Peeler (38 page)

‘What better incentive could there be to tell the truth than saving one’s own skin, Sergeant?’

‘In my experience, it gives a man more incentive to lie.’

‘And was that your experience with Seamus Connors?’

O’Keefe could feel his face redden. ‘Seamus Connors told me only that he didn’t kill Deirdre Costelloe. He told me that he loved her and that he had a solid alibi, one that you, of all people, could probably confirm. He wasn’t touched when I questioned him. There are others involved in this investigation with their own motives and means. It’s not the way I work.’

Brennan nodded. ‘You understand then, why it’s important to us that the truth of this matter be made public.’

‘I do,’ O’Keefe told him, ‘only why do you need me to do it? You lads seem to have the newspaper war half won.’

Brennan acknowledged the truth of this without pride.

‘Yes, but we want confirmation from your end, Constable. It’s all well and good for our supporters to believe that we don’t go around butchering young women like that lot in there, but it’s those who would never believe us who have to be convinced.’

‘And what makes you think I want to push your story, Mr Brennan? Your mob has shot friends of mine. Good Irishmen every one of them.’

‘I was under the impression that you didn’t think of it as a question of our story or yours. I’ve been led to believe that you think of it as a matter of truth or lies. That you’re a good man, Constable. Is that true? Are you a good man?’

O’Keefe didn’t know how to answer. He thought back to how he had broken his parent’s hearts; led his brother to the slaughter of a foreign war for reasons he could hardly remember; and in that war killed many men, most of them probably good men themselves. ‘No, I’m not a good man. But I try to be a fair one.’

He turned to Brennan’s young subaltern. His eyes. He had seen them in the cave when he was taken to the Skelly brothers, he was certain of that, and now he remembered where he knew them from.
Farrell
. His father, the draper from Newcestown, a sot, always tearing it up in some pub, barred from most in his own town and eventually in Ballycarleton as well. How many times had he helped the son drag his father home to his wife and shame-faced daughters? Years back; it seemed another life. O’Keefe asked young Farrell, ‘Did your father think I was a good man? Did
you
?’

The young man blushed. He looked to Brennan, who said nothing, and then back to O’Keefe. ‘If I didn’t, you wouldn’t be alive now.’ The bravado in his voice rang false.

O’Keefe turned back to Brennan. ‘Can I question the suspects myself, Mr Brennan?’

‘Of course.’

‘And you’ll release them to my custody so that they can be arrested and tried?’

‘To be tried at court-martial, by their fellow officers, who have no evidence of their guilt and only praise for their past records?’

There wasn’t a lot O’Keefe could say. ‘I have evidence.’

‘You have supposition and circumstantial evidence, which you’ve done well to get. But you’ve nothing that would stand up in any court without the confessions we’ve got.’

‘Confessions at gunpoint aren’t known for their weight in court.’

‘And confessions obtained under torture are?’

Again, O’Keefe felt heat rise in his face.

‘I take your point,’ Brennan continued, ‘but the stories match. The information we have confirms the truth of the confession.’

‘I thought you said
confessions
.’

‘We have one confession and the truth behind it.’

‘You think.’

O’Keefe’s eyes caught a flash of sky blue passing one of the windows outside the house. Barton’s Hispano-Suiza. O’Keefe said, ‘Do you mind if I search the motor?’ He reached down and picked up his briefcase. The men sitting against the wall stirred.

‘Anything to help, Constable.’ Brennan looked amused.

O’Keefe walked past Brennan and patted young Farrell on the shoulder. ‘Come with me.’ Brennan followed them out.

The Hispano-Suiza was parked in front of the house on the circular drive. O’Keefe took two photographs from his briefcase, handing them to Farrell before opening the car’s luggage boot.

‘What is it in the pictures?’ Farrell asked.

‘It’s the imprint left in the mud by a plank of wood used, I’m certain, by whoever it was brought the body to the hillside. By Barton or his man, Cole is it? I’m hoping …’ O’Keefe said, leaning into the Hispano’s boot and rooting among the tools and blankets, shoving aside a half-full case of burgundy wine and an empty picnic basket, ‘I’m hoping that I might find it in here.’

But there was no plank of wood in the boot nor inside the car. O’Keefe stood with his hands on his hips.

‘I took these photographs at the site where the girl’s body was found. We knew some form of transport was needed to bring the body there. One of our men spotted ruts in the ditch. The car used to transport the body had become stuck in the soft ground at the edge of the path, we assume, when it was turning to leave the hill. Deirdre Costelloe mentioned a blue-coloured car in the diary we found in her rooms. Called it his Fancy Spaniard. Barton was “D” in the diary. “Dickie”, one of his acquaintances called him. For Richard. He was the card player who’d been courting her, if that’s what you could call it.’

Farrell said, ‘It’s the same car Mrs Gannon spoke of when she came to me. A lovely blue motor. She took a lift back to her niece’s in it, the night the Costelloe girl was here. The night we know she was killed.’

‘Mrs Gannon was here that night?’

‘Not for long,’ Brennan said, ‘she was visiting her niece in Bandon and returned late that night. There was a commotion of some sort and the Major asked Barton’s man to drive Mrs Gannon back to her niece’s. She said he didn’t seem to want her about the place.’

Barton’s man. Bella had called him Bill. ‘One of the other girls who was at the house said that his man had taken Deirdre home early. Bill something …’

Brennan nodded. ‘Cole. Bill Cole. Driver and minder. We’re holding him with the others inside. He served under Barton in the war.’

‘The West Kents?’ O’Keefe said.

‘It would seem so.’

‘There has to be proof.
Has
to be. Here,’ Farrell said, ‘has one of ye a lighter?’

Finch handed him his. Farrell sparked the lighter, leaned into the boot and, like O’Keefe, rummaged among the detritus, taking time to remove the picnic basket, the wine crate and the blanket, handing the last to Finch.

‘Fuck it anyway,’ he said, staring into the empty boot. ‘We have the confession.’

‘It’s a weak case without any hard evidence, Mr Farrell. The defendants will claim coercion,’ O’Keefe replied.

Farrell said, ‘Look, we have the earring Mrs Gannon gave to me. We can prove she was here by matching it with the one that was found on her body.’

‘And how would you know about that, Mr Farrell?’ O’Keefe asked, but smiled.

Farrell blushed and Brennan said, ‘Ways and means, boy. Ways and means.’

‘Still,’ O’Keefe said, ‘that only proves she was here, not that anyone present killed her.’

Frustration showed on Farrell’s face. ‘Fuck it anyway,’ he said again, taking the basket and wine case up off the ground, roughly shoving them back into the boot. Finch handed him back the blanket and brushed down his coat, sending dust and ephemera from the blanket floating into the still, damp air.

Farrell tossed the blanket in after the other things and was about to close the boot when O’Keefe said, ‘Mr Farrell, take that blanket back out, would you? Carefully now, and set it out on the ground, there.’ He stepped closer to Finch as he spoke. ‘Don’t move, Finch.’ He reached out and plucked something that was clinging to the cashmere above the Finch’s breast pocket, holding it up between his thumb and forefinger for the others to see.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘Mr Farrell, could you open the blanket out? Gently, so.’

Farrell folded open the blanket on the wet gravel drive as Brennan examined what O’Keefe held in his fingers. The Intelligence man smiled.

‘Is that hard enough for you, Constable O’Keefe?’

The touring blanket was a standard feature of many luxury motor cars – along with the picnic basket – and was stitched with Hispano-Suiza in a flowing script to match that of the grill work on the car. The blanket was a deep blue with gold stitching, making it all the easier to spot the stray, downy feathers that had lodged themselves in the wool weave of the blanket.

‘Hard enough,’ O’Keefe said, ‘when you consider this as well.’ He squatted beside the blanket and pointed to a glossy, black, ‘C’-shaped stain on its corner.

Farrell crouched beside him and appeared confused for a moment before his face blossomed into a smile, one that exposed his youth to the world. He reminded O’Keefe of Keane – of how Keane had been once, before all this.

‘Tar, boy,’ Farrell said. ‘It’s fuckin’ dry tar!’

O’Keefe couldn’t help smiling. ‘That’s police work for you, Mr Farrell.’ He took out his patrol diary and noted the find, the date, time and place, and those present on discovery. ‘The smallest thing can turn a case. Something that seems unimportant at the time. Half a copper’s job is documenting the details. Most of them you won’t use, but some that you think are of no importance, a clever prosecutor can use in ways you never thought of.’

Farrell’s expression darkened, as if he was suddenly asha-med of his excitement. ‘And if you can’t find any evidence, you can always fabricate some for the sake of the court-martial judge. That’s police work too, Constable, wouldn’t you say?’

‘It happens,’ O’Keefe said, ‘but not on my watch.’

Brennan turned to the young man. ‘I was led to believe Constable O’Keefe was more than fair to you and yours, Mr Farrell?’

Farrell’s face washed red and he looked down at the blanket.

Brennan turned back to O’Keefe. ‘Would you care to question the prisoners yourself now?’

‘I wouldn’t mind hearing their version first-hand.’

‘I think you’re entitled to hear it, Constable.’

***

Bill Cole killed his first prostitute on a two-day leave before the second battle of
Ypres. He couldn’t have said at the time why he’d done it other than it didn’t seem to matter – one more death.

He had wanted to see her privates – wanted to see inside the place where, in his mind, the eggs came out and she wouldn’t let him. She had taken offence somehow, though he couldn’t understand a single foreign word she’d screamed at him in the roofless, shell-pocked cowshed where she’d taken him. She was once a fat girl who had grown thin on the war, her skin slack, stretch-marks etched across her belly and sagging breasts, her breath smelling of vinegary wine, between her legs reeking of garlic and fish and sweat and semen.

Yet she was proud and angry and spiteful towards him when all he had done was look at her down there. He had money after all. And he had his Boche-poker. He and some of the hardened night raiding gang had made them themselves: knuckle dusters with a welded six-inch spike fashioned from a French pig-sticker bayonet. One blow with the poker was all it took usually. Like the hammer back in the abattoir.

When the whore was dead, he took his time with her. He saw where the eggs came out and he thought how the whore reminded him of his mother and he felt good, spilling his seed into the private place where the eggs came from.

***

Two Volunteers stood guard in the library. When O’Keefe entered the room, they went to lean against the wall and watch. The Major was tied to his desk chair. His face was red and smeared with blood, and he was shaking. O’Keefe reckoned he’d been given a slap or two but he wasn’t badly injured. He guessed that forced abstinence – there was a whiskey bottle and a half-full glass just out of his reach on the desk – was the primary cause of his suffering.

A second man was bound to an upholstered chair set against the wall, bleeding from his nose, his tidy moustache stained claret, staring straight ahead, a look of fierce bullishness on his face, as if he’d said all he was going to say. Colonel Prentice. DI Masterson’s hunting pal. Bearer of the Childers letter, which O’Keefe now knew was a fake.

O’Keefe nodded to the men. ‘Colonel. Major.’

The Major blustered, as if he’d been rudely disturbed from sleep. ‘I should have known you were one of them. Traitor to your country, to the men who died serving with you.’

‘
Traitor
,’ O’Keefe said. ‘Isn’t that what you wrote on the sign you hung around Deirdre Costelloe’s neck? Misspelled it, mind.’

‘I had nothing to do with that. Nothing!’

‘But you knew about it, didn’t you? And let it happen – let a poor girl be butchered and then helped cover it up.’

Burleigh looked away. O’Keefe turned to the Colonel.

‘Colonel Prentice. You tried to strangle the girl, am I correct?’

Prentice stared straight ahead in silence and O’Keefe wondered if he had been taking lessons from Seamus Connors.

‘She didn’t want to do what you had in mind, Colonel? Or you went too far with things – maybe squeezed a bit too hard? That’s what’s written here.’ He gestured to the statements taken by the IRA. ‘Major Burleigh’s words, Colonel, not mine – that you’re the poo-bah of the club. Says that each month a different member brings you a girl as an offering. Mostly whores, the Major says, but then this time, Barton brings Deirdre Costelloe. A beautiful young woman. A virgin, I’d imagine. Only she didn’t fancy being offered to you, Colonel, did she? The whole house heard the ructions. The lot of you thinking you’d killed her when she resisted – your little Hellfire club. And then you had your friend Barton and his batman clean things up for you. Is that how it went, Colonel?’

The Colonel sniffed back blood.

‘Except she wasn’t dead. Not yet, she wasn’t.’ O’Keefe said, turning back to Burleigh.

The Major pleaded from his chair, his voice high and wheedling. ‘We’d no idea what that beast would do. Don’t you see?’

‘But none of you saw fit to come forward when you found out what he’d done.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘Oh, I understand. You West Kents stick together. Tight lot, you lads. And now you’re going to die together.’