The Death of an Irish Tradition (8 page)

New pins of shiny brass in the hinges, McGarr noted, as he closed the door. The Caugheys had had it added to the premises when they moved in, and, now that he came to think of it, the door had the look of a country item, the sort of ostentatiously elegant touch that some farmers with a bit of money to burn would lavish on the front doors of their cottages. The doors seemed ludicrous, of course, but one look and you could tell they cost a pretty penny, that nothing was too good for that family, humble as they were. McGarr rapped the glass—plate, all right. And nice joining work. It closed with a solid, reassuring clump.

He turned to the desk, a drop-top antique that stood near the piano where the light from the tall bay windows flooded the plants, the parquet floor, the Oriental rug. The latter was burgundy with dark green-and-gold patterns—of a knight on a charger, castles and fortifications, a battle scene with lances locked and reserves in tight rows behind—and it had been well used, the rug, but not worn. Quality stuff and tasteful too, even if graphic. He wondered if the old woman had selected everything. His eyes strayed to the tattered Morris chair where they had found her.

He unlocked the desk and everything was neat inside. He found mainly bills from expensive women’s clothiers, two recently arrived and outstanding; rent receipts (sixty-five pounds, all inclusive); a piano tuner’s charges—but no letters from relatives or friends, not even a postcard. McGarr turned and considered the framed and glassed photo portraits on the table near the piano. Why hadn’t she received anything from any of them? Could they all be dead or forgotten? Certainly, in spite of all the…pretensions, the dead woman had been very Irish.

He went through the drawers, looking for stationery, the sort in pastel colors with or without Margaret Kathleen Caughey’s name (her daughter, her namesake, although in Irish) engraved or printed on top, the sort that was sent out as a personal note, a friendly, chatty letter. None. Not a single sheet of paper. Just business envelopes that were prestamped and had been bought at the post office, a pad of cheap, lined paper, a little Hermes Rocket typewriter that was fitted neatly into the corner and had French punctuation keys and had been bought at a certain shop in Paris. Pencils—a mechanical model in fourteen-carat gold. Pens—again only one, a Parker that was modern in design and looked like it belonged in the pocket of an airline pilot.

But where were all the details of years of living, of having to communicate with this one and that, of having to mail envelopes and packets, of needing staples and clips or labels or—. Even the ribbon in the typewriter was new.

He closed the desk and thought of the phrase he’d used in his preliminary report of the night before, “…the apartment must be examined in greater detail to more fully assemble a picture of the victim, her involvements, her family, her circle of acquaintances and friends.”

And she had them, McGarr was sure. Why else the pictures?

He lifted the seat of the piano bench. Nothing but sheet music and difficult stuff, pages of complexities of sharps and flats and rapid transitions. He closed the lid.

What now? Basic signs of life, things that were impossible to conceal—food, clothing, toiletries.

McGarr stepped back across the carpet, past the mantel and the eight-day clock with the porcelain face and the golden ballerina who was pirouetting first one way and then the other, past the Morris chair toward the hallway and the kitchen beyond.

Out in the alley he could hear the men from the bomb squad and the Technical Bureau conferring. Van doors were being slammed; Gardai—now at least several squads of them—were blocking off the streets and laneways with sawhorses. People were complaining, dogs barking at the intruders in the dark-blue uniforms.

But here in the Caughey apartment all seemed in place, tranquil, and—was it cool; yes—McGarr could hear the dull drone of a cooling unit in an air conditioner and, pausing in the shadowed hallway, he listened for the location of the sound.

Opening the door to a bedroom, a bank of cold air fell on him, smelling of sweet, spicy perfume. The windows of the room were curtained and draped and, unlike the rest of the house, the room was cluttered. The bed was unmade. Already the effects of the mother’s death were being felt, but he’d save this room for later. At the moment McGarr was concerned with the victim.

The fridge was still well stocked. McGarr imagined that the girl probably hadn’t been able to think of eating since the mother’s death.

Cheeses—but not the crumbly orange Irish cheddar or the processed Galtee varieties, but brie and camembert and port du salut and some unusual brown sort from Norway made of goat’s milk and tasting of the udder. Cottage cheese. A tall chocolate layer cake with chocolate icing. Yogurt. Skimmed milk. Where, he wondered, had they found that here in Ireland? “Specially Prepared For Finlay’s Select Customers.” They were that all right. With distaste, McGarr slid the bottle back into the fridge. It was bluish and frothy, like soapy dishwater. McGarr preferred his milk with a thick collar of cream around the top…when he drank milk.

A bottle of Medoc from Pauillac, nothing expensive, but it had a full, burnt-ruby color when McGarr poured some into a wine glass and the characteristic tartness that he greatly admired. It was a shame that it was chilled and corked, and he left it on the kitchen table, the cork by its side—for future reference.

Now then—he raised the glass to his lips; it was full-bodied but smooth, and its bouquet, while slight, was pleasant—what had the mother eaten? She was plump. Certainly she hadn’t lived on air, and all the fresh fruit and vegetables he could see under the glass in the hydrator seemed more like the daughter’s fare.

He stooped and looked into the shelves of the large refrigerator, really too big for two people, and saw several covered pots: simmered calves’ hearts with slices of onion, some bacon, and a bay leaf for flavor; a stew—he dipped his finger into it and tasted—beef and without any wine or condiments, just a plain dish with carrots, onion, potatoes, and stock. Some ham slices wrapped in waxed paper. McGarr slid several into his mouth, decided the daughter would only end up throwing the rest away, and so finished them off, tossing the paper in the garbage bin, which he sorted through.

Nothing unusual there either.

The cupboard shelves in the large, well-lit pantry also held two types of things: specialty items like smoked baby clams, tins of salmon, boxes of wild rice, Italian cookies from Perugia, Drosti’s chocolate, bottles of
aqua minerale
, an espresso maker; and then cans of tomatoes, peas, beans, corn. Daughter and mother. What a difference.

And in the bedrooms too.

The daughter’s: posters of her concert performances framed and under glass; and pictures of horses, her in the saddle; others with roses in her arms, standing on brilliantly lit stages, orchestras behind her, bowing in one so that the bodice of her dress hung loose and much of her breasts were visible.

Even as a youngster, McGarr concluded, she had been…fetching, and whether out in green rocky fields with her hair braided and pinned to the back of her head or in a white dress with some older mustachioed man holding her hand in—was it Rome? yes, St. Peter’s, the Vatican; she had to squint because of the sunlight—she looked worldly and knowledgeable. Not a child. No, never really a child. But still…childlike.

And all the rouges, emolients, unguents, powders, eye-shadow sticks, lipsticks, fingernail polishes, vials of perfume and such that lined the top of her dressing table; and the black flimsy things—garters, negligees, a kind of chemise and housecoat of embroidered silk that McGarr had only seen once in a movie, and that portraying the life and passions of a courtesan—in the drawers of her chifforobe, her deep closet, and her armoire all bespoke a certain sophistication.

McGarr found letters in French and Italian, one in Spanish, another in German which somebody had translated onto another sheet. It was about one of her performances—all technical and impersonal and erudite.

But still, the look and feel and smell of the bedroom was not girlish by any means. Had McGarr not known of the mother’s death, he would have bet two people had spent a strenuous, sleepless night in the rumpled bed, the sheets of which were silver satin.

The mother’s: a picture of Jesus and His Sacred Heart over the mantel, His hand raised gracefully, His face long and gaunt with a thin, shapely beard; a white robe with a red collar to match the color of the heart. And those haunting eyes.

McGarr turned away from the portrait, having seen it thousands of times before, having been frightened and shocked by it even from his first remembrance—God showing His heart. It was…macabre, savage, part of the terror that had been his first impression of the religion he called his own but had not practiced for many years.

The mother’s closet: black, dark gray, brown, and navy blue dresses, all nearly ankle length. Strong, serviceable shoes in only two or three styles. Heavy winter coats of good quality, but again plain. Only one summer dress made of some thin, lilac-colored material with a green leaf pattern—willows—running through it.

Hats: little woven bonnets or pillbox caps representing years of changing styles were on the top shelf with a few broad-brimmed summer types; and she had been soft on purses too. McGarr fished through every one, and what struck him was the absolute care that had been taken to purge each one of every scrap of—was it evidence? yes, in a way—that the items had had an owner who had an identity. Not a bobby pin or a toothpick or a hanky was left. He wondered if the liners had been pulled out and smacked clean of lint. No, there was lint, but evidence was the key word.

Keeping it in mind, McGarr carefully checked the rest of the bedroom, the dining room, the back entry, kitchen cabinets, pots, lid drawers, the sideboard and the silver, but he found no…evidence that would help him put together a picture of M. K. Caughey, the elder.

Where were their personal documents? Passports, since they had traveled; birth certificates, since they had required those for passports; and financial records like deposit slips, bank- or check books, since everything McGarr had seen so far had cost money and it hadn’t just appeared whenever the daughter had wanted a flimsy, see-through blouse from some fancy shop. And baptismal records, Sunday offering cards, school reports, other photographs than the ones on the table. In a safe deposit box? Then where was the record of that kept? Had the killer come for that?

McGarr opened the back door and stepped down the stairs to the dustbins in the latticed compound near the side of the house. He dumped the contents of the bins onto the concrete and went through the trash, only to come up with nothing and have to replace it all, bit by bit.

It was well past noon before McGarr trudged back up the stairs and closed the door to preserve the cool, rarefied atmosphere that the air conditioner was now straining to maintain.

He washed his hands at the kitchen sink, then dried them on a towel in the bathroom and noted the contents of the medicine cabinet. It was a good Irish object—aspirin, corn plasters, a mild laxative, and some eyedrops. But clean as a whistle—toothbrushes in a holder except for one that he assumed was the daughter’s.

In another cabinet, though, he found a range of soaps and shampoos, bath oils, body oils, cold creams, cleansing creams, hand creams, creams for dry skin, night creams, conditioning creams, cream rinses, and even a talc that looked in McGarr’s palm just like fresh cream. All the daughter’s. And to think, he said to himself, spilling a handful into the water of the toilet bowl, she drinks skim milk. He wondered if she was allergic to cream, the real stuff.

And prescription drugs. Codeine, ergotamine, dihydroergotamine. Ergotamine tartrate—lots of that. Valium, Librium, phenobarbitol. And reserpine and phenothiazine. In all, quite a wallop. The substances had been purchased at a variety of chemists’ shops in Dublin and abroad, but he noticed also that none had been much used, apart from the ergotamine tartrate. In the bottle of Librium that the label said contained thirty-six tablets, thirty-two remained. In others only one or two tablets had been taken.

He replaced everything, opened the sliding glass doors of the shower and noted the massage nozzle on the shower head, wishing he had one himself for those difficult mornings-after that sometimes plagued him. He then examined the toilet bowl and even lifted off the top of the tank to peer into the dark water there. Nothing still.

Scented toilet paper and a bidet, of all things. In Ireland. He shook his head once more.

McGarr then raised the frosted glass window and looked down across the backyards toward the garage. The vans were no longer there but had moved to either end of the laneway, except for one which was bulky and windowless. Only one man was inside the garage. He was working under the hood by the light of several brilliant portable lamps. He wore an asbestos suit and mask and a flak jacket. Gillis, McGarr thought. He didn’t work much, but he could have it. And it was taking some time. Whoever had rigged it had had some experience.

He lowered the window and returned to the kitchen and the glass of Medoc. He poured himself a bit more. McGarr needed to think and time was running out. He didn’t know how long Ward would keep the girl at the Castle. It was perfectly within the law for him to be in the apartment, but he preferred to form his conclusions alone. And the privacy of the evacuated neighborhood was now near total.

He carried the bottle and glass into the old woman’s bedroom and sat in the rocker near the small hearth. It was cool here too, and at least the comfort was not mechanized and…precise. That was it. The old woman had been precise in everything—careful, attentive, and reasoned about the details of the house, almost to a fault. Why? He had never seen anything like it. No—again he thought of evidence—proof of her having lived here, Margaret Kathleen Caughey herself, the person who must have had some attachment to the world other than her daughter.

But where was her husband? Which one of the photos on the piano was of him?