The Murk Beneath

by L. D. Cunningham

  At home, I booted up the laptop and connected the camera. I had two usable photos – one of Red and one of Doc Martens. Could I trouble Cotter again, see if these guys were known to him? I suspected Red would be. But Doc Martens? I doubted it.

  It was after half-four. I went to bed. I had a dream I didn’t enjoy about being bagged, shot and dumped. Like a piece of rubbish. Though I had been shot in the head, I was aware of being kicked into a hole. The hole became the boot of a rusted car. My father wasn’t in the boot. Robbie was.

  11

  Good Old-fashioned Legwork

  The previous night’s events came to me in flashes. It was overwhelming. I brewed up some Classic Blend and sat at the table. It worked on my brain like a set of jump leads. I began to put the flashes in order, to put some manners on them.

  Did I need to trouble Cotter with the photo of Red? From what I’d seen at the table, Red was a mug. The warning at the pier more or less confirmed it. He was small fry, of no consequence. I decided to shelve the photo for now, use it later if I’d exhausted other avenues.

  I was on thin ice with Barry, so I decided to use some old-fashioned legwork first to find an identity for Doc Martens. I knew a good place to start.

  Ned Fagan was long since retired from service in the engineering group at Collins Barrack’s 1st Cork Brigade, but he had seen the comings and goings in or around the barracks for nearing half a century.

  How I came across Ned is a long story. The short version involves a girl named Deborah. His granddaughter. That’s the link. The long version is too painful to recall. It inevitably invites the memory of that Valentine’s night fifteen years ago.

  If there was one man who might identify a soldier, it was Ned. There was every chance he would tell me to take a running jump, but I knew, at least, that he was discreet.

  I drove to his house and took my laptop. The house is on the aptly-named Military Hill, which is within pissing distance of the barracks. It’s a fine Georgian-style house that was built in the fifties. Pale yellow paint on the walls, the mouldings around the sash windows an antique white.

  Originally from Athlone, Ned relocated to Collins Barracks to take up a senior rank. When he retired, he used the skills he learned to start a wrought iron business – gates, railings and such. An impressively bright, black set of iron railings on a low wall seesawed from one end of the site to the other. Each railing was topped with an ornate gold-painted fleur-de-lis design. Ned might have been trained to stick someone with a bayonet, but he sure had an eye for detail and a high level of craftsmanship.

  He welcomed me warmly. He always did, had a soft spot for me. Despite what happened with Deb. He invited me into his living room.

  The living room had wall-to-wall shelving on two of its walls. The shelves were full of books. Biographies were prevalent – De Valera, Collins, Pearse and others associated with the rising and the civil war. Pearse – another guy who died in his prime. Like Gerald Griffin and Dad. There were also biographies of figures from the great wars – Haig, Churchill, Rommel, Roosevelt and a dozen or so others.

  The room was exceptionally clean and the furniture in very good order. Deb was mostly to thank for that. She would call most days to help out and I worried she might be there when I arrived. I think I was glad she wasn’t. On a side table next to an armchair by the gas fire was what looked like a new book about the Congo by van Reybrouck. Ned saw me studying it.

  “Fascinating book. Some of it new to me,” he said. Of course, the Congo was writ large in his mind, like so many Irish soldiers of his generation.

  “You know,” he said, “every now and again I hear someone use the word Baluba to mean a fool or they say are you Baluba? instead of are you mad?” His mouth twitched. “We lost nine men to those savages at Niemba, so we did. They butchered them like something from the stone age.”

  I envied his use of the word we. I wasn’t able to use that word about the Guards.

  Ned sat in the armchair and turned down the flame in the gas fire.

  “I hope it’s not too hot for you, Michael. Old folks like myself get cold so easily.”

  I said I was fine. I sat in another armchair on the other side of the hearth.

  “The year after, I was deployed to the Congo as part of the 35th Batallion. This was before I transferred to Cork. There was only a hundred and fifty or so of us at Jadotville when the Katangans came with thousands.”

  He had a glass of Lucozade on the table and paused to take a sip. I refused when he offered some to me.

  “Forgive me, Michael. I’m getting into one of my war stories again, so I am.”

  I’d heard several of his stories, but he had never opened up about Jadotville. There were obvious reasons for this.

  “Well, we were dug in real good. Quinlan’s orders. We had some old Vickers machine guns. We liked those, even though they dated back to the first world war and were heavy as hell to carry around the jungle. We got our own back on the Balubas then, I can tell you. Cut them down, so we did.”

  He paused again to regain his breath. He was eighty and in failing health. I thought he might have had emphysema. Unfortunately with my hypochondria, I’ve become a bit of a diagnostician – like yer man House on the TV.

  “Six days we held them off. Our reinforcements couldn’t break through the Katangan lines. We had no choice in the end but to surrender.”

  He paused and his mouth quivered again.

  “Jadotville Jacks they called us. They mocked us with it. We put up the white flag, you see. There’s no honour in that, so there isn’t.”

  “It was a scandal as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “Each and every one of you should have gotten medals.”

  “I could handle it. I largely got on with business when I got back. Transferred to Cork not long after. But what they did to Quinlan was unforgivable. He was a fall guy, so he was. The real blame went much higher up the chain. All the way, in fact.”

  “And in typical Irish fashion,” I said, “his good name was only restored after his death.”

  Ned nodded. “He saved countless lives. We’d all have been cut down within a day but for his orders. I’d never have met my Mary, for instance.” He looked up to the mantelpiece where a picture of his dead wife was. She was smiling. “We knew he was a hero and I think for him that was enough.”

  I don’t know whether I also had Quinlan to thank for Deb. We’d had a good run of it until that day in February all those years ago. But I couldn’t look at another woman for years after.

  Ned got up from the chair and went to a window. He pushed down one of the sash panels to shut it.

  “It’s a fine balancing act, so it is,” he said, “between the heat of the gas fire and getting in some fresh air.”

  Before he could get back into stories about the Congo or anywhere else, I took my laptop out of its case.

  “There’s something I would like you to look at, Ned.”

  I lifted the lid on the laptop and it came out of its hibernation. I thought hibernation was something bears did, but apparently computers can go into a similar deep sleep and wake up as if nothing had happened.

  “I’m a welder, Michael,” he said. “Computers aren’t my thing.”

  “You’re more than just a welder. But I just want to show you a picture of someone. I’m hoping you might know who it is.”

  I had one worry. Soldiers, the men in green, like the men in blue, closed ranks. If he thought I was after one of his brethren, I might get nowhere with him.

  “Go on,” he said.

  The laptop booted back into Windows and I opened up the Pictures folder. The photos were sorted by year, month and day, so it wasn’t difficult to find the ones from the night before. I loaded the best I had of Doc Martens and expanded it to fill the screen.

  “Pass me those, will you?”

  He was pointing at a pair of over-sized reading glasses. I obliged.

  He squinted his eyes. He examined the photograph intently. He took his t
ime about it.

  “There’s two types of people I hate most in this world, so there are,” he finally said. “Belgians and mercenaries.”

  I understood why. Chief among the culprits at Jadotville had been the colonial Belgians and the white mercenaries hired by the Katangans. In fact, it is a bitter irony that the commander of the Katangan forces at Jadotville, Mike Hoare, aka Mad Mike and himself a mercenary, spent his early years in Ireland.

  “And he’s not Belgian,” I said. I had taken what he said as an acknowledgement of recognition.

  “No, he’s most certainly not.”

  He stayed quiet for a few seconds and I wondered if he would decide to close ranks after all. Then he spoke.

  “Hognatt is his name, so it is. Matthew Hognatt. He’s an East Kerry man. Retired from the army when his twenty-one years were up.”

  After twenty-one years of service you were entitled to a full army pension.

  “Any idea where he is now?”

  “The last I heard of Hognatt, he was working for an oil company in Angola.”

  I assumed Hognatt wasn’t the drilling kind. “You mean working as a mercenary?”

  He nodded.

  What Ned said only confirmed what I suspected. I needed to find where he was or what he was up to in Cork. And why his path had crossed mine at least one time too many for it to be just coincidence.

  “How do you know Hognatt?”

  “He drank up in Sheehan’s. I knew all the soldiers up to about the turn of the century. When I was mobile enough to go for a pint up the hill. I only go as far as the Ambassador now, so I do.”

  “Do you know where he lived?”

  Ned shrugged his shoulders and wheezed from the effort. He coughed a smoker-like cough, though he hadn’t smoked in more than twenty years.

  If I couldn’t get to Hognatt directly, maybe I could do so indirectly.

  “Up in Sheehan’s … did he hang around with anyone?”

  He thought for a few seconds, took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “There were two or three lads, alright. One was a guy called Davis. Another was Crowley.”

  He stopped then. His eyes rose a little in their sockets.

  “You know, that Crowley fellow … I think his mother lives up on Old Youghal Road, so she does. Down towards Dillon’s Cross a bit. Anita her name is. I’m trying to remember his name.” His face strained. “Ah damn this memory of mine.”

  “That’s OK,” I said. “I can go and –”

  “Barney,” he said. “It’s Barney Crowley. He retired about the same time as Hognatt. Never made it past private.”

  One thought came into my mind from the card game. The nickname – Airforce One.

  “This Hognatt guy … was he into aeroplanes or anything like that?”

  Ned laughed and he began to wheeze again, but more deeply this time. I told him to take his time and I picked up his glass of Lucozade for him. He took a sip and composed himself.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “It was choppers, so it was. He wanted to join the air corps. Ten years in the army and he suddenly decided he wanted to fly. The brass laughed him out of it, told him to cop himself on. It was a running joke for a while.”

  There was no one better to capitalize on a joke than the Eel. He would have taken some glee from giving Hognatt the Airforce One moniker.

  Ned was out of breath. The more he spoke, the worse he got. With a solid lead in the bag and some names to go with it, I decided to give the old guy a break and leave. I asked about Deb before I got up.

  “She’s doing OK, Michael. She married this guy – gobshite he is – and they have a kid now. I’d given up on being a great grandfather.”

  The word grandfather had tapered to a whisper. He had no breath left to give. I shook his hand and thanked him for his time.

  There was a phone on a table at the front door. In a shelf underneath was a phone book. I took it out and thumbed my way to Crowley. No Barney. No Anita, either, but she wouldn’t be difficult to find. I had every right to believe that her son, Barney, was in the van on both occasions. And I believed he would lead me to Hognatt.

  It didn’t take much detective work to find Anita Crowley’s house. Cork folk are very obliging when you ask where so and so is, not being in the least bit suspicious about your intentions. As long as you’re not black, Polish or a traveller, that is, in which case it’s pot luck.

  She lived opposite Harrington Square where a grotto allowed people to pray to the Virgin Mary. The grotto was well-maintained – grass cut, bushes trimmed, and so on. Immaculate, I would say it was, like the good woman herself, apparently. I could well believe there was a Jesus at some point, but him being conceived by magic – that I didn’t buy.

  I didn’t know if Anita was in, or if someone else, including Barney, would answer. I wouldn’t pretend to be the most patient of detectives; staking the place out all day wasn’t in my script. If Barney had answered, who knows how it would have gone down. I wasn’t carrying my gun. That would have been ammunition for Savage or Halloran to arrest me.

  As it happened, nobody answered. As I waited for someone to open the door, a neighbour left her house.

  “Looking for Anita?” she enquired.

  She had a scarf over her head. A bit young to be wearing one, though. The clear sky had dropped the temperature below ten degrees.

  I said I was, said I was there to sort out the paperwork for her life insurance.

  “That sounds important,” she said.

  “Yes, madam,” I said, playing the part of the prototypical slimy insurance salesman.

  “You’ll find her over there in the launderette.”

  She was pointing to the other side of Harrington Square and Suds Launderette on Ballyhooly Road.

  I thanked the neighbour and walked through Harrington Square. It was a minor oasis in an otherwise bustling suburb. An old woman was kneeling on a cushion, praying to the Good Mother. If you prayed long enough, you began to hallucinate, see an arm move, or a tear fall. From the blood pooling and the brain deoxygenated, if you ask me.

  On Ballyhooly Road, a number seven bus passed going north. I noticed a kid on the bus – and for some reason I was noticing kids more often – who was blowing a bubble with some gum. On the back of the bus was an advertisement for the re-election of Niall O’Donnell, TD. Corruption, it seemed, had a way of getting around.

  I crossed the road. Suds had a lattice grille covering the window and the door was covered with solid steel plate. It looked tankproof.

  Inside, there were about ten large industrial washing machines. To the rear a counter accepted laundry – individual items to be cleaned with care and bags to be washed without.

  A couple of student types – one with hair in braids, the other with a nose ring and black fingernail polish – were sitting on interlocked chairs. One had one of those tablet things, the other her nose – and the ring on it – buried in a smart phone. I had to pity them. The best screen of all was the window to the outside world, security grille or not.

  There was only the one woman behind the counter. She was around seventy and I assumed it was Anita. The job was for a few extra bob on top of her pension, I assumed. Either that or she was the owner. She was painted more than the statue of Mary I’d seen moments earlier – deep pink lipstick, red blusher, purple eyeshadow. Gold hoop earrings, bottle blonde, the look of a hard woman.

  I’d worked on my cover story when walking through Harrington Square.

  “Hi there,” I said. “Anita, is it?”

  She looked me up and down. “It is. What do you want?”

  Abrupt, impolite.

  “I’m Jerry O’Leary,” I said, lacking in imagination. “I was in the 1st Brigade with Barney.”

  Her demeanour changed completely. She softened.

  “Oh, you know Barney?”

  “Yeah. I’m trying to get in touch with him. One of our comrades died, I’m afraid. We’re trying to get the lads together to
honour our fallen brother.”

  Invoking that kind of brash sentimentality isn’t my normal style. Honouring a colleague in the Guards largely consisted of a lorryload of booze.

  “That’s terrible. Don’t you have Barney’s address?”

  “I lost touch with Barney when he went to Angola,” I said. “I was hoping you might help me on that front.”

  I didn’t know for sure whether Barney had gone to Angola with Hognatt, but it would have made sense if they were still operating as a crew. Dropping the name of the country would, I hoped, convince her that I’d kept in touch with Barney up to that point.

  “We all lost touch with him. The rotten animal.”

  Surprisingly candid, even with the harshness of her demeanour.

  “Do you have an address for him?”

  “I have a number. Why don’t you call him?”

  I didn’t want to talk to Crowley. I wanted to shadow him, get him to lead me to Hognatt.

  “I’d like to surprise him. Besides, I need to go over the design of some wreaths with him.”

  I’d honoured my own father recently with a cheap wreath, put no thought into it. I regretted it at that moment.

  “OK. I see. Hang on.”

  She took a handbag from below the counter. She rummaged in it and pulled out a little black notebook. Like a detective’s notebook. She wet an index finger and flicked through the pages.

  “Here it is,” she said. She read out an address on Blackrock Avenue, a fairly new build of duplex townhouse apartments in Mahon. Or Blackrock, depending on your position on the snobbery scale. It was a Celtic Tiger build. Townhouse was a favourite word of that tiger. Terraced, it seemed, was too dirty, evoking images of coalminers and the common folk of Coronation Street.

  “That’s grand, so,” I said. “It’ll be good to catch up with Barney again.”

  There was little doubt about that. The closer I got to Hognatt, the more emboldened I got. Crowley was a stepping stone I would happily stamp on.

  I went to leave, but turned back.

  “It’ll be good to surprise him,” I said. “I can’t wait to see the look on his face.”