Death in Dublin

by Bartholomew Gill

  Directing McKeon to pull right into the long drive in front of the house, he ordered one group to search Pape’s Jaguar and the grounds with McKeon and Swords accompanying him into the mansion.

  They found Pape exactly where McGarr had left him the night before. But he was a far different man from then, and different from the tweedy don who had appeared in Kehoe’s office earlier in the day. Dressed in a black suit that looked as though it were made of silk, he had had his hair cut, pomaded—it appeared—and combed back. His shirt was pearl gray, his tie silver.

  On the wrist of his left hand was a fashionable gold watch with a black dial. His shoes were Italian, his cologne French, but his eyes—McGarr had seen eyes like that before—were Colombian.

  “I have here a court order to search your house.” McGarr tore off Pape’s copy and offered it to him. When the man made no move to take it, McGarr dropped the document in his lap.

  From in the hall, he could hear Sheard saying, “He’s here. Yes. What we discussed—you should speak to him yourself, then.”

  “Are you witness to his refusal?” McGarr asked McKeon and Swords. “Then proceed with the search.” As they left the room, they heard Sheard ask, “What exactly do you think you’re about here?”

  “Think? We don’t think shit, Jack,” said McKeon. “Or do I have the syntax wrong?”

  McGarr stepped into Pape’s line of sight. “Mr. Pape—I understand you own a facsimile copy of the Book of Kells.”

  “It’s Dr. Pape. Doctor, my man.” Pape’s eyes were agatized—two blue impenetrable bluish orbs with only a hint of pupil.

  “Do you own such a thing?”

  “The last time I looked.”

  Out in the hall, Sheard called out, “McGarr. McGarr!”

  “Where is it?”

  The hand came up from his crossed knees and flapped in the direction of the bookshelves. “It’s somewhere about, I should imagine.”

  “Somewhere—where?” McGarr demanded, taking a step in on him.

  Pape’s reaction was delayed. “Please don’t be so demonstrative. I find it oppressive.”

  Which touched off McGarr’s simmering anger. Reaching down, he snatched up a fistful of Pape’s gray shirt. “You sorry piece of posturing and predatory work. Let me tell you what’s going on here—when I find your stash, which is inevitable, I’m going to haul your sorry ancient arse in for questioning, and we’ll see how you’ll define ‘somewhere’ on day three.

  “I’ll ask you only once more—where’s the book?”

  “Jack!” Pape called out. “He’s in here, and he’s threatening me.” His opaque eyes met McGarr’s defiantly. “Now, would you take your bloody proletarian paw off me, Inspector?”

  Sheard appeared in the doorway, and McGarr shoved Pape back into the chair.

  “McGarr—the commissioner is on the phone.”

  Stepping past the bookshelves where, he knew, a book worth 30,000 quid would not be stored by a librarian, McGarr brushed past Sheard, who was holding out his cell phone. “He knows my number,” McGarr said. “I have work here.”

  “That may be in some doubt. You should speak with him.”

  Nearly two hours later, McGarr found the facsimile edition with several dozen other books in a safe in a closet underneath the main staircase. As far as he could tell, it looked as though two pages had recently been removed with a razor and a straightedge, the cut having slightly penetrated to the page behind.

  Which was when his cell phone rang.

  “Peter? It’s Commissioner O’Rourke.”

  McGarr waited.

  “Are you there?”

  McGarr still said nothing.

  “Taoiseach Kehoe has asked me to take you off the inquiry immediately and for you to turn over any and all reports and evidence to Jack Sheard. I’m placing you on administrative leave of absence, pending the outcome of an inquiry into the incident on the Glasnevin Road.”

  McGarr was tempted to say, You know as well as I what happened there. Instead, he pressed his palm into the keypad, so that the phone gave off a multitonal bleep. Then he said, “There’s something wrong with this connection, Commissioner. I hope you’re still there. Did you say Taoiseach Kehoe would like to speak with me? He could do that directly at this number. I hope you’re still there. I might try to get back to you soon, if I have time.”

  “You’re a cowboy, McGarr. And I’ll have you up on charges” was the last thing he heard before ringing off.

  Some time later, Swords appeared by his side with something that looked like the drain of a sink in the palm of one hand and holding a black garment in the other.

  “Where’s Pape?” McGarr asked.

  “He left with Sheard and his gang maybe an hour ago.”

  It was only then that McGarr remembered Maddie.

  Maybe it was the smell of chocolate that pervaded the neighborhood in Coolock near the address Morrigan had given her. But Ruth Bresnahan was hungry—ravenous, in fact—and tired too.

  And the problem was, whenever she got hungry these days, she got angry as well. When what was called for at the moment was a level head, Ward reminded her. He was sitting beside her in the old battered Opel, staking out the warehouse from the parking lot of the Cadbury chocolate factory, where dozens of cars were gathered.

  Ward had just got off the phone with McGarr, who had brought him up to speed on the developments at Pape’s house. And where McGarr now believed he stood with the Garda.

  The car radio had been covering little else than the story of Kehoe’s having appeared on television to show portions of the ransom tape and to announce that he had no intention of dealing with their demand.

  “It is an outrage that they have absconded with several of Ireland’s national treasures and murdered at least two persons that we know of so far. We are bending every effort to apprehend them and retrieve the books.

  “But we cannot and will not legitimize crime by submitting to their demand. It would only encourage further brigandry,” Kehoe had said, appropriating a term that Bresnahan had last heard from her aged grandmother before her death years ago.

  It was only as a kind of afterthought that Garda spokesman Sheard disclosed that McGarr had been relieved of his command and placed on an administrative leave of absence.

  A commentator then came on to say that in his opinion Kehoe “politically or morally” had no other choice but to refuse to negotiate with proven murderers or to pay them a dime when, “after all—and let us remember—it is not as if they are ransoming a person. These are books, albeit important books. But even were it a person, paying them would not be the correct step.”

  Bresnahan switched off the radio. “It’s distracting, is what it is. Like the smell of that bloody chocolate.”

  The Cadbury chocolate factory, which stood on the corner of the street, virtually shielded the old warehouse from view. There was one alley in, a brace of seven roll-up bay doors on a loading dock, a windowless door with a double lock, and not a window in sight.

  “And it’s fecking illegal, them being in there,” she hissed. “What if there were a fire, what then? How would they get out?”

  “Probably open those big bay doors. But would we want them to?” Ward asked.

  “Yes, certainly—until we find the Book of Kells and gather enough evidence to get Peter off the hook. It’s plain what Kehoe and Sheard are about. With the bloody tape showing a supposed New Druid making the demand and then the bungling—no, my bungling—of the bust in Glasnevin, they’ll blame him for anything else that goes wrong and martyr him to Kehoe’s continuance in office and Sheard’s ambition.

  “Nothing short of retrieving the books and collaring Ray-Boy—or whoever is masterminding this thing—will do.”

  “But why choose Peter? What did he ever do to Kehoe or Sheard?” mused Ward.

  “Which is the curious part. Now, Sweeney doing this I’d understand. But Kehoe and Sheard? I guess Peter was—is—just handy. And he had the bad sense to bring us tw
o arrogantly sinful, disgraced, and failed cops in on what proved to be a debacle. Wait until that gets out. We were just what they needed.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because before my cock-up, it was a no-win situation for Kehoe. He would have been damned philosophically if he dealt with them, double-damned fiscally if he splashed out fifty million of public money for something actually owned by a private institution.

  “And, on the other hand, damned at least as much if his government failed to find the thieves and allowed the most revered single item of early Irish Christendom to be burned in public by a defiant and lawless group of thugs and louts.”

  Ward could see the sense in that. But there was something they were still missing; he was sure of it. He glanced back out the windscreen at the warehouse.

  “I want to get in there right now and bust the fuckers,” Bresnahan hissed.

  Ward’s hand came down on her thigh with a friendly smack. “Down, girl. You know how these things go. We have to be patient and wait on the situation. If somebody’s in there—Ray-Boy or some others of his tribe, they’ve got to come out sooner or later.”

  Bresnahan glanced down at his hand, which had inched up her thigh from the contact point. In a heartbeat, literally, she fantasized how the next few minutes would unfold. “You know something I don’t.”

  “Could be. I bet…I bet”—the hand moved up while the other pointed toward the windscreen—“there’s a skylight or a series of skylights or even a glass roof in that structure.”

  Bresnahan scarcely heard him. She was concentrating on something entirely different—his hand on her thigh. It was like a pleasurable manacle that had suddenly been clamped onto a most sensitive area of her overly sensitive—she had often thought—body.

  “Remember, it was put up when electricity was even more exorbitant in this country than it is today. The owner wouldn’t have wanted the expense of rows and rows of lights constantly on.”

  Being easy with men had never been her way, not even with Ward. She made them work for her affections. But releasing herself to his touch, abandoning herself to the love she felt for him—a love she could and would die for—well, that was something she both could not help and would not attempt to quell.

  And what if, perchance, for some inscrutable masculine reason he decided suddenly never to touch her like that again—which happened, as some of her women friends had confided to her about their husbands and lovers. Ruth Bresnahan could not conceive of the absence of his hand on her thigh. It was as simple and as tragic as that.

  Bresnahan studied Ward’s dark features, which were so regular and proportionate—to her taste, handsome—that at times it took her breath away.

  “If we could get to the top of that roof, we might be able to look down upon them. And if your woman, Morrigan, is right and they’re there, we’ll place the call to Peter. Point is—the place might be hard to get into, but it will also be hard to get out of.”

  She again considered his hand, which was still on her thigh. “I hope you don’t expect me to climb up there.” Having been raised on a farm in Kerry that was bounded on the west by a tall sea cliff, she knew her mother’s constant admonitions about avoiding the undercut brink would be with her for the rest of her life.

  “Only if you want a slice of the glory.” The hand moved farther up her thigh.

  “And you’ve planned it out, this move?”

  “To a fare-thee-well. You hold your hand like this”—Ward twined the fingers of one hand through the other—“I put my foot on them, and you boost me up. I even think I might know where the office is located.”

  The hand fell back on her thigh. “And my plan for what we can do in the meantime—you haven’t asked me about that. It’s much more readily achievable.” Now the hand was moving over the material about as far up her thigh as it could go.

  “Out with it.”

  Ward made sure their eyes met. “When was the last time we made this old car rock?”

  Taking hold of his wrist, she moved it away.

  From out of his pocket, Ward drew a Cadbury nut bar—dark Swiss chocolate with hazelnut-and-nougat centers.

  “Where’d you get that?” She tried to snatch the bar out of his hand, but he was too fast for her. “You bastard, give it me.”

  Pinching and gouging did not work either. A former international boxing champ, Ward easily parried her jabs. “Do we have a deal?”

  Sighing, Bresnahan rested her back against the seat. At least he was still that interested in her after—how long had it been?—at least six years, counting the period he had moved in with Lee, his other “wife.”

  She lowered her eyes to his lips. “Chocolate, I’m told, can be used as a lubricant. That way one of us can keep watching.”

  “What about the nuts?”

  “You should be worried more about me teeth.”

  The chocolate bar alighted in her lap.

  “Well, you’re on television for a second day in a row,” Maddie announced getting into the car. “Only Aisling’s father can top that.”

  He was the anchor of a popular television show.

  “Granted, it was a still shot, but there you were, gun in hand, looking down at somebody hanging out of a car and obviously dead.

  “And one other thing nobody else’s pa will ever equal on TV—getting sacked on the teley. Does administrative leave mean we can go on a long holiday someplace far, far away?

  “Not to worry, I won’t bawl today. I’m getting rather used to all of this.”

  “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Then it isn’t true.” The sarcastic tone was gone, and he could tell she wanted it not to be true.

  “No, it’s probably true. But it doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Probably? They haven’t spoken to you directly?”

  “They’ve tried, but I switched off my phone.”

  “So you wouldn’t hear the bad news that you’ve, like, been put out to pasture. And that’s why it doesn’t mean a thing?”

  McGarr could feel his anger mounting, not at Maddie or her tone, which ultimately was one of childish concern, but at those three political scuts who, by choosing the most politically expedient and, in Sheard’s case, advantageous tack, would condone a spate of murders and grand—no, the grandest—theft.

  To say nothing of making McGarr himself, who was actually working on the case and not just the media, a very public scapegoat in a way that had already disturbed his daughter and destroyed his reputation.

  People wouldn’t remember any of the arrests he had made year after year; they would remember the photo of him gun in hand with the dead driver dangling out of the smashed car.

  “It means that they might think they’re putting me on the shelf for a while, but they haven’t. And then—” McGarr had to brake for a traffic signal, and he glanced over at her: the retroussé nose and protrusive upper lip, her long ringlets of copper-colored curls. “Maybe it’s time for me to pack it in anyhow.”

  Her eyes widened in alarm. “What? You’re a policeman, a detective. It’s what you are, what you’ll always be. And what would you do with yourself otherwise?”

  McGarr shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe join Hugh and Ruthie. Or set up my own shop—special investigations, that class of thing.”

  Maddie shook her head and looked out the window at the Victorian row houses they were passing.

  After a while McGarr said, “All the changes, all the uncertainty in our lives must be hard on you.”

  “It’s not me I’m thinking of, Peter.” Now he could see tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.

  At home, she went straight to her room. Nuala made eye contact with McGarr before following her there.

  Failure. He was now living with it in virtually every aspect of his life: on the job; with Kara Kennedy, who he suspected had too much “history” for him, even the little he knew; and now here with the one person whom he loved more than anyone in the world and whom he could not le
t down.

  But he was doing just that, wasn’t he? Even now, before any official inquiry, his own personal history had become a burden for her.

  In his den, he slipped the second tape into the video player and leaned back against the edge of his desk. Again, music with a Celtic flair preceded the appearance of the cloaked figure.

  McGarr paused the tape and studied the room with its lime-green chipped paint and probable human heads on the wall, while trying to remember the rooms he had searched in Pape’s house. None was green, but he had remained on the first floor; McKeon and Swords had conducted the rest of the search, which had turned up the voice-scrambling device and the cloak.

  The figure appeared to be a large man with wide shoulders and a heavy body. While tall with definite shoulders, Pape was gaunt, although he might easily have worn a jacket beneath the capacious garment. He pressed the play button.

  As the music faded out, the figure held up what appeared to be another illustrated page from the Kells book. “Tape two, page two. It will be burned if, by tomorrow, you haven’t assembled the fifty million in bearer bonds and delivered it to the drop that will be sent you through the usual source. Have a helicopter ready.

  “You’ll have two hours to deliver it. If you fail, the drill will continue, only we’ll begin burning a page an hour, as documented so.” Holding up the sleeve of a videocassette, he began his deep, rumbling, and fractured laugh, until it faded out along with his image.

  McGarr wondered if Pape’s voice, which, while deep, could be made to carry the Vaderesque timber of the voice on the tape. And where were the horrific heads, to say nothing of the level of planning and coordination seen thus far?

  In McGarr’s experience, druggies and drunks did not possess or could not summon the clarity to carry off detailed crimes. But then, of course, there was the example of Sweeney, who was an epic toper.

  Sweeney. Why Sweeney? How had he become involved in all of this? Because of Ath Cliath, where the New Druids or whoever was behind the theft were sure to find a forum for their videotapes, regardless of what the government chose to do?