Peeler (23 page)

‘Indeed. You’ve got the book down have you, Sergeant?’ Masterson glanced over at his friend. ‘Didn’t I tell you O’Keefe was the man for the job, Owen?’

O’Keefe said, ‘About the exhumation, sir.’

‘All right, Sergeant. I’ll do my best. I’ll contact the County Inspector. But you realise, of course, that he has the final say on it. I suggest you half-sheet your reasons and I’ll pass them up. After that …’ The DI held out his hands.

‘Thank you, sir. Is there anything else?’

‘The letter, Walter. You forgot to show the Sergeant the letter,’ the Colonel interjected.

‘Sir?’

The DI said, ‘Ah, how could I forget? One of the reasons I called you in.’ He produced a letter from inside a cardboard file marked with a red ink ‘Classified’ stamp and handed it to O’Keefe. Colonel Prentice scrutinised him as he read.

‘We got it in a raid in Cork,’ Prentice said, ‘three days ago. I brought it here myself when I heard of your murder, Sergeant.’

‘Can I have a transcription of this, sir?’ O’Keefe directed his question to Masterson but the Colonel answered.

‘Certainly. For the murder book, eh? Get your batman to type up a transcription there, won’t you Walter?’

‘On your desk later this evening. Constable Senior is out on patrol at the moment. When he comes back, I’ll have him tap it out for you, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe looked up from the letter. ‘Senior’s on patrol, sir?’

Masterson looked as amused as O’Keefe was puzzled by the fact. ‘He insisted. Said everyone needed to do his part fighting republican terror.’

Prentice nodded. ‘Damn right, too. If the bastards in Whitehall would do their part and declare proper martial law on this godforsaken country, the insurrection would be over in days. No stomach for it, I tell you. No iron at all.’

‘Will there be anything else, sir?’

The DI rose and indicated the door. ‘Catch him, Sergeant. That’s all we ask.’

***

O’Keefe read the letter again, seated at his desk.

A cara, Michéal,

It is with the greatest urgency I appeal to your leadership in the matter of women spies. Concern has been expressed by Volunteers as to the rectitude of their execution. There is one case in particular, originating in your own part of the world, which has caused particular concern among committed officers and men. And yet, certainly the act shows a passionate commitment to our cause among units in West Cork and could serve to deter fraternisation with the enemy among women so inclined. We are certain there have been cases of information being passed from women in the towns and city to soldiers which has been used to effect searches and, in a few known cases, the arrest of Volunteers and the capture of arms and documents. The possible deterrent effect such trial and execution of women spies may have, however, must be weighed against the reaction in the British and Irish Press.

Thus, your counsel is required forthwith. Shall we say (a) the execution of women spies is forbidden and that this woman in Cork, of whom I dare say you will soon hear a great deal, was not killed by the IRA? Or, (b) this woman was killed in contravention of orders by the IRA and that the woman was a victim of common murder committed by member(s) of the Crown forces? Or (c) that this woman and others who may require similar sanction was arrested, tried and executed by the IRA as a traitor to her nation and people?

Awaiting your instructions. As always, I wish you luck in the gruelling task you have so willingly borne on behalf of the people of Ireland.

Mise le meas,

Erskine Childers, Dáil Director of Publicity

It
had
to refer to the case, O’Keefe thought. A surge of optimism washed through his tired mind. IRA brass were worried. And if they were worried at the top of the IRA, it meant that the local Volunteers who may have committed the murder would be twice as scared. This meant that he now had some leverage. Of course, it pointed him back to Seamus Connors. Connors’ motive might not have been strictly ‘for the cause’, but then again maybe he had got sanction. Or maybe not. Childers to Collins? Heavy boys to be crossing if they disapproved of your means and methods.

O’Keefe was well aware that IRA units around Ireland were given a degree of independence unusual in conventional armies, but still there were actions that were punishable. And rumours abounded of Volunteers who had fallen foul of Collins and HQ staff in Dublin. Rumours of men from Collins’ own active Squad who had been sent into country towns to plug some disobedient Shinner, the Squad men disguised in RIC greatcoats or British army uniforms. The ‘removal’ of recalcitrant IRA members gussied up to look like the work of Crown assassin squads. Rumours only, but in a war like this one, rumours carried the force of truth. There were so many rival hit squads in the country that sometimes it was impossible to tell who had killed whom and for what reason. Nonetheless, no one deserved to die like Deirdre Costelloe. There was something so cynical about the letter. To seek to deny involvement in the killing seemed to O’Keefe to be an admission that the IRA
had
committed the murder; equally, the suggestion that the murder be framed as the work of soldiers or police. But the most frightening thing to him was the possibility that this type of killing could be considered as a just punishment for a traitor. As he had said to Mathew-Pare, there were rules to this conflict and it was incumbent upon them to figure out what they were. He wondered now: was he reading the IRA’s attempt to draft the rule book? And was there anywhere a similar document in the British army archives that authorised the murder, mutilation and rape of female combatants and spies? He wouldn’t bet against it.

He scanned through the letter a final time and then filed it in the murder book, less optimistic than he had been half-an-hour before. In itself, the missive was proof of nothing. It was hearsay or speculative, circumstantial evidence of IRA involvement.

His brain was tired and he pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. Nothing was ever simple. Nothing. The unpopular Rising of Easter 1916 turned into an heroic struggle overnight by the act of executing James Connolly, wounded and tied to a chair, at Kilmainham Gaol. Hundreds of thousands of obedient soldiers lying unprotesting in trenches under a never-ending rain of shells, then sent over the top to their deaths by men worthy of neither love nor respect. Obedient soldiers like himself, his brother Peter, wading unprotesting headlong into the maelstrom of Turkish machine-gun bullets. A young woman stripped and butchered and laid out on a hillside. A young girl dead in an alleyway, her life not worth the hours it would take to investigate. None of it made sense and O’Keefe wondered if it ever would.

He poured himself a large measure of Bushmills and drank.

***

Mathew-Pare and his two men sat Davey Noonan in a hard-back chair at a wooden table in a room with lead-lined walls, deep within in the former quayside meat-packing warehouse rented by 6th Division Army Intelligence.

Noonan was shaking. He sniffed and winced. His nose had been broken. Mathew-Pare lifted his blindfold and Noonan blinked as his eyes adjusted to the bright overhead light. A refrigeration unit hummed from another room.

The pimp recognised his interrogator. The English bastard from earlier that evening. The one who had sat smiling while the Peeler questioned him. He cursed himself now for not having spotted him for what he was. All the Peeler’s talk about crushing his monkey nuts when here, now, he was talking to the organ grinder. Still, he had been in the business long enough to know that there was always a way out of a dodgy spot. Throw the monkey some nuts. Throw the grinder something shiny.

‘Yis can take off the goggles, lads,’ Noonan said. ‘We can settle this like the gentlemen we are.’

Mathew-Pare laughed, took off his motorcycle goggles, stuffed them in his pocket and lit a cigarette. ‘Hear that, boys? Mr Noonan has said we can remove our goggles.’

Starkson and Eakins removed their goggles. Eakins took a chair outside the halo of light cast by the single hanging bulb while Starkson joined his boss at the table. Mathew-Pare sucked hard on his cigarette and without preamble held it close to Noonan’s left eye. ‘I’ll start with your left. Then I’ll do your right, Mr Noonan.’

Fear contorted his features and Noonan turned his head away from the glowing ember.

‘Jaysus fuck, lads. What do yis need know? Yis only need ask, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Who rents the girls for the parties?’ Mathew-Pare withdrew the cigarette and took a long, relaxed drag.

Calmed by this, Noonan considered the question. ‘Are yis gonna plug him? ’Cause if you don’t, there’s no fuckin’ difference between what ye could do to me and what that mad fella he has working for him would do. Sure, he finds out I told yis and I’m as good as dead.’

‘You’ll be taken care of, Mr Noonan.’ Mathew-Pare offer-ed the pimp a cigarette and lit it for him. ‘A name, please.’

Noonan sighed with relief, looking up eagerly at Mathew-Pare. He gave them a name. ‘Gentleman-fella. Doesn’t even use the girls himself. Hires them for his pals in his gentleman’s mob is all. Lives in Montenotte. And his friend, his man – Bill something – lives there with him. Acts queer for yer man. Does anything the boss says. Puts the fear of God in me, I’m tellin’ yis, that Bill fella.’

‘And the girls he brought to the parties?’

‘I told yis the truth on that. Two of ’em gone away, one dead, and Bella. All right, all right, I neglected to mention Bella. She’s back at the shop. You’re not gonna mark her face, are yis? She’ll be worth fuck all to me with a marked face.’

He looked at Mathew-Pare and then at Starkson. Mathew-Pare stubbed out his cigarette on the scarred wooden table. Noonan swelled with confidence, dragging on his own smoke. ‘Yis know I can work for you lads, if yis need ears. Loads of all sorts use my shop. IRA lads, priests, your lot. I scratch yer bollocks, yis scratch mine, right?’

Eakins stood up from his chair and stepped out of the shadows. Mathew-Pare and Starkson stepped back.

‘That’s a very generous offer, Mr Noonan.’

‘I’m telling yis, I can …’

Even if there were passers-by – so long past curfew, so far down the quays – the shot would have sounded like a slammed door inside the darkened warehouse. They would have taken no notice.

***

In the dream, his brother Peter clutches his hand, smiling, pulling him forward. They are on the
River Clyde
, though the deck is elongated, an impossible distance to the pontoon bridge that will take them to shore. In the dream, the one he knows by heart but is powerless to stop, his legs are weighed down by the dread of what is coming and yet he moves forward, along the deck of the ship. He can make no sound, pass no word of warning to his brother. There are men behind him, more in front, all heavy-stepping into the gnashing teeth of Turkish bullets. Men moving forward, knowing but still moving, like cattle down the chute in an abattoir. The Turkish machine-gun fire beats distant and oddly regular, like a snare drum or blacksmith’s hammer. Peter smiles and says, ‘Come on, Seán, for the sake of Jesus. You’re stalling, man.’

Now he is in the water, the weight of his pack dragging him under. Something, someone grabs his arm and tries to pull him down into the rust-coloured foam. Peter. He cannot see his face, but he knows it is his brother. He lashes out, kicks him away.

‘It’s me, boy! Jesus, go easy.’

A large hand slapped his cheek, the blow exploding O’Keefe into consciousness. He opened his eyes.

Constable Logan had a forearm across O’Keefe’s chest, pinning him to the bed.

‘I’m awake, Logan.’

The constable released him and O’Keefe sat up. He lifted his watch from the empty bully beef crate that served as a bedside table. It was a quarter past two in the morning. He had been asleep for no more than an hour.

Logan relaxed and lifted his pipe from where he had set it on the crate. He struck and held a match to the bowl and fragrant smoke filled the room. ‘I’d hate to be your missus, Seán. You’d surely kill her in your sleep.’

‘I’d kill you awake if you were my missus, Logan.’

The older man chuckled. ‘Much too good for the likes of you, filthy jackeen git. A good country girl like myself would never have you.’

O’Keefe smiled, the terror of his dream ebbing in the comforting presence of the old con.

‘Sorry to wake you, young Seánín, only you’re wanted on the blower.’

O’Keefe rubbed his eyes and pulled on his shirt without buttoning it. ‘Who is it?’

‘Didn’t say, only that he’d speak to you and nobody else and to be quick about it. Pushy fecker. Must be brass.’

The barracks reception room was to the left of the front door. O’Keefe imagined it had once been the parlour, the wife’s best room, used only when the parish priest visited, or maybe when the eldest son brought a girl from a good family back to the house for the first time. A girl from a family with a bit of land. Now the room was bisected by a long counter and the walls papered with wanted posters, yellowing with age, some of the suspects long since dead or captured, others still at large. There were ordnance survey maps of the local area, as well as a locked gun rack holding six Enfield carbines. A photograph of the King hung over the fireplace. Like the rest of the barracks, reception had fallen into a state of shabbiness that would never have been tolerated in the past. Dust accumulated in the corners, ash spilling out of the hearth.

O’Keefe took a seat at the desk behind the counter and picked up the phone. Logan moved his chair closer to the fire and made a show of reading his newspaper.

‘Sergeant O’Keefe speaking.’

The voice on the line had a strong West Cork accent. ‘Twenty minutes,’ the caller said. ‘The Kinsale–Toureen crossroads. Come alone. And our friend says bring the photographs.’

O’Keefe was wide awake. ‘Do you have the –’

‘Bring the photographs. Come alone. You’ll be watched. If we see anybody leave that barracks other than you in the next half hour, you’ve just had your last sleep, Sergeant.’