by Stuart Woods
I turned away and tried not to vomit but failed. When I got control of myself again, I started for the cottage; I had to call someone, but the dogs were still there. I charged them, swinging the mop, chased them until they ran into the woods toward the sound of the pack, receding into the distance. I hoisted myself up the wall, walked weakly into the cottage, found the phone directory, called the local police, and briefly told my story. They would be along shortly. I sat down heavily and put my head between my legs. As it began to clear I was struck suddenly with a thought: who was the man? I stood up quickly. What had happened in my absence?
I walked outside and stood on the wall, forcing myself to look down at the naked corpse a few yards away. The smell seemed to be growing worse. I gagged but held on. It was not a woman, I felt sure of that, even with the awful bloating. Thank God it wasn’t Annie, but … It was difficult to determine how big or tall the man had been, since the legs were partly obscured by the water. I’ve got to look at the face, I thought, I’ve got to go down there and turn it over. But I couldn’t do it. Instead, I went back into the cottage and, trembling, dialed the number of Cork Harbour Boatyard.
“Hello?” It was Finbar’s voice.
“Finbar, it’s Will.” I took a deep breath. “Is Mark there?”
“Oh, hello, Willie. No, he didn’t come in today. I rang the cottage about ten thirty, but there was no answer. I haven’t spoken with him since before the holiday. Where are you?”
“I’m at the cottage.”
“He’s not there, then?”
“No.” I was beginning to think he might be.
“Well, maybe he just needed a day off. He’s been putting in a lot of time, y’know.”
“Yeah, okay, Finbar, I’ll see you later.”
“Right, Willie.”
I hung up, shaking badly. Panic was creeping up on me, now. What was I doing in this place where people didn’t want us, where our work had to be guarded by people like Major Primrose? Why did one of us have to die before I knew that I shouldn’t be here? And Christ, where was Annie?”
“Willie! Welcome home!”
I jerked around. Annie walked across the room, tossing a duffle onto the sofa, struggling out of her coat before coming across the room to hug me. I held onto her tightly.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, taking my head in her hands. She made a face. “And what’s that awful smell?”
“Annie … ” I was having difficulty speaking. “Annie, where’s Mark?”
“Right here, old sport.” He was standing in the front door, holding two bags of groceries.
I sank into a chair and tried to take some deep breaths while the two of them stood mutely and looked at me. “Just give me a minute,” I managed to say. I took some more breaths. I was curiously angry with both of them. “Mark, why didn’t you go to the yard today?”
“We decided to drive down to West Cork for New Year’s. We spent a couple of nights at Castletownshend.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you call Finbar?”
“I tried, but the phone down there was on the blink. Anyway, Finbar knows how to run a boatyard without me. What’s going on, Willie? What’s wrong?”
“There’s a goddamned corpse out there on the foreshore, that’s what’s wrong, and I thought it was you!”
Mark turned and left the cottage, and Annie started after him. “Hold it, Annie! Please don’t go out there. Really, you don’t want to.” She stopped.
Mark stuck his head inside the door. “The police are here; you’d better come and talk with them.”
I walked from the cottage to find two policemen on the foreshore, kneeling over the corpse. They were wearing yellow rain gear; it was coming down hard, now. One of them, the sergeant in charge at the little Carrigaline station, got up and came over to me.
“Mr. Lee?”
“Yes, I’m Will Lee. I called you.” I told him my story. “I don’t think it was there when I left the cottage; I would have smelled it. It must have washed up while I was out walking.”
The sergeant nodded. “I’d say you’re right. They don’t smell much when they’re still in the water, but once they’re out, they go bad very quickly. He’s been in the water for a few days, I’d say.”
“Do you think he was dumped around here?” Mark asked.
“Maybe, but he could have been put in the water in Carrigaline, or almost any place in Cork Harbour. The tides do some odd things, and the current in the river here is pretty stiff at times.”
“About two knots at full ebb or flow,” Mark said.
The sergeant turned and looked at his men, who were rolling the corpse into a plastic bag for loading onto a stretcher. “I’d like you both to come and have a look at him; I know he’s not a pretty sight, but he won’t get any prettier, and I’d like to know if you recognize him.”
We followed the sergeant down to the foreshore; a policeman was just zipping the bag shut. He partly unzipped it again for our benefit. Mark and I looked at the face.
“I don’t know him,” Mark said. “At least, I don’t think so. It’s pretty hard to imagine what he looked like without the swelling.”
“And you, sir?” the sergeant asked of me.
I started to say, no, I didn’t recognize the man, but then my eyes drifted downward from the face and stopped. “Just a minute,” I said. I found a tin can on the wet foreshore, got some water, and splashed a little on the corpse. Some mud and weed washed away.
“Jesus Christ,” Mark said quietly.
We were looking at a heart-shaped tattoo on the corpse’s chest; the initials, “M. M.” were clearly visible. “His name is Donal O’Donnell,” I said to the policeman.
“One of the twins? From Kinsale?”
“Yes. The tattoo is the only way I could tell them apart.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
I shook my head. “I think he and his brother used to share a flat somewhere, but I heard he had moved into his own place; I don’t know where, though.”
“We’ll find out, then we should be able to get a fingerprint identification, as well. I’ll need you to sign a statement of identification in a day or two.”
“Any idea how he died?” Mark asked.
“Well, this is unofficial, but he was shot in the back of the head.”
“A proper execution, then.”
The sergeant nodded. “Looks that way. What’s more, he was kneecapped.”
We were all a bit subdued at dinner.
“Donal, he was the nice one, wasn’t he?” Annie asked.
I nodded. “I liked him. He wasn’t like Denny at all. I always thought that identical twins were supposed to be more alike than anybody. They could hardly have been more different. To think that Denny could …” I left the remark hanging.
“I’m thinking the same way you are,” Mark said quietly. “Without any sort of evidence, I believe implicitly that Denny killed his brother. I think he was perfectly capable of it.”
We ate silently for a while.
“What does this mean in terms of the boat?” Annie asked.
“Not much, I suppose,” Mark replied. “If anything, it means we’ll have to worry less about Denny. If he did it he’s surely on the run. He won’t have time for us. He won’t stay around Cork, where he’s known, either.”
“It’s ironic that just when Derek has arranged all this security, we’re less likely to need it,” I said. I had told Mark about Major Primrose, and he had canceled the local guard.
“I’m quite happy to have it, anyway,” Mark said. We were silent again.
“Well, I’ve told you about Paris,” I said, finally. “What’s the news here?”
“Not much,” Annie replied. “Oh, there was a bank robbery in Cork; it was quite funny, really. The robbers seemed rather awkward, apparently, then by coincidence, an armored car rolled up to the bank to make a delivery, and they got three or four times as much as they might have a few minutes earlier. They just blundered their wa
y through and walked off with a fortune.”
“They haven’t caught them?”
“No; they found the car they’d used—stolen from a local fisherman—remember that big fellow with the red beard on the fishing boat when we ran over his salmon nets last autumn? Shook his fist at us? His car, it was—a Volkswagen.”
I remembered. I also remembered the Volkswagen that had followed me when I left the boatyard, and the familiar-looking, red-bearded man in it, and the number plate, OOP. All these things, the bank, the car, the fisherman, the murder of Donal O’Donnell, seemed to be rubbing together. There was one more link in the chain, but I didn’t know about that yet. I would soon.
33
IT WAS NEARLY TEN O’CLOCK when I arrived at the cottage, but I knew she wouldn’t be asleep yet.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, without enthusiasm, when she opened the door.
“Do you mind if I come in?” I asked, when she didn’t automatically show me in. “I want to talk with you.”
“I don’t much want to talk to you,” she said sullenly. She still didn’t ask me in.
“What’s going on, Connie?” I asked.
“Not very much that I’d care to discuss with you. Why don’t you go back to Paris and do your talking there?”
So that was it. She’d somehow found out that I hadn’t spent New Year’s with my parents. I certainly didn’t want to discuss that with her. “Donal O’Donnell is dead,” I said. That did it; she let me in. Oddly, she didn’t look terribly surprised.
“How?” she asked. She didn’t offer me a drink.
“I found his body washed up at Drake’s Pool this afternoon. It had been in the water several days.”
“How?” she asked again.
“He was shot in the back of the head.” I stopped, uncertain whether to go on. Her face would not let me stop. “And kneecapped.”
“Oh, God,” she said softly, sinking down onto the couch. “I can’t believe he did that.”
“Denny?”
She nodded. “And I certainly don’t believe Maeve could have been a party to it.”
I sat down beside her. “Maeve? Why Maeve? Why would she be mixed up in Donal’s death?”
“I hope she’s not,” Connie sighed, “but she left the convent on New Year’s Eve; just walked out in the middle of the night. I think she’s with Denny. But I don’t think she could have had anything to do with killing Donal, I won’t believe that.”
I was baffled by all of this. “I don’t understand; why would Maeve be with Denny O’Donnell?”
“She’s been seeing him for a long time; she finally told me about it after your fight with Denny at the boatyard.”
“Well, I had sort of a fight with her, too.” Now I was beginning to understand why Denny had attacked me.
She nodded. “I know. That was my fault, I guess, I’d been telling her about my troubles with you.”
“Jesus, what troubles?”
“You son of a bitch,” she shot back, “you were supposed to be with me on New Year’s Eve; and then, supposed to be with your parents. All along it was that aristocratic bitch in heat from London, wasn’t it? Lady Jane.” She spat out the name.
“All right,” I said, backed into a corner, “All right, I lied about that. It was just ….”
“Just a better offer.”
I squirmed under her gaze. I couldn’t think of any way to reply to that. “What about Maeve?” I asked, grateful for a new subject to hide behind. “Where is she? What will she do now?”
Connie turned and looked into the dying turf fire. “I don’t know where she is,” she said sadly, “but I think I may know what she’s doing; I have a feeling she’s doing banks.”
“Banks?” I was baffled again for just a moment. “You mean that thing in Cork? Jesus, what makes you think that?”
“Oh, in some circles it’s the time-honored method of raising money.”
This was all coming too thick and fast for me. “Now, wait a minute, let me get this straight: You think that Maeve and Denny O’Donnell killed his brother—his identical twin, for Christ’s sake—then stuck up a bank and went off to join the IRA?”
“I do not believe Maeve had anything to do with killing Donal.”
“But the rest? Is that what you think?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I think.” I was annoyed at all this outrageous fantasizing and happy to have something to be annoyed about to keep from discussing how I had spent New Year’s. “I think that’s the craziest thing I ever heard. I think you’re crazy. I think that none of this makes any sense at all … except …” I faltered as I began to think about it.
“Except,” she ticked off her points on her fingers, “that Donal is dead, ritually murdered; Maeve is gone from the convent without a trace; the bank has been robbed—”
I broke in. “I haven’t heard anything about one of the robbers being a woman.”
“Maeve is a big girl, five nine or ten—taller than Denny—and in a stocking mask, if she didn’t speak, she could pass for a man. The shorter of the two robbers did all the talking.”
“Where are you getting all this information? I haven’t heard any of this.”
“You forget that my father was manager of that bank before he retired. He’s had all the gossip.”
“But why would Maeve do all this?” I felt I was beginning to lose this argument on points.
“Well, you’ve heard a bit of her politics, haven’t you? Maeve is a very angry person; she’s very political; and she’s always been very activist in everything she’s done. Lately, she’s been spouting a real load of rubbish about what brave people the Baeder-Meinhof gang are, and how nothing’s ever going to change without—”
“Baeder-Meinhof? Those crazy people in Germany?”
She nodded. “Them, and the Red Brigade in Italy, those are sort of her heroes, those and the Irish Freedom Brigade … ”
“Jesus, isn’t that the outfit that claimed credit for bombing Derek Thrasher’s office in London?”
“Now you’re getting the picture,” she said.
I was very much afraid that I was. “Well, shouldn’t you tell the police about all this?”
“Oh, no,” she said firmly, “this is just all my crazy notion, remember? I don’t have any real evidence of all this.”
“But Donal is dead. Surely … ”
“And I can’t bring him back. Maeve is still my friend, and I know she couldn’t have had anything to do with that. If you’re so hot about this, why don’t you go to the police?”
That shut me up. I just wanted to be as far from all this as possible.
“I thought not,” she said, after my silence. “Anyway, you’re out of it, now. Maeve and Denny are gone, and they won’t be back here. Now you can build your boat in peace.”
I hoped to God she was right.
34
“SUNSHINE TRAVEL.” The voice on the phone was pleasant, eager to help.
“I wish to arrange a special holiday in a warm and sunny place.”
There was only a tiny pause. “What sort of holiday did you have in mind?”
“I have one or two ideas, but I’d like the advice of your managing director.”
“Who recommended our agency?” The voice was cooler, harder now.
“My bishop.”
“How many in your party?”
“Two. A priest and a nun.
“Are you interested in a retreat?”
“I’m more interested in something educational.”
“That could be very expensive.”
“The parish coffers will bear any expense nicely.”
“Your name?”
She paused and thought for a moment. “Sister Concepta.”
“Please hold.” He covered the phone with his hand and held a muffled conversation. “Where are you now?”
“In a call box in Grafton Street, across from Switzer’s.”
“Are you
alone?”
“The priest is with me.”
“Get rid of him. Buy a newspaper, stand in front of Switzer’s for fifteen minutes, reading the paper. Then walk to the southwest corner of St. Stephen’s Green. There’s a call box there. Wait for a call.”
“Right.” She hung up the phone and turned. “Take this stuff,” she said, thrusting her packages upon him, “and go back to the hotel. Wait for me there.”
“Oh, no,” he replied. “I’m coming with you.”
“They insisted I come alone,” she said tightly, grateful that they had. “It’s the way it has to be.”
“Not a chance,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere without me.”
“Listen,” she said impatiently, “this is our only chance, the only contact we’ve got; everything depends on it. They want me alone; we’ll do it their way. Otherwise we’re done. Do you understand?”
He wavered, then gave in. “All right. Call me in an hour to let me know you’re okay.”
“I’ll call you when I can. We’ll both have to wait; this is their game, now, but if you haven’t heard from me by six o’clock tonight, consider that you’re on your own. Take the money and go.”
“Jesus, go where?”
“England would be best. Try for another contact there.”
He looked at her for a moment, then nodded and walked away, rearranging the bulky packages. She walked across the street, bought an Irish Times, walked to Switzer’s, stopped and, glancing at her watch, began to read the newspaper. There were two stories to interest her, both on the front page. The first made her smile; the second made her grind her teeth. Fifteen minutes later she started up Grafton Street toward the Green.