Death at Christy Burke's (42 page)

“I guess you’re telling me you don’t know of anyone who might be trying to raise the issue now, either publicly or perhaps in a more roundabout way.”

“No one has listened to me trying to raise it in living memory; those who listened in the past didn’t believe me. If someone is trying to bring it up now, they haven’t taken me into their confidence. More tea, Monsignor?”

Michael stayed and chatted with Irene Brogan for an hour or so after that. They talked about history and her family’s role in it, Dublin and changes in the city that she had heard about but never seen. When Michael got back to the city centre, he headed to Aughrim Street to say Leo Killeen’s noontime Mass, as promised. Then he went looking for a flower shop and, when he found one, he ordered a bouquet of lilies to be delivered to the lonely woman in Ballymun. He asked to have some chocolate included with the order.

But flowers and chocolate were not uppermost in the mind of Michael O’Flaherty that day. His thoughts were on the ex-garda Eddie Madigan and the terrible blight on his family name, or what would be a blight if it ever became public knowledge. Michael had no trouble seeing this as the kind of secret one would risk one’s career to cover up. But was it more than that? Was it a secret to kill for?

Michael

There were a number of old and sickly people at the noon Mass on Monday, and this inspired Michael to spend a few hours that afternoon visiting patients at the Mater Hospital. When he got back to his house in Aughrim Street, there was a note tacked to his door. “15:35. Dropped in to see you, will try church or back here later. TS” Just above the initials was a cross. Tim Shanahan, still signing his name as a priest after all these years. Michael looked at his watch. It was just past four-thirty. Tim might still be at the church, if he hadn’t come by again and updated his note. Michael headed out again. He entered the church, which was radiant with the sun shining through the multicoloured glass of the windows. There on the left side near the back was Tim Shanahan, sitting in a pew, gazing at the altar.

Michael slid in beside him. “Hello, Tim. Got your note.”

“Hello, Michael. I just wanted to thank you for what you tried to do for me.”

“Oh?”

“I saw the bishop yesterday.”

“Ah.”

“He told me you went to the brick palace to plead for clemency on my behalf!”

“Well, I just thought a word in the right place might help. You never know till you ask.”

“He wasn’t all that receptive, I take it.”

“Well, he seemed to be a little fixated on your troubles.”

“My drinking, my heroin addiction, my disastrous mission in Africa. You have to admit, Michael, Tom O’Halloran could be forgiven for not begging me to resume my place in the pulpit, telling good Catholics how they should live.”

“You do have some obstacles to overcome, Tim. And yet . . .”

“There was a major diplomatic flap when my mission crashed in Africa. I’m sure he mentioned that.”

“He did say there was some political fallout.”

“I told you about my young student, Sabine, whose family sold her to a child trafficker, and about things becoming destabilized, the balance of power shifting between rival factions, all of that. I was so disillusioned I walked out on my mission and was in a drunken, drug-ridden fugue for months afterwards.”

Michael nodded. He remembered all too well the dreadful story Shanahan had told him. He also remembered something Archbishop O’Halloran had said, “all those deaths.” Had things been even worse than Tim admitted?

“Six weeks after I left my African parish, Michael, a power struggle broke out between the child trafficker who had purchased Sabine and the hard man who had protected our parish. Our man now considered our parishioners to be allies of his enemy. During my time there, I had developed a bit of a rapport with him; maybe there was something I could have done. . . . But I wasn’t there. He and his henchmen went into the school and slaughtered everyone on the premises that day. Seven people. Sister Josephine and our young priest, Father Amegashie, who both threw themselves over the children’s bodies to try to protect them. Five of the schoolchildren were killed. All of them hacked to death by machetes. Is it any wonder I’m not allowed to practise my vocation as a priest? The priest who walked out and left his parishioners to be murdered? You asked me the first time we spoke whether I had no shame. Now you’ve heard the story, and my role in it.” He held Michael’s gaze. “Is that shame enough for you, Monsignor?”

Michael was overwhelmed when he got home. And that feeling stayed with him throughout an evening of reading and sipping tea. He became even more disturbed when he tried to get to sleep. The horror that Tim Shanahan had lived through, and still lived with, was something Michael would never be able to endure. Would Michael have turned to serious drinking or drug use if he had gone through that? Who could say he would not? And Tim was not the only one of the Christy Burke Four who had hardship in his life. Eddie Madigan’s dreadful secret, Frank Fanning’s past, Jimmy O’Hearn’s family saga. The case of the pub vandal, however, remained as resistant to Michael’s efforts as ever. Who was the vandal singling out in his
J’accuse!
on the walls of the pub?

Surely, it was stretching things to imagine the fellow knew all the skeletons in all four closets. True, Michael and Brennan had learned the men’s secrets, but the two priests had set out to investigate the pub regulars. Why would the graffiti artist zero in on four individuals and dig up dirt on them, if he had nothing against them starting out? Other than being regulars at the pub, the Christy Burke Four had nothing else in common, as far as Michael knew. The slogans were painted on the pub’s walls, not on the walls of the men’s homes. So did the vandal himself have some connection with Christy’s? Well, Michael had been over this ground with Finn Burke. And Finn had been unable to identify anyone with a serious grudge against the pub. That was why Brennan had started the investigation by trying to identify the target and work backwards to the vandal, rather than the other way around. And here they were with four suspected targets, men who had violent events in their history, which could go a long way towards explaining why they spent so much time drinking their cares away at Christy’s. It struck Michael then that the four men almost certainly knew each other’s secrets, even if they did not divulge everything they knew when questioned. Loyalty, Michael assumed. Or, if they weren’t privy to the details, they knew at least that each of them had a troubled past. This shared sense of hardship would account for the fact that they were a close-knit group and had been drinking together for years. But Michael had never felt threatened by them as a group or as individuals. Not one of them made him feel he was in the presence of a killer.

How could he and Brennan get to the bottom of the Christy Burke’s mystery? It was none of their business, really. None of Michael’s, certainly. Brennan at least had a family connection and had been asked to assist. It was no secret that Brennan had taken on the task reluctantly and considered most of what they’d learned useless. No doubt he wished he’d never heard the half of it. As for Michael, he hadn’t exactly shone in his role as Sergeant O’Flaherty.

But how was he doing as
Monsignor
O’Flaherty? In spite of the suspicions that had attached themselves to the Christy Burke Four, Michael had become fond of these men, all of them. He wanted to help them, no matter what they might have done. How could he do that, though, really? Why not just give it up, and leave them to solve their own problems? He drifted off to sleep with that thought in his mind.

But he awoke the following morning with a line from Genesis running through his head. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” For better or for worse, Michael knew that’s what he was called to be. If his brother, his friend, his fellow human being was troubled, Michael felt duty-bound to lend a hand.

The most obvious person to start with, he felt, was Jimmy O’Hearn. There was something Jimmy should know. Michael could not keep the secret of Rod O’Hearn’s betrayal to himself. Nor could he stand by while the lawyer, Carey Gilbert, was being slandered, however unintentionally, by the O’Hearn family. Michael got up, showered, ate a hasty breakfast, and went to morning Mass. He would catch Jimmy O’Hearn at home before Jimmy installed himself at Christy Burke’s for the day. This was a conversation to be had in private.

It was a soft day, cool and cloudy with a bit of a morning mist, when Michael got off the bus in Ringsend and made his way to Pigeon House Road, where the Poolbeg Marina was located. Michael asked around and was given directions to Jimmy O’Hearn’s boat. Michael remembered someone saying it was a sailboat, not a proper houseboat. It was maybe twenty-five feet in length, rocking gently in its berth. He stepped gingerly onto the deck of the boat and knocked at the cabin door. No answer. He peered into the boat’s immaculate interior. No sign of Jimmy. Another time, maybe. When he had hoisted himself back onto the pier, Michael heard a banging noise coming from the shore, and looked over. There was Jimmy, standing in the back of a little truck with a rag and a bucket of water.

“Jimmy!” Michael called out, and O’Hearn started at the sound. He stared in Michael’s direction for a couple of seconds, nonplussed, then greeted him.

“Is it yourself, Monsignor? Making your rounds early, are you?”

“I am. But I’m loath to interrupt a man at work!”

“No worries. I’m just finishing up.” He poured liquid out of a container onto his rag and gave the bed of the truck a final rub, then jumped down and wiped his hands on his pants. “You get to the point where you can’t put off your cleaning any longer. So, Mike, are you out here looking for the floating chapel?”

“Floating chapel?”

“You’re too late. Our people came up with the plan for a floating chapel when the English forced all the Irish people out of the city. They came out this way, and that’s why you have a neighbourhood called Irishtown in the city of Dublin! They had a church moored to the shore. But they eventually built St. Matthew’s. On land. I kind of like the church-boat idea myself, but I’m a few hundred years out of time. Enough of that, though. What’s on your mind today, Mike?”

How to begin? “Well now, Jimmy, I’ve been a little concerned about you. Thought we could have a bit of a chat before the day gets underway.”

“Before I check in at Christy’s, you mean!”

“I suppose that’s what I mean. I’ll be checking in myself later on.”

“What did you want to talk about?”

“Well, em . . .”

O’Hearn looked at him and waited, then said, “Come inside, why don’t you, Mike. Make yourself a cup of tea while I wash up and change my clothes.”

“Sure.”

So Mike brewed tea for two as O’Hearn got himself cleaned up. They sat down together at the tiny galley table and sipped their tea.

Mike got to the point. “Jimmy, I’m aware of your family’s loss of the boat-building company.”

Jimmy looked down at his teacup and said in a voice tight with tension, “I suppose it’s no surprise you’ve heard about it. People talk. No getting away from that.”

“The story going around is that the lawyer . . .”

The eyes that met Michael’s were haunted and filled with pain. It took a while for Jim to find his voice again. Finally, he said, “He cut us out of the business, cut the hearts out of us, then scarpered to parts unknown!”

The look in the man’s eyes was enough to disabuse Michael right then and there of any notion that the truth would set Jimmy and his family on the road to healing. Michael could see that the loss of the business, the treachery, was still an open wound. Michael wasn’t about to rub salt in the wound by revealing to Jimmy that his own brother had betrayed him and his sisters. The family should be told, no question, but Michael couldn’t bring himself to do it.

All he could say was, “I just thought it might help if you talked about it.”

“Thank you, Mike, but I said all I have to say on the subject a long time ago. And there’s nothing you can do to make it better. I do appreciate your concern, now, don’t get me wrong there.”

“All right, then, Jim. I’ll be off. See if I can do any better on my next stop!”

“Thanks all the same, Mike. I’ll see you later today, I expect.”

And with that, Mike was off, his pastoral efforts come to naught.

Brennan

Brennan was the barman at Christy’s again on Tuesday afternoon. He had received a call from Sean Nugent, passing along a request from Finn: could Brennan take over bar duties today?

“I could and I will. Nothing wrong with Finn, I hope? Or yourself, of course.”

“No, not at all. We, em, he has to go off somewhere, so.”

“Ah.”

“I have to bolt now. Thank you, Brennan.”

“No worries.”

So here he was. And there was a little girl on the bar stool opposite him, her legs swinging high above the floor.

“You’re leaving us, Normie.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so, Father. I really like Dublin; it’s not that. But Kim and her mum and dad have rented a cottage at the beach back home, and they invited me for a sleepover for a whole week at the cottage! I really miss Kim.”

“And I’m sure she misses you. You’ll have a brilliant week together.”

And, Brennan hoped, Monty and little Dominic would have a brilliant few days by themselves. Days brought to them in part by Brennan Burke. The Collins-MacNeil family’s original plan was to stay in Dublin till Saturday. But Monty received an urgent call from the office; an important client was in trouble, and the firm wanted Monty to handle it. Immediately. All the talk about him going home made little Normie homesick, and she called her best friend, Kim, and this resulted in the cottage invitation. Brennan saw it all falling into place. Here were a few days — or evenings at least — for Monty and Dominic to spend together, get to know each other, be father and son. With a bit of lobbying, ostensibly on behalf of Normie and Kim, Brennan saw the project through: tickets home for Monty, Normie, and Dominic. They would fly from Dublin to London tonight, and to Halifax tomorrow. This would give the MacNeil time with Kitty without the kids, before Kitty departed for Rome on Friday. Maura would stay on till Saturday as planned. Brennan was pleased with the arrangements.