Death at Christy Burke's

by Anne Emery

  “Ah. Michael. We were just finishing up.”

  “Good timing. I’ve a question for you, Monty.” They all left the pub together, and Michael told them what he had discovered at the Foyleside Centre for Longterm Care. “So, Frank Fanning is carrying a heavy burden of guilt. But, Monty, you’ve dealt with accident cases, have you not?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Is it possible someone else could be at fault for an accident, by distracting the driver’s attention or something like that?”

  “Sure. Might be kind of hard to prove now, with Fegan in the shape he’s in. Or they could have been drinking together, Fegan knowing full well how much Fanning had to drink and getting in the car with him anyway. I had a case recently in which the plaintiff, the passenger, was catastrophically injured. Something like poor Fegan. But his damage award was cut in half because of his contributory negligence.”

  “That could be the case here?”

  “Maybe, but sounds as if you’ll never know. How long ago was the accident?”

  “Eight years or so, back in 1984.”

  “And even if that is what happened, how could it do anybody any good now to find out?”

  “It could relieve Frank Fanning of some of the guilt he’s been carrying around all these years.”

  “But, presumably, Fanning already knows what happened.”

  “He may not know. He may have been so drunk that he didn’t grasp the extent of Fegan’s complicity, if that is the case. Frank is still making guilt trips, mercy visits, to Fegan after all this time. He obviously feels responsible. If it could be put to him, privately and compassionately, ‘Frank, we know what really happened. You’re no more at fault than Fegan. It’s time to forgive yourself.’ A bit of healing for Frank. That sort of thing.”

  “And, as far as the graffiti goes, Fanning is not a killer, or not a man who took Fegan’s life in every meaningful sense of the word. If indeed the graffiti was about him.”

  “Which, of course, we don’t know,” Brennan reminded them.

  “Even if it isn’t, Brennan, how could it hurt to minister to the man?”

  Brennan relented a bit at that, though Michael knew he and Monty were far from convinced that there was anything to gain by pursuing the matter. But Michael persevered to the extent that they agreed to accompany him to his next destination, the offices of the Derry Journal. His purpose there was to search for more newspaper accounts of the 1984 accident. There might be something that had not been recorded in Fegan’s scrapbook.

  The Journal’s receptionist showed them to a back room, where they began flipping through old editions of the paper. It didn’t take Michael long to find what he was looking for, in the July 31, 1984, edition:

  Man Severely Injured in Road Accident

  A young man was transported to hospital in Derry last evening with very severe injuries, following a single-vehicle accident on the Groarty Road. The injured man has been identified as Donal J. Fegan, age 20, a resident of Derry City. RUC Inspector Lyle Robinson said Fegan was found alone in the car, on the passenger side. The driver apparently lost control, and the car was found upside down at the edge of the road. The car was stolen, Inspector Robinson said, and the driver has not been found. Police were tipped off to the accident by an anonymous caller. A witness told the Derry Journal that the RUC removed some “items” from the boot of the car, but Inspector Robinson would not confirm that information. The investigation continues.

  Had Frank Fanning left the scene, left his badly injured passenger alone in the wrecked vehicle on the roadside? That would surely add to the burden of guilt. Had the anonymous tip come from Frank himself? Michael would dearly love to question the investigating officer. But that was way beyond his abilities as an amateur detective.

  So he went to work on Monty. And Monty agreed to try to secure an appointment with Inspector Robinson of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Meanwhile, Michael had another destination in mind, beyond the walls of Derry. He intended to board a bus for County Donegal and make the acquaintance of Jimmy O’Hearn’s sister at McKelvey’s Bar.

  Brennan

  The last place on earth Brennan Burke wanted to be was at the heavily guarded Royal Ulster Constabulary station in Derry. But Monty was hoping to assist Michael O’Flaherty in his commendable efforts to make things right for Frank Fanning. Talking to the police was nothing new for Monty, but Derry was not Halifax, and the RUC was not the Halifax Police Department. Nevertheless, Brennan acceded to Monty’s request that he come along to pose as a kindly priest who had recently come upon poor Donal Fegan and who struggled to understand what had happened out on the Groarty Road in July 1984, which resulted in the wasting away of such a promising young man.

  Of course nobody was interested in helping Father Burke and Mr. Collins secure an appointment with Inspector Lyle Robinson. The inspector was out. Then he was in, but he was tied up. Monty counselled Brennan that patience was their only hope. The day the Man Above was handing out the virtue of patience, Brennan Burke had been too impatient to wait in line for it. And the two hours he and Collins had to wait for Robinson gave rise to fantasies of trashing the police headquarters and leaving it a rubble of stone and sticks, with Inspector Lyle Robinson lying in a heap at the bottom of it. Difficult it would be to make the mental transition from this mode of thinking to the mode of mild-mannered priest of the New Testament of brotherly love. But, finally, they were ushered in to see the man who had investigated Donal Fegan’s car accident. Monty cautioned Brennan not to mention Frank Fanning’s name. As if Brennan Burke would walk into an Ulster police station and start spewing names. But he took the point; they did not know whether the inspector had ever been able to identify the driver in the crash.

  Brennan had never seen a man who looked so exhausted. Inspector Lyle Robinson’s pale blue eyes were bloodshot, underlined with dark circles. He ran a hand over his close-cropped grey hair, and the hand stayed up, as if he had forgotten it was there. Every movement seemed laboured, as if he was completely drained of energy.

  “How can I help you, sir? Father? I’m a wee bit busy now.” Wee but buzzy nye, it sounded like.

  “We won’t keep you two minutes, Inspector Robinson,” Monty assured him, “and we are most appreciative of your help. Father Burke here is of course a priest, and I am a lay minister.” It was the first Brennan had heard of that. But Collins was, as always, convincing. “One of the people we have met in our ministry is Donal Fegan. And, simply put, we are trying to piece together what happened back in 1984.”

  “Drink driving is what happened.”

  “Oh! How terrible, and what a senseless waste of a young man’s life.”

  “Aye, it is. But maybe not as terrible as what would have happened if he had reached his destination.”

  “Oh! Where was he going?”

  “He was headed towards the border on the Groarty Road. You’d have to be out of your mind with drink to flip a car on the Groarty Road. Do you know it? Straight as an arrow. Anyway, you may or may not know that they were on their way to pick up a fertilizer bomb to use against a target here in Londonderry.”

  Ah. Here it comes, thought Brennan.

  “No!” Monty protested. “There must be some mistake. His room is full of testimonials to his fine character.” Monty spoke as sincerely as if he did not spend every day of his working life inventing bogus testimonials for characters who were anything but fine.

  Robinson snorted. “Fegan’s family and his admirers and his terrorist brethren can say what they like. Doesn’t change what we know about him. Maybe they think exploding a car bomb in front of a building full of people is a mark of a fine character.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “We know.” Robinson sighed and sat back in his chair. He looked as if he could drop off to sleep in an instant. “I don’t know what your politics are, Mr. . . . Collins. Or yours, Father
. . . Burke, is it?” His gimlet eyes took them both in.

  “Our politics don’t include murder, Inspector,” Monty declared in earnest.

  “Well then, that differentiates you from an awful lot of people in this city and in this country. Have you any idea what it’s like to be a police officer in this place, knowing you may not get home to your family at the end of your shift because a bomb may go off and blow you to smithereens? Have you had a look at this city? You’ve heard of fire sales? The shops here have bomb sales. Have you any inkling of what it’s like to be a British soldier stationed over here, seeing your companions ambushed by snipers?”

  Brennan spoke up then. “I don’t condone bombing and killing and intimidation, Inspector, although you’ll have to admit Catholics have not been treated as equal citizens in the North of Ireland. I won’t go through the eight hundred years since this island was invaded but how can we forget Oliver Cromwell, destroyer of churches and killer of Catholics? Cromwell, who gave the Irish the choice to go west or be killed — ‘To Hell or Connacht’ — leaving the good lands for the English and Scottish settlers —” He’d better shut up. He had slipped out of character, and was no longer coming across as a simple, kindly cleric in service of the sick and helpless.

  “There is truth in all of that, no question,” Robinson replied. “But the atrocities have not all been on the Protestant side, as you well know. And that’s been true all through our history. But guns and bombs in the 1990s are hardly the way to redress those historic injustices, wouldn’t you agree? The Republicans think the whole country should be run from Dublin, that Northern Ireland should not exist. I say, why shouldn’t it exist? You mentioned the plantation of Ireland by the English and the Scots. There was some movement in earlier years, but it really got underway in the sixteen hundreds. As you say, the Anglo-Normans arrived nearly five hundred years before that.”

  Robinson leaned forward and rested his arms on his desk; he addressed himself to Monty. “Where are you from, Mr. Collins?”

  “I live in Canada.”

  “How are the native people doing over there?”

  “Not well,” Monty had to concede.

  “The English and Scots settlers came to Ireland roughly around the time the French and English started settling in Canada. I’d say the aboriginal populations of Canada and the U.S.A. are worse off than the Catholics of Northern Ireland. Does anybody think the French and the English, the Irish and the Scots, the Germans and the Italians should pack up and leave Canada?”

  The last thing we need, Brennan thought, is to get into a sectarian row.

  Monty was obviously thinking along the same lines. He got the conversation back on track. “Tell me about the plan to set the bomb.”

  The inspector took a few moments to change his focus, then replied, “Do you know what I mean by the Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall?”

  Brennan felt a spasm of fear, right to the tips of his fingers.

  “Yes,” Monty said, “the big stone place with the spires, up on the hill.”

  “Fegan and his co-conspirators were planning to blow it up.”

  “Oh, Christ! No!” Monty exclaimed. There was nothing calculated about his response this time.

  Derry, or Londonderry as it was called by the Protestants, was the mythic city of Protestant Ulster. It didn’t start out that way. Derry had been the site of a monastery founded by St. Columba in the sixth century. And for nine hundred years afterwards, efforts were made to keep it an oasis of calm and contemplation. But the area was a strategic site overlooking the Foyle River; control of Derry meant control over access to the interior of the country. The English built a fortification in the year 1600 and in the following decades proceeded with the plantation of Ulster, the colonization of the province by English and Scottish settlers, and the concomitant effort to displace and subdue the native Irish population. The tables turned in 1641, when the Irish massacred thousands of plantation settlers in various parts of Ulster. When the Protestants were able to regroup, they massacred the Catholics in return. It was a time of horrific violence on both sides. The fear never left the Protestant mind, Brennan knew, that the Catholic Irish would repeat the slaughter of 1641.

  Derry’s big moment in history came in 1688, when Catholic forces under the banner of James II approached the walled city. Things did not look good for the Protestant defenders until, according to a mixture of legend and fact, thirteen young men — who came to be known as the Apprentice Boys — slammed shut the gates of the city to keep the invaders out. The Siege of Derry followed some months later in 1689 and lasted for more than one hundred days. One hundred days during which the people inside the walls were starving, and would eat anything they could find. Brennan knew the old joke: “A Derry menu: dog, fed on the bodies of papists, two quid.” When reinforcements arrived and the siege ended, many Protestants took the view that providence had delivered them from the hands of the popish hordes. The event provided the Protestants of Ulster with their national defining myth. And their rallying cry, “No Surrender!”

  The baronial building that loomed over the Catholic Bogside, with its tower and spires — the Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall — was, if not in appearance, certainly in symbolism, the Parthenon of Protestant identity in the city. And Fanning and Fegan planned to blow it up! Even apart from the loss of life and the property damage, the psychological effect would have been incalculable and the vengeance unthinkable. Thank God the plot had failed.

  “Did you catch the others involved?” Monty asked.

  “Well, there was no point catching Donal Fegan. He’s in hospital in a vegetative state. Has been since the accident. As for the others, we have our suspicions as to who was going to provide the explosives. We are keeping an eye on things. Next time they make a move, we’ll be ready.”

  “Was Fegan involved in any previous activities of this nature?”

  “Fegan was a louser. Scum. The newspaper coverage — at least in the Republican press — was sickening. Making this clown out to be a model citizen. He was in fact a foul-mouthed, violent petty criminal who couldn’t learn a trade or hold a job or his liquor. That may be news to you if you’ve only come to know the Fegan family recently.”

  As far as Brennan was concerned, he and Monty had just come to know Frank Fanning himself recently, as recently as the RUC inspector’s revelations thirty seconds ago. They, and Michael O’Flaherty, would have to come to terms with what they had learned about Fanning. Frank was now a serious contender as the subject of the graffiti on Christy’s wall.

  Brennan and Monty thanked the inspector, then returned to the Abbey B and B, rousted Michael from his room, went out for a bite to eat, and gave him the bad news about Frank Fanning. Michael looked like a man who had been betrayed by his dearest friend. They all took a walk around the city walls and polished off the evening with a few pints and a session of traditional music at Peadar O’Donnell’s pub. The session was brilliant. The accordion player had a good rolling style of play, and the bodhran provided appropriate and sympathetic support to the rhythms of the pieces, but it was the fiddle that was outstanding: the intricacy and drive of the playing, the exquisite tonal quality, were everything you could ask for. Brennan had no inclination to leave while the music was going on, and his companions raised no argument. By the time they set out for their lodgings, they came across very few people in the dark city streets, with the exception of police and soldiers.

  Michael

  Michael surprised his companions the following morning by announcing that he would not be travelling with them back to Dublin. His mission now lay in a small town called Ballybofey in County Donegal, where he hoped to meet Jimmy O’Hearn’s sister. He knew her place of employment was McKelvey’s Bar. If Michael could enjoy a pint in a new setting and find out a bit about another of the Christy Burke Four while he was at it, so be it.

  He prayed he would not find out something terrible abo
ut Jimmy O’Hearn, the way he had about Frank Fanning. It was nearly impossible for Michael to picture Frank planning an atrocity like the bombing of the Apprentice Boys Memorial. It was Michael’s understanding that the IRA generally gave coded warnings to the police to clear a target like that, to prevent loss of life. But that didn’t always work out, obviously; just look at the body count. Surely, Frank would have backed off when he realized the enormity of what he had planned to do. Or would he? Well, Michael hoped there was nothing remotely like that in the history of Mr. O’Hearn.

  The day was close and muggy, too warm for clerical dress. Michael had a cool shower and donned a pair of khaki pants and a pale blue short-sleeved shirt. He caught an early afternoon bus to County Donegal, which, as far north as it is, is not part of Northern Ireland, but part of the Irish Republic. Michael had a little laugh to himself when he thought of giving directions. “Well, it’s in the north of Ireland, but don’t call it northern Ireland because it’s not Northern Ireland. But it’s not north of Northern Ireland, nor is it south of Northern Ireland; it’s to the west of it. Up north.”

  McKelvey’s Bar was situated in Glenfin Street in the lovely little town. The place looked as much like a family home as it did a pub. It was a large white house with black trim and a black roof with three dormers. Chimneys stuck up at both gable ends. Michael went inside and sat at the bar. There was a young dark-haired girl serving drinks, and Michael asked after Sarah O’Hearn, or formerly known as O’Hearn.

  “Oh, that would be Sarah Duffy. She’s just out on an errand; she’ll be back soon.”