McGarr only nodded and stepped down the narrow stairs of the announcing booth, admitting to himself that it was what he too wanted. If Frayne was present, two opportunities would arise: one for Frayne, but another for McGarr as well.
Keegan wasn’t a religious man, but, if there was a God he had been praying to Him all morning long—that his back, which was galling him, would hold up until he could get himself in position; that he could shake the cop and that the others wouldn’t see him or, if they did, they’d be looking for Frayne. And for simple justice—he was praying for that most of all—of the sort he could understand. For Maggie Kate and for the family.
“Down this way,” he said to the cop, who had hold of his elbow as they walked down through the long rows of stables in Pembroke Hall, the upper halves of most of the large green doors open and the stalls empty, the horses either being shown or exercised.
“But I’m telling you, there’re only horses here,” McKeon replied, cautious now, sensing the urgency in the old man’s voice and step.
“You’ll be surprised, so. He brought her along for the hell of it, says he. But she’s a beaut and she’ll walk away with a sack of prizes. Up for auction too—he let it slip.” He winked at McKeon.
“Here we are.” He pushed open the door and stepped aside.
But McKeon turned and Keegan shoved him into the stall where the other man was waiting.
McKeon saw the punch coming down on him, but he was off-balance and had thrust a hand into his jacket for the gun. It caught him on the side of the head and drove him up against the boards that lined the wall, a glancing blow.
Keegan had closed the door behind them, and the other man—Boland himself—came on, wide and towering but old, like Keegan, his nose flattened off to a side of his face, his fists and arms raised, like somebody who knew what he was doing. And Keegan had pulled a gun, some sort of machine pistol that he held pointed at the floor.
McKeon kicked out with his foot, catching the big man on the side of the knee that was thrust forward. He staggered toward McKeon, who pushed off from the wall, lashing out with his right with everything he had. His fist landed squarely on the nose, but the man only flinched and his eyes bulged, his mouth opening in rage as he blundered forward.
Again and again McKeon struck solidly, his knuckles only seeming to ruffle the leather of the man’s great, battered puss. The pug waited for the one punch that came up from the ground and drove McKeon’s head back into the wall.
He felt only the snap of his teeth meshing together and the blow at the back of his head. Then everything was brilliant red, like a sunset.
Already Keegan had tossed the greatcoat into the straw, the hat alongside it.
He was wearing the blue coveralls of the R. T. E. tech-crew navvys, and he fitted on a blue cap. Against a wall was a mike with a long boom attached.
“You sure you don’t need me?” the other man asked, dabbing at his bloody nose with a handkerchief.
“No, Dick, but—” he glanced up and their eyes met, “—thanks. I couldn’t have taken him alone without—.” He looked down at the gun and pulled the wire butt off the barrel. He wondered where Menahan had gotten it and what his hobnobbing with Murray meant.
But there was little time and he fitted the silencer on. It would affect the range and accuracy some, but if it wasn’t heard over the roar of the crowd he could get off the entire clip and be sure.
And him up there in the announcing booth, in plain view through the large glass window, like a bloody effigy, he thought.
He hung the gun down inside a leg of the coveralls.
In the darkness of the trailer McGarr scanned the screens and the monitor that showed him where his staff was located—McKeon with Keegan in Pembroke Hall, having been there now (he checked the luminous dial of his watch) ten minutes; Ward with the mother and daughter, who were in the exercise area of Ring 4, waiting to be called to jump; O’Shaughnessy with Bechel-Gore in the announcing booth; Delaney in a seat two rows in back of Murray; Greaves near Menahan; and the others whom he had positioned in various spots around the field.
He then scanned the TV screens, knowing he couldn’t linger on any one of them long enough to study the faces but wanting more to know that everything was in place.
Bechel-Gore was the target, of course, but he could be hurt perhaps more grievously if either of the women were attacked. Would Frayne be thinking of that? No, certainly not. He had cause to hate Bechel-Gore, but McGarr judged that he was the sort who would go for the man himself and then again he’d have been given orders for pay.
If from Murray, would he have named the women? McGarr thought for a moment. Perhaps the mother, who would be riding the Bechel-Gore mount, but certainly not the daughter. And if from Menahan? McGarr had been struck by the man’s utter surety that he was clean and was likely to remain so, but if, say, he had hired Frayne—again, not the daughter. The mother, if the mother.
In any case, McGarr had had the jumping pocket, the laneway between, and the exercise ring virtually sealed off with uniformed and armed Gardai.
Without thinking, his hand went into his coat for his cigarettes. Empty. He crumpled the packet and threw it down, reaching for Flynn’s on the table beside him.
Flynn only glanced at him. He was wearing earphones and a microphone on a wire that seemed to be pointed at his nose. He murmured another order to the cameramen who were following the action of the riders on the field.
Murray felt powerless, weaker than he had at any time in his life. Everything he owned or had touched—he turned to his wife, who was sitting beside him and who knew nothing of what had happened and was going on—had just seemed to crumble and pull away from him and not gradually but all of a sudden, overnight. What had it begun with? The horses, or was it the girl? Both really, but she had brought it all on.
She had caught him at a weak moment—there it was, the weakness again—when he’d forgotten about women and…and had even come to see him there in the library, flirtatious with those black, deep eyes, like other young girls who turned heads just for the thrill of it. But it was as though he had forgotten about that—he looked down at his wife’s hand and picked it up, studying her palm—over the years.
And the things he’d suggested to her, the girl—every class of impossible…trips, holidays in Portugal, a flat in a posh section of London, when she really never intended anything with him and had just been playing him for a fool.
And then Sean was his son and she was his…
With that thought what he had succeeded in damping down all morning came blazing up now and made his temples hot. Guilt—that he’d even gone so far as to try and wish a murder on his son, had convinced himself in his own mind that his son, his one and only child, was capable and indeed had…on top of the other thing.
Sean. Where was he? Murray looked around, but his eyes caught on the announcing booth at the other end of the enclosure.
Fool, he thought, what Bechel-Gore had made of him from the start, passing off animals to him that looked perfect in every regard and that veterinarians had said were sound but proved useless, slow as lead or barn rats or spoiled in training or some other class of thing. And how Bechel-Gore had gotten others to do the same and then snubbed him at hunts and at the ball.
Even now the nasaline drawl was a scald that rankled. “Mister Mick Murray, my dear. He’s a politician, a big fellow—as you can see—in business and the newest and perhaps the grandest of Ireland’s dealers in—” he had turned his eyes on Murray and the mustache had twitched, “—horse flesh.” He had then turned his back, guiding the woman—some old cow and a member of his set—away.
But mostly Murray felt physically enervated, drained—he swirled his left shoulder—and as weak as a foal, and he wished he was someplace else.
“She’s next,” his wife said to him.
“Who?”
“The Bechel-Gore woman.” Her tone was icy. She knew how he felt but not how much. And why, but not really wh
y.
Two differences marked the entrance of Grainne Bechel-Gore onto the field of the jumping enclosure: scant applause, mostly from the members’ boxes, and a harmony with the horse that McGarr had not noted in the other riders. She seemed not to have to control the large chestnut mare, and they moved together more easily than the other riders, even though flecks of spittle had gathered at the corners of the horse’s mouth and the animal was lathered from the warm-up period in the exercise ring just prior to their being called.
And when the bell rang, the crowd quieted yet more, so that Flynn, who was sitting below where McGarr was standing in the dark R. T. E. trailer, had to say, “Volume, for chrissakes. What are we, at a funeral?”
Tracing the line of the hedgerow that bordered the field, she and the horse, cantering now, moved back toward the first gate, their movements contained and together, and McGarr found himself having to force his eyes to move to other screens—the exhibition halls, the show rings outside the jumping enclosure, the farriery display that was closing down now, all the competitors trundling off their boxes of tools, their goggles set back on their foreheads and making their blackened faces seem to have two pair of eyes.
But he kept returning to her, from one camera angle or another, the best being those that showed horse and rider from below the fences, clearing them in one fluid motion and alighting gracefully, nothing out of place—not the hands too tight or her position in the saddle too far forward—and, unlike many of the other horses, Kestral seemed neither to be extending herself nor to be making an extra effort to keep her rear hooves from knocking on the rails. All was a flow, gentle and smooth and more like a dance—the high, curling arch—than an athletic endeavor, as they cleared each jump and moved toward the next.
Somebody touched McGarr’s sleeve. “I don’t know what to make of it, Chief, but we’ve got a navvy up on the roof of Anglesea Hall.”
McGarr followed the guard over to the screens he’d been monitoring, and there on the green, corrugated metal roof of the general enclosure was the lone figure of a man dressed in blue R. T. E. coveralls and holding a long mike boom.
McGarr turned to Flynn. “Do you have a sound man up on the roof of the general enclosure, Dermot?”
“What?”
“This sound man. Here. The one with the boom and the mike—is he yours?”
Flynn whipped his head to the screen. “Yes. No. I don’t know. I hope so, we need him.”
“Well, can you focus in on him?”
“Why?”
“Just do it, goddammit.”
“Jesus—what’s the camera number? I’ve got a show to run.”
“Eleven,” said the guard.
“Eleven—in on that man on top of the jumping enclosure.”
But McGarr didn’t wait to see the picture. The man had dropped the boom and reached for the zipper of his coveralls and McGarr pivoted toward the door.
“Clean round,” the voice over the public address system said, “and the best time of the day for Lady Bechel-Gore and Kestral.
“Miss Mairead Caughey is next, riding…”
They were passing each other right there beside the trailer and number board, and, glancing up at the figure on the roof, McGarr saw out of the corner of his eye the women reach out and touch hands.
The man stood and pointed something at the announcing booth, and McGarr drew his Walther but knew he had no chance of hitting him at that range. Still, he might distract—.
Bechel-Gore had stood to watch his two women passing below the booth, and just as O’Shaughnessy reached out to pull him back into the seat, the window seemed to explode, spewing a burst of brilliant, jagged glass around the interior of the booth. O’Shaughnessy and the others threw themselves to the floor. Bechel-Gore crumpled back on top of the superintendent, his hands to his shoulder and his jacket bloody.
The guards with the sniping rifles had been attracted by McGarr’s shots and their fire knocked Keegan back and made his body jump in a wild and spastic dance before he fell and rolled slowly down the slope of the long, green corrugated roof.
But only McGarr and the guards seemed to be watching him.
The crowd in the general enclosure, as one, had risen up and begun fleeing, some back toward the pavilion and the exits, but most of the others onto the field, tumbling over the hedgerows, shrieking, dragging their children after them.
McGarr turned and looked for the women, but they had gone, following the direction that their horses had shied in, off through the jumping pocket toward the Simmonscourt Road.
When the shots began, the guards, who had been standing by Frayne and the other men from the farriery competition, had run into the jumping pocket, weapons drawn. With the confusion and the approaching horses and the others, who were panicking all around him, Frayne saw his chance.
But which of them? All that had been told him was that Bechel-Gore or his horse and a woman would be riding, but which one of them?
Frayne pulled up the leather apron and jerked the Skorpion from under his belt. He’d only got half the money, and without the kill—.
He caught the front one as she rode right at him, and Ward saw her fall, cut back off the horse like a toy rider being knocked down by the swipe of a child’s maddened hand.
But the other woman had bolted past Frayne and was gone behind the wall.
He hesitated a moment, crouching, pivoting, and saw the man making for him, tossing people aside with something black in his hand, and Frayne sprinted down the Simmonscourt Road toward the gate and the exit.
Only one other had seen and understood what had happened—Menahan. Throughout the confusion he had kept his field glasses focused on Mairead, and when she fell he shouted, “No! No, you bloody fool!”
Greaves, who was sitting behind him, watched him closely. The priest stepped out of the aisle and rushed down onto the walkway around the jumping enclosure. He took a few steps toward the field, hesitated, and then followed some of the crowd down the narrow lane between the members’ stand and the grandstands, then through the green-and-white striped tents that enshrouded the tea gardens, pushing and shoving people roughly. He pulled open a flap of a tent and stepped through.
Greaves waited before going through himself, but he thought it better not to lose the man.
At the far side of the bandstand, the priest was having trouble getting through the shrubs and the low fence there, and, turning his back to the benches, he saw Greaves.
He straightened up and seemed surprised, but he said, “Don’t just stand there, man. Come help me. I’m a priest and I’ve got to get to the jumping pocket.”
Frayne had lost the cop, the young one with the black hair and the gun in his hand, he was certain. But he waited behind the vans in the arrival and departure area to make sure nobody else had seen him before he stepped toward the one he’d been told was his, the Skorpion back under the apron.
And Frayne was sure he’d gotten at least one of them and maybe the horse too, and he’d make the bastard pay even if—.
He tugged open the bay doors of the van and tried to see into the darkness and knew it was a mistake. There was somebody back there, and his gun was—.
The burst began at his crotch and ran up his chest, face, and forehead, and Frayne dropped back, dead before he hit the ground.
The other man tossed the Skorpion he had used into the straw and opened the side door, stepping out.
There he smoothed back his blond hair, fitted the chauffeur’s cap on, and walked toward the Simmonscourt Road.
NINE
Snaps, Litters, Salvage and Truth, The Connection—Fogarty And Ruth
MCGARR WAS NOT the first to get to the girl. Fogarty and his cameraman were standing over her, the latter taking pictures. McGarr pushed through them and bent to her.
She was lying on her back, just as she had fallen, with one leg turned under her at an odd angle. The front of her blouse was covered with blood that also flowed from the corner of her mouth. McGarr ope
ned the jacket and shirt. One wound in the upper chest, but she was having great difficulty breathing and her pulse was hardly there, the merest of threads.
“No—not that horse, goddammit!” McGarr heard a familiar and angry voice shout.
Several men were clustered around the horse, which was writhing on the ground only yards away.
It was Murray, and the men were intending to put the injured animal out of its misery.
Then Lady Bechel-Gore was there, kneeling on the ground by McGarr, stroking the girl’s forehead and making low, keening sounds. Her eyes were wide but tearless, as though she could not believe what she was seeing.
Fogarty’s man attempted to take her picture and McGarr rose up and shoved him away.
“Can’t you see she’s—” Fogarty began to say, but he was grasped by the collar and hauled off. It was O’Shaughnessy.
Chaos still obtained, and only when the doctors and ambulance attendants had arrived did McGarr move away from the girl. All the while he thought furiously of how it had happened and how his planning could have gone so wrong and how he could at least salvage some part of the situation.
“Is she alive?” somebody asked him. Bechel-Gore had a hand underneath his jacket and a uniformed guard was supporting him.
“Just barely, but I’m no doctor.” McGarr stepped squarely in front of the larger man. “Now, you answer me this and answer me straight—those dossiers you were sent, that wasn’t the first knowledge you had of your daughter’s whereabouts, was it?”
Menahan was trying to push in close to the girl, but other guards were keeping him away. “But I’m a priest! She requires my office!”
Bechel-Gore’s eyes moved to his daughter.
“Quick, quick!” a doctor was saying. “Out of the way! Get out of the way!” The ambulance was being backed toward them.
A shot sounded, people cringed and looked toward the horse, a leg of which twitched and then was still.
“No—I knew earlier.”
The Death of an Irish Tradition Page 25