Death in Dublin

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Where’s his advantage?”

  “Beyond fifty million quid?” Ward shrugged. “Revenge on you and Kehoe. He’ll both score the money and hang the both of you with this thing.”

  Years past, when Brendan Kehoe had acted as state prosecutor, he had put Sweeney in jail for three years. McGarr had done the same for a lesser period.

  “You and I both know how many times he’s said it—he never forgets. Or forgives.”

  Nobody detested Sweeney more than McGarr, but Sweeney could not have foreseen the incident with the television crew. Or this.

  And they had involved him because of his ownership of Ath Cliath and his conservative Catholic background. Who could beat the drum and make more of getting the books back than Sweeney, to whom they would be precious if not sacred? Why not keep him informed as a check against any government machination or foot-dragging?

  Trevor Pape’s house on the Morehampton Road was old, large, and would fetch a handsome price in spite of its condition, which was unimproved.

  Unlike nearby houses of the same vintage, its windows had not been replaced with double-glazed, its flag walkway was pitched and heaved, and its long front garden—laid out at the time when that part of Dublin had been a suburb—was a tangle of old, exotic growth, including a eucalyptus tree.

  Under it was parked an old pearl-gray Jaguar sedan.

  McGarr climbed the ten steep steps to the first-floor entrance and had to reach to twist the disk of a mechanical bell contained in the center of the ornate door. It was as old as the house, McGarr judged, and gave off a weak jingle.

  Again and again he rang, until finally he rapped on the frost-glass pane. At length a light flickered on above him, and through the glass he could see a shape approach.

  “Yes?” a woman’s voice asked through a faded brass speaker.

  “Police.”

  “Yes?”

  “Trevor Pape—would he be in?”

  “Yes.”

  There was another long pause.

  “May I see him?”

  “You are?”

  “McGarr. Peter McGarr.”

  “From the television.”

  McGarr opened his mouth to object but changed his mind. “The same.”

  “Then you’d better come in.”

  The bolt clicked, and the door opened slightly. McGarr pushed it open in time to see a young woman wearing some diaphanous shift with nothing more than a thong below.

  Moving quickly to the stairs, she said over her shoulder, “He’s in there.” Her hand swung to a lighted hallway that led farther into the building.

  McGarr could not keep himself from noticing how her breasts, which were visible in their entirety through the shift, juddered with each step. Seeing him stare, she glanced down at herself, then back up at him and smiled. It was not an unfriendly smile.

  The hallway was long and narrow with a tall ceiling and—could it be?—carved mahogany wainscoting that extended past McGarr’s shoulder. The sliding doors of a dining room appeared on one side, a darkened sitting room with a marble mantel and Hepplewhite furniture next, and finally a well-lighted study that proved to be a long room, lined with bookshelves and containing several library-length tables, reading chairs, and a fire glowing in a patterned brick hearth.

  Near it, Pape was sitting in a leather chair with copper rivets, staring at a television screen that pictured a pride of lions on a parched savanna with Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance. It was something like a screen-saver; nothing—the grass, the lions, the clouds—was moving.

  “Dr. Pape?” McGarr had removed his hat, which he held in his hands before him.

  It took a moment for Pape’s head to move to him, his blue eyes focused on the hat. “You.”

  “I have something I’d like you to see.”

  After another pause, Pape’s eyes flashed up at McGarr. “I’ve seen it on television. You as thug and lout. You’re well suited to what you do, it’s plain. But flogging a few journalists won’t get you your bloody book back, I hope you’re learning.”

  His eyes moved up from the hat; they were bright, glassy, the pupils nearly absent. His hands were gripping the arms of the chair.

  “I’d like to show you something. Is that a video player?”

  Pape’s head dipped down and then up.

  McGarr scanned the tables on either side of the chair and then the room. Pape seemed slightly drunk or in some other way…absent, but there was no sign of a glass or bottle.

  “I assume it’s operated like other players.”

  “Give it to me—I’ll do it,” said a voice behind him.

  McGarr turned to find the young woman, who had put on a purple V-necked jumper and jeans. Her feet were bare.

  “When was the last time we caught a flick with the cops, Poppy?”

  The pale skin around Pape’s eyes wrinkled, his mouth opened, but no laugh came out.

  “I assume that the thing is rewound.” Bending to the machine, she had to fork her long blondish tresses away from her eyes, and McGarr followed the smooth, tanned skin on the back of her hand. Few hairline wrinkles, no trace of geriatric sheen. Late twenties, he estimated, at most early thirties.

  “There we are.” Turning, she handed McGarr a remote. “You play.”

  Her smile revealed long teeth and stunning dentition—a fetching woman with a well-structured face and full lips painted some deep shade of purple to match her eye shadow and jumper, the V neck of which was cut deep. Her jeans were white.

  A hand came out. “Gillian Reston. I live here with Poppy.” Her tones were British, privileged but slightly slurred.

  “You’re his—?”

  “Houseguest,” Pape roared. “Get on with it. Get on with it now and get out. I’ve half a mind to ring up Jack Sheard and report you. It’s nearly eleven of the bloody evening, and here you are, of all people, coming round with a bloody video, of all things. Give me that.”

  Half a mind exactly, McGarr thought, ignoring Pape’s outstretched hand and activating the player.

  “Drink?” Gillian Reston asked.

  McGarr shook his head and allowed his eyes to drop down her body. She was nubile, to say the least, with a narrow waist and a pleasant flair of hip, and the breasts that he had glimpsed earlier now peaked the cashmere-like material of her top.

  “Come, sit.” She patted a cushion of the sofa. “You must have been on your feet at least since your encounter with the press earlier, no?

  “Oh, how nice—music too, Poppy. And there I thought it would be some dreary drunk-driving exemplum.”

  Pape coughed or cleared his throat. Then, “Whiskey!”

  “Poppy’s taking the entire matter of the theft and the murder of the guard too awfully hard,” she said, getting up.

  While the tape came on, McGarr looked around—at the bookshelves that lined three walls, the long windows for daylight, the library tables with colored-glass reading lamps, rather like one of the reading rooms that McGarr remembered from his several excursions to Trinity with Noreen some years past. But furnished for comfort, not scholarship.

  There were tall, healthy-looking potted plants in two corners, an immense Oriental rug on a gleaming parquet floor, and the pleasant grouping of large, leather-covered seats around the entertainment center and hearth with its carved—could it be?—rosewood mantel.

  The farthest wall from McGarr was filled with a glass-fronted case behind which was a collection of pottery and stone objects that looked to be Celtic or at least ancient in design. Perhaps three dozen items in various conditions from intact to mere shards were kept there.

  The crystal whiskey decanter, from which Gillian poured Pape’s drink, was nearly full. If Pape’s odd demeanor was due to drink, he had not drunk much from the decanter.

  Delivering the glass to Pape, the young woman bent at the waist and brushed her lips against the side of his face, whispering something McGarr could not hear. Straightening up, she regarded McGarr, her dark eyes defiant and—he only no
w noticed—as bright as any he had ever seen. She returned to the sofa.

  “My word,” Pape said over the lip of the glass. “Do we really have to watch this? I’m no student of history, but this is just…drivel.”

  Gillian Reston turned to McGarr, her smile still complete. “Sure I can’t get you something?”

  The invitation was complete with a dark, arched eyebrow. Again, McGarr considered her eyes, which sparkled. As though having to gather herself—like Pape had, only less conspicuously—she turned back to the television, arms folded under her breasts in a way that emphasized their splay.

  Pape’s chin rose, and he sat up when the hooded figure came on. “Is this the chap?” he asked.

  “Chap, Poppy?” she asked, an edge of concern in her voice.

  “The chap who murdered Sloane and stole the bloody books, what other chap would I mean?”

  “Perhaps if we listen, Poppy—”

  “Don’t take that tone with me. You’re here at my behest.”

  McGarr increased the volume. “A Judas book. And expendable,” said the hooded figure with the voice-scrambling audio device covering his mouth.

  He waited until the flame of the welder’s torch was held to the page before pushing the pause button. “Now, there. Is that a page—can you tell?—out of the Book of Kells?”

  Pape held out a hand, then pulled himself up in his chair. The woman quickly moved off the couch toward one of the tables, where she retrieved Pape’s spectacles.

  “Now, go through it, no stops.”

  McGarr did.

  “And again.”

  McGarr complied.

  “Well, it surely appears to be a page from Kells, a text page. But I should imagine your Garda laboratory will be able to blow up the image, the better to judge.”

  “What about the possibility of what we’re seeing there being paper?” the young woman asked.

  Pape’s head swung to her. “Gillian—leave the room.”

  “From one of the facsimile—”

  “Out! Now!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m telling you to.”

  “I require a reason. Certainly nobody in his right mind would burn—”

  “Now!” Pape as much as bellowed.

  Color had risen to her cheeks, and she had again folded her arms across her chest, this time defiantly. “I won’t.”

  Removing his glasses, he made sure his eyes—agatized both from age and from whatever it was that had narrowed the pupils—met hers. “Oh, yes, you will. Now. Without another word.”

  Her head swung to McGarr, her humiliation obvious. Yet she rose to leave.

  “Facsimile?” McGarr asked. “Facsimile, what?”

  “And you too. Get out. I didn’t invite you in. I’ll discuss that”—Pape cast a hand at the screen—“and anything else with Jack Sheard, who has the background to appreciate the finer points of incunabula. And take your bloody gyre of vulgarity with you.”

  Pape tried to rise from the chair, but neither arms nor legs were up to hauling his tall, thin body to a stand. With a grunt, he rocked back heavily into the cushions. “I’ve told you all I know, and I’ll only speak to Jack henceforth. Am I understood?”

  Hitting the eject button, McGarr stepped to the tape player while calling out to the woman, “Hold on, please.”

  “Do I have to ring him up?” Pape asked.

  She was nearly at the top of the stairs by the time McGarr got into the hall. “Poppy’s collection, the one behind the glass cabinet—Celtic, is it?”

  “The Beaker people,” she said without turning her head to him.

  Who had been a wave of Celtic immigrants, McGarr seemed to remember.

  “Facsimile—what? What did you mean by that?”

  She kept climbing.

  “What’s OxyContin feel like? Is it pleasurable?”

  She hesitated, turning only her eyes to him, before stepping into the shadows at the top of the stairs.

  Treading the expanse of heaved flags on the walkway of the front garden, McGarr used his cell phone to add Gillian Reston’s name to the list of principals in the investigation that Swords and the Murder Squad staff were working on.

  “Anything besides the name and her association with Pape?” Swords asked. His voice sounded tired.

  “I’d guess she’s British.”

  “Oh.” It wasn’t much of a lead. “Jack Sheard get hold of you?”

  McGarr waited.

  “Been on the blower here…oh, a half dozen calls, if one.”

  Only McGarr’s staff knew his cell phone number, and he had switched off his pager. “Say what he wants?”

  “The business at CU headquarters. It’s on the wire in triplicate.”

  Also blinking was the call monitor on the radio in his car, but he ignored that too.

  CHAPTER

  8

  APART FROM THE TINTED WINDOWS AND THE BATTERED body, Ruth Bresnahan’s decades-old Opel GT was the perfect surveillance car because of its superior sound system and seats that reclined all the way back.

  As long as she was careful not to fall asleep, the oversize rearview mirror, which, like the radio, Ward had installed, gave her an unobtrusive perspective on anything behind. And leaning back as she had been for—she checked her light-up Swatch—nearly two hours, it was impossible to tell if anybody was in the car.

  Truth was, Bresnahan had thought never in a thousand years would she miss this kind of surveillance work, stuck in an alley across from Celtic United headquarters waiting for the woman, Morrigan, to come out. But it felt as comfortable as slipping on a pair of old shoes, as was said.

  Even the grimy brick walls to either side, the orangish light, the smell of baking bread or buns or biscuits from the factory in back of her were welcoming. Paltry though it was, this had been and should still be her work. Like a corpse, she did not turn her head to the vans that kept threading the narrow alley on their way to a loading dock.

  Computers, manipulating databases, hacking into government, bank, and medical mainframes may be the name of the security game at present and was how Bresnahan & Ward, Ltd., made its money. But it was not one that she cheerfully played. There was no humanity, no inherent joy attached to crunching numbers to reveal that target X spent far more money than he ever earned or Y had once been arrested for indecent exposure.

  This, however—sitting in the shadows of an abandoned building and wondering how Morrigan (aka Sheila Law of Antrim Town) could have become involved with CU and the New Druids—was another cup of tea altogether. Morrigan was university educated, pretty in a blowsy way, and possessed of an angular shape that she had kept trim right into her early forties.

  Perhaps it was sex, as one of Ward’s touts had mentioned. But Bresnahan would not allow herself to believe that any woman would center her life around sex, although in a way she herself had.

  When Ward had as much as thrown her over for Leah Sigal four years earlier, she had seduced him, got massively pregnant on purpose, and now the three of them—no, actually, the six of them when the children were counted—lived together most contentedly, she believed, in what Sweeney’s Ath Cliath had called “pagan, orgiastic bliss.” For love, not sex. Although there was that too.

  As a good country lass from a Catholic background, Bresnahan had spent her adolescence and early adult life in rural Kerry ignorant of sexual delight. But once exposed to it, she could not imagine ever being without a man like Ward, who played her body like a pianola, as was also said. Maybe her life was just one big cliché.

  In fact, on stakeouts such as this, Ward and she engaged in nearly constant and unremitting sex, each taking turns maintaining the watch while the other was beyond the plane of view. Phew—where was she getting these thoughts? She hadn’t fantasized like this since…well, since she was last on a stakeout that mattered, over two years earlier, before Ward and she were sacked because of Sweeney.

  Sweeney. With him now involved, it made what they were about all the swee
ter. Because he was in the thick of it, she was certain. Sweeney was like a disease, a scourge, a pestilence. If he was present in any way, he was the problem. It was his MO.

  But the lights now began to go out in the CU building across the road. And there she was, Morrigan herself. Stepping out, checking inside her large handbag to make sure she had everything—most important, the ransom tape, Bresnahan hoped—and locking the door. She looked around before heading down the stairs.

  But the woman wasn’t halfway to the street when a car door opened and a young man in a half shirt with a roll of tanned, exposed abs approached her somewhat drunkenly.

  She shook her head and pushed by him. Looking rather like a beefy Brad Pitt, he reached for her hip, but she slapped his hand away.

  “Go, girl,” said Bresnahan in the darkness of the car. You’ve got an altogether different bun in your oven tonight. Sex can wait.

  Damn, she thought, I must concentrate.

  The lights were on in what McGarr guessed was Kara Kennedy’s apartment. With legal parking nonexistent, he pulled the car up on the footpath and lowered the Garda ID that was attached to the sun visor.

  The cold front that McGarr had felt earlier had arrived, with a sharp wind angling in from the northeast. Above the rooftops in a cloudless sky, the stars were layers deep, the achromatic light appearing purer because of the orange-colored cadmium vapor lamps that lined the street.

  The house was a large old brick Victorian of the sort that had been built by people who thought of themselves as “West Britons” and had re-created the middle-class uniformity of Hampstead or York, this one situated on a corner with a well-clipped lawn and hedges bordered by a spiked iron fence.

  Back around the turn of the last century, the houses—in fact, most of Rathmines—had been considered an anonymous tract, McGarr knew. Now, the old brick, slate roofs, and tall chimneys soothed the eye, when set against the urban sprawl of the city.

  Comfortable if chilly before central heating, the houses featured four bay windows, two up and two down. The gate squeaked on its hinges as he pushed it shut.