The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf

by Bartholomew Gill

  Breege? No—she was a fine-boned woman with narrow feet. And because of her blindness, she undoubtedly would have never been there.

  The answer to who it had been was printed on the wall about twenty feet in. What looked like an animal—an elk or a deer stylized in the manner of the ancient Celts—had been chipped into a flat surface. Near it somebody else had written in Irish, in faded reddish-colored paint, “Gearoidi Vairnh.” It meant “Gerard’s Cave.” Clare Island, however, had not been a stronghold of the Irish language, and even at the turn of the present century there had been few Irish speakers, which rather dated the graffiti.

  Finally, large white letters announced,

  “2 SEPT, 1916

  TOUCH NOTHING OR YOU’LL HAVE

  PEIG O’MALLEY TO DEAL WITH

  UP THE REPUBLIC!”

  Tucked into the wall were stacks of empty, wooden rifle crates stenciled “Springfield Armory, Springfield, Mass.” Guns from America. Peig must have hidden them here after the ill-fated Easter Rising at the Dublin GPO when the British scoured the country for caches of arms.

  Mirna thought she should go on, having come this far. But she was exhausted from all her worrying and the long dark climb. Also, the torch seemed to grow dimmer and dimmer, the farther she got away from the mouth of the cave. And finally she came to an aven that plunged sharply to what could only be some other, deeper gallery.

  Lining the shaft was a wide and smooth, wooden skid—built from the wood of other gun cases—that was scarred, as though having been used to lower some things that were heavy below. A large winch with a great bale of cable wrapped around its drum and powered by a donkey engine stood before it.

  Mirna decided to sleep the night, before carrying on farther. Maybe the twinge of fear that was tracking up her spine would have left her by then. One thing she knew without ever having to see what was down there—what Clem had told her was true, and probably all of it.

  CHAPTER 18

  PETER MCGARR WAS waiting in the wing chair in Mirna Gottschalk’s sitting room when she arrived home at 8:11 the next morning.

  The sun had come up at 4:22, but McGarr had been in the house since around midnight, after receiving a phone call from McKeon. There was no nook or cranny in any of Gottschalk’s four buildings that McGarr had not searched. But he had found nothing related to the Fords, beyond their telephone number written on the inside kitchen cabinet near the phone.

  “Well, Chief Superintendent McGarr—aren’t you the true guard in every sense. A woman steps away for a night, and there you are, securing her portals.”

  “Which were open.”

  “As they always are.”

  “Even now during tourist season?”

  “What tourists would I get out here? Only the odd lost soul.”

  McGarr cocked his head, as though to say, My thought exactly. “I also came to return your Rover. It was in the way, still sitting in front of the hotel with all the O’Malleys arriving.”

  Pulling her rucksack off her shoulders, Mirna let it down onto the flagstones beside her in the hall. There was color in her cheeks, and her dark eyes were bright and clear. McGarr could see no sign of what McKeon had reported as her probable fate. Her clothes were dry, and she even looked rested.

  “Sure, my parents and I spent most of our lives without owning a motorcar. Even now it sits idle in the shed until some one of my employees needs to get home. But as luck would have it, I have to collect my son at the ferry and take him to the funeral.” She pulled off her jacket, and a clump of fine beach sand sprayed over the flagstones.

  “Could I catch a lift there myself?”

  “Mais oui. A lift is in order. I like the sound of that, don’t you?”

  “Lift?”

  “Lift. I feel so rejuvenated after my hike.”

  McGarr studied her. “May I ask where you’ve been?”

  “Oh, of course, you may. You may ask anything you wish.” But she only cocked her head and eyed him; she was a different woman from the one he had met two days earlier. She was insouciant, playful, and even—was it?—cocky.

  “May I take a look at what you have in the sack?”

  “Better, I’ll show you.” She pulled open the straps and dumped the contents. “And tick it off—crampons, spikes, chocks, nuts, pitons, carabiners, climbing harness, climbing ropes, swami belt, down bag, halogen light, camera. A large part of Croaghmore is an ISO. I enjoy photographing wildlife.” The last phrase was said with a smile. “Dawn is the best time.”

  But the camera was a Polaroid, meant for portraits and close-ups. McGarr wondered what class of wildlife she would be photographing with that.

  “Now then, Chief Superintendent, I must shower and change. If you continue to need me for any reason, just follow the sound of water.”

  And what was that—a proposition?

  Beyond picking up the camera, Mirna Gottschalk did not move. Instead, she stared at him quizzically, as though waiting.

  Which left McGarr in no doubt. He only held her gaze. She had made her choices in life, he his.

  In the shower, Mirna wondered how much the policeman could know. Surely not the totality of what Clem Ford had left. Had she not snapped some photographs to show Karl, she would scarcely credit it herself. And then there was Dublin.

  Mirna was elated. What she could do for Mayo, for Ireland, for the arts! When the ice-cold water in the shower, plumbed from deep in the cliff courtesy of the Clare Island Trust, struck her face, it shocked her, but she felt renewed and suddenly powerful.

  She flexed her muscles and wished the policeman had decided to give her a tumble. She needed sex, a man…something. It was just mind-boggling that Clem and Breege had sat on such worth for so long without ever using it. There was a lesson in that, and Mirna understood why she, of all people, should have been chosen by Clem.

  They were the same. Worldly goods, things, possessions meant little to her, witness the fact that only a short while past she had been standing in the midst of incomparable wealth, and it had never dawned on her to take a thing. Like Clem and Breege, she had no personal need for wealth other than what she already possessed. She only hoped Karl would see it that way too. But, of course, he would, being her son.

  Karl Gottschalk was a tall, dark, young man who was thin almost to the point of gauntness. With wide shoulders—made larger by the padding of a dark, square-cut suit—he appeared to lope when he walked. His eyes were deep-set and dark, like his mother’s.

  When he was introduced to McGarr by his mother, his smile was quick, his gaze steady. “This is a pleasure,” he said in the designedly neutral voice that could be anything—British, Canadian, American, Australian even—that McGarr placed as the lingua franca of preferment. Karl Gottschalk knew how people of privilege spoke.

  “I’ve always wanted to meet the man beneath the bowler. My friends will be envious. I’m sure they’ll make me ‘play’ McGarr. I hope you don’t mind if I observe you closely.”

  “The bowler?” McGarr asked with mild dismay. “Sure I wear that only during photo ops.”

  Which elicited a vulpine smile and an unhurried look of assessment from Gottschalk. Taking the wheel, he said he was an architect practicing in Dublin now five years.

  “With a firm?”

  “Someday, maybe. Right now, I’m on me own.”

  And struggling, McGarr could hear from his tone.

  “It’s difficult to get started if you don’t fancy building shopping centers or housing estates,” his mother put in.

  “Or bloody Georgian restorations, or neo-Georgian…anythings. I swear there’s not a person in all of Dublin who doesn’t have graven on his subconscious mind the ideal of the fanlight, cornices of white stone, and tall arched windows, even if he claims he doesn’t.

  “I show a client my drawing, and I can tell from his reaction there’s something wrong. I take something away here, add something there. Still wrong. Throw in a Georgian window—it doesn’t matter where; on the bloody roof
even—‘Ah there, young sir, you’re getting the hang of it now.’”

  McGarr and Mirna laughed.

  Karl Gottschalk was a pleasant sort—Trinity grad and then on to Italy and London. He had worked in England for a while, but, like so many other émigrés, he had always planned to settle in Ireland, and he had returned at the first opportunity. “But it’s been dribs and drabs, so far, I’ll admit.”

  Presently he was living in Herbert Park, a decidedly staid and pricey section of Dublin. “Five of us from Trinity—house sharing,” which was the practice for young people who found themselves with mortgages they could not afford.

  “Your place?” McGarr asked.

  “Oh Lord no. A friend is trying to own it. And he’s got the proper license.”

  “And which would that be?”

  “The license to steal, legally. He’s a barrister.”

  Again Mirna Gottschalk laughed; as it turned out, for the last time that morning.

  There were two churches, a burial ground, and a holy well at the abbey. Or, rather, a white stucco church that looked to have been built fairly recently and the fifteenth-century abbey where Grania Uiale was said to be interred. Presently the frescoes of the old, graceful stone structure were being restored, and it bristled with rusting iron scaffolding.

  “A Board of Works project,” Karl said. “Handled right, it could become a career for at least several people.”

  A Cistercian abbey had been on the site since the twelfth century, Mirna Gottschalk informed McGarr. “Actually, some think the holy well was a Druidic worshipping place before Christianity established itself here. There’s a standing stone in the graveyard that might mark a Bronze Age burial site.”

  “The Bronze Age,” McGarr mused, “just when was that? After Copper and before Brass?”

  “The Bronze Age around here was about two thousand B.C. But the 1989 study of the island turned up a Stone Age passage grave that’s been conservatively estimated to be at least fifty-five hundred years old.”

  “And to think we’re still waiting for the Gold.” McGarr opened the door and stepped out.

  The laneway in front of the newer church was packed with a motley assortment of “island” vehicles, and the new Rover rather amplified the Gottschalks’ difference from other Clare Islanders—Mirna, the entrepreneur who put the others to work; Karl, the professional who had been forced to emigrate only as far as Dublin from which he could return easily, as now, when needed. She was divorced, a blow-in, a Jew.

  And she looked all of the part: dark, tanned, wearing some simple black summer dress that was at once decorous and fetching. With her white hair brushed out and the knobs of her shoulders exposed, she collected the eyes of many of the people there. A woman sitting near the rail beckoned, and Karl and Mirna took the places that had been saved. Born-and-raised Clare Islanders, they were not without friends, seoinini that they were. McGarr himself took a seat among the police presence. There were guards from Galway where Kevin O’Grady had put in ten years, Wicklow Town where he had also served, and from Phoenix Park which was Garda Siochana headquarters in Dublin.

  “Which one is O’Grady’s father?” McGarr asked Tom Rice in a whisper. “What’s his first name again?”

  “Fergal. He’s the one in the brat with the sugan belt,” Rice muttered in patent disdain. “And the mane in need of shearing.”

  By brat he meant the long Celtic-style cloak with a ruffled collar that O’Grady was wearing; the sugan belt around his waist resembled a link of braided beige rope but was probably straw or dried heather. Together the costume was a bit much but obviously designedly so; nobody looked like that without wanting to.

  “There’s them that claims he’s a senachie,” Rice went on. “He’s got a regular following here on the island.” The word meant wise man or soothsayer.

  Like Paul O’Malley’s mother, McGarr remembered, with her saying O’Grady had predicted trouble would come because of the presence of “strangers” like the Gottschalks and Clem Ford.

  “But there’s others that say he’s a shite-hawking, poormouth hoor with a good word for nobody but himself and his toadies.”

  “And what do you say?”

  Rice cocked his head. “This might sound hard, given the situation, but if he’s a senachie, then he’s a senachie with an ‘attitude’—as is said. He never deserved a son like Kevin. What you see there is just how he looks. Worse is his carry-on and blather. The antics of the man are beyond belief.”

  In the churchyard, McGarr found himself standing beside the ancient Bronze Age burial stone that Mirna Gottschalk had spoken of earlier. It was at least twice McGarr’s height and had a Latin cross engraved on its surface, probably cut by some early Christian attempting to consecrate the Druidic worshipping place.

  In that way it was little different from the land where EU sheep now grazed on the corrugations of former potato beds, some of which had been cut through fulachta fiadh—ancient cooking sites, McGarr had been told by his wife.

  As the priest droned on, McGarr thought of the waves of people who had invaded Ireland with its good harbors and deep rivers, immigrants after a fashion. The first were from Brittany or Spain or perhaps even the Tagus area of Portugal, it was thought. Then came the Celts, the Danes, the Normans, the British, the Spanish, the British, and now individuals from who knew where who had money and could tolerate island life. Or who had discovered a way of providing themselves with an income. Like Mirna Gottschalk and Clem Ford.

  Somehow, Ford had a personal source of wealth that was beyond the scope of other Clare Islanders. Witness his wife’s magnificent diamond-and-sapphire ring. And whatever it was that the raiders had searched for and not found.

  True, McGarr had not known Kevin O’Grady, former guard and father of seven. But it was strange and sad how, after a lengthy career in the guards that had probably exposed him to his share of danger, lethal violence had found him out in his retirement in this remote place.

  The general prayer had begun, and McGarr joined the assembled mourners in the communal chant. The priest then said that there was no doubt life was linked through death to an afterlife. McGarr looked away. He supposed something had to be said to give the family hope, but the certitude of the pronouncement rang hollow.

  After the ceremony, McGarr found himself chatting with some other guards he did not know. But two of them knew somebody who knew him vaguely and had said to say hello, so they gabbed about him. It was a closer conjunction than McGarr had experienced at some other police burials. Either the country was too large; or there was too much crime, too many police, and too many police burials.

  When he looked around, he discovered that O’Grady’s father had left. He was not among the family, nor in the church, nor on any of the roads McGarr could see from there. Using another police Land Rover that Rice had succeeded in ferrying over from the mainland, he checked the shop of the Clare Island Co-op—a small grocery store that was nearby—and then the pub in the harbor and the bar at the hotel. No Fergal O’Grady.

  Finally, after a quick inquiry for directions, McGarr drove out to O’Grady’s house. It was an old-style Irish cottage, built perpendicular to a hill with two small windows to either side of the door. The roof, which was in good thatch, was held down by a netting of rope that looked handmade; the corners were staked to the ground. There was no car; in fact, there were no wires leading into the buildings.

  McGarr knocked but got no reply. When he tried the door, it was open. Inside, there was a strong smell of paraffin, and a ship’s lantern hanging over the central table was lit by wick. McGarr shouted, only the wind replied.

  Walking past the house, however, he caught sight of a figure about a half mile off on the heath, footing turf—O’Grady himself, McGarr could see as he got closer. Standing with his back to the wind so that his wild mane was shielding his face, the old man was punching a slane down through the moist peat, the bright blade coming away with a dark divot with every thrust.

  O�
��Grady had doffed the brat, which now lay carefully folded across the yoke of the panniers that draped his donkey’s back. A black-and-white sheep dog met McGarr halfway and barked at his heels for the better part of a quarter mile.

  Working in a loose tunic that looked handmade, O’Grady was also wearing woolen trousers of a coarseness that resembled cottage weave. Probably all of eighty, he was nevertheless hale, his thin muscles gnarled and strong.

  “I wonder if I might have a word with you,” McGarr said over the dog’s continuing harangue.

  O’Grady did not look up. “Ná bí ag cainnt Bearla.”

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to speak English. My Irish isn’t up to it.”

  “I don’t have to speak nothin’ to the likes of you.” Raising the slane, O’Grady shook the sharp right-angled blade at McGarr.

  “And what likes is that?”

  “The likes of them that murdered my son, is what likes. The likes of foreigners and scuts, like you. Yeh’ve ruined this country, this island, and now my son who served his time and then did everything in his power to get clear of you. Frauds and gobshites, all of yiz. Mots, bowsies, and gurriers.”

  McGarr had heard that before—from Colm Canning on the “water taxi.” “Ruined this country how?” The point was to keep him talking; maybe he might have some idea of who the raiders were, senachie that people claimed him.

  “By taking the king’s shilling is how.” It was an old phrase alluding to a traitorous act. “The Europeans paid you hoors twenty billion pounds since 1973, and what did they want in return? Not just our bodies in Brussels. No—they knew they could get that. This time they wanted our souls too! It was you that sold them.” He shook the slane again, his old eyes wide in anger, his mane flaring.

  “And you Dublin swine, you were first into the trough—snouts, jowls, trotters, and all—with one GUBU outrage after another.” It was an acronym that had been coined in the press to describe ever-unfolding government scandals and stood for Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, Unprecedented. “Shoddy housing estates, poor roads, payoffs, kickbacks, nepotism, and plain old theft.