Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16

by Bartholomew Gill

  “I, well, chose less risk, even though I’m from the Short Strand and the tenth of eleven kids, I kid you not.” It was a small, often besieged Catholic enclave in a Protestant section of Belfast.

  “Sure, me da worked at what he could, given the inset. And he did as right for us as any man there. Ring me up, if you think I might help. Otherwise, I won’t bother you—unless I have something...critical.”

  Slipping her hands in the front pockets of her jeans, she turned and walked out of the security offi?ce.

  At the desk, McGarr scanned the logbook of cars admitted to the college. The fi?nal entry was at 11:07 P.M., when the automobile of a Professor Hurley left. McGarr fl?ipped the pages, noting that it was either policy not to admit cars after nine at night or none seemed to arrive after that hour.

  An arm of the chair had broken, where the man had fallen heavily. He had not bothered even to get up when his assailant had entered. Or had sat back down, trusting him.

  Outside, a crowd of students had gathered at the police tape, where the uniformed Guard was keeping them back.

  “How did that woman get by you?” McGarr asked.

  “You mean the one who was just inside with you, Superintendent? She fl?ashed a Garda ID and said she was with you.”

  “Did you check the ID?”

  “Yes, I did, sir.”

  “Her name?”

  “Bresnahan, Ruth. Serious Crimes Unit.”

  It was the name of a former detective.

  “And the photo?” Ruth Bresnahan was a tall redhead.

  “It matched. I took particular notice because I thought I’d seen the woman’s face before.”

  Moving through the crowd, McGarr pulled his cell phone from his pocket.

  The number answered on the second ring. “Bresnahan and Ward,” said a deep yet womanly voice. “Aren’t you busy? Or are you in need of expert help?”

  Along with her common-law husband, Hugh Ward, another former Murder Squad staffer, Ruth Bresnahan now ran a successful security fi?rm.

  “Orla Bannon—know her?”

  “Who doesn’t? She’s the diva of Ath Cliath. Column, front page whenever she wants it, features with miles of space.”

  “She just got herself into the crime scene here. The ID had her head shot with your name.”

  “Go ’way.”

  “How would she have got hold of your ID?”

  There was a pause.

  With cell phone to ear, McGarr was weaving through a stream of students.

  “Let’s see—I still have my last ID in the glove box of the car. But maybe four or fi?ve years ago, I lost another when my purse was nicked at a pub in Enniskillen where we were staking out Eva Morrisey. Remember?”

  He did. Bresnahan had been undercover, trying to get a lead on an IRA squad leader who had murdered her lover in Donegal.

  “Orla Bannon had covered the story from Morrisey’s arrest and trial to her sentencing. It was all hearts-and-sorrows. She portrayed her as an unloved child, the victim of an abusive upbringing and a social and court system that failed to address her obvious psychological needs.

  “And now that you’ve mentioned her name, I also remember her ringing me up around that time, wanting to know how the ‘Mata Hari of the Murder Squad’ had fared, north of the border, up Enniskillen way. She even sang it. At the time, I wondered how she knew.

  “But it’s classic Orla Bannon, all right. It’s not how you get the story, but that you get it. Which doesn’t bother her boss one bit, I bet.”

  Sweeney, who used Ath Cliath as his own literally bloody pulpit.

  “Although I hear there’s bad blood between them, with Sweeney wanting to sack her but the editors telling him she’s too well known and too knowledgeable of him and the paper to let her go.”

  “Would some other paper have her?”

  “In a heartbeat. Nobody comes through with new takes and evidence on old dead stories like O.B.”

  “She’s called that?”

  “With the allusion to the all-knowing Star Wars character not disavowed by her.”

  “She’s well scarred.”

  “On the head from truncheons. She was a kid during the civil rights marches, and it’s said by those who would know that she’s got other scars that are not merely physical.

  “Fetching, wouldn’t you say? Small, dark, fi?ne-boned but full-fi?gured. Yet she’s never married, never been in a serious relationship that I’ve heard about. And any word of one would be all over town in a jiff, given who she is.

  “If we can we help you with the Kells thing, Chief, you only have to say the word.” McGarr detected more than a little interest in her voice.

  Since leaving the Murder Squad, Bresnahan and Ward—with their knowledge of computers and databases—had provided McGarr with information he could not have obtained otherwise.

  And none of what they came up with would have to be entered into Garda fi?les and shared with the likes of Sheard.

  “Call round at six”—when McGarr held his evening squad meeting. “And, thanks, Rut’ie.” He rang off.

  McKeon was waiting for him in what had been Sloane’s offi?ce in the Trinity security headquarters, a small room with a gas fi?re in the grate and a tall, paned window that looked out on a playing fi?eld.

  “Listen to this.” McKeon hit a button on what looked like a recording machine. “Hello, Tom,” a man’s voice said. “What can I do for you?”

  Another somewhat muffl?ed voice replied, “Jesus, Ray—get here fast. I don’t know who these yokes are, but—”

  “One, I guess, is Sloane, the other the guard at the gate, the one who got thumped. Problem is”—McKeon again worked the answering machine, spooling back— “this is the prerecorded message for incoming calls.”

  McGarr again heard Sloane say, “Hello, Tom—what can I do for you?” Thereby establishing an alibi about where he was when the vehicle was let through the gate.

  “Later, he’d come back, erase it, and put in a regular ‘You’ve reached security headquarters at Trinity College. Please leave a message’... and so forth.

  “As well, there’s this.” Moving toward another machine, McKeon punched two other buttons. “It’s the voice recorder in the Old Library. It’s switched on whenever sensors detect movement in the gift shop and book Treasury rooms after hours. When I walked in, it was the fi?rst thing I noticed. This light?” His fi?nger swung to a red light the size of a 50P coin. “It was blinking.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” said the same voice. Sloane’s voice. “If you take away what’s in this room, the police will hound you into your graves.”

  “Use your hand,” said a deep, gravelly, and obviously scrambled voice. “Kill the alarms and open it up.”

  There was a pause and then “Do it!”

  McKeon stopped the tape. “Scramblers like that are used on the teley for interviews with informants on news shows. You know, for anonymity.”

  McGarr nodded as McKeon began to fast-forward the tape.

  “I thought you said you were only going to take—”

  Again, McKeon stopped the tape. “There he’s so frightened he’s forgot they’re being taped.”

  “Open your fi?st!” the curious voice continued. “Open your bloody fi?st or I’ll stomp it to bits.”

  “You said you—”

  “I never said a thing.”

  “And me,” another scrambled but much higher voice put in, “I lied.”

  There followed noises of something or somebody falling, a groan, grunts, scraping.

  Then, a scrambled: “Give me a hand with him. Right enough—up he goes.”

  “No!” Sloane wailed.

  They heard a clump, then another and another, then: “Blood enough for you?” Even through the scrambling, a kind of evil joy could be heard. “Enough to be taken seriously. Pity is—there’s not enough. A man like that deserves all this and more.”

  “Too-da-loo.”

  “Ta.”

 
; What they then heard, McGarr assumed, was a rushing of air, as the atmosphere within the case was evacuated. And footsteps as the two left with their booty—the books of Kells, Armagh, and Durrow.

  “Any word on the guard, Tom Healey?”

  “Still unconscious.”

  “We’d best speak to Sloane’s family directly.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  RAYMOND SLOANE HAD LIVED IN A SECTION OF THE Liberties that had been gentrifi?ed, the former commercial buildings rehabbed into lofts.

  Others had been torn down with “Georgian-inspired condominiums,” McGarr had read, erected in their stead. Randomly, it seemed, unpaned arched windows studded the facades, and every doorway carried an exaggerated fanlight.

  The Sloane residence was far different and the genuine article altogether, McGarr could see as the car rounded a narrow corner in the warren of ancient laneways that marked the area.

  It was a low two-storied affair with a sharply gabled slate roof and narrow windows. The front door opened directly on the footpath, where a uniformed Guard was standing, keeping the Fourth Estate at bay.

  “Would you look at this cock-up.”

  A clutch of television vans had gathered before a dusty attached row house.

  “All because of Sheard, who is a piece of work. He had to know how quickly the press would suss out who got whacked, once he said it was murder. There were only four guards’ families to ring up.

  “But him—he didn’t give a shit, not being the one having to deal with it.”

  McGarr raised a fi?nger to the windscreen. “Go down the block to the second alley. We’ll go in the back.” As a child, he had roamed the area with his mates; the buildings may have changed, but the ancient streets and laneways had not.

  But a large BMW with tinted windows blocked the laneway, and they had to walk.

  “How ya keeping on?” It was a question McKeon had been asking McGarr now and then since Noreen’s death.

  But he only nodded and reached for the handle to the back gate of the Sloane residence. McGarr was not used to divulging his feelings, nor did he do that easily.

  The small back garden had been paved with concrete and fi?lled with sheds from which they could hear pigeons cooing. Planters, some still in bloom, lined a sunny wall.

  McKeon knocked on the back door with a frosted glass window. From the inside, they heard a deep man’s voice say, “Jesus fookin’ Christ, Ma—didn’t I tell yeh to lock the back gate?”

  Then, louder. “Yeah?”

  “Police.”

  “What police?”

  “Murder Squad.”

  “And bloody fookin’ late, yiz are.”

  They heard a lock turn, and the door was jerked open. In it stood a large young man with a kind of silver ring through the septum of his nose.

  His head was shaved, and over his broad shoulders he was wearing something like a woolen half-tunic. His trousers were light green and looked more like pajama bottoms. On his feet were sandals.

  Apart from the ring, most noticeable were his bulging biceps that were mottled with patterns of tattoos. Yet from his long face and beaklike nose, McGarr could see he was Raymond Sloane’s son. Early twenties, maybe twenty-fi?ve.

  “Yiz fookin’ cunts—nice of yeh to stop round. We thought you’d taken to informing families of murder victims on the teley. What’s next, E-mail?”

  “Would your mother be at home?” McGarr asked, noting that the nose ring was shaped rather like a Claddagh with azure studs on either end. He wondered how it must feel to have something like that there. Always.

  “And now sneaking in through the back.” His eyes, which were dark, played over the two smaller older men assessingly. “Two poncey codger cunts. What’s wrong—gone suddenly camera shy? Or did yiz leave your balls back at Trinity?”

  McGarr glanced at McKeon before pulling out his Garda ID, which he held toward Sloane with his thumb covering his name. “And you are?”

  “Does it fookin’ matter?”

  When Sloane’s eyes fell to the card, McKeon’s hands shot out, one thumb digging into the young man’s neck, the second fi?nding another pressure point on the triceps of his right arm.

  Sloane actually yelped, as McKeon jerked him out of the doorway and over an outstretched knee—depositing him rather gently on the concrete. Stepping back, he advised, “You. Stay. There.”

  McGarr moved into a low hall that led to what had been a scullery in days gone by but was now used as a kind of closet.

  A small kitchen with a bedroom off it came next, then more narrow hall.

  He found an older woman seated between two others, who were younger, in a small sitting room that was packed with overstuffed furniture, tables, fl?oor lamps, more potted plants, framed photographs, curios, and even a spinet piano.

  Eyes on McGarr, none said a word.

  “Chief Superintendent McGarr.” He took a step into the room. “I have some questions for you.”

  “Took you long enough,” said one of the younger women.

  From the back, he could hear McKeon. “And don’t even think about getting up.”

  “But it’s me own fookin’ house.”

  “Shut your bloody gob. You think your mother needs you giving out like this?”

  McGarr took a seat opposite the three women.

  With eyes red and swollen, the wife had a fi?stful of photographs in her hand. Her cheeks, which had fallen into loose folds of skin, were streaked with tears. With prominent teeth and a weak chin, she had never been a pretty woman. But somehow she looked older than Sloane himself had in death.

  Her eyes fl?ickered up at him. “I know you know what it’s like. But...”

  McGarr only nodded, his personal tragedy having been played up by the press. Even now, his name was seldom mentioned without reference to the still-unsolved case.

  One of the younger women twitched and opened her mouth to speak. But her mother’s free hand came down on her thigh. “It’s unfortunate how you came to learn of this tragedy. But my job is different. I’m here to gather information.” He turned to the young woman on the mother’s left. “And you are?”

  “Siobhan Sloane.”

  “And you?”

  “Sally.”

  McGarr addressed the wife. “Was there anything unusual in your husband’s life of late?”

  Siobhan rolled her eyes.

  “What wasn’t?”

  “Derek Greene—” Sally began saying.

  But her mother cut her off. “Please, let me. There’re things you don’t know.” She drew in a breath and looked at a point over McGarr’s shoulder. “You could say it began with the death of Derek Greene about a fortnight ago. But”—her eyes fell to McGarr’s—“it began much before that. Two years ago, at least.”

  “Ah, Ma—he don’t need to know that, now that Da’s dead. That’s family business. Private like,” said Sally.

  “You see, Raymond had a drug problem.”

  “But he was over it. Why bring it up?”

  “First, it was marijuana when he played in a band, back when we was young. Then it ran on to pills, cocaine, and fi?nally heroin, which he kicked three years ago, when Trinity announced it would begin taking urine samples from its security staff.

  “So nobody would know, he went away to Holland, he did, on what should have been his holidays. Came back clean.” Her eyes veered off. “For a while.

  “All along, you see, he’d been a maintenance user, and clever like that—holding down the job, pleasant even home here, not like the other men hereabouts, always down the pub pissing away any extra money. Seldom jonesing in any way noticeable.

  “He had the dose down, and it was like other people on Prozac or antianxiety tablets. He’d be alive today if he could have stayed on it.

  “But once off, well, he became another man altogether. Nervous was not the word for it. Frazzled he was, all the time. He seldom slept for the fi?rst year.

  “So, he tried drink, which made him sic
k and was no good for the work. Methadone, which he said was like weak heroin and just made him want to go back to the real stuff. And they might test for it without telling.

  “All of which made him miserable until... until he found something new he wouldn’t tell me about, apart from saying his troubles were over.

  “And they were, sure. For maybe six or seven months, when I discovered he’d been into our savings for old age. He’d even taken a loan on the house.

  “ ‘Not to worry, me love—I’ve got it all worked out. We’ll be in the chips big-time by year’s end. And I’ll be saying hasta la vista to effi?ng Trinity and all the bluenose pricks who teach there.’

  “It was the way he’d been talking since he’d found whatever he’d found to calm him—wild like.”

  “And stupid,” put in Sally.

  “Then Derek died, who was Raymond’s assistant, and it was like all hell broke loose for Raymond. Suddenly, he was hardly home. ‘Work, work,’ he said. ‘Who’s to say it’s not a good in itself.’ ”

  “Even stupider,” said Siobhan.

  “And when he was here at home, he was either on the phone or nipping down to the pub for a chat with some barfl?y or other. But the money improved. Last Friday didn’t he show me a deposit slip for all the money he’d taken from the savings and a receipt for

  what he’d screwed out of the house.”

  “Then there was the car,” said Sally.

  Mrs. Sloane shook her head. “Whatever will we do with it now?”

  “Ray-Boy will want it,” replied Sally.

  “Out in the alley. A big shhh-tu-pid car,” put in Siobhan.

  “Ray-Boy will take it,” said her sister.

  “The hell he will. We’ll turn it back in.”

  “He’d just signed the hire-purchase agreement,” said the wife.

  Asked McGarr, “Do you know the source of the money?”

  The wife shook her head.

  “What about people? The new people around him recently. On the phone, in the pub. I’m only asking because whoever stole from the library had to have studied Raymond’s rounds, the layout of the college, and the security protocol for the display cases. One way to do that would be to befriend the security chief.”