The Death of an Irish Consul

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Just another humble toiler in this vale of tears.” McGarr smiled at Gallup, but the comment was not appreciated. Actually, McGarr wished he had a couple of days to pore over the mass of information.

  “You better get going,” said Gallup. “You’ve only got Lieutenant Simpson for the day. After that, somebody’s got to start paying the RAF for his time and the use of his aircraft, and that somebody is not going to be Scotland Yard.

  “And remember this, McGarr.” Gallup spun around. He was nettled. “If the world contained only irresponsible administrators with the yen to play sleuth and let the paperwork, the budgets, the recruiting, and the procedures go to hell, then we wouldn’t have any decent police protection.”

  Sheepishly, McGarr opened one of the folders, only to have something to do with his hands. He said, “My contention is that one must learn to delegate authority. If you thoroughly understood this position, Ned, you’d realize you don’t really have a job at all. That, then, would free you to do only those things which please you. That’s the secret to all innovative and imaginative administration. They put you in this job not because they thought you were a gifted administrator alone, but because, first and foremost, you are a gifted policeman. Why not be that?”

  “Delegate authority, he says! Delegate authority!” Gallup began roaring at the map of pins. “He has the brass to say that when he delegated all the boring work to me and toured Italy in doubtless high style!”

  McGarr quietly shut the door. He didn’t think it politic to point out the high style of his upper lip and black eye.

  Gallup’s secretary was staring at him.

  “Pressure, pressure,” McGarr whispered to her.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the secretary. “This place runs itself.”

  McGarr made a mental note to try and convince Gallup to let his secretary take over the s.o.p. aspects of his job.

  McGarr rather enjoyed riding a helicopter across the rolling fields of southern England. What with the steady beat of the rotor blades, the sensation was like that of being mounted on a winged horse, as opposed to being in an airplane that moved like a bird.

  Thus, they charged toward Bath and Bristol, the area in which Lieutenant Simpson supposed any helicopter pilot not wanting to refuel in Ireland would have stopped, going and coming.

  The sun kept trying to break through the cloud cover, so that below them the green fields and bordering oaks occasionally appeared through the mist, wet and sparkling, as though elements in an aquarium of fog.

  They tried the airports in Bath and Bristol, a heliport in Bristol, and an emergency runway that also had a fuel pump in Weston-super-Mare. Then airports in Cardiff and, pushing down the Welsh Peninsula, Barry, Neath, Swansea, Llanelli, and Pembroke.

  Technological architecture, McGarr speculated—like airports or petrol stations or cities that had been redesigned to accommodate the automobile—had no human history. All the airports, of need, were the same. The only changes the physical plant could tolerate were those of an advancing technology, whence the older elements would be chucked out or the entire airport abandoned.

  One such place was the airport in Fishguard. Built as a Spitfire base to attack German bombers on their way to destroy the shipyards in Belfast, the concrete runways had been reclaimed by the pasture from which they had originally been carved. At several points, as the helicopter clipped in low over windbreaks, they saw cows grazing on the grass that burgeoned between the separations of the concrete slabs. A wind direction finder, once an orange-and-white-striped sock, was a tattered brown rag, blown out. Rusting Quonset-type hangars lined the unused sections of the runway. They touched down near the office of the present airport. It too was a corrugated metal structure.

  It was five-thirty in the afternoon now, and McGarr had to zip his jacket when he stepped outside the toasty bubble of the helicopter.

  The office door opened and a man hopped down the steps. One leg was stiff. “What’ll it be, mates—fuel, directions, or the time of day?” He spoke with a thick Welsh brogue. He was wearing gray coveralls, which were spotted, and he smoked a pipe.

  McGarr, as he had done at all the other airports that day, explained that he was interested in learning if a helicopter, piloted by a small man—he showed him Rattei’s and Battagliatti’s pictures—had stopped there on the nineteenth and twenty-sixth of June.

  “If they did, I can tell you certain. I keep a record of such things. You’ll have to step into the office, however. Can I get you anything first?” His face was smudged with grease, and he had needed a shave yesterday.

  In one of the old hangars they had passed on landing, McGarr had seen a gleaming Spitfire. He imagined the man had restored the airship. Here, he probably had a great deal of time on his hands.

  Lieutenant Simpson said their helicopter needed nothing.

  A tea kettle was beginning to whistle on top of a cylindrical coal stove. The man placed it on a trivet. “Tea?”

  “No, thanks,” McGarr said. “We’ve got to push on.”

  “A little snort then?” The man opened a file cabinet, pulled out a bottle of twelve-year-old Ballantine Scotch, and handed it to McGarr. Rummaging around a bit more, he picked out four short glasses. Many greasy fingerprints were impressed upon the exterior surfaces of the glasses.

  “That’s an interesting filing system you have there,” O’Shaughnessy said, helping him set the glasses on top of another dusty sheet-metal cabinet.

  “The best. The very best,” said the man, winking. “Never misplace a thing. If I think for a moment I have, I consult my ‘inspiration.’”

  The rest of the office was similarly dusty, but neat and warm. There was a mark on the top of an old wooden desk where the man placed his feet. From that seat the traffic control radio was a reach away. McGarr sat.

  “Here it is.” The man pulled a folder from another drawer of the cabinet.

  O’Shaughnessy poured liberal drinks of the Scotch and handed the glasses around. When Lieutenant Simpson began examining the glass, the Garda superintendent said, “Sure and there’s enough antiseptic in the glass to cure a thousand evils.”

  The man placed the folder in front of McGarr and opened it. “Seems that the only helicopter I had in during that week stopped twice. Let me check the dates.” He ran the black nail of a finger across his list on the dates McGarr had mentioned. “Yup—same ship. But this one is piloted by a woman, not a man, and not the men you showed me in your pictures. Them I’ve never laid eyes on before.

  “I remember her because she stops in here often. Horse-racing woman, she told me she was. Does a lot of training and racing in Ireland, where you’re from, no?”

  McGarr bent his head to acknowledge the question.

  “Often she’s accompanied by a black man. Big as a house, he is.”

  O’Shaughnessy glanced at McGarr, who asked, “Balding, close-set eyes, Jamaican accent?”

  “Aye—and he’s got a taste for good whiskey. Once drank a whole bottle while I greased the main bearing on the rotor of their ship. And generous, he was. He paid me handsomely for the pleasure.” The man was eyeing O’Shaughnessy, who, having drunk off the first glass, was pouring himself another.

  McGarr followed the entry across the page of the airport log. “What sort of registration is that?”

  Lieutenant Simpson, looking over his shoulders, said, “That’s a rental helicopter.”

  “Avis. Heathrow,” said the man. “Rumor has it they’d rent you a dive bomber if you could get up the cash. Americans, you know.”

  “What’s her name?” McGarr asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Do you have her check stubs? Did she ever charge?”

  “Can’t allow that. I’d never get my money.”

  O’Shaughnessy asked, helping himself to yet another drink, “What does she look like?”

  “She looks good,” said the man, “you know, for an older girl, that is. I got the impression the man w
ith her was her last ‘fling.’ Can you understand me?” He winked. “She had this way of doting over him, waiting on him and such, although it was clear to me she hadn’t waited on many other people in her life.”

  “How are her legs?”

  “Fragile, you know. Birdlike and—nice.”

  “Blondish hair, bent nose, high cheekbones?”

  “Yes, I’d say so.”

  “Hitchcock’s wife,” said McGarr. He stood, took five pounds out of his wallet, and placed it on the folder. He paused for a moment and put five more on top of that and asked, “May we take the bottle with us?”

  “Indeed, indeed. And thank you. I buy the stuff from a fellow who comes through the international section of Heathrow. Doesn’t cost me half what you put on the desk. And since you’re not local police and Irishmen to boot—except for the lad, of course”—he meant Simpson—“let me do something else for you.” From under the desk he pulled a case of Beamish half-pint bottles. He put six of them in a paper sack for them.

  “That’s some plane in the hangar over there,” said O’Shaughnessy, when they had gotten outside.

  “Is it fit to fly?” Simpson asked.

  “Fitter than the day she rolled from the factory. And that’s more than a plane, that’s my retirement. I figure by the time I’m ready to pack it in, that’ll be an antique some eccentric will squander half his fortune on. Are you checked out in airplanes too, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes. Prop jobs and jets. Fighters, too.”

  “Then stop back when you have more time and I’ll let you give her a run. Nothing made on the other side of the swamp could ever touch that craft.”

  “I’ll take you up on that offer sometime soon.” Simpson was delighted.

  McGarr could see him reassess what they could see of the Spitfire in the now deeply shadowed hangar, looking at it this time with the eyes of a pilot who would someday fly one of the most important historical items of Britain’s recent past. There was no question of his not returning and soon.

  At the Heathrow Avis office, the manager confirmed the Fishguard airport attendant’s information. “Graham Hitchcock, Mrs. E. L. J. Hitchcock, Sixty Avenue Road, St. John’s Wood.”

  “Strange name for a woman,” said O’Shaughnessy.

  “Strange woman,” said the manager.

  “How so?” asked McGarr.

  “Ah—I suppose I shouldn’t say. She’s a good customer of mine. No—I won’t say. I spoke out of turn.”

  “How good a customer?”

  “She rents a ship a couple of dozen times in a year, which makes her a very good customer.”

  “Who cleans the helicopter?”

  “Bobby Greene.”

  “May we speak to him?”

  “If he’s on.” The manager took them out to the time clock and checked Greene’s card. “You’re in luck. He’s got fifteen minutes. He’s down in the shop.”

  There Greene said he couldn’t remember from one day to the next what the helicopters contained, if there was mud or grease or trash on the floor of each airship. “Once I switches on the vacuum”—he pointed to the large industrial vacuum cleaner—“me mind slips into suspended animation.” Earlier, McGarr had noticed the science fiction paperback in his overall pocket. “I become an automaton. You’re welcome to peek into the lost and found, though. Anything I find I put in there. Come twelve month, we sell the lot for a bonus. You won’t believe what people will leave in airships. I think it’s because they’re so glad to be down safely, they just rush away.”

  He unlocked a door and McGarr and O’Shaughnessy stepped into a closet so vast it shocked them. Clothes on hangers lined both walls; baggage, umbrellas, and cartons were stacked under them. McGarr didn’t know what he hoped to find. “You didn’t happen to come across any shell casings or shell boxes, or, say, anything like a hypodermic needle, did you?”

  “Anything I found I put in here. The small stuff is in that bin. But the sort of space a dope addict is looking for can’t be found in a helicopter.”

  There McGarr found ballpoint and fountain pens, ladies’ hats, gloves, pairs of shoes, sunglasses—one pair was a wraparound type, the heavy chrome of which made McGarr’s face look like the windscreen of a sleek automobile when he tried them on; O’Shaughnessy laughed and said, “Flash Gordon. I wonder why the old boy”—he motioned to the door—“hasn’t taken them home with him”—rubber boots, wallets complete with money and identification, keys and rings, pocket secretaries, cassette tape recorders, cameras, even two portable typewriters.

  After fifteen minutes of pawing around, McGarr and O’Shaughnessy left.

  Before taking rooms at the Carlton for the night, McGarr phoned Gallup and told him what he had discovered. Gallup agreed to make an appointment to interview Mrs. Hitchcock early in the morning. McGarr would have preferred to do this at Scotland Yard, but Gallup objected. “We just can’t go hauling in the widows of once powerful men for a criminal-type interrogation until we’ve got facts. All you know is that she and Foster might have had a ‘relationship,’ that she flew a helicopter and was in Ireland on the dates of the murders.”

  “Shoe size.”

  “Shoe size be damned. Another unavailing item of quite circumstantial evidence. We must see her at her house in Avenue Road.”

  “In state, you mean.”

  “Absolutely. And I hope she’s regal and guiltless. I detest scandal. Everybody, even the police, loses. And, incidentally, your request to inspect the Service dossiers of the murdered men has been denied.”

  “What? But why? I don’t understand.”

  “I was told simply that nobody can see them. They’ve been declared ‘Most Secret.’”

  “Is it because I’m not English?”

  “No. I asked to see them myself and that request was denied too.”

  “But why is that? Don’t they trust you?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  McGarr thanked Gallup for trying anyhow, and then hung up.

  Next he phoned Noreen at the Excelsior in Siena. While McKeon and Ward were keeping tabs on Battagliatti, she was reacquainting herself with Tuscany. He told her the events of his day.

  “You sound hoarse,” she said. “Are you catching a cold?”

  “Don’t think so. Probably too many cigarettes. This case is beginning to bother me. See if you can impose upon Falchi to get me a meeting with Foster. Everywhere I turn, he’s been there.”

  “But he’ll never change his story.”

  “I’m not so much interested in his story.”

  “Well, what then? He won’t permit you to learn anything about him personally. He’s been around too long for that.”

  “I don’t know what I mean. I just feel like there’s something missing, my never having talked to him at length.”

  “You had better get some rest.”

  After sandwiches and further drinks in the bar, McGarr and O’Shaughnessy went upstairs to their rooms. There, McGarr got a phone call. It was Gallup again to say all was arranged for 8:45 A.M. at Hitchcock’s widow’s house in St. John’s Wood.

  McGarr undressed, climbed into bed, and began leafing through all the dossiers he had collected.

  And Graham Hitchcock was indeed icily imperious at first. What was more, her barrister was present. He was a bald old man whose nose seemed to rest on his coppery moustache. After having adjusted his hearing aid and inquired McGarr’s name and credentials, he insisted upon Gallup’s asking all questions of his client. “A matter of jurisdiction, you see.” He was wearing tails and, upon sinking into a wing-back armchair, appeared to doze off. His eyes closed, but McGarr could tell he was listening to and probably would remember every word of the interview. McGarr had run up against old foxes like him before.

  Mrs. Hitchcock wore a gray pantsuit with a white silk blouse that had ruffles on the bodice and cuffs. Her shoes were black patent leather, stockings a silvery nylon. She was somewhat nervous, but confidently so. She sat very straight without allowin
g her back to touch the chair. McGarr imagined that even at this age—fifty-five—she was still actively athletic. Her small body seemed strong and even fetching. McGarr could imagine himself taking her down for a tumble. The way her hair was sleeked back along her narrow temples interested him most. And she was aware of his eyes on her. She smiled to him slightly before Gallup asked, “On the nineteenth and twenty-sixth of June you fueled helicopters at Fishguard airport prior to flying to Ireland. Where did you go in Ireland and what did you do there?” He was reading from his small black notebook.

  “On the nineteenth I flew to Baldoyle race course. That’s about fifteen miles north of Dublin. On the twenty-sixth I flew to Leopardstown race course. That’s ten miles or so south of Dublin. I own, breed, and race horses. That’s my profession. I’m certain the officials of both courses will vouch for my presence there and, incidentally, for at least two days after the last date you have mentioned.”

  “I must warn you we plan to check everything you say.”

  “Please do.” She turned to McGarr and smiled again.

  Gallup looked down at his book. McGarr had written the questions in case Gallup had to do the asking. “Let’s see. Did you use the helicopter otherwise?”

  “No. My barrister”—she indicated the old man—“has a signed receipt. The total mileage was seven hundred seventy-two miles, certainly not enough to fly to Slea Head and back.”

  McGarr had already checked that; it was true.

  “Did you fly any other helicopter while you were in Ireland on the stated dates?”

  “No.”

  “Did you leave the Dublin area on the stated dates?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you stay on the stated dates?”

  “Both times at the Intercontinental Hotel in Balls-bridge.”

  “Were you alone?”

  She flushed a bit, but she turned to McGarr and said, boldly, “No.”

  “Who were you with?”

  “On the first stated date, June nineteenth, I was with Sean O’Ryan. He’s one of my jocks.”