The Revenge of Liam McGrew: A Dermot Sparhawk Mystery

by Tom MacDonald

  “Tullyverry?” Jackie sounded bewildered. “That was more than thirty years ago. Why do you care about Tullyverry?”

  “What happened that night in Tullyverry?” O’Byrne asked.

  “I’m not sure I can help you,” Jackie said. “Can you be more specific?”

  “How close did the Brits come to catching you?”

  “Catching me?” Now Jackie really sounded bewildered. “You lost me.”

  “The Brits seized two boats at Tullyverry that night and sank another,” O’Byrne said. “How did you escape their dragnet? How did you get away?”

  “I didn’t have to get away,” Jackie answered. “I wasn’t even there.”

  “You weren’t there?” Now O’Byrne was the one who sounded bewildered. “If you weren’t in Tullyverry, where were you?”

  “I was here in Boston watching the Red Sox blow the World Series against the Mets. It was game six and—”

  O’Byrne interrupted. “What do you mean you weren’t in Tullyverry?”

  “Liam called me a week before the scheduled shipment and told me not to come. He said he smelled a rat or something like that. He didn’t want me to risk going there.”

  “A week before, you say?” O’Byrne asked.

  “Yeah, a week before. How come?”

  VI.

  I sat in the Café Bar and watched as smiling greeters embraced arriving passengers. Everyone was happy, joyous, and free, as we say in AA. The last thing they were worried about was getting whacked by the IRA. The café itself was an open affair, bordered by brass railings and elevated two feet above the terminal floor. The raised platform provided an excellent view of pedestrian traffic. I spotted Liam across the way.

  He came toward me, his shillelagh clicking, his face snarling, his oxygen tank dragging like an anchor in muck. He took the handicap ramp into the café, and when he got close enough, he stared at me with ruthless eyes, two cesspools of cruelty. I hadn’t seen Liam since the day I threw him out of my office in Charlestown. I wish I had that decision to do over. But you don’t get a mulligan with the IRA. He sat at the table and wasted no time.

  “You killed my grandson.” He pulled the tank closer and twisted the knob. “Now I will kill you.”

  “You sent a boy to do a man’s job.” I leaned forward. “Alroy drank himself blind the night he shot me. The simpleton couldn’t kill me from a foot away he was so drunk. I didn’t want to kill him, but I had to. He left me no choice.”

  “You bastard!” Liam croaked.

  “I wish you could have heard the blows.” I smiled. “I crushed his skull with a big chunk of granite. The thuds made a sickening sound, especially the second one. And his screams were horrific.”

  “I’ll kill you!”

  Liam raised his stick and swiped at my head. I yanked it out of his hands and broke it over my knee. Liam looked at it. His face screwed into a pink coil of flesh.

  “That blackthorn shillelagh belonged to my father.”

  “Now it belongs in the trash.” I tossed the splinters aside. “Let’s discuss the reason I ordered you here.”

  “You didn’t order me here.” Liam drew a breath, but not without difficulty. “Nobody orders me anywhere!”

  “I have the $100,000 bills.” I leaned forward again, getting closer to him. “I found your stash, Liam. You picked a stupid place to hide it, which was no surprise.”

  “Bullshit!” He wheezed.

  “I’m returning the money to the United States Treasury.” I tapped a cardboard tube on the table. “Treasury is sending a couple of agents to meet me today. I’ll be exchanging this tube of money for an extremely handsome reward.”

  “You’re full of shite, Sparhawk.” His eyes darted back and forth, scanning the terminal. “What sheet of money? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “This one.” I uncapped the tube and removed the $100,000 bills. “Should I spread it on the table so you can inspect it?”

  “Put it away, buffoon.” Liam searched the surroundings, probably for agents. “Put it away I said!”

  “You stole this from the World’s Fair of Money.” I held it up. “You also stole three other sheets, which you gave to Halloran. I took Halloran’s away, too.”

  “Liar.” He choked for air. “You’re a no-good, feckin’ liar!”

  “This sheet is going home to where it belongs,” I said. “What is taking the T-men so long to get here? Usually they’re prompt.”

  Liam looked around again. He took a breath and appeared to gather himself. He sat up in the chair, seemingly unruffled, and pointed at me.

  “Do you think you can traipse through my town like you own it?” He bent over for air and came up again. “Dozens of men are under my command, dozens! You won’t get out of Belfast alive, Sparhawk.”

  “I enjoyed showing you the bills.” I held the sheet up again. “It was fun to rub your face in it.”

  “You are going to regret every word you said today.”

  “You’re a failure, Liam.” I rolled up the sheet and put it back in the tube. “You got your grandson killed, you got McAfee killed, you got Webb killed, and you lost a sheet of $100,000 bills. Only a complete fuck-up could accomplish those feats of failure.”

  “You’re a dead man.” He got up to leave. “Dead, I tell you!”

  “Do you really think I’m afraid of you?” I stood next to Liam and looked down at him. “Get out of here before I swat you like a flea.”

  “You’re feckin’ dead!” He walked away.

  §

  I tapped the tube on the table, a roll of cardboard worth $3.2 million. Kenny Bowen came into the café and sat next to me. I handed him the cylinder.

  “Do you think it worked?” he asked.

  “We’ll know in a day or two,” I said. “I thought he might point a gun at me to take the money right here in the café. Then we’d be out two sheets of bills.”

  A man at the table behind me turned and said, “He wouldn’t have gotten far.”

  It was Rat T. Kennedy, hiding in plain sight. He opened his windbreaker and showed me a concealed weapon. I wondered if it was the same gun he used to blow two holes in Phillip Webb’s head.

  “Hi, Rat,” I said. “You have my back as usual.”

  Kenny said, “I take chances, but they’re measured chances. Rat T. has a way of mitigating risk.”

  “I found that out firsthand,” I said.

  “If Liam tried to grab the money, we’d have stopped him.” Kenny paused. “Well, Dermot, you set the hook.”

  “And a fine hook it was.” I replied. “But as my bald Irish friend would say, it’s not a fish ’til it’s on the bank.”

  Kenny Bowen and Rat T. Kennedy left the Café Bar. A minute later my cousin Cam O’Hanlon came in. He’d been monitoring the scene from the magazine stand across the terminal.

  A few days ago I had called Cam and asked him for help. Superintendent Hanson made the necessary arrangements with law enforcement in Northern Ireland, paving the way for Cam to come to Belfast. I wasn’t going to risk losing a sheet of $100,000 bills no matter what precautions Kenny put in place. I also wasn’t going to risk eating a bullet from Liam’s gun. Cam sat with me.

  “As it turned out, you didn’t need me,” he said.

  “But I might have, and I might yet.” I thought about Liam’s threats. “I’m not out of Belfast, Cam, not by a long shot.”

  “I’m here until you leave.” He turned to me. “Are you wearing the Kevlar vest?”

  I tapped my chest with an extended thumb. “You bet I am.”

  VII.

  Kenny called me at the Maryville House the moment I got in. The call surprised me because I had just talked to him at the airport. He asked me how O’Byrne reacted when I told him that Phillip Webb had murdered Kathleen on Liam McGrew’s orders. Before I could answe
r, Kenny cut in and repeated the question. Kenny sounded hyper. He wasn’t his usual cool self. When I got an opening, I spoke.

  I told Kenny that I couldn’t get a clear reading on O’Byrne’s reaction, that he was a tough guy to figure out. Kenny pursued the topic. Did O’Byrne believe me when I told him about the link between Webb and Liam? I repeated that I didn’t know whether he believed me or not. I found Kenny’s questioning odd, almost slippery.

  “What’s going on?” I finally asked. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “My mind is racing all over the place,” he said. “Bottom line, I think I have something you can use.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Phillip Webb collected souvenirs.”

  “Okay, Webb collected souvenirs,” I said, and I started to see where Kenny might be going. “What kind of souvenirs?”

  “He saved objects from the people he killed, keepsakes of his dirty work.”

  “Right, keepsakes.” I thought about Webb’s dead body on the Northern Avenue Bridge, the back of his head blown off, the blood dripping through the grating. “I thought you said he had nothing on him.”

  “Webb had a flat in West London, in Mayfair, to be exact.” Kenny was so excited he had to stop and catch his breath. “Nobody knew about the flat, not his family, not his colleagues in the British Army, nobody. It was his secret hideaway. After some extensive digging, Scotland Yard tracked it down.”

  “Is that where Webb kept the trophies, at his Mayfair flat?”

  “Webb had souvenirs from Tullyverry. He had other things from a foiled IRA bombing campaign near Buckingham Palace.” Kenny paused. “He also had a souvenir from O’Byrne’s wife, some kind of a religious item.”

  “How do you know it belonged to her?” I asked.

  “The name Kathleen O’Byrne is embroidered on it.” He paused again. “The item was also stained with blood, probably her blood.” Kenny continued. “The item is made of a fine woolen cloth, according to the lab boys at Scotland Yard, and it is speckled with dry blood. I think it could be useful.”

  “What a sick bastard.”

  I wasn’t sure what Kenny had in mind. I doubted the lab could get usable DNA off it. Too much time had passed. And even if they got a viable reading, they’d still have to dig up Kathleen’s body to get a tissue sample for comparison, if there was any tissue left after thirty years in the ground. I knew one thing. O’Byrne wouldn’t fancy the idea of his wife getting exhumed.

  “Wouldn’t the blood be degraded by now?” I asked.

  “The blood is useless for forensic testing,” Kenny said. “Why do you care if the blood is degraded?”

  “I assumed you were thinking of DNA testing,” I said.

  “I see the confusion,” Kenny said. “No, not DNA testing, I was thinking of sending Kathleen’s item to you, so you can show it to O’Byrne as physical evidence of her murder.”

  “You want me to show it to O’Byrne?”

  “Scotland Yard found the item in Phillip Webb’s flat, which proves that Webb murdered Kathleen.”

  “It sure does.”

  Kenny’s idea might have been morbid, showing O’Byrne a souvenir from his wife’s murder, but it was also smart.

  I said, “You’re saying the item will prove to O’Byrne once and for all that Kathleen was Webb’s target all along. The item Webb took was a trophy for a good kill.”

  “Should I send it to you or not?” Kenny asked.

  “Send it along,” I said. “Can you send Webb’s souvenirs from Tullyverry, too?”

  “Consider it done,” Kenny said. “But Tullyverry is ancient history.”

  “Not in Belfast it’s not.” Something was amiss. “Why did Scotland Yard give you the souvenirs? Isn’t that stuff evidence?”

  “It wasn’t really Scotland Yard that found Webb’s flat,” he said. “A consulting group that works with Scotland Yard found it. And since nobody can say with certainty that Webb is dead, and since nobody can know for sure that the flat belonged to him, the consulting group was willing to be more flexible than they usually are with the evidence.”

  “Flexible?” Then it came to me. “You bribed them to get the items.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a bribe,” Kenny said. “I’d call it cooperation between interested parties. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Just get the stuff over to me.”

  Kenny told me that a courier would be delivering the evidence to the Maryville House. I asked him when it might get here.

  “I’m a step ahead of you, Dermot. You’ll get it today.”

  “Including the Tullyverry trophies?” I asked.

  “Like I said, I’m a step ahead of you.”

  He hung up the phone.

  An hour later Rat T. Kennedy delivered a sealed manila envelope to my room. He nodded and left without a word. I opened the parcel and emptied it on my bed. I saw various forms of withered identification. A driver’s license, a library card, a passport, things like that, which presumably belonged to the Tullyverry victims. The items were cloudy and yellowing and tough to read. Some were burnt, some were torn. Clearly they had seen battle.

  I then found the souvenir that had belonged to Kathleen O’Byrne, a blood-spattered necklace with the Carmelite scapulars. A third patch had been attached to the necklace with Kathleen’s name sewn in gold needlepoint. It looked similar to the scapulars that Aunt Bridget had given to me, except mine had a Saint Bridget’s Cross on it. It must be an Irish thing, the scapulars.

  I put everything back in the envelope and dozed off on the bed. I had no sooner fallen asleep when my phone rang. It was O’Byrne. He said that he wanted to see me, that he had important news. I told him to come by whenever he wanted.

  VIII.

  When O’Byrne arrived at the Maryville House, he called Sparhawk’s room from the front desk and told him that he was downstairs. He then sat in a leather club chair and waited. Moments later Sparhawk came into the lobby carrying a manila envelope. He sat down across from O’Byrne, who smiled.

  “Your plan worked,” O’Byrne said. “I tailed Liam for two days, and by Jesus, he led me to the money. I couldn’t believe his carelessness, his sloppy disregard for protocol. Not once did the eejit check over his shoulder, not that he would have spotted me if he had. I followed him out to the country, miles outside of Belfast to the farmlands, and that’s where the damn fool hid the sheet of money. He stashed it in an old barn on his family farm. After Liam left the farmhouse, I went into the barn and took the sheet.”

  “Any trouble?” Sparhawk asked.

  “Not a bloody lick,” O’Byrne answered. “A teenage boy could have done it.”

  “Unless that teenage boy was Alroy McGrew,” Sparhawk said. “Don’t sell yourself short. You did well. Let’s make the exchange.”

  Sparhawk handed O’Byrne a cashier’s check for $320,000, ten percent of the sheet’s worth. O’Byrne handed Sparhawk a canister containing the sheet of money. He asked Sparhawk to look inside it, which Sparhawk did, and the towering Yank nodded his approval.

  “The deal is done,” Sparhawk said to O’Byrne. “Now you can leave Northern Ireland. You can get out of Belfast and never look back.”

  “I only wish Kathleen could join me.” O’Byrne cleared his throat and looked away. “I suppose I’ll have to go it alone. My godmother told me of a place in the Leeward Islands. The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean she called it, the island of Montserrat.”

  “Never heard of it,” Sparhawk admitted. “Sounds tropical.”

  “Aye, it is indeed. Montserrat is part of the West Indies, the Lesser Antilles chain, but you’re probably not interested in a geography lesson.” He said this with anticipation in his voice. “I’ll be packing my bags any day now.”

  “I need to ask you something.” Sparhawk shifted his weight. “Did
you believe me when I told you that Liam ordered Kathleen’s murder?”

  “I believed that your man on the phone told you that, yes.” O’Byrne answered.

  “But you have doubts as to whether it’s true.”

  “Most of life is filled with doubts, don’t you think?” O’Byrne said. “We rarely get definitive answers.”

  “I hate to show you this,” Sparhawk said, “but I think it’s important you see it.”

  He handed O’Byrne the manila envelope.

  “What is this?” O’Byrne emptied the envelope on a low table and picked up the scapulars. His eyes riveted onto the bloody patches and his breathing turned to panting. “Where the feck did you get this? It belonged to Kathleen. Bridie gave it to her on our wedding day.”

  “I thought it was hers,” Sparhawk said.

  “Where the hell did you get it?” O’Byrne’s eyes flooded to two pools of blue. He touched his chest, feeling his own scapulars.

  “Scotland Yard found this stuff in Phillip Webb’s flat in Mayfair,” Sparhawk answered. “Webb collected souvenirs from the people he killed.”

  “Webb killed Kathleen,” O’Byrne said with resignation in his voice, not wanting to believe it. “Webb really did kill her.”

  “Yes, he did.” Sparhawk looked at the Carmelite scapulars. “Webb killed her and took the necklace as a memento.”

  “And Webb was in cahoots with Liam,” O’Byrne conceded. “They were partners in her murder.”

  “Yes, they were,” Sparhawk said. “Their relationship went back forty years.”

  “What are the other things, the identification tags and such?” asked O’Byrne.

  “Souvenirs from the raid at Tullyverry,” Sparhawk told him. “ID cards from the dead rebels, more of Webb’s mementos.”

  “Proving that Liam told Webb about Tullyverry,” O’Byrne admitted.

  O’Byrne rose from the chair and slowly walked to the men’s room. He came back a few minutes later, with his eyes stinging red and his hand clutching Kathleen’s scapulars. He sat down and gathered his emotions. He told Sparhawk that he now believed that Liam McGrew had hired Phillip Webb to murder Kathleen.