Peeler (25 page)

‘What’s that?’

‘I said them very same words to that fool Ryan, I did.’

‘Clever man, you are.’

‘Not clever enough to ask him could I plug you if you didn’t bring them. Ryan, see, he thought you’d keep your end of the bargain. He thought, down under the arm-twisting, there was something of the decent skin about you, Sergeant.’

‘Maybe we kept our end of the bargain seven years ago. Burned the prints back when we said we would.’

‘Maybe you did, but I doubt it.’

‘You’ll never know though, will ye? There’s always a chance I’ve left them to be sent on to Mrs Ryan if I get shot. Sure, the creamery is still in her name, I hear.’

‘Better mind yourself then, Sergeant.’

‘Councillor Ryan should mind I do.’

Mushroom cap laughed and signalled the man behind O’Keefe to lower the gun from his back. He stepped over to O’Keefe and put an arm around his shoulders, escorting him back to the entrance of the cave. ‘What’s in those photos anyway, Sergeant, just between yourself and myself?’

O’Keefe stopped, as if considering the question. ‘Just between the two of us?’

The man nodded, eyes shining with anticipation.

‘Ah now, what kind of man would I be, describing the private …’ O’Keefe paused, ‘peculiarities of our democrati-cally elected representatives?’

The Volunteer laughed again. ‘It’d be a grand shame to have to plug you, boy. You’re a gas man.’

‘Be a grand shame for Councillor Ryan.’

There was a smile in the Volunteer’s eyes. ‘Democracy’s a queer thing, Sergeant. People are fierce fickle. There might come a time when it won’t matter any more what Ryan sticks his mickey into or who sees the pictures.’

‘Time will tell.’ O’Keefe nodded over at the Skelly brothers. ‘What’ll happen to those two?’

The Volunteer followed O’Keefe’s gaze and the smile in his eyes faded. ‘Them two’ll be grand. Don’t you worry yourself about them two soft bastards, Sergeant.’

***

After the Peeler had gone, Liam Farrell took the Peter the Painter in his hand. Watched his own shadow on the cave wall as if he were watching another person altogether – a stranger with a shadow gun. He hefted it, noting the boxy shape, the long thin barrel. ‘Peter’ had been an anarchist painter who had shot a policeman in London with the same type of Mauser pistol during a bank robbery some years before, hence the gun’s common name. There was a popular children’s rhyme that followed the event and it came to him now.
Peter the Painter, paint your head red …

‘Is it loaded?’

Eamonn Halloran pulled the white handkerchief from his face and stuck it in his pocket. ‘Wouldn’t be much use if it wasn’t.’

One of the Volunteers said, ‘He could club the fuckers to death with it, sure.’

The younger Skelly brother, Mutton, was crying. The older brother stared at the shadows on the cave wall. He cleared his throat occasionally and spat a mixture of blood and phlegm onto the packed earth floor.

Taking a watch on a broken chain from his pocket, Halloran said, ‘Tonight, boy. Sorry …
sir
. We need to get a move on while the country’s still in darkness.’

Farrell caught the barb.
Sir
. He was nominally in charge of this interrogation, although he’d known nothing of it until Halloran and his men had called for him at McGowan’s that evening. He was the Intelligence Officer. It was his investigation, and he had done his part, he told himself. He had questioned these two lads and had been satisfied that they’d had nothing to do with the body on the hillside. As for the egg woman, they’d got carried away. They were a foul lot, the Skellys, and these two should never have been used by the IRA for anything at all. But did they deserve to die for it?

‘I still don’t see why …’

Halloran said, ‘Farrell, I’ve told you, and I’ll not tell you again: why in the name of sweet fuck do you think that grasping bastard was cut loose out of Millstreet? You heard the Peeler. They’ve enough paper on the boy to bury him and yet four days inside and he’s out? Use the loaf, boy, and if that don’t work, use the nose and smell the rat.’

The older Skelly brother looked over at them. ‘I’m no rat.’ But he said it without conviction, as if he had learned some time in his life that this was what – as an Irishman or a lifelong criminal or both – he was supposed to say.

Halloran was right. Farrell knew he was wasting his breath trying to spare the Skellys. He had a job to do. He stepped behind the two brothers and raised the Mauser. His hand was shaking. He had never pictured it quite like this, killing for his country. Putting bullets in the brains of two unarmed men had never featured in any of the heroic scenes he had screened in his imagination.

His index finger brushed the trigger guard and as if aware, the younger Skelly brother found his voice.

‘I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t. I’m no rat. I swear it. Please.’ His words were choked with sobs. ‘I done nothing.’

Halloran said, ‘You hurt that woman. You done that, you fucker. Who told you do that, Mutton?’

The older Skelly was unmoved. He hacked and spat again, saying nothing and Farrell was seized by sudden terror.
Jesus. I can’t do this. This is not what … not how …

He turned, handed the gun to Halloran and ducked out of the cave.

Eamonn Halloran shook his head, partly in disgust, partly in sympathy. Out of his depth, Farrell was. Should have stayed in college. No business in the fray, poor bastard. He checked the load in the Mauser and raised it.

‘Any prayers, lads, before we get down to it?’

The elder Skelly brother cleared his throat and said, ‘Fuck all o’ ye cunts.’

The younger brother wept.

Climbing out of the ravine, O’Keefe and his escort of gunmen heard the shots. Faint pops in the night. Almost as if they hadn’t happened.

***

When the serving maid left, he found another house, this one in a less salubrious area, where he would perch on the roof of a coal shed and watch as a girl, maybe eighteen, nineteen, brought in soldiers from the barracks. Sometimes they left the light on, at other times it was off, but always, once the men had left, the whore put it on and he watched as she squatted over her chamber pot, usually naked but sometimes with her shift bunched about her hips held in one hand while she cleaned herself with the other. Her bunched shift white, her buttocks a warm pink from fucking. She was a hen. He was a hawk, perched on the coal shed. Watching. Waiting.

O’Keefe had one more thing to do before he left the barracks. He descended the stairs to the lower ground floor, entered the kitchen and cut a thick slice of brown bread, thinking of Daly’s words when he’d told him earlier that he’d be visiting the Sheehan woman again. Daly had accused him of looking for a cut off another man’s loaf and O’Keefe shook his head now in disgust, as much at himself and his odd brew of feelings for the woman as at Daly’s lewd insinuation. He made tea, buttered the bread and topped it with a greasy fried egg from a tin tray that had been prepared hours before, and ate and drank without relish. Then he poured a second, sweet, milky cup of tea and carried it with him.

Dunn was at the desk in the hallway containing the barracks’ three cells, reading a copy of the racing pages.

‘Any tips?’ O’Keefe asked him.

The jailer looked up. ‘None worth a bullet on the way to the bookmaker’s.’

‘How’s our friend?’

‘Quiet.’

‘May I?’ O’Keefe pointed at the open packet of Sweet Aftons on the desk.

‘Work away.’

He took the cigarettes and the cup of tea down to cell three. Behind the bars, Finch lay on the iron cot fixed to the wall, hands behind his head.

‘You come up with your list of charges yet?’ O’Keefe asked him.

The Tan laughed. ‘ ’Ard to make a list when you can’t remember ’alf of what you done, Sergeant.’ He didn’t get up, but he didn’t turn away either.

‘Here.’ O’Keefe held out the cup of tea and shook a cigarette from the packet.

Finch waited a moment, then rose and accepted the tea and smoke. O’Keefe lit the cigarette through the bars.

‘You eaten yet?’

‘Not yet, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe noted the use of Sergeant and reckoned that Finch had had enough of his cell time. ‘Right, Finch. Forget about Sergeant Daly’s list of charges. Court-martial’s off if you can give me a dig out with something.’

‘Dig out?’

‘If you can help me with this case. The girl who was murdered.’

Finch nodded and sipped his tea. ‘What do you need, Sergeant?’

‘Our garage man Morton told me you know cars nearly as well as he does. Told me you’re saving every penny you make over here for a flash motor when you get back across the water.’

‘That’s true, Sergeant. ’

O’Keefe lit a cigarette for himself. ‘Tell me this then.’ Setting his briefcase on the floor, he took out his investigation diary and opened it to the notes from his interview with Anne Duffy, Deirdre Costelloe’s friend and flatmate. Then he picked up Deirdre’s diary.

He had spent the previous evening – before he’d been summoned to the crossroads – reading the journal. It was sporadically kept. Many days she had written nothing, while on others there were several pages on the gossipy doings of workmates and friends. Which fella was courting which girl and the like. Which of the typists or clerks was in with Mr Barton and why. When writing of her own relationships, the young woman was discreet, using initials for the names of men. O’Keefe had discovered this when he reached the part in the diaries where she had begun seeing Seamus Connors – SC – after meeting him at an Irish language class.

The Irish language, after many years of decline through-out most of the country, had come back into fashion, with young and old alike taking lessons set up in church halls or sports clubs by the Gaelic League. Contrary to myth, the British had never actually banned the language – Keane for example, was a fluent speaker from a Gaeltacht in Donegal – but it had died out in most places through parents wanting their children to speak English so that they might get ahead in the world. More effective than banning the language, the Crown had convinced the Irish people to see it as a hind-rance.

Most of those who attended lessons genuinely wanted to learn Irish but, to the chagrin of the committed and monkish instructors of the Gaelic League, there were others who looked upon the lessons as a means of meeting eligible members of the opposite sex. Personally, O’Keefe didn’t see any conflict between the two aims. Obviously, Deirdre Costelloe hadn’t either. Nor Seamus Connors, though O’Keefe imagined he hadn’t attended many classes after the shooting had started. The classes themselves were technically banned under the Restoration of Order Ireland Act as subversive gatherings, but in practice they were allowed to continue and were known to be riddled with Crown agents and spies.

Deirdre’s diary charted a year and a half relationship with SC, with references to dances attended, hotels visited – for meals only it seemed – and coy admissions of SC’s desire to consummate the affair. According to the diary, Deirdre had let Connors have his way to a point, stopping him short of any activity that might risk pregnancy. This, O’Keefe gathered, reading between the lines, was done more from this fear than from any great sense of moral virtue. She also claimed that Connors had repeatedly asked her to marry him and she had refused, reluctant to spoil the fun she was having living as a single girl in the city. In her diary Deirdre came across as one of the new breed of Irish women trying to shake off the shackles of Victorian morality and religious inhibition – hard working, independent and liberated.

Connors, on the other hand, and to O’Keefe’s surprise, was portrayed in the diary as rather conventional, stuffy even, despite his ardent physical desire for Deirdre, and nothing like the menacing presence described by Anne Duffy and Connolly, the Crimes Special Branch man. His intentions towards Deirdre appeared honourable. He had proposed marriage half-a-dozen times, if the diary entries were to be believed. There were references to Connors’ growing frustration at this state of affairs. Entries such as
‘SC sulking because I put the bridle on him in the Miller’s field after the dance and wouldn’t let him have what he’s after wanting for ages’
led O’Keefe to believe that after two years Connors strongly wanted to consummate the courtship, but nowhere in the journal was there a hint of violence or evidence of the searcher of ‘dark souls’ Anne Duffy had spoken of. Clearly, Deirdre was unafraid of Seamus Connors.

The reason O’Keefe had come to see Finch was a recent reference in the diary to Deirdre’s new man, the card player. The entry was dated two months earlier, 14 September 1920, and was written after a month-long gap in entries, during which, O’Keefe assumed, Deirdre had met ‘D’
.
There was no mention of their first meeting.

O’Keefe read aloud to Finch:

D collected me today in his beautiful motor. The seats are of the softest, vermillion-coloured leather and the top is soft calfskin. It’s as long as a Galway currach and bluer than the sky. He calls it the Spaniard, for some reason. What a car! What a rogue! D makes SC seem the dreary boy that he is. All talk about the great republic, all the while trying to throw his leg over mine. D has been the perfect gent so far but there’s something dangerous about him and his friends. He told me today that if I was very, very good, he’d take me to his club! Very wicked of him to insist on my being so very good! Delightful and dangerous is my D! Just what a girl needs in these days of shootings and misery. If only I didn’t have to work!’

He pointed out the section and handed the journal to Finch through the bars. After a long pause, the Tan said, ‘Ver … verm – what in fuck is that word? Sorry.’

‘Vermillion. It’s like maroon.’

Finch shrugged.

‘The colour of red wine.’

‘Oh, right. I got you.’

‘A long car, shaped like a boat. Tan calfskin cover, sky blue painted body. Swanky motor, her friend said. Any ideas what kind it might be?’

Finch mulled it over, taking long, leisurely drags on his cigarette. ‘Well, it’s no Rolls that I can think of ’less the paint’s a special job. The ‘Spaniard’ bit though. Only thing I can think of is an Hispano-Suiza. Sounds like the H6B. Came out in red and blue and black, I think. But that’s a French motor. Made in Barcelona.’

‘Barcelona is in Spain, Finch.’

‘It is? Learn something every day, don’t you? They’re made in France as well, I do know that. They was carriage-makers before the war. If it is an ’ispano.’

O’Keefe noted:
Hispano-Suiza
. ‘Is this a popular car, Finch?’

‘Not at all, Sergeant. Right squodge it’d cost you. Never even seen one up in Dublin, let alone Cork. Rich man’s motor. Stuck a bloody aeroplane engine in it. Same one they used in the Spad biplane – 150 horses under the bonnet. Runs like a bullet, so I’ve ’eard.’

O’Keefe jotted down the information. Shouldn’t be that hard to track this ‘D’ down with a car like that, he thought. He underlined Hispano-Suiza, H6B twice and then called down to Dunn for the key to the cell. He turned back to Finch.

‘You’re on lates until I tell you otherwise. Patrols if they’re going. If I ever see you drunk in barracks again or disobeying a direct order, you’re done for, Finch. You want that motor you’re saving for so badly, you’ll keep the head down and get on with the job.’

Finch grunted. ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

As he turned away, O’Keefe thought of something he had always wanted to ask one of the Tans. Now seemed as good a time as any. ‘Why’d you come over here, Finch, if you don’t mind my asking. Was it the money?’

Finch shrugged. ‘For the few bob, yeah, that was mainly it. But then, you’d need to see London to know it’s the kind of place a man needs to get shot of. Four years in the mud and come ’ome to that place? Do me a favour. Bloody veteran soldiers, officers even, begging on the streets, begging for any kind of work. Doing awful things for a few quid, their decorations pinned to barrel organs, in the lanes selling toys and matches with their pittance of demob money spent. A “land fit for ’eroes”? ’Ardly. Ireland seemed a fine way out of it all. Besides …’

‘Besides what?’

‘It’s the only thing I’m any good at.’

‘Policing?’

Finch laughed. ‘Fuck no. Fighting.’

***

Liam Farrell stepped out of Garvey’s bakery into the milky morning sunlight, a fresh warm loaf under his arm, his eyes smarting from lack of sleep.

Away all night presiding over the interrogation – no, he decided, call a spade a shovel – presiding over the execution of two young men and McGowan had the nerve to send him, like some errand boy, to the bakery. He’d been tempted to ask the man what Maureen was doing that she couldn’t fetch the bread herself, but he hadn’t had the nerve. There was something about McGowan he found daunting, despite the man’s reserve. It was an instinct only but it was there all the same. He sensed that men such as McGowan – every bit as much as gunmen like Barry – would have a major role in the new republic when the time came. Better an ally than an enemy.

A man appeared from out of the doorway of McManus’s pub and stopped in front of Farrell as he made his way toward the solicitor’s.

‘Have a drink, Liam?’

Eamonn Halloran. A tight, sick feeling gripped Farrell’s insides, an almost electric charge of fear sparked by Halloran and the air of good-natured menace he wore about him like an old coat. He said, ‘What do you mean, have a drink? I – ’

‘Step inside here, Liam.’ This time Halloran wasn’t asking.

Farrell followed him into the pub. It was quiet and cold and smelled of old beer and tobacco. The light in the bar was tinted amber by the pub’s coloured windows, as if it were filtered through a pint of lager. A fresh turf fire was crackling to life in the fireplace. McManus, in a white shirt and apron, was washing pint glasses in a basin behind the bar. Memory rose up. Ages ago it seemed, and it was. Seven long years past and his father, banned from every pub in Newcestown, had taken to travelling the eight miles to Ballycarleton for his binges. Seven years at least it had been, since the night Liam Farrell had found his father in McManus’s, vomit on his shirt, a shattered mirror behind the bar, two police constables standing over him. One of them had been a young Constable O’Keefe. The same O’Keefe – older now, his face harder, more angular and rent by a long purple scar, but the same man – who had come to the cave to question the Skelly brothers the night before. The same man leading the investigation into Deirdre Costelloe’s murder. Farrell’s face burned. The Peeler hadn’t recognised him behind his scarf and surely nor would the publican now, after all the years. Or would he?

Halloran sat down at a small table by the fire and leaned across it. Farrell set the loaf on an empty stool and leaned in as well, meeting the man halfway. ‘What’s this about? I’ve work to do for McGowan. Is it about last night?’

‘Never mind about last night,’ Halloran said. ‘Last night’s done and dusted. Now you listen, Liam.’ He looked around the empty pub and then back at Farrell. ‘First: leave out the fucking funny codes. That’s an order. Might as well be reading Greek, they say, your poxy messages.’

‘I sent them a key.’

‘Knock the queer stuff on the head, Liam, and do your job.’ The man looked up and called for two pints of stout.

McManus began to pump the Murphy’s tap.

‘Next, you need to get out and find this Seamus Connors fella. He’s one of Barry’s flying column boys.’

‘Yes, I know him.’

Farrell pictured Connors driving a bayonet into a wounded Auxie on the road near Kilmichael.
Like a spade into soft ground
. Remembered O’Sullivan’s shed and his questions about the missing girl. ‘Did he know the dead girl – Deirdre Costelloe?’

McManus came over to the table carrying two pints of stout. Farrell looked away when he came, but the publican ignored him. McManus’s was a Volunteer-friendly house, but it was better for the publican to sympathise from a distance.

Halloran took two long draughts of his pint. ‘He knew her. He was courting her in Cork. He put in a good long stretch with the girl before she gave him the push. Word is he took it fairly hard.’

‘What do I do when I find him?’ Farrell tried to sound nonchalant, feeling weak and small inside under the awareness that the man across from him wasn’t afraid of anyone. Halloran’s eyes, watery blue under his cap brim, were full of pitiless good cheer.

‘You’re to bring him to Inchigeela. To O’Sullivan’s. The boys want a word with him.’