish, you had a certain innate guile that allowed you to think like a criminal and keep one step ahead of them?”

  McGarr began to laugh. He had a framed copy in his study on the second floor of his Rathmines home. The Irish Press, giving secondary coverage to the story, had been outraged and had begun an editorial cat fight with the big Parisian newspaper, which ended with the Press’s asking McGarr how he could continue working in a country whose largest newspaper had denigrated him so. The answer was simple: no criminal investigative agency had ever accepted any of his many applications for a senior position in Ireland, and the contention of Le Monde was largely true. McGarr had a definite penchant for intrigue.

  O’Higgins continued. “I loved that piece. I showed it to all the guys and told them to watch out.”

  “Will you do it, then?”

  “I don’t know. This is so highly irregular. What if—”

  “Don’t you worry about a thing. I know how this place works. The old boys won’t even know it happened. We’ll tweak their noses.”

  McGarr and Noreen started down the stairs.

  O’Higgins shouted after them, “And, Inspector, I’m training to be a pathologist here. Did I tell you that? In a couple of years we’ll be working together for sure.”

  “That I should live so long,” McGarr said to Noreen. McGarr had had to wait until somebody died for a position to be offered to him. He was forty-four at the time. O’Higgins would find the post of chief pathologist even more exclusive. McGarr mused that in ten years O’Higgins would probably be chief pathologist in Rochester, New York, or Brisbane, Australia, or some other place of exile.

  Noreen and McGarr drove straight to Dublin Castle.

  The soldier at the guard house was surprised to see McGarr. “The few who were here, Inspector, have just left,” he said into the open window of the Cooper. “Only the night shift is left.”

  “We won’t be long, Gerald.” McGarr knew the guard had a sweetheart who would come by to keep him company once the department chiefs had left for the weekend.

  Dublin Castle is the set of mean brick buildings from which the British directed the subjugation of Ireland. No more than a quadrangle of barracks houses set on a small rise, its treeless courtyard was the site of innumerable political assassinations. It was McGarr’s opinion that the Irish Free State had made a big mistake installing even some of their own police and military here. They should have dynamited, then leveled the spot as a symbolic gesture, or failing that, opened it as a memorial to those who had died in the six-hundred-year battle for freedom.

  With the lights off and the day dwindling, the corridors leading to the wing McGarr’s staff occupied were as dark as he had ever seen them. The few rays of slanting late-afternoon sunlight could not penetrate the rain-streaked and dusty windows. A dim glow alone outlined the battered furniture and heaving floors. The place still smelled like a barracks: old leather, dubbin, tons of aging paper in file cabinets, floor wax, and the pine-scented cleanser the British had used in the cells, all too familiar to McGarr whose official responsibilities had made the Castle the part of his life he enjoyed least.
The one portrait he allowed in his office was that of Wolfe Tone.

  While Noreen sat in his chair and, swiveling it away from the desk, looked out the west window at the startling contrast of the greenery in Phoenix Park, a mile distant, McGarr scrawled several notes and then copied them into their running log book. In a country where pubs were social centers and the imagination was as yet unshackled, McGarr believed the procedure entirely appropriate. More than one of his men had a touch of Ireland’s special failings.

  First he ordered Ward to pick up Brud Clare and grill him until he revealed the woman’s name, to learn everything he could about Horace C. K. Hubbard right down to dental charts. He then sent Kevin Slattery to lawyer Greaney’s office on Leeson Street to find out who owned 17 Percy Place, who leased flat 5A, and who paid the rent. Paul Sinclair, a new man who had returned home after seventeen years on the Sydney police force, was to stake out the apartment. McGarr assigned Bernie McKeon and Harry Greaves the thankless task of canvassing the entire hill behind the Killiney Yacht Club. There remained the possibility that another shut-in like Moran might have been scanning the docks when Ovens was attacked. Also, a tourist or sightseer might have snapped a picture at that moment. He asked them to assign a few uniformed men to cover all the chemist and photography shops, even the Agfa-Gevaert and Kodak processing plants, to see if anybody might remember handling a tourist’s or sightseer’s photos of Killiney Bay on a sunny afternoon. Friday afternoon, the weather had been spectacular.

  Midway through this procedure, Noreen asked, “Shall I get hold of Liam O’Shaughnessy and ask him if he could arrange to rent his brother’s lobster boat for tomorrow? How long does it take to run out to Inishmore? I’ve never been to Kilronan.”

  McGarr nodded, then added to McKeon’s orders the job of examining the Loretto Avenue garage in Dun Laoghaire that Ovens had used as a workshop. He called the home of a reporter friend and told him about his plan to release news of Ovens’ death. The man concurred and thought he could slip a back-page article and an obituary short into the Sunday papers.

  Noreen had taken McGarr’s phone directory from the top drawer of his desk. Both knew their first order of business was to find out if the attack on Ovens had resulted from something to do with the gun oil on the cabin flooring of Virelay. If so, the case would then become enormously complicated, and McGarr would have to use his contacts in the contending factions of the IRA to learn more. Because of the treacherous waters of Galway Bay, especially near Inishmore, an island some twenty miles out to sea, it was difficult for authorities to patrol the area. A boat with a skilled pilot or experienced captain, such as Ovens, well might have negotiated the channel and off-loaded a cargo. Spud Murphy, the Inishmore IRA contact, owed McGarr at least that much information for a favor done him in the past. Also, McGarr was tolerated by many elements of the IRA. He seldom had trouble learning the details of past operations.

  Noreen said the phone rang only once before O’Shaughnessy picked it up, announcing “Bronx Zoo” into the mouthpiece. With the noise of a Gaelic band in the background, the huge man pretended he couldn’t hear her. He was half lit and had every intention of torching whatever remained, he told her. A party was in progress, just the sort of house gathering McGarr enjoyed most, with poteen and roast pork and, outside, miles of rock walls, small cottages with yellow lights in the windows, and the cleanest air in all of Europe to clear one’s head. They were only 110 miles away. The Cooper made it in less than two hours. McGarr found that in no way was he dressed out of character here. The sweater was right, and the rest of their garb was accepted as perfectly appropriate because they, friends of a friend, chose to wear short pants and canvas boating shoes. Killiney Bay, Dun Laoghaire, and Dublin itself were still part of that other culture’s pale.

  CHAPTER 3

  FROM OFFSHORE, INISHMORE was a block of shale. Gorse was shaggy on top, bright green dappled pink and windswept. Sea gulls in legion flew out to meet the lobster boat as it bucked the Atlantic swells.

  This coast, McGarr mused, thinking of his years in France, was indeed a côte sauvage, the ragged end of the continental land mass. Gulf Stream tides and ocean storms pounded away at the rocky beaches and precipitous cliffs. The wind was roaring, impelling the steady rain in horizontal torrents that stung the face. The hull clapped, shuddered, then sank on every second wave.

  Not a house was in sight through the driving mist until the cliffs rose into a massive promontory. Around this Liam’s brother, Michael, spun the wheel. Once past, the land softened dramatically, although the rocky coast was still hazardous. A cluster of limed cottages with thatched roofs and nets drying on driftwood racks appeared through the mist. The old boat needed all the power its diesel could muster to keep from broaching on a wide shoal over which the surf boiled. Michael headed up into the wind, and McGarr, being dashed with spray and pelted with wind, ran the boat hook through the eye of a permanent mooring. He pulled the barnacle-encrusted line onto the foredeck and secured it to the cleat.

  A double-ended beach boat came out to lighter them ashore. Liam had reached Spud Murphy on the wireless. The long boat with eight men manning the oars pitched and yawed and finally, mounting the crest of a wave, surfed ashore.

  The beach of pulverized oyster shells made one color with the seafoam, driving mist, ashen skies, and cottages in Kilronan: a grey as glossy as from a tube of oil paint. Upon this background, the beach boat, the tanned faces and wet woolen clothes of the crew, oars over their shoulders, seemed to be imposed starkly in too sharp a focus. Thus the men looked older than they were, the boat battered, the cottages mere shelters from these unremitting elements.

  McGarr was drawn to this place with what he well knew was the appreciation of a dilettante. This was the Ireland of the picture books he had read as a child. Here life was hard. The sea yielded her bounty at a price exacted in toil and life loss. Nearly a third of the men ever born on this island had been lost at sea. The road, like the beaches, was a glistening surface of crushed shells.

  Murphy met them in a small building that abutted the seawall on the outskirts of Kilronan. A plank between two porter barrels sufficed as a bar. Coal oil, dried fish, candy, tobacco, oilskins, rubber boots, and week-old newspapers were also offered.

  Murphy was a stout man even shorter than McGarr. The name Spud suited him with great precision, for his face was a fleshy welter of moles and bumps, his skin deep brown. His eyes were dark. He wore a soft cap, black rubber bib overalls that formed boots at the feet, and a filthy tweed sportscoat. In spite of the pipe he drew on so often that he seemed forever wrapped in a cloud of acrid blue smoke, Murphy stank like a mackerel. It had been this sour stench that had landed him in McGarr’s Dublin Castle office two years before.

  A customs officer at the Dun Laoghaire docks had asked Murphy if he had anything to declare. “Only a couple of fowling pieces for grousing, don’t you know,” the old fisherman had declared. It had been the middle of the winter and a storm had sickened many of the mailboat passengers in the line behind Murphy. The officer was about to let him pass, since the top piece was indeed a shotgun and the stocks of the others, all of which had been stripped to components, seemed similar, when he detected the reek of the mackinaw Murphy was wearing. The officer then consulted the address on Murphy’s identity papers. The only grousing Inishmore offered was that which Murphy could do with his mouth. All of the guns but one had been M14s. McGarr, wanting to cull the favors of as many IRA contacts as possible, and knowing his countrymen to be inveterate gossips, told the prosecuting magistrate that since none of the guns had been loaded, no crime had been committed. Murphy had left Dublin Castle with his shotgun in hand and a good word for McGarr.

  “Chief Inspector,” Murphy said in a voice so high it was like the warble of a bird, “have y’ been exiled? You can’t be planning to fish since there’s not a mullet between here and the Grand Banks this past week. Good to see you.” He extended his hand. “I recognize this whale to yer right”—he meant O�
��Shaughnessy, who was paying the proprietress for the jug of poteen he had lifted onto the plank—”and his squid of a brother Michael. How are you, boys?” Murphy shook with them. “And who, dear God, might this be?” A small coal sputtered from his pipe and fell to the floor. He made as though he would put his arm around Noreen’s shoulder, saying, “A trim red woman with lots of fire. Sure and I’d give you a hug myself if I hadn’t come from roiling in the ‘flits’ of several species of bait fish we peddle in Dublin.” Like many men who lead solitary lives, the mere sight of a visitor made Murphy jolly. “People there, they tell me, are nothing but carp themselves, swimming in that turbid bowl the Liffey forms between Rathfarnum and Swords.”

  Said McGarr, “Speaking of fish, Spud, have you shot any with automatic weapons recently? Meet my wife, Noreen.” And then to her, he added, “He’ll grouse as much now as when I had him on the hot seat at the Castle.”

  “Pleased, pleased.” Murphy’s eyes fixed on Noreen’s, then darted to her chin, her nose, her tight copper curls, and elsewhere.

  Since Murphy’s entrance the proprietress, an old woman with a red face and pure white hair that stuck from her head in patches, had been gesturing to him with her eyes. She wished to speak to Murphy behind the curtain in back of the candy counter. Finally, she said, “Murph, boy, may I see you for a second out back?” and she stepped behind the blind.

  “It’s just my girl, Eileen. Jealous, I should think.” He stuck only his head beyond the curtain and whispers passed between them. The wind howled through the chinks in the roof corrugations and eddied the thick clouds from Murphy’s pipe.

  Their consultation gradually rose in volume so that McGarr heard the words “…police…jail…bloody Tanner…” from Eileen. Then Murphy, pulling her by the wrist into the room, said, “This is Eileen McFadden, my fiancée. Chief of Detectives McGarr and his lovely wife, Noreen. I take it you know that walrus and his brother the giant grouper from Dublin.”