Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16

by Bartholomew Gill

  McGarr nodded. “In the line of duty.” He had been sued more than a few times on frivolous grounds, only to see large sums awarded by a legal system that was notoriously arbitrary. “But enough about me. What about you? Are you married?”

  Her eyes dropped to her glass. “Yes. I think I am. Or, at least, I was.” She then explained in halting tones that she had been married four years earlier to an oil broker who, fi?fteen months ago, was sent to Yemen by his fi?rm.

  “Either he walked away from me, all his responsibilities, and his life, or something catastrophic happened to him over there. Nobody’s heard from him—not his fi?rm, his parents, nor I.”

  When she raised her eyes, they were again brimming with tears. “Sorry, I’m just not in good form tonight. Not good company.”

  “Nor am I, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah, that’s nonsense. Haven’t you been good company tonight? Haven’t you cheered me up?” She clinked her glass against his. “It’s the way to get out of a depression, I’m told—putting your own troubles aside and helping others.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said a deep male voice. “It’s why I’ve come.”

  McGarr looked up. It was Chazz Sweeney himself—immense and in a powerful way formless—his nose beaked, his fl?eshy face pocked from some childhood malaise. He smiled slightly, and his bloodshot eyes surveyed them, looking sly and not a little bit predatory.

  Charles Stewart Parnell Sweeney—his complete and sardonically apt name—was a man whom McGarr thought of as more dangerous than any violent criminal in the street.

  Although only ever a Dail backbencher—and that time out of mind—Sweeney had once been said to virtually control the country through his contacts with the movers and shakers in commerce and industry.

  Nominally the director of a private merchant bank, Sweeney had a small, drab offi?ce on the Dublin quays. But he was said to have been the bagman for an older group of politicians who had been exposed, publicly shamed, stripped of much of their known wealth, and even—a few of them—placed in jail several years earlier. But not Sweeney.

  Not even when—two years ago, following the deaths of Noreen and Fitz—Sweeney was arraigned and tried on a variety of charges including the murder of Enda Flatly, a Drug Squad detective.

  A brace of the country’s best barristers, however, convinced a jury that McGarr and Ward were “contaminated with hatred for him [Sweeney] because of his stalwart religious beliefs.” Sweeney was an adherent of Opus Dei, the ultraconservative Catholic religious sect.

  McGarr himself had little history of church attendance, and Ward was shown to be “living in sin under one roof with not one but two common-law wives and children by both of those women.”

  Sweeney’s weekly newspaper, Ath Cliath, became a daily during the three and a half weeks of the trial, with coverage of both the trial and continual exposés of Ward, Bresnahan, and Ward’s other “common-law wife,” Leah Sigal, whose Jewish background was referred to often.

  During what came to be known as the Barbastro Affair, Sweeney was convicted only of possessing an illegal handgun. Sentenced to six months in prison commuted because of time served, he walked out of court the day of the decision.

  The following Monday he sued the government for “a consistent pattern of police harassment” and was awarded 2.7 million pounds.

  Yet for all his millions, Sweeney was wearing his signature wrinkled and soiled, if expensive, mac, a rumpled shirt, and a patterned red tie. His cordovan bluchers were in need of polish. There would be a navy blazer the size of a small sail beneath the mac.

  “Yes?” McGarr asked.

  “I’ve come for a wee chat. About the book.” He was sweating, in need of a shave, and his skin as always looked sickly and gray.

  Turning to the bar, Sweeney raised a fi?nger and swirled it. There was a drink in his other hand.

  “Which book?”

  “Sure—is there any other at the moment?”

  “How did you know I’d be here?” Certainly Nuala, who loathed the man, would not have told him.

  “How did I not? What’s the phrase—to be predictable is to be controllable. But you can risk that, not being controllable in any way that’s been determined thus far. Which is your great strength, McGarr. And don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise.”

  A barman, whom Sweeney had obviously tipped handily, now appeared with a tray of drinks.

  “Not to worry—I won’t interrupt your cozy fi?reside chat for long. Fancy how convenient it is, given what went on last night—yous two living so nearby. Curious how life throws people together, is it not?”

  Sweeney raised the drink in the maw of his left hand, drank it off, and set down the empty glass. From under his mac he then brought out what looked like a videotape in a clear plastic sleeve. “My purpose in coming—to give you this.” He held it out to McGarr, who only regarded the object.

  “Right enough.” Sweeney set the box on the table and picked up a full glass. “I’m no part of this. I don’t know why they chose me to be the messenger. Did I look at it? Of course I did, curiosity as always getting the better of me. And then, amn’t I a publisher these days?” His slight smile was rueful and exposed a clutch of yellowing teeth.

  “But I’m passing it on to you and not that gobshite Sheard out of concern for the cultural heritage of the country. He’s no real cop and will just make a balls of the situation.

  “Look, McGarr.” Because of his height, which had to be all of six-fi?ve, he had to bend to pick up the fresh drink. “To put it mildly, we’ve had our differences over the years, and I know you think I’m in some way responsible for your wife and Fitz, which I’m not.”

  Tilting back his head, he opened his mouth and tossed off the second drink in one swallow. As Sweeney set the glass back down, McGarr noticed that the rough contours of his face were now running with sweat.

  “But after you watch what’s in here, you’ll see that these motherless pricks aren’t bluffi?ng. Sure, the urge is to bring all the force possible down on them, which will not change one thing—they’ve got the bloody books, and we don’t.”

  “It’s a ransom demand?” asked McGarr.

  Sweeney nodded.

  “How did it come to you?”

  “Motorcycle messenger—dropped it on the desk in the newsroom and said it should be brought to me immediately.”

  “Messenger?”

  “Standard-issue leathers, boots, helmet, and goggles—I checked. No different from any other.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe two hours ago. I gave it a gander and thought it should be passed along to you pronto.”

  “How did you view it?”

  Sweeney’s massive head moved to Kara and back to McGarr. “How else? In a feckin’ videotape player.” There was a pause, and then, “Ooops—fi?ngerprints. I never thought of that. Did I chuck a spanner in the works?”

  Sweeney touched his index fi?nger to his lips, as though cogitating. Then, “No, not likely. You’ll see— they’re professionals. The entire shenanigan has been thought out to a sweet good-bye. I’m sure they considered everything. Why, even in the burn sequence, the bastards are wearing black gloves.”

  He pulled back a cuff to check a large gold watch nestled in the bramble of hair on his wrist. “Shite and double shite. I’ve got to run. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to give me a shout. I’m still at the old stand, when not at the paper. You know where it is.

  “Ms. Kennedy.” Sweeney touched a hand to his brow.

  Pivoting, as though to leave, he then careened back. “By the by, how be young Ward and his mot, Rut’ie? Thriving, I’m told. Don’t tell them but I myself— Chazz, the Terrible—contracts with them through a brace of dummy corporations, of course. I only ever hire the best, and don’t I know their quality fi?rsthand. Ouch.

  “Give them my regards on their next stop by your shop, the whole magilla between yiz all and me being just part of life. And profi?table. But I’m happy for them t
hey landed on their feet.

  “Remember, I’m only the messenger. Just the messenger.”

  In arresting Sweeney two-plus years past, Ward—a former All-Ireland and European boxing champ—had give Sweeney a thorough beating, which had cost the country an additional 500,000 quid. And, in part, had cost Ward his job.

  “Somehow, he seems larger and more ominous in person,” Kara observed.

  Watching as Sweeney stopped at the bar for another quick drink and to pay his tab—his broad but shapeless back and bent head looming like a kind of carrion bird—McGarr remembered that Flood, the publican, had an offi?ce in the cellar with a television and video player for taping World Cup matches.

  He turned to Kara Kennedy. “Would you mind if I took a look at this?”

  “How would you do that?”

  “In the pub offi?ce. I’m sure it won’t take long.”

  “You mean, you’re not inviting me?”

  “Think of this as my work. I’ll be back shortly.” Ransom demands almost always being brief. “If you have to leave, I understand. Perhaps we might do this again. Or dinner.”

  “I understand as well. You don’t trust me. I’m just another suspect. And you couldn’t have it said you allowed a suspect to view evidence.”

  Turning her head, she raised her glass. In profi?le, he decided, she was truly beautiful, given her long, slightly aquiline nose, the rake of her forehead, thick darkish eyebrows, and a defi?nite widow’s peak.

  Moving down the stairs into the cellar of the pub, McGarr remembered how miraculously Sweeney had appeared at McGarr’s father-in-law’s door in Kildare two years earlier, just as McGarr was beginning his investigation into the murder of Mary-Jo Stanton.

  At the time, she was perhaps the wealthiest woman in the country and, like Sweeney, an adherent of the secretive and reactionary Catholic sect Opus Dei.

  Having enjoyed McGarr’s parents-in-law’s vaunted hospitality and knowing the doors were never locked, Sweeney had entered the house whole hours—it was later determined—before any of the family had returned and was found sitting in the very room where Fitz’s and Noreen’s guns were kept unlocked.

  Others, including Delia Manahan, the woman who actually murdered Mary-Jo Stanton and her gardener, had also spent time in the house alone. But whoever had spiked Noreen’s favorite shotgun—inserting a 21gauge shell into the 12-gauge chamber so that it would block the barrel and explode when the larger shell was fi?red—knew guns.

  And Sweeney did much more than Manahan, whose death—McGarr suspected—Sweeney later arranged.

  In the darkness of the stairwell, McGarr stopped. He could not go on. His eyes had yet to accustom themselves to the dim light, and behind his eyelids the death scene was unfolding again.

  McGarr had not been far away—down in the sleepy Kildare village near Fitz’s estate—when Noreen rang up his cell phone, asking him to come home. The gun had exploded, Fitz was down, and it was an emergency.

  Commandeering a car, McGarr caught sight of them in the distance by the shooting blinds: Noreen down on her knees with her father’s head—looking like a bright red berry—in her lap. His arms were stretched out, his legs splayed.

  She did not rise to meet him, and once out of the car, he could see it was serious. It seemed as though the older man no longer had half of his face. One eye was untouched. It was open and staring up at her. But his brow, his other eye, his cheek, and even most of his left ear looked like it had been wiped away with one pass of something sharp.

  There was blood everywhere—on Fitz, on Noreen, in a puddle on the ground around her knees. She looked up at McGarr, her green eyes glassy. “Is he gone?” she asked in a strange, disembodied voice.

  McGarr then noticed a black and cratered spot the size of a 10P coin just behind her right ear. It looked like a splotch of dried blood, although he knew it couldn’t be.

  He was hearing the steady, distant thump of rotors from the emergency helicopter that he’d called in while driving there. He rose to direct it in.

  “Oh—where are you going, Peter? I’m not sure I can support his head much longer.”

  When McGarr glanced back at Noreen, he saw she was not speaking toward him, as though she could neither turn her head nor follow him with her eyes.

  Fitz died fi?rst, Noreen several days later.

  In a coma.

  CHAPTER

  6

  MCGARR FOUND NIALL FLOOD IN THE PUB OFFICE, going through a stack of delivery invoices.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Peter. The police is just what I need. Fookin’ help’ll steal you blind, if you let them. Look at this—charged for two dozen cases of Saxenbrau, twenty came over the threshold. Here, a dozen bottles of Black Bush with a bottle missing.

  “But it’s nothing compared with the two chancers I had in here Monday week.” A tall, thin man with silver hair, a bright red bow tie, and blue straps over a white shirt, Flood had taken over from his father, who had taken over from his father, and so forth. “Since before the fl?ood,” the chuckle went.

  “One says to me, says he, ‘None of the theft, nor the rash of broken windows, nor the trashing of the jakes will continue,’ if I ‘bring them on board,’ says he.

  “ ‘In what capacity?’ says I.

  “ ‘Protectors,’ says he. ‘People do stuff, you tell us, we fi?x ’em.’

  “Says I, ‘More easily said than done.’ No geniuses, they were at a loss. ‘For you to fi?x yourselves.’ I threw them out and rang up your cohorts over at the substa

  tion.”

  “Immigrants?”

  “Nothing of the kind. Irish as you and me, apart from the bangles and rings in their ears and noses. The one had a bloody big stud—like a tie tack—through his tongue. Made him lisp.”

  “Tall fella? Blond with broad shoulders?”

  “Nah. More like a midget, he was. Dark. The one with him was blond with broad shoulders, though he didn’t open his mouth.”

  “Anything in his nose?”

  “Snot, I should imagine. But I didn’t check.”

  McGarr explained what he wanted, and that it was offi?cial. “Won’t take but a sec.”

  “I’ll go up, then, and see who’s stealing from me aboveground.”

  McGarr thumbed on the machine and took Flood’s chair, wishing he’d thought to carry a drink down with him.

  The video began with a blank screen and pipe-andfi?ddle music, some traditional tune McGarr had heard before but couldn’t name.

  As the screen brightened, Newgrange—the ancient passage grave on the banks of the Boyne near Slane— appeared, and the voice-over declared:

  “This is what the Irish were capable of building without metal tools or the wheel fi?ve hundred years before the oldest pyramids were constructed in Egypt. The structure is so perfectly aligned with the sun that only on one day per year does sunlight strike the central altar—on winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. In more than fi?fty-three hundred years, never has the massive corbeled stone roof allowed a drop of water to penetrate the sanctum.”

  In travelogue fashion, the video went on to describe the high points of Celtic civilization: brehon law, Beaker people pottery, La Tène design, the “proto-Arthurian values of chivalry and gentilesse, as developed within the Fianna, which was the group of legendary heroes who were said to have ruled the Ireland of Celtic myth.

  “Also democracy—rule by the consensus of the clan. The Celts had a way of dealing with each other on a daily basis that was based on warmth, clan solidarity, and trust. The most extreme punishment that could be meted out to an offender was not death. It was expulsion from the community—to be declared pariah.”

  The voice was what McGarr thought of as “mid-Atlantic,” one that could not be identifi?ed as demonstrably Irish, British, or North American. It was, however, surely urbane, and McGarr wondered if the entire piece had been lifted from some television show run on the BBC.

  “But Christianity, which arrived in the latter
part of the fi?fth century, proved disastrous to Ireland,” the voice continued, noting that early Christian converts were encouraged to renounce the world and retreat to abbeys, monasteries, and other sanctuaries. “This alien movement not only usurped and supplanted the ancient religion of Ireland’s native Celts, it also led to the central religious division of the country that obtains to this day.

  “The most immediate deleterious effect was the escapist teachings of early missionaries, their advocacy of converts becoming ‘exiles for Christ.’ ”

  Family, clan, and nonreligious community ties suffered—the video continued—such that 350 years later, when Vikings began raiding the Irish coast, there was no effective militia in place to defend the country.

  “Abbeys, monasteries, and churches had waxed fat, amassing great wealth, while secular institutions, which might have countered the Viking threat, were all but absent.

  “Even after seventy years of sustained Viking pillaging, Christianity with its otherworldly ethos could not bring forth a common defense. In A.D. 863, Christian Ireland allowed a Viking force to sack Newgrange and other nearby megalithic tombs in the Boyne Valley.

  “For over thirty-fi?ve hundred years, those tombs and religious relics of former greatness—the very gateways to the Celtic Otherworld—had been revered by the Irish people and kept sacrosanct. Having withdrawn to its many stone keeps with its own booty, Christianity simply allowed those treasures of Ireland’s ancient past to be plundered.

  “The remains and artifacts interred there were not relics of the Christian past—the past of their prophet from the deserts of the Middle East. No. Oenghus, to whom the site was sacred, was an indigenous god of the older religion. Therefore, Newgrange was deemed expendable and valueless.”

  After showing photos of Newgrange before its restoration in the 1990s—when it was a near ruin in a wet pasture with boulders strewn about—the screen presented a collage of the tall medieval keeps that monastic communities had built as sanctuaries. During Viking raids, the monks had retreated there with whatever precious objects they could carry or had stored there, drawing up the ladder after them.