The Death of an Irish Consul Read online

  Bartholomew Gill

  The Death of an Irish Consul

  A Peter McGarr Mystery

  Contents

  Characters

  One

  McGARR GLANCED out the window of the lurching express train…

  Two

  NEXT MORNING, McGarr stepped into a phone booth and dialed…

  Three

  MIDAFTERNOON in late spring, the sprawling runways of poured concrete…

  Four

  FROM THE SHORE, the oil derricks seemed like toys in…

  Five

  LIKE MANY Italian cities, Siena owed its train station to…

  Six

  CARLO FALCHI was wroth. The carabinieri commandant was sitting behind…

  Seven

  THE RALLY BEGAN with two big bass drums. They were…

  Eight

  A DAY LATER, McGarr was sitting in Ned Gallup’s office…

  Nine

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE of a torrid afternoon by the…

  Ten

  NEARLY TWELVE HOURS LATER, McGarr was sitting in the Palazzo…

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Boooks by Bartholomew Gill

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHARACTERS

  AGNOLLO, REMIGIO

  Turin car maker

  ALFORI, ALDO

  Carabinieri commandant, Chiusdino

  BATTAGLIATTI, FRANCESCO

  Chairman, Italian Communist party

  Browne, C. B. H.

  Former C. of SIS

  CERVI, PAOLO

  Servant to Enrico Rattei

  COLE, DR. PATRICIA

  Professor, chemistry department, Trinity College, Dublin

  CROFT, SIR SELLWYN

  London solicitor

  CUMMINGS, SIR COLIN

  C. of SIS; appointed British ambassador to Italy

  CUMMINGS, ENNA RICASOLI

  Wife of Sir Colin

  DELANEY, RICHARD S.

  Detective inspector, Garda Soichana

  DRAKE, ROD

  American oilman

  FALCHI, CARLO

  Carabinieri commandant, Siena

  FOSTER, MOSES

  Former SIS operative

  FRANCES, JOHN

  Irish Ambassador to Britain

  GALLUP, EDWARD

  Assistant commissioner, CID

  GARZANTI, MARIA

  Opera diva

  GREAVES, HARRY

  Detective inspector, Garda Soichana

  HITCHCOCK, E. L. J.

  Former C. of SIS

  HITCHCOCK, GRAHAM

  Wife of E. L. J. Hitchcock

  MCKEON, BERNARD

  Sergeant of detectives, Garda Soichana

  MCGARR, PETER

  Chief inspector of detectives, also superintendent, Garda Soichana

  MCGARR, NOREEN

  McGarr’s wife

  MADIGAN, HUGH

  Private detective, London

  MALLON, DERMOT

  Lieutenant, Garda Soichana

  O’CONNOR, KATHLEEN

  Householder, Slea Head

  O’SHAUGHNESSY, LIAM

  Superintendent, Garda Soichana

  PAVINI, UMBERTO

  Historian

  RATTEI, ENRICO

  Chairman of ENI, Italian oil cartel

  SCANLON, TERRENCE

  Superintendent, Garda Soichana, Dingle

  SCLAVI, VICENZO

  Official, Monti dei Paschi di Siena

  SIMPSON, ROBERT

  Lieutenant, RAF

  SINCLAIR, WILLIAM

  Detective inspector, Garda Soichana

  WARD, HUGH

  Detective inspector, Garda Soichana

  ZINGIALE, OSCAR

  Italian industrialist

  ONE

  MCGARR GLANCED out the window of the lurching express train, then looked down at his hand. If my thumb sprouts a rose, he thought, I’ll let my fingers become serpents. He placed the hand on his wife’s thigh. She didn’t stir from her sleep. They were in Italy.

  Since Florence, a mauve line had been forming on the eastern horizon, silhouetting the cypress trees on the hilltops. All the farmhouses now had lights in upper windows. In the courtyard of one, a shawl-draped woman, surrounded by chickens, was strewing grain from a basket. Near the barn of another, a young boy was leading cows through a vineyard toward open fields. Even though McGarr could not as yet see the olive trees through the ground fog, he knew they were there, could feel their presence on the hillsides—fecund, gray green, ancient witnesses to the evanescence of man.

  Such as the vendors, who with vans loaded tall were driving toward Siena on this, the day of the Palio. The festival had begun as a horse race among the seventeen contrade, or sections, of the medieval city. Since then, however, it had become much more: a parade of bright costumes, a flag-throwing exhibition, a religious ceremony, a bacchanal, a highly profitable business week, and finally a mad, bareback scramble through a vortex of people in an exquisite Renaissance square—brief, impassioned, tempestuous. Half the riders never finished. In the heat and excitement, women swooned, men cried, the church bells of the victorious contrada rang for a day. In short, McGarr believed the Palio to be a little bit of everything that was characteristically Italian. Pomp, beauty, family, passion, sport, and greed—it was here in Siena twice yearly that Italians were most unabashedly themselves.

  Separate but identical murders in a vacation house near Slea Head in southwestern Ireland had brought McGarr to Italy. McGarr believed an experienced killer—a former agent of SIS—had been a party to these executions and now planned to kill the man whose head was nodding in sleep across the compartment from the chief inspector. He was Sir Colin Cummings, who had recently been appointed British ambassador to Italy. His wife, the former Enna Ricasoli, was awaiting them in her family’s palazzo on the Piazza del Campo in Siena. Nearly forty years before, one of her disappointed suitors had promised to kill the Englishman if he dared return to the city. All facts that McGarr had learned in his investigations of the Slea Head murders pointed to this same man, who was rich and powerful enough to fulfill his vow. Yet McGarr felt serene—deeply content to be hurtling through the dark Tuscan countryside where, remembering his Petronius, he believed everything, even protecting a man’s life among 125,000 revelers, was possible.

  In the compartment behind him, McGarr had stationed Garda Superintendent Liam O’Shaughnessy. Because of his neutral Galway accent, he was pretending to be an American tourist. In the compartment in front of him, Inspector Hughie Ward was dressed in the cassock of a Jesuit priest studying at the Vatican. At the Excelsior Hotel in Siena, Sergeant of Detectives Bernie McKeon had already secured two suites of rooms. The balconies offered views of the Stadio and Siena’s Duomo, and the Excelsior was only a ten-minute walk to the Piazza del Campo where the Palio would be held. There Ward would be staying in the Palazzo Ricasoli with the Cummingses. McGarr could do no more for the ambassador.

  McGarr looked out the window again. With the rising sun an azure tint had begun to suffuse a cloudless sky. The weather would be perfect for the Palio.

  The events that brought them to Siena had begun nearly a week and a half before. McGarr remembered the day well, since after fourteen straight days and nights of rain the sun had suddenly broken through a lowering sky. Traffic rushing to Dublin that morning slowed; nobody tooted. When McGarr got to his office at Dublin Castle, his staff, their faces pasty and winter-worn, had collected around Sergeant Bernie McKeon’s desk. They were drinking tea and staring out an open window.

  The sun catching in its chrome and black enamel, a limousine passed in a fiery blur. The tires hissed o
n the wet macadam. The wind off the Liffey was soft now, mild and welcome. McGarr walked into his dark cubicle to answer the ringing phone which everybody had ignored. Indoors, things seemed dusty and old.

  It was Superintendent Terrence Scanlon, commandant of the Dingle Garda barracks. They had found a dead man in an outbuilding of a vacation home on Dingle Bay. His arms and legs had been trussed behind him, wrists to ankles, and he had been shot once in the back of the head.

  “An execution,” said McGarr. He was a short, thickset man with red hair gone bald on top. Off the cap of a wooden match he flicked his thumb. He held the flame to the tip of a Woodbine, then sat on the edge of his desk. He glanced over at his staff and the open window. Dingle would be glorious on a day such as this, he thought. “IRA?”

  “Don’t think so,” said Scanlon. “That’s why I called. The murderer either dropped or ignored the shell casing. The gun seems to have been a twenty-two, nothing an IRA gunman would choose.”

  “If the choice were his.” An IRA gunman would use anything with a trigger, McGarr well knew.

  “But this is different, sir. The man’s name is Hitchcock with three initials. He has a London legal address. Rumor has it he’s a retired civil servant—Coal Board, I think—but nobody, not even my brother, knows who he is.” Scanlon’s brother was the Kerry C.O. of the regular IRA. “A quiet sort, it seems. Didn’t frequent any pubs whenever he was here; even stayed in the car when his wife completed the sale of the place at the barrister’s office. And it’s some place, it is—stretches half a mile, I should think. He must have owned the Coal Board and several other utilities as well.”

  “Where is she?”

  “London, I believe.”

  “Does she know yet?”

  “Only found him this morning when their laborer let out the donkey. The smell it was, you know.”

  “How long dead?”

  “A week. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind coming out here, sir. I might have missed something important, not being used to this sort of thing and all. If this isn’t an IRA affair, mightn’t we have a chance of learning the facts?”

  “Dingle, you said,” McGarr said in a loud voice. A fringe of the Gulf Stream struck Ireland near Dingle, and on a day when Dublin was balmy, the southwest coast of the country might well be tropical.

  As one, his staff turned to him.

  “Well,” said Scanlon, “it’s actually far Dingle. You can see the Great Blasket from the shore.”

  “You can? The weather must be fair out there too, Terry.”

  “Smashin’, at last. Puts me in mind of Portugal where the missus and me—but that’s another story and not one for the phone.”

  “Portugal-like, eh?”

  “We went there over Easter. Can we expect you?”

  “Early afternoon.” McGarr rang off.

  When he raised his head, a dozen expectant faces were looking at him. The silence was complete. “I won’t be in today, men. I’ve got a little field work to do.” McGarr fitted on his derby, then tossed his dark raincoat over a shoulder and made for the door.

  “But that damn car fits five at least,” roared Bernie McKeon. “What—do you think the rest of us enjoy this great, gloomy dungeon?” Histrionically, he swept his arms about the room. His face was now scarlet, eyes bulging. “Or messing about with this slick tissue?” He grabbed some papers off his desk and tossed them over his head. He then approached McGarr truculently. “Get a hold of yourself, Chief Inspector. You’re not a dictator around here, you know. This isn’t a penal colony. We’ll just have to choose up to see who gets the dirty duty of carting your carcass out to Dingle and back. Have a seat.” McKeon pulled out a chair for McGarr and eased him into it. “Now then—you make up the tickets, Ward, and I’ll get the hat.” He reached behind him and plucked the derby off McGarr’s head.

  All the men laughed. Only McKeon could treat McGarr like that and get away with it. McKeon was a chubby, blond man who spoke in a rush. His eyes were small, very blue, and mischievous.

  Ward put twelve slips of paper into the derby. On four of these he had marked an X.

  McKeon did not win.

  As Ward, Delaney, Sinclair, and Greaves started for their coats, McKeon said, “Wait just one minute, you blaggards. This was a put-up job. Today, I’m going to have to pull rank on one or the other of you two. And, if you give me any lip, neither of you will go.” He meant Ward or Greaves, who asked, “But why? It was all aboveboard. Didn’t you hold the hat yourself?”

  “That’s why I lost. By the time I got to choose, there was only one ticket left and blank at that.”

  “Chance,” said Sinclair.

  “Luck,” said Delaney.

  “Rank,” said McKeon again, heading for the coat rack.

  Greaves glanced at Ward, who shrugged and reached into his pocket for a half-crown to flip.

  McGarr stood, picked his derby off the table, and fitted it on his head. “C’mon, we’ll take the Rover. That way all five of you can go.”

  “But the energy crisis!” said Boyle from his desk. He hadn’t chosen an X.

  “—the energy crisis,” McKeon advised.

  “Why don’t we take two Rovers?” another asked.

  “Or a staff car and two tanks.” McKeon shut the door. Taking McGarr by the elbow as they walked down the long, gloomy hall, he observed, “Gripers. I’ve never seen the like. They complain all the day long. And such a pleasant day, what?”

  They were in the courtyard now. The sun made McGarr pull the short brim of his derby over his eyes. The men removed their rain gear and suit coats and folded them into the trunk.

  Lowering himself into the front seat beside Ward, who was his driver, McGarr said, “Scanlon will think half the Dublin office has nothing better to do than take a junket to Dingle for the day.”

  “Sure,” said McKeon, sinking back into the plush rear seat of the new Rover, “and we haven’t, have we?”

  And between the elements a most pleasant tension obtained that day—rivers, streams, even the roadside drainage ditches were rushing with clear winter water that was made to seem all the more frigid in the bright sun. Every so often a cool breeze off a cow pond would cut through the heat. All Ireland, it seemed to McGarr, had revived in this first burst of warmth. Whole families, mile after mile, were working their fields, repairing walls, cleaning barns, stables, and outbuildings. Cottage doors were open, bedding hung on wash lines, babies playing among the chickens by the back doors. Deeper into the country, near Limerick, the crack of an ash sapling turned McGarr’s head to a field in which young boys, clubs whipping, were playing hurly. In the Shannon, salmon were running. From boats men were tossing nets into the black, swift water.

  Near Foynes they stopped at an inn that was perched on a hill. From their window seat McGarr could see Ennis and Lough Dergh to the north and east, and Kil-rush down the sparkling Shannon estuary to the west. The color of the spring grass in Ireland, he thought, has no equal, especially, like now, after a long rain.

  They ate salmon that had been roasted over a special spit made in the form of an oblong cage and situated, as part of the fireplace, in the middle of the dining room. The fresh whole fish, so the chef told McGarr, who conversed with him in a French made colloquial during his seven-year stint with Criminal Justice and after with Interpol in Paris, was stuffed with a julienne (thin strips of carrots and celery hearts cooked in butter to which truffles, an equal amount of mushrooms, and some sherry had been added, all bound with a thick béchamel sauce). The fish was then covered with bards of bacon fat held in place with twine. It was placed in the cage and braised before a hot fire for fifteen to eighteen minutes, basting often. Before taking the salmon off the spit, the chef removed the bacon bards and allowed the fish to color. He served the dish with fresh lemons and dispatched the bar boy to the cool depths of the second cellar to retrieve a few bottles of a select white Graves from Illats that he favored with the dish.

  As McGarr talked with him, the ch
ief inspector noted that the only other diners in the inn were two men who were seated on the other side of the room, directly across the open, circular fireplace from McGarr and his men. One was a black man whose girth was only somewhat less remarkable than his broad forehead and close-set eyes. At first McGarr thought he must be slightly macrocephalic, but decided, after discreetly glancing at him several more times, that the effect was only caused by the man’s baldness. McGarr, who was also bald, felt the need to examine his own appearance in a mirror, but contained the urge. The other man at the far table had white hair, the curls of which had been allowed to develop freely à la mode, a thick black moustache, and a sallow complexion. Both were very well dressed and were speaking what McGarr believed was Spanish. He could only hear a word or two from time to time.

  After thick, black coffee, McGarr and his staff pushed on.

  McGarr burst from the outbuilding with his handkerchief still held to his nose and walked quickly toward the car where his staff and Superintendent Scanlon were standing. It was true, he noted, that one could see in the distance the steep cliffs of the Great Blasket being slammed by the North Atlantic. It was cold here still, however, what with the breeze off the ocean, and the stone house of at least twenty-five rooms had a bleached appearance, as though too often cleansed by the brilliant sun, stiff breezes, and salt spray.

  The man in the shed had been in his late sixties, McGarr supposed. He was tall, thin, in good shape, and from the marks of thrashing in the chicken droppings on the floor McGarr guessed he had been tied up and left there for some time before being murdered. The bullet itself did not pass through his head. The cord binding his hands was elasticized, like that used to secure parcels to the carriers of bicycles, but thicker.