Peeler (11 page)

It was nearly a day’s pay for the average Peeler. The true cost of the bottle was a quarter of the price. The hotelier smiled and left to get the whiskey.

Over the past months, the hotel had developed into a kind of free zone that welcomed both sides in the conflict. The RIC men and soldiers used the residents’ bar; IRA men and their political representatives in Sinn Féin, the main lounge. There had never been any trouble in the hotel and O’Keefe didn’t expect there ever would be. He explained this to Wells as Murphy was fetching the bottle. Murphy returned and enquired after their health and welfare as he poured out two glasses of the Bushmills, commenting on the weather and the football from England. O’Keefe imagined he did the same with the local boys out front, substituting some comment about the weekend’s Gaelic matches for the soccer.

Wells gulped his whiskey and put his glass back down on the bar, taking his billfold from inside his overcoat. O’Keefe took out his own and his money was halfway to the bar when Wells handed the publican his price.

Murphy took the money and wedged it into a pocket of his waistcoat. ‘Now, gentlemen, I’ll leave you to your bottle. It’s black with people out front it is.’

O’Keefe nodded and tipped his glass to the publican.

Wells spoke up. ‘Thank you, Mr Murphy. One question, if you don’t mind?’

‘Certainly not, sir.’ He smiled benignly.

‘The Bushmills, Mr Murphy. Do you sell much of it in the lounge?’

Murphy, still smiling, replied, ‘Of course, sir. A most popular whiskey, Bushmills. The boys would hardly do without it, would they?’ He left through the swing doors.

Wells took another drink, then turned to O’Keefe. ‘I’m beginning, I think, to understand your country a bit better, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe raised his glass, ‘To my country, Major, a bit better.’

The surgeon laughed and drank, and O’Keefe did the same. O’Keefe liked the man. He seemed adaptable, non-judgemental.

‘One more question, Sergeant – forgive me.’

O’Keefe nodded for him to continue.

‘If you know there are active IRA men in the front bar, Sergeant, why don’t you simply arrest them?’

O’Keefe lit a cigarette from a crushed box of Players’ Navy Cut. Exhaling, he said, ‘If I did that, who’d Murphy sell his bootleg Bushmills to?’

Wells laughed. ‘Seriously though, why don’t you?’

‘Me personally?’

‘No, but surely there are only so many of them. Why doesn’t the RIC and the army simply arrest them all, lock them up and ship them off to their cousins in America or some other bloody place?’

‘There’s many who’d like to, believe me. Lock up every Irishman of fighting age. It would be one way of dealing with the problem. But
your
countrymen wouldn’t stand for it. Imagine the letters pages to the
Manchester Guardian
and
The
Times
: citizens of the Crown arrested on mere suspicion of being involved in insurrection. The public wouldn’t tolerate it because they’d know it could be themselves next. The army interning every miner, dockworker or railwayman who went on strike or who was suspected of being a union member? They find the curfews and courts-martial of the Restoration of Order Act bad enough as it is, and I can’t say I disagree. ’

‘But this is a different situation to striking miners, Sergeant. This is a war …’

‘It is? Do you see a war on, Major? I don’t. I see what the readers of the morning papers see. I see British citizens under curfew, arrested and placed under courts-martial, citizens like any other in England, Scotland or Wales. Citizens assumed to be innocent until proven guilty and a free Press to keep an eye on it all. The fellas on that side of the wall can’t be arrested because the good people of England wouldn’t stand for it.’

The surgeon thought it over for a minute. ‘Unless you suspect they’ve done something, committed a crime?’

‘Of course then we can arrest them. Readers of
The
Times
are against crime as a rule. Law and order types. Crime won’t do, sure it won’t?’

‘Something tells me it’s not just the breakfast readers of the British Press who restrain you from putting bracelets on the lot of them. You seem different to the average head-breaker.’

‘More average than you might think, Major. And hardly any different from any of those men in the front bar but for the uniform. I want an independent Ireland the same as them. I just think there’s a right and wrong way to go about getting it, that’s all.’

‘And a right and wrong way of preventing it as well?’

O’Keefe laughed. ‘It’s a steady wage and don’t all the lovely schoolteachers want a fine Peeler for a husband?’

Wells laughed with him. ‘And will you be allowed to arrest the killer of the young woman I opened up today?’

O’Keefe looked at him, the laughter gone. ‘Sure, why wouldn’t I be?’

The surgeon shrugged and drank again before speaking. ‘Then I suggest, Sergeant, that you do your best to find the man who killed her. Because if you don’t, he’ll do it again.’

‘Like he’s done it before?’

‘Just like that, Sergeant. Just like that.’

A silence settled over them. After some time O’Keefe asked, ‘Do you think she was killed because she was an informer?’

‘Not my job, the why of it.’

‘As you said, “only the how of it”. But I’m asking you, in your own opinion.’

The surgeon took time to light his pipe, then poured himself and O’Keefe more whiskey. ‘If she was executed for political reasons, why bother tarring and feathering her after she was dead? And leaving her on the hillside?’

It was O’Keefe’s turn to shrug. ‘A warning to others maybe? To further terrorise the locals?’

‘Is it necessary to terrorise them any more? A bullet and a body left in a ditch would do the same. Nobody talks these days anyway. This is a very popular insurrection, Sergeant. Surely you know that. Leaving the girl on the hillside like that would be excessive to say the least. It would cause the people of the area, who already, for the most part, support the IRA, to wonder what kind of boys they’d be supporting who could do such a thing to a young woman.’

‘You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘And you’re forgetting one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That whoever did it took a lot of care to get it just right. That in my opinion – personal, you understand, not medical opinion – ’

‘Yes.’

‘In my opinion, the body was the point of the killing – the possessing of it. The way the feathers were arranged, the way the body was laid out on the hill. Just think what kind of man it would take to do those things to the girl and then spend so much time with the body afterwards. Bad men, like your District Inspector imagines? A bad
man
, most likely. And no local cornerboy, I suspect. Political killing?’ Wells shrugged again and sipped some more. His words were beginning to slur. ‘All politics are personal, Sergeant. Don’t forget that.’

O’Keefe swallowed the last of his second glass. ‘I won’t.’

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s everywhere, politics. Murder is its own form of politics.’

Wells was losing O’Keefe now, the several whiskeys taking hold of him. A young army Private in Essex colours entered the bar and approached them.

‘Major Wells sir, you’re needed right away. We’ve a Crossley out front.’

‘Needed for what? What could possibly be the matter at this time …’

‘There’s been an ambush sir, up the Macroom road. Near a place called Kilmichael. Loads dead, sir.’

‘Loads?’

‘Loads of ours, sir. Shot to ribbons, so the word is.’

Wells stood up and pulled his overcoat over his shoulders. ‘Politics, Sergeant, remember that,’ he said, placing a steadying hand on O’Keefe’s shoulder. ‘Murder is an extension of politics by other means – someone said that, or something like it.’ And then he left, weaving a little as he followed the Private out of the bar.

O’Keefe poured himself one last glass of whiskey, replaced the cork and slipped the bottle into the pocket of his trenchcoat. There was a quarter of the bottle left. His mind drifted to Katherine Sheehan and how she too had been violated, mutilated. Bad men, the surgeon had said. One man, most likely. A bad man. O’Keefe would remember.

***

Politics.

It was half-past eight that same Sunday evening when O’Keefe arrived at the Ryan house. After leaving the hotel, he’d stopped at the back door of Casey’s pub and undertaker’s and convinced Casey to tend to the body of the young woman back at the barracks. He would need photographs of the victim’s face that showed a likeness to life. The boycott meant the undertaker couldn’t minister to the body of an alleged informer openly, and so O’Keefe had smuggled Casey into the barracks, his hat down, collar up. Casey would be paid for his work, but he did it more as a favour to O’Keefe, who had pulled the undertaker’s son out of more than one scrape before the war. The dead needed tending and O’Keefe was well aware that he and Casey served the same master.

Now he was calling in another favour. He expected more resistance to this one.

‘Come in, Sergeant. Come in. Nothing wrong I hope?’

Councillor Ryan’s wife was a short, nervous woman. She wore her hair pulled back so tightly, it struck O’Keefe as more punishment than style. He assured her that there was no problem.

‘A social call then?’ she asked, leading him down the hallway of the house she and her husband, Sinn Féin Councillor Edward Ryan, had inherited from her father, along with a large creamery and dairy herd. Other than Murphy in the hotel, the Ryans were the only real wealth in Ballycarleton and it had been a natural move for Edward to enter county politics. He had been elected in the November 1919 local government elections, where Sinn Féin had taken an overwhelming majority of the seats. O’Keefe suspected that the Councillor’s republicanism was a convenient sham, but Ryan – as Daly had once remarked – was a man with a knack for knowing which side his bread was buttered on, him being a dairyman after all.

O’Keefe also reckoned that if a fella like Ryan knew that Sinn Féin was the real future of Ireland, then the King could have spared himself the trouble and signed off on a republic right then. It was men like Ryan – who married into money and then made more – who told anyone who asked all they needed to know about the future of Ireland. The men with the money rarely got things wrong, O’Keefe believed.

Except once, when Ryan had got it badly wrong – proving to O’Keefe at the time that men with money might be sharper about most things, but that they were as dull as any man when it came to the fairer sex. And he half thought Ryan’s wife knew this as well as anyone. O’Keefe pitied her a little.

The Ryan’s parlour was stiflingly warm, a coal fire crackling brightly, lace collars on the backs of stuffed, upholstered chairs. One of Ryan’s daughters, a girl of sixteen or so, was playing a melody on an upright piano. O’Keefe recognised the tune: Thomas Moore’s ‘The Last Rose of Summer’. It was a most popular piece in Ireland and he remembered his mother singing it when he was a child. Somehow, he couldn’t picture his mother singing it now, after all that had passed since then.

Ryan sat with his eyes closed, the
Cork Examiner
draped across his lap, a contented smile on his lips. O’Keefe wondered what he was dreaming about and then decided he would rather not know.

‘Edward, you’ve someone to see you.’

The girl stopped playing and looked up at O’Keefe. She was pretty in a conventional way but, like her mother, wore her hair drawn severely back from her forehead. She smiled at him and O’Keefe smiled back, unable to avoid the notion that the young woman on the butcher’s table back at the barracks was only a few years older than this one.

Ryan sat forward in his chair and blinked. There was a look of momentary panic on his face and just as quickly it was gone, buried behind a politician’s smile that was buttressed by two well-fed chins spilling over a starchy white collar. He stood up, his hand extended. This man, O’Keefe had to remind himself, was once a small dairy farmer.

‘Sergeant O’Keefe. To what do I owe the pleasure? Fierce damp aul’ night to be out in!’

‘Could be worse, Councillor. You’re looking well.’

Ryan threw back his head and laughed, patting his large belly. ‘Public office suits me, Sergeant. That and Lizzie’s stews.’

His wife chipped in now, a brittle smile on her face. ‘Sure, Sergeant, he’d eat four men’s share and then ask when dinner was!’

The three Ryans laughed and O’Keefe wondered, as he conjured up a polite smile, what kind of life the daughter must lead, amidst all the bluster and money. O’Keefe allowed Ryan to guide him out of the parlour and further down the hall to his office. He heard the Councillor’s wife calling out that she would bring tea, but Ryan told her not to bother.

‘I think it’s late enough for the real stuff, don’t you, Sergeant?’ Ryan closed the door to the office and indicated a chair in front of his desk. The room was as stuffy as the parlour, the dying embers of a fire in the grate still giving off heat. Shelves full of creamery accounts books and animal husbandry manuals lined the walls. Ryan’s desk, with papers neatly aligned and a tall, thick accounts book open to a page of figures in ruled columns was set before a window overlooking the darkened farmyard and dairy. To the left of this was a smaller desk, piled high with papers, an overflowing ashtray, invoice sheets, receipts and more ledgers. Ryan saw O’Keefe looking at the desk and picked up the ashtray, emptying it into the fireplace. He stirred the embers with an iron poker.

‘Colbin,’ he said, pointing to the desk beside his. ‘My accounts man. Manners of a tinker, but a damn fine bookkeeper. Those bloody Churchman’s he smokes – stink like Satan left the doors to Hell open, boy. He’s a good man, though. Indispensable. The business suffered greatly when he was away.’

Colbin, O’Keefe remembered, had been ‘away’ in Mount-joy Prison, lifted in Crossbarry with a stolen Enfield in one of the creamery trucks. He had been released in April when Dublin Castle, in its wisdom, had decided it would be a good idea to free one hundred and twenty republican prisoners because a number of them had decided to stop eating their porridge. It was just one of the many things the Castle had done to let Peelers know how low down they stood in the scheme of things. The RIC locked up the bastards, took bullets in the head for their troubles, while the government let the same bastards go again because they were afraid of the stir in the Press if some of them lost a few stone on hunger strike.