The Death of an Irish Tradition Read online

  And McKeon enjoyed the assignment, there in the long room stacked with the leather-bound proceedings of the Society dating back to 1731, the deep shadows which the little lamp with the green translucent shade cast, its circle of light, the quiet there contrasting sharply with the hubbub of the exhibitors out in the Main Hall. There carpenters and trade-show personnel were putting up booths to display their wares—equestrian equipage of every sort, tractors, stoves, prefabricated barns, new-technology silos, craft exhibits, an art show, some Finns who had brought with them a whole factory, it seemed, of stylish furniture.

  At one point two men, who were arguing in the stilted accents of the old Ascendency, had entered from the Members’ Rooms and pulled down a dusty volume. One of them then proved to the other that an ancestor of his had numbered among the founders of the revered Society that had done so much for the country, more than just the Show itself. Having settled the question, they noticed McKeon writing away in his book. “Sorry, old boy,” one of them had said.

  Old boy, indeed, McKeon had thought. He was as much an “old boy” as they were pedigreed asses of the sort he was reading about there in the catalogues.

  J. J. Keegan had, in fact, been an exhibitor of donkeys from 1959, the year he’d been freed from a British nick, to ’69, a year which had been marked by much I. R. A. activity. In ’71, Doctor Malachy T. Matthews had begun exhibiting a number of donkeys that corresponded rather closely to those of Keegan, in particular a prize brood mare Keegan had called “Pegeen” and Matthews had called “Meg.” McKeon couldn’t be sure they were one and the same, but the prizes they gained in the category, brood mare with foal at foot, were always best of show, and he had a feeling they were. Matthews was listed as an exhibitor for the current year, although the Office said he had not as yet registered.

  McKeon replaced the volumes and switched off the light. He strolled out through the Main and Industry halls to Ring 2, where the hot, late afternoon sun forced him to doff his jacket.

  There gardeners were studiously clipping grass around the fence posts, while others up on ladders worked on the linden trees, rounding their bowls as a foreman shouted up at them from afar—a little here, a little there—to make them equal.

  Horses passed McKeon, being led down the path of crushed cinders to the stables, which were located throughout the Show Ground. And people—busy people, expectant or anxious or simply caught up in the excitement of the impending Show—pushed by him, talking among themselves, preoccupied, carefully guiding a caravan or a horse lorry toward the quarters they had been assigned. Many—he well knew—had worked all year toward the next few days, and McKeon found the atmosphere of the place much to his liking.

  After—how many years was it, now?—twenty-eight and some months as a policeman of one sort or another, strolling under the vaulted porticos of Pembroke Hall with a horse in nearly every paddock, its half-timbered façade Elizabethan and elegant, jumpers in the exercise ring even now loping over low gates, ridden by grooms or young family members, was the class of assignment that McKeon believed he deserved. The Castle and his desk, while a valuable post in regard to promotion and the like, seemed a bleak prospect to him.

  Sure—he had often told himself—Commissioner Farrell would soon retire and McGarr would be given his job; O’Shaughnessy would take over the Detective Bureau for a short time and then he himself would be given the assignment with Ward as his desk man. But McKeon didn’t know how much more of it he could take himself. More outings like this, though, and he could hump it. He imagined he might even drag some of his kids along for the first day of the Show, make it look more genuine—the pose and all.

  At the animal arrival and departure area McKeon managed to insinuate himself among the clatch of men who had gathered in the registrar’s office—smiling to this one, nodding to another, smoking a cigarette with his back against the wall until the man in the R. D. S. blazer moved away from the log book. McKeon then stepped toward it, as though not really interested, but his small, dark eyes had scanned all the pages but one before the registrar returned.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Just looking to see if a friend has arrived.”

  “Name?”

  “Matthews, Doctor Malachy.”

  The man cocked his head. “Don’t think so. Not yet anyhow. I know him though, I think. Brood mares?”

  “After a fashion. Brood-mare donkeys.”

  The man nearly turned his back on him. “Try the caravan park. We’ve no stabling room for them this year.”

  There McKeon found the two entrants that had attracted him in the log book—a car-towed trailer from Maam, near Leenane, and a large animal lorry from Slane, near Drogheda.

  The man in the former vehicle was trying to back it into a narrow slot near the Merrion Road wall and a tree that would provide it good shade, and McKeon tossed his jacket over the hood and directed him in, then gave the man a hand with propping up the trailer and leading the animals out.

  His name was Goggin, and he had his kids and his missus with him. He offered McKeon a bottle of lager, and under the shade of the tree they talked and had a smoke before McKeon departed.

  “Going to be around?” the man had asked.

  “Think so. I’m in the market. Retired now. Thought I’d raise a few donkeys.”

  “Ah—no money in it, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  “I wouldn’t be in it for that. We had five of them when I was a lad, and now I’m after wanting a few myself—for my kids.”

  “Been away?”

  McKeon only nodded.

  “Stop back. I might be letting one or two go.”

  One of his little girls had jumped up on the back of a strong young donkey stallion, and he was hopping and bucking, trying to get her off. He sprinted forward fast and then came to a sharp stop, twisting his head, but she held fast to its mane. “You’re nothing but a Tinker’s ass, hear me, Willy?” she shouted in his ear and whacked his side so he jumped and scampered around the cars, his legs strong and stiff, his lips fluttering over square, yellow teeth as he brayed and complained.

  At the lorry, the side of which read, “Homewood Farms, Horses and Donkeys, Slane, County Meath,” McKeon found nobody about. It was a large Bedford truck, almost the size of a mover’s van, its lettering silver and brilliant against polished maroon lacquer. It had a sleeping cab behind the driver’s seat and a grill that was higher than McKeon was tall. Even the six lugs on each wheel had been polished, and an auxiliary engine was working to cool the inside.

  There were five doors—two to the driver’s compartment, the rear bay flaps, and a small door with a window in it on one side. That a curtain nearly covered. Standing on tiptoes McKeon squinted, trying to see past the glare, and thought he caught a glimpse of a figure reclining or sleeping on a small couchlike berth.

  He knocked but got no response. He knocked again, harder, then grasped the handle and found the door locked.

  The van was parked near the wall, and the door was quite close to it.

  McKeon glanced down both sides. There were many people close by and he could hear conversations, shouts, car and van doors being closed, but the lorry had been so positioned that the door was concealed from sight.

  McKeon reached in his pocket and, with a few turns with one of the several picks on his key ring, had the door open.

  He pulled it back slowly, and the figure on the bed stirred. “Dick?” His voice was muffled against the cushions. “Somebody was banging on the door a while back. Where’d you put the bottle? Christ, I’m dying.”

  The man turned to McKeon.

  His face was pallid and drawn, a large handlebar mustache covering his upper lip. He was wearing white coveralls, like those of the gardeners McKeon had seen earlier, and his eyes were glassy. And he was old, maybe seventy or better.

  Before McKeon could speak, a hand was placed on his arm. “Can I help you?” somebody asked close to his ear.

  It was a large, older man with a f
ace like that of a professional boxer—the nose flattened off to one side, one eyebrow missing and whitish scar tissue in its place, one ear larger than the other. The grip on McKeon’s arm was firm.

  “I’m after wanting a peek at your donkeys.”

  “But the door was locked.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I looked in and saw your man, and—” McKeon glanced down.

  The man was holding a whisky bottle, like a club, in the other hand.

  “What do they call you?”

  “Kennedy.”

  “From?”

  “Leitrim.” It was McKeon’s mother’s name, the town and county where he had been born and raised.

  “How’s the fishing?”

  “Fine.”

  “What did you catch this summer?”

  “Brill. A salmon or two.”

  The man released his arm. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow? We’re having a little problem here at the moment.” He raised the bottle. He smiled. Several of his front teeth were false and very white compared to the others. He was a massive man, all shoulders and chest.

  “I’ll do that.”

  The other man had turned his face to the cushions once more.

  “Buying or selling?” the large man asked.

  “Buying, and that’s a certainty.”

  He twisted the cap off the bottle and discarded it roughly. He reached it out toward McKeon. “No sense in wasting all of it.” He gestured with his head toward the man in the lorry. “He won’t even taste it.”

  “After having a drop?” McKeon asked, reaching for the bottle.

  The man closed his eyes and shook his head. “The failing, I’m afraid. Desperate. But he’s a right bloke when he’s off it.”

  McKeon drank off as much as his throat would permit. “I’ll be back.”

  “I’ll count on it.”

  Do that, McKeon thought.

  They arrived at the Matthews’s farm outside Drogheda late in the afternoon, and Noreen remarked on the little boy they could see sitting on the stairs leading to the front door, head on his hands. The door beyond him had been broken open. It was swaying on one hinge in the slight breeze off the front lawn, its glass stove in.

  The farmhouse was an old, two-story affair that had recently been modernized, the narrow windows enlarged, the stucco touched up and painted a light-blue color little different from the summer sky. The slanting sun made it seem brilliant, and the grass of the front lawn, which grazing animals had cropped, had a bushy summer appearance, as though nothing could keep it back, tufts and sprays burgeoning here and there.

  Off one side of the house a kennel had been added, a long, shedlike structure with a corrugated metal roof. From it they could hear the muffled barking of many dogs.

  McGarr swung the car around, heading it back down the drive. “Perhaps you’d better wait here. And—”

  But she had already reached below the seat for the Walther that he kept in a holster there.

  McGarr checked the clip and placed the automatic under his belt. Stepping out, he tugged at the brim of his panama to shade his eyes. A flock of corncrakes, black and raucous, passed overhead, and the sun was hot on his back.

  The little boy did not look up at him, only stared at McGarr’s bluchers, his eyes again filling with tears. His cheeks were stained from crying. “Pegeen,” was all he said.

  “Where is she?” McGarr stared down at the tousled head, the sunlight so bright there he could have counted the strands.

  The boy stood and they walked through an anteroom to an office, the floor of which was covered with broken glass. Other doors had been smashed open, and McGarr could see an operating table for animals, surgical cabinets, and sinks. Yet another burst door led into the house proper. A radio was playing in the sitting room, one light by a chair left on.

  But the boy led him through the house, out to the back where, in a pen, an aged donkey was lying in a pool of blood, wheezing, her old eyes glassy. She shied as McGarr approached her, fearful but complacent too.

  She had been pulled or had dragged herself into the shade at the side of the house. There was a horse blanket over her and something that looked like a compress on her head.

  The boy stooped and pulled back the blanket to reveal a gunshot wound in her rib cage. “And here,” he sniffled, gently lifting the compress away.

  The blood there was dark, almost black, but the bullet seemed to have passed through the fleshy part at the back of the neck.

  “Who done it, Mister? Not Doctor Matt.”

  McGarr reached down for his hand. “It happened some time ago and she’s still with us. Maybe she’s not as bad as she appears. We’ll see what we can do, straightaway.”

  The boy slid his small, limp hand into McGarr’s, and they moved back into the house.

  “Anybody else about?”

  “The dogs.”

  “When did you last see Doctor Matt?” From the doorway McGarr signaled to Noreen.

  “Yesterday.”

  “What time yesterday?”

  Seeing Noreen step from the car, the boy began crying harder, and he walked out onto the stair, toward her.

  In the sitting room McGarr found the phone and, grasping the cord of the receiver, lifted it off its cradle. With the end of his fountain pen he dialed the Castle and then, after having consulted the directory, the closest vet.

  In the kitchen Noreen washed the boy’s face and hands and found him something to eat.

  He lived down the road and had a small job with Matthews, cleaning the kennels and feeding the animals.

  Upstairs in one of the bedrooms, McGarr found a window open and spent casings from some sort of machine pistol scattered over the carpet in front of it. A burst had caught the roof at the side of the house and had smashed the slates. There was blood too, on the carpet and leading into the hall. In the bathroom there was a towel smeared with blood and the medicine cabinet had been rifled, bottles tossed about, some broken.

  Down below in the backyard he found footprints of many men—four or five at least—leading toward the marsh at the end of the property. The Boyne lay beyond, black and tranquil, and in one spot the reeds had been trampled down.

  McGarr turned and considered the house and kennel. It was quiet there, with Noreen and the child having now fed the dogs. He remembered the letter he’d found in Margaret Kathleen Caughey’s apron. “Sis, Get out. He’s onto me. Jimmy-Joe.”

  Back inside, in the office, McGarr discovered that the desk and files had been ransacked, the contents strewn about the tile floor. On the desk were two manila folders, both empty. The label of one read, “Bechel-Gore,” the other, “M. K. Keegan-Caughey.” From the bent and rumpled edges he supposed each had been long-standing and substantial.

  The medical supplies in the office had been used as well, gauze and bandages and adhesive tape.

  “What does it mean?” Noreen asked him after the others had arrived.

  McGarr glanced down at the empty folders. He wondered why they had been left behind. “That we know far too little about the Caugheys, the Keegans, and Bechel-Gore, I suspect.”

  “Does that mean Galway?”

  “It does.”

  She smiled. They had yet to take their holiday and soon the fair, summer weather would be over.

  In the car again, she smacked his thigh. “Where shall we eat?”

  McGarr hadn’t thought about food since the rectory, and he was suddenly ravenous.

  But he glanced at her—her ringlets of copper-colored hair, her green eyes, which were bright, the slight tan she’d gotten from noontime tennis at the college. She was wearing a turquoise jersey and a white dress. “An outing, is it?”

  “Certainly, Chief Inspector. It’s the weekend, it’s summer, and you’ll never see this day again. Where’s your joie de vivre, your éclat, your…” she gave him a sidelong glance, “youth?”

  McGarr looked away and slid the gearshift into first.

  “We could start with a good, stiff d
rink.”

  McGarr blinked.

  “I know just the place.”

  She would, he thought.

  “The chef is Italian, the real McCoetaneo. He serves a fagiano arrosto alla ricca that’s unbeatable, especially considering the birds we have here.”

  It was a pheasant entree that McGarr particularly enjoyed. Sage leaves and juniper berries were rubbed inside, then it was barded with bacon and browned in oil and butter. Grappa and black olives were added, and, after turning it into a hot oven and basting frequently, hot stock was added to the pan. And then a tablespoon of butter and a few drops of lemon—the final and perfecting touch. It was one of McGarr’s favorite dishes.

  “They serve a light red wine that the owner says his brother sends him straight from his villa in San Gimignano.”

  McGarr’s stare at her was sidelong and sustained. Perhaps she knew him too well.

  FIVE

  On Shots in the Night And Worry, A Spin, a Death, Sin And Fury

  MATTHEWS COULD DISTINCTLY remember the radio having been on—the late news in Irish—and he had given it half an ear and considered whether he should pour himself another tot of brandy, just enough to color the soda in the glass. And it was only that gesture—looking up from the government report on the alarming upsurge of brucellosis in dairy cattle—that saved him.

  He remembered turning his head to the radio and wondering if the sound had come from the cabinet with the dim yellow light, dusty, its top heaped with magazines and other reports long dated.

  It was a soft, spongy sound, like a boot being tugged out of wet earth, and it had carried across the garden from the marsh and through the window, which he had opened upon returning from the pub several hours earlier.

  And he had even glanced at the clock. Half twelve and late. He had a foaling due sometime in the morning, and the mare had a history of breech presentations.