Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16 Page 13

  “Is that an order?”

  “No”—she smiled in the way that transformed her rather stately face—“just a test. I’m not sure I fancy a willful man, and you bear all the hallmarks of unrehabilitatable independence.”

  Squeezing his wrist harder still, she lowered the booties and slid off the chair. McGarr’s head turned— like a puppet in a Punchinello show, it came to him— to follow the graceful lines of her body into what he supposed was the kitchen.

  He glanced down at his wrist, wondering at his own vulnerability—that so little as her fi?ngers on his skin and a fl?irtatious remark, doubtless sparked by the whiskey, could so transform him.

  In a nanosecond, he had posited what it would be like again to have a woman in his life. And such a woman. She was, well... charming was the least of it. The most being her beauty and the contrast between her obvious sophistication and her equally apparent naïveté in regard to Pape and perhaps the husband as well.

  If McGarr’s decades of police work had taught him one thing, it was this: After two years of hearing nothing from a husband or wife—not a note, phone call, or ransom demand—he or she was gone, one way or another.

  He backed up the tape.

  “Now, you’ll notice,” Kara said, as she approached her chair, glass in hand, “those medallion-like objects behind our Darth Vader look-alike.”

  Having been concentrating on the fi?gure and the garbled voice, McGarr had taken only scant notice of the background, apart from judging it a drab interior with a lime-green wall and a dingy white door. The objects on the wall were only in partial focus and seemingly distant.

  He shook his head.

  “Shall we fi?nd out?” Raising an eyebrow, she shot him a sidelong glance. “You’re supposed to ask how.”

  “How?”

  “Why, by a miracle of modern technology is how.” Advancing on the television cabinet, she retrieved another small device. “Trinity supplied me this to study the details in illustrated manuscripts on fi?lm that we might acquire. If you spool the tape back to where those objects are most conspicuous, I’ll demonstrate.”

  McGarr complied.

  “Now,run forward to...there.”

  Wielding the wand, she both magnifi?ed the screen in successively larger stages and focused in on one of the several objects beyond the fi?gure’s shoulder.

  The larger the image became, the more it began to resemble a human face. But the image sometimes became grainy.

  McGarr got to his feet and approached the television.

  “The quality of the videos I’m supplied, of course, is superior. But what are we seeing here? Doesn’t that look like . . . ?”

  A human head. One that had been fi?xed with several others, Janus-like, to one side of the door with—Mc-Garr had to squint—what looked like a spike through the hairy skull just at the point where the nose met the forehead. The head of the spike gleamed like a shiny, tenpenny bit.

  Lowering the device, Kara turned to him and shook her head. “The Druids—the ancient Druids—believed that if they decapitated their enemies in battle they would not come back for revenge in another life.

  “But can I tell you something?—I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

  McGarr switched off the television and hit the rewind button. With head lowered, she was staring down at the toe of one of the homely booties that she was moving over the carpet.

  “Who are these people?” McGarr asked through the whirring of the VCR, if only to distract her. He pointed to the long table.

  “Family.”

  Most of the photos were obviously dated. One showed a handsome couple as young adults who in other portraits added three children, the youngest of whom was obviously Kara.

  “Where’s home?”

  “Mull. Actually, Salen.” It was a fi?shing village on Mull, the large island in Scotland.

  “And who’s this with you?”

  “My husband.”

  The photo could not have been taken too long before, given her appearance. And whereas her husband’s face looked somewhat younger than hers—four or fi?ve years—his curly, blondish hair had also begun to gray. He was a tall man, thin and square with regular, if blunt, features of the sort that were called ruggedly handsome. McGarr picked up another of the photos.

  Dressed in oilcloth and twill, and wearing a rain hat, he was holding open his shooting jacket to shield Kara from a strong wind that had fl?attened the heather by their feet. Obviously chilled, she was clutching the collar of her jacket and had leaned her head against his chest. Her smile was wan, but she seemed contented.

  In his other hand he was grasping the barrel of what appeared by its shape to be a Purdy shotgun. Noreen and Fitz, her father, had owned several of the expensive guns. “Where were you here?”

  “Skye.”

  “When?”

  “Three years ago. We were only married a year before.”

  He had either left her suddenly, leaving no trace, or had been somehow lost abroad, she had told him. “His name?”

  “It was Dan. Dan Stewart.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “Here in Dublin. At an opening, in fact.” She brightened but then looked off.

  He knew what she wanted to say; the opening had been at Noreen’s gallery.

  “First marriage?” McGarr set the photo down.

  “For me. Dan was married before.”

  Which surprised McGarr—that a woman so fetching, charming, and obviously intelligent would not have married until she was—what?—nearly forty and perhaps beyond childbearing age.

  “I know what you’re thinking. It’s rather late for marriage. But it’s not as though I didn’t have other offers over the years. It’s just that I had never really fallen in love before.”

  “And you haven’t heard from him?”

  “Not a word.”

  “What does his business say? Didn’t you tell me he had been away on business?”

  She shook her head. “They heard nothing from him either. He fl?ew to Yemen, checked into his hotel, went out for dinner, and was never heard from again. No note, no appointment in his scheduler, not a phone call to the front desk or on his cell phone.

  “I hired a private investigator, who cost me most of my savings. He said Dan’s either dead or he just walked out on his life. And me.”

  “It must have been—it must be—hard for you, not knowing.”

  She cocked her head and again considered the pictures. “Oh, aye. At fi?rst all I could think of was him— what might have happened, how he might have suffered. And all the news out of that part of the world didn’t help much either. I did everything I could—contacted the Yemeni embassy in London, Arab organizations. I even went there to see the hotel and collect his effects.

  “I spent two weeks in a Yemeni bureaucrat’s outer offi?ce being served tea until I decided the joke was on me; I gave them a piece of my mind and began walking out. Only then was I invited in to see the offi?cial, who told me they had concluded Dan had run off with another woman—and could he take me to dinner?”

  “I’m sure that was diffi?cult,” McGarr managed.

  “But then, later—know what?” She turned her body to him and waited until their eyes met. “I began thinking of me—how long I would continue to wait, write letters, make phone calls, and console his parents. It was my loss too—the loss of weeks, months, years of my life. I had become obsessed. Nothing else mattered. My work suffered, as we know all too well.

  “And then, curiously, I felt guilty about feeling so selfi?sh and fi?nally angry at myself for feeling guilty, if you know what I mean.”

  McGarr did. The guilt he felt about the deaths of Noreen and Fitz had obscured or at least shadowed every other aspect of his life. He ejected the videotape, then reached for the case. When he straightened back up, he found her standing very close to him.

  “If Dan came back tomorrow or fi?nally phoned me telling me where he was, I wouldn’t have him back. If he
’s dead, well, I’m sorry, but I’ve grieved for him. If he’s alive, well, I’m equally sorry, but I’ve grieved for me.

  “Look”—she waited until he looked into her eyes— “you and I are in the same situation. I liked what I knew about you and now, having got to meet you, I rather fancy who you are. I rather fancy you.”

  McGarr tried to look away.

  “No, don’t look away. Look at me.” With a hand she turned his chin. “When you held me this morning, it made me realize how much I need a man’s touch. Your touch. And I can tell you fancy me. Would you hold me again?” She raised her arms. “Please?” She was smiling, and the pupils of her jade-colored eyes were dark.

  It was against everything that McGarr believed in about police work. But close, like that, he was breathing in her distinctive perfume—some mélange of... he didn’t know what. And he was feeling her warmth, her—was it?—excitement. There was a fl?ush in her cheeks. She pulsed her eyebrows once, as though to say, What about it?

  Slowly, knowing it was wrong and actually frightened that he could not help himself, McGarr placed his hands on the supple curves of her hips, which felt slick under the silk of the dressing gown, and drew her to him, her lips grazing the side of his face as their bodies met.

  Tentatively, at fi?rst. Testing each other. Then, as he drew her closer, he felt her shudder, and she moved her face into the crook of his neck.

  They remained there like that for a long moment in which McGarr wrestled with and tried to deny the comfort that the embrace was giving him, the desire he felt for her, and the near-heady lust that had welled up in him. In a way, it was making him feel almost ill.

  There was how warm and soft she felt, the line of smooth yet downy skin leading from her neck onto her shoulder, the pressure of her thigh that now moved between his legs as she drew her head back from him. “Kiss me.”

  His eyes moved to her lips, which were full and well formed. Her mouth was open in a half-smile with her eyes on his lips as well. “Go on, kiss me.”

  When he tried, she moved her head aside. “No, not like that.”

  He tried again.

  “Nor like that. I want our fi?rst kiss to be memorable.” Slowly, her eyes rose to his and her smile faded.

  Like that, with their eyes locked, their heads moved together and their lips met gently at fi?rst and then more completely, until their abandon was such that they staggered.

  She had slipped her hand between the buttons of his dress shirt and onto his breast. “Come. Come into my bedroom.” Her lips darted for his, meeting them hard. “Let me make love to you.”

  But McGarr, summoning all that he knew about himself and how he had conducted his life over the years, broke away from her. “I can’t, really. I couldn’t. I—” With the video in hand, he moved toward the chair, his hat, and the hallway that led to the door.

  “You can’t because you’re afraid,” she said to his back. “And, worse, you’re in love with your guilt, the guilt you feel because of the way your wife and fatherin-law died. It controls you. It rules you and makes you lust after revenge, doesn’t it?

  “When I’m offering you this. Turn around. Look at me. I’m offering you love and a way out.”

  At the door to the hallway, McGarr paused, knowing he should just keep on moving, knowing that—if he were to turn around—the turn would be a life turn. Nothing less.

  “Turn around,” she repeated, her Scots burr now definite. “Like you, I don’t do this lightly. Turn for me. Turn for yourself.”

  McGarr’s head went back, and his eyes searched the pattern of light on the ceiling of the hall. Off in the distance, the claxon of an emergency vehicle was sounding, and the wind was moaning through the eaves of the house.

  He thought of how complicated his life had become as a single parent and head of an embattled agency. How in all probability it could not accommodate another and without question a most complete complication—no, the most complete complication possible. And how, fi?nally, turning around would amount to turning his back on the decorum that had regulated his life for more than a quarter century.

  He did not allow himself or any of his staff to become involved with principals in investigations. Certainly Kara Kennedy, for all her beauty and openness with him, remained that. A suspect.

  And yet McGarr could not keep himself from turning around. As though being drawn by a force that he could not resist, he found his shoulders and head, his body, swinging toward her, all while another and different voice in the back of his mind was counseling, If you’re going to do this, do it right. If you’re going to love her and keep loving her, love her as well as you’re able. No half measures.

  She had opened her dressing gown and was holding the plackets out at arm’s length to expose her body, which was naked and at once svelte but very womanly. “I want you,” she said as he approached her, “because you’re a good man.” And she virtually leaped into his arms.

  At her fl?at in Coolock, Morrigan switched on the lights. With a phone receiver cradled between neck and shoulder she almost immediately lowered the blinds and switched out the lights. She then waited an exact hour before stepping out again, the large handbag over her shoulder.

  After scanning the cul-de-sac, Morrigan stepped into her car and pulled away. Because there were few cars on the road at the late hour, Bresnahan gave the woman a long lead before pulling behind her.

  CHAPTER

  9

  MCGARR AWOKE WITH A START. THERE WAS A HAND ON his shoulder. He turned his head and found Kara standing above him.

  “You said you had to get going early. It’s half nine.”

  With a tumult of confl?icting thoughts and emotions suddenly welling up in him—that he shouldn’t be there for any number of reasons, that he should have been home or at least called home before his daughter went to school, that he should presently be at his desk assembling whatever he would need when he presented the videotape to Jack Sheard, the commissioner, and perhaps even the taoiseach—he glanced at the patch of lowering sky that could be seen between the drapes, and then, with one sweep of his arm, drew her into the bed and on top of him.

  An hour later he left for home, activating his cell phone and beeper as he moved through traffi?c. He had over a dozen messages on each of the devices, and he had only slipped the key in the lock of the front door when it opened.

  “Where in the name of God have y’ been, man?” Nuala asked as he rushed by her. “The phone has been ringing off the hook with this one and that—the commissioner, that fella Sheard, even the blessed taoiseach’s offi?ce. Bernie said if you didn’t surface by noon he’d put out an all-points on you. I’d ring him up fi?rst.”

  While he was shaving in the toilet off the bedroom that Noreen and he had shared, Nuala appeared in the open doorway, his clothes of the night before in her hands. “Is there something I should know?”

  In the mirror he glanced at her. “The Book of Kells was written on vellum, calfskin, not paper,” he said, trying to keep the shaving cream out of his mouth. “But there was a ‘facsimile edition,’ they call it—alike in every way—that was produced on paper, back in the nineties. It could be a page from that that he burned on the tape.”

  She shook her head. “No—is there something else I should know?”

  McGarr began shaving again. “Like what?”

  “Like when you started wearing cologne.” She hefted the clothes. “She the one on the teley?”

  McGarr lowered the razor and stared down into the basin, feeling with all the greater force what he had been stuffi?ng down all morning long—empty, vacuous, devoid of himself, the person he’d abandoned on the night before. But also he felt wonderful, as though he had put aside a great burden. He knew, of course, what it was.

  With Kara Kennedy he had moved on, as Nuala herself had been urging him, from Noreen. And it was the guilt he was feeling at having abandoned her that was making him feel so miserable. And in need of a drink.

  “She’s beautiful,
all right, and brilliant, it’s said. But next time, tell us. Maddie couldn’t take her breakfast, she was so worried.”

  Turning his face, he applied the razor to the unshaven cheek. In spite of lacking sleep, he looked as well as he had in ages, he judged—clear of eye, steady of hand; there was even a fl?ush in his cheeks. “Said by whom?”

  Given her age, Nuala spent much of the day on the telephone or at lunch, and for whole decades Fitz and she had been connected to the very highest circles of Irish government and society.

  “The papers, of course. The teley. That Pape bloke brushed right by them without a word. Anyhow, she’s much more telegenic.”

  “What about Ath Cliath?”

  “Wouldn’t you know they’re onto their ‘extra’ editions again, calling it a national crisis that’s sure to bring the government down. Given the New Druids gang of thugs being behind it and Kehoe having foolishly brought Celtic United, their upstart party, into the government after the last election.”

  Having no option but to step down, lacking a majority in the Dail.

  “Where’d they get that?”

  “Sources, wouldn’t you know.”

  “All by Orla Bannon, I imagine.”

  “She the pretty little one with the sloe eyes and pukka smile?”

  McGarr nodded.

  “The very one. They have her picture on the front page, bragging about her ‘scoop,’ which, if true, sure it is.” She waited for McGarr to respond.

  He fi?nished the cheek before saying, “Well, you saw the tape yourself.”

  She tilted her graying head, and her eyes, which were becoming agatized with age, moved to the window. “But later I thought—wouldn’t it be a right fi?ddle to put together that tape, get a whopping big ransom, and blame those poor fools in North Dublin for the entire scam?”

  Washing off the excess shaving cream, McGarr reached for a towel and moved out into the bedroom. “When you watch the tape again, look closely at the medallion-like things on the wall.”