The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf Read online

  “Are both of you going to sleep in that wee tent?” Maddie asked.

  “Really, young miss—that question is impertinent, and I think both you and your mother are far too inquisitive for my liking.”

  Bidding them a good evening, since it was fast approaching, Noreen took Maddie by the hand and beat a quick retreat. “I bet you’re hungry. Ruthie is waiting dinner on us at the hotel, so we’d best hurry.”

  Maddie kept turning her head to look back at the tent raising.

  Night came on with two warnings for Peter McGarr. The first was from the wind that ceased with an abruptness so sudden that the silence seemed loud. Then it got dark.

  Positioned on the east side of Croaghmore, McGarr could not see the western horizon, but he could tell from the way some of the campers now gathered on the cliff edge to point out to sea, that something ominous was gathering there. One of the men moved quickly back to his tent and put all his gear inside, zipping the flap, then checking the fly sheet and tent straps and pegs. And yet the sky to the east was a limpid blue just the color of a robin’s egg.

  The second warning was quite different and made McGarr question his strategy. Was he taking too many chances—with the Gottschalks, his staff, the congregated O’Malleys? He even had his wife and child out there, like it was a holiday. And finally with his own life.

  Feeling a few grains of sand drop onto his neck and trickle down his collar, he glanced up at the ledge that was in back of his head.

  Standing there looking down at McGarr with—was it?—an ax in his hands, was a wild-looking man with a great shock of white hair but whose face was in shadow. “Whatever are you doing there?” he asked.

  McGarr had heard that voice before. “And you? I could ask the same of you.”

  “Me? I suspect I’m doing your bloody job for you, since it’s plain you can’t.”

  Turning on his heel, Fergal O’Grady moved into the darkness, as though he would climb Croaghmore, the blade of his slane an even brighter patch than his unruly hair. In the renewed breeze, it was standing on end.

  CHAPTER 24

  WHEN HUGH WARD got back to the office in Dublin at dusk, he did not go straight to the chief’s office. Instead he only waved to Sinclaire and two undercover operatives who were meeting in there. For more than a year they had been trying to bust “the Penguin,” an oily, squat, adder of a man who controlled the flow of heroin into Dublin north of the Liffey.

  Ward labored under no illusions about the effect of any one arrest, but he imagined that a great deed would be done the city, could they put the Penguin away for one of the many murders that had been committed in his name. At least until some other piece of work stepped into his spats.

  Also, at quarter to ten of a fair summer evening, he could not have it seem that he was hard at work. Diligence of the forever-panting sort was frowned on, even for the police, and, when ringing up his “sources,” he would have to make it seem as though a wee question had occurred to him over a pint or at dinner or on the links.

  Thus he repaired to his own tiny cubicle and closed the door. Since he was an officer assigned to the Clare Island investigation, copies of all replies to queries and other memoranda had been placed on his desk. After ringing a clerk for coffee, he removed his jacket and sat.

  The first report was from Scotland Yard replying to the query about any possible public school or Ox-bridge graduates by the name of Clement or Clem Ford or Angus or Helmut Rehm or Angus Helmut Rehm. The only perfect match was for Angus Helmut Rehm, a Scot, who had attended Aberdeen Grammar until 1932 and graduated from Cambridge in 1935 with a first in modern languages.

  The Yard information officer had launched subsequent searches; British Immigration & Customs reported the following: Angus Helmut Rehm had left England 11 October 1935, departing from Dover and bound for Bremen, but there was no record of his ever having returned.

  Also, Inland Revenue said that there was no current, tax-paying British citizen by that name or one who owned real property in the British Isles.

  Finally, Yard criminal records were examined: Angus H. Rehm had been arrested and charged with the crime of inciting to riot 1 May, 1934, when he and a “band of hooligans” attacked a Communist party gathering in Hyde Park. He gave his permanent address as Crovie, Grampian, Scotland. At his court appearance, in which charges were reduced to a disorderly persons offense when his victim failed to identify him, he gave his present address as Magdalene College, Cambridge.

  Which made him the same Angus Helmut Rehm.

  The Yard information officer added that Rehm was involved in another altercation in the fall of 1935, after having graduated from Cambridge. It seems that, to settle an old score, he along with four others attacked a fifth man, and all but Rehm ended up in hospital. When the victim—one Klimt Dorfmann—refused to press charges, the Cambridge constabulary did, because of the severity of the beating. But the victim, appearing in court, would not identify the four charged men as his attackers, and the case was dismissed.

  “I noticed that the address given for Klimt Dorfmann was also Magdalene College, Cambridge,” the Yard information officer had written. “The only other information about him was that his permanent residence was listed as Harwich.”

  The phone rang, and Ward’s hand plucked up the handset in a reflex action. “Ward.”

  “Superintendent Hugh Ward?” a barely adolescent voice asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “This is Lugh Stone. My mother thought it would be all right if I phoned you directly.”

  Ward leaned back in the chair and smiled. To think that it was his son who was speaking to him was nearly too much to take in. “Yes, Lugh,” he managed. “How are you?”

  “Well, sir. Thank you. I’m phoning about my grandfather’s records. I’m after having gone through them.”

  “Good lad.”

  “I think I’ve found something. Or I’ve found the only Clare Island reference in the entire nearly seventy-five years that Lou did business here. He died in his nineties.”

  Ward liked what he was hearing; the kid sounded intelligent, focused, and competent. Of course, his mother was brilliant, from everything that Ward had known about her fourteen years ago, and he had confidence in his own intellect. “Go on.”

  “From what I can put together, it seems that a man came into the shop in March of 1947. He said he wanted to sell some gold in the form of bullion, which means ingots or bars. He had ingots—two of them to begin with in pure form. Lou was a careful man, and he asked for identification. The man produced a British passport that Lou corroborated was genuine, and from that point until Lou’s death in 1982, the two of them traded regularly—gold, silver, gemstones of every sort, and some jewelry. The man’s name was Klimt Dorfmann from Harwich, Suffolk; that’s what the passport said. His address in this country was care of Peig O’Malley, Clare Island, Westport, Mayo.

  Ward’s head went back. “Lugh—I can’t tell you how important what you just told me might be or how much I appreciate your effort on this. I owe you a night out and a slap-up dinner. I’ll ring up when this is over.”

  “I’d like that. My mother says to tell you hello.”

  “My best to her.” Ward hung up and immediately turned to his computer. Not only was there the run-in that Klimt Dorfmann had with Rehm in 1935, there was the statement by Paul O’Malley’s mother (contained in one of McGarr’s reports) that she believed Ford was from Harwich. In fact, she said he had told her he had inherited property there. And finally—it occurred to Ward, as he accessed his E-mail service and typed in the Klimt Dorfmann name—that it was a partial, “poetic,” and adumbrated anagram of Clement (Klimt) Ford (Dorf) with the “-mann” elided.

  He checked the time of the Yard report, which had come in only three hours earlier, which meant that same information officer could still be on the job. He would E-mail the officer directly, which would save the time of going through channels which with delays might result in some other person de
aling with the follow-up. He wrote:

  “Klimt Dorfmann = Clem Ford. Please check all Harwich, Suffolk, Cambridge University, and any other references at hand for Dorfmann. It is rumored that Dorfmann inherited property in Harwich from his mother, name unknown. Am making a formal request in case you’re off work. I owe you a pint.”

  Signing off, he added his formal title—Detective Superintendent, Serious Crimes Unit,—so the researcher would understand that it was a felony investigation.

  After completing the formal request, Ward turned back to the desk, wondering why Rehm had not returned to Britain after the war. Perhaps he’d been killed, or, as a Nazi sympathizer, he had been unable to return. Who else would have attacked a CP gathering in Hyde Park but some right-wing organization that resorted to violence? Certainly there had been many in Britain during the depths of the Depression who believed that fascism with its state control of commercial enterprise was the answer to the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism.

  From his studying history, Ward also knew that by 1935 Hitler had seized complete control of Germany, having abolished the Reichstag in 1934, repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, and begun a program of massive rearmament. Could Rehm with his German-sounding last name and first-honors degree in modern languages have removed himself to Germany to aid in the cause?

  Another possibility was that he had been recruited by MI-6 as a spy, and all the Nazi sympathizing and brawling that had brought him before the courts had been nothing more than cover.

  Of course, Dorfmann’s name was German as well and meant…villager, Ward seemed to remember from his study of that language.

  History. Ward thought of Lee Stone again, his history teacher, and their Lugh, which was history on the most personal level. He glanced across the cubicle to the stack of books from which he culled names when in need of an obscure “source.” Among the telephone directories and membership lists of various clubs and organizations was the UCD annual from the year that he had been at university.

  Forcing his mind back to the matter at hand, he picked up the second memorandum that reported on the identity check on all persons who had arrived on Clare Island that day. The lists of their purported names and addresses had been faxed to Serious Crimes Unit Headquarters in Harcourt Street where a team of information-processing clerks was keying the information into the computer that was tied to both Garda Siochana and Customs & Immigration mainframes. But with 1,178 names and addresses, the supervising officer had no hopes of fulfilling the request before midnight, which could be too late.

  Ward picked up the phone. “May I speak to Sergeant Johnston, please? Hugh Ward here.”

  He waited, and when another voice came on, he said, “Sheila—how’s the list coming.” He listened to her tale of woe—she had one clerk on maternity leave, another on holiday, the third could barely key in her own name.

  “Sheila—may I ask you something?”

  “Yes, of course. Anything.”

  “Do you type?”

  “I do, sure. How do you think—”

  “Then I’d appreciate you rattling the keys for me on this tonight. I type. Do I come over there and pitch in?”

  “Oh no—Jesus! Don’t you dare.” Since she’d never hear the end of it.

  Ringing off, Ward now had nothing more to do than wait. His coffee had arrived, and he carried it over to the stack of books. When he picked up the UCD annual, it opened immediately to the group portrait of the faculty of history. Had he looked at that page often in the past, or was it just coincidence?

  And there she was in all her dark beauty—his dark lady. He wondered if she could have been pregnant at the time the photo was snapped, since she looked luminescent compared to the others. She glowed. And like a scent jar of past experience knocked from the shelf, everything they had shared together—their youth, their hope, their expectations, sex, love, Proust even—came flooding back to engulf Ward in a vivid, heady moment that left him with a pounding heart and feeling slightly dizzy. It was as though he could feel her again and feel how it was then.

  How could he not have known? How could he have been so blind and self-centered?

  “You can’t imagine what it’s taken to defend this table from the O’Malley hordes,” Ruth Bresnahan said when Noreen and Maddie finally reached the crowded and noisy dining room of the Bayview Hotel, looking wet and frazzled. “Especially now with the weather closing in and the tenters in rout. Is the storm as bad as they say?”

  Not knowing what had been said, Noreen could only nod. The blast had struck when Maddie and she were only halfway back. First the sky had darkened almost as if night had fallen, except for a sparkling band of rich golden light at the very edge of the horizon. There had been many gawkers who had never seen so dramatic an ocean vista.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” one O’Malley had asked, as Noreen and Maddie had hurried past. Having summered on Clare Island, Noreen understood what well might follow. “I’d find some shelter fast, were I you.” But her advice was disregarded, since the air was still, the evening warm from the heat of the day, and…well, the O’Malleys were among themselves and a power in their own right. What possibly could go wrong?

  But when the wind came on again, it had changed direction, swinging around nearly one hundred and eighty degrees. And it came on with a faraway roaring that sounded like the howl of some oceanic turbine. “We’re in for it now,” Noreen just managed to say, before it struck them full in the face and knocked Maddie’s feet out from under her.

  Noreen, swinging the child around into her lee as she turned her back, could barely move forward. And when a frigid rain began, it raked them in a horizontal torrent that pounded their skin right through their rain gear.

  “I can only pity those poor campers,” Noreen now said in the dining room of the hotel. She settled Maddie in a chair and looked round for a waitress who could get them tea and cocoa. “If that wind caught them the way it struck us, they’re now tenting on Achill.”

  “But could you not see it coming?” Ruth was always amazed at city people who seemed oblivious to the elements until it was too late, since she had grown up on a farm in the South Kerry Mountains, hard by the wild Atlantic, and to this day she kept one eye on the clouds.

  “I think I did, but we were all the way out by the standing stone in Ballytoohy. I can remember feeling that we should get back. But then, a question arose about the purpose of fulachta fiadh, and who should we bump into but Ernst Schweibert—the professor from the boat this morning.”

  “You mean, the one non-O’Malley tourist of the day?”

  “There weren’t any others?”

  “Not that I know of, apart from resident Clare Islanders and two journalists whom I recognized. Tom Rice thinks the ‘Rally’ and the report of the murder are keeping other tourists away.”

  So much the better, thought Noreen, both for them and for the investigation. “What about his assistant?”

  “She was nice,” Maddie pronounced in a most grown-up voice, only to add, “Mammy—when are we going to eat? I’m famished.”

  “Soon, luveen—if I have to get it for you myself.”

  “Which assistant?” Ruth looked into the teapot on the table that she had long since drained, hoping that there might be some wet in the bottom.

  “Didn’t you interview the woman? She said she came on a boat that’s presently in the harbor—at Schweibert’s request. She’s a tall, strong-looking girl in her early twenties, well capable of turning down a core drill. He had one with him.”

  “She told us her name was Helene,” said Maddie, “and they were going to sleep in the same tent.”

  Noreen’s eyes flashed at Ruth, who said, “Well—perhaps her middle name was Helen, but I reviewed the lists for duplications and any Louisiana or South African addresses, and there was not a single Helene among them. Quite a few Helens, given their family tradition of tossing up strong women. But no Helene.”

  Noreen thought for a moment; certainly Schweibert had ap
peared to be the real thing. It could be checked with a single phone call to Peter Coxon at Trinity College, who had unearthed the seven-thousand-year-old hazel nut. “So we have to conclude that his assistant, Helene, either has a different first name and her last is O’Malley, or that she somehow managed to slip on to the island without our taking her name or snapping her picture.”

  Ruth shook her head. “Not if her boat is in the harbor, and you met her all the way out in Ballytoohy. She must have put into the harbor, what—”

  “At least an hour before that.”

  “—to have hoofed it all the way out there. And I can tell you I personally went over every boat stem to stern until seven o’clock, when one of Rice’s men took over.”

  “Maybe she was already here?” Finally Noreen caught the eye of a waitress close by, who raised a finger to say she would be with them in a minute.

  “Not possible. The chief personally visited every house on the island, and now it’s like we’ve got a team of one hundred and forty confederates. There isn’t a Clare Islander who’s not on the qui vive.” Bresnahan stood. “So tell me—did Schweibert give you an opinion about fulachta fiadh? Hot baths or boiling pits?”

  “To give the divil his due, it was no time for idle chatter.”

  “Well, let Professor Ruthie set your minds to rest—they were both.”

  Noreen and Maddie stared up at the tall, auburn-haired woman.

  “Sure, nobody wants to tell the truth about the matter, since it’d be an admission of ancestral guilt. But remember, I’m from Kerry where there’re so many fulachta fiadh that people claim they were invented there.

  “Now then, follow me closely. First, consider the size of your average Bronze Age maritime intruder.” She held a hand out from her shoulder. “Now think of the dimensions of the fulachta fiadh you saw today. It would hold him neatly, no? And last, imagine the state of his bodily cleanliness—how many years ago?”

  “Five thousand. Conservatively.”