The Death of an Irish Consul (5 page)

“Sit down. Where are ye all from?” the old lady asked. She shuffled over and switched off the early edition of the Telefis Eireann news. “Are ye from the ‘far side’?” by which she meant England. “I should think so, considering your odd way of speaking and all. Would ye care for some tea?” She pronounced the last word “tay.”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” said Mallon, “we just——”

But McGarr, who was about to sit near the fire, reached over and slapped the Garda lieutenant’s arm, then motioned toward the pot steaming over the fire. “But on second thought,” continued Mallon, “it
was
weak tea, if you know what I mean.”

“I do, I do,” she said. “You mean you’re hungry.” She allowed the oilcloth she kept on top of the television to drop over the screen. “I always cover the contraption,” she explained. “It’s rented and not mine, and, what’s more, I love it and could no more do without the thing than church.” She shuffled toward the sideboard, her gait arthritic, half-walk, half-trot. She seemed ancient, perhaps in her eighties. Her white hair was bunned and she wore clear-frame bifocals, now yellow with age. McGarr could see at least two dress hems near the heavy black stockings that bound her thin legs. She also had on a sweater, checkerboard apron, and fluffy house slippers with bright green pom
poms on the toes. In spite of all her vestments, the room was snug.

McGarr stood and removed his jacket, saying, “The last thing we want to do, ma’am, is to put you to any bother, but the truth is that we were summoned rudely from our lunch and I have not eaten peat-simmered lamb kidneys and rashers since my mother died.” He imagined that the old woman had not had company all winter.

She looked up from the tea canister on the sideboard. “And when was that, dear boy?”

“I was quite young, ma’am.”

“How old? I was a mother meself, and you can tell me.”

“Ah—ten, I believe.”

She shuffled over and put her hands on his shoulders, “And here now thirty years later in Kate O’Connor’s kitchen you’ll eat them to your heart’s content.” Lowering her voice, she said into his ear, “Could you use a bit of the good stuff? I’d offer it to your man”—she tilted her head to Mallon, who was in uniform—“but what I have isn’t exactly legal.”

“Ah—to hell with legality and the law,” said McGarr. “I think that’d be smashin’. Just a sip, mind you.” And before she could shamble back to the sideboard, he added, “And you can offer the others a drop too, since I believe”—he glanced out the window at the ocean—“we’re westwards of the law.”

“I like you,” she squeezed his shoulders and raised
her head so she could the better see McGarr through the bottom half of her bifocals. “IRA?”

McGarr shook his head.

The bridge of her nose was thick, the end a rosy ball. Her eyebrows were still black. At one time, McGarr speculated, she had a sort of dark, Spanish beauty one seldom saw any more. “There’s something wild about you, boy.” She straightened up. “But don’t be too sure about being beyond the reach of the law.” She turned to Mallon. “No offense, darlin’.” She patted his shoulder, too, and returned to her work. “Because I believe they’re patrolling the coast in airships and regular.” She handed Gallup an empty jam jar, then one to Mallon, and finally McGarr, to whom she also reached a crock that was nearly too heavy for her arm.

“How so?” McGarr poured a good amount into his container, then handed the crock to Mallon.

“Heliochoppers,” she confided past her hand. “They’ve nearly flown two of them in through my windows lately.”

Gallup poured some poteen into his jam jar and got up to look out the window, where McGarr now stood.

The sun was a magenta crescent sliding rapidly into the far Atlantic. It made the distant water seem very blue. Directly below them waves slammed into the sheer cliff of Slea Head. Shadows and a ground fog rising from the Great Blasket were beginning to obscure that island.

“From which direction, ma’am, and when?”

“My name is Kathleen, son. That”—she pointed over her shoulder, as she placed four plates on the sideboard. “From off the water. Five days ago in the morning, say, half-eleven.”

“North or south?”

“North, I believe. I heard the throbbing of its blades minutes before, every time the wind blew in my direction. I couldn’t imagine who could be hammering spiles here and at this time of the year, so I climbed up to the road to look around. I saw its little light on top winking. The beating grew louder as it approached and nearly knocked me off me pins when it whisked over.”

“Did you see it land?” Gallup asked.

“Gad—he has a beauty of a way of speaking, what? Are you English?”

“My great-grandmother was Irish.”

She was bending to lift the black pot off the andiron. “Don’t tell a soul. The way you talk nobody will ever suspect. No—in answer to your question, sir—I did not see it land.”

“Did the noise stop soon after?” Mallon asked, somewhat sheepishly, looking to McGarr to see if he approved.

McGarr nodded and sipped from his cup.

“Now that you mention it, it did, son. But I’ve noticed in times past when, after a storm, the air force sends out several machines to look for shipwrecks, that the throbbing has a way of dying suddenly, so I took no notice, until last night.”

McGarr finished his drink and made for the crock near the hearth.

She had begun to ladle the lamb kidneys and rasher stew onto the plates, on which thick slices of soda bread, lavishly buttered, now rested. The tea kettle was sitting right on the coals. “Last night, it was far different. It’s at night a person hears things more distinct, what?”

“Of course, of course,” McGarr said into the raised jar.

“The beating seemed to pick up once the thing was over the house. I threw open the door to see if it had landed on the road above. It was frightful the racket it was making. What I then saw was lights in the heavens. They were twirling through the fog we had. Suddenly the throbbing stopped, then the light went off, then a little later the whirring sound ceased too. I shut the door to keep the dampness out, so I did.

“Then, while I was dozing over my darning, hours later, the thing started up again, made a great hullabaloo, and died out.”

“Did you see which way it went?” Gallup asked.

“I was too tired to get up. I only know it did not go over the house or out to sea, because I looked out the window. I wanted to see its lights over the water, don’t you know. Sit down now and eat while it’s hot.”

“Hadn’t we ought to——”

McGarr knew Gallup wanted to buzz right back to Hitchcock’s house and check the ground for evidence of the old woman’s story, wanted to complete the on
site investigation and get back to London as soon as possible. “It’s not shish kabab, patlijan moussaka, or stuffed grape leaves, Ned, but we have no Armenians on the western coast, and you’ll be glad of it once you taste this stew.”

Glumly, Gallup ate.

McGarr had thirds. Kathleen managed to dig up several bottles of stout. The peat sputtered in the fireplace, the waves beat against the cliffs, and the wind rattled the loose panes in her bay window.

With a cup of hot tea in one hand and a freshly lit Woodbine in the other, McGarr asked the old girl if he could use her phone, which was displayed prominently on a table by the door. It too was covered, but with a clear plastic sheath. “The calls are going to be to Dublin and London, Kathleen. I’ll leave the money for it under the mat here.” McGarr tapped the table.

“Will you have enough? All that distance won’t strain the thing, I hope. Remember, it’s new. I haven’t really learned to use it myself as yet. My kids who live in America got it in for me. They call at Christmas and Easter and sound as though they’re in the next room. It’s luvelly what they can do now.”

“Bernie?” McGarr said. “Peter here. I’d like you to send the pathologist’s van down to pick up this corpse and some lab boys to cover the outbuilding carefully once more. Then I want you to dispatch Sinclair to the Air Ministry office to see if they have reports of helicopter movements in the past six days, especially over
the western ocean and then from Slea Head eastwards. Maybe radar installations might pick up something like that.”

“Too low,” said Mallon, who was sipping his tea.

“Also, I want you to canvass all helicopter owners, pilots, and landing pads in the twenty-six counties. I’m sure I can get U.K. cooperation for the other helicopters in the general area.”

Gallup nodded and took out a small black notebook and pen.

“Put as many men as you have to on this. I want to talk to anybody who has flown a helicopter over Kerry in the past week and a half.” A correlation occurred to him at that moment. “Also, which of these persons might have recently purchased the elasticized cargo cord we’ve been investigating.”

McKeon sighed.

“Or might soon. I assume whoever owns this helicopter will want to replace what’s missing. The only other thing I can think of is the ketobemidone-base drug that Professor Cole found in Hitchcock’s body. We better check Browne for that, although I’m assuming now the same person or persons who killed Hitchcock killed Browne.”

“They certainly want it to look that way. Have you called London yet?”

“Cummings?”

“I don’t know his name, he won’t give it. But please get a hold of him, Peter. How is a man supposed to get
any sleep around here with this horn going off every quarter hour?”

McGarr chuckled and said, “I’m presently at Dingle three ring seven,” and put down the receiver. He picked it up again and asked the operator to connect him with London operator seventy-eight-
H
. While he was being connected, he glanced over at the old girl.

She was worried. McGarr surmised that she was a pensioner and would probably be hard pressed after the spread she had laid before the three policemen, yet being hospitable to the wayfarer was a Celtic tradition that most of the older people in the country honored. And McGarr was sure they had cheered her.

When the London number answered, he said, “Peter McGarr, Garda Soichana here.”

“We were wondering when you’d call, McGarr. I had the exchange route all calls through to my home. I haven’t had a chance to relax all evening.” It was Cummings. “What have you discovered?”

“Gallup will fill you in.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Cummings indignantly. “I thought we were going to cooperate on this matter.”

“So far,” said McGarr, “it has been all give and no take. Have you gotten the information I asked you for this afternoon?”

“As a matter of fact, I have. But I must say I don’t care for your thinking you have to extort it from me.” In spite of his bluster, Cummings’s tone had changed. In back of it all, McGarr thought he could detect a lit
tle fright. If the assassination of SIS C.’s was following a pattern, he was next.

“Well?” McGarr asked. “This call is costing me money.” They were no longer speaking to each other over lunch at the Proscenium Club and McGarr wanted to make that very plain. Any continuing relationship had to be mutually beneficial.

“I’ve put together a list of our agents who have been issued the ketobemidone-base drug. We began using it only a year and two months ago so the list is not long.

“I then cross-referred this list with that of former, disgruntled agents of SIS. I came up with one man who is now an ENI employee. His name is Moses Foster. Do you know that Browne was also working for ENI?”

“What position?”

“Security, deputy director and second-in-command after Hitchcock.” Cummings’s tone was becoming self-satisfied once more. “This Foster is quite competent. He spent eleven years in Havana during the Cuban revolution and later through the many purges. Castro sent him to their embassy in Moscow and then Peking. After he narrowly escaped being exposed, we offered him a desk job in London. That galled him. He demanded a large amount of cash, not just his pension, but what he called ‘combat pay for a Cold War hero,’ all of it in one lump sum and immediately. When we told him that was impossible, he ran amok in our offices, put several senior fellows in hospital, nearly killed a policeman.

“In what I thought a surprising reversal some months later, Foster then accepted the post Browne—who was C. at the time the man was refused the lump sum payment—offered him with the security team at the ENI operations in Scotland. Browne felt he was the cause of Foster’s problems, since Browne should have known better than to have tried to put Foster behind a desk. Well, Foster took the job about two years ago. When I saw Browne at the club from time to time, he said Foster was working out just fine.”

McGarr asked, “Is he black?”

“Why, yes—he’s Jamaican.”

“About six feet, sixteen or seventeen stone, wide forehead, and close-set eyes?”

“Right again—how do you know this?”

“I’m not sure that I do. Are any other of your former agents currently employed by ENI?”

“I’ve checked that. None.”

“What sort of operation is ENI running up in Scotland that it needs such high-caliber security?”

“Oil exploration is a cutthroat business, Mr. McGarr. A man who knows where the oil is well may make his life’s fortune with that information. Hitchcock’s, Browne’s, and Foster’s job was to see that that information stayed in the company. They were being very well paid for their services.”

“Does Foster now become head of the security operations for ENI?”

“Yes.”

“What about a former agent, a man about fifty with
lots of curly white hair, a big, black moustache, and a sallow complexion? I should imagine he’s handsome in a Mediterranean way.”

“Nobody I can recall. I’ll check, however. Any other details on him?”

“No—he was sitting in a car when I saw him. What about Browne? Was he married? Can we trace his movements before he arrived here in Ireland?”

“Not likely. He was a bachelor and necessarily rather secretive about his personal affairs. He employed an aged manservant. We’ve questioned him. He says Browne left for Scotland about a week ago, called twice to have certain letters read to him.”

“Did you get a look at those?”

“Of course not. I didn’t ask.”