The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf

by Bartholomew Gill

  “The slops that splashed out? Why, they fell to us gruntlings. With twenty billion in play, why, even the fools in the West could get some. Grants for houses, lights, toilets, piped poor water, the bloody telephone, farm this way, fish that way, even put your rubbish out their way. And with every sort of backhander along the way for government men like you.” O’Grady stuck out a hand behind his back as though to accept bribe money.

  McGarr dug a smoke from his pocket. He had heard the twenty-billion figure before; in fact, he knew people—his wife’s father, for one—who had made a great deal of money since 1973 because of his associations with politicians and his knowledge of the workings of government. But he had never been accused of any misdeed, nor had any of his friends. Also, since 1973 life had got better for almost everybody in Ireland, at least on a material level. But it was that which seemed to bother the old man most.

  “What else did we get?” Now O’Grady was pointing a finger at McGarr. It was shaking noticeably, he was so exercised, and McGarr wondered if the man was entirely right. Maybe his son’s death had put him over the top. “Illegitimacy—one in five born in Ireland today is a bastard.”

  McGarr managed to light the cigarette. Apart from the term, it was nothing new in a country where, formerly, all means of contraception had been illegal. Over the years more than a few Irish women had gone to England for abortions or to give up a child for adoption. The difference was—now unwed Irish women were keeping their children, the stigma having eased in many circles. Thankfully.

  “Ireland has the youngest population in all of Europe. More than half are under twenty-five, and no jobs for them. No sir. They’re the children of Lir!”

  Who were changed into swans by a jealous stepmother and made to wander the earth for centuries, McGarr seemed to remember. He blew out the smoke that bolted past the old man. Again McGarr wished he was out in a boat with his favorite gillie, dropping flies through the clear water to the salmon that were entering Loch Eske.

  Now O’Grady climbed out of the bog, slane still in hand. “Now we even have divorce, and why shouldn’t we. We’re practiced at it. We’ve been divorcing our children for two bloody centuries as a matter of policy! But not your child, buck!” O’Grady darted the slane in McGarr’s direction. “Not now that you’ve banked the twenty billion that would have kept ours at home. No, you’ll send yours to Trinity on government grants.”

  Please, God, thought McGarr.

  “Then she’ll waltz right into the art shop on Dawson Street and have her weekends in Dunlavin reported in the press.”

  O’Grady took another step toward McGarr, who wondered where he had come up with that. But people talked, and it was all public information.

  “See this?” Now the old man had the slane only inches from McGarr’s face. “I’m probably the only cottier on this island who still cuts turf for heat or grows potatoes for sustenance or raises sheep for his food and clothing.”

  You’re a piece of work, all right, thought McGarr. I’ll give you that.

  “Now it’s all coal from Poland or spuds from bloody Cyprus! And alcoholism, drug addiction, child battering, divorce, and abortion advocates. Kids on the telly making fun of everything from the Irish language, which they, like you, canna speak, read, or write, to taking off their parents and teachers! Taking off Republicanism! Taking off religion and God!”

  McGarr raised a hand and pushed the blade away from his face. “I came here to ask you if you know who killed your son.”

  “And you just heard it.” With the tool O’Grady riffled the air above McGarr’s head.

  Not knowing how much more he could take or should, McGarr turned and began making his way back toward the house.

  But he had only moved a few steps before O’Grady shouted, “The voice that Paul O’Malley taped was speaking Afrikaans. It was just a discussion of course bearing and the gap that should be kept between the two boats, the schooner and the dark sportfisher that was lacking numbers. ‘Northwest’ it said. ‘Bearing three hundred and twenty-two degrees.’ The man’s voice was elderly, and he advised the other boat not to break radio silence again until they reached their destination, which was not discussed. He—the elder—signed off by using the word ‘Helmet.’

  “The second voice, who spoke nothing beyond calling for the Mah Jong and asking for the bearing, speed, and delay, was that of a pubescent boy or a young woman, I’m thinking.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Don’t I be known as a senachie.” It was not a question and was said with perfect surety.

  “You speak Afrikaans?”

  “Monck of Monck and Neary represented Paul O’Malley in his action against Aran Energy. Paul was put onto them by Clem Ford, who had them on retainer through the Clare Island Trust. Monck settled for three million pounds. Ford thought it too little and paid Monck’s fee and all Paul’s medical expenses.”

  “And built the house.”

  O’Grady nodded.

  “And bought him the automated wheelchair, the robotics scope, the transceiver, and scanner.”

  “The works.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Clem Ford is rich.”

  O’Grady looked away and forked his fingers through his hair. “I wouldn’t say he is, which is the one thing I admire him for. He has great inhuman restraint.”

  And you inordinate pride, thought McGarr. “So, the Clare Island Trust is well funded and Ford controls it through Monck and Neary?”

  “I know nothing about the Clare Island Trust, apart from the fact it’s brought grave trouble down upon us, as I said it would from the very beginning. Which is this.”

  “I’ve called into most of the houses on the island. Why did nobody else tell me of the Clare Island Trust?”

  “Because it’s their fiddle too, and they’re afraid you’ll ruin it for them. Me, I couldn’t care less. I wouldn’t take a farthing from that scut.”

  McGarr waited, before asking, “Anything else?”

  O’Grady shrugged, as though considering. Finally, he said, “I only hope you’re different from the others of your kind and know your job. And you should get some help. Packy O’Malley is a Republican, fried and true. He won’t let what happened to Kevin and Breege Ford go unpunished. He’s got Clem with him and maybe some others, and he’ll be back.”

  “Back where? Here?”

  O’Grady nodded.

  “Why here?”

  O’Grady turned and moved away toward the bog.

  Back at the desk of the hotel, McGarr asked for his messages and confirmed what Fergal O’Grady said about the language on the tape being Afrikaans. A Tech Squad report said the second voice was definitely that of a woman. She had called herself Hester or Ester when signing on. The Naval Service had dispatched a long-range reconnaissance aircraft to search the area along a line of the compass bearing, but McGarr expected little from the effort. Too much time—nearly three days now—had elapsed.

  The registration number on the Royal Navy Webley automatic placed it last in the possession of one Lieutenant Owen Hoarsely whose gunboat never returned from patrol off the coast of Scotland at the beginning of the war.

  And finally there was a note from Tom Rice to the effect that while chatting in the pub over jars after the funeral, he was told that Clem Ford was said to have controlled a charitable and philanthropic institution called the Clare Island Trust, “that has done wonders for the island and Mayo.”

  McGarr signaled to the desk clerk. “When a message comes in for me, how is it dealt with?”

  “It’s put right into the box for your room.” She stood and showed him a cabinet of numbered pigeonholes.

  “Do you read them?”

  “No, sir. I was told when I started—all that is private, strictly so, and none of my affair. Don’t so much as look at it. If I did, I’d be sacked.”

  “And you never leave the desk.”

  “Oh, of course I do. I fill in for the
barman on his break. Or when it’s slow I find something else to keep me busy, like.”

  So much for Fergal O’Grady, senachie.

  Two hours later, McGarr was standing in the hallway of the Ford cottage with his wife, Noreen, by his side. Over Maddie’s complaints they had left her in the Garda Land Rover out in the drive.

  The flies that had been attracted by the surfeit of blood had already produced maggots. The hall floor was teeming with them, and the reek was nearly enough to make McGarr retch. Noreen remained in the cubby, a handkerchief covering her nose and mouth.

  McGarr punched down the playback button of the voice message on the answering machine, and after a pause Clem Ford’s deep voice came on, saying, “You have reached the home of Breege and Clement Ford. We are unable to…”

  “Hear it again?”

  “Don’t have to. From the precise way he suspirates his consonants, to say nothing of his lazy nasalized vowels and dropped Rs, it’s Ox-bridge. Or something like it. A good public school—Harrow, Eton, one of those. Also, I don’t think he’s a native speaker. Did you hear that ‘message’ of his?”

  McGarr had not, so they heard it again.

  “…if you would kindly leave a meszage—”

  “Notice the gutteralization of that final S. And also in the way he says ‘please.’”

  They heard that too, which sounded slightly like, “Pleasze wait for the….”

  “Doesn’t it remind you a little of Henry Kissinger or—I don’t know—Boris Becker? Finally the giveaway is the way he pronounces his own name. It’s like he’s saying, ‘Khlemt.’ In phonetics, that’s the non-English velar fricative sound. Native English speakers don’t say it and often can’t without practice.

  “And another thing—on the other tape, the one of the Afrikaans speaking boat to boat?” Although neither Noreen nor McGarr spoke that language, they had listened to it several times over on the drive out from the hotel. “Couldn’t the ‘Helmet’ that the man calls himself be ‘Helmut,’ to keep everything tribal and within the range of gutteralized languages.”

  Back out in the Rover, they listened to it yet again, and she was right. It now sounded more like Helmut which seemed to make more sense.

  All the advantages of a university degree, McGarr thought. But then, of course, by marriage he had acquired three of them without having to carry around a burden like “velar fricatives” in his head. He had all he could to remember the details from his backlog of open cases.

  Before retiring to their room in the hotel, McGarr rang up his Dublin office and asked the desk sergeant to put in a request to Scotland Yard for a search of any and all possible Oxford, Cambridge, and British public school graduates by the names of Clem or Clement Ford.

  “And as long as they’re about the check, let’s add the name of Angus Rehm,” since it was the only other name they had. And on a whim, McGarr now said, “And Helmut Rehm.” Noreen had mentioned keeping everything “perfectly tribal,” and, whereas, Angus was an identifiably Scots name, Rehm was something else entirely—German or Dutch or perhaps even Afrikaner.

  Some one of their inquiries was bound to turn up some information at least on Clem Ford. The recording apparatus of modern society was too pervasive and complete for anybody, even an old man in the West of Ireland, to get lost. After all, Ford hadn’t just sailed up Clew Bay in a bubble; there had to be facts on file about him someplace.

  “What about Ward and Bresnahan?” He wanted them there by the morning, when Rice said the O’Malleys would begin coming over for their “rally.”

  “As far as I know, they’re on their way here now, Chief.”

  “Any word on the diamond ring?”

  “Other than its authenticity and value, nothing. Yet.”

  McGarr then spent the better part of an hour going over the progress of the other open murder investigations and the preliminary details of a death in Cork that local guards thought suspicious.

  After ringing off, he phoned his contact in the Naval Service about the search for the schooner and sportfishing boat.

  “Nothing unusual—the Spanish tuna fleet is beginning to assemble in the Stream, three larger sailing craft, no schooners. There’s a Norwegian trawler and two draggers working a bit farther north off Donegal, and a fair few of our own boats plying coastal waters.”

  CHAPTER 19

  MIRNA GOTTSCHALK WAITED until after dinner to tell her son about Clem Ford’s visit, the packet, and the cave. For good reason.

  With the tide coming in, Karl would not be able to thrash off into the night and find the cave. Though an experienced climber, he would at least have to sleep on it, prudence dictating that he wait at least until morning or the evening of the coming day.

  Better still, he might be satisfied with the photos Mirna had taken. She showed them to him in the studio. Breege’s portrait was still on the easel.

  “It’s a complete cave in every sense with four galleries that I know of and what looks like an aven leading up into the mountain.”

  “In addition to the cave entrance, the one you went in?” Karl was intrigued.

  “Yes, I could feel a draft there, but my light only carried thirty or forty feet.”

  “Meaning there could be a second entrance somewhere up on the mountain?”

  “It would seem so, but where? I thought I knew every inch of that mountain.”

  Karl nodded, being well acquainted with Croaghmore himself.

  “Which brings me to what I discovered inside. Do you know that immense ring that Breege always wears?” Mirna pointed to the painting. “I always thought it couldn’t possibly be real.”

  Karl nodded. “Because of its size.”

  Standing beside the chair he had taken at the long drawing table, Mirna placed a Polaroid snapshot in front of him. “Here are the pieces that go with it—the earrings, the necklace, the brooch. The central stone in the necklace is the single largest diamond I have ever seen.”

  Mirna waited while Karl studied the photograph and the eleven others that she had taken of the…treasure, it could only be. She had shot one Polaroid roll.

  “My God, Mother. This stuff is magnificent. How do you know it’s real?” His dark eyes flashed up at her, but he knew it was. “Where could Clem have come by it? Was he a pirate with all his bother about the boats that put into the harbor?”

  Mirna glanced at Clem’s packet on the other side of the table; she had not again opened the pouch with the memoir or explanation or apologia or whatever it was, not wishing to learn anything worse about Clem. His reputation was already being destroyed now by Fergal O’Grady and his toadies on the island. Also, Mirna’s head was still filled with the possibilities for doing good. And finally she suspected that Clem, by asking her to wait before reading the memoir, had wanted them to suspend judgment of him until they heard whatever the solicitors at Monck & Neary in Dublin would tell them.

  Karl shuffled through the other photos: one British Navy ammunition box after ammunition box filled with heaps of gold jewelry encrusted mostly with diamonds, but with rubies, emeralds, sapphires, topazes, and tourmalines looking like bright ribbons of golden Christmas candy. There was also a variety of metal-working equipment: cylinders of gas, torches, crucibles, ladles, and molds for creating ingots that were still lined with gold droplets and gold dust.

  “What are those things heaped in that corner?” Karl asked, pointing to a pile of strange cone-shaped objects with propellers.

  “I have no idea. There are ten of them, but I was so overcome by everything else, I didn’t pay them much mind.”

  “And Clem said this was the lesser part? What you could do with this! I mean, in a positive way.”

  Mirna squeezed Karl’s shoulder, who was surely her son right down to the way he thought.

  His eyes darted at the packet on the other side of the table. “Is that Clem’s? Is that what he gave you? What’s in it?” His hand darted out. Mirna tried to stop him, but the flap of the packet popped open and the conten
ts spilled onto the table. They both stared down at the two pieces of paper and the pouch with the red wax seal that was broken.

  “I think we should respect what Clem asked of us.”

  Karl glanced at the two sheets with the names and the map, then picked up the pouch. “But, look—it’s been opened. Did you open it?”

  Mirna nodded. “After I heard what had happened at the Fords’, I thought I should know more about it. But I didn’t read much.”

  “Oh please, Mother. I know you.”

  “Well I didn’t, I read only a page.”

  “And you stopped? Why?”

  “Because I decided it was wrong. As I said, I decided that we should honor what Clem asked of me.”

  “That wasn’t the reason.”

  Mirna sighed and looked away. She supposed that, in her heart of hearts, she had been thinking that here lay a glorious future for Karl. Without taking so much as a sou from the cave or the Trust, he would wield power and influence in matters architectural, social, educational, and moral even.

  Life was short; Mirna had blinked, and here she was a middle-aged woman with a small business on a small island in a small country on the edge of Europe. In her youth, she had wanted so much else for herself—fame in the arts, notoriety, the haut monde of talent and achievement in some place like London or Paris—but now what she had was about as much as she could expect. In that way.

  “But since you did open it, where’s the harm?” Karl’s finger slid under the flap, but he waited for Mirna’s permission.

  “No—if we can agree that Clem knew what he was doing all these years, then we should follow his instructions to the letter.”

  “But that’s a specious argument. He obviously didn’t know everything that he should, since the whole thing came acropper when he was elderly and least able to defend himself. It ended in disaster. A debacle.