McGarr would try to hold O’Duffy to that.
“Now I will attempt to answer any questions.”
On the desk was a single typewritten sheet of paper, signed by Gladden.
What I do, I do out of love for my country and for the good of all Irish people who wish to keep Ireland in Irish hands. And so that generations from now there will still be an Irish people, proud in their culture, traditions, and patrimony, who will be free to determine their own destiny.
What’s needed is a government run by persons who are patriots first, last, and always, and not merely capitalists interested only in enriching themselves and their friends no matter the cost to the country.
The evidence that I needed to prove that Paddy Power was murdered to remove him from the political scene was contained in the notes that he had written for his memoir. They were stolen from me, sequestered, and without a doubt destroyed by Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr of the Garda Siochana, acting upon the direct orders of Taosieach Sean Dermot O’Duffy.
It was signed by Gladden.
“Have you seen this? Have you read it?” McGarr asked Coyne, who was standing on the other side of the desk.
Coyne blinked, which meant he had, but said, “I need glasses for reading, more so upside down.”
“Good man.” McGarr buried the sheet in the pocket of his mac.
Out on the bridge O’Duffy was answering a question. “As I stated yesterday afternoon and was printed in this morning’s newspapers, the government has no knowledge of these note cards that Dr. Gladden alleges were stolen from Paddy Power around the time of his death. Personally I know that Paddy was compiling notes to write a memoir, but nothing of the sort has been entered as evidence in the inquiry into his death. Nor lodged with the property division of the Garda Siochana. If Chief Superintendent McGarr has Paddy’s notes, he has neither surrendered them according to procedure nor made mention of them in his daily reports of his investigation into Paddy’s death. Again, according to procedure.”
There it was—the basis for dismissal and the tag of scapegoat.
It was then, however, that McGarr heard the loud, angry snarl of an unmuffled diesel engine, shouts, and then gunfire from down in the street near the green. He spun around to the window where he saw Gladden’s tall, battered Land Rover bearing down on the line of policemen and soldiers that stretched across the street. Some had turned to fire, and several were caught off-balance, directly in its speeding path. Sheets of rusty metal covered the radiator and most of the windscreen, and, in spite of the rapid fire, the vehicle hurtled forward.
Beyond the soldiers stood the crowd of onlookers from the funeral, the press with its television and other cameras, and on the bridge the bristling patch of microphones, and the taosieach, his two ministers, and some of their local supporters.
A few in the crowd, understanding what was about to happen, turned to flee, but found no place to run. There were simply too many people cramped into the funnel made by the buildings and the chest-high rock wall of the narrow bridge, and those there—“Gladden!” McGarr shouted; who else could it be?—were doomed.
McGarr wrenched free the Walther he had slipped under his belt and with its pommel dashed out the pane of the window. But already the Land Rover had burst through the line of soldiers. With the crowd only a dozen yards away, McGarr dared not fire and could only watch the catastrophe unfold.
“No!” McGarr shouted.
In the crowd an old, shawl-draped woman had fallen, and a child turned back to help her to her feet.
It was then a figure darted from the shadows and hurled himself at the door of the speeding truck, smashing something through the window and with the other hand clutching at the roof rack. It was a remarkable athletic feat, and his body was thrashed against the side of the truck. But he hung on, recovered his balance, and lunged at the steering wheel.
CHAPTER 22
Bridge Burned
HUGHIE WARD HAD walked into Sneem. Now that his cover was blown, he wasn’t about to spend one additional minute serving drinks and running errands. Sonnie had looked down at Ward’s Garda I.D. and said, “Wouldn’t it have been easier, had you just told me, ah, er—”
“Detective Sergeant,” Ward suggested. “Maybe, but after I became acquainted with your modus operandi, I couldn’t be sure you weren’t our man.”
“Fair play,” Sonnie had said to his back. “Fair play to you.” And when Ward was nearly out the door, “What about your wages?”
Stuff ’em, Ward had nearly said, but had only waved, happy to be out in the new day, sailing on the wings of morn’ the two or so miles into Sneem. His joy was visceral and scarcely permitted thought, until he caught sight of the cars, parked up on the banks of the drainage ditches and the blue overcoat of the first of what would prove a gauntlet of Guards and army thugs.
“Where’d you get this?” one Guard asked, meaning Ward’s Garda I.D.
“Where you got that.” Ward pointed to his uniform.
It was his credibility problem again, and even without the oversized service tux. Ever since his recent promotion to detective sergeant—on merit, he did not think he should be forced to divulge—people simply did not believe he was who he was. It had something to do with the photograph, which was a bleached-out-head-and-neck shot that looked like a snap from a sixth-form yearbook. Also, the rank of detective sergeant was seldom achieved before forty. Ward was wearing a light green warm-up jacket, jeans, and a pair of Everlast ring shoes.
“I don’t know—” The Guard tapped the I.D. on the back of his other hand and turned to look toward the village, as if for help.
“Precisely why you’re standing here in the middle of a country road,” Ward observed, snatching back the I.D. “Any farther west and you’ll be in the drink.” He pointed toward the harbor that could just be seen in the distance.
The other checkpoints were similarly bothersome, but had he not been hassled by an army lieutenant, who kept asking dumb questions about his “duty station” and “superior officers,” Ward would not have turned to look back. His eye caught on a battered Land Rover. It had just cranked over, and its vertical exhaust pipe was gushing a dense cloud of diesel smoke.
Mossie Gladden got out of the truck and began lowering a steel plate over the radiator. At first Ward thought little of it, since winter was now upon them and a grill cover was one way of skimming a bit of heat off an engine. Until, looking back again, he saw Gladden lowering some other rusty plates over the two panels of the windscreen, such that only a slit was left to peer out. Gladden quickly climbed back in.
By then two soldiers, who were closer to the Land Rover, had begun to move toward Gladden. Suddenly a boil of black smoke broke from the stack, the engine roared, and the truck shot out into the road, right at them. They threw themselves to either side, and other soldiers shouldered weapons, unsure whether to fire until the truck broke the final line of blue and drab uniforms.
Gunfire erupted, a staccato gout of deafening noise that was over as quickly as it had begun. Once the truck hurtled by them toward the crowd, the soldiers had to jerk their weapons skyward.
Ward had his Beretta out, which was virtually useless against the truck. He glanced at the crowd, then back at the careening Land Rover that was bearing down on them. He didn’t know what he could do, but suddenly he was sprinting off on an angle that might get him to the truck before it reached the crowd.
And did. At the last moment, just as the truck was about to sweep by Ward, Gladden jerked the wheel to catch a soldier with the bumper. It was then Ward launched himself at the side of the truck, grabbed hold of the roof rack, and smashed the twenty-three ounces of his Beretta through the side window.
Bits of glass sprayed over Gladden, who was crouched behind the wheel. There was another man in the truck who had fallen to the floor. They were still speeding wildly forward, and Ward lunged for the wheel, trying to turn the Land Rover away from the crowd and into a building.
But Gla
dden swung the wheel violently, attempting to shake Ward off. Yet Ward held on and managed to jerk the wheel, aiming the truck at an open space in the crowd and the thick stone restraining wall of the bridge beyond.
Striking it at an angle, the Land Rover was carried by its momentum along the line of the wall, jouncing up onto the bridge and bursting through the thicket of cameras and microphones that had been grouped there for Taosieach O’Duffy’s speech in eulogy of Paddy Power.
Before he lost his grip and tumbled from the running board, Ward saw two men, frozen before the oncoming truck. One of them was O’Duffy.
It was strangely quiet for the several seconds it took McGarr to sprint to the bridge. The living and uninjured had been stunned into silence. Those who could act seemed hesitant, as though not knowing who of the fallen to help first. He heard a moan here, a whimper there, but mainly the harsh winter wind soughing over the bridge.
Then suddenly as one, nerves broke. McGarr heard a cry of grief from behind him, which was picked up and echoed by others from every side. McGarr caught sight of Ward, who had fallen in the road in the middle of the bridge; McGarr began running toward him when the concussion of the colossal blast tremored the macadam beneath his feet.
McGarr snapped his head to the west. There, perhaps two hundred yards away, a greasy orange fireball from an exploded Garda patrol car was burning black into the western sky.
McGarr only glanced at Ward, whose eyes were beginning to open, and at the two men whom the truck had knocked over the wall into the rocky Sneem River below. Some photographers were scrambling down steep banks to help them. Others were already aiming cameras at what they could see:
Sean Dermot O’Duffy was spread out on his back on a flat rock, his legs and feet being whipped about in the boil of the swift river. His eyes were open and unblinking in the spray of rushing water. Crumpled near him but submerged in a shallow pool made pink by his own blood was Minister for Finance Quinn, his long gray hair swirling in the livid water.
McGarr saw Noreen next. She was holding Maddie’s face away from the heat of the burning car.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “I thought you were back at Parknasilla.”
“We bought”—Noreen’s eyes flickered down on the fisherman’s knitted tam and jumper that Maddie was wearing—“but by then microphones and so forth had been set up, and they wouldn’t let cars back over the bridge.”
“What happened here?” He pointed to the burning patrol car.
“Gladden. He stopped, pointed a rifle out the window of his Land Rover, and fired at the petrol tank. Two shots is all it took.”
“Anybody in it?”
“Not that I could see.”
“Where’s our car?”
Noreen pointed across the square.
“Get ahold of a senior Guard, somebody like Superintendent Butler. Tell him I said to seal off the Ring of Kerry. Gladden’s driving either that Land Rover or a gray Ford Granada with Northern plates,” McGarr remembered from the car he had seen in one of Gladden’s outbuildings. “Helicopters, airplanes, anything they can throw in. The taosieach has been killed.” He could not bring himself to use the accurate word that now would not be avoided.
Noreen reached for his arm, but McGarr turned and broke for her car. Gladden had now achieved his secret desire, McGarr thought as he eased Noreen’s large sedan past the fiery wreck and then accelerated down the Waterville road in pursuit of the Land Rover. He was now pariah complete, to be put down with the same dispatch as he had hunted the wild dogs that had preyed on his sheep.
Now Gladden had a lead of—what?—seven, eight, maybe ten minutes, McGarr estimated, as his powerful car clipped along the narrow, winding road. The truck Gladden was driving had to be damaged in some vital way, and what were Gladden’s options?
None by the main, traveled roads that could lead him most quickly out of the peninsula that was the Ring of Kerry. It was twenty-five or so steep, sinuous miles to Waterville alone, where Gladden would then have to choose between shore or mountain routes, which were some thirty-five or forty additional miles long, if McGarr’s knowledge of geography served him well.
But something else occurred to him: Throughout history the mountains of Kerry had served as a refuge for outlaws of every stripe. Certainly Gladden would be acquainted with at least a few of those mountain sanctuaries, and Gladden could probably either live off the little that was offered there or had already prepared for the eventuality.
Also, Gladden had a connection with elements of the Northern wing of the IRA, among some of whom the solitary, daring act of having assassinated Sean Dermot O’Duffy would be accounted a stunning tactical achievement. O’Duffy’s internationalist, free-market economic policies had been diametrically opposed to the insular and socialist IRA, and O’Duffy had endorsed agreements concerning Northern Ireland that previous taosieachs had entered into with the British.
But there was yet another alternative. As McGarr swung around a broad curve in the middle of the mountain, below him he saw black sooty smoke rising in a flame-driven plume. A tour bus was stopped, and the driver and several of the passengers were staring down the sheer face of the mountain at a burning wreck below.
McGarr parked the sedan and got out. It was the gap in the rock restraining wall where on Tuesday Noreen had surveyed the view below. The wind sweeping along the road was fierce enough to stagger him, and he had to snug his hat over his brow and turn his back to belt his mac.
Plainly it was Gladden’s Land Rover that was burning in a twisted pyre. The cab had kept some of its boxy shape, in spite of having plummeted several hundred meters to the rocks below, and McGarr could see a steel plate covering one side of the windscreen.
McGarr flashed his identification at the others and tried to shout over the roar of the wind, “What happened?”
“Poor bastard came right out in front of me, you can ask this man here,” said the bus driver, who was British. “He was sitting in the front seat. And him.” He pointed to another man, who nodded. “I was going dead slow, as it was. Because of the road,” which along the stretch that followed the cliff face was just wide enough for the passage of the bus itself. Otherwise, there were step-asides—such as where McGarr had parked the sedan—for cars to pull in until a bus or lorry had passed.
“But it was a wreck even before it went over, if you want to know the truth. God—I never seen the like. Smoking and spewing steam, all…shot up?”
“Bloke was slumped over the wheel,” said one of the other men. “Must have had a heart attack or—”
“There was somebody else standing here by the side of the road who must have seen it go over. A local, by the look of him. But—” The driver turned to look behind him, as for that witness.
McGarr moved first to one edge of the gap in the wall and then to the other to see if the Land Rover had struck the rock. No. As Noreen and he had imagined on Tuesday, the truck had sailed cleanly off into the ether toward the tan beaches and cliffs on which the surf was breaking in silvery lines.
McGarr wandered back along the road to look for skid marks, signs that Gladden or…whoever had tried to save himself. He could not believe that the man would have taken his own life without finishing the business of providing a motive—or, at least, the semblance of one—for the atrocity he had committed back in Sneem. Gladden was just too…rationally deranged for that and had nothing to lose, not even his life, now.
But there was nothing to indicate that the Land Rover had braked or swerved or skidded. There was, however, a fresh pool of motor oil or coolant, some rainbow-tinged viscous substance oozing down the road. Which had dropped in a clump on the road while the Land Rover was speeding past to its doom?
Back with the driver and his witnesses, McGarr asked, “How fast was the truck going?”
The driver shook his head and tried to remember. A car behind the bus began honking.
Said one of the other men, “A moderate speed. Not enough to have lost contro
l.”
“Or skidded,” McGarr prompted.
“That’s how we got a look at the driver. Had it been speeding, I don’t think we’d have seen him at all.”
“What about this local, where was he standing? Here?” McGarr pointed to the area near the gap. “Or there?” He swung his finger to a spot of oil.
“There,” all three said, the driver adding, “I said to him, says I, ‘You see that?’ The man tightened his hat over his brow and crossed the road.”
“Toward the step-aside?” Where McGarr had parked the sedan, he meant.
All three men nodded.
“Was he also wearing a black farmer’s great coat?” McGarr prompted. “Wellies on his feet. The hat is dark brown, good quality, wide brim.”
One man nodded. “Except for the Wellies. What he had on his feet was more like hobnail boots. They bit and scuffed on the road, I remember. When he moved to the other side.”
For climbing, McGarr thought. He raised his head and scanned the side of the bald gray-green mountain. There near the pinnacle was a figure in a black coat and dark hat who had himself stopped to look back at them. He had something in his hands that he now raised to his face.
It jumped, and the step-aside was filled with the yellow light of the sedan exploding. The concussion blew them back into the grill of the bus as Noreen’s sedan burst into a sheet of flame, the howling report of the high-powered rifle echoing through the mountains to the east. When McGarr looked up again, Gladden was gone.
Why shoot the car and not McGarr himself? He had been standing exposed for whole minutes now. The note cards. Contained in them was the only—justification was too definite a word—that Gladden’s atrocity would ever garner. And if McGarr and not the Garda Siochana had them, Gladden might have a chance of getting them back. McGarr allowed himself a thin smile.
The Death of Love Page 27