The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf

by Bartholomew Gill

  So, if they could assume that O’Malley’s boat was gone because he was on it, then he left sometime after 10:45. “What’s the connection—O’Malley to the Fords?”

  “She—the wife, Breege—is an O’Malley too, and they’re probably related somehow. But the publican says Ford and Packy got on famously and often had jars together. But other than that—” Again Rice shook his head, then pointed to the drive that was speckled with the same brass 7.62 mm bullet jackets that had littered the jetty at the harbor. “’Tis here that the shell casings begin.”

  And also what McGarr thought of as the “mess” that marked the scene of almost every murder, victims seldom being taken completely unawares. The soft clay-and-gravel drive was pocked with footprints, as was the even softer earth of a small cabbage garden that had been planted between the two legs of the switchback drive. Somebody—evidently whoever had been wielding the automatic weapon—had sprinted across the drive near the cubby entrance to the house and then plunged down through the garden, firing all the while.

  “Hard to figure it though—them’s small prints for a man or even a boy. Could it have been a woman?”

  There was no way of knowing, and at the moment McGarr was merely observing, taking in everything he could. But whoever it had been, he or she had not been afraid of the steep slope through the garden and had leapt four or five feet at a bound, firing all the while. The shell cases looked like bright brass seeds that had been strewn over the earth, which was dark from the rain of the night before.

  But there were other prints too, most notably those of a size as large as McGarr had ever seen.

  “Ford himself,” Rice opined, pointing. “There, there, and there. Huge man. As tall and broad as we’ve got in these parts, and Mayo has some big men.”

  And there carrying something heavy from the house to the car, most of the weight on the heels. The impressions were filled with clayey rainwater the color of milky tea. But they did not lead to where the boot of the car must have been, given the tire tracks, but rather to the backseat that had contained so much blood.

  There were also prints of a smaller man leading to the back door on the passenger side, and the prints of yet another even smaller man to the driver’s door. Two of those had been partially stepped on by Ford, who appeared to have been in a great hurry getting behind the wheel. One of his immense shoes had slid a half yard before digging deep into the drive as he pushed off.

  Stooping, McGarr picked up one of the several, smaller shell casings. Nine mm. Probably fired from the Webley automatic that the car had run over and was partially buried in the drive. It had to be an antique, since to McGarr’s knowledge Webleys of that type had not been produced since the Second World War.

  And what was that on its grip? McGarr stepped closer. It was an anchor that had been cast in intaglio along with the words “PROPERTY OF THE ROYAL NAVY.” Patent and registration numbers were on the barrel.

  “These here are the palm prints I told you about.”

  There were several. It looked like somebody had fallen and scrambled through the wet gravel and clay with one rather small hand fully opened and the other cupped.

  From his jacket McGarr pulled out a box of cigarettes and turned toward the house where, maybe, he could find a windless corner and light up. At his wife’s insistence, he’d been trying to quit now for…oh, ten years off and on. But mainly off. The overconsidered cigarette wasn’t worth smoking, and he decided he liked the guilt.

  He displayed the packet to Rice, who shook his head and tapped the uniform pocket over his heart. While lighting up, McGarr noticed a pair of high-tech binoculars hanging from a peg. Zeiss, which were high-quality and—could they be?—of the night-seeing variety. They were bulky with a large dome between the lenses. He wondered what something like that cost; doubtless a pretty penny. Whatever the raiding party had come for, it had not been for a simple theft. Turning, he stepped into the house.

  Blood. Rice had said there would be blood, and he had not lied. Somebody had died in the narrow hallway, probably O’Grady from the pieces of sandy-colored scalp and whitish gore that McGarr caught sight of. A gush of vital matter covered the array of framed photographs and paintings on the wall; in fact, Ford with his huge footprints had trod through the coagulating blood and then stopped six or so feet from where the corpse had lain. There was an outline of shoulders where the blood had pooled.

  Said Rice, “These here are my tracks, Chief, when I came in this morning.”

  But McGarr was distracted. Something had caught his eye. Turning his head, he again scanned the wall. A picture, one of the black-and-white photographs near where Ford had stopped. In it was a beautiful young woman with raven hair and light eyes.

  Smiling into the camera, she had a rose in her hair, and her gracefully formed hands were grouped near her neck. On one finger was the ring that he had seen in the Granada at the harbor, the one with the “diamond” of unlikely size and the surround of “sapphire” stones. Blood had spattered the picture, and somebody with two large fingers had touched the bloodied glass covering it. The fingerprints were definite and now dry.

  But the footprints in the hall were worthless, McGarr judged. After O’Grady had died in the hall, his murderers had tossed the place completely, walking back and forth, searching every nook and cranny. Not one drawer or cabinet had been spared, the contents dumped in piles in the center of the rooms.

  Correspondence was everywhere. Letters had been ripped open, scanned, and the sheets tossed down. Only one stack of paper was still in some order on a table by a lamp that was lit. Each page had “Clem and Breege Ford, Clare Island, Co. Mayo” printed in fancy script at the top. But the handwriting was so eccentric as to be nearly illegible, with backward-slanting characters that looked almost Gothic. McGarr could make out only a word or two.

  Framed photographs—mostly of children and young adults—were also scattered on the hearth, the glass broken. McGarr counted them—eighteen. “Did Ford have that many children or grandchildren?”

  “Far as I know he had none. But, like I said, he was a friendly sort.”

  In other rooms chairs had been overturned and gutted, floorboards ripped up. The hatch to the low attic was still open and a heap of old trunks and cases lay smashed beneath it. The phone was off the hook. Yet the small light on the answering machine was lit, saying there were 0 recorded messages.

  With the butt of his pen, McGarr depressed the button to hear the outgoing message. A deep and sonorous male voice said, “You have reached the home of Breege and Clement Ford. We are unable to come to the phone at the moment, but if you would kindly leave a message, we will ring you back at the earliest possible opportunity. Please wait for the tone.” The English was precise but neutral, the consonants suspirated crisply but without affectation. In all Ford sounded like somebody from a privileged background.

  The kitchen table was still laid with dinner for two, although only one had been eaten; some sort of chowder, lamb chops, brussels sprouts, and boiled potatoes. The other plate had been filled, but the serving remained untouched.

  There was no other sign of life or death. The house had been sacked and its occupants were now missing. Pushing open the back door, McGarr stepped out into another but much larger glassed-in cubby that was filled with rows of potted plants. It was hot in there, and the door to the yard was bolted. McGarr opened it and stepped out.

  A large, well-tended garden ran up most of the length of the dingle. Because the house blocked the blast, it was nearly windless there. A haggard with a row of outbuildings occupied one side of the cleft, and the mountain stream that had formed the dingle ran down the other, passing well beyond the house. Today it was a sparkling torrent, in full spate with the storm water pouring off the mountain.

  Opening one of the sheds McGarr was surprised by geese that bolted past him in a flutter of white feathers and raucous complaint. He found a cow, which he also let out into a grazing yard, and some chickens, but nothing else.
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  Crossing the garden again, he moved toward the stream and a well-worn path along its higher bank. So—he mused, reaching for another cigarette—a large white sailing vessel arrived in the harbor at sundown, and Paul O’Malley, a shut-in who monitored such events, phoned Clement Ford.

  It was suppertime, a storm was raging, yet Ford—a large man nearly eighty who would have to walk two miles each way—pushed himself away from the table and set out immediately. Why? Because he feared (and had been fearing for years) what came to pass?

  Ford then hurried back here to the cottage and rang up Kevin O’Grady, a former guard, asking him to come with a weapon and stay with his wife while he…?

  McGarr stopped by the stream and looked down into the amber water that had been colored by some tannin-rich mountain bog and was gushing golden down the rocky sluice.

  …while Ford hid whatever the raiders had tried to find when they tossed the house? Why else would he leave his blind wife at such a moment?

  But what and hid where? Certainly not in the house or anywhere near it. And whatever it was, it had to be something that an old man, like Ford, could carry during a raging storm.

  McGarr looked round him—at the cottage and ocean beyond, at the garden and haggard, and farther up the ravine to the top where the stream seemed to be spewing from the azure sky. Turning, he began to climb toward that point; maybe from there he could see what the rest of the area looked like.

  So—Ford left the house, O’Grady arrived and the wife let him in. The blind wife, McGarr reminded himself. But before Ford could return, the raiders arrived, murdered O’Grady, and tossed the house. Then Ford, entering by the front door, was shocked to find O’Grady on the floor with the back of his head blown off. It was then that he touched the bloodied picture of his wife. And whatever happened after that was less definite. McGarr thought of all the bloody footprints that had been tracked through the house.

  Now he kept his eyes focused on the path where there were other prints, mostly those of sheep and a donkey—probably the dead donkey, since there was no other—and here and there an immense boot print, obviously Ford’s. But, then, it was equally obvious that Ford farmed the property actively. His prints were probably all over the area.

  At any rate, there was the Webley. No, the antique British Navy-issue Webley. McGarr tried to think of when he had last come across a Webley handgun of that sort. Over a score of years earlier, and even then it had been unusual.

  Somebody in or near the car had fired the Webley at the house, then dropped it in the drive and jumped into the car that ran over it. Ford himself, McGarr was willing to bet; there was the large, skidding footprint just where the driver’s door would have been.

  The car then moved off, and the person wearing the small, narrow boots charged down from the top of the drive, through the cabbage garden, and out onto the switchback drive again, firing clip after clip of 7.62-caliber ammunition.

  At what? At the car, O’Grady’s car, the Granada that had been left on the jetty wall with O’Grady dead in the boot. It was pocked and riven mainly with large-caliber bullet holes. The raiders had then hitched the donkey to the cart and taken it the four miles by road to the harbor, rather than the two overland. Why?

  Because they did not know the overland route and feared blundering into a bog? Or because they had found what they were after here and had to transport it back to their boat? Or because one of them had been hit by the fire from the Webley, and the donkey cart was the easiest means of getting their wounded back?

  Then who had lost so much blood in the backseat of the Granada? Ford’s wife. Because she was blind, she could not have been driving the car. But yet her ring was lying on the floor by the driver’s seat.

  Plainly McGarr did not know enough, and he tried to keep his mind from rushing on. But if the raiders had found what they were after here at the Ford cottage, why had they then broken down the door of the fisherman’s living quarters on the quay and sprayed the interior with gunfire? Pique at not having discovered what they had come for? Or anger that one or more of their number had been killed or wounded by Ford? They must have thought Ford was in there. Or O’Malley.

  No, not O’Malley. It all had to have happened before half ten, while O’Malley was still in the pub. Why had nobody heard the gunfire? An assault rifle produced a deafening report, especially when fired in basin of concrete and stone like the Clare Island harbor. Unless, of course, the gun had been silenced, which the Tech Squad would be able to determine by examining the recovered slug.

  The raiders had then left on their boat, the large white schooner. How far could it have got in the twelve plus hours between leaving Clare Island and McGarr asking the Coast Guard and Naval Service to search for it? Far. Say, it could motor as well as sail, and it made…fifteen knots under power. That would be over two hundred miles.

  Say then, that it took another four or five hours at the inside for Scottish or Norwegian authorities to be made aware of the alert and to deploy their ships and planes. Or, say, that the boat had simply sailed straight out to sea, or that the raiders had in place some contingency plan for scuttling the vessel. Or abandoning it in some port on the mainland that was only eight miles distant.

  McGarr shook his head, before tossing down the cigarette and crushing it under foot. Raiders with silenced assault rifles, who had come to the island for a purpose and were willing to kill, had probably also devised some way of making off. As well, there was the additional problem that there had been few government vessels in Mayo waters on the night before, and that onboard radar could sweep a radius of only twenty miles at the outside.

  Now nearing the top of the dingle, McGarr again felt the wind off the ocean pushing him forward, more strongly the higher he climbed. At the top he had to plant his legs to look around.

  Three hundred or so yards below him directly to the west, and tucked neatly into the dingle, lay the Ford cottage, looking like a photo for some “Hidden Ireland” promotional campaign. Were there not a road, it would be impossible to tell that there was a house anywhere nearby. Both to north and south the land was nothing but a reach of towering, treeless mountain and an equally open expanse of rolling fields—bounded by the cliff—all the way to what appeared to be a lighthouse some two long miles away.

  McGarr could see only one other group of buildings. Another cottage with some large buildings nearby had been grouped virtually on the cliff edge maybe half the distance to the lighthouse. It was also the direction in which the path now led, over hill, dale, stile and stream. McGarr set out.

  Overhead a young gannet, its dun wings speckled, swooped in a circle, gathering itself before diving toward the edge of the cliff and the deep blue waves below. Farther on, McGarr came upon a patch of alpine sawwort, its yellow leaves thriving at the edge of a bog. Formerly he had thought the exotic plant restricted to special growth areas in Cork and Kerry in Ireland, and he plucked a leaf to make sure. Later—perhaps back in Dublin—he’d look it up. Other than fishing, McGarr’s hobby was gardening and plants.

  Farther still along the path, he discovered a wallow where Ford—it could have been nobody but—had blundered through the mud. Perhaps walking at night in a storm without a torch because he feared being seen?

  The water was deep but the prints still crisp.

  McGarr moved on.

  CHAPTER 9

  MIRNA GOTTSCHALK SAW the man approaching from at least a mile away. She had been scanning the hills with the binoculars she used for birding, ever since she received the first phone call about Breege and Clem and poor Kevin O’Grady. And now Packy O’Malley seemed to be missing as well. His house had been shot up, and his boat was gone.

  Her first thought had been to go to the Fords’ cottage, her dear friends and nearest neighbors who meant so much to her and her parents in their time. Why? Because she felt guilty, and she wished there was some way she could help, now that it was probably too late.

  Why had she thought Clem had been exaggerating
or acting a bit dotty when he had come to her studio the night before? To her knowledge Clem Ford had never uttered so much as a fib, and he had been upright and genuine in all his dealings. Maybe she could have prevented whatever it was that had happened to them and the tragedy of O’Grady’s death.

  How? Well, by having notified the guards in Louisburgh on the mainland. Would they have come on the report of an elderly man acting a bit strange? No, probably not. And even if they said they would, could they have got to the harbor and then all the way out to the Fords’ on time? No again.

  Worried by what Clem had said and how he had acted, she had rung up Breege shortly after he left but had been unable to get through to the cottage, even though she let the phone ring and ring. And Breege could not possibly have been anywhere else on such a night. That alone should have alerted her to the extraordinary nature of the situation—for the half century that she had known the Fords, they had been the most predictable and dependable people on the island.

  Instead of taking action, Mirna had told herself she would stop round in the morning and return the packet. She had thought it an embarrassment for Clem, a sign that he was getting old and beginning to lose his grip on reality. But after the phone calls, she had changed her mind.

  With fear and trembling, she had summoned the courage to look inside. It contained only what Clem had said—two single sheets of paper. The first listed the names of the two firms that Clem had told her about and also the name of the man that she should avoid at all costs: Angus Rehm. Also there was a paperboard pouch that was sealed with red wax and felt like it contained papers.

  Could the rumors be true? Could Clem and Breege, who had lived the simplest of lives, have controlled the Clare Island Trust? Is that why they were missing or…whatever? Mirna reflected on how the Trust had helped her, granting her incipient business venture an immense loan of one hundred thousand pounds. And it had not foreclosed during the ten months that she had been unable to meet the repayment schedule.