The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf (16 page)

O’Grady had doffed the
brat
, which now lay carefully folded across the yoke of the panniers that draped his donkey’s back. A black-and-white sheep dog met McGarr halfway and barked at his heels for the better part of a quarter mile.

Working in a loose tunic that looked handmade, O’Grady was also wearing woolen trousers of a coarseness that resembled cottage weave. Probably all of eighty, he was nevertheless hale, his thin muscles gnarled and strong.

“I wonder if I might have a word with you,” McGarr said over the dog’s continuing harangue.

O’Grady did not look up. “
Ná bí ag cainnt Bearla
.”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to speak English. My Irish isn’t up to it.”

“I don’t have to speak nothin’ to the likes of you.” Raising the slane, O’Grady shook the sharp right-angled blade at McGarr.

“And what likes is that?”

“The likes of them that murdered my son, is what likes. The likes of foreigners and scuts, like you. Yeh’ve ruined this country, this island, and now my son who served his time and then did everything in his power to get clear of you. Frauds and gobshites, all of yiz. Mots, bowsies, and gurriers.”

McGarr had heard that before—from Colm Canning on the “water taxi.” “Ruined this country how?” The point was to keep him talking; maybe he might have some idea of who the raiders were,
senachie
that people claimed him.

“By taking the king’s shilling is how.” It was an old phrase alluding to a traitorous act. “The Europeans paid you hoors twenty billion pounds since 1973, and what did they want in return? Not just our bodies in Brussels.
No
—they knew they could get that. This time they wanted our
souls
too! It was you that sold them.” He shook the slane again, his old eyes wide in anger, his mane flaring.

“And you Dublin swine, you were first into the trough—snouts, jowls, trotters, and all—with one GUBU outrage after another.” It was an acronym that had been coined in the press to describe ever-unfolding government scandals and stood for
G
rotesque,
U
nbelievable,
B
izarre,
U
nprecedented. “Shoddy housing estates, poor roads, payoffs, kickbacks, nepotism, and plain old theft.

“The slops that splashed out? Why, they fell to us gruntlings. With twenty billion in play, why, even the fools in the West could get some. Grants for houses, lights, toilets, piped poor water, the bloody telephone, farm this way, fish that way, even put your rubbish out their way. And with every sort of backhander along the way for government men like you.” O’Grady stuck out a hand behind his back as though to accept bribe money.

McGarr dug a smoke from his pocket. He had heard the twenty-billion figure before; in fact, he knew people—his wife’s father, for one—who had made a great deal of money since 1973 because of his associations with politicians and his knowledge of the workings of government. But he had never been accused of any misdeed, nor had any of his friends. Also, since 1973 life had got better for almost everybody in Ireland, at least on a material level. But it was that which seemed to bother the old man most.

“What else did we get?” Now O’Grady was pointing a finger at McGarr. It was shaking noticeably, he was so exercised, and McGarr wondered if the man was entirely right. Maybe his son’s death had put him over the top. “Illegitimacy—one in five born in Ireland today is a bastard.”

McGarr managed to light the cigarette. Apart from the term, it was nothing new in a country where, formerly, all means of contraception had been illegal. Over the years more than a few Irish women had gone to England for abortions
or to give up a child for adoption. The difference was—now unwed Irish women were keeping their children, the stigma having eased in many circles. Thankfully.

“Ireland has the youngest population in all of Europe. More than half are under twenty-five, and no jobs for them. No sir. They’re the children of Lir!”

Who were changed into swans by a jealous stepmother and made to wander the earth for centuries, McGarr seemed to remember. He blew out the smoke that bolted past the old man. Again McGarr wished he was out in a boat with his favorite gillie, dropping flies through the clear water to the salmon that were entering Loch Eske.

Now O’Grady climbed out of the bog, slane still in hand. “Now we even have divorce, and why shouldn’t we. We’re practiced at it. We’ve been divorcing our children for two bloody centuries as a matter of
policy
! But not
your
child, buck!” O’Grady darted the slane in McGarr’s direction. “Not now that you’ve banked the twenty billion that would have kept ours at home. No, you’ll send yours to Trinity on government grants.”

Please, God, thought McGarr.

“Then she’ll waltz right into the art shop on Dawson Street and have her weekends in Dunlavin reported in the press.”

O’Grady took another step toward McGarr, who wondered where he had come up with that. But people talked, and it was all public information.

“See this?” Now the old man had the slane only inches from McGarr’s face. “I’m probably the only cottier on this island who still cuts turf for heat or grows potatoes for sustenance or raises sheep for his food and clothing.”

You’re a piece of work, all right, thought McGarr. I’ll give you that.

“Now it’s all coal from Poland or spuds from bloody Cyprus! And alcoholism, drug addiction, child battering, divorce, and abortion advocates. Kids on the telly making fun of everything from the Irish language, which they, like you, canna speak, read, or write, to taking off their parents and teachers! Taking off Republicanism! Taking off religion and God!”

McGarr raised a hand and pushed the blade away from his
face. “I came here to ask you if you know who killed your son.”

“And
you
just heard it.” With the tool O’Grady riffled the air above McGarr’s head.

Not knowing how much more he could take or should, McGarr turned and began making his way back toward the house.

But he had only moved a few steps before O’Grady shouted, “The voice that Paul O’Malley taped was speaking Afrikaans. It was just a discussion of course bearing and the gap that should be kept between the two boats, the schooner and the dark sportfisher that was lacking numbers. ‘Northwest’ it said. ‘Bearing three hundred and twenty-two degrees.’ The man’s voice was elderly, and he advised the other boat not to break radio silence again until they reached their destination, which was not discussed. He—the elder—signed off by using the word ‘Helmet.’

“The second voice, who spoke nothing beyond calling for the
Mah Jong
and asking for the bearing, speed, and delay, was that of a pubescent boy or a young woman, I’m thinking.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Don’t I be known as a
senachie
.” It was not a question and was said with perfect surety.

“You speak Afrikaans?”

“Monck of Monck and Neary represented Paul O’Malley in his action against Aran Energy. Paul was put onto them by Clem Ford, who had them on retainer through the Clare Island Trust. Monck settled for three million pounds. Ford thought it too little and paid Monck’s fee and all Paul’s medical expenses.”

“And built the house.”

O’Grady nodded.

“And bought him the automated wheelchair, the robotics scope, the transceiver, and scanner.”

“The works.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Clem Ford is rich.”

O’Grady looked away and forked his fingers through his
hair. “I wouldn’t say he is, which is the one thing I admire him for. He has great inhuman restraint.”

And you inordinate pride, thought McGarr. “So, the Clare Island Trust is well funded and Ford controls it through Monck and Neary?”

“I know nothing about the Clare Island Trust, apart from the fact it’s brought grave trouble down upon us, as I said it would from the very beginning. Which is this.”

“I’ve called into most of the houses on the island. Why did nobody else tell me of the Clare Island Trust?”

“Because it’s their fiddle too, and they’re afraid you’ll ruin it for them. Me, I couldn’t care less. I wouldn’t take a farthing from that scut.”

McGarr waited, before asking, “Anything else?”

O’Grady shrugged, as though considering. Finally, he said, “I only hope you’re different from the others of your kind and know your job. And you should get some help. Packy O’Malley is a Republican, fried and true. He won’t let what happened to Kevin and Breege Ford go unpunished. He’s got Clem with him and maybe some others, and he’ll be back.”

“Back where? Here?”

O’Grady nodded.

“Why here?”

O’Grady turned and moved away toward the bog.

Back at the desk of the hotel, McGarr asked for his messages and confirmed what Fergal O’Grady said about the language on the tape being Afrikaans. A Tech Squad report said the second voice was definitely that of a woman. She had called herself Hester or Ester when signing on. The Naval Service had dispatched a long-range reconnaissance aircraft to search the area along a line of the compass bearing, but McGarr expected little from the effort. Too much time—nearly three days now—had elapsed.

The registration number on the Royal Navy Webley automatic placed it last in the possession of one Lieutenant Owen Hoarsely whose gunboat never returned from patrol off the coast of Scotland at the beginning of the war.

And finally there was a note from Tom Rice to the effect that while chatting in the pub over jars after the funeral, he
was told that Clem Ford was said to have controlled a charitable and philanthropic institution called the Clare Island Trust, “that has done wonders for the island and Mayo.”

McGarr signaled to the desk clerk. “When a message comes in for me, how is it dealt with?”

“It’s put right into the box for your room.” She stood and showed him a cabinet of numbered pigeonholes.

“Do you read them?”

“No, sir. I was told when I started—all that is private, strictly so, and none of my affair. Don’t so much as look at it. If I did, I’d be sacked.”

“And you never leave the desk.”

“Oh, of course I do. I fill in for the barman on his break. Or when it’s slow I find something else to keep me busy, like.”

So much for Fergal O’Grady,
senachie
.

Two hours later, McGarr was standing in the hallway of the Ford cottage with his wife, Noreen, by his side. Over Maddie’s complaints they had left her in the Garda Land Rover out in the drive.

The flies that had been attracted by the surfeit of blood had already produced maggots. The hall floor was teeming with them, and the reek was nearly enough to make McGarr retch. Noreen remained in the cubby, a handkerchief covering her nose and mouth.

McGarr punched down the playback button of the voice message on the answering machine, and after a pause Clem Ford’s deep voice came on, saying, “You have reached the home of Breege and Clement Ford. We are unable to…”

“Hear it again?”

“Don’t have to. From the precise way he suspirates his consonants, to say nothing of his lazy nasalized vowels and dropped Rs, it’s Ox-bridge. Or something like it. A good public school—Harrow, Eton, one of those. Also, I don’t think he’s a native speaker. Did you hear that ‘message’ of his?”

McGarr had not, so they heard it again.

“…if you would kindly leave a meszage—”

“Notice the gutteralization of that final
S
. And also in the way he says ‘please.’”

They heard that too, which sounded slightly like, “Pleasze wait for the….”

“Doesn’t it remind you a little of Henry Kissinger or—I don’t know—Boris Becker? Finally the giveaway is the way he pronounces his own name. It’s like he’s saying, ‘Khlemt.’ In phonetics, that’s the non-English velar fricative sound. Native English speakers don’t say it and often can’t without practice.

“And another thing—on the other tape, the one of the Afrikaans speaking boat to boat?” Although neither Noreen nor McGarr spoke that language, they had listened to it several times over on the drive out from the hotel. “Couldn’t the ‘Helmet’ that the man calls himself be ‘Helmut,’ to keep everything tribal and within the range of gutteralized languages.”

Back out in the Rover, they listened to it yet again, and she was right. It now sounded more like Helmut which seemed to make more sense.

All the advantages of a university degree, McGarr thought. But then, of course, by marriage he had acquired three of them without having to carry around a burden like “velar fricatives” in his head. He had all he could to remember the details from his backlog of open cases.

Before retiring to their room in the hotel, McGarr rang up his Dublin office and asked the desk sergeant to put in a request to Scotland Yard for a search of any and all possible Oxford, Cambridge, and British public school graduates by the names of Clem or Clement Ford.

“And as long as they’re about the check, let’s add the name of Angus Rehm,” since it was the only other name they had. And on a whim, McGarr now said, “And Helmut Rehm.” Noreen had mentioned keeping everything “perfectly tribal,” and, whereas, Angus was an identifiably Scots name, Rehm was something else entirely—German or Dutch or perhaps even Afrikaner.

Some one of their inquiries was bound to turn up some information at least on Clem Ford. The recording apparatus of modern society was too pervasive and complete for anybody, even an old man in the West of Ireland, to get lost. After all, Ford hadn’t just sailed up Clew Bay in a bubble;
there had to be facts on file about him someplace.

“What about Ward and Bresnahan?” He wanted them there by the morning, when Rice said the O’Malleys would begin coming over for their “rally.”

“As far as I know, they’re on their way here now, Chief.”

“Any word on the diamond ring?”

“Other than its authenticity and value, nothing. Yet.”

McGarr then spent the better part of an hour going over the progress of the other open murder investigations and the preliminary details of a death in Cork that local guards thought suspicious.