Sunday, 1:30 P.M. Parknasilla: debt conference
Have paused on the pinnacle of Mullaghanattin, which is spectacular in its desolated beauty. From here I can see Kenmare to the southeast and Dingle Bay to the north. Below me I can also see Mossie Gladden’s stony mountain farm, snugged into a lee ledge of the topographical curiosity that is called “The Pocket.”
The pocket is a sudden, nearly circular declivity in the mountains that is watered by the two cascading sources of the Blackwater River. It is protected by a moat of sheer cliff that one can breach from above only if he knows the way; and Mossie’s fastness sits there like a forlorn mountain island. In all, Mossie’s property is testament to the ability of man to eke out a living from even the most barren pitch.
Mossie, of course, has his doctoring and his government pension, but if I had the time and inclination, I could count the white specks in the green between the rock formations that are his sheep. He must have several hundred head. Near the house he keeps two small fields in potatoes.
Card 2 of that entry went on.
I can see a figure, obviously Mossie, walking from the Land Rover that has just pulled in over the rough road he has cut to his perch. It’ll take me an hour to get down there, and I hope he doesn’t leave on some other message before I arrive. I could use some tea and a bit of a rest. His chat, however, is something else.
Mossie contends that the country as a whole is a wasteland as definitive as that which I now see before me. We’re cut off, he says, from the succor of our religions, which are not relevant to the modern experience, and from the means of bettering our daily lives by a government which serves only itself. With this last I agree.
His approach, however, is to withdraw here and try to reestablish touch with the ancient modes of who we were as a people and who we can be. With the “Living Waters,” he calls it, pointing to the clefts in the rocks from which the Blackwater springs, “of inexhaustible, ineffable Source.”
All well and good, after the likes of O’Duffy are tackled and brought to ground. With that Mossie concurs, but when I told him about my plan for the national debt he flew into a rage and asked me why I don’t just go after O’Duffy with my knowledge of what went on during the years that I served in his governments. He’s fixated on the man and doesn’t understand that politics of confrontation always boomerang. What goes around, comes around. Better to propose doable alternatives and remain aloof from naming-calling. I sometimes worry he’s gone round the bend.
The penultimate card, the one with McGarr’s penned mark in the corner, read simply:
Sunday, 3:30 Parknasilla: debt conference
Have stopped again to catch my breath before descending the narrow path through the cliff face. From time to time the sharp report of Mossie’s high-powered rifle comes to me and then howls through the mountains. Target practice, he’s told me, for the dogs that summer people leave when returning to the city. Jackals, he calls them. The wily and strong have survived to reproduce, preying on Mossie’s sheep. For a time he took to trapping the dogs, but with no takers even for the pups of such animals, the local dog warden only had to put them down.
Now he uses the rifle.
The final card said:
Sunday, 4:30 Parknasilla: debt conference
Tom, the head porter, tells me Big Nell stopped by. Not knowing where I was, he directed her to my room and let her in. What in the name of God can that troublesome, avaricious woman want with me after all we’ve been through? I hope she isn’t up to staging another of her rows. Not here, not now when I’m about to step into the political arena.
McGarr glanced up. He needed another drink, and he now caught sight of Shane Frost, standing tall among a clutch of bankers at the bar.
“Still with us, McGarr?” Frost asked, assessing him from his eminence as he would, say, a servant.
McGarr only nodded. “Might I have a word.” When they stepped away from the group, he handed Frost the final note card. “Who’s Big Nell?”
Frost looked down. “Paddy’s wife, of course. Or, rather, his ex-wife. They’re divorced, you know.”
McGarr remembered having read a report of it but years ago. “London, wasn’t it?”
Frost nodded.
Divorce was still illegal in Ireland, and very much a political liability that only a Paddy Power, who had done so much good for others, might overcome. But then, of course, there was the Catholic Church, which O’Duffy had been courting for decades and was very much in his corner. McGarr could imagine an aggrieved, divorced wife, conspicuously on the scene, making a debacle of Power’s “first step” into politics.
“Helen?” McGarr asked.
Frost nodded.
“Helen Power?”
Frost shook his head. “I’m not sure if she resumed her maiden name.”
“Which was?”
“Nash. They were an old family in these parts.”
“Does she live around here still?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t see much of her anymore. The parents’ place was left to an older brother in England who sold the property. The house went to ruin and was knocked down.”
“Could she be staying in the area now?”
The possibility seemed to worry Frost. “I don’t think so. At least I hope not. Apart from the conference, the hotel is closed. The season over. You’ll have to check. Nell is…contentious, and the thing with Gretta and then the divorce seemed to set her off. I’m not certain she’s over it yet.”
“What thing with Gretta?”
“Ah”—Frost looked away—“she blames Gretta for breaking up their marriage, but, you know, Paddy didn’t marry Gretta. “What happens if you decide to investigate Paddy’s death?” After tomorrow, he meant.
McGarr shook his head, not wanting to speculate.
“Promise me you won’t flood this place with Guards.”
McGarr turned and walked away. He tried never to make promises, especially to somebody like Frost, who seemed concerned only with appearances.
In the sun room Jim Feeney, the hotel manager, assured McGarr that Nell Power née Nash was not staying at Parknasilla.
“Why would your head porter have conducted her to Mr. Power’s room?”
“Did he?”
McGarr nodded.
“Well, being from Sneem, Mrs. Power is known to all the staff. And then she’s been coming here for years. With Mr. Power.”
Tom, the head porter, was a short, square man who was nattily attired in tuxedo and tails.
“Did you see Mrs. Power depart?”
“I did, sir.”
“And when was that?”
“Just about the time that Mr. Power’s guests began assembling in his rooms for the reception yesterday afternoon. I believe she spoke to Miss Gretta Osbourne, a guest here, who was helping Mr. Power with the conference. After that, she left.”
“Did she have anything in her hands?” The note cards, McGarr was thinking; given the size of the case, their bulk would have been too great for a purse.
He paused, trying to remember. “I can’t say for certain, now, but had she anything sizable, like, I would have taken it from her and carried it to her car. So, I’d say she hadn’t.”
“Did you realize they were divorced when you let her into Mr. Power’s room?”
“I’d heard that, but not from herself. Or himself, for that matter.”
McGarr again asked to use the phone. When he finally located Superintendent Butler at home, he asked him to canvass the area for one Helen Power. “She might also be using the name Nash.”
“The wife.”
So, she was known to him too. Ringing off, McGarr drew on a cigarette and eased his back into the cushions of the manager’s desk chair. What did he have?
Until the postmortem report, which would not be available until tomorrow morning, nothing but Gladden’s allegation and the missing note cards. Even if they had been stolen, what would that prove or even imply? Certainly not m
urder, which was McGarr’s only concern.
Still, it irked him, the strategy Farrell had employed by means of his early morning phone calls: to bind him tight in the shackles of administrative guilt. If Paddy Power had not been murdered but Dr. Mossie Gladden insisted he had and rumor got out, McGarr would be guilty of a lapse in “discretion.” If Paddy Power had been murdered, McGarr would be guiltier still, doubtless in equal measure with the murderer, of the failure to conclude—as had Farrell and Frost, who were expert in the matters of mortality—that Power had died a natural death.
McGarr tried to think of a way to keep Gladden from broadcasting his theory. As part of the investigation he could ask Gladden to “help the police,” was the phrase, and hold him incommunicado for forty-eight hours. But that might only extend a claim of official complicity to the Garda itself. And as Taosieach O’Duffy himself had said and Frost had reiterated only minutes before, Gladden was his own self entirely. Gladden would do what Gladden would do, and there was no stopping him.
The most McGarr could do was to cover his arse and maintain a studious neutrality. What would he need? Witnesses who were sure to be friendly, if his own actions were ever questioned.
Again reaching for the phone, he seemed to remember that Ruth Bresnahan, a new inspector on his staff, hailed from Sneem and would at least know of most of the major figures in the case—Power, Gladden, Frost, and their families. He would place her among the guests where she could nose about and ask questions, perhaps even stir things up. He would need to equip her with, say, a large new rental car and some attractive, pricey clothes paid for out of the squad’s “extraordinary expenses fund.”
McKeon and O’Shaughnessy, the squad’s two most experienced hands, he would place as delegates from two Irish banks where he had contacts. And finally he would put Detective Sergeant Hughie Ward in the bar.
He spoke to each of them in turn, requesting their confidentiality. “Have you phoned home?” Ward asked, when McGarr had finished.
“Not yet.”
“You should—your wife has been on to us twice that I’ve answered.”
“Has Madeleine et yet?” McGarr asked, when Noreen picked up.
“Of course she’s et. A half hour ago. How’s it going? Is it what they called you in for?”
“Care to dine out?” It was a cheap ploy; any invitation that included the word “out” was now irresistible to Noreen.
“Where?”
“Here, of course. Parknasilla.”
There was only the slightest pause. Any normal person would have challenged him on the fact that the hotel was at least a five-hour hard drive from Dublin. This was a time, however, to try a recently parturated, young professional mother’s soul, McGarr suspicioned, and Madeleine slept like a rock in their second car. It was a large, comfortable Rover that had been handed down by Noreen’s well-off parents, who changed cars every few years.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“And I won’t.”
She understood what that meant: It was a long-distance call that might well be monitored by an operator, and they discussed McGarr’s work only in private.
“Well, when I arrive, how will I get my dinner?”
McGarr smiled, having led her to the magic phrase. “Room service.”
There was another pause in which he guessed she was imagining all the delightfully restful ramifications of hotel living. “And you’ll be up when I arrive?”
“Count on it.”
“How long will we be there?”
“This week until Sunday.”
“But how will we pay? Parknasilla costs a bloody bomb.”
“It’s official.”
Noreen made a sound in the back of her throat that McGarr interpreted as delight.
TUESDAY
“The relations between sovereign borrowers and their creditors is like that of partners in a threelegged race; they can run, limp, or fall together, but they cannot part company.”
World Debt Tables, 1983–84
CHAPTER 5
Scald/Squelch/Scorch
NOREEN MCGARR AWOKE with a start Tuesday morning. Blinding her was a burst of golden light made all the brighter by starched linen drape liners, in the gauzy mesh of which the new sun now caught. It was scouring a storm-washed sky. She blinked, trying to clear her vision, but the dazzling, shimmering film punished her eyes, and she turned her head to the wall.
Panic struck. Where was she? More—where was her baby?
She snapped her head to the other side and saw another large, but empty, unmade bed, a tasteful early-nineteenth-century chiffonier reproduction, and a stuffed oval-back love seat on a royal-blue carpet. Raising a hand to her eyes, she again tried to look out the two windows, which seemed to fill the wall of the room that had eighteen-foot ceilings.
There she saw sparkling green islands in a running jade sea. Closer was the corner of a terrace with white cast-iron furniture and a white iron rail. To one side was a boxwood maze patterning & lawn that swept down to a beach where the water was just the turquoise color of her eyes.
Parknasilla.
Noreen fell back into the pillows. Her hand reached out and lifted the receiver from the telephone. When a voice came on, she ordered scones and butter. “And scalded coffee with scalded milk. I don’t know if you still do that, but there was a time—” A small voice on the other end assured her that she could have her wish. “And I wonder, have you seen my husband. I’m Noreen—”
“Oh, yes. I can see him presently. He’s with the other babies in the sun room, reading the papers.”
Noreen stifled a laugh and thanked the woman.
“You’re welcome, Miss Frenche.”
The woman began phrasing her correction, but Noreen said there was no need. After all those years—how many? Five, seven? No, longer. It had been nine full years since she had last been here, and somebody on the staff had remembered that she—or perhaps rather all of the Frenches—ordered scalded coffee with scalded milk. She would have to tell her mother and father. It was the sort of thing they appreciated, and provided the illusion that, in spite of being a tiny minority in an often exasperating country, they still belonged to the right things, some of which endured.
And yet, ringing off, she felt glum. Here she was in one of Ireland’s premier resorts, which her parents had visited for whole weeks at a time but she herself could afford only on a government freebie. Barring some windfall, Maddie would never get to know the little bridges and lovely shadowed walks through the groves of island willows, the small, hilly, difficult golf course, the great green bay that she could now see in front of the hotel.
Times had changed, and whereas she and McGarr enjoyed a combined income that on paper would have classed them as wealthy, no, rich—twenty or thirty years ago, they in reality had been caught in a kind of financial vise. Taxes on everything—income, property, gasoline, the V.A.T.—just seemed to go up and up, while inflation made what little money they had to spend worth less and less. At the same time property values had plummeted in the nine years since they had bought their house, which meant that they had lost money on their only real investment.
Well, maybe somebody or something would bail the country out, she thought, but in the meantime she would enjoy the place while she was here. Noreen was about to palm a pillow over her eyes, when she heard some rustling and looked out through the sitting room to see a large buff envelope being eased under the door. On it was an official seal and stamp, and her languor was immediately dispelled. Paddy Power had died, her husband had been called in, and the envelope might tell her why.
A thin, quick woman, she hopped from the bed, and was soon back under the covers with the seal broken, the envelope open, and what proved to be Power’s autopsy in her hands. Tears came to her eyes, which she had to blot with the sheet, before she read, “Padraic Benedict Power, Age 58, Final Diagnosis.” A summation on the title page said Power had died of ventricular fibrillation brought on by acute digita
lis poisoning. It then listed the effects of the fibrillation on his heart and body, along with signs of aging that were also discovered during the postmortem: a hernia, some arteriosclerosis of the coronary arteries, scarring in his kidneys, liver, and pancreas.
He had a gash on his forehead and bruises on other parts of his body, evidently the result of a fall. There was evidence of burn scarring from some prior accident on both hands. The digitalis in his system was “…far in excess of what might be expected from the administration of the maximum dose of two 1 mg. tablets, as prescribed as a remedy for an attack of tachycardia,” the report concluded.
Digitalis poisoning—was it unusual? Why else would her husband have been called in?
Noreen was now wide awake. The details of McGarr’s investigations were a kind of leitmotiv in her life: a constantly unfolding, complex subplot, the installments of which she wheedled from him over breakfast in the morning, over drinks before dinner, and sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep and had nothing good to read, late at night. A native Dubliner, she could not resist the least bit of information concerning anybody she even vaguely knew, much less an investigation surrounding the death of a person of Paddy Power’s caliber and…potential. Again tears rose to her eyes.
But when the news got out, she now realized, Parknasilla would be besieged by journalists. When she had arrived last night, she had found only a team of Gardai at the gates. She wondered how long Power’s death could be kept a secret. Or his murder. My God, what a story, and there she was in the thick of it. She almost wished she were back in Dublin where she could make “insider’s capital” of what she knew.
Noreen tossed back the covers to swing her legs out of bed when the phone rang.
Said McGarr, “We’re having breakfast in the dining room in ten minutes. Maddie, me, and Ruth Bresnahan.”
“But I’ve just ordered coffee.”
“You don’t drink coffee.”
“I do here.”
“I’ll have it brought to the table instead.”
The Death of Love Page 6