The Death of an Irish Consul

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Is this Dublin Castle?” the lieutenant barked into the phone. “Do you have a McGarr there? Put him on.” He paused a moment. “Is this McGarr?”

  McGarr knew the policeman must have reached McKeon, who dealt with all incoming queries when McGarr was away.

  “This is Garda Lieutenant Mallon calling from Shannon airport. Does a McGarr work there? What’s his position? I’ve got a joker here who says his name is McGarr. He claims he’s chief inspector or something.” McGarr had been on the job slightly over two years now. He conscientiously maintained a low image, which he believed best for efficient police work. He had had little to do with the regular Garda. Still and all, Mallon should have known who he was. “He’s a little man, bald, about fifty.” McGarr was still in his forties.

  He distinctly heard McKeon say, “He’s the chief inspector of detectives, special branch, and his other…” before Mallon tightened the receiver to his head. His other title was superintendent of the Garda Soichana, which made him the second most important law enforcement official in the country. Only the commissioner, who was two years from retirement, held higher rank, and McGarr had been hired into his present job on the agreement that the top post would be his when it came open. Of course, the Minister for Justice controlled all police matters, but his was an elective position.

  From the length of time that Lieutenant Mallon listened, he must have been hearing most of this from McKeon. When Mallon turned to McGarr again, his face was drawn. The redness in his cheeks had spread. He handed the phone to McGarr. “Sergeant McKeon would like to speak with you.”

  McGarr took the receiver from him. “Do you mean Detective Sergeant McKeon?” he asked, smiling. McKeon’s sergeancy was perhaps twenty years away from Mallon’s present rank. “Bernie?”

  “SIS, London, has been trying to get in touch with you for several hours now. They won’t talk to anybody but you or Assistant Commissioner Gallup.”

  “Number?”

  “No number, just an operator. Seventy-eight dash H. They do things official there. You’d think you were dealing with the Kremlin or the Pentagon.”

  “Many of the things they do involve both of those places. I sort of wish we could become a little more official over here as well.” He glanced up at Mallon.

  “If they call again, tell them to get in touch with Superintendent Scanlon in Dingle. That’s where I’ll be.” McGarr hung up. He figured Cummings had been in no great rush to cooperate with him in his investigation of the Hitchcock murder and could well do with a little of the same treatment.

  Turning around, McGarr said, “Would you two patrolmen mind leaving us alone for a moment?” He would never dress down an officer in front of his men. If he took away Mallon’s pride, he could never expect the lieutenant to command the respect of his staff again.

  When the men had shut the door behind them, McGarr asked Mallon, “How old are you, Lieutenant?”

  “Thirty.”

  McGarr raised his eyebrows. “That’s quite young to be a lieutenant. You must have done things right previously. University?”

  “Cork.”

  “Honors?”

  “Second, but high second in history.”

  “What do you think of this post?” McGarr meant the Shannon lieutenancy.

  Mallon, flustered by the questions, confused that McGarr wasn’t ripping into him, said, “Well—it’s a—it’s a job.”

  “But not much to do, right? No challenge. That’s what the car is all about isn’t it? That’s at least a part of why you feel rather”—McGarr searched for the proper word—“nettled today? You think this is a dead end, that your career will be a concatenation of similarly boring assignments—Donegal, Roscommon, Wexford—little cattle towns or fishing villages with a paltry pension at the end of it all. Are you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “Two. Boy and girl.”

  “How does your wife feel about this place?”

  “Well”—Mallon was still looking down at his shoes—“it’s not Cork City.”

  “Nor Dublin.”

  Mallon glanced up at McGarr. He breathed out and said, “No—nor Dublin.”

  “So, you’re not happy here.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “And, consequently, you’re not happy being a Garda lieutenant.”

  Mallon breathed heavily again. “I shouldn’t say this, but no, I’m not.”

  “And you’ve been considering quitting to try your hand at something else? Business? The law?”

  Mallon nodded. “Yes—the law. Look, if you’re going to sack me, I’ll save you—”

  McGarr reached up, grabbed the young man’s shoulder. “Hold it, don’t say anything stupid. Control yourself, man. If I acted the way you are acting now, certainly I would have sacked you ten minutes ago. I’ve got a temper, too, you know. Have a seat.” It was not a request.

  Mallon sat on the desk. Now he was McGarr’s height.

  “Now then,” McGarr checked his watch. It was 4:15. “How would you like to come to work for me?”

  Mallon, surprised, glanced up at him.

  “Wait—let me tell you the advantages and the disadvantages of my offer. First, you’ll be living in Dublin, I’ll let you go to school part-time, and you’ll certainly feel challenged. That brings me to the disadvantages, which are legion. That man you just talked to on the phone—”

  “Detective Sergeant McKeon?”

  McGarr noted that Mallon had understood the distinction. “—he is not a gentleman. He will think he owns you. He won’t give a farthing for your home life or aspirations. You’ll lose that monkey suit and your title. You’ll be the new boy on the block, a raw inspector. The pay will be slightly less, the Dublin expenses grievous. Now then, do you want to think on it, discuss it with your wife?”

  “Well, of course, I must—”

  McGarr checked his watch once more. “You can do your thinking in the car while taking us down to Dingle. That way you can observe what a very small—the best—part of your job may be like, after you’re with us for a while. I’ll give you five minutes to call your wife. Tell her you won’t be home until late tonight. At that time I’d like your decision.” McGarr walked through the office. At the car he apologized to Gallup for the delay and altercation.

  “No problem—it’s a wonder any of them were awake.” The vast parking lot was utterly devoid of automobiles.

  When Mallon climbed behind the wheel, he asked, “Dingle?”

  “No. Hangar B is our first stop. It’ll probably be your last chance to drive that or any police car for a long time.”

  “You didn’t—” Gallup asked McGarr.

  McGarr put his finger to his lips.

  A traffic light brought them to a halt just in front of the hangar. Stopped in a car across from them and traveling in the opposite direction was the very same black man with the broad forehead and close-set eyes who had been dining in the inn on the Shannon the day before. Next to him sat the other man. He was wearing a tan coat with a large fur collar. The car was a black Morris Marina and looked brand-new. Watching it pass by, McGarr noted that they were headed toward the terminus.

  They drove southwest, nearly into the dwindling spring sun which, now that the days were growing longer, lingered well past supper. It was still weak, however, and cast upon the rock pastures and ubiquitous stone walls a pale, grainy light. For the second time in as many days McGarr was rushing down the banks of the Shannon. At this time of day, the salmon fishing boats were port bound, bucking the stiff tide and current upstream. Starboard running lights, bright green, winked as the boats pitched in the choppy whitecaps that a brisk wind now made. A supertanker droned twice, intending to overtake a pilot launch, and the other vessels scurried from its path. The monstrous craft, most of its hull submerged, wallowed up the estuary, pushing, it seemed to McGarr, half the Atlantic before its stubby prow.

  Superintendent Terrence Scanlon was waiting for McGarr in front of
Hitchcock’s summer home on the tip of the Kerry peninsula. Hughie Ward and Liam O’Shaughnessy were inside the house.

  After tea had been poured, Ward began his rundown. “The interior of the house is spotless, since we sealed the doors and windows because of the prior investigation. The outbuilding, too, was sealed, but that didn’t seem to matter. Whoever they are, they hammered off the seal, then dumped Browne, who was unconscious—he’s got a gash on his forehead—into the shed, and shot him once. His hands were bound with the same cargo cord.”

  Whoever they were, McGarr mused, they were very intent on making sure these two men with identical pasts had died in identical ways. “Have you checked the neighborhood?”

  “No. We’re only after just arriving ourselves,” said O’Shaughnessy. “We called you the moment Terry called us. We had to drive.”

  “Then that’s the first order of business.”

  “But most of the houses are vacant this time of year.”

  “But not all of them.”

  “No—not all.”

  “And laborers, field hands, shepherds, fishermen?”

  “You could count them with either hand.”

  “Good. You take them, Terry. Liam and Hughie, you take the road to Dingle. After looking about for a while, Ned and I and Lieutenant Mallon will take the road around the head. Make sure you speak to everybody.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?” asked Scanlon. He, being the Dingle barracks commandant, was not used to McGarr’s techniques.

  “Anything out of the ordinary. If necessary, sit down, have a cup of tea. Certainly these two bodies didn’t drop from the sky.”

  But, in fact, McGarr couldn’t have been more wrong, for after having examined C. B. H. Browne’s body and having quickly perused the immediate environs of the house, the three of them began canvassing the other dwellings in the area only to find a woman who had indeed noticed something strange earlier in the day.

  Her bungalow was perched below the road and on the very face of the cliff of Slea Head. The walkway down to her front door had been chipped from the basalt itself, as had the foundation of the house. A long paned window in the main room, which served as a kitchen and living room, offered a view of the sunset over the western ocean.

  Rolling clouds way out on the Atlantic were now a fiery pink that cast a red glow along the inner walls of the room. Over a peat fire, a black pot, hanging from an andiron, piped a small jet of steam. McGarr recognized the aroma immediately. It was lamb kidney stew with rashers. Also, he could smell fresh soda bread, the kind with caraway seeds and eggs. Sure enough, cooling on a low, stone-top table near the hearth was a large, circular loaf, its crown a glistening golden surface of baked yolks through which the currants protruded like so many eyes.

  “Sit down. Where are ye all from?” the old lady asked. She shuffled over and switched off the early edition of the Telefis Eireann news. “Are ye from the ‘far side’?” by which she meant England. “I should think so, considering your odd way of speaking and all. Would ye care for some tea?” She pronounced the last word “tay.”

  “No, thank you, ma’am,” said Mallon, “we just——”

  But McGarr, who was about to sit near the fire, reached over and slapped the Garda lieutenant’s arm, then motioned toward the pot steaming over the fire. “But on second thought,” continued Mallon, “it was weak tea, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do, I do,” she said. “You mean you’re hungry.” She allowed the oilcloth she kept on top of the television to drop over the screen. “I always cover the contraption,” she explained. “It’s rented and not mine, and, what’s more, I love it and could no more do without the thing than church.” She shuffled toward the sideboard, her gait arthritic, half-walk, half-trot. She seemed ancient, perhaps in her eighties. Her white hair was bunned and she wore clear-frame bifocals, now yellow with age. McGarr could see at least two dress hems near the heavy black stockings that bound her thin legs. She also had on a sweater, checkerboard apron, and fluffy house slippers with bright green pompoms on the toes. In spite of all her vestments, the room was snug.

  McGarr stood and removed his jacket, saying, “The last thing we want to do, ma’am, is to put you to any bother, but the truth is that we were summoned rudely from our lunch and I have not eaten peat-simmered lamb kidneys and rashers since my mother died.” He imagined that the old woman had not had company all winter.

  She looked up from the tea canister on the sideboard. “And when was that, dear boy?”

  “I was quite young, ma’am.”

  “How old? I was a mother meself, and you can tell me.”

  “Ah—ten, I believe.”

  She shuffled over and put her hands on his shoulders, “And here now thirty years later in Kate O’Connor’s kitchen you’ll eat them to your heart’s content.” Lowering her voice, she said into his ear, “Could you use a bit of the good stuff? I’d offer it to your man”—she tilted her head to Mallon, who was in uniform—“but what I have isn’t exactly legal.”

  “Ah—to hell with legality and the law,” said McGarr. “I think that’d be smashin’. Just a sip, mind you.” And before she could shamble back to the sideboard, he added, “And you can offer the others a drop too, since I believe”—he glanced out the window at the ocean—“we’re westwards of the law.”

  “I like you,” she squeezed his shoulders and raised her head so she could the better see McGarr through the bottom half of her bifocals. “IRA?”

  McGarr shook his head.

  The bridge of her nose was thick, the end a rosy ball. Her eyebrows were still black. At one time, McGarr speculated, she had a sort of dark, Spanish beauty one seldom saw any more. “There’s something wild about you, boy.” She straightened up. “But don’t be too sure about being beyond the reach of the law.” She turned to Mallon. “No offense, darlin’.” She patted his shoulder, too, and returned to her work. “Because I believe they’re patrolling the coast in airships and regular.” She handed Gallup an empty jam jar, then one to Mallon, and finally McGarr, to whom she also reached a crock that was nearly too heavy for her arm.

  “How so?” McGarr poured a good amount into his container, then handed the crock to Mallon.

  “Heliochoppers,” she confided past her hand. “They’ve nearly flown two of them in through my windows lately.”

  Gallup poured some poteen into his jam jar and got up to look out the window, where McGarr now stood.

  The sun was a magenta crescent sliding rapidly into the far Atlantic. It made the distant water seem very blue. Directly below them waves slammed into the sheer cliff of Slea Head. Shadows and a ground fog rising from the Great Blasket were beginning to obscure that island.

  “From which direction, ma’am, and when?”

  “My name is Kathleen, son. That”—she pointed over her shoulder, as she placed four plates on the sideboard. “From off the water. Five days ago in the morning, say, half-eleven.”

  “North or south?”

  “North, I believe. I heard the throbbing of its blades minutes before, every time the wind blew in my direction. I couldn’t imagine who could be hammering spiles here and at this time of the year, so I climbed up to the road to look around. I saw its little light on top winking. The beating grew louder as it approached and nearly knocked me off me pins when it whisked over.”

  “Did you see it land?” Gallup asked.

  “Gad—he has a beauty of a way of speaking, what? Are you English?”

  “My great-grandmother was Irish.”

  She was bending to lift the black pot off the andiron. “Don’t tell a soul. The way you talk nobody will ever suspect. No—in answer to your question, sir—I did not see it land.”

  “Did the noise stop soon after?” Mallon asked, somewhat sheepishly, looking to McGarr to see if he approved.

  McGarr nodded and sipped from his cup.

  “Now that you mention it, it did, son. But I’ve noticed in times past when, after a storm, the air fo
rce sends out several machines to look for shipwrecks, that the throbbing has a way of dying suddenly, so I took no notice, until last night.”

  McGarr finished his drink and made for the crock near the hearth.

  She had begun to ladle the lamb kidneys and rasher stew onto the plates, on which thick slices of soda bread, lavishly buttered, now rested. The tea kettle was sitting right on the coals. “Last night, it was far different. It’s at night a person hears things more distinct, what?”

  “Of course, of course,” McGarr said into the raised jar.

  “The beating seemed to pick up once the thing was over the house. I threw open the door to see if it had landed on the road above. It was frightful the racket it was making. What I then saw was lights in the heavens. They were twirling through the fog we had. Suddenly the throbbing stopped, then the light went off, then a little later the whirring sound ceased too. I shut the door to keep the dampness out, so I did.

  “Then, while I was dozing over my darning, hours later, the thing started up again, made a great hullabaloo, and died out.”

  “Did you see which way it went?” Gallup asked.

  “I was too tired to get up. I only know it did not go over the house or out to sea, because I looked out the window. I wanted to see its lights over the water, don’t you know. Sit down now and eat while it’s hot.”

  “Hadn’t we ought to——”

  McGarr knew Gallup wanted to buzz right back to Hitchcock’s house and check the ground for evidence of the old woman’s story, wanted to complete the onsite investigation and get back to London as soon as possible. “It’s not shish kabab, patlijan moussaka, or stuffed grape leaves, Ned, but we have no Armenians on the western coast, and you’ll be glad of it once you taste this stew.”

  Glumly, Gallup ate.

  McGarr had thirds. Kathleen managed to dig up several bottles of stout. The peat sputtered in the fireplace, the waves beat against the cliffs, and the wind rattled the loose panes in her bay window.

  With a cup of hot tea in one hand and a freshly lit Woodbine in the other, McGarr asked the old girl if he could use her phone, which was displayed prominently on a table by the door. It too was covered, but with a clear plastic sheath. “The calls are going to be to Dublin and London, Kathleen. I’ll leave the money for it under the mat here.” McGarr tapped the table.