The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf Read online

  The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf

  A Peter McGarr Mystery

  Bartholomew Gill

  For Bert:

  Great, good-hearted companion

  and loving friend.

  We miss you.

  Contents

  Part I

  Island Man

  Chapter 1

  CLEMENT FORD HEARD the phone ring in the hall of…

  Chapter 2

  FORD KNEW THE boat—or at least the type—since he had…

  Chapter 3

  AT THE DOOR of his cottage, Clement Ford did not…

  Chapter 4

  MIRNA GOTTSCHALK HAD been born on Clare Island in 1941,…

  Chapter 5

  FORD STAGGERED AND fell again. He had imagined the descent…

  Chapter 6

  THERE WAS NO light in Packy O’Malley’s tiny cottage by…

  Part II

  Seoinini

  Chapter 7

  CLARE ISLAND WAS just as Peter McGarr remembered it—a bright…

  Chapter 8

  THE FORD COTTAGE lay some two miles from the harbor…

  Chapter 9

  MIRNA GOTTSCHALK SAW the man approaching from at least a…

  Chapter 10

  AS THE ROVER wheeled slowly along the rutted boreen, McGarr…

  Chapter 11

  A TRIED PATIENCE was Detective Superintendent Bernard McKeon’s condition exactly.

  Chapter 12

  JUST BEFORE DAWN, Angus Rehm cut the auxiliary engine and…

  Part III

  Temptation

  Chapter 13

  WHEN DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT Hugh Ward opened his eyes the next…

  Chapter 14

  COLM CANNING THOUGHT his head was one of the bells…

  Chapter 15

  JUST AFTER NOON, Noreen McGarr stopped the car at the…

  Chapter 16

  “IS SIGAL A Jewish name?” Ruth Bresnahan asked Hugh Ward,…

  Chapter 17

  THE TURRET ROOM of the Clare Island lighthouse was like…

  Chapter 18

  PETER McGARR WAS waiting in the wing chair in Mirna…

  Chapter 19

  MIRNA GOTTSCHALK WAITED until after dinner to tell her son…

  Chapter 20

  WITH A CRASH and a curse Colm Canning arrived at…

  Part IV

  Plunder

  Chapter 21

  NOT MANY YEARS ago, a large new ferry had been…

  Chapter 22

  “DID YOU MANAGE to meet that boatload of young women?”…

  Chapter 23

  BERNIE McKEON’S BRIEF touch with serenity was over, he could…

  Chapter 24

  WHEN HUGH WARD got back to the office in Dublin…

  Chapter 25

  AS HAD ANGUS Rehm. He was clutching the VHF scanner/decoder…

  Chapter 26

  CLEM FORD WAS at a loss what to do. Anchored…

  Chapter 27

  WHEN THE THREE people walked into the office of Monck…

  Part V

  Dispossession

  Chapter 28

  TWO DAYS LATER, while lying on the beach at the…

  Chapter 29

  McGARR GLANCED UP at Maddie. She and some new-found friends…

  Chapter 30

  McGarr closed the sheaf of photocopied pages and handed it…

  Chapter 31

  HE DID NOT knock. With the barrel of his automatic…

  Epilogue

  SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, after having taken Lugh Sigal to gyms,…

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, writing of Clew Bay, County Mayo, in 1842:

  The most beautiful view I ever saw in the world…. The mountains were tumbled about in a thousand fantastic ways and…the bay…which sweeps down to the sea, and a hundred islands in it, were dressed up in gold and purple, and crimson with the whole cloudy west in a flame. Wonderful, wonderful!

  PART I

  Island Man

  CHAPTER 1

  CLEMENT FORD HEARD the phone ring in the hall of the Clare Island cottage that he had occupied now for over fifty years. He glanced at the clock on the mantel—4:15.

  “Strange hour of the afternoon to be ringing up,” said his wife, Breege, who was sitting in the other wing chair across the hearth from him.

  Like a cracked red eye, a mound of peat was glowing in the fireplace, the white smoke tracking quickly up the flue. Outside a chill wind that had brought drenching rains was whining through the eaves. It was the last gasp of a wild and wet spring, Ford hoped. Apart from the clock, the clicking of Breege’s knitting needles was the only other sound.

  “Shall I answer it?”

  “No, of course not,” said Ford, clenching his pipe between his teeth and grasping the arms of the chair. “I’ve always answered the phone round here, and I’ve no intention of stopping now.”

  “Mind your poor knees. Or are they feeling better today?”

  Ford glanced at her. Although her hands were moving at a furious pace, her star-burst blue eyes, which he had always considered the most beautiful he had ever seen, were staring up into the shadows on the other side of the room. Breege had been blind since birth.

  A dark woman with long, finely formed features, she was thin with good shoulders that had remained square even as she had aged. In fact, with only a touch of gray in her jet black hair, Breege scarcely looked a day over fifty, though she was nearly as old as Ford himself.

  A proper woman in everything, she kept herself, her house, and all she touched shipshape. And he loved her still, as he had from the moment she and her aunt had pulled him half-dead from the sea all those years ago.

  “If you must know, my knees are beyond hope, says the specialist in Dublin. So there’s no sense discussing the subject further. If I don’t use them, they’ll seize up, and then we’ll be in the soup right enough.” One blind and the other a cripple who was now pushing eighty, Ford thought.

  In spite of his age, Ford’s shoulders and arms were still well muscled and strong, and he easily pushed himself up from the chair. He had to wait a tottering moment, however, before knowing if his legs would bear his weight, which was twenty stone. A massive man by any measure, he had “shrunk”—Breege was wont to tell people who asked—to six feet six inches tall. “I can see him diminishing by the day,” she’d say with a slight smile.

  “Well, whoever it is, they know enough to keep ringing,” she now observed.

  The phone was maintaining its manic, two-ring jingle in the hall.

  “Maybe it’s one of the children calling.” The Fords had no offspring of their own, nor had they raised any. Yet their mantel was filled with framed photos of several dozen young people in various stages of growth. “We should really get one of those radio telephones that Mirna rang up on the other day,” Breege continued. “She bought it in Westport, and she can even carry it up to her pasture and down to the harbor. It’s rigged to one of the American satellites. I’m afraid I’ll never understand how it happens, but she sounded like she was sitting where you are, Clem.”

  It was the last thing they needed, Ford thought—as he moved stiffly—another modern device that would put him on his duff and keep him there, until the both of them were ready for some “home.” Ford planned to live at least as long as Breege, who needed him more than she knew.

  How? By staying active. “Chinese exercise,” Breege’s own maiden aunt had called it, and Peig O’Malley had died at an even hundred years. “I’ve had to hack, scratch, and claw for everything I’ve ever needed,” it was her wont to say, “and ’tis work that’s kept me
fit.” And would Ford too, if he could just persevere and fight through the pain. Clare Island practices had saved him once before and would keep him alive now, if he let them.

  “Hah-loo. How may I help you?” Ford said, forcing a bit of affability into his voice. His accent was decidedly British.

  “Clem—Paul here. I’ve got another one for you.” A distant relation of Breege, like so many others on Clare Island, Paul O’Malley meant another boat. His was the highest dwelling on the harbor side of the island and commanded nearly a complete view of the surrounding sea. As a shut-in, he was known as the “eyes of Clare Island,” and he phoned Ford whenever any vessel of size put into the harbor.

  For the favor, Ford bought O’Malley the odd pint when the quadriplegic’s parents took him out for an airing. Also, it was believed that Ford had performed several extraordinary services for the large clan, who had inhabited the island at least since the notorious Grace O’Malley of Elizabethan times.

  There was the matter of Padraic “Packy” O’Malley’s surgery in Dublin, where he was taken after having caught his hand in the winch of his lobster boat. A specialist had to be flown in from London, but miraculously the bill had arrived at Packy’s tiny cottage marked “Paid in Full.” When Packy had inquired by whom, he was told a “giant Englishman” with a great white beard, though Ford had denied everything. He made mention of his modest lifestyle in the cottage that Breege had inherited, the three meager fields that he farmed assiduously, and the fact that he did not own even an automobile. Or a boat.

  Also a number of O’Malley children had been sent to universities in Ireland and abroad, courtesy of the anonymously endowed Clare Island Trust. Businesses on the island and in County Mayo, of which Clare Island was a part, had been started, churches repaired, and libraries supported through the Trust.

  And it seemed that whenever Clement Ford was informed of a native Clare Islander or a good cause that was in need, the matter was set to rights, later rather than sooner. There was always an appreciable lag between Ford’s learning of a problem, and its happy resolution. Clare Islanders, who believed they knew the source of the bounty, called it “the Ford gap.”

  Ford now thanked Paul O’Malley and inquired after his health and that of his parents. “Will I see you at the hotel?”

  “Saturday, as usual.” It was the night Paul was taken to the island’s only hotel for a bit of a gargle. “Nine sharp.”

  “I’ll stop round, and we’ll have a jar.”

  “I’d like that. Bring Breege.” Perhaps because they were both disabled, the two cousins got along famously and seemed to buck each other up.

  “Sure, I couldn’t get out of the house without her.” Ford rang off and reached for his storm anorak and hat. To Breege he called, “I’m stepping out for a moment, dear heart. Don’t hold tea—I might be late.”

  “Who was that—Paul?”

  From the cabinet beneath the hatrack, Ford added the pair of Zeiss night-seeing binoculars that he had treated himself to when last in Dublin. They were heavy, bulky, and had cost the better part of two thousand quid. As always, he had trouble fitting them under the rain gear.

  “Don’t you think you could stop this foolishness after all these years?”

  It was a question that Ford had often asked himself when having to go out into weather like this. But he always came up with the same answer: He had been placed in trust, as he thought of it, over the cargo that he had brought with him to the island in 1945. It wasn’t his. In fact, after the passage of time and all the changes that had taken place in the world, it probably wasn’t anybody’s.

  But the uses it could be put to were important to Ford. Granted, the impulse to acquire the cargo had not been selfless. But during his long recovery from the pummeling that the ocean had given him, Ford had realized that there was something operating in the world that was bigger than he or his personal needs. That something had saved him. And it had given him Breege and Clare Island, which was like a kind of paradise. It was right to use the resources at his disposal to serve that something. And so he had.

  The others that Ford had, well, “stolen” the cargo from? They were predators and would never forget. As long as even one of them was still alive, there was a chance that he might be out there in the harbor someday, and Ford had to guard against that possibility, if not for himself then for Breege and for the Trust.

  “I’ll try to make it fast.” But all depended on how quickly the crew of the vessel would show themselves on deck.

  Ford lowered his head and glanced at himself in the hatrack mirror. With his full beard and long hair, which was now going white, he looked rather like Father Time. His nose was long and beaked, his cheeks now hollow with age. Snugging the woolen fisherman’s hat over his brow, he clamped his pipe between his teeth. “Good-bye!” he called, opening the front door.

  But before he could amend his words, Breege snapped, “Don’t ever say that! You know how I don’t like it.”

  “Cheerio, then.”

  “Well, I hope it isn’t cheery, and the storm drives you home. I’ll hold your tea.”

  “I said don’t. Don’t!”

  “And who are you, out on a fool’s errand, to tell me anything at all.” Breege stood to take herself into the kitchen at the back of the cottage.

  As Ford closed the door, he saw her reach toward the table beside the chair, her fingers feeling for the diamond ring he had given her all those years ago. The surround of brilliant sapphire stones was just the color of her eyes, and too large to wear when knitting. “Foolish man,” she muttered, as she slipped it on her finger.

  The blast of the storm staggered Clem Ford the moment he stepped out of the small vestibule that was necessary protection on an island that fronted the Atlantic Ocean. Between his home on Clare Island and New York lay nothing but ocean, over three thousand miles of it.

  Still, Ford paused out of habit, while the wind buffeted him, to push the small Judas stone against the edge of the door. Glancing up, he scanned the ragged edge of the storm front that was sweeping in off the ocean from the northwest.

  Like a black curtain—dark and impenetrable—it was closing down over the brilliant tones of the setting sun. More tellingly, the barometer had begun to plummet. Reaching toward the panel of instruments that he had fixed above the frame of the door, Ford tapped the glass face. They had lost a full inch of mercury in the last hour; the storm would strike soon and hard.

  Ford pulled the hood of the anorak over his woolen hat and knotted the scarf about his neck. It might be high time for early summer on the calendar, but Nature heeded her own schedule. Bitch-goddess that she was, she would do as she list.

  Turning, Ford launched his large body into the gale.

  CHAPTER 2

  FORD KNEW THE boat—or at least the type—since he had sailed one in his youth between the wars.

  Then his father had operated a legitimate import/export business by day, but by night he had made his real money. From Harwich in England he had smuggled alcohol, tobacco, gasoline—any commodity that was in short supply or heavily taxed—into the Weimar Republic.

  An eighty-foot North Sea pilot schooner made little more noise than the water cut by her sharp bow. Drawing a mere eight feet, she could sneak into the sleepy, shallow ports off the Friesland coast that the authorities never thought of patrolling. Yet her beam was great enough for substantial cargoes of contraband. “Why risk confiscation for a pittance,” his father had instructed him. “If you’re going to steal, steal big.” Words that had later come to haunt Ford.

  Now he wondered at the fluke of an exact replica of such a boat sailing back into his life at the end of his seventh decade. Clement Ford was not given to superstition, but his life on Clare Island had made him attentive to the vagaries of chance. According to more than a few of the island’s inhabitants, there was no such thing as coincidence.

  God—they had it—spoke to us through other persons, places, and even things. Could the boat now be a
warning? Ford thought it might.

  A sliver of waning sunlight was still striking the graceful, white hull, where she was anchored in the harbor not far from the granite breakwater and short quay. From the crosstrees of her two tall masts, working lights had been hung. Once the sun faded, the deck would be awash in achromatic light.

  Raising the binoculars to his eyes, Ford discovered he did not need their night-seeing capability. He had positioned himself, as he always did on such an occasion, in the topmost open window of the small O’Malley castle. Now a national monument, it had guarded the harbor in ancient times and did so again for Ford.

  From there the quay with its short jetty and tall protective wall were about a hundred yards away and the schooner perhaps two hundred where she was riding easily on her anchor in a stiff chop. Bracing his elbows against the castle wall, Ford focused the vessel in.

  There were two men working the rigging, furling and securing the sails, while a third hand, who moved like a woman, was belaying line and stowing running gear. All were dressed in bright orange foul-weather gear that displayed the name of the vessel—Mah Jong—on the back in Chinese-like letters.

  When the schooner swung on her anchor, Ford noted that her home port was “New Orleans, La.” and he wondered if the boat had embarked from there. If so, the crew had time and good weather to work on the boat. The topsides bore none of the encrusted salt or dull bronze that an ocean crossing inevitably produced. Everything from her paint through her brightwork to her sheets and canvas seemed fresh or recent-lyitted out.