The Death of Love

by Bartholomew Gill

  Arriving back in Sneem a half hour later, he found Noreen nearly where he had left her—on the north side of the bridge. Maddie was now asleep in her arms.

  “How many died?” he asked, relieving her of the burden of the child.

  Noreen shook her head. “On this side of the bridge everybody’s been concerned with Sean O’Duffy and Patrick Quinn, who were killed outright. I’ve heard two or three others, but it could go higher. Some people are badly injured.”

  McGarr led them past the cordon of police, and they climbed the arc of the narrow bridge. The wind was still fierce and bitter, and McGarr imagined that the pretty little village would never be the same. “What about Hughie?”

  Noreen tried to smile. “No concussion, but a broken leg for sure. And scrapes.”

  “He’s a brave wee man.”

  Noreen nodded. “He must have saved”—again she shook her head—“at least all those people on the other side of the bridge. What about Gladden?”

  “Got away, at least for the moment. They’ll think he died in a fiery wreck, but they’ll discover it’s somebody else, most likely some gunman from the North who was already dead.”

  “They?”

  “Whoever investigates this entire thing. I have a feeling my career in the Guards is just about over.” McGarr moved his chin toward the other end of the bridge where Garda commissioner Fergus Farrell was waiting, his red face set in grim resolve.

  “But why? What did you do?”

  “It’s more a matter of what I didn’t and won’t do.”

  “You mean, you didn’t arrest Gladden when you had the chance? But they wouldn’t have wanted that either then.”

  Which was precisely the point. Farrell and the politicians he represented could never be wrong, as long as a scapegoat could be found. “Also, there’s the note cards.”

  “That they’ll want to suppress even more now, because of Power’s unflattering portrayal of Sean Dermot O’Duffy.”

  McGarr turned his back to Farrell, who was now approaching, so he might speak to Noreen without being overheard. “Listen to me closely and do exactly what I say. I’ll explain it all later, but if I’ve got any chance of collaring Gladden, I’ll need your unquestioning cooperation.”

  Noreen blinked.

  “Find a car that will take you back to Parknasilla. Pack up our belongings along with the photocopies of Power’s notes that I made last night. It’s on the top shelf of the closet. Then have the hotel get you a rental car. Say it’s an emergency, and you need it immediately. Then go someplace I’ve never been and people don’t know who you are. Use your maiden name, park the car where it can’t be seen, then phone your mother and tell her where you are. And just wait. I’ll be in touch.”

  “But—”

  McGarr handed Maddie to her and turned to Commissioner Farrell, who said, “May I have a word with you. Private, if you don’t mind.”

  “But I do.” McGarr began walking toward a group of reporters who were interviewing an emergency-medical officer. He needed an impartial witness with a large national following. There he reached for the arm of a reporter whom he had once treated unfairly. “Got time for a scoop?”

  Through thick lenses her eyes tried to read McGarr’s face, but she stepped away from the others with him. She was a thin young woman with a large, round face and pug nose.

  “You remember the commissioner, don’t you? Go ahead, Commissioner—shoot.”

  Farrell glanced at the reporter, but her presence suited his needs as well. “Nell Power tells me Gladden assaulted you on Tuesday. You had a chance to take him into custody, and you didn’t. Why?”

  “Because you didn’t want me to.”

  “What? Did I ever say that?”

  “No, you didn’t. But Taosieach O’Duffy did, when I spoke to him on Tuesday night in his West Cork bungalow about Paddy Power’s murder.”

  “Murder?” the young woman asked, writing furiously in her notepad. “Was Paddy Power murdered? Officially?”

  “Semi-officially, you might say,” said McGarr.

  Farrell’s nostrils had flared, and his eyes drifted down onto the reporter’s pad. “I wouldn’t make accusations that you can’t prove, were I you.”

  “But you’re not me, and I can.” McGarr tapped his chest pocket. “Wire.”

  “You recorded your meeting with the taosieach?” Farrell demanded indignantly. “Without telling us?”

  “No, but there’s proof.” McGarr winked at the reporter, before asking, “Can I say something to Commissioner Farrell strictly off-the-record?”

  “Of course,” she replied, though her pen did not leave the pad.

  “Try me, Commissioner, and I’ll take you down. You, Harney, and whatever’s left of your government.” Their eyes met for a moment, and McGarr hoped an understanding passed between them.

  “The note cards. I want them.”

  “Mossie Gladden does too.”

  “What does Mossie Gladden have to do with the note cards?” Farrell, enraged now, demanded. “Those note cards are evidence in a murder case that is directly linked to the assassination of the taosieach. As such, they are the property of the state.”

  “And they made him commissioner,” McGarr said to the reporter. “Shall I explain it to both of you?”

  She nodded.

  McGarr swung to his face to Farrell. “If I give them to you now and you say you have them, I won’t get Gladden. But if, under the present circumstances”—he pointed to the reporter’s notepad—” I refuse to give them to you, I well might. In other words, the note cards are neither evidence nor the property of the state, but rather bait. Is that plain enough for you?” McGarr waited, but when Farrell said nothing, he muttered, “I wonder if we speak the same language.” Then. “You know, it might be better if you sacked me.”

  “McGarr—you’re sacked. As of this moment I’m relieving you of your duties.”

  McGarr turned to the reporter. “There you go—I promised you a scoop.”

  “There’ll be a disciplinary hearing,” Farrell shouted at his back. “Charges will be brought.”

  “You’d better check that out with your masters. Who are they now—the Harneys? Remember, I hold the cards. A whole big box of them.”

  “Look—I can help you,” said the reporter, reaching for the sleeve of his mac. “I have a million questions, and—”

  But he was already by her, weaving through the milling officials near the South Green, where he stepped over the chain and walked toward M.J.P. Frost’s chemist shop.

  A woman and child had just come out the door, yet McGarr found the old man as he had left him the day before: asleep in the tattered, stuffed chair; the cat in his lap; a newspaper at his feet; the ancient wooden radio on the table telling from Dublin of the events that had occurred a hundred yards from his door.

  McGarr turned to the jars, boxes, and bottles of pills. He scanned through three rows before the old man said, “Phenobarbital is the third bottle on the last shelf. Pills. Powder, one down. What you do is, take the date off the bottle, then refer that to my prescription book. Add up all the tablets I’ve sold to the present, subtract that from the original figure, then count the tablets, which should match. It’s the same procedure for the powder, but more time-consuming. One has to measure by weight. The scales are over there.” He pointed toward another counter in the cluttered back room of the chemist shop.

  “What about in solution?”

  His smile was more a baring of tea- and tobacco-stained teeth, and the ammoniac smell coming off him was daunting. “Sodium barbital is soluble in water. Or champagne. You’ll find Gretta’s name down for it rather often. Refills. High doses. From Mossie.” He waited while McGarr thumbed through the book. “Care to hear my theory?”

  McGarr was all ears; so far Frost had not mentioned Sean Dermot O’Duffy or the others, probably many from Sneem, who had been killed or injured at the bridge. Gretta Osbourne’s death was obviously on his mind.

  �
��It was neither suicide nor murder but merely a…how do you term it? A misadventure with her medicines.”

  Another misadventure with medicines, thought McGarr.

  “It was close to bedtime. Gretta had been taking the substance for years now, and had built up a kind of tolerance to the effect of the drug, which masked the actual quantity in her body. Her blood and organs and such.

  “A couple of glasses of champagne and—” He hunched a bony shoulder.

  McGarr wondered when Shane Frost had stopped in to visit his father. It could not have been before Paddy Power’s funeral, since Frost had been late already when he arrived at Gretta Osbourne’s door. And certainly not after, since Frost had accompanied Nell Power to the bridge, and McGarr had been standing there before Gladden struck. Therefore, it must have been sometime after the horrific event at the bridge that Frost visited his father with the details of Gretta Osbourne’s quiet demise in her suite at Parknasilla. “What about the suicide note?”

  “That was no more a suicide note than any of the note cards in Paddy Power’s file. I doubt if it was even written at the time she was dying. I think she got it out to, you know, add something to it. Or complete the thought. Shane tells me her pen was found on the right side of the card. And there Gretta was a lefty all the way.”

  Which was what had been bothering Frost, such that he sought out his father to discuss the particulars? And why still no mention of Sean Dermot O’Duffy? “He tell you the good news?”

  “About Eire Bank? Yah—a coup, isn’t it? Never in my wildest dream did I think Shane capable of a deal of such magnitude. I only wish I could drink champagne, but I can’t. Mossie says—But then, of course, it wouldn’t be decorous, would it? Now.”

  McGarr waited, watching him closely. M.J.P. Frost was both a sly and a silly old man. For a moment there he had been taunting McGarr, rubbing salt into the wound, which was Power, Osbourne, Gladden and the bridge, his son’s £80-million-plus deal that had been worked right there in Parknasilla under McGarr’s nose.

  “Mossie has been off his chump now for years. The only reason he was even tolerated is he was a medical doctor and gave away his services free. But in taking on the likes of Sean Dermot O’Duffy, he went to hell altogether, didn’t he now? Making those foolish accusations in public twice, no less, and finally this thing, which is straight out of the IRA. You know, the new gang from the North that Mossie was always helping. I wonder if ever they helped him?”

  McGarr himself wondered what he was hearing—a simple explanation of the massacre at the bridge? One that excluded the complications of Power’s and Osbourne’s murders and the theft of the note cards and what they contained? One that would be acceptable to the surviving government and believed by the Irish people who would want to hear some “soft” truth and were inured to the depravities of the IRA? Again McGarr thought about the body that would be found in the Land Rover, doubtless that of some gunman from the North.

  “What I came for were some sacks. You know, your plastic sacks with the name of the shop on the side.”

  “They’re under the counter, there as you go out.”

  “I’m going to take several, and these note cards here.” He meant the packets of blank note cards that were being offered for sale.

  “Do you know that Paddy asked me to get them for him some years ago. Now that I come to think of it, they’re probably the very material from which he scratched out his potentially scandalous notes. Take them, go on. Again, no charge. I’m always happy to help the police.”

  Now that your son is rich, McGarr thought. By the felicity of two murders.

  Outside near the church McGarr found McKeon and O’Shaughnessy waiting at his Mini-Cooper. “Commissioner Farrell told us you were here, then ordered us off the case and back to Dublin. Told Liam and me to write up everything we could remember about the past week.” McKeon flexed his elbow. “Short list for me.”

  McGarr smiled. “At least we now know the enemy.”

  “Having seen the not-so-whites of his shifty, politic eyes.”

  “What about Gladden?” O’Shaughnessy asked.

  McGarr filled them in, saying that he had Paddy Power’s note cards—“The originals and Gladden’s photocopies”—in the boot of the Cooper, and he would return to his house in Rathmines. “As per the commissioner’s orders.”

  McKeon smiled. “With the cards.”

  “Gladden will want them, but understand this—he’s mine. Alone.”

  “Where’s Rut’ie?”

  McKeon looked toward the bridge. “I dunno—went with some of the injured, I suspect. I saw her and the big fella—”

  “O’Suilleabhain,” O’Shaughnessy supplied.

  “—bending over some of the fallen.”

  Who would be known to her, McGarr concluded.

  FRIDAY

  “Leave me, O Love, which reacheth but to dust”

  SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

  CHAPTER 23

  Death

  WHEN MCGARR GOT back to Dublin just after midnight, he again had to refuse offers of help from McKeon and O’Shaughnessy, telling them that Gladden would probably not be able to leave the Kerry Peninsula for several days, and he had his own preparations to make. Also, they could better serve him by manning their desks at Dublin Castle.

  “But how do you know he’ll come alone?” O’Shaughnessy asked. “If he has an IRA connection, he might get help, and he—or they—could be here any minute.”

  McGarr did not think so. Gladden might have sought IRA assistance, but no earlier than Wednesday, when after his “press conference” he had decided on extreme measures. Up until then Gladden had hoped by some means, if only press and media pressure, to get the note cards back. And Gladden would not allow them to fall into somebody else’s hands, not after what they had already cost him. And others.

  And then Gladden might not get through what the radio was even now calling “the biggest manhunt in the nation’s history.”

  Even so, McGarr took his own precautions. After having dropped off McKeon and O’Shaughnessy at the Castle, where they collected O’Shaughnessy’s car, McGarr drove around Belgrave Square twice, looking for details that were out-of-place. It was late and cold, and yet there was at least one light in every house, as—he supposed—people followed the hunt for Gladden, which was being monitored by every Irish radio station on the dial.

  Pausing beside an ambulance that said, “ST. COLUMBA’S EMERGENCY SERVICE, BLACKROCK, CO. DUBLIN,” McGarr heard the boyish, insouciant, and—was it even?—happy voice of Minister for Justice Harney promising, “We’ll have the man in short order.” If not, Harney would hatch him from an egg, McGarr thought, trying to remember if he had seen the ambulance before. Some medical students had rented one of the large houses in the square, and, as usual, lights were burning in nearly every window, even now at—McGarr checked his watch—1:45 A.M. Perhaps one of the students was moonlighting as an ambulance attendant. He crept slowly by.

  Otherwise, every other car was familiar to McGarr, and only the occasional taxi was passing through the wind-swept winter streets. Nevertheless, he took his own precautions, parking in a cul-de-sac three blocks away and leaving the note cards and photocopies in the boot. He removed only the five plastic sacks from “M.J.P. Frost, Chemist, Sneem, Co. Kerry,” which McKeon had stuffed with blank note cards on the long trip up from the country. He also approached the house through back alleys and laneways, and took the final precaution of entering the back garden not of his own house but of the house next door.

  A light was on in the kitchen, and, when he knocked, Sol Viner answered the door. A large, lumbering man with full dark beard, wirerim reading glasses, and black yarmulke even at the late hour, he stepped aside and bid McGarr enter his large, modern kitchen. On the table McGarr could see, Viner had a stack of newspapers and magazines not all in English; low, funerary music was coming from a radio on the sideboard.

  “Ah, former chief superintendent McGarr. Just the man whose c
areer I’ve been mourning. I’ve always admired the literal approach to life, but, I wonder, could you be taking it a bit far?” He pointed down at the sacks that McGarr was carrying.

  Rabbi of a small congregation, Viner was, like McGarr himself, a native Dubliner; he now closed the door behind McGarr and stepped back to take a look at his friend. “What will it be—a nice cuppa or a little something to take the edge off the wind?”

  McGarr shook his head. “I just stopped by to say we might be having a visitor here in the neighborhood sometime soon. It being the weekend, I was wondering if you, the missus, and the kids might be off to Arklow,” where Viner’s wife’s brother lived and they often visited.

  “You mean Mossie Gladden, the mad doctor?” Viner’s eyes again fell to the sacks, then quickly returned to McGarr’s. “Yer coddin’ me.” Viner prized the least detail that he was able to extract from McGarr about his investigations, and here he was in the middle of what loomed as the major criminal event of the decade. “Sit down. Sit down, man.” He swept a hand at the table. “Really—have a seat. I’ll put on a pot.”

  McGarr shook his head. “I just thought I’d let you know.”

  There was a pause in which McGarr could almost hear Viner’s quick mind scanning through what he had recently heard and read. “You mean about the evidence that you’ve sequestered and refused to turn over to the government? It just came over the one-thirty date. A kind of teaser let drop by some woman reporter. You know, details to follow in the morning’s Times.” There followed another slight pause, then, “But do you mean Gladden here?”

  McGarr blinked.

  “And him after Paddy Power’s note cards? It’s in the papers.” Viner flicked his hands at the newspapers on the table. “What about Gladden’s IRA connection—is it for real?”

  McGarr turned and reached for the handle of the door. “You should visit Phoenix Park on Monday and fill out an application. I understand there’s a position open.”