Habit of Fear (23 page)

T
HE POET WAS BURIED
in a bleak little churchyard cemetery where the wind flattened the uncut grass and whistled through a few lonely pine trees. An ancient high cross rose among the withered bracken and weeds, and across the road was the formidable ruin of a round tower. Not a living creature in sight. Julie stood by the pebbled grave site of Yeats and his wife, George, and read aloud the epitaph he had composed for himself and ordered carved on local stone:

Cast a cold eye

On Life, on Death.

Horseman, pass by.

“What does it mean?” Irwin wanted to know.

Julie shook her head. She was not going to interpret Yeats. She took a long look at the mountain, Ben Bulben, and thought it resembled a lurching beast against the sky.

On the way back to the car she thanked Irwin.

“For what?”

“Everything. For bringing me here. I feel better now. Stronger.”

“You’ve had a hard life, haven’t you?”

“No. Not really.”

“Could we find a place and talk for a piece?”

“How about the Lake Isle of Innisfree?”

“Oh, God love you. You are a romantic. That’d be Lough Gill, and I’ll have to have a look at my road book.”

He had no sooner got out the book than a patrol car pulled up, the garda asking if he could assist. “It must wait another time,” he said when he heard where they wanted to go. “You’ll soon be needed back at the hotel.”

Irwin turned the car around. “I’ll drive slow and give you the main points of my interview with Quinlan. I want to know who snatched my tape and why. And something else now: does it connect up with the murder of the Gray Man?”

Neither he nor Julie could find anything remarkable in the interview. “He follows the straight IRA position,” Irwin summed up.

“But you said they were something else, not IRA,” she reminded him.

“I said, but I couldn’t prove. I’m pretty sure that lot was the ONI, and they’re to the left of the Provos. Or to the right, if you see it that way. Extremists, in any case. Ah, now, wait. You may have something: they were afraid of what Quinlan
might
have said to further discredit them. There was a confrontation of some sort at the meeting. That has to be it: what he
might
have said. Don’t I wish he had said it—a Roy Irwin exclusive.”

As though all the world was waiting for it, Julie thought: he was like an actor who had come within tasting distance of the part of a lifetime. “How did you get to him in the first place?”

“Ah, now. Whenever I go to a strange town, I go first to the local bookshop to find out what’s going on. There’s a grand woman there in a shop called Greely’s—you’d take to her yourself in a minute—and you’d have seen her in the funeral cortege, marching with the boys of yesterday. When I told her I was the Irish correspondent for the
New York Daily,
she set up the interview for me.”

“Maisie Craig,” Julie said.

“Did you meet her?”

Julie shook her head. “But I was in the bookshop.” She thought about Garvy’s grandmother sending her to Maisie Craig and then her niece saying she needn’t say who sent her. A house divided? And the old woman’s presentiment of death. Which had not taken long to follow. “So where are we with the Gray Man?” she asked. “Is there a connection?”

Irwin glanced at her and then back at the road. He took his time before saying, “Sometimes I wonder if you’ve been entirely honest with me, Julie. Isn’t there some reason you’re in Ireland besides the quest of your father? Or is the father search a ruse altogether? You wouldn’t be CIA, would you?”

“You are wrong on all counts,” she said.

“What about Seamus McNally? Isn’t he on your agenda, you going north? That’s his territory.”

“Roy, I’m an entertainment columnist. Richard Garvy is going to do
The Far, Far Hills of Home
on Broadway. That puts the author on my agenda. Yes.” Entirely honest … oh, yes.

“You don’t need to bridle,” Irwin said. “McNally doesn’t write the kind of poetic propaganda that lot likes exported.”

“I understand,” Julie said. On the instant she realized that something was missing from her hotel room: she had left the copy of McNally’s play alongside the clock on her bedside table. She’d been aware of the clock after she discovered the dead man. But she was sure now the book wasn’t there.

When, within the hour, she was called before Inspector Superintendent Alec Fitzgerald in the private-party room the hotel had provided him, the book was the first thing that caught her eye:
To Spite the Devil
lay before him, the solitary object on the polished table.

I
NSPECTOR SUPERINTENDENT: THE TOP
man in Irish homicide investigation. He rose from behind the table long enough to give a courtly little bow and to indicate the chair alongside the table; a stocky and hard-jawed man with a halo of rusty red hair and peaked eyebrows and very blue eyes that seemed to have needlepoints of light in them.

“Is it yours?” he said of the book on the table.

“It could be mine. I bought a copy at Greely’s bookstore yesterday.”

Other men of the team were coming and going in the room, soft-footed. Fitzgerald took a pen from his pocket and poked at the book until it fell apart where it had been torn into three parts. “And would this be your doing, Mrs. Hayes?”

“No, sir.”

At his signal a younger detective came and with a pair of pincers gathered the book into a plastic bag. Fitzgerald bade him come back and sit in on the interrogation. After he dispatched “that desecration.” He introduced Sergeant Detective Lawrence Carr to Julie. Carr was bright-eyed and ruddy-cheeked and far more given to smiling than his chief.

“Are you an actress, Mrs. Hayes?” Fitzgerald asked.

“No, sir, but I write about theater. I work for the newspaper the
New York Daily.
”

“Ah-ha. And are you working for them now? What I’m asking is, are you here on assignment or on holiday?”

“I’m on my own time, Inspector Superintendent. I may do a couple of interviews for my column, but the reason I’m in Ireland is to try to find my father. I’m not sure he’s here. I’m not sure he’s alive even. But I came to try to find out.”

She waited then with Carr’s return until he had sat down at the opposite end to her of the table. Fitzgerald soon moved him. “Bring your chair to the middle, so I won’t have to swivel my head like a whirligig. You were saying, Mrs. Hayes … are you at the beginning or near the end of the trail?”

Julie was soon telling of her visit to Sally O’Rourke and her trip to Wicklow and Ballina, making the account as brief as possible.

“Take your time,” Fitzgerald said. “After all, dead is dead, isn’t it? We cannot hurry the man upstairs back to life. What is your father’s name, Mrs. Hayes?”

“Thomas Francis Mooney.”

Did he react to the name? He was too experienced a man to show reaction, but some small change occurred, although she could not define it. “And where will you go from here in your search?” he asked.

“A place called Ballymahon in Donegal. I’ve learned that he was—or is—married to an artist who lives there, Edna O’Shea.”

He looked at the younger detective and repeated, “An artist named Edna O’Shea.”

Julie chanced his displeasure and turned her chair so that she could see both men. Carr was making a note of the name.

Fitzgerald smiled slightly at her move, a mere downward pull at the corners of his mouth. “I’d like you now to tell us in your own words, Mrs. Hayes, all you can about Edward Donavan. I understand you and your Irish colleague called him the Gray Man for your own convenience.” He reached to the chair behind him for a file. It was the transcript of the preliminary questioning by the local police. Julie had been told before she entered the room that her evidence would be recorded. It was one of the quiet activities going on in the background. She described her experience of the Gray Man from his appearance and disappearance in the lobby of the Greer Hotel, to the disco dance, to the National Gallery, to this hotel in Sligo, where she had confronted him yesterday afternoon and where he had denied having ever seen her before.

“Why did you not go to the police, Mrs. Hayes?”

“I intended to if he showed up in Donegal, where I’d be going alone. There was some doubt in my mind—Roy Irwin once suggested that
he
might be the one the Gray Man was interested in.”

“And it’s only natural that you would want to agree with him. Go on.”

Julie had the feeling of being led. The tone was of fatherly concern. Either that or he was setting a trap on the assumption that she was not telling the whole truth. “There was doubt in my mind, Inspector,” she said again, “and I did challenge him when we came face to face.”

“So you did. So you did.” And without pause: “Can we talk for a moment about the telephone call you received from New York at your Dublin hotel? Would there be anything in that to throw light on the situation?”

A soft zinger.
Soft
was a great word with the Irish. She could understand now why the Murder Team was delayed in arrival: they had done their Dublin homework before setting out. “The call was from my partner on the
New York Daily
.” She went on to explain the Garvy-McNally association and that she had come along to Sligo primarily to see Richard Garvy’s grandmother.

“The Far, Far Hills of Home,”
Fitzgerald mused aloud. “I’ve heard of it. Haven’t you, sergeant?” It was his first direct involvement of the other detective.

“I have, sir. There was a fracas in Dublin when it opened there. Stink bombs and the like. I thought myself it was very true to life.”

Fitzgerald permitted himself the downward smile, and the younger detective blushed and fell silent.

Fitzgerald then said to Julie: “Did you know Donavan gave up the hotel room he had booked so that you might have it?”

“No, sir. I was told only that a room had become available. Isn’t it strange he’d do that? When did he make the reservation in the first place?”

“A good question. And from where did he make it? All we know now is that he booked yesterday noon by telephone. And used credentials somewhat exaggerated to assure the booking.”

“But how would he have known I was coming to Sligo?”

“When you left Dublin, it was with Irwin, and every newspaperman in Ireland was due to arrive here last night.”

“Then the question I should have asked is why he gave up the room to me.”

“Has it not occurred to you that there were elements of protectiveness in Donavan’s attentions?”

“I have thought about it,” Julie said.

“And would there be anyone from whom you would need protection while in Ireland?”

Julie felt the pressure building. She took her time. “Not to my knowledge.”

“He would not have been in your employ?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m sure you agree by now that whatever Mr. Donavan’s mission may have been, it was on behalf of someone concerned with your activities. Or your person.” A quick switch: “Would you care for a cup of tea? A biscuit? Some sort of refreshment?”

“No, thank you.” Julie’s mouth was dry, but if she admitted to distress at the moment, he would pick up on it, and she was not ready to confide what she had run away from in New York. Certainly not when she did not see it as relevant. But if the Gray Man had been hired to protect her, she could think of only one person who might have hired him: Sweets Romano. What she hadn’t told these Homicide men was the part of her New York phone call in which Tim said someone, using Father Doyle’s name, had been trying to get her Dublin address. And Tim had referred them to Roy Irwin. It occurred to her then that the Gray Man was not much of a protector. Romano would have made a better choice. She felt justified in silence.

Fitzgerald said, “I think we must face the possibility that we are dealing here with two separate chains of events that may have somehow crossed each other. It may well be that Donavan’s death has nothing to do with you at all. It may derive entirely from his previous employment.”

“But he was killed in my room. Why there?” Julie said.

“He may have been followed and cornered there, and as to why he was there, you must remember he had gone to some lengths to see that you had the room. Would there be anything in those notebooks of yours that might have interested him?”

Julie shrugged. “I don’t think so.” But after going upstairs from dinner she had entered the day’s findings in her journal, accounts of her visit to Lady Graham-Kearney and to Gran Garvy, and she had noted the discovery at Greely’s of where Edna O’Shea was to be found. She had also entered the possibility that her father was not in Ballymahon, but that she was resolved to go there anyway. “It didn’t look at though my notebooks had been disturbed,” she said then, “but you might want to dust the covers for fingerprints.”

The chief of the Murder Team pursed his lips and sniffed. “I’m afraid we’ve already presumed right of trespass.” He then spoke to Detective Sergeant Carr. “Let’s have the reporter, Irwin, in now and see if we can be more specific about Donavan’s movements in Sligo. Is there nothing more in from Dublin?”

“Not yet, sir.”

Fitzgerald had the grace to explain to Julie: “Donavan, it seems, lived with a sister, who’s away on holiday at the moment—something she could only recently afford, according to neighbors. Isn’t that interesting?”

He was talking as much to himself as to her, she thought.

When Roy Irwin joined them, Fitzgerald offered the information that Donavan, in order to obtain the hotel room, had identified himself to the management as Special Branch.

“Wasn’t he invalided out of the service, sir?” Irwin asked.

The inspector superintendent looked at him sourly: he did not like to be anticipated. “Retired for whatever reason, he was taking an advantage to which he was not entitled, and a very odd one in view of the political mix that converged on this town last night. It suggests that his mission was in no way associable with politics—so far as he knew, let’s say—and he came having no sense of danger to himself from the employment in which he was engaged. Did he blunder into a nest of vipers? Very curious. We shall have to see what his service record shows and who was in town. Ach! Who wasn’t! I believe you’ve said the Provos were here, and this break-off group, the ONI. Yes, Mr. Irwin?”