Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16 (17 page)

The other papers, while more restrained in their cri
t
icism, still ran several photos of both events.

“Proud of yourself?” a low voice asked through a chuckle quite close to McGarr’s ear. “You’re one of a kind, really. Little wonder you never called in—off beating the piss out of the press and shooting up a neighborhood. You should read the
Times.
Could it be they’re right and you didn’t remain long enough at the scene to fi?nd out if your victim was dead?”

Sheard would not be speaking in an undertone u
n
less somebody else had entered the room, and in tur
n
ing he stiffened an elbow and brushed by him. “Ah, Jack—I didn’t know you were there.” McGarr moved toward the taoiseach, who was standing in back of the commissioner. “The other is me good ear.”

“Peter.” The commissioner—a former politician by the name of Sean O’Rourke—only nodded, but Bre
n
dan Kehoe, the taoiseach, stepped around him to offer his hand.

“Good to see you again, Chief Superintendent. I u
n
derstand you’ve been busy since the event. Does all of that”—Kehoe swept his hand at the newspaper on the table—“mean you’re making progress?”

“Perhaps.” Taking Kehoe’s hand, he made sure their
eyes met. “You’re to judge. It could be we have a ransom demand.” From his jacket he took out a copy of the videotape.

“What?” Chuckling, Sheard’s smile lit up his han
d
some face, apart from his eyes, which were icy and f
o
cused on McGarr. Otherwise tanned, the knob of fl?esh on his square jaw—formed by the smile—was nearly the color of his blond hair. “You’re unique, McGarr. Full of ”—there was a pause—“surprises.”

“Is there a tape player about?”

“Did they send you a video?” Sheard asked. “Kind of them and right up to the moment. Curious, I didn’t get one.”

“Perhaps they thought you too busy cutting your own footage.”

“This way.” Kehoe led them out of the anteroom and down a hall to a wing of the building that was obv
i
ously used for communications. “Could you leave us, please?” he said to two young men who were huddled over a newspaper.

Eyes moving from Sheard to McGarr and the tape in his hands, they complied. O’Rourke closed the door behind them.

“Before this goes any further, I wonder if Peter could bring us up to speed on his investigation.” Sheard’s smile was still broad. “As I mentioned earlier, we seemed to be suffering from a communications glitch.”

“I think we should watch this fi?rst, Jack. Then, if you have questions...” McGarr shoved the tape into the receptacle of the player and hit the play button, adding, “The intro is a bit much, but the message is clear.”

Once the music came on, he leaned back against a
desk and slipped his hands in his jacket pockets, reminding himself that Sheard had the ear of Kehoe and was certain to have fi?lled it with every doubt before McGarr’s arrival. And then there were the newspapers.

“Can you tell us how we know this is genuine?” Sheard asked before the fi?lm had ended. But Kehoe shot him a glance, and McGarr waited until the picture had faded out.

The three men glanced up at him.

“Credibility?” he asked Kehoe, who nodded. “Well, there’s the delivery the very day—or at least the night after the day—of the theft and murder in Trinity. I don’t know how long it would take to produce such a thing, but it has the look of having been devised rather earlier.

“Second, there’s the disguised voice of the fi?gure who makes the demand. It’s similar to one of the two scrambled voices on the Trinity library security tape. Presently, the Tech Squad, which has the original, is making a comparison and also analyzing other aspects of the tape, such as the color of the fl?ame from the burning page.”

“What?” Sheard began laughing again. “You mean, this isn’t the original? Don’t you think you should have brought the taoiseach the original? You’re a rare brave man, Peter McGarr.” And stupid went without saying.

But Kehoe remained impassive.

“Last night I learned that a facsimile edition of the Book of Kells was produced in the early 1990s. In every way, including wormholes, it resembles the original, with the exception of having been printed on paper, not vellum, which is treated calfskin. Spectr
o
scopic analysis might give us an idea of what’s being burned.

“And fi?nally”—McGarr spooled back to fi?nd the length of videotape that pictured the decorations on the wall behind the hooded fi?gure—“notice the large platelike decorations on the wall behind your man with the book. Were this tape player equipped with an e
n
larging capability, you’d see that they’re actually h
u
man heads that have been nailed to the wall with spikes.”

“This gets better and better,” Sheard said to O’Rourke. “You can’t make this stuff up.”

“In fact, one of the heads may well be that of Derek Greene, the Trinity security guard who was knocked down and killed by a car in Stephen’s Green more than a fortnight ago. His death gave Sloane, who was in league with the thieves before they murdered him, the excuse of walking Greene’s beat in Trinity without e
x
posing himself to further scrutiny.

“Yesterday, Greene’s family reported that his grave has been disturbed. His corpse has been decapitated, and the head is missing.

“As for the car that killed him, witnesses described it as a large midnight-blue BMW with gold wheel covers.

“We believe that the same car, a large midnight-blue BMW with gold wheel covers, was parked behind Sloane’s house yesterday and was driven away by his son, Raymond. It’s also the car with the driver who r
e
fused to stop and fi?red at us in front of CU headqua
r
ters on the Glasnevin Road.”

“Where the lad was killed?” Sheard asked in an i
n
souciant tone.

“Aye—killed by a rifl?e bullet. Took off half his head. The slug is presently being examined by ballistics. Or are you ignorant of that as well?”

Sheard’s smile fell, his jaw fi?rmed.

“Fired by whom?” Kehoe asked.

McGarr shook his head. “But not any of my people. We fi?red handguns and a shotgun only.

“The right front headlamp and grill of the car appear to have been damaged in an earlier accident, with re
m
nants of clothing and blood found there as well.”

“What about Sloane’s son?” It was still Sheard.

“Nowhere to be found. He got away.”

“Ah.”

McGarr switched off the television and turned to the other men. “As for the possibility that the tape is a fraud, I’d say it exists. Chazz Sweeney hand-delivered it to me, saying it came to him by motorbike messe
n
ger.”

“
The
Chazz Sweeney?” O’Rourke asked.

McGarr tried to smile. “I hope there’s not another.”

“And he delivered it to you and not Jack?”

McGarr did not reply. The tape ejected automat
i
cally, and he tried to hand it to Sheard.

“I’d prefer the original.”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me—you have it in the Tech Squad lab.” Where it belongs, went unsaid. Mc-Garr was being as petty as Sheard, but it felt good.

“So, Sweeney had this fi?rst?” O’Rourke asked. “I’m surprised he didn’t run the image of the page from the book being burnt. I can’t imagine him fi?nally stu
m
bling over a bit of discretion.”

“Don’t discount the man.” Kehoe reached for the tape. “Sweeney may be a world-class chancer in some matters, but there’s his special brand of Catholicism, of which the Book of Kells and the two others are icons.”

That had been exhibited in a secular—and formerly Protestant—institution, it occurred to McGarr.

Turning with video in hand, Kehoe moved out of the
room and back into the corridor where, at the desk of his receptionist, he asked for a television and video player to be brought into his offi?ce immediately.

There he closed the door behind them and asked the others to take seats. From behind his desk, Kehoe said, “Jack and Peter—I won’t take up more of your pr
e
cious time beyond asking you this question. Then I’ll let you go on about your important business.

“From a police perspective, what should happen now?”

Sheard began, “Why don’t we begin with what should have happened beginning last night when—”

But Kehoe was shaking his head. “I don’t think you heard me, Jack. That’s water over the weir. What comes next?” He turned to McGarr. “Peter?”

McGarr would have preferred to speak last. “If the o
b
jective is to get the books back and also collar the mu
r
derers of Greene, Sloane, and the driver of the BMW, then we should tell them we will meet their terms. We should encourage them to come forward and name the place of the exchange.

“Murderers and thieves always make mistakes of one sort or other, and all that money—if it comes to that—will only make them incautious. Sooner rather than later, they’ll supply us with some idea of who and where they are.”

“But don’t we know who they are?” Sheard asked. “I think their identity is plain.”

McGarr’s eyes met Kehoe’s before both looked away. Could Sheard be that gullible?

“Hear me out. I know what you’re thinking, which was my fi?rst thought as well. It’s all too obvious. But look at it this way—who’s their audience, who are they playing to? Their electorate and the other unemployed
native Irish who feel themselves challenged by technology or have had their neighborhoods changed by immigrants and other outsiders.”

Sheard got to his feet and, slipping his hands in his pockets in a way that was characteristic of Kehoe hi
m
self, moved toward the window in the large corner o
f
fi?
ce. “I wonder if it matters that they’re ever paid. Actually it’s probably better for them if the perpetr
a
tors of these crimes are caught and killed.

“Like the early IRA, what they’re creating are ma
r
tyrs to be continually revered and waked in ballad and verse. The theft of the Book of Kells is tantamount to the IRA blowing up Wellington’s bloody monument on O’Connell Street in 1966 or the hunger strikes of Bobby Sands in 1981. Their leader, this Mide—he was with Sands. This is his generation’s thing, and he’ll play it to the max, if we let him. His intent is to propel his band of hooligans into a potent cultural/political force in this country. That’s the purpose of the prea
m
ble to the demand.

“Taoiseach Kehoe”—pivoting, Sheard swung his powerful body around and began moving back toward them, his eyes on the carpet and the high gloss of his black bluchers—“if you don’t show the nation this tape and any others this Mide sends us, he will, mark my words. And they’ll be shown to the cheers and appr
o
bation of every poor punk, thug, and body-pierced rocker in the country, to say nothing of the other young who’ll adopt their vestments and stance just to set themselves apart and piss off their parents.

“It’s why the tape was given to Sweeney to pass on. This Mide is a sly one, so he is. He knew—he knows—that Charles Stewart Parnell Sweeney, arch-conservative Catholic and self-avowed patriot, will
have copied it and, sooner or later, when this government does not do Mide’s bidding, Sweeney will release it to the media.

“McGarr, tell us something.” Standing only inches away, Sheard glared down. “What other bloody obje
c
tive could there possibly be than getting the stolen books back and trying the murderers?”

McGarr glanced at Kehoe. “I’m in the police bus
i
ness, Jack, not the objective business. Could that be a failing?”

“Of course it’s a failing. It’s even a failing by the book, to mention books. Which has been evident for the past thirty hours.”

McGarr struggled to keep himself in the chair. “Nor am I in the book business. I’m not in that either. But were I, which book would that be, Jack?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Sheard stepped away, a kind of joy in his voice. “Why”—he swirled his hands—“the book of standard police practice. The pr
o
tocols and procedures that police have found essential all over the world. Do you have any idea what standard police practice dictates in this situation, McGarr?”

Kehoe sighed and glanced at the clock on his desk. “Jack—the point.”

“You never pay ransoms to kidnappers or terrorists. It only encourages others to do the same. And in this case, it’s not as if they’re holding human beings.

“Also, we—the government—do not own the Book of Kells, and if we did, where would we get the bloody fortune to splash out on these bloody scuts? Where would it come from? We’d have to go to the Dail, and you would not want to stand for reelection as a polit
i
cian who voted to splash out fi?fty million Euros on the New Druids. It’s not as though they’re the IRA.