The Death of Love

by Bartholomew Gill

  By that time Bresnahan and O’Suilleabhain were standing over them, and they rolled her father off the even-then dead woman. His eyes, which were half-open, were dim and glassy, and there was a fleck of spittle on his chin. But otherwise the blood was hers, and O’Suilleabhain was saying, “You take Ma. I’ll take Tom, and we’ll get them help before—”

  Pandemonium broke out: There were people running toward the bridge, and from off on the north side of the village an enormous explosion erupted. The next thing she knew she was in the car, and they were far from Sneem, O’Suilleabhain at the wheel and beating the quick, surefooted car over the unpaved narrow mountain roads to Tralee.

  “Pa! Pa!” she kept saying to her father, but it was as if he couldn’t see or hear. Or as though what he had seen and heard had been too much for him, and he had simply quit, which was the gist of what he said to her later.

  “The shock and his heart—” the doctors had told her. “I’m afraid there’s little we can do but revive him for a time, so—” you can at least say good-bye went unsaid.

  Her mother couldn’t. “I knew it was coming, but I just can’t bring myself to face him, knowing I’ll not see him again. And it should be peaceful with no weeping, which he always hated.” And, like a child, she had come apart altogether, making it clear to Bresnahan that the tables had turned and her daughter was even now in charge.

  And then, after they gave him the last injection of digitalis—a coincidence not lost on Bresnahan in spite of her anxiety and grief—he said he wanted to speak to “Ruthie alone. With the door closed.”

  Bresnahan had then entered the room as though stepping onto a stage to play a scene that she would reenact—she knew even then—over and over again for the rest of her life.

  The nuns and nurses had propped him up on the pillows and even combed his thick, steely hair. But for the cardiac monitors taped to his hairy, bearish chest, his torso was naked, and he looked, as she had always thought of him, immense: at once square and wide and strong, and certainly not about to die. She was tempted to rush out and try to find some other doctor, who would see how sound he was and could save him.

  But he had seen her, and that same substantial chest was heaving, his eyes were now wide open but glassy, and when he spoke her name, his breathing was labored.

  He opened his hand, and she took it.

  “Well, Ruth Honora Ann—here we are.”

  At the end of the road, she supplied without having to say it. Not being able to help herself, she felt tears streaming hot down her cheeks.

  “It’s all right, really. I’ve been lying here thinking that the least that can be said about me is I was fierce proud and never lowered myself.” He kept having to pause to gather breath, like a runner at the end of a long race. “I did my duty, like my father and his before him. You know”—his eyes cleared for a moment—“living here between the mountains and the sea where we’ve lived since time out of mind.” Another pause. “Not like some, who don’t know or care where they live or why.” His eyes closed and his chest tensed, while the heart monitor drew some lines shaped like gentle waves; Bresnahan squeezed the rough calluses of his hand, but he did not respond for what seemed like the longest time.

  When his eyes opened again, they were more distant. “It’s an important thing you do. I saw so today at the bridge. Mossie—” He tried to shake his head; there was yet another long pause in which Bresnahan tried to listen to the sounds of the hospital so that she would know that it all was real: a metal trolley passing, like a set of cymbals, in the hall; a nun’s beatific voice speaking a prayer over an intercom that could not be stifled completely; the clank and knock of the central heat, warding off the winter cold.

  “But I’m leaving you now. Comfortable enough, you’ll see, at least for your ma.” His eyes tried to scan the room but quickly narrowed again. “Where she is. You do what you want, but I have one thing to ask you.” His head turned fully to her, and his eyes fastened on hers. “Promise me you’ll keep at least a piece of the place, even if it’s just a cottage on the mountain that we’ve loved. And the name.” He then eased himself back into the pillow. “Nead an Iolair,” Bresnahan had said to herself. Eagle’s Nest.

  It was the last Bresnahan heard from him. Or would, she suspected. Now he was just lying there, waiting for the spark to go out, which she now told McGarr, who did not reply.

  Only when she asked, “Chief?” did she realize that McGarr had long since left the line.

  And was already hanging from his own handcuffs. His wrists had been clasped behind his back, and his body had then been raised on a length of line from a rafter in his basement.

  It was an interrogation technique—torture, to be precise—that British forces had practiced on terrorists in the North, and they now used themselves. The purpose? To gain information, such as the question Gladden asked before McGarr had passed out from the pain. “The note cards. You can tell me now or after your shoulders are dislocated. But tell me, you will.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Cuffs

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT BERNIE McKeon’s wife and four of his twelve children met him at the door of his house in Rings End, a working-class section of Dublin. They had been gathered around the kitchen table, listening to the radio reports of the manhunt for Dr. Gladden.

  Upon giving him a kiss, his wife had said, “But the sh-tink of you! Janie, what is it?” She lowered her nose to his overcoat, then grabbed hold of his full shock of blond hair and pulled his head down where she gave it a sniff, tossing it roughly from side to side as she would the hair of one of the children. “Booze, and plenty of it. But that’s a given. And…perfume is what it is.”

  “Now, I can swear to you one thing—I didn’t drink a drop of perfume in me entire time down there. But I did give me mop its yearly rinse.” From a coat pocket he extracted a handful of small vials of fancy shampoo that had been left in his room at Parknasilla; from another pocket he produced the complimentary soaps put up in pretty octagon packets. Four pairs of small hands shot out, and a squabble ensued until each child had one soap and one shampoo apiece.

  McKeon regaled them in his usual fashion about what he had witnessed in Sneem, but his wife’s comment about the drink had hit its mark. Perhaps if he hadn’t spent most of his waking hours in a pleasant pickle, he might have done more to avert the tragedy, the like of which the McKeons themselves had experienced. Seven years earlier his eldest son and firstborn grandchild had been shot to death—executed, bullets to the backs of their heads—by terrorists whom they had surprised burying land mines on a road that ran past their family farm in Monaghan.

  McKeon had not, nor did he suspect he ever would, completely recover from the tragedy. It had something to do with the fact that he was still alive, and his strong, handsome son and his innocent, beautiful child were not. How much more severe his discomfort now to think that many of the people who had died or had been injured in Sneem might now be whole had he been sober. McKeon had guessed when he saw Gladden outside of Parknasilla that he was some sly class of culchie madman.

  With that exact thought in mind he heard the radio announcement about the gray Ford Granada with the Northern plates that had been found in Carlow. Without a doubt it was the same car that McGarr had discovered in an outbuilding on Gladden’s farm. McKeon reached for his hat and the telephone in that order.

  “What—going out again?” the wife asked.

  Glancing from her to the children, McKeon could read the disappointment in their upturned faces. They got to see him seldom, and they had been fascinated by his description of the scene at the bridge and innocently proud that their father had been party to such a momentuous event.

  “I’m going to arrest Dr. Gladden,” he told them.

  “You know where he is?” the littlest lad said with wide, frightened eyes.

  “I have a good idea that I do.”

  “Ah, g’wan wid’ yah,” said the wife. “Don’t be leading them on. Aren’t we after hearing you�
�ve been taken off the case? You’re just off now for a bit of booze. We’ve no room service here.”

  Which was the cruelest cut, there in front of the kids. But warranted, he judged.

  McGarr’s phone was connected to his answering machine. O’Shaughnessy picked up on the first ring.

  “Can’t sleep,” said McKeon. “You hear the latest?”

  “About the Granada? I was just out the door myself. Do I pick you up?”

  “No—a cab’ll be quicker.” McKeon did not own—because he could not afford—a car, and O’Shaughnessy lived on the other side of Dublin. “I’ll approach the house from the back. If they’re already there, I’ll try to flush them out the front.”

  “Right.”

  But McKeon could not seem to find a cab, and when he did by phone, the driver had to stop at every police barricade—“with even the boot being searched,” he said. “Traffic backed up for blocks. That man will never get into this city.”

  Already had, McKeon decided, when he saw the ambulance parked on the quietest corner of Belgrave Square. O’Shaughnessy had not arrived yet, and McKeon had the cabbie let him out beyond sight of the house in an adjoining street. He wagged an extra five-pound note at the man. “Do me a favor?”

  The man nodded.

  “Drive down to the Murder Squad office in Dublin Castle and give this to the man at the desk.” On the back of one of his cards he wrote the license number of the ambulance and added, “Belgrave Square.”

  Trying to keep himself in the shadow of the back-garden walls along the laneway that led to McGarr’s gate, McKeon had to step through ankle-deep, crusted snow and hop over slush puddles and thin, treacherous ice. It was only first light, and with sleet now falling in a biting slant, even the visibility was against him.

  At the gate he put an eye to the crack but had to wait an eternity, it seemed, for the sky to brighten. He then saw no footprints from the gate to the house, but a definite track from the door to the stile in the yard wall that led to the house of an old woman who lived next door. And the Alsatian—the former Bomb Squad dog that was now hers—was pacing around and around McGarr’s house, its nose pointed strangely toward the windows and the basement door, where it stopped each time and sniffed further.

  There was a light in the basement and others in the kitchen and around the side of the house, but McKeon could detect no movement within.

  What to do?

  If McKeon was any judge of dogs—and fifty-three years of almost exclusively negative betting experience told him he was not—the dog had lost his talent for sniffing and just wanted to get into the house for some heat or a tidbit or both. On the other hand, McGarr might have placed the dog on “watch,” and now the beast suspected something within. But how to approach the house or him without getting ripped apart or, worse, shot?

  The old woman. Over the top of the wall McKeon could see the glow of lights from her kitchen. He’d get through her back gate, cross her backyard, and be in her door before the bleeding dog—who was deaf, he seemed to remember—knew he was there.

  But the gate was locked, and, when he put a shoulder to the wood, he found it made of some tough stuff, like teak, the lock stout and sure. In his bare hands a skeleton key, even though warm from his pocket, soon burned his fingers like a shaft of frozen mercury. And once in, he turned to find her back garden a bog of thin ice that first sagged and then collapsed under his weight, making each step a bit of loud, low, unlovely comedy. When finally he arrived at her back door and pulled an ancient brass chain that rang a bell in the kitchen, his shoes were brimming with frigid water.

  “Who is it?” the old woman called out.

  Even with the gate and the ice, McKeon’s luck was holding in regard to the dog. Without uttering a word, he dug out his Garda I.D. and pressed it to the glass, only to realize from the way she squinted and tilted her head, that the woman was nearly blind.

  He then heard what sounded like the basement door open in McGarr’s house and a voice that he didn’t recognize call out, “Here, doggie. Here doggie, doggie. Cum an’ git y’ere lee-ad.” A Belfast accent if McKeon had ever heard one.

  “Lemme in, for Jesus’ sake,” McKeon averred under his breath, pointing to his own chest and then toward the McGarr’s house.

  She only regarded him severely down the length of her long, bony nose.

  Having tried all else, McKeon opened his coat and showed her the pistol that was tucked under his belt; when he looked up, miraculously she had opened the door.

  “You’re one of Peter McGarr’s men, aren’t you? I recognized you by your hat.” She pointed to his bowler.

  McKeon again heard the voice calling for the dog and what, immediately after, sounded like a muffled gunshot and a yelp. Suddenly the dog was on top of the tall wall; it paused there, as if wanting to jump, but instead flopped roughly down into the snow onto its back and neck. There, it tried to get up but staggered and went down again, its eyes blinking once, as though to say, No—I can’t.

  McKeon heard the door close on the other side of the wall.

  “Wellie!” the old woman shouted and pushed past McKeon, half slipping down the snowy stairs and out through the crusty snow and ice onto the side lawn. “Ah, Wellie—what have they done to you?”

  McKeon had an idea. And another about what was going on in the house. It had something to do with shooting what, they thought, was McGarr’s dog: a threat that had been acted on. Now, if they saw the old woman, something else would happen, and soon.

  Out in the snow McKeon had to pry the gnarled hands of the grief-stricken woman off the panting animal. He then squatted down and forced his hands between the frozen snow and the dog’s blood-smeared body, hoping it wouldn’t turn and sink its creamy fangs, which were visible as it struggled to breathe and live, into his arm.

  McKeon, though short, was a wide, strong man, but he was sure, as he lifted the brute, that he felt the sharp pain and even heard the pop of his stomach wall giving way. A fecking hernia, he thought. The last thing he needed, though maybe he’d be lucky to get out of it with just that. It was nearly daylight now, and if either the old woman or he had been seen, whoever was in the house would be back, and McKeon would need to be prepared.

  Carefully he negotiated the slippery stairs and swung the bloody cargo past the old woman, who was holding the door, and into the house.

  All that McGarr watched from a dark nursery window that looked out over the side of the house. Gladden and some younger man, both dressed in the white uniforms of ambulance attendants, were standing behind him. They had let him down from where they had hung him by the handcuffs in the basement, and had pulled, kicked, and dragged him up to Maddie’s bedroom so he could watch the dog be shot. His hands were still shackled behind his back, and Gladden was holding a gun to his head. “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing to McKeon.

  “Her son,” lied McGarr.

  “Will he be over here soo-ehn?” asked the other man, who was obviously from the North.

  “Not likely,” said McGarr. “He’s a bit of a poof, and guns—”

  Said Gladden, as though pleading a point, “If they didn’t hear the shot, they’ll think it’s a road accident. Or the fall from the wall.” He wanted the note cards and the time to get them.

  “A fookin’ strong fookin’ poof,” said a third man from the door. “That dog must weigh ten stone. See the way I drilled him, Sahmmy? One shot freehand and him going over the wall like a snipe. Me with the silencer and all.

  “What’s next, the rope trick again?” he asked, like a child bemused at play.

  The man Sammy spun around and delivered a blow that drove the other man out into the hall. There, beyond McGarr’s sight, he heard two further punches and the advice, “Bring back the old woman and hope, pray, they haven’t phoned the police. Double quick, now. Run, run!”

  Gladden jerked up on the cuffs, and a bolt of pain shot across McGarr’s shoulders. He was directed out into the hallway and then shoved down the sta
irs to the first floor and then back down the cellar stairs to the basement.

  They had been in the house all the time, having arrived in the speeding ambulance sometime during late afternoon or early evening, before the snow had begun to fall. They had waited for McGarr to arrive, even waited through the beginning of his phone call to Bresnahan, hoping he might tell her the location of the note cards.

  While the other man now tied a length of line to the handcuffs and walked the free end up the cellar stairs, Gladden asked, “I ask you again why you think you should protect O’Duffy’s reputation and scum like that Harney and his father. O’Duffy was planning to sell you out. Now Harney will.”

  There was much that McGarr would like to ask Gladden, but he was in no position. He knew that his left shoulder was already dislocated, and even the slight pressure of the line on the cuffs was galling.

  “Do we wait for Mick or—?” the other man jerked on the line, and McGarr’s eyeballs floated up into his head. Every time his yoked arms were raised beyond a certain point, it felt as if they were being prised from his shoulders.

  And ripped, when Gladden pointed down, and the other man, using his own body as a counterweight, jumped from the landing while holding on to the other end of the rope. McGarr was jerked off his feet and left dangling.

  The pain was blinding, horrendous, a flash of livid light that seared through his back, shoulders, neck, and head. He couldn’t breathe for it. Nor see with his head lowered to his belly and his body swaying wildly on the pendulum of the rope. He kicked out and scattered the plants on the table. He tried to lift his head and breathe, but the pain only became more severe, and he felt himself passing out.

  Before he could, they dropped him into the dirt of the scattered plants.

  “So, we ask you yet again—” Gladden said in an even and dispassionate tone, “—where are the note cards?”