Peeler (39 page)

‘You need to take us in, Sergeant. Arrest us for God’s sake, man.’ There was terror in Burleigh’s eyes, in his voice. One of the IRA men against the wall muttered something to his comrade and they both smiled.

O’Keefe said, ‘I don’t think they’re going to allow me do that, Major. You could have told me what you knew when I came to you three days ago. A fine young constable died because you lied to me. A businessman guilty of nothing more than beating Richard Barton at cards.’

‘I didn’t know what to do.’ Burleigh’s bloodshot eyes welled with tears.

Bile rose in O’Keefe’s throat as he watched him.
How many men did this fat sot send to die in his time?
‘The feathers came from your birds, didn’t they, Major?’

The Major nodded. ‘But it wasn’t my idea. I never knew what he’d done to her until after … until I read about it. Like everybody else.’ A sob broke in his throat. ‘Jesus, I didn’t know. The man’s insane.’

‘To do your dirty work?’ O’Keefe turned. ‘Colonel?’

Prentice’s eyes locked on O’Keefe’s and for the first and last time that day, he spoke.

‘Let’s get this done with, Sergeant, shall we?’

***

One morning, the sun heating the mud of no man’s land, raising the stink of the dead, ‘C’ company of the West Kents had taken a hundred yards of German trench. And then the Germans had counterattacked and had taken it back. The fighting had been close and brutal, and Birdy’s hands and forearms were drenched in blood as he dragged the young lieutenant back out of the German trench, shrapnel from a potato masher grenade riddling the young man’s legs and groin.

As he pulled the lieutenant over the pocked, steaming earth, the Boche machine-guns stalked the surviving West Kents as they retreated across the waste.

Birdy dragged the lieutenant into a shell-hole deep enough for cover. Some time later, the lieutenant calmed himself and made Birdy a promise. His father, he said, was a very wealthy man, back in Ireland. He’d be taken care of, Birdy would, if only he’d help him. Birdy would never want for work again in his life if he helped the lieutenant survive the war.

And the lieutenant had kept his promise. There was always work, after all, for a man of Birdy’s certain expertise.

***

In the scullery two more young IRA men watched over Richard Barton and Bill Cole. Both of them were bound with their hands behind hard-backed chairs. They had bruising on their faces and Barton had a cut on his forehead that had been bleeding heavily, blood running down his cheek and neck into his collar.

‘Which of you killed her?’ O’Keefe began.

Barton’s man looked up and smiled. ‘I killed the cunt.’

O’Keefe was stunned for a moment, as much by the tone of Cole’s voice as by the admission of guilt.
The man was proud of what he’d done.
He continued, ‘And did you enjoy it?’

Bill Cole smiled wider and O’Keefe studied his face. High cheekbones and close-set, blue eyes. A thin slit of a mouth and regular, straight teeth with a small gap between each one. Thinning fair hair. O’Keefe sensed the man’s strength, even tied to the chair. Looking closer, he saw there was a deadness in Cole’s blue eyes, a vacancy he’d seen in men in the war. A vacancy still there in some who had come back. At times he’d seen it in his own face when he looked in the mirror.

‘I did,’ Cole said. ‘And I enjoyed doing the whores as well. Not enough time with them for my liking, but needs as needs must.’

‘Janey Plunkett?’

‘Don’t know what her name was – a skin and bones, young brown-haired bitch is what I knew. And Bella. Curly-haired Bella.’

‘Bella? You couldn’t have, I was – ’

‘Watched you leave, Sar’nt. Popped in for an old poke. Don’t mind seconds, me.’

O’Keefe felt his insides twist. He swallowed back his rage. ‘And the salesman, two nights ago? The card player.’

Bill Cole turned to Barton. ‘He insulted us, didn’t he sir? Taking the mick, he was.’

Barton shook his head. ‘I never wanted you to kill him, Bill.’

Gone was the game-cock he’d been in his home the night before. O’Keefe felt a stab of pleasure at this and then guilt. This man was going to die today and there was nothing O’Keefe could do to prevent it. ‘Or the girl. I didn’t, Sergeant. You have to believe me. I only asked Bill to drive her home.’

It was O’Keefe’s turn to shake his head. ‘But you brought her here for Prentice. Why? What did that girl think you were bringing her to?’

Some defiance came back to Barton’s face, his voice. ‘She
knew
. She liked it, the flirting and the bold talk.’

‘Well ripe, she was,’ Cole interjected, as if reminiscing. ‘The fruit in her box spoiled from the mind down. The Lieutenant here,’ Cole nodded at Barton, ‘had her well spoilt in the mind. Only ready for a bit of poking to make her bits agree. That’s us: work together, always have. The Lieutenant works on the mind, the holy Catholic souls of these butter-wouldn’t-melts. And it’s others get to do the actuals.’

‘Shut up, Bill. Shut your fucking mouth. I never knew what you were at.’

‘Course you did, back as far as the war. You knew, but you turned a blind one ’cause you knew you’d never survive without old Bill at your back. We was a great old team at tearing down the butter-wouldn’t-melts and their holy Catholic cunts.’

O’Keefe had thought that Barton held the reins on Cole, but was wondering now if, in the end, Cole had been more than Barton could handle. As if reading O’Keefe’s thoughts, Barton said, ‘I didn’t know what he was doing. Honestly, I didn’t.’

O’Keefe ignored his plea. ‘Where did you kill her, Cole? When the men asked you to take care of her?’

Cole appeared pleased to be asked. ‘Right there in that old cottage on the hill. Nice and cosy, it was. Every time I drove by it with Mr Barton on our way out here, I said to myself,
Bill, there’s a place where you could work in peace.
Dodgy enough getting there at night with these chaps,’ Cole nodded at the two Volunteers, ‘all over the roads like maggots on old meat, but I got there.’

O’Keefe remembered the fresh ashes in the fireplace of the derelict cottage, the staining on the makeshift table. ‘Where did you get the birds, the feathers?’

‘Right here, Sar’nt. Took his last couple of beauties when I took the girl. Shame to kill them but we had a fine grub-up that night.’

‘And the tar?’

‘Here again, mate. What farmer with his wits about him don’t have a tin of tar in the shed. “Nelson’s Coal Tar for Veterinary Complaints of the Skin.”’ He smirked at O’Keefe.

‘But why did you cut off her breasts? Why did you mutilate her?’

Cole’s face brightened. ‘Because I fucking could, is why. How’s that serve you, Sar’nt? Because I wanted to and I could.’

O’Keefe had to stop himself from driving his fist into Cole’s mouth. He turned to Barton. ‘District Inspector Masterson. Did he know about Deirdre Costelloe, Mr Barton? Was he here that night?’

Barton hesitated.

‘There’s no point keeping him out of it, Barton. Sure, he was no West Kent, was he? Do you want him to be the one who walks away from this with his bib clean? You’re not walking away; you know that, don’t you? But you can make sure that Masterson doesn’t either.’

‘He was here as Prentice’s guest, just like all the other times. Had his man Senior drive him back to your barracks when things got out of hand. He took Prentice with him as well, with some Tommies who’d been on sentry outside, running escort. Great friends, the Inspector and the Colonel. What the Inspector wouldn’t do to help his friends.’

‘You’re sure about this?’

Barton nodded. ‘The DI loved the bints. Every time a club night was mooted, he’d ask me,
Are you bringing the lovelies, Barton?
He was like a child in a sweet-shop.’

O’Keefe thought of the DI and the Colonel, how they had pushed the Childers letter at him. He imagined them tapping a friend in the Documents Office up in Dublin Castle for a favour; the forged letter flown down special delivery with Connors’ file. And it came to him now clearly: how everything they had done had served to lead him away from themselves and towards Connors. It had been a lucky break for them that Deirdre Costelloe had once been courted by the IRA man. Could a more convenient scapegoat for their mess have been invented? But O’Keefe had somehow stumbled onto the truth. With the help of the IRA.

‘If it’s any consolation, Mr Barton, I’ll have Masterson for this as well,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can do for you. If you’d spoken openly to me yesterday or the first time I interviewed you …’

Bill Cole looked up at O’Keefe. ‘Don’t you worry about us, Sar’nt.’

One of the Volunteers shifted the rifle from his left shoulder to his right. A new recruit by the look of him, better suited to tramping hillsides than standing guard over a snivelling Barton and his deranged bodyguard.

‘Have you searched these men?’ O’Keefe asked the Volunteer.

The older of the two guards answered. ‘You mind your business, Peeler, and we’ll mind ours.’

O’Keefe persisted. ‘Did you find the murder weapon? I didn’t see any mention of it in the file.’

‘He had a Webley and half a dozen spare rounds, Peeler, which we fucking took off him, didn’t we? We know how to search – ’

Bill Cole suddenly stood up, as if he had grown bored with the conversation. Somehow his hands were free from their binding and they went to the table, gripping it, lifting.

The younger of the IRA men scraped back his chair, his rifle dangling from its strap, butt against the floor. The table hit him, flipped up and over before he could get his rifle up. Cole shielded himself with the table as he moved, his right arm swinging, the colour of brass flashing, knuckle-duster sheathing his fist, lethal pick protruding, the pick driving, jabbing in lightning fast blows into the neck of the young Volunteer. Arterial blood sprayed, a red plume, drenching Barton who remained tied to his chair.

O’Keefe jumped back to avoid the table, its legs in the air, ploughing into the older IRA gunman, the man dropping his rifle in the scramble. O’Keefe went for the rifle on the floor, had it, when the IRA man wrenched it from O’Keefe’s hands. O’Keefe stepped back as Cole stepped around the table legs, advancing towards O’Keefe and the Volunteer with graceful, weaving steps.

Odd, grunting silence in the struggle. Flashing images. The young Volunteer slumped on the floor, hands at his throat, the spew of blood slowing, pooling, his legs kicking in the crimson morass. Barton covered in the dying man’s blood, struggling against his bonds in the centre of the storm. The older Volunteer raising his rifle. A shot, explosively loud in the scullery. The shot missing Cole. Barton’s head snapping back, blood, brain and bone painting the white wall behind him. Cole now knocking the rifle aside easily, driving the pick into its owner’s heart. Cole’s momentum driving him forward, slamming through the scullery door and into the hall. The sound of pounding steps. A shot, two more shots.

O’Keefe sprinted down the hall and out onto the steps in pursuit of Cole. A shot cracked and split the stone beneath his feet. The IRA men watching the house had been taken by surprise and were firing at any moving figure. O’Keefe raised his hands and roared at them to cease firing.

He watched Cole’s sprinting form making for the forest at the far edge of the drive. ‘He’s there, he’s there!’

‘Hands up! Keep your fucking hands up, boy!’

O’Keefe did what he was told. ‘He’s getting away, for Jesus sake! He’s made the trees!’

‘Keep your hands up. He’s going nowhere.’

As Cole made the tree line – some hundred yards from where O’Keefe was standing on the steps of Burleigh House – the crack of a rifle shot sounded. A muzzle flash and puff of gunsmoke from within the shadow of the woods and Cole stumbled, then dropped as if a rope had been pulled across his path. His limp form skidded in the soft earth and came to an abrupt halt. A Volunteer emerged now from the tree line, rifle at his hip. Before others could arrive, the Volunteer pointed the barrel of his Enfield down at Cole and pulled the trigger. Bill Cole’s head jumped in the mud and then was still. The Volunteer shouldered the rifle and strolled towards the house.

‘I told you he was going nowhere, not with Mickeen Cope in them woods,’ one of the men behind O’Keefe muttered as he escorted him back into the house.

A while later, O’Keefe stood with Brennan and Farrell in the hallway outside the scullery, watching as the bodies of the dead men were removed.

‘Are we free to go?’ he asked. Waves of fading adrenaline shook through his frame. He was tired, of no more use to the IRA, but confident he and Finch wouldn’t be harmed.

Farrell watched Brennan carefully.

‘In the morning,’ Brennan told him. ‘Hate to inconvenience you, but that’s the way it has to be.’

‘I need to question the DI. He was
here
. The night Deirdre Costelloe was murdered.’

Brennan nodded. ‘The DI will be taken care of.’

‘I can’t allow that, sir. You know I can’t.’

A bitter smile cracked on Brennan’s face. ‘And you’ve a choice in the matter?’

‘He needs to be tried for his crime.’

‘Which was?’

‘Aiding and abetting a criminal act. Accessory to murder. Obstructing an investigation. He’ll be given jail time, Mr Brennan.’

‘And you can guarantee this?’

O’Keefe was silent, knowing that he could guarantee nothing.

‘I thought not,’ Brennan said.

‘So you’ll have him shot and he’ll die a martyred servant of the Crown, instead of serving sentence for the crime.’

‘We’ll work his reputation to the best of our abilities in the Press, Constable. Otherwise, I couldn’t care less how he dies. His reputation will matter very little in the new republic.’

‘If it comes.’

‘When it comes.’

‘And the other two? The Colonel and the Major.’

‘See for yourself.’ Brennan turned away from the scullery door and beckoned for O’Keefe to follow him.

To his back, O’Keefe said, ‘There’s nothing I can do to stop you?’

Brennan paused. ‘Nothing.’