Peeler (37 page)

Finch looked as if he had no notion of what Connolly was on about. ‘’Ow long’s she been in the ground then?’

‘Six weeks,’ Connolly said, ‘God rest her. Say she could use a bit of air by now.’

O’Keefe looked at Connolly. ‘I thought you were a soft one.’

‘Only so much heart to spare, Seán.’

O’Keefe turned to see the surgeon approaching. In the daylight, Major Wells looked close to death himself, his cheekbones gouging the ashen skin of his face. O’Keefe could smell last evening’s whiskey on him from several feet away.

‘Thank you for coming, Major Wells.’

‘At your service, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe didn’t see the need to inform the surgeon of his demotion. He was fairly certain Wells would help him for the right reasons regardless, but with drinkers, he reasoned, a fella never knew. The Major had seemed the right sort when he’d done the post-mortem in Ballycarleton. A man who felt for the dead. Like Connolly. Unlike Connolly, however, he was paying the price for his solicitude in alcohol.

‘How long as she been interred?’ Wells asked, after he had shaken hands and been introduced.

It was Finch who answered. ‘Six weeks, Doc. Think there’ll be anything left of ’er?’

Wells considered the question seriously. ‘Depends on the condition of the box she was buried in, soil temperature, rain, et cetera, et cetera. Bring her up and we’ll see.’ And then he blessed himself.

Seeing the mild surprise on O’Keefe’s face, he said, ‘Yes, Sergeant. Slave to Rome, same as yourself. Why I’ll never make General.’ He smiled as if at the notion of something so ludicrous and indicated the shovels lying on the ground at the foot of the headstone. ‘You do have authorisation for this, Sergeant?’

Connolly responded. ‘Sure, as a fellow Catholic you’ll understand, Major. Did Christ himself – bless His name – have authorisation when he raised Lazarus?’

The pained smile again. ‘Will this help catch the killer of the girl I worked on at your barracks?’

O’Keefe answered. ‘I think it will.’

‘Shall we start digging then?’

Finch and O’Keefe took shovels and sliced into the damp, heavy soil. At one point, O’Keefe stopped to rest. He scanned the graveyard, seeing no living soul among the headstones in the grey autumn daylight. And yet he was certain suddenly that they were being watched, as certain as he was that day on the hillside when they had found Deirdre’s body. Goose pimples washed over him and he went back to digging.

The mud-slicked lid of the coffin came off with a shrieking of nails, the wood on the surface soft and rotting, underneath hard and holding its contents firm, resisting a return to the earth.

The smell was overwhelming at first, summoning memories of the war; the constant, inescapable scent of decomposition, of mortality. Finch remained impassive, but stepped back. As with O’Keefe and Wells, the smell was a part of his past, lodged in the memory of his senses as firmly as the scent of his mother, of stale beer or London fog heavy with coal smoke. Connolly, O’Keefe noticed, turned a shade of green that would have done the Shinners proud.

‘Jesus, lads,’ the Crimes Special man said, covering his nose and mouth with a silk handkerchief.

The surgeon stooped to Janey Plunkett’s withered body, smaller in death, sunken in on itself, skin sloughing from bone. He handled the head carefully, as if it were an heirloom. He lifted the girl’s hair. It had been thick brown once but was the shade of tarnished brass now, life’s colour gone, but clumps of it resolutely clinging to the mouldering scalp. Wells worked at the loose skin at the base of the skull with gloved fingers, peeling it up and back, puffing a protective veil of sweet pipe smoke in front of his face. The skin came away easily as if from a boiled onion. He pointed now at the glistening skull revealed and O’Keefe leaned in.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Same wound.’

O’Keefe touched his shoulder. ‘Thank you, Major.’

‘Just find the bastard, Sergeant. Then we can sit down and finish that Bushmills.’

Wells didn’t smile as he said it. He looked as if he wouldn’t mind joining Janey in the ground: quiet, safe, finished with a life so steeped in violence.

***

The Hispano-Suiza was gone when O’Keefe and Finch arrived at Barton’s house in Montenotte. They tried both doors of the redbrick house then stood under the coachman’s archway.

‘Do we wait for them, Sergeant?’

O’Keefe’s idea – formulated on the ride over from the cemetery – had been to lift Barton and his man at the house and get them to Tuckey Street barracks where Connolly was softening the ground with the head constable. The man was a ‘good skin’, according to Connolly. Once they didn’t take the piss, the head would go along with things, he had assured them: an old-style law and order type who had worked his way up to his present rank and was known to despise the cadet officer system generally, and District Inspector Masterson particularly. But the deal was only on if it was done quick. Word of O’Keefe’s troubles would be general to the county by the day’s end. The Tuckey Street Head Con would help, Connolly had told him, if it meant putting the screws to Masterson, but only if the man could deny his knowledge of O’Keefe’s demotion and confinement to
barracks.

‘Police work, Finch, is as much about waiting as doing.’ O’Keefe offered him a cigarette.

They hadn’t waited long when a black Ford pulled up in front of the gates to the Barton house and two men in trenchcoats and scuffed boots sauntered up the drive. A third man stayed in the car with the engine idling.

‘Fine day, lads,’ O’Keefe said, thumbing the safety off the .45 in his holster inside his coat as the men walked towards them.

‘You won’t find them two here, so you won’t,’ the one on the left said. He wore a trilby, cocked back on his head, and the collar of his trenchcoat turned up like a London cornerboy, though it was a mild day.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because we’re entertaining them at the moment.’

‘And you are?’

‘You don’t know that, boy, and you’re not half as clever as they say you are.’

The men stopped in front of O’Keefe and Finch.

‘I’ve a fair idea,’ O’Keefe said, resignation in his voice. ‘You followed us from the graveyard?’

Trilby nodded. ‘You’ve to come with us now. There’s lads want a word.’

‘Will I get to question Barton?’

The one on the right, in a flat cap, smiled. ‘We’re just to collect you. You can talk to the boss when we get there.’

***

Men armed with rifles stood watch at the gatehouse. They stared after the Ford as it sped through the open gates of Burleigh House. In another, more peaceful time, they could have been gamekeepers on guard for poachers. It all came together for O’Keefe in the Ford as they rolled up the tree-lined drive to Burleigh House – what had been eluding him, dodging his conscious mind for the past two days. Deirdre Costelloe had written in her diary that she was hoping ‘D’ would take her to his club. For ‘D’ read Dickie. How had he missed it?
She liked to run with the fast girls, but I don’t think she reckoned on what she’d to do after the cards were finished
, Bella had said. Parties, the Madam Grace girl had told him.
Like a drinking club, meets once a month for a laugh or three and a bit of slap and tickle.
He remembered Hanratty’s account of the party his friend had attended.
In some pile in the country.

Once a month maybe,
Bella had continued
. They had one on Sunday two weeks past. And that girl, Deirdre, was there. Not the place for her, when the fun started. After the cards. She kicked up a fierce hubbub, screaming blue murder like one of the gentleman was after trying to kill her instead of give her an honest turn. What did she think she was in for anyway? Some of the men left then, which was happy days for us with less rope to pull.
And the girl, O’Keefe had asked, did she return to Cork with ye?
No. Bill Cole said he drove her home early …

It was the regiment that linked the men. It seemed so obvious now, he didn’t know how he could have missed it. He had stood in front of the banner in Burleigh’s library and then listened while Hanratty had told him that Barton had fought with the West Kents. And Masterson’s friend Colonel Prentice, of course. Sitting in the DI’s office selling Seamus Connors like a quare butcher pushing bad meat at the close of day, pushing Connors like there was no one else in the world who could have killed Deirdre. McKenna might still be alive if he’d seen it. Heatherfield too. Even Noonan, the pimp. Rage knotted itself in O’Keefe’s gut. Someone would pay for their deaths. Theirs and Deirdre Costelloe’s and Janey Plunkett’s.

They stopped in the circular drive and got out. More armed men were lounging on the stone steps and patrolling the edge of the forest. All of them watched as O’Keefe and Finch were escorted up the front steps and into Burleigh House. O’Keefe didn’t imagine the IRA men would take kindly to using the tradesman’s entrance. Not after eight hundred years of it.

Once inside, one of the Volunteers asked them for their pistols.

‘Why don’t you try and take it off me, mate,’ Finch said. The young Volunteer raised a Webley and pointed it in Finch’s face.

‘No sense of ’umour, you lot.’ Finch smiled as he handed over his own Webley by the barrel. O’Keefe gave Keane’s .45 to the second Volunteer.

The three Volunteers then showed them into the drawing-room, its walls covered with faded, peeling flower-print wallpaper. Dusty sheets were thrown over chairs and Ottomans, a grand piano standing silent in the corner of the room. The chairs were occupied by men like the ones who had collected them. Enfield rifles and two Winchester pump shotguns rested against the piano with their stocks on the floor. O’Keefe wondered where they had got their hands on those. Taken them after the Kilmichael ambush, most likely. Dogs knew the Auxies loved their Winchester pumps.

A fresh fire crackled in the marble fireplace and O’Keefe watched as Mrs Gannon – the old woman O’Keefe had met on his first visit to the house – entered the room and began handing out sandwiches and steaming mugs and odd china cups of tea from a large tray. Seeing him, the woman smiled warmly.

‘Sergeant, there you are again. Sure, you’ll have a bite, won’t you? You must be starved from the long road,’ she said, as if O’Keefe and Finch were invited guests. She handed O’Keefe a plate of sandwiches.

O’Keefe smiled and helped himself. ‘Thank you, Mrs Gannon. I will. Finch?’ Finch took two.

‘I’ll have tea along for you lads in a tick now. You just sit down there by the fire and make yourselves at ease.’

One of their escorts, the driver, cracked a smile. The gunman with the flat cap was angling for a sandwich. O’Keefe held the plate out of reach.

‘That’d be grand, Mrs Gannon. Tea would be lovely.’

She smiled again before turning to the men in the sheet-covered chairs by the fire. ‘Get up you boys and let your guests warm themselves. Have ye no manners at all on ye?’

The Volunteers at the fire looked suitably chastened and obeyed the old woman. So this, O’Keefe thought as he scanned the room, was what a flying column looked like. The men were young, most of them, seventeen to twenty-four or twenty-five at the oldest. Their faces were smudged with the sweat and dirt of a long journey and their clothes were rumpled, as if they were used to sleeping in ditches. And yet there was a quiet confidence about them. They were fit lads, of the kind seen on hurling pitches any Sunday afternoon in Ireland. Young men like he himself was once. Before all the shooting started. These young sportsmen now hefted rifles so comfortably, so naturally, like the thousands who had fought in the Great War. It was as if God had made young men with killing in mind, O’Keefe decided, and He had loved His creation so much, He never wanted war to end.

The drawing-room door opened and the men rose as one. They didn’t come to attention, as they would have in a conventional army, but they stood. This was deference, discipline and respect that men chose freely to express. Respect and discipline without the coercion of regular armies. Two men entered the room and O’Keefe and Finch instinctively stood as well.

A week earlier, O’Keefe would not have thought it possible that he would ever be standing face to face with Seán Brennan, Head of Intelligence, West Cork Brigade. The man looked older than the dated photograph of him that was posted in every RIC barracks in the county. There was a good deal known about him because he had been one of the founding members of the Volunteers in West Cork in the days before the 1916 Rising. Among other things, he was thought to be a member of the secret organisation known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, along with Michael Collins and many of the highest-ranking members of the IRA.

With him was a younger man who looked vaguely familiar to O’Keefe. He was in his shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled up over thin, freckled forearms. It was a boy’s face on the brink of becoming a man’s.

Brennan extended his hand and O’Keefe shook it. ‘Ser-geant,’ he said, ‘thank you for coming at such short notice.’

O’Keefe nodded. ‘Not that I had much choice. And it’s Constable now.’

Brennan shrugged, as if the whole situation was rife with absurd humour. ‘Sure, you’d never have made the trip otherwise.’

The IRA man handed O’Keefe a sheaf of papers, pinned together at the corners. ‘These are the signed statements of the men we have in custody. Details of the girl’s murder are listed and the statements are sworn and witnessed by a serving judge of the republican courts. His name, naturally, has been left off the documents. It will be made available when circumstances allow.’

O’Keefe flicked through the pages and saw names he recognised. The card players, officers just as Bella had told him. And another name that shocked him, but perhaps should not have. He shook his head at his own innocence. Masterson. How could he not have seen it? Still, it would take time to read the statements and assess their degree of truth. Even in his haste, however, he could see that the name Barton featured prominently in the statements.

He looked up from the papers. ‘I hardly think that these would hold any water in a court of law, Mr Brennan, knowing that they were made at the end of an IRA gun barrel.’