The Death of an Irish Lover (5 page)

At the door, Carson signaled to one of the other barmen, who reached for a button near the pigeonholes on the back bar and buzzed them through.

“So, what brings you here, Chief Superintendent?” Carson asked as they climbed the wide stairs.

McGarr waited until they got to the top. “Put your hands on the wall and spread your legs.”

“What?” Carson asked incredulously.

McGarr spun the older man around and shoved him toward the wall. “Hands. And feet.” He did not know if the charges against Carson in the North had been justified—at the time, many people had been falsely convicted and imprisoned—but he would take no chances.

“Whatever you’re about, you don’t want to do this,” said Carson, as McGarr patted him down.

Apart from a billfold and a sizable ring of keys, his pockets contained only a pen, a comb, and two objects that felt like clasp knives, one in either front trousers pockets.

“You should mind your manners. I’m not without friends. D’y’know who I am?”

“A cop killer, twice over. Or are you threatening me?”

“Call it what you will, it’s fact. You should be wary.”

“What’s fact—that you killed two cops?”

Carson did not reply.

“Step over to that chair and empty the contents of your pockets.”

“I will, but I won’t forget this. Your day will come.”

The object in Carson’s left pocket was a shiny chromed waiter’s tool with a corkscrew, a bottle-cap opener, and a small knife to cut off wine bottle top-wrap. The second was indeed a clasp knife with a rosewood grip; it had a marlinspike on one end, a stout four-inch blade on the other.

“That your shank?”

“Let me give you a bit of advice—it’s none of your fookin’ business what it is. Like the man said downstairs, you should get in your fookin’ car and get the fook out of here, while you can.”

Suddenly angry—perhaps because of what had happened down in the bar, or because he had been dealing with the Carsons of the country for too long—McGarr said through his teeth, “You think so? I’ll show you my business.”

McGarr seized Carson under the arm and rushed him toward the door behind which the two corpses lay. Still powerfully built in spite of his fifty-plus years, McGarr threw open the door and shoved Carson in, grabbing a handful of the man’s graying hair and pulling him across the carpet.

At the bed he yanked the head down hard, so it was nearly touching Ellen Finn’s mortally wounded head that was lying on Pascal Burke’s dead chest.

“There’s me business, you gobshite. And the double murder of two cops has you written all over it.” McGarr jerked up the head, then kicked Carson’s legs from under him. The man came down hard on the carpet but in a sitting position.

Bending so his mouth was next to Carson’s ear, McGarr whispered, “I could wrap this up right here and now. Not a judge in the country would think twice about putting you away for good this time. And one other thing. Never—ever—threaten me or anybody in my hearing again, or I’ll put you down. Permanently.”

Carson’s blue and clear eyes darted up to McGarr’s.

“My promise.”

“And mine—you lay hands on me again, and I’ll have you up on charges. I have a cast-iron alibi—three people—who’ll tell you I only ever left the bar to piss, Friday noon to Friday midnight.”

Flicking his hand, McGarr sent the man sprawling.

He reached for the cell phone in a jacket pocket; a function key dialed his office in Dublin. While waiting for it to ring, McGarr realized that the brewing storm outside had struck—wind was whining through the eaves of the large building, and a heavy rain raked the windows.

“Get me the sheet from the North on Benny Carson,” he said when a voice answered. And to Carson, “Is it Benny or Ben E.?”

But Carson, who had straightened himself up, was staring at the two bodies on the bed, and…could it be? Tears were streaming from his eyes.

“Don’t have to,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, “didn’t I grow up with the yoke?” It was Bernie McKeon, McGarr’s chief of staff, who was from County Monaghan, like McGarr’s own father and his father before him.

“I thought he was from the North.” Technically, Monaghan was part of Ulster, which was thought of as the north of Ireland by traditionalists and Republicans. But like Cavan and Donegal, Monaghan was firmly part of the twenty-six counties that now made up the Irish Republic.

“I think he always wanted to be,” McKeon replied. “Relatives in Portadown. You know. Republican background. And he spoke that way—with the full Scots burr even as kids. Like he was really from there.

“And he carried it off, being a bit of a thespian. A great lad for skits and jokes. Tell you the truth, I liked him well enough, until he shot those two R.U.C. cops. But, sure, there were those who said he didn’t, being too smart for something so…direct. There’s that too—with his mates he was known as a backroom man, a planner.

“He with you?”

“Yah.”

“And you’re thinking he just shot two more?”

McGarr let silence carry the thought.

“I’ll get the details. But there’s this too: he’s still a local hero up there—the whole IRA thing and his record in solitary. He was in on one of the hunger strikes, too. Takes a hard man to have lasted that.”

McGarr glanced down at Carson, who looked anything but.

“When he got out, it was said by some he’d had enough. And he retired from active service. But me Uncle Mick, who’s friendly with the family, said they’re awash in cash from time to time. A new pricey car. They gussied up the old house. Mod cons, that class of thing. All from ‘Benny B’y,’ they call him over jars, though he’s seldom seen.

“And then I think he’s wanted again in the North.”

“Check that.”

“Something to do with strong-arm and protection schemes.”

Perhaps here focusing on the lucrative eel trade. Or the busy inn. No—if the inn was the object of Carson and the Frakes’s attention, why murder two police here? McGarr shook his head; he was getting ahead of himself. Now was the time to gather information, not draw conclusions.

He glanced back down at Carson, who was still staring at the bed, his face now streaming with tears. “Why don’t you come down here too, Bernie?”

“You’re kidding—along with Ward and Bresnahan? What would there be for me to do?”

“I think I need you.” To poke around, to renew his acquaintance with Carson, to talk about old times or just talk. McKeon was a friendly sort, and there was never any telling what might come out over jars.

“But who’ll handle the desk?” The question was pro forma; McGarr could hear the joy in his voice. McKeon was a desk man—the Squad’s primary interviewer—and was seldom asked to leave the city.

“Swords. But tell him we want to keep a lid on this thing for as long as we can,” McGarr said. “Have the other two left already?”

“An hour gone now. They should be there any minute.”

McGarr switched off the telephone and slipped it back in his pocket.

“Know them?” he asked Carson, pointing to the bed.

Still sitting on the floor, Carson was using a handkerchief to blot his face. “Yes. I mean no. Not well
enough, it’s plain.” He sighed. “People come in here, they talk to you come day go day, year in year out. You know the names of their mothers and fathers, their kids, the problems in their lives, their joys and sorrows, but it’s all…mouth music. Nothing but form. A way of passing a few hours. All in all, it has no more meaning than birds in a tree.

“Take her—she and her husband, Quintan Finn, they had their wedding reception here at the inn, when…? It can’t be much over a year ago. A big splash with all the muckety-mucks from three counties around to seal the deal. And look at her there on top of him.” He shook his head. “Jaysus.

“And him.” Carson paused to blow his nose; he then rose unsteadily to his feet. “Sure, he was a bachelor, moderate in his ways but one. You know, forever panting. Always up for a lark with a woman.

“And where was the harm? Maybe he brought a bit of joy into the lives of the odd widow or some others who were just playing out a bad hand for the sake of children and family. Divorce in Dublin may be common, but out here it’s still a curse.

“This though.” Carson cast his hand at the bed and shook his head. “This is hard to grasp.”

McGarr waited, but Carson had said his piece.

“Quintan Finn—he come into the pub yesterday?”

“No.” Carson closed his eyes and made a noise in the back of his throat, as though struggling with himself. “Of course, he came in. He comes in nearly every noontime and most nights. A couple of pints, some chat. He throws the odd dart, jokes with the lads. A happy openhanded sort with not an enemy in the world.

“
This,
though, will kill him. He’ll never live it down.”

“Could he have known about them?”

Carson hunched his thin shoulders. “If he didn’t, he was the only one in town. They’d been at it since before she married Quintan, kind of like the father thing for her, I guess. But Burke could be persuasive.”

“Could Finn have come up here?”

Carson sighed and shook his head. “I’ve said enough for the moment. You’ll have to ask the others. I’m the dog and pony show. I chat people up. ‘How’s the missus? Has your prize pig ovulated?’ That class of thing. Talk is, the only drinks I pour are me own.”

“Are they?”

“Are they what?”

“Your own. Do you own a piece of this place?”

“I’d like to, I’ll admit to that. But at present I’m a leaseholder. Sylvie owns the building and the license, since that’s not on for me.” His eyes swung to McGarr.

Because of his convictions, he meant. Felons were prohibited from owning a drinks license or even serving in a pub. But not from having a drink behind the bar, chatting people up, and knowing what there was to know in a small town. In many ways a popular barman was more knowledgeable than the local priest, since anything could be said to him. And was.

“What about Tallon? How does he fit in?”

“Here?”

McGarr waited.

“He’s a bollox altogether. Without her he’d be just another Dublin blowhard. All mouth, no sense.”

“Without his wife. Sylvie,” McGarr clarified.

“Wife?”
Carson objected. “Let’s hope not, for her sake. When they opened up here, he had this side of the building, she the inn. Within a month there wasn’t a person in town who’d come into the pub if he was
there. It took me nearly a year to build up the trade again. I had to spread the rumor that I had banned him from his own pub.”

Which was hard to believe, but maybe not about Tallon. “Manus and Donal Frakes come into the pub.” It was a statement, not a question.

Carson nodded. “Aye.”

“And what are they to you?”

“Mates.”

“Colleagues.”

“One time.”

“And now?”

Carson paused before answering.

“Ach—they’re younger than me, and regulars here. At different times we made the same mistakes, and we know some of the same people.”

And perhaps the same techniques for getting on, thought McGarr. “Then, you’re their mentor. They come to you for advice.”

Carson’s eyes were fixed on the corpses again. He shook his head slowly. “I never said that. Nor would they. Not a word.”

“But I trust you know where they live.”

Carson nodded.

“On your feet, then. Take me to them.” With Carson in tow, no quick telephone call could be made. And McGarr himself would be safer with the jocular barman and convicted murderer as a shield.

Or so he thought.

Like a brief impassioned kiss, the storm had been fierce and pointed. It left the countryside crushed and damp.

Water was sluicing in creamy streams down the narrow dirt road leading to the house that the Frakes were occupying, as McGarr—accompanied in his Mini Cooper by a glum Benny Carson—skirted the puddles and tried not to get stuck in the buff-colored mud.

The road wove through a section of dense wood that was filled with a jumble of limestone outcroppings, too rocky and poor to farm in spite of its proximity to the water of the broad river. And yet the thick underbrush and tall trees had become a refuge for wildlife.

In the twilight, a cloud of crows lifted off a copse of beech trees, roused by the light from the headlamps of the small car that was jouncing over the rough path. A hare bolted in front of them. McGarr even thought he caught the fugitive glimmer of the eyes of a deer behind deep cover.

And there suddenly in front of them—about a long mile from any main road and hard by the eastern bank of the Shannon—stood a substantial older house with several outbuildings. Lights were blazing, but there were no cars in the drive.

McGarr turned the Cooper in a circle to scan the rest of the holding; nobody seemed to be about. Stopping the car, he switched off the lights and ignition, then reached for two objects that he kept under the seat.

“The Frakes own this place?” he asked, the darkness now lit only by the lights from the house and glow of Carson’s cigarette.

“I wouldn’t say so,” Carson replied, “though I don’t know. I think maybe they’re ‘sitting’ it, like. For a friend.”

Which was probably code for the friends that Carson and the Frakes had served with in the past. It had the look of a safe house, with a poor road in through cover and no near neighbors to gossip about who came and went. Also, there was the river for a quick escape. McGarr now saw the green beacon of a navigational light on the opposite shore.

Switching off the overhead light so the interior of the car would not be illuminated when he opened the door, McGarr turned to Carson. “Give me your wrist.”

“Why?”

“Hold it out,” McGarr did not wait. Grabbing Carson’s arm, he clamped one ring of his handcuffs over the older man’s thin wrist and then fixed the other ring to the steering column.

“Did you think I’d bolt?” Carson asked incredulously, as McGarr got out of the low Cooper. “Where would I bolt to? The river or the wood?”

“Pukkas in both places, it’s said. And you’re just the
man to know them.” Reaching beneath the driver’s seat, McGarr removed the 9mm Walther that he kept there in a sling.

“Can’t be too careful,” Carson opined. “Once a soldier, always a soldier. You’re a right man, McGarr. Always on watch.”

“Aren’t you mistaken?” McGarr asked in a low voice, turning his back to the house to check the action of the weapon and the clip, which was full. He slid the gun under his belt, then reached for the spare clip that was also under the seat. “Weren’t you the soldier and a volunteer? Like them.” McGarr canted his head toward the house.

Carson passed some air between his lips. “There’s enough guilt to go round with all of us on the wrong side. It’s just that we’re a bit more advanced than you.”

Intrigued, McGarr waited.

“We had to lose to win. As I said earlier, your day will come.”

“Is it a threat I’m hearing?”

“Me threaten you? Not on your life. Or, rather, not on mine.”

McGarr studied Carson before closing the door. “And so, if you won in the end, tell me—what exactly was the prize?”

“Our objectives were met. What about yours? Or don’t you have any save your pay packet and whatever retirement the citizens of this country will be giving you? To make you go away.”

McGarr closed the door and advanced on the lighted house through a mist that was thick there by the river, feeling…what was it? Vaguely meretricious, being—what?—a cop with a salary and a pension, as Carson had said. Not an idealist and romantic who could stick
years of solitary and abuse. And whose idealistic goals had been realized, although the jury was still out on how completely.

It was—McGarr supposed, tugging the Walther from under his belt and thumbing off the safety—the old argument spun from the wool of a millennium of romantic defiance; that their tribe had a tyrannous enemy who was known. And any action, no matter how destructive of life—even one’s own—was justified in ridding the country of the yoke.

The culture was steeped in the lore of insurgence. You couldn’t switch on the telly or walk into a pub without some reference to rebellion in words, music, or the portrait of some famed martyr on the wall. No sacrifice being greater or more revered. And nobody who hadn’t joined the struggle being considerable, it was implied.

But for those who had—like the Carsons and Frakes of the island—all else could be tolerated. Including perhaps the squalor that now appeared to McGarr as he pushed open the front door, which was ajar.

It was as though the center hall and two rooms that he could see had never been occupied apart from clutter and trash. Things like building materials, brick, tiles, slates were heaped in piles on what had only recently been gleaming beech-wood floors. In the second room, two sooty Aga cookers—one tumbled over on its back with its oven doors open and its guts pulled out—shared the space with fishing gear, an anchor, and what looked like a mound of trash stuffed into plastic bags. The warm air of the house, escaping through the open door, reeked of it. A cat had clawed its way into one and was picking at a chicken bone.

With the Walther cocked by his side, McGarr
stepped in without announcing himself, knowing he was breaking the law. This one act alone could have him up on charges. He had to think of such things since he was a cop—a civil servant—with a pay packet and a pension to lose and no more romantic lore than the letter of written law to abide by.

Glancing back out at Carson, he wondered why he was smarting from the man’s gibe. He had dealt with the IRA all his life, from family stories about the organization, family members who had been in it, the histories learned in school spoken of wherever people gathered. And then, later, he’d had to deal with the IRA professionally.

And to a man or woman—every last one—they had seemed immature, as though they had never grown up in some major way. Maybe because they saw things in terms of black and white, when so much of what McGarr encountered was gray.

Water was running hard in the sink in the toilet off the hall and both lights there were on, as though whoever had been using the sink had simply bolted.

And so, too, in the kitchen, which was the source of the heat with yet another Aga torrid from having its flue opened wide. Wood was being burned and split right there in the kitchen. The tiles were chipped and cracked. A pile of beech saw logs was stacked nearly to the ceiling. An axe was nearby.

McGarr damped the flue, so the stove wouldn’t be ruined or the house set afire. He turned to the table.

Tea had recently been poured and a plate placed before a child’s highchair, which had been knocked over. The rashers, toast, and chips had not been touched, and the glass of milk nearby was half-filled.

A bib was on the floor, and the door leading to the
back garden was also ajar. A large Grundig radio with a wooden cabinet of the sort that had been a feature of farmhouses in McGarr’s youth was playing. Even the teakettle on a trivet still held heat.

They had been warned, but by whom? Somebody in the bar could have recognized McGarr, as had Carson. But why, then, would they have thought to phone the Frakes?

Or maybe they had installed a device at the top of the drive—an electric eye to warn them. McGarr knew of electronics shops in Dublin that sold such things.

But nowhere in the house—not in the child’s room off the kitchen nor in any of the four rooms upstairs, one of which was locked, did he find a monitor or much of anything besides two mattresses and some men’s clothes.

A plastic sign on the locked door said, “KNOCK FIRST” in block capitals. McGarr removed from his pocket the brace of picks that he kept on a key ring and set about opening the door.

It was a skill that he had learned on his first police job with Criminal Justice in Paris. During the sixties, Marseilles had been a hotbed of drug activity, and senior officials decided that they needed several undercover cops—preferably young and non-French—to pose as buyers and target major drug traffickers.

As a young tough redheaded Irishman who spoke French execrably, McGarr fit the bill exactly, and he was then taught every sort of criminal skill, from picking locks through forgery and counterfeiting to the use of a gun, a knife, and his hands to kill. Drug testing and the art of negotiating drug deals convincingly came next. But over the years, of all the skills, picking locks—which was illegal in Ireland without a court
order—had proved the most useful, if not the most critical.

It took McGarr perhaps five minutes to turn over the dead bolt and a moment or two longer to release the handle lock. And he had only just opened the door to view a surprisingly orderly bedroom with a four-poster bed and dresser to match, when he was stopped by the sound of a double blast outside.

The first report sounded like a collision of metal with metal, which was followed immediately by an explosion and howling, like a jet plane passing over the roof at Mach speed. Which could be only one thing.

A high-powered rifle. Louder here—McGarr realized when a second shot again concussed the windows—for having been fired over water from the opposite bank of the Shannon.

Down at the door McGarr discovered the target—his Cooper with Carson in it, handcuffed to the steering column. And nowhere in sight behind the shattered windscreen.

A third shot now slammed into the grill of the low car, rocking it back, and after the howling ceased McGarr heard Carson moan or cry out, which meant that at least he was still alive. And such an easy target in the gleaming car lit by the lights from the house.

What to do? McGarr could try to find the fuse box, or he could rush out the other door and try to draw their fire with his Walther.

But the river was too wide for any shot from a handgun to carry effectively, and the shooters on the other bank might not even hear the report. Which was when he remembered the axe in the kitchen.

Three more high-powered rounds slammed into the Cooper before McGarr discovered the utility meter on
the side of the house with its main power lead. Rearing back, he chopped it in two, and except for some sparking from the severed wires, darkness fell over the yard.

Rushing to the Cooper, McGarr found Carson huddled on the floor with only his shackled arm jutting up.

“You there?” McGarr asked.

“Where the Christ else would I be?” Carson replied. “Get me out of here. The fookers—they’ve got an infrared scope. And it’s only a matter of time before they change to it.”

McGarr had only unlocked the handcuffs and freed the clasp from the steering column when another shot screeched through the darkness and thwacked into the open door by McGarr’s thighs with all the force of a sledgehammer. It knocked him down. Fortunately.

The next round blew through the window of the door.

Snatching up the now open end of the handcuffs, McGarr wrenched Carson from the Cooper and—on all fours himself—dragged the man into the lee of the house.

“You’re hurt.”

“Only the hand. And my pate, I think. Is that blood?”

McGarr pulled the penlight from his pocket; Carson’s face was streaming with blood. Tiny shards of glass spangled his balding head, which was showering blood.

McGarr trained the beam on Carson’s hand, which had taken a sizable fragment of either bullet or glass—glass, McGarr guessed—to the fleshy part of the palm. The blood there was dark and slow-flowing, but the shard of a bullet would have gone through. “Anyplace else?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.” Slowly Carson began trying to stand; McGarr helped him up, then steadied the man.

“Ah, fook,” said Carson. “What a fookin’ mess.”

Indeed, thought McGarr, who glanced out at his car just as yet another round—a
coup de grace
—found the carburetor. And raw gas, spilling onto the hot engine, ignited.

With a blast, the Cooper went up in an oily ball of flame. The explosion staggered them, and Carson, bending his head, moved toward McGarr, as though seeking shelter.

And did he whimper? McGarr thought Carson did. After a while, as the conflagration raged, Carson straightened up and again tried to brush the blood from his eyes. “I’m too old for this shit. Let’s get it over with. I did it.”

McGarr slipped the Walther under his belt and glanced at his blazing car. “Hold out your arm.” He tapped the one with the injury to the palm. “You did what?”

“Shot Burke and the woman up over the bar.”

Using his handkerchief, McGarr fixed a tourniquet around Carson’s upper arm. “Why?”

“Because Burke was a prick. A womanizer. D’you know that Quintan Finn is my nephew?”

McGarr had not.

“It’s how I got here, you know—after prison. They took me in, gave me a place to stay.”

McGarr waited.

“And I figured—the boy needed a clean go at life with no woman like her on the other end. So I gave him one.”

“And you murdered them—how?” McGarr reached for the telephone in his coat pocket.

“Like you saw. One bullet, clean. Her being on top of him.”

McGarr tied the binding tight, then reached for the phone in the pocket of his coat. “And you got into the room—how?”

“Door, of course. Don’t I have all the keys at the bar?”

McGarr punched in a number. “They didn’t hear you.”

“Not being…engaged. You saw them yourself, her on top of him.”

“Lights off.”

“Aye.”

“And in the hall, when you opened the door? Lights were off as well?”

Carson paused. “I must have switched them off. When I opened the door, it was dark. They didn’t see me.”

“And you have good eyesight. You knew they were…what was your word? Engaged. I like that. Is it a local term?”