The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf Page 6

  “The only time we see seoinini, like you, is when there’s trouble!” the man now went on. “All you ever give us is grief!”

  And the odd forty-five pounds, thought McGarr, though he imagined life could be hard here on the rocky edge of the continent. In Irish Maigh Eo meant “the Place of the Yew Trees.” It had been sacred to the ancient Celts, and certainly the terrain with its many mountains and formidable cliffs was dramatically beautiful.

  But Mayo had long been thought of as the most remote of the counties of Connacht, and its people had fiercely resisted every foreign incursion from Christianity, through Cromwell, to the English language. For some, Dublin was now the enemy. Seoinin meant aper of foreign ways or jackeen or city slicker, which in many ways McGarr most definitely was. And he’d now give up the forty-five quid when good and ready. If then.

  Finally the man wrenched his eyes away and jerked back the sticks, “Ye’re hoors and gobshites, all of yiz. Louts, bowsies, and gurriers.”

  The boat surged into an oncoming wave that burst over the foredeck and thundered against the windscreen. “All piss and cess like a tinker’s mule,” he went on, having tried and failed to put a bit of wind up the chief superintendent of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Garda Siochana, the national police.

  But with no witnesses save the mate, at worst he was out the price of the ride.

  By the time the boat reached the island, the blinding sunlight had become another medium altogether, and McGarr wished he had brought a hat with a wider brim. Roiling sparkles now appeared in the periphery of his vision, as he glanced from the well-preserved O’Malley Castle that dominated the harbor entrance to the crowd on the jetty. There perhaps a hundred people had gathered in two groups—by a cottage and car and by a two-wheeled cart a few feet off. Which had to be most of the island’s population, McGarr judged.

  He did not wait for the boat to tie up. What was good enough for Roonagh Point, he decided, was even better for here, and he jumped off when they were three feet from the jetty wall. The captain howled to the mate, then called out. But McGarr did not look back.

  “’Tis the only two corpses we can find,” said Superintendent Rice from the Louisburgh barracks, pointing to the young donkey that had been shot point-blank in the side of the head and was now heaped in its traces.

  His finger then moved to the boot of the battered car, the lid of which was open but covered by a blanket. Standing there was a middle-aged woman with her head bent and rosary beads in her hands. Grouped tightly around her were seven children of various ages. Other adults were keeping themselves at a respectful remove.

  McGarr glanced down at the donkey. The muzzle blast had burned a black aureole around the entrance wound, and the outer lens of the visible eye was milky blue.

  “It’s Clement Ford’s beast, I’m told,” Rice said in an undertone. “He’s one of them that’s missing.”

  The animal’s mouth was open, and the stiff breeze, bucking over the edge of the jetty, riffled its upper lip. Now and then square yellow teeth appeared, and a length of dry-cracked tongue. It was as though the mute corpse was saying, We dumb beasts are better than this, but you! McGarr turned toward the car and what he suspected was human carnage.

  “Apart from the one body in the boot, like I mentioned on the phone, the rest is just bullets and blood, and plenty o’ both.” Rice went on, following him. His hand swept over the shiny brass bullet casings that littered the ground in front of a small white cottage, more a kind of converted outbuilding than a house by design. The door had been broken open and was hanging at an odd angle.

  McGarr now glanced down at his feet. There were dark stains from the car to the edge of the jetty. The vehicle itself, while old and rusty, looked like it had been caught in a cross fire. The faded blue sheet metal was riddled and pierced by large-caliber bullets, the glass blown out of all windows but one. There were some other holes that appeared to have been caused by smaller-caliber fire, perhaps by a handgun. Or handguns.

  “The other crime scene I told you about—the house—is about four miles by road from here at the base of Croaghmore. It’s the same. Blood in the hall, in the sitting room, on the gravel drive. Casings all over, one from a handgun in the house.” Croaghmore was the large mountain behind them, McGarr now remembered.

  The crowd broke before him, silent, their eyes on his face, regarding him closely. He was the cop, the government man, the seoinin who might make sense of it all, when, in fact, it was they who had the answers. Unlike in Dublin or Cork or Limerick where anonymous crime was common, there was little possibility that the pivotal details of whatever had occurred were unknown to them. The challenge would be in convincing them to give up that truth.

  “So, what we have is—three people is missing and one boat,” Rice went on. A beefy older man in a blue uniform, he toddled and huffed a half step behind McGarr.

  “Two boats, if you count the one that put into the harbor at nightfall. It was a big white yoke with sails, somethin’ like a schooner I’m told. There was at least three people aboard, foreigners from the sound of them. But only one of them called in at the bar over there.” He jerked a thumb at the largest of the buildings in the harbor front. “He was a young man, middling height, sandy hair cut short and wearing”—Rice consulted his notepad—“an orange deck suit with ‘Mah Jong’ on the back.”

  “Like the game.”

  “And the boat evidently. It was called that too. The bloke spoke good English sort of like an American and was quick to ask after Ford—where he lived. How he could get there? Was it far? That class of thing. When the barman volunteered to ring Ford up, he said no, he wanted his visit to be a surprise. Left most of his fresh pint on the bar.”

  “Ford’s one of the missing?”

  Rice nodded. “An Englishman who’s lived here for fifty years. Big fella, huge, and a kind man. Great, white beard.”

  The woman standing by the boot of the car now turned her face to McGarr; it was haggard with woe. McGarr touched the brim of his cap. “Peter McGarr. I’m—”

  But she nodded, and Rice interposed. “Jacinta O’Grady. Sergeant O’Grady’s wife. Former Sergeant O’—” but he had explained about O’Grady on the phone, along with how the man had come to be at the Fords’ house armed on the evening before—as a favor to the old couple. “He left his tea on the table, fetched his revolver from the closet, and that was the last seen of him,” Rice had reported.

  The youngest child now began to cry, and the widow lifted him into her arms.

  Because O’Grady had been a guard, a funeral detail would be sent out from Dublin. Radio and television would cover the event. It would do nothing for the family, but maybe somebody would recall having seen a large white schooner leaving the island. Or O’Malley’s fishing boat. Already every maritime policing agency had been notified, not only in the Republic but also in the North, in Britain, and in Norway. Planes and helicopters had been dispatched, but so far nothing.

  “Would you tell me something?” Jacinta O’Grady took a step closer to the boot of the car, then turned her head to her other children. “The lot of yeh stay where you are.” She then tried to raise an edge of the gray blanket, but the wind, sweeping over the jetty, tore the wool from her hand. Only Rice, reaching out, kept the blanket from being swept out into the harbor. “Whatever happened to the back of his poor head?”

  McGarr could see at a glance. The bullet had entered the forehead, then exploded, blowing away the skull from the ears back. It made his face look unreal and one-dimensional, like a pasteboard cutout tacked to his shoulders.

  But McGarr only shook his head. It was a scene he knew all too well, and no words, no matter how well chosen, could help.

  “Don’t you know? Can’t you tell me?”

  Rice signaled to some of the other women who moved forward.

  “Who was it? Who could have done such a thing? Taken a life, a husband. Taken a father from his children.”

  Stepping round the car, McGarr pe
ered into the backseat at a mass of fat green flies that had gathered on the pooled blood. There was plenty of it. Too much for one person to have survived. In the matter of lethal bloodletting, McGarr was rather expert.

  “Now—what I mentioned, Chief, is here on the floor under the wheel.”

  It was a woman’s ring that was sparkling even in the shadows. A single shaft of sunlight, angling through a bullet hole in the side window, had caught its large central stone and was spewing rainbows of prismatic light over the pedals. The smaller surrounding stones had the deep blue color of sapphires.

  “Could it be real?” McGarr asked.

  “Not likely. That big job is the size of a peach pit, and them other ones is too alike to be real. And whyever would it have been left behind.” If it were real, Rice meant.

  McGarr was tempted to reach for it, but the Tech Squad would be arriving soon by helicopter. Instead, he turned toward the cottage.

  It was bachelor digs, he could see as he entered; men’s clothes were hung on pegs, and the furnishings were Spartan and few. Dirty dishes were heaped in the sink, most shattered by bullets. Somebody had swept the room with an automatic weapon.

  Turning to step back outside, McGarr walked into the chest of a larger man; it was the captain of the boat that had ferried him to the island. He was standing in the doorway with a hand out. “Now, bucko—my forty-five pounds.”

  McGarr tried to step to one side, but the man moved in front of him. And to the other. Again.

  “Did ye not hear me?”

  McGarr knew the tone; more, he had seen that squint-eyed smile before. The man in the yellow rain slicker was twenty years younger, twenty pounds heavier, and a good six inches taller. Already his hands had formed fists. He was about to give McGarr a thumping, or at least try. Which posed a dilemma.

  McGarr could not appear to be intimidated, especially not here in front of the gathered population of the island whose respect he would need. But neither could he be seen in a brawl that would be reported to the press.

  As though wary or frightened, he moved back into the room, drawing the man away from the door. Rice stepped forward to intervene, but McGarr raised a hand. “Sure, if that’s all the gentleman wants, I’ll give him his twenty-two pounds fifty. He’ll get the other half when he takes me back.”

  The hazel eyes widened and the ears pulled back. Here it comes, thought McGarr—telegraphed, no, carrier-pigeoned maybe a whole second—before the hands leapt for McGarr’s throat. Sidestepping, McGarr threw a double jab with his left hand. The first blow caught the small ribs—the soft, cartilaginous, easily broken and sensitive ribs just up from the belt. The second landed smartly on an ear, with a twist to make it sting all the more.

  When the right hand jumped up in pain, McGarr loaded his weight into a shot thrown straight from his knees that sank so deep into the stomach he thought he felt backbone from the inside. Buckling up, the man sank toward McGarr, who grabbed a fistful of curly hair and spun him toward the door.

  “There’s a lesson in this, bucko. Seoinini like me? We do this for sport. Or at least it would have been sport, had you been more of a challenge. Like this, it’s just plain old police brutality.” Raising a foot to the rump, McGarr shot him out the door where he stumbled and fell roughly onto the concrete for all to see.

  Stepping out of the house, McGarr pulled some money out of his billfold and showed it to Rice. “How much is this, Superintendent?”

  “I count forty-five pounds.”

  Bending to the man, McGarr said in a low voice, “I’d stick this in your gob, if you didn’t need it to suck all that wind. In the future, put into the dock for your passengers. I might’ve broken my leg. And show some respect for your elders. You never know when they might teach you a lesson.” He shoved the money into a pocket of the oilskin, then straightened up.

  “Now, Superintendent—I’ll see the house.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE FORD COTTAGE lay some two miles from the harbor overland. But it was a good four by road, much of it along a rough mountain track scarcely wide enough for the ancient Bedford van that Rice had borrowed from the owner of the island’s only pub.

  The floor of the vehicle was largely gone, a few sheets of steel having been welded onto the frame for their feet. Looking down, McGarr watched the gravel, rocks, and grass flow past them, like an endless, gray-green watercourse. It reminded him of what he would rather be doing.

  Rice, who was driving, explained, “The islanders pick up these junks cheap wherever they can, so long as the engine has a bit of life left. Diesel’s the thing, since it’s cheap and they get the government subsidy.” On fuel used while farming or fishing, he meant. “Road tax? Insurance? Even number plates? Why bother, since the car’s never going off the island.

  “You hear these people complain, and some of them have ‘attitudes,’ like yehr mahn with the forty-five pounds. But with eight miles of water between them and the government, they have it made.”

  Unless, of course, they were visited in the dead of the night by a raiding party with murder in mind.

  The cottage was set off on a high cliff on the western side of the island with no near neighbors in any direction. The views were spectacular, especially on a clear day such as this.

  To the north across Clew Bay were the mountains of Achill Island and North Mayo, layer upon towering layer, with the ocean defining all in a fringe of silver surf.

  To the south the steep shoulder of Croaghmore continued to rise. Two narrow paths wound across it, one leading up to its peak and the pristine sky, the other tracing down through a defile to a beach that was probably exposed only at low tide.

  To the east lay a long stretch of green commonage and walled fields. And beyond, the harbor with its collection of white houses, the pub, a shop or two, and the castle. But without so much as a tree for perspective, they seemed leagues away.

  Finally, to the west and maybe three hundred feet down lay the blue depths of the Atlantic clear to New York. And wind, McGarr discovered, stepping out at the bottom of the drive so as not to destroy any evidence. Gathering at the base of the cliff after thousands of miles of unimpeded sweep, it surged over the edge and pinned him against the side of the van.

  McGarr imagined that the place was virtually uninhabitable most days of the year; the storm of the night before, while severe, was not unusual. Now climbing the steep switchback drive, the wind was so strong that both men had to lean back into it and brace their legs to keep from being hurled forward.

  How had Ford and his wife—near octogenarians both, Rice had said—ever managed to leave the house? And why had they remained in such an inhospitable place for “How many years did you say they lived here?” McGarr tried to ask, but the gale swept away his words. What was their support? How had they kept themselves from being prisoners of the wind?

  It was then, as they turned through the first switchback and began to mount the next incline, that the wind ceased abruptly, nearly tumbling McGarr. Rice staggered, then righted himself. “It’s magic, what? This morning I thought me ears would burst.”

  The house had been sited with care in a kind dingle or combe that a stream had cut into the side of Croaghmore. And although still windy there, the swirling breezes lacked the force of the gusts that were wailing overhead.

  “Many’s the time I wondered how man or beast could live in a place like this, seeing it from down there.” Rice pointed toward the ocean. “I fish a bit with the brother-in-law. Now I know.”

  McGarr stopped and looked behind him down the declivity to the beachlike area and the ocean. “Go through the chronology again for me.”

  “Like I mentioned on the phone, Chief—the call came to the barracks in Louisburgh around four in the morning. The two men who fish with Packy O’Malley went to roust him out, since he’s a bit of a character and usually closes the pub. And they found the boat gone and his kip all shot up. That’s when they noticed O’Grady’s car with the doors open and blood everywher
e. One of them thought to look in the boot.

  “I got to the harbor around seven, the brother-in-law bringing me out. Word, of course, had spread, and even at that hour the jetty was packed.

  “Says the publican to me, says he, ‘You should speak to Paul O’Malley, he’s got something to tell you.’ ‘Who’s Paul O’Malley,’ says I? ‘A crippled fella who lives on Capnagower.’ That’s another of the hills to the east of the island. ‘Paul can do little else each day but monitor local waters with binoculars and sideband.’ It’s him that told me about the schooner and how Clem Ford would always want to be informed the moment any new boat put in.

  “But, sure, by that time I’d already heard from Jacinta O’Grady, saying that Ford had rung up her husband, asking him to come and sit with the wife while he stepped out for a moment. And to come armed. O’Grady thought it a bit daft, but he left his tea nevertheless, worried, like, about the two old-timers.”

  “And he took along a gun?”

  Rice nodded. “So the wife said. A handgun.”

  “Did Ford mention why he wanted O’Grady to come here?”

  “No—he said he’d explain it all later.”

  “Or where he was stepping out to?”

  Rice shook his head.

  “Do we have any idea of any later times?”

  “Jacinta said she began to get worried when, by midnight, O’Grady hadn’t come home or phoned her. It was then she began ringing him here, but the line was busy or off the hook. Also, the publican said Packy O’Malley stayed as usual ’til closing, which was half ten last night, no later. He also says he saw Packy’s boat in the harbor when he put out the bottles and locked the back door of the pub fifteen minutes later.”