The Death of an Irish Lass Read online

  “Because you knew sooner or later we’d find out who you were, what you did for the I.R.A. over here in the States.

  “And then yesterday sometime, Fleming, thinking that we might be getting near him, replaced your brother’s pitchfork in his shed. I found Fleming’s phone number among the things you placed in May Quirk’s apartment to make it look like you lived there while you went through her files. Somehow you were just too well acquainted with her files for a servant.

  “And you went along with that, didn’t you? Fleming had told you how disturbed your brother was, how he was even unable to speak anymore. Better to sacrifice him than Fleming and yourself. But Fleming—your man with all the brains—blew it.

  “Not only did he wipe the handle clean with a rag that had traces of gelignite constituents on it, but he also stepped in the offal there with a very interesting style of boot.”

  He placed that report in front of her too. It said that Abercrombie & Fitch, the New York sporting goods store, had sold a pair of Dunham boots with Montagna block vibram soles to Dr. John Fleming four and a half years ago. The size, 9B, matched the track taken from the shed.

  She pushed all the reports aside. “Interesting fable. Prove it.”

  “My sentiments exactly, gentlemen,” said the lawyer.

  “Can we hold her on the gun charge?” McGarr asked Simonds.

  “Better—threatening an officer with a loaded weapon is a felony.”

  “We’ll beat that,” said Cauley.

  Simonds was smiling now. He shook his head. “You might have when we were believing the lie that she lived there. But now—not a chance. She broke, she entered, she gave false information to a law enforcement officer. She is in big trouble. Here and abroad.” He stood. “McGarr—you’re a prince. I thought you were good last night, but the performance you’ve given this morning is unbeatable. I gotta admit I was worried earlier.” He wrapped his arm around McGarr and began walking him out the door. “I’m rusty. Been in an office too long. I was hasty with her. Like you said, it was a matter of pride. But now,” he looked back at Cauley, who was shaking his head, “it doesn’t really matter, does it? Lunch? Wait until the boys hear about this one.”

  As the door closed, McGarr heard Cauley say to Nora Cleary, “You never told me about all these things. He wasn’t blowing smoke, that mick. If this stuff all checks out, we’re in a jam.”

  “I’m in a jam. You’re fired,” she said flatly. “I better get myself somebody who’s tough.”

  McGarr begged off lunch. He thanked Simonds for everything and invited him to come see him at Dublin Castle. He said he had to get home right away. Whatever was in May Quirk’s work diary must be quite important; he was convinced of it.

  THIRTEEN

  A Cooper, Some Scoops, Mackerel, and a Horse Show

  AS THE Aer Lingus 707 shuddered down from its transatlantic route into a holding pattern over Clare it broke through the cloud cover suddenly, and McGarr and Noreen could see a quilt of fields bounded by hedgerows. Usually, anything growing was brilliant green, but because of the dry spell the colors had muted—a field of beige wheat, browning hay new mown, the delicate green of second-growth grass. The contour was irregular and soft, not the concrete grid-work laced by superhighways which from the air was Long Island and New York. Here lay large rocks that people had worked around instead of removing, farms and roads and boundaries that conformed to the movement of the land. In the fields cows, sheep, and donkeys grazed. The buildings seemed indistinguishable from the general vegetation below. A barn looked like a big brown bush, a house like a patch of grass or a garden plot on top of a lime rock.

  McGarr, sipping a final malt whiskey over crushed ice, was moved to consider the dilemma of Dr. John Fleming: that such a young, vigorous, involved man should choose this gentle, archaic patchwork of homesteads instead of the bustle of the earth’s most dynamic metropolis seemed an irreconcilable disjunction of expectations. Fleming had returned hoping to find the seeds of a new order, one that wasn’t as brutal and mechanistic and unfeeling as that which he had experienced in New York. But after only a few short years he had become involved with an organization that represented the most vicious, atavistic aspects of the Celtic personality. Why? McGarr put it down to boredom. Fleming had had little to do. He had even tried his hand at veterinary medicine.

  McGarr glanced down at the university transcripts in his lap. It had to be boredom. A man with a record like this—McGarr hefted the dossier—didn’t support and actively engage in terrorist activities. At least he wouldn’t stoop to the level of actually producing the bombs that ravaged politically innocent persons in cities far distant from the immediate problems in the Six Counties. Nor did he murder a long-time acquaintance with a pitchfork just to further the cause. But yet—he had. That was the truth of it.

  McGarr opened the folder. The record was clear: First Honors with special distinction in chemistry from U.C.D., and then a concatenation of superlatives from Columbia Medical School, A pluses and phrases like “exemplary achievement, brilliant performance.” His undergraduate thesis on T-jump measurements had been published by Cambridge University Press, and he had turned down a number of offers to go into biochemical research. Instead, he had become a surgeon specializing in internal medicine. Here too the record showed him to be extraordinary. There was a memo attached to the original transcript to the effect that if Fleming were to request to have his transcript forwarded, the dean of Columbia Medical School wanted to be put on notice, doubtless to make a counteroffer. Fleming was that good, McGarr had been told over the phone, that he could afford to spend a number of years back in Ireland without the system forgetting him. “Do you represent a research institute or hospital in Great Britain, Mr. McGarr?” the dean had asked.

  “I’m afraid the most I can tell you is that I’m an officer of the Irish government.”

  “Is he being offered a post there?” There had been an edge to his voice. Columbia had the money and facilities, McGarr had not doubted, to better any Irish offer, and would have done so without hesitation.

  “That’s all I can say. You’ll probably read about it in the papers.” McGarr hung up.

  Now, as the plane eased down toward the runway, Noreen read McGarr’s thoughts. “Maybe you’re wrong.” But she knew that was not likely.

  And then there was O’Connor, who was a much more usual Irish figure, the romantic, idealistic writer searching for a cause to support. The book he had explained to McGarr had been satirical, an attempt to point up the deficiencies of modern American life. McGarr didn’t doubt that O’Connor’s other books were in part social critiques. To take away something evil from the world rather than to add something good was a very Celtic point of view. O’Connor’s disenchantment with his career had probably made him susceptible to Fleming’s way of viewing the world. And the I.R.A. social program—if it could be dignified by such an expression—was vague enough to accommodate O’Connor’s social preferences.

  And then O’Connor was quite wealthy, too. Whatever it had been that had brought them together, Fleming and O’Connor would have been a very formidable team, a whole different order of leader from the common run of I.R.A. gunman and terrorist, had they not been scared off by McGarr’s murder investigation and gone to ground, and McGarr had no reason to suspect that they had.

  Liam O’Shaughnessy, who met them in the bus that transferred passengers from the plane to the terminal, was smiling slightly with a look he only assumed when the pieces of an investigation were fitting together with great facility. “The both of them,” he said, meaning Fleming and O’Connor, “are moving about Lahinch as though they were above suspicion, as though they’ve believed every word we’ve released to the press about Hanly.”

  Noreen glanced at McGarr, who turned to O’Shaughnessy.

  He said, “But just in case they’re only feinting, waiting for the proper moment to take off, I’ve put details on the addresses of the phone numbers you gave Bernie.” He pulled a
small black memo book from an interior pocket of his gray summer suit. “Let me see. We’ve got Harry Greaves in charge of watching an old school in Dunquin that’s owned by a former Englishman art dealer in Dublin who has I.R.A. sympathies.”

  “Not Trevor Towne?” Noreen asked.

  “The same,” said O’Shaughnessy, not looking up from the page.

  “From the way he talks and acts, I would have thought he was a militant Unionist.”

  “He’s a slippery one, so it seems. And I’ve got Sinclair covering the Brazen Head.”

  “That’s another number?” McGarr was surprised. The Brazen Head was possibly Dublin’s oldest public house. It was also a hotel. And then McGarr thought of Fleming’s interest in the work of James Joyce, and O’Connor’s literary persuasion. “Say no more.” He knew where two men such as they would choose to go to ground, not in the picturesque West of Ireland that Fleming had often praised but in town, where O’Connor could get a good meal and both of them might engage in conversation and read current editions of the world’s periodicals. There was a wide gap between the preferences Fleming claimed for himself and those he espoused.

  “That’s what I was thinking as well,” said O’Shaughnessy, “although I’ve put teams on both other locations—a farmhouse outside Mullingar and a youth hostel in Glendalough.”

  But the expression on Dan O’Malley’s face wasn’t in any way sanguine. He was waiting for McGarr and Noreen in the terminal. He had Fogarty from the Times with him. The latter’s face was as set and as hard as an irregular lump of Clare shale.

  “Don’t tell us,” said Noreen. “Hughie has had no luck with James Cleary. Phil Dineen won’t say a word and keeps asking for Peter.”

  O’Malley blinked. He took Noreen’s hand as she stepped off the bus.

  Fogarty said to McGarr, “You mean to say you tell her all your police business?”

  “It’s better than telling somebody like you, who’d plaster it all over the front page of that scandal sheet you work for.” The Times was the most reputable paper in all of Ireland.

  Fogarty stopped. “Are you starting again?”

  McGarr stepped back and took Fogarty by the arm. “Don’t take it to heart, Billy. We’re a strange, unlikely people. What we say always sounds worse than it is. It’s because we hate to be disappointed. I promised you a big story. Has Liam filled you in on what we’ve found so far?”

  Fogarty nodded. He was wary of this new familiarity from McGarr.

  “Is that a big enough scoop for you?”

  Fogarty nodded again. His eyes were darting every which way. His brow was slightly furrowed. His old hatchet face was worried. He was wondering what machination McGarr was forming to dupe him.

  “Then stick around. It’s going to get bigger.” McGarr could have added, “So big you won’t be able to print it,” but McGarr wanted to save the best for last. McGarr had decided to husband his agon with Fogarty. It made his public life interesting; and in no way would this old fossil fault him in the pages of the Times, since McGarr planned to tell and show him everything and put the onus of that responsibility squarely on Fogarty’s shoulders for once.

  When McGarr went out into the parking lot, however, he got a surprise. There alongside Dan O’Malley’s Triumph Toledo that had a bullet hole in the right fender was a gleaming and new-looking Mini Cooper. It was exactly the same as the one that had been blown up on the beach at Black Head, right down to its dark green lacquer and number plates. And standing next to it was Fergus Farrell, his pocked face the color of liver.

  “Jesus,” said McGarr, like a child who had been presented a new toy. “Where’d you get that? They stopped making Coopers in 1971.”

  “It’s a 1971.” Farrell glanced in the car. “With about the same amount of mileage on it.” He reset his tortoiseshell glasses on the bridge of his nose. “It was a little old lady from Ballybunion’s before the Garda Soichana bought it to replace your own.”

  “You’re codding. Is that right?” He turned to O’Shaughnessy, who was smiling now himself. “Cripes—that’s gracious of you, Fergus.” McGarr shook Farrell’s hand and walked around the auto. His own Cooper had been a ’65 and in only passable shape. “Not a scratch on her. Hardly run in.” He looked up and saw O’Malley, who was staring at the bullet hole in the fender of his own new car.

  McGarr said, “Of course, by the same token, we need to get a new fender for Dan’s car.”

  “It’s coming,” said Farrell.

  They got in the cars and McGarr told Farrell everything that had happened in New York. Farrell said they’d already begun extradition proceedings against Nora Cleary.

  James Cleary was propped in the pillows of a bed in a large private room at the Saint Agnes Psychiatric Hospital near Kilrush. Hughie Ward was standing close by. A large spray of red-and-white carnations sat in one vase, yellow chrysanthemums in another.

  McGarr examined the cards. The first was from John and Aggie Quirk—God bless them, McGarr thought—the second from Rory O’Connor.

  Cleary had had a shave and a close haircut in the style that, McGarr had noticed, was making a comeback in New York. He had just enough hair to comb a part. This, somebody had formed with great precision. The hair was still wet.

  Also, Cleary’s face shined. The room smelled of the flowers, after-shave lotion, hair tonic, and talcum powder. In all, Cleary presented McGarr with an entirely different picture from that in which he had first seen the man, back at his farmhouse near Lahinch. Except for his eyes. They were the same—pale blue and glassy, the pupils mere pinpricks at the centers.

  Ward whispered to McGarr, “The medical thinking is that he had a severe emotional shock recently, but also that he had taken or was given something else, too.”

  McGarr turned to Ward.

  “Something like a hallucinogen. Something that disorients his perceptions. They’ve found traces of it in his blood.”

  McGarr thought back to the scene in the kitchen of the farmhouse where Fleming had given Cleary a shot to calm him. It had put the old farmer right out. “Has he said anything to you?”

  “Not a word, although I’ve gotten the impression that he’s been trying. He’s slobbered a couple of times and he whimpered once after I put him a question about the Quirks.”

  McGarr advanced to the bed.

  Cleary had an envelope in his hands. His left thumb was moving over the surface of it.

  McGarr said, “I’m Peter McGarr, Jamie. I’m chief inspector of detectives at Dublin Castle. That’s,” he pointed to Farrell, “the commissioner of police himself, Fergus Farrell. And you know Dan O’Malley.

  “I know you saw May Quirk murdered. Fleming did it, didn’t he? With the pitchfork you brought with you when you drove Nora to the cliffs.”

  Cleary’s appearance hadn’t changed a bit. Still his thumb worked over the envelope.

  “Don’t you worry, we’re going to get Fleming and make him pay. Sooner or later. And you can help us, too. When you bent over May up there on the cliffs to see how bad she’d been stuck, you found something that was falling out of her coat. Do you remember that?”

  Still nothing. Still the thumb on the envelope.

  “It was May’s work diary. The one she made notes in for the story she was writing. You took that. It was smart of you. You’d heard Nora speak of it. She must have told you some lie about it to get you to drive her up there.” McGarr watched Cleary closely once more.

  Still nothing. Just the thumb.

  “You decided they wouldn’t get it after what they’d done to May. You slipped it under your belt. One of these—” McGarr turned to Fogarty. “Let me see yours, please, Billy.”

  “My what?” asked Fogarty.

  “Your work diary.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The thing you take your notes in.”

  Fogarty looked away, out the window. “I’ve been in this business too long to take notes.”

  O’Shaughnessy glanced at Farrell, who
then took a long look at Fogarty.

  Ward handed McGarr his notebook.

  “Like this, Jamie. It’s just like this. If you can tell us where it is you can help us put Fleming in prison.” He held it up to Cleary’s eyes.

  Still nothing.

  That was when McGarr looked down at the thumb. It was still working over the surface of the envelope, and not any faster.

  McGarr handed the notebook back to Ward, then reached for the envelope. “May I, Jamie?”

  Cleary’s hands released the envelope. It was as though he had wanted McGarr to take it from him all along.

  It was the envelope which the card for the flowers from the Quirks had come in.

  McGarr stepped back and thought for a moment. Cleary had come to the Quirks’ door late at night and thrust the open bottle of Canadian Club at John Quirk. Why, then, hadn’t he given him the work diary, if he had had it? Maybe because of something Nora, his sister, had said or Cleary had overheard. Maybe he hadn’t thought old Quirk was the right man. Maybe May Quirk had been alive and had asked him to do something specific with it when he took it from her.

  McGarr kept staring down at the envelope, kept running his own thumb over the surface.

  Then it struck him. “Did you—” He stepped closer to the bed. “Did you put it in the postbox? Is that what you did with it—put it in Quirks’ postbox?” The Quirks probably hadn’t checked the mail since hearing of May.

  Cleary opened his mouth and whimpered. An unsightly rope of saliva dropped from the corner of his mouth.

  McGarr placed the envelope back in Cleary’s hands. “Good. Thank you, Jamie.”

  McGarr picked up the call cord that lay on the pillow and pushed the button for a nurse, then started toward the door.

  “Some scoop,” said Fogarty.

  McGarr wrapped his arm about Fogarty’s shoulders. “Patience, old sod, patience. It’s necessary to truly great gumshoeing of the kind both you and I do without notes.”