The Death of an Irish Lover (8 page)

“Murderers are seldom neat,” said Ward. “They almost always leave something lying about.”

“And there’s this.” McKeon held up a Garda fact sheet and passed it to Ward. “I did some checking before I came down yesterday afternoon. It seems Ellen Finn was a kayaker and could get around the river without making much noise.

“Last month in the middle of the night she came upon the Frakes poaching eels. They jumped in their van, and when they wouldn’t stop for her, she shot out two of their tires. They kept going, but they’d left their woman behind—”

“Gertrude McGurk, her name is,” said Bresnahan, who was scanning the tech-squad report.

“And she resisted arrest. Maybe you remember the picture of her appearing in court the next day.” McKeon had a photocopy of that as well. “Our woman there—Ellen—thumped her bloody, and Gertrude McGurk swore out a complaint charging her with police brutality.”

More silence ensued, as each of the five tried to put
the case together. Or, at least, tried to understand which avenue of investigation should be pursued first.

“Also there’s the matter of the other guests—who they are, what they might have heard,” said Ward. “We’ve got an all-points out on them.”

“And the personnel in the inn and pub,” McKeon said, almost wistfully, adding, “Didn’t you mention in your report, Chief, that you didn’t think the maid was telling you everything she knows about who Burke had been bedding?”

Lost in thought, McGarr only nodded. He was trying to marshal the facts, even though he knew it was too early to draw any conclusion but one: that the ballistics report and autopsy made the dynamic of the double murder apparent. Ellen Finn’s murder had been staged to mislead them about who had slain Pascal Burke three hours earlier.

Why? To implicate the Frakes, who subsequently tried to murder their erstwhile comrade, Benny Carson?

Plainly, they didn’t know enough. But in McGarr’s experience, murders of such premeditation and…craft seldom occurred without some animus. Having been known eel poachers as well as regulars at the bar—to say nothing of having carried a carpet upstairs at or around the time of the murders—at least Manus Frakes would have been a suspect in Burke’s death without the money in Burke’s jacket and without the photographs of the Frakes poaching eels.

Why, then, murder Ellen Finn?

The husband, Quintan Finn, had been with Frakes at the time. Finn of the note on the table, Finn who was missing.

McGarr also remembered the little girl he first met
in the courtyard, the one with the beeper of the same brand as issued to Garda personnel. Manus Frakes’s daughter, as it turned out. But not by the woman, Gertrude McGurk, whom Carson described as “something close to a professional woman.”

“Also there’s this—where are Ellen Finn’s undergarments?” said Bresnahan, holding up the page of the tech-squad report listing all items found in the room. “No bra, panties, stockings.”

“Maybe she was just dressed for action,” McKeon suggested.

The two women glared at him.

“Don’t look at me—you know yourselves, it happens.”

Tallon had appeared in the doorway. “Sorry—but there’s a gentleman from the Shannon Regional Fisheries Board to see you.”

Thanking him, McGarr waited until Tallon had left the room before he passed out assignments, sending Bresnahan and Ward to the house where the Frakes had been living to see if they could find some lead as to where the three might have fled. McKeon was dispatched to the bar to renew his acquaintance with boyhood chum, Benny Carson.

“Ah, no—Chief, please—anyplace but the bar on a Garda Siochana expense account.” McKeon grasped his throat. “Send Hughie, send Ruth—anybody but poor parched Bernie McKeon.”

Signaling that the meeting was over, McGarr stood but not without pain. His right leg was now a mottled whorl of bruises where the door of his erstwhile Cooper had slammed into his thigh after having been struck by the high-powered bullet. It reminded him of his loss. And the Frakes.

Out in the hall McGarr shook hands with Chief Officer Eamon Gannon of the Fisheries Board and expressed his condolences on Gannon’s having lost two of his staff.

A bearish man in his early forties with a full beard and mustache that had just begun to gray, Gannon looked off. “I still can’t take it all in. It’s so hard to believe. Do you know who…?”

McGarr shook his head. “But you can help us.”

“Anything. Anything at all.”

McGarr then introduced Noreen. “Would you mind if my daughter comes along? She’s very interested in fish and the environment.”

“What about me?” Noreen demanded. “Do you think I’m not?”

McGarr knew for a fact that her only concern for fish was limited to the one that might appear on her dinner plate. Also, any environment lacking horses was for Noreen not considerable at all, she being profoundly a land person. “I thought perhaps you’d like to poke around town here, like Bernie. Who knows what somebody might have seen.”

He watched admiringly while his impulsive, intelligent, and beautiful wife sorted through the probability of enjoying an outing with her husband and daughter or the possibility of discovering something critical to the investigation on her own.

Twelve full years younger than he, Noreen was a trained art historian and restorer who managed her family’s fine arts gallery in upmarket Dawson Street in Dublin. But her hobby—where she had the most fun—seemed to be his career, which, however, she would be the last to admit.

No item of information regarding a current investi
gation was too small to be of interest, and any request for “word on the street”—meaning Dublin gossip—was pursued with a diligence that few on his staff could equal.

Now wrestling with the pleasant trade-off which either way promised an enjoyable day, tiny crow’s-feet—new now in her forty-second year—appeared at the corners of her green eyes.

Noreen was a diminutive, well-formed woman with fine features. Today she was wearing jeans, flats, a cable-knit green cardigan that matched her eyes over a white turtleneck jumper—what McGarr had dubbed her “off-duty” uniform.

Gritting her teeth—her eyes sparkling nonetheless—she asked, “Do you think Maddie would mind?”

McGarr pretended to demur. “It’s an agonizing decision, I know. But somebody has to make it. And there’s the possibility that you need your own time.” To
investigate,
he knew she knew he meant, marriages being largely about the first language—the unspoken language—that was forged in intimacy over many years. The McGarrs had been married for an even dozen.

“Yah,” she agreed. And to the Fisheries Board Chief, “Excuse me. I’ll fetch our daughter. She’s up in our rooms doing her schoolwork.”

“Dress her warm. It’s cold and wet by the river.”

While waiting for Maddie to join them, McGarr took Gannon into the room that functioned as the library, saying, “You’re not going to like what I’m about to show you. But it’s necessary. I have some questions.”

The sky had cleared, and a ray of strong sunlight was falling across a table near a window. Into it McGarr placed the least graphic of the forensic photographs taken at the murder scene, one that showed the victims plainly but from afar.

Gannon gasped, and his body flinched.

“What do you know about their relationship?” McGarr asked.

Gannon had to put a hand out to steady himself before sitting in a nearby chair. And it took a while before he could speak.

McGarr pulled up another chair and listened to the contrapuntal ticking of two competing grandfather clocks in the overfurnished room.

Finally, Gannon glanced up at McGarr. “I feel rather nauseous. It’s almost worse than their having been…murdered. I don’t mean that, but…”

McGarr considered easing the man’s pain by telling him about the three-hour interval between their deaths and the supposition that the tryst had been staged. But what he was seeking was a confirmation of that theory. “Burke was a Lothario, I take it.”

“Oh, aye—desperate. But I would never think, I
could
never think that Ellen and he were…”

“Did you ever see her with Burke after working hours?”

Gannon hunched burly shoulders that were wrapped in a waxed-cotton waterproof jacket of the sort that had been in the boot of his Cooper—McGarr only now realized—and would now have to be replaced. “Our ‘working’ hours are mainly at night at this time of year. It can be dangerous, so I often pair the staff. But not with Burke. I didn’t pair her with him. Ever.”

“Why not?”

Gannon’s eyes met McGarr’s for a moment before shying toward the door. “I know it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, but Pascal Burke was an unsavory character altogether and possibly a bad man.”

McGarr nearly smiled at the innocence of the assessment. “Forever on the make, if you know what I mean.

“At first I dismissed it as a midlife crisis, but it went on for”—Gannon opened his palms—“years. Also, there was the suspicion—which I was never able to prove—that he was taking backhanders.”

“From poachers?”

Gannon nodded.

“What about this? It appears that Ellen’s husband
thinks her affair with Gannon had been going on before and during their marriage.”

Gannon shook his head. “I can only say that, of all the women I know, including my own loyal wife, I would have expected that of Ellen Gilday Finn least.”

Asking for Gannon’s confidence, McGarr then told him about the time lapse and the fact that Burke had been shot twice—once through the heart three hours earlier than the young woman, who had obviously been arranged on top of Burke before being shot herself. “That bullet entered Burke, too, but not as perfectly as the murderer or murderers planned. Was Ellen working Friday night?”

Gannon nodded. “I had her paired with another officer patrolling the riverbanks about ten miles south of here.”

“Can I speak to the…man, woman?”

“Man. I’ll take you to him.”

Outside, McGarr had to dodge a clutch of reporters, photographers, and cameramen who had gathered in front of the hotel.

“You know as much as I know,” he told them. “The investigation has only just begun. When I know more and can tell you, I’ll call you together.”

Which was greeted by a chorus of, “Yeah,
right!
”

Cold air from the fallen snow—meeting warm vapors off the water of the river—had created a funnel of cottony fog over the Shannon, and the ruts of an informal road along its eastern bank were brimming with meltwater, slush, and a thick slippery mud.

Through it Gannon drove his battered Land Rover at a snail’s pace, the four-wheel-drive gear clattering in its box.

McGarr sat beside Gannon, and Maddie had hopped in back with Gannon’s dog, a friendly black Lab that reeked of river muck and reeds.

As though sensing that Maddie was a dog lover, O’Leary—as he was called—immediately moved toward her and leaned his considerable weight into her shoulder.

Like her parents, Maddie would not grow tall, but she was a pretty girl with regular features and hair such a deep shade of red it was nearly brown. And where her dark brown eyes came from, nobody knew, since the only dark-eyed ancestor on either side was McGarr’s grandmother. Today, her hair was braided in a long pigtail.

“I’m glad I wore my slicker,” she observed. “No offense, O’Leary, but I’ve got one word for you—SOAP. And your breath! Tell me true—how many eels have you et today?” And yet the diminutive girl, who was ten, had an arm around the friendly beast that was panting in the warm truck.

“I’ll put the lad outside, if he’s bothering you,” Gannon said.

“Ah, no—O’Leary’s fine right here,” Maddie replied, patting the dog’s wide glossy chest. As though to thank her, the dog turned its head and tried to lick her ear.

“Oooof! You’re a basilisk, you are, O’Leary. And you like it that way, I can tell.”

Basilisk was obviously a term Maddie had picked up from her mother, who had an intellectual bent, and McGarr tried to recall just exactly what a basilisk was besides, obviously, having bad breath. But without yet another cup of strong coffee he was locked in the kind of half-cognizant stupor that one of his older friends
called, “Senior stasis—don’t expect it to get any better. It won’t.”

Thus, McGarr was paying only half a mind to Gannon’s narrative of how difficult it was to police the Shannon eel fishery.

“The eels, you see, migrate during the fall, and they move mainly on windy, moonless fall nights when the current is favorable. That’s when the fishing is best and most poaching takes place. In the dark off roads, like this. Which makes the poachers very difficult to catch.”

“Using fyke nets?” McGarr asked, if only to prove to himself that he was conscious.

“Sometimes, if they’re well-organized poachers. And many of them are. They wear masks and have lookouts with walkie-talkies. No numbers on their boats and no license plates or tax stamps on their cars. And operating down here along hundreds of miles of riverbank in the dead of night…” Gannon shook his head. “They’re harder and slippery-er than the very eels to catch. That’s why Ellen’s nabbing the Frakes, like she did in her kayak, was brilliant, God rest her soul.”

“Weren’t they jailed?” McGarr asked.

“Sure—for a night. Irony is, in morning their woman, the blond—”

“Gertrude McGurk.”

“Came down with a fistful of readies—doubtless got from poaching—and bailed them out. It was their third time in court for poaching, so the judge threw the book at them—a two-thousand-pound fine apiece, and the promise of doubling that if they were ever hauled in again.”

“And they paid it?”

“Without a word, like they were buying a round at a bar. Eel wholesalers buying for Japanese and Chinese
brokers are currently paying two hundred pounds a kilo for eel elvers. In one pass, a fine-mesh fyke net with a motorized winch can pull in nine to fifteen hundred kilos. Deployed several times a night with a lorry nearby to carry them out.” Again Gannon shook his head. “You don’t need many nights like that for a packet of money, tax-free.”

“What are fyke nets?” With a sleeve Maddie wiped the condensation off a window so O’Leary could look out, but it was as though the Land Rover were passing slowly through a dense but brilliant cloud. Overhead the sun had to be shining.

“Nets that form big bags and can stretch across the entire river,” Gannon explained. “Because fyke nets catch all the elvers migrating inland, pretty soon there would be no eels left to procreate. That’s why fyke nets are illegal.”

“So anybody using them has to be a poacher,” McGarr put in.

Gannon nodded. “We only issue about three dozen licenses a year by lottery. And applications require the kind of personal and business information that thugs don’t like giving. Instead, they horn in on the fishing sites of legitimate eel fishers, who’ve paid hundreds of pounds for the exclusive right to fish there.

“Beatings, cars and boats shot up. One had his fishing shack bombed.”

“By the Frakes, you think?”

“Ach, who knows—the Frakes are not alone, and, really, I’ve always thought of them as small fry, not nearly as organized as some. You heard about the report of high-powered weapons fire at a shooting range near Mullingar?” It was a Midlands city about forty miles distant.

McGarr nodded, having read the report that later appeared in newspapers. When the local police arrived, they found whoever it was gone but the ground littered with a mass of shells fired from a Kalashnikov rifle. Could it have been a Kalashnikov that had been used to destroy his Cooper the day before, he wondered.

“What’s an elver?” Maddie asked from the back.

Gannon turned his head to her. “A baby eel. Do you know about eels, Maddie?”

She made a face. “I don’t think I want to. They’re slimy, aren’t they?”

“Well—the slime is actually a very important slime. It’s a mucous membrane that protects their tender skin and allows them to wriggle and squiggle after food and find shelter in rocks.”

“Do people actually eat them?”

“Any way they can—fresh, smoked, barbecued, and even jellied. In many countries, smoked eel commands a much higher price than premium-grade smoked wild salmon.”

“Now salmon I like,” said Maddie.

“O’Leary even likes to roll on them, but only when they’re dead.”

“Ooof.” Maddie tried to push the dog away, but it wouldn’t budge.

Gannon and McGarr both chuckled.

“Now, don’t knock what you haven’t tried.” A pleasant man, Gannon winked so only McGarr could see. “I bet you didn’t think you’d like salmon, when you first tried it. And consider this—the elvers that arrive here to Ireland are some of the bravest and hardiest creatures on earth. Haven’t they swum all the way from the Sargasso Sea without eating once?”

“Where’s that?”

“Way down by Bermuda, off the coast of America. On their way, dozens of species of predaceous fish take their toll, and then—here in the river they’ve got to get over fish ladders at dams and past legal fishermen and poachers, like I was just telling your dad.

“But they don’t begin to eat—not so much as a single zooplankton—until they’ve spent twenty-four hours in fresh water. And then they’ll only eat what they’ve first tasted, which makes a Shannon River eel taste different from, say, a Lee River eel.”

“You mean, eels from each river have their own distinctive taste?” McGarr asked, not having known that.

“That’s right. And something else that’s unique to eels—opposite of salmon, shad, sea trout, and sea bass, they’re the only fish that breeds in salt water but lives in fresh. It’s called being catadromous.”

There was a pause as the three thought about what had been said.

Finally, Maddie asked, “How far is the Sargasso Sea?”

“It’s a big still spot in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean about three or four thousand miles from here.”

“And they come all the way from there on no food?”

“And no parents to guide them, either. Their digestive systems are devised for freshwater eating only, so they can’t feed until they find the river that their parents lived in. Which is why they’re called glass or silver eels. If you catch one when it first enters the river and hold it up against the light, you can see right through its body and the tube of its digestive system, which is empty.”

“What happened to their parents?”

“Ah, now—there’s the sad part of the tale. After spending up to fourteen years in a freshwater river or
lake, adult eels reverse-commute, so to speak, to the Sargasso Sea again on no food. There they spawn and die, the cycle of their lives being over.”

“But how do the elvers know which way to swim to get here?”

Gannon hunched his broad shoulders. “Nobody knows for sure. It’s one of the great mysteries of nature. They’re only five or six inches long with a brain the size of a grain of sand, and yet they get here, year after year. Or, at least, we hope they’ll continue to arrive, year after year.

“Do you know about the new pressure we have on this fishery?” Gannon asked McGarr.

He then explained that in the past the Fisheries Board had to worry only about poaching in the river. But recently because of just what his staff was trying to end in Ireland—overfishing that had stripped stocks in Asian waters to near extinction—commercial fishing fleets from China and Japan had begun netting glass eels off the coasts of the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

“They use electronic sensors to spot the eels and enormous nets, some of them stretching up to twenty-eight miles. In one pass they can take an entire school of fish.”

“Like our salmon,” McGarr put in, since schools of salmon returning to Irish rivers to spawn had been faced with the same threat for over a decade now.

“The new technique is to ship them live back to the Orient where in aquaculture plants they’re ‘educated’ to eat a secret diet that makes them taste the way Chinese and Japanese eels tasted.”

“When they had them,” Maddie said with an angry edge to her voice.

“Exactly. They’re also stuffed and treated with hormones so they reach maturity in about two years instead of the usual fourteen. Fattened up, like that, they go for around a thousand American dollars apiece. In Japan, the eels are barbecued for a special dish called
kabayaki
that’s considered a rare culinary treat, rather like Beluga caviar is to European palates. Or truffles.”

“But can’t we stop them from stealing our eels?” Maddie asked, her eyebrows knitted with concern.

“Not really, if they’re fishing in international waters, which begins at twelve miles off the coast.”

“Or our Taosieach. Can’t he go to their Taosieach and tell them to stop?”

“It’s been tried, but…” Gannon pulled the Land Rover off the road onto a laneway, and a building that resembled a fishing shack suddenly appeared through the cottony fog. A small boat with an outboard motor was tied to a dock. “Which is all the more reason that we have to stop the poaching here—so the elvers that get through can live long enough to make the trip back to the Sargasso Sea.”