Peeler (21 page)

‘Yes. I’m not sure if it’s worth it or even possible, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask Division about it.’

Smiling, Mathew-Pare said, ‘Anything to help, Sergeant. Anything at all.’

***

‘There,’ O’Keefe said, shutting down Mathew-Pare’s Ford. ‘From Cork to Ballycarleton in under two hours without a
shot fired or barricade crossed. I’ll put us in for a com-mendation, Keane, what do you think?’

It was obvious that Keane wasn’t sure if he was joking. To be fair to Keane, O’Keefe thought, it was something he rarely did any more. Not since the war. And it struck him that there was something about life, an axiom which held that the longer one lived, the less there was to laugh about. But then he thought of his mother and father downstairs in the evenings of his childhood, sometimes alone together, other times with friends or relations, as Peter and he lay awake in their shared bed listening to them laugh. The deep, rich bass of their father’s laugh. The light, sweet stutter of their mother’s and her feigned disapproval of some off-colour joke. Their parents’ laughter that had made him – them, as he was certain Peter felt it too – feel all the warmer and safer in their beds. But then again, he didn’t imagine that either of his parents laughed much now, since Peter’s death. So the axiom held – life as a continuum, a shifting through days and ever-increasing gravity and pain that was the lot of the living. And where did that leave the children who were poor and mistreated from birth? Girls like Janey Plunkett, whoring at the age of twelve or fourteen? A steeper slide towards adult misery. They died younger, so the slide started earlier?

O’Keefe shrugged off the run of morbid thought, cursing himself. Maybe it was the Jesuits who had ripened his mind for such gloom with their brutal logic and constant exhortations against the evil they believed was so rampant in the world. And how right they were, about evil. My poor auld fella, he thought. Sending me to the best school he could afford on a policeman’s wages and all I came away with was an icy reliance on the logic of pain. He smiled at Keane, letting him in on the joke that had now faded.

Keane smiled back. ‘Good thing, aye. Hands like claws so I have, with the cold. Couldn’t pull a trigger if I tried.’

It was nearly ten. Mathew-Pare, Eakins and Starkson had told Keane and O’Keefe to take the car back without them; they were going to paint Cork red. They had asked O’Keefe and Keane to join them, but there was something about Mathew-Pare’s offer that made O’Keefe think it was perfunctory. Not that he had any intention of joining them anyway. He wasn’t sure if he’d take to the way those three laid on the red paint. Besides, he had work to do.

His search of the rooms Deirdre Costelloe had shared with Anne Duffy had revealed little, but he had managed to find a cloth-covered notebook in a drawer that seemed to serve as Deirdre’s diary. He had given it a cursory read, sitting in the girls’ flat, and had seen nothing of interest in it, but then it had been impossible to concentrate with the girls’ landlord, Mr Timulty, standing over him. The man had insisted on being present while O’Keefe searched the room, as was his right. Since the raiding of houses in search of republican suspects had started in earnest over a year before, complaints against the army and the RIC for theft had shot up. Dublin Castle, in all its wisdom, had drafted regulations for searches, which they then made public, assuring the citizenry that a police constable would be present during all searches led by the army, and that a senior ranking constable would supervise at all police searches, to ensure the lower ranks weren’t filling their tunics with the family silver. The regulations allowed the owner of the home in question to be present during the search. O’Keefe had no gripe with the principle of the regulations, but the practicality was a different matter. After about five minutes, he was feeling some sympathy with Seamus Connors’ threat to shoot the landlord. When he had questioned the landlord, the man had refused to answer any questions, claiming that the police had never done him any favours, so why should he help them? O’Keefe had stared at the landlord until discomfort sent the man scuttling down the stairs. In any case, his search and questioning of Mr Timulty was quicker and less thorough than it might have been. Still, he had found the diary and taken it away.

Now he and Keane made their way across the yard, boots scuffing the cobbles, breath billowing in the night air. Squares of light showed through the firing slits in the shuttered windows. Trapped inside for days on end, most of the men had come to hate the barracks, the Tans in particular. ‘Like a bloody prison, innit?’ O’Keefe had heard one of them say. Finch, he thought it was – a man who probably belonged in prison. And it was like a jail in some ways. These men had no experience of barracks life before the Troubles. Back then – it seemed a lifetime ago – an RIC barracks could be a happy, sociable place, depending on the officer or sergeant in charge. People from the town, while not entirely comfortable within its walls, would come to have their forms read for them and signed if they couldn’t read or write. They were often offered tea while the sergeant – citizens rarely trusted anyone of lower rank than a sergeant with personal or legal affairs – read them letters from their sons and husbands at the Front, or the forms for claiming death pensions when these sons and husbands were killed.

In O’Keefe’s first barracks, in Navan, County Meath, there was an old bachelor farmer who would bring the
Meath Chronicle
to the barracks once a week and ask for O’Keefe to read the Gaelic football and soccer results to him. He always asked for him personally, telling the barracks sergeant that O’Keefe had the voice of a schoolmaster. He told O’Keefe once that his sister, who shared the farm with him, could read, but that the GAA and the soccer was ‘man’s business’ and so he preferred Constable O’Keefe to read it to him. And every Christmas a pint bottle of the bachelor’s home-distilled poitín would find its way into O’Keefe’s possession. O’Keefe believed the farmer also spared a bottle for the head constable. Finer drink he’d rarely drunk and unsurprisingly the old man’s still was never raided.

All this had changed. Gone forever, O’Keefe imagined. Still, on a cold night, even behind steel shutters and rolls of concertina wire, there was always a pot of tea and a warm fire going in the barracks.

As they entered through the rear door, O’Keefe said to Keane, ‘Go up and tell Jim … Sergeant Daly, to take you off the patrol roster for tonight and the rest of the week. You’ve been hard at it and I could use you for the next couple of days.’

Keane beamed. His face was bright red from the drive and his hands were smeared with grime from the starter crank on the Ford, but his smile was bright enough to light up a building. He took off his cap, revealing that his hair was pressed awkwardly against his head, making him look more like a schoolboy than a police constable. ‘Are you sure, Sergeant? I can do my lates and work with you in the days.’

‘No, I need you fresh. Fall in for inspection and drill, and take school in the morning with the rest of the lads. Then change back into mufti and report to me.’

Keane started down the steps, paused and looked back.

‘Something else, Keane?’

‘Yes, Sergeant. I was wondering …’

‘Spit it out, Keane. My belly thinks my throat’s been cut with the hunger.’

‘Well, since you said I’d be working in my civvies …’

O’Keefe nodded.

‘Do you think there’s any chance of me getting the Working in Plain Clothes Allowance? Fierce hard on the rags, working plain clothes is, Sergeant, so it’s said.’

O’Keefe stopped himself from smiling. Jesus, what Jim and a few others hadn’t started with their union organising. Now, even young cons like Keane, green as grass on the job, were looking for
per diems
and allowances. When O’Keefe was Keane’s age, he would never have dreamed of asking his sergeant for the Plain Clothes Allowance, although there had been times when he had been entitled to it.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

The young constable smiled his thanks and said something in Irish.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s a thing my mother always said. It means:
If you want, you must start by asking
.’

‘Put the kettle on, would you Constable?’ O’Keefe said, remembering a phrase his policeman father had liked to say to him and his brother when they were young:
Want with one hand, shite in the other, see which fills up first.
He imagined it would have sounded better in Irish.

In his office O’Keefe shrugged off his trenchcoat and stabbed at the ashy turf embers in the grate. He crouched and warmed his hands in the faint glow, thinking of the welcoming fire in the hearth of Katherine Sheehan’s house. And then he remembered her husband beside the fire. There but for the grace of God …

His stomach growled and he realised he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, his only nourishment being the two large bottles of stout and the short whiskeys in Sutton’s tavern. He thought of heading down to forage for a meal but then reconsidered, wearied by the idea of having to endure the banter of the barracks kitchen. He could picture Keane gossiping away with his Tan friend, Heatherfield – the table tennis ambassador – recounting Eakins’ beating of the doorman at the brothel and the beautiful young whore in the hallway of Madam Grace’s. Or maybe he was underestimating Keane and the young lad was the soul of discretion. Still, he should have told the young constable to keep a lid on things.

To hell with it. He took the quarter bottle of the army surgeon’s black-market Bushmills from his desk drawer and poured himself a glass. He shook a Player from the dented tin on his desk and lit up. The whiskey and smoke dampened his hunger, settled his nerves. Food could wait. Now, two days after receiving it, he took out the letter from his sister and read it.

Dear brother,

I hope this letter finds you well and in good health. Forgive me for not writing sooner. Things have been so busy and you surely heard what happened here, with the sacking of the town by Crown forces.

‘Crown forces’? Irritation rose in O’Keefe. When, exactly, Sally, did you start using the language of the republican Press in your letters to your brother, a member of the ‘Crown forces’. He read on.

In a strange way, those awful events have much to do with what I must tell you. I had hoped this would be joyous news, for it is to me a joyous announcement. But it is tinged with sadness. I am to be married, Seánín. To a fine man from a fine family, the Gilshannons …

O’Keefe knew the family vaguely from his past visits to see his sister in Balbriggan. One or other of the many Gilshannon lads were forever offering help to Sally, weeding the garden, digging up spuds from the small plot that came with the teacher’s house, bringing eggs from their mother’s hens. They were handsome boys – men, he realised now. He wondered which of the brothers had managed to win his sister’s heart.

… but in great sadness, dear brother, I must ask that you not attend the wedding. Colm’s family have suffered greatly at the hands of the police and are of a mind that they …

O’Keefe noted the ‘they’ and read ‘you’.

… have outstayed their welcome in an Ireland striving to hold itself as an independent and proud sovereign nation. Perhaps if you were to leave the police you could come, as I want nothing more than for my brother to be with me on the day I marry. Please, Seánín, don’t think me cruel.

He tossed the letter onto the desk and threw his cigarette into the fireplace.
Cruel?
What kind of family are you marrying into, he thought, wondering then if he could access the file on the Gilshannons that DI Masterson had. Bitterness filled him. He took a long drink of whiskey. There was a knock on the door.

‘It’s open.’

Old Reilly put his head around the door. ‘Drinking alone, Sergeant O’Keefe? In my day, any drinking at all would get you docked by the Head. Drinking alone, though? Not done, no.’

Someone had once told O’Keefe that the word ‘chat’ had come from the trench slang for louse. Buddies would comb the nits and lice out of each other’s hair in the hours between shelling, all the while nattering away. Chatting. O’Keefe wondered how obvious it looked that he didn’t want to chat. Reilly appeared oblivious, however, and entered the office. O’Keefe scratched his head reflexively and wondered how to get rid of him.

‘Just thinking about the case, Reilly. Sure, y’know yerself, a man needs a bit of quiet now and again.’

Reilly took this as an invitation and sat down in Daly’s chair, leaning back, making himself at home. Wind rattled the steel shutters and a draught snaked its way through a gap in the window frame.

‘Fierce night all the same. No rain though, thank God,’ Reilly said, eyeing the bottle on the desk.

O’Keefe flipped up the collar of his suit jacket against the draught and resigned himself. ‘Has the coal lorry come today?’ The army now supplied RIC barracks with coal.

‘Did you order coal?’

Frowning, O’Keefe tried to remember. Maybe Jim had ordered it. More likely he hadn’t. He shrugged and leaned forward, took a second glass from his desk and passed it over to Reilly. ‘Help yourself.’

He did, a generous portion. As O’Keefe got up and checked the coal scuttle, he wondered was the old man naturally avaricious or did a retired police constable’s pension not stretch to good whiskey. If it was the latter, he felt a touch guilty. Reilly was his father’s age, give or take a few years. He was from Louth or Monaghan, O’Keefe couldn’t remember which, but had been barracked in West Cork for most of his days. O’Keefe had no idea what kind of constable he had been and didn’t much care one way or the other. The coal scuttle was empty and he returned to his chair.

‘How come you never went home when you retired, Reilly?’

The man took a gulp of whiskey and let it slide down his throat, relishing it as if he was remembering the taste from some fine day in the past.

‘Never had no mind to. Bought a plot of land near Upton and was going to farm it, so I was.’