The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf Read online

  From the east and west boats had also appeared, one of which had gathered McKeon’s attention rather more grippingly than the others. It also corrupted the feeling of “fleshless beatitude” (he had dubbed it) that he had been nurturing since his reclusion in the lighthouse turret.

  For at the wheel was nothing less than a great blond and bronzed goddess, who, in squatting to drop anchor and a second time to deploy a rubber dive raft, presented for McKeon’s optically enhanced delectation the most shapely and ample pair of orange cheeks that he had viewed in many a moon. McKeon liked his women big.

  Running up a blue-and-white international code flag, she also showed him the rest of her generous and nearly bare anatomy, before ducking down into the small cabin in the foredeck. But nobody else seemed to be aboard, which was a no-no for divers who were warned time and again never to dive alone. McKeon’s sixth son was a diving enthusiast.

  She soon reappeared, dressed in a wet suit with a mask, tanks, flippers, and the complete regalia including a curious-looking belly pack. McKeon had not seen the likes of it before and wondered what she had in there. From a deck locker, she pulled out a speargun, and without further ado got into the rubber raft and paddled in toward the cliffs, out of McKeon’s field of vision.

  And, sure, weren’t there several other boats farther along the cliffs, fishing with rods in the turquoise shallows and one now pulling in a lovely big mackerel. Suddenly McKeon was hungry. And thirsty. He was just a fleshly sinner after all, he concluded.

  The final boat was so far along the cliffs by Croaghmore that McKeon could barely make out the two figures on deck, but they appeared to be loading a net into a skiff. One man then took the oars, and they soon too were out of sight, rounding the cliff beyond the Ford cottage where McKeon had lost the woman and nearly drowned two nights before.

  Also, there was some new action on the southeastern flank of the mountain, a single figure trudging up a goat path. He was heading toward a ridge that was cast in deep shadow, now that the sun had begun to decline. McKeon recognized the man’s gait, his build, the khaki hat and jacket; the figure then turned his face to him and waved. It was McGarr. Unclipping the VHF radio from his belt, he held it up and shook his head.

  McKeon understood what he meant. They could chance using the radio only in an emergency, so as not to scare off the raiders. Even if they used the police channel with DSC (Digital Selective Calling) that transmitted digital messages to only specific receiving stations, or if they employed a complex scrambling code, they could not be sure they would not be heard.

  While costly, the electronics needed to interdict such systems could be purchased on the open market. The best were portable, some even handheld, and every major drug dealer in Dublin had them.

  McKeon glanced down at his own handset to make sure it was still functioning. Every once in a while throughout the day, a voice had come on chatting almost exclusively about fishing or the weather or asking a boat to pick up something on the mainland.

  The most often heard voice was that of “Paulie-O’,” who McKeon assumed was Paul O’Malley. He always had something to tell the various captains about catches, conditions, and the presence of water bailiffs, sometimes citing what he called “other sources.”

  By that McKeon guessed he meant the Weather Fax and Fish Fax services that he subscribed to and read off to a inquisitive captain when asked. He invariably added what he had picked up on his other radios that could be heard in the background whenever he came on.

  McKeon watched now as McGarr chose a perch on the side of the mountain. Removing his own binoculars from a case, he settled himself under a low ledge that virtually obscured him from sight. Had McKeon not seen him take the position, he would not have been able to tell he was there.

  Which cut McKeon’s area of sweep in half. Beginning at the far perimeter, he began raking the binoculars back and forth in horizontal bands, ever closer to his own post there in the lighthouse. Once the sweeps were completed, he then checked all figures that he had seen or anything else that seemed different or suspicious, particularly in the immediate vicinity of the Gottschalk residence, including the glimpse he could catch of the cliffs and the ocean below. He then swept the entire grid vertically, from the fields near the lighthouse to the edge of his perimeter, which was roughly half the distance to Croaghmore. McGarr, he knew, was doing the same with his half.

  But apart from the dive boat with the goddess, none of the O’Malleys—pushing out from the harbor after finding all rooms taken—had gone anywhere near the Gottschalk place which lay as far north as it was possible to walk. Tents were now being pitched wherever the landscape offered shelter from the wind. In fact, Timmermans had said he’d heard that some of the O’Malleys actually preferred camping out. “You know, to make contact with the earth where most of the generations of their clan were conceived, passed their days, and were buried. It’s said some of them go away fulfilled.” There had been a twinkle in the Belgian’s eye.

  Shades of a pagan rite, thought McKeon. No, some excellent pagan rite, Christianity—or, at least, his Christianity—being no more than a light gloss on the surface of his personality. Whenever it was scratched, up came the battle helmet with horns, the cudgel, the flagon, horses, hounds, and women—all glimpsed in his mind’s eye under a full summer moon. McKeon howled lightly, then scanned the area below the cliffs. The mermaid had yet to return.

  Already McKeon could count eleven tents up with several others on the rise. It was only a matter of time before they discovered the sheltered boreen running from the main road to the Gottschalk compound of buildings. And night was only a few hours off.

  Now a solitary figure had appeared at what was marked on the map as a standing stone in Ballytoohy, due south of the lighthouse. He was a short, square, older man in a cap and spectacles who had a large rucksack strapped over his shoulders and some sort of device in his hands. It was long and thin with handle spokes for…turning?

  After examining the standing stone on all sides, he laid the device on the ground, pulled off the rucksack, and removed a notebook. Carrying it over to the plinth, he squatted down on the far side where he was no longer visible to McKeon, and certainly not to McGarr both because of the distance and an intervening ridge.

  Anyhow, it was then that the radio bleated, as a scrambled voice came on, perhaps from one of the “factory” fishing ships that earlier had been working the waters to the west of the island. Spaniards, they had been catching tuna, Paulie O’ had told some of the local fishermen. There was a reply, and yet another from a third source with a deeper voice. And then nothing.

  As with all other transmissions—especially now that Chief Superintendent McGarr had given him the duty—Paulie O’ had taped the exchange, which he ran through his computerized code descrambler that copied the unscrambled voices on a disc. He then listened to the transmission a third time and immediately activated the voice-recognition telephone that was attached to his robotic wheelchair. He spoke the number that Chief Superintendent McGarr had given him.

  The language was not Spanish, and Paulie had heard the language only once before. It was Afrikaans.

  When the Dublin number answered, Paulie played the unscrambled voices a fourth time to the man on the other end, who was a translator. “Is that all of it?”

  “The lot.”

  “Do I tell you what they said?”

  “If you would.” Paulie was trying to sound calm and cool, as though all of this was just S.O.P. to him, when it was without a doubt the most exciting challenge he had faced since the accident that had crippled him. His mother had wanted to help, and they’d had a dreadful row with Paulie making a run at her in the automated chair. When she fled down the stairs, he locked the door.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Ready.” Paulie switched on the recording function of the telephone answering machine which gave off a bleep.

  “The first voice says, ‘Helmet here, in place. Can you read me, Heather?’
r />   “The second voice—the woman’s voice, I take it—replies, ‘Yes, Helmet, Heather here. In place.’

  “Then the first again, ‘Good. And you, Ducal?’ or Dugald, I couldn’t make out which.

  “Ducal answers in a playful voice, ‘Yes, Father. Don’t do anything foolish. I have you in my sights.’ And that’s it.”

  Paulie thanked the man and rang off, only to be faced with an enormous decision—to alert McGarr that the raiders were back and on the island, “in place” by their own assessment.

  McGarr had told Paulie, “I’m going to leave it up to you. Be judicious. Contacting us could tip our hand, but anything vital we should know.”

  Paulie now thought—their taking the chance of checking in like that, telling each other they were in place, could only mean that not all of them were visible to each other (only Ducal or whatever his name was could see Helmet) and that they were in the places from which they would strike. And confident! Paulie did not speak Afrikaans, but the playful tone was unmistakable.

  Problem was—Paulie could see just about everything everywhere that McGarr and his man up in the lighthouse could (and better because of the power and quality of his Swarovski spotting scope), but there seemed to be nothing unusual. Just like the “Rally” before and the one before that and before that, the O’Ms were raising tents and starting campfires.

  Musical instruments had been brought out, and he could see people singing. A donkey pulling a cart with a big barrel of Guinness on the back, which had collected a crowd in one place. Others of Paulie’s clans people were moving from one fire to the next; the “partying” had obviously begun and would continue at many campsites right through to the dawn.

  It was a perfect blind for the raiders, and at the very least McGarr should know that they had established themselves somewhere among the crowd. With his chin, Paulie activated the VHF, but he decided to forgo the police band and leave off the DSC signal and scrambler which is what the electronically adept would expect of the police. And then, had they been monitoring Channel 16 for any length of time, which he was sure they had, they would have heard him signing on and off, speaking with the local fishermen.

  “Paulie O’ to Fish One.” It was the call name they had agreed upon for McGarr.

  “Fish One here.”

  “Fish One, how’s the luck?”

  “Miserable.”

  “You mean, you don’t have your limit?”

  “There’s not a squid between here and Nova Scotia.”

  “Have ye’ checked that limp thing in yehr britches lately?”

  “Paulie O’, if I was there, I’d catch yehr neck, and then what?”

  O’Malley laughed. “I’ll try to forget you said that, yeh shagger. Me callin’ with where the fish are.”

  “In the market or a seal’s belly. Or is this where I begin the penitential prayers?”

  “Well, now—that’s better. For a wee afternoon of velvet scoops, I’ll tell you this; there’s mackerel, tuna, and hake.”

  “Where?”

  “Whoa, buck—are we agreed?”

  “Jaze—how many scoops fill a wee afternoon?”

  “As many as I can keep down.”

  “No problem, then—ye’re on. Two it is.” McGarr tucked the speaker into his chest and laughed, as though to suggest that there were others listening in the cabin of a boat. “As for the mackerel, tuna, and hake?”

  “Ye’ bastard, yeh—I shouldn’t tell yeh this, but on ’Turk.” He meant Inishturk, which was another island to the southwest of Clare Island.

  “Where off Turk?”

  “Haven’t I got three reports?”

  “Of mackerel running? The bloody Spics have probably hoovered up the rest.”

  “Strong and clear. All on the surface.”

  “You mean, walkin’ round, just waiting for the net?”

  “Depends on who’s handling the net. The boats I spoke with say they got their quotas, and the schools keep narrowin’, like they’ll link up soon. But it should take you the rest of the night. I’ll give me love to your missus.”

  “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Not to worry, she will. She always does.”

  When McKeon looked up from his own VHF that he’d been staring at, concentrating on every little word, there she was—McGarr’s missus. With her daughter, Maddie, Noreen was at the south edge of McKeon’s sector. And what were they doing?

  He raised the binoculars to his eyes.

  They were staring down at what looked like a mound of stony rubble. As she spoke, Noreen was scrabbling the toe of a shoe through the debris.

  And something else had changed in McKeon’s sector. But what?

  Pulling down the binoculars, he surveyed the mile-square sector with his eyes alone, looking for the anomaly. What was it? The tents were all still in place, one more of them fully up; the large family had secured an enviable spot in the lee of a flat mound of land where they had a strong turf fire burning and their other gear was being pulled from tuck bags; the three mountain bikers had joined up with a fourth and were trying to negotiate a bog.

  There it was—the man at the standing stone had been joined by another person. McKeon raised the binoculars to his eyes again.

  She was a rather large but pleasantly made woman dressed in boots and khakis with something like a bushman’s hat over her blond hair. Her well-tanned face was framed by tortoiseshell sunglasses. Reaching down for the device that the old man had been carrying, she followed him away from the stone.

  McKeon began working the grid again, with renewed dedication, now that they knew that the raiders had arrived. Still, there was nobody even remotely close to the Gottschalks’ compound. The big new Land Rover was still parked near the house. Smoke was coming out of what McKeon supposed was the kitchen chimney. He glanced at the door, hoping that Timmermans would not forget his tea, now that the lighthouse was overrun with O’Malleys. McKeon would not dare leave his post.

  “Another name for fulachta fiadh is burnt-stone mound. Do you see the burnt stones here among the rubble?” Noreen asked.

  Maddie nodded. The mound they were looking at had been cut by the hoe of a tractor, so that a cross section was exposed to view. The bottom layer was composed of the rubble of a glacial moraine. Above it was a clear sign of what had been turf—a thick layer of sod that had grown there perhaps as many as three thousand years earlier.

  “The people then dug a horseshoe-shaped trough here on the banks of this stream so they could divert some of the water into it. Once it was filled, they closed it at both ends. At the same time, they had built a fire to heat rocks that they pushed into the trough until the water was boiling and hissing and steam was pouring out. That was when they put in the meat, and the cooking began. It was from heating the rocks over and over and over again that they cracked into pieces, like this.” With the toe of her shoe, Noreen pushed a few of the shards around. But today they provide us a record of what went on in fulachta fiadh.”

  Maddie looked dubious; her brow was furrowed. “It seems like a great lot of bother to cook some meat.”

  “Actually, I think it’s rather ingenious myself. They’ve discovered over thirty of these on Clare Island so far, and no major watercourse was without one.”

  “Why didn’t they just use a pot?”

  “Because metal that could withstand such heat hadn’t been found.”

  “Then why didn’t they just hold the meat over the fire like a barbecue or put it on some of the hot rocks, like a grill?”

  “Good question. I’ve often wondered about that myself. Perhaps they preferred boiled meat. Another explanation is that these horseshoe-shaped trenches are actually hot baths. That after they got the water to a good warm temperature, they jumped in. But because there’re so many of them on so many of the islands off Ireland and Scotland, the people who study these things tend to think they were ancient kitchens. Not baths.”

  “I like the baths better.”

  Pref
erring grilled meat like your father, thought Noreen. “Oh look—there’s Professor Schweibert. Let’s ask him what he thinks they were used for.”

  Maddie ran ahead toward the two people who were engaged in setting up a tent on a raised bit of land along the boreen leading to the Gottschalk place.

  “What are you doing?” Maddie asked, obviously startling the man whose bare hand jumped toward his rucksack. The other was still encased in a glove.

  But the woman with him intervened. “Now, what does it look like we’re doing? What’s your name?” She kept spreading out the tent.

  “Putting that up?”

  “I knew you were a smart one the moment I looked at you.”

  “Her name is Mattie,” said Schweibert.

  “Maddie,” Maddie corrected.

  “She’s the little girl I just told you about that I met this morning.”

  “The one with the mother?” But catching sight of Noreen, she added quickly with a smile, “Everybody has to have a mother at one time or another, don’t they? And here she is, I assume.”

  “That’s right. I’m Noreen. Did I meet you on the boat too?” Noreen displayed a brilliant smile and offered her hand.

  “Helene, is mine. I’m afraid not. I’m certain I would have remembered you. And Maddie.”

  “Then you came by private boat?”

  Before she could answer, Schweibert said, “Of course she did. Helene is my assistant, and she brought over the project boat. What with these ‘ferries,’ as they call them, and ‘water taxis,’ and all this blasted dither with this clan of fools—we’ll get nothing done.”

  Noreen glanced round, hoping he had not been overheard; it was an opinion best kept to oneself.

  “We require secure, dependable transportation, so I rang up Helene.”

  “Project? Really? I wasn’t aware that you’re engaged in a project.”

  “The study!” he barked.

  “Did you put in at the harbor?”

  “Yes—she put the boat in at the harbor. It’s there now.”