The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf (6 page)

CLARE ISLAND WAS just as Peter McGarr remembered it—a bright green and treeless eminence rising from the sea, the last and largest of the three hundred and sixty-five islands in Clew Bay, so said a sign in the Roonagh Point ferry terminus. It was as if the land had raised a three-by-five-mile, fifteen-hundred-meter shoulder against the fury of the ocean. Today it was mounting a thundering offensive against the Mayo coast.

Under a brilliant early-summer sun that had been swept clean of every cloud, mist, or color but a blistering robin’s egg blue, Clew Bay was a boil of turquoise wave. Approaching the breakwater and harbor, the boat that had been sent to fetch McGarr bobbed like a cork in a cauldron. Only the skill of the captain—playing one engine off against the other—kept it from dashing its side into the jetty.

But there it waited, two yards maybe three from the wall, until the captain waved an arm. “Are yeh comin’ aboard?”

McGarr nodded.

“The feck are yeh waitin’ for?”

Hesitating, half hoping conditions would change, McGarr launched himself off the jetty and over the rail. Only the mate, catching him, prevented an ugly fall. The boat then lurched away from the wall, and again McGarr nearly went down.

“Pig of a blow last night,” the mate confided. “As you can see.”

McGarr had been seeing nothing but for the past two hours. His Dublin office had paged him while he was fishing Lough Eske in nearby Donegal. It had been early morning—around 7:00—and McGarr had only just returned to the lodge for breakfast, having fished the dawn for the salmon that were entering the lake. Two and a half hours later, he arrived at Roonagh point, only to be made to wait two more by the owner of the “water taxi.”

“The price is forty-five bloody quid for guards, God, or gombeen men,” the owner of the concession had said when McGarr had rung him up. The alternative was the twice-daily ferry, which would have meant a six-hour wait.

McGarr now had a feeling that it was the captain he had spoken to on the phone. For a forty-five-pound skiting, he should get more than a sea-sickening, eight-mile crossing. Already his stomach was feeling queasy.

In his early fifties, McGarr was a short, well-knit man with an aquiline nose and pale gray eyes. What little hair he had left was a lustrous red and curled at the nape of his neck. Having been on holiday fishing in Donegal when the call came through, he was wearing a short-brimmed khaki cap, windbreaker and trousers to match. On his feet was a pair of stout but supple walking shoes which, he knew, would be well suited to the rough terrain of Clare Island. He had spent a summer holiday there several years before. Apart from the blousyness of the jacket that concealed a 9 mm automatic, there was nothing to suggest his occupation.

“Rough day,” he said by way of making conversation.

But the curly-headed captain with the ginger beard and weathered face did not so much as glance his way.

“Was it you I spoke to on the phone?”

Still the man did not reply. He was wearing a bright yellow rain slicker and bib overalls.

Could he be deaf? No, he had shouted to McGarr on the jetty.

“So—what gives on Clare Island?”

That got him. Shoving forward the throttle levers, the man cut the speed of the boat that pitched and heaved yet more
violently as it lost momentum. The captain’s eyes were hazel and angry. “Hear me—I couldn’t care less who you are or why you’ve come, you’ll bring
me
no bother. Now, I’ll have me forty-five pound or it’s back to the mainland with you.” He tapped the flat top of the control console.

McGarr did not move. He could imagine the flap if this “captain” returned to the island without him. McGarr had been summoned by the superintendent of the Louisburgh barracks because of “a homicide and maybe some others. Whatever happened, we got one dead, three people missin’, and there’s blood and…mayhem everywhere.” To McGarr’s knowledge there had not been a capital crime on Clare Island in recent times, and its forty or so families would need the reassurance of an official presence.

“The only time we see
seoinini
, like you, is when there’s trouble!” the man now went on. “All you ever give us is grief!”

And the odd forty-five pounds, thought McGarr, though he imagined life could be hard here on the rocky edge of the continent. In Irish
Maigh Eo
meant “the Place of the Yew Trees.” It had been sacred to the ancient Celts, and certainly the terrain with its many mountains and formidable cliffs was dramatically beautiful.

But Mayo had long been thought of as the most remote of the counties of Connacht, and its people had fiercely resisted every foreign incursion from Christianity, through Cromwell, to the English language. For some, Dublin was now the enemy.
Seoinin
meant aper of foreign ways or jackeen or city slicker, which in many ways McGarr most definitely was. And he’d now give up the forty-five quid when good and ready. If then.

Finally the man wrenched his eyes away and jerked back the sticks, “Ye’re hoors and gobshites, all of yiz. Louts, bowsies, and gurriers.”

The boat surged into an oncoming wave that burst over the foredeck and thundered against the windscreen. “All piss and cess like a tinker’s mule,” he went on, having tried and failed to put a bit of wind up the chief superintendent of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Garda Siochana, the national police.

But with no witnesses save the mate, at worst he was out the price of the ride.

By the time the boat reached the island, the blinding sunlight had become another medium altogether, and McGarr wished he had brought a hat with a wider brim. Roiling sparkles now appeared in the periphery of his vision, as he glanced from the well-preserved O’Malley Castle that dominated the harbor entrance to the crowd on the jetty. There perhaps a hundred people had gathered in two groups—by a cottage and car and by a two-wheeled cart a few feet off. Which had to be most of the island’s population, McGarr judged.

He did not wait for the boat to tie up. What was good enough for Roonagh Point, he decided, was even better for here, and he jumped off when they were three feet from the jetty wall. The captain howled to the mate, then called out. But McGarr did not look back.

“’Tis the only two corpses we can find,” said Superintendent Rice from the Louisburgh barracks, pointing to the young donkey that had been shot point-blank in the side of the head and was now heaped in its traces.

His finger then moved to the boot of the battered car, the lid of which was open but covered by a blanket. Standing there was a middle-aged woman with her head bent and rosary beads in her hands. Grouped tightly around her were seven children of various ages. Other adults were keeping themselves at a respectful remove.

McGarr glanced down at the donkey. The muzzle blast had burned a black aureole around the entrance wound, and the outer lens of the visible eye was milky blue.

“It’s Clement Ford’s beast, I’m told,” Rice said in an undertone. “He’s one of them that’s missing.”

The animal’s mouth was open, and the stiff breeze, bucking over the edge of the jetty, riffled its upper lip. Now and then square yellow teeth appeared, and a length of dry-cracked tongue. It was as though the mute corpse was saying, We dumb beasts are better than this, but
you
! McGarr turned toward the car and what he suspected was human carnage.

“Apart from the one body in the boot, like I mentioned on the phone, the rest is just bullets and blood, and plenty o’
both.” Rice went on, following him. His hand swept over the shiny brass bullet casings that littered the ground in front of a small white cottage, more a kind of converted outbuilding than a house by design. The door had been broken open and was hanging at an odd angle.

McGarr now glanced down at his feet. There were dark stains from the car to the edge of the jetty. The vehicle itself, while old and rusty, looked like it had been caught in a cross fire. The faded blue sheet metal was riddled and pierced by large-caliber bullets, the glass blown out of all windows but one. There were some other holes that appeared to have been caused by smaller-caliber fire, perhaps by a handgun. Or handguns.

“The other crime scene I told you about—the house—is about four miles by road from here at the base of Croaghmore. It’s the same. Blood in the hall, in the sitting room, on the gravel drive. Casings all over, one from a handgun in the house.” Croaghmore was the large mountain behind them, McGarr now remembered.

The crowd broke before him, silent, their eyes on his face, regarding him closely. He was the cop, the government man, the
seoinin
who might make sense of it all, when, in fact, it was they who had the answers. Unlike in Dublin or Cork or Limerick where anonymous crime was common, there was little possibility that the pivotal details of whatever had occurred were unknown to them. The challenge would be in convincing them to give up that truth.

“So, what we have is—three people is missing and one boat,” Rice went on. A beefy older man in a blue uniform, he toddled and huffed a half step behind McGarr.

“
Two
boats, if you count the one that put into the harbor at nightfall. It was a big white yoke with sails, somethin’ like a schooner I’m told. There was at least three people aboard, foreigners from the sound of them. But only one of them called in at the bar over there.” He jerked a thumb at the largest of the buildings in the harbor front. “He was a young man, middling height, sandy hair cut short and wearing”—Rice consulted his notepad—“an orange deck suit with ‘
Mah Jong
’ on the back.”

“Like the game.”

“And the boat evidently. It was called that too. The bloke spoke good English sort of like an American and was quick to ask after Ford—where he lived. How he could get there? Was it far? That class of thing. When the barman volunteered to ring Ford up, he said no, he wanted his visit to be a surprise. Left most of his fresh pint on the bar.”

“Ford’s one of the missing?”

Rice nodded. “An Englishman who’s lived here for fifty years. Big fella, huge, and a kind man. Great, white beard.”

The woman standing by the boot of the car now turned her face to McGarr; it was haggard with woe. McGarr touched the brim of his cap. “Peter McGarr. I’m—”

But she nodded, and Rice interposed. “Jacinta O’Grady. Sergeant O’Grady’s wife.
Former
Sergeant O’—” but he had explained about O’Grady on the phone, along with how the man had come to be at the Fords’ house armed on the evening before—as a favor to the old couple. “He left his tea on the table, fetched his revolver from the closet, and that was the last seen of him,” Rice had reported.

The youngest child now began to cry, and the widow lifted him into her arms.

Because O’Grady had been a guard, a funeral detail would be sent out from Dublin. Radio and television would cover the event. It would do nothing for the family, but maybe somebody would recall having seen a large white schooner leaving the island. Or O’Malley’s fishing boat. Already every maritime policing agency had been notified, not only in the Republic but also in the North, in Britain, and in Norway. Planes and helicopters had been dispatched, but so far nothing.

“Would you tell me something?” Jacinta O’Grady took a step closer to the boot of the car, then turned her head to her other children. “The lot of yeh stay where you are.” She then tried to raise an edge of the gray blanket, but the wind, sweeping over the jetty, tore the wool from her hand. Only Rice, reaching out, kept the blanket from being swept out into the harbor. “Whatever happened to the back of his poor head?”

McGarr could see at a glance. The bullet had entered the forehead, then exploded, blowing away the skull from the ears
back. It made his face look unreal and one-dimensional, like a pasteboard cutout tacked to his shoulders.

But McGarr only shook his head. It was a scene he knew all too well, and no words, no matter how well chosen, could help.

“Don’t you know? Can’t you tell me?”

Rice signaled to some of the other women who moved forward.

“Who was it? Who could have done such a thing? Taken a life, a husband. Taken a father from his children.”

Stepping round the car, McGarr peered into the backseat at a mass of fat green flies that had gathered on the pooled blood. There was plenty of it. Too much for one person to have survived. In the matter of lethal bloodletting, McGarr was rather expert.

“Now—what I mentioned, Chief, is here on the floor under the wheel.”

It was a woman’s ring that was sparkling even in the shadows. A single shaft of sunlight, angling through a bullet hole in the side window, had caught its large central stone and was spewing rainbows of prismatic light over the pedals. The smaller surrounding stones had the deep blue color of sapphires.

“Could it be real?” McGarr asked.

“Not likely. That big job is the size of a peach pit, and them other ones is too alike to be real. And whyever would it have been left behind.” If it were real, Rice meant.

McGarr was tempted to reach for it, but the Tech Squad would be arriving soon by helicopter. Instead, he turned toward the cottage.

It was bachelor digs, he could see as he entered; men’s clothes were hung on pegs, and the furnishings were Spartan and few. Dirty dishes were heaped in the sink, most shattered by bullets. Somebody had swept the room with an automatic weapon.

Turning to step back outside, McGarr walked into the chest of a larger man; it was the captain of the boat that had ferried him to the island. He was standing in the doorway with a hand out. “Now, bucko—my forty-five pounds.”

McGarr tried to step to one side, but the man moved in front of him. And to the other. Again.

“Did ye not hear me?”

McGarr knew the tone; more, he had seen that squint-eyed smile before. The man in the yellow rain slicker was twenty years younger, twenty pounds heavier, and a good six inches taller. Already his hands had formed fists. He was about to give McGarr a thumping, or at least try. Which posed a dilemma.

McGarr could not appear to be intimidated, especially not here in front of the gathered population of the island whose respect he would need. But neither could he be seen in a brawl that would be reported to the press.