The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf (9 page)

Walking over to the wastepaper bin, McGarr peered inside. But there was nothing muddy visible. Straightening up, he again surveyed the room. “Of course by now you know what happened last night to your best friends, the Fords. And to Kevin O’Grady and probably to Padraic O’Malley?” McGarr moved slowly about the large room, making sure his eyes surveyed every surface. “But do you know the sequence of events? You should.

“Paul O’Malley, the quadriplegic with the binos and sideband—he saw a large white schooner anchor in the harbor. He rang up your friend. Sometime after that, Ford phoned O’Grady and asked him to come out here and sit with his wife.
Armed
, he was so worried.

“Why? Because he knew what the people aboard the boat had come for, and he had to get it out of the house. So he came here and gave it to you. Now O’Grady’s dead, and the Fords and Padraic O’Malley are missing, along with O’Malley’s boat. Is this what he gave you? Or is this only part what he gave you?”

Yet again McGarr waited for a reply before continuing.

“I can understand loyalty to friends. It’s important, and probably all the more so on an island, like this, where you are so few. But if Clem Ford gave you what those killers came for, you’re now taking a hell of a risk. All they need is a map. Where else could Ford have come on short notice and during a storm in the dead of night? And him an old man. This place is the only possibility. And has it occurred to you that your friends might not be dead, that your helping me now might allow us to find them?”

Yet again McGarr waited, but she did not move from the
sink. She was looking out the window there, at the brilliant ocean to the northwest.

“What do these names mean? Who are these people? Why did Ford bring them to you? It was last night, wasn’t it?”

McGarr waited at least a whole minute, listening to the wind wail past the eaves of the studio. “I can appreciate that you’re distraught. And that you have not actually lied to me.”

That brought the woman round. Her face was streaming with tears, her fists clenched by her sides. “Get out.” She moved to the door and opened it. “Get out now.”

“I’ll leave you my card.” Slowly, deliberately, McGarr removed one from his pocket secretary and placed it on the sheet from Ford on the drawing table. “I have a feeling you’ll need it. For the moment, I’ll be at the hotel. Or you can ring any barracks. They’ll put you through. Please understand that you’re in danger, and I can help.”

Tom Rice was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “The old van we drove to the Fords in? Wouldn’t start. I thought I’d hoof it over here to save you time.”

“Do you know where Paul O’Malley lives?”

The large older man shrugged. “The place is called Capnagower, but we’ll have to ask at the harbor.” Rice gazed resignedly at the collection of white buildings that had to be about four miles away. “Maybe we can get the loan of another car when we get there.”

McGarr turned to Mirna Gottschalk, who was closing the door. “Is it possible to walk to Capnagower?”

With her palms she pushed the tears from her eyes. “If you know the way. But I wouldn’t recommend it. You can take my van and leave it at the hotel when you’re through. The key’s in the switch.”

It was a generous gesture to be sure, and McGarr wondered how much it was by way of apology. A Land Rover with only 492 miles on the odometer, it still bore the rich fragrance of new leather. The powerful engine ticked over on first crank.

As soon as the van disappeared over the crest of the drive, Mirna went straight to the reading chair and pulled the muddied manila packet from under the cushion. She had never felt so compromised in her life, so sullied. Like some criminal
in a docket evading a charge, she had kept silent when she should have spoken; she had failed to acknowledge the truth. She had even challenged the man.

Well, she had enough of that and it. Stuffing the note from Clem in among the other papers, she carried the thing to the house where she would hide it beneath the hearth where it belonged. And it would remain there, at least until she heard more about Clem and Breege or Karl arrived to tell her what the thing meant.

She would ring him up right now, so he would come out for Kevin’s funeral. And they would decide then what to do. Together.

AS THE ROVER wheeled slowly along the rutted boreen, McGarr regretted not having taken a more definite tack with Mirna Gottschalk.

He could have simply begun a search of the premises, later saying that he had been “in hot pursuit,” since Ford’s footsteps led to the studio. If she filed a complaint. But would she? Probably not, given the fact—and he was convinced of it—that Ford had brought her whatever the raiding party had come for.

But it now occurred to McGarr—as they topped a ridge that presented a panoramic view of the verdant island—that her keeping it might be helpful in another way, so long as she was willing to take the risk. And she obviously was.

Said Tom Rice, looking out the windows that were photosensitive and had darkened in the strong sunlight, “’Tis a wonder how tidy the greenskeepers maintain this place. They could use them yokes at Ballybunion,” which was one of Ireland’s premier golf courses. He meant the sheep that could now be seen in every direction.

“It’s rumored there’s not an inch of grass on even the most remote ledge of Croaghmore. Time was the south slope of that mountain was three feet thick in heath. Now I don’t think you could find a patch. It’s the EC or EU—they now call
themselves—playing Puck. Anyhow, the bloody Common Market t’ugs from Brussels telling us how to live.”

McGarr nodded, knowing about the policy. Having designated much of the West of Ireland “severely disadvantaged,” Brussels had decided that it could keep people on the land by encouraging “traditional farming practices,” one of which was raising sheep. But the subsidy did not reward farmers for animals brought to market, which would depress sheep prices. Instead it paid them according to the number of sheep on the land—aged, infirm, or ill; it did not matter—which had led to overgrazing and the destruction of native plant habitats.

On the other hand, an environmentally-conscious farmer was not required to accept Brussels’s largess, however hard it might be to pass up. Being “severely disadvantaged.”

McGarr stopped the Rover so Rice could get out and open a gate that prevented animals from straying down the road.

“Are those the remains of lazy beds?” he asked when Rice climbed back in. He pointed to the tightly spaced pattern of ridges in the fields that followed the contour of the land right down to the edge of Clew Bay in one direction, and all the way up the flanks of Croaghmore in the other.

“Famine furrows, some call them. Sure, people hereabouts never do nothin’ halfway. Now it’s the sheep, then it was potatoes. Before the blight in the last century, you had sixteen hundred people on this island with every last patch of ground they could find in potatoes. Compared to other places, like Inishturk”—Rice jerked a thumb at the looming shape of another large island to the southwest—“the land here is good, which was their undoing. When the potatoes thrived, the population grew. When they rotted, people died. I’m a bit of a history buff, don’t yeh know.

“Ten years after the blight, there was only six hundred people on Clare Island. Today”—Rice paused dramatically—“a hundred and forty in a good year with them forty kids who leave the island for school at age twelve, some of them never to return for more than a few weeks on holiday or to get in the hay. Here’s a fact for you—seventy-five percent of the children born into this parish will emigrate sooner or later.”

Which made the people here indeed severely disadvan
taged, McGarr concluded, no matter who had devised the phrase—
seoinini
from Brussels, Dublin, or Mars.

The Paul O’Malley house stood on the top of Capnagower, a word meaning “Hill of the Goats” in Irish. It was a tall but flat bluff on the southeast side of Clare Island, surveying Clew Bay, the Mayo coast from Inishturk to Croagh Patrick, and the shoreline as far as Dooega Head.

Much of Clare Island itself was also visible from there, all the closer—McGarr assumed—when viewed through the lenses of a spotting scope. The instrument sat on a tripod in the middle of the floor and could be rotated to any of the four large windows of the highest room in the building.

“You’ve heard of houses with widow’s walks,” the young man said from his curious-looking wheelchair. “Well, this is a quad’s quad.” Paul O’Malley was disabled from the neck down because of an accident while scuba diving. Clare Island was noted for the sport, there even being a dive school here, McGarr seemed to remember.

“Aran Energy sank a new pipeline in Galway Bay, and nobody thought to mark it. I was a commercial diver, and when I went over the side to check out why a boat was hung up…well, here I am.” With a gross compression of vertebrae C4 and C5, the mother had told them while leading McGarr and Rice up the stairs to the top of the house. “It’s a miracle he can even breathe on his own.”

And yet O’Malley could move about the room in a high-tech wheelchair that he controlled by moving his neck, which was fastened to an electronic collar.

His light blue eyes met McGarr’s. “After I rang up Clem about the boat, I ate supper, which is a chore that took—” He glanced at his mother, who had remained in the room.

“An hour at least.” She was a thin, older woman with sunken cheeks and carefully permed hair that looked like baked meringue.

“Normally, I listen to the sideband”—he pointed to the radio—“and last night was no exception, since there was another odd craft—something like a sportfishing boat—anchored about a mile off Lecknacurra, which is over there.” O’Malley spun the chair so that his feet were pointing a few
degrees west of due north. “It was lighted, but fishermen passing her couldn’t see anybody aboard, nor raise them on the blower. Stranger still, she had neither name nor numbers.”

“Was the Naval Service notified?” McGarr asked. “Or the Coast Guard?”

O’Malley’s eyes flashed up at him. “Ah, I’m afraid we’re not quick to call the authorities round here. Especially not the fishermen, who’ve got the water bailiffs on their backs, come day go day.” He meant the officials of the Board of Fishery Conservators who enforced the Maritime Law against drift-netting and other fishing abuses. The fishermen complained that the three frigates operating off the Irish coasts usually let foreign boats off with a warning, while confiscating the catch, nets, and sometimes even the boats of Irish captains.

The water
seoinini
, McGarr thought.

“What about yourself?” Rice asked.

O’Malley rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t want anybody to think I’m up here watching them day after day, just waiting for the chance to grass. Anyhow, it was nigh on dark by the time I looked again, but the twilight factor on this Swarovski is excellent.” Spinning the wheelchair, O’Malley rolled toward the spotting scope in the center of the room. With an elaborate extended eyepiece, it was positioned low on the tripod which, like the chair, bristled with motors and drives. “The focusing is automatic.

“The mast lights of the schooner were on, and the crew was furling sails and what not.”

“A crew of how many?” McGarr asked.

“Four, counting the captain. He was an older man, but the three others were young, say, late twenties, early thirties.”

It was a different report from the publican, who said only one young man had stopped in there. The three others must have waited outside, careful to keep any possible identifications to a minimum.

“At one point they switched on a strong searchlight—halogen, I think—and played it over the castle.”

“That’s the Granuaile castle down at the harbor,” the mother explained; it was the Irish way of saying Grace O’Malley’s name.

“They kept the light on it for a while, and I think I saw a figure in one of the windows.”

“Clem,” the mother concluded. “Many’s the younger man could not have got himself to the harbor by then. But he had great old go in him all the same. Never mattered the time of day or night. Paul would ring him up, and there Clem’d be, fierce soon altogether.”

“But I’m not certain it was him, mind, the angle from here being a bit tricky.”

“And them walls is thick.”

“And, sure, he never once let on why he wanted me to keep him informed about the boats that arrived,” the young man lamented, a definite note of sorrow in his voice. “Maybe if I hadn’t rung him up, Breege and him and Kevin might still be with us.”

Guilt. It ruled all in the Ireland that McGarr knew. “What about the boat, the schooner?” he prompted.

“Well—the four of them come off it in a tender they tied to the jetty wall. Then they moved up toward the pub, where I lost them among the buildings.”

McGarr stepped to the window that looked south toward the castle, the breakwater and jetty, and the small group of structures gathered about the harbor. Even under a brilliant afternoon sun, they looked tiny and unimposing from such a distance—the gray cube of the castle, the white pub, some stucco walls and slate roofs. Croaghmore lay to the west, rising in a steady gentle slope that went up and up and up and thoroughly dominated the landscape of the island. He let his eyes trace the four miles of road out to the Ford’s; he then tried but failed to find the direct, overland path. “What about later?”

“That’s the troubling part. I must’ve dozed off, because the radio woke me. Whoever they were, they were using a scrambler. But wouldn’t you know I’ve got a little box here that can decode everything from one-twenty-eight to four-oh-nine-six codes automatically. It’s computerized and darts through the field of possible codes until it comes up with a match.”

“Paulie’s gadget-mad, don’t you know,” said the mother.

“But it didn’t help. They were speaking some language I
never heard before. And the schooner itself was gone from the harbor, and the only activity I could see on my three directions of the compass was at the boat, the one that bore no name or numbers and was anchored off Lecknacurra. Its running lights were on. To me the exchange sounded like a ship-to-ship transmission, but I could see only the one set of lights.”

As if the schooner were running without any, thought McGarr.

“Anyhow, it was dark and stormy, and along about then didn’t another boat charge out of the harbor, passing the light on the jetty, the one that’s on the night long. But no lights on her either, so the moment she hit the dark ocean she was gone from sight.”

“But in the glimpse you’d say it was Packy’s,” the mother prompted.

“I would now, since she was all of forty feet with a small cabin, and wasn’t Packy’s boat missing in the morn’?”

McGarr thought for a moment. “I know you didn’t see the schooner leave, and we don’t know if it was she that linked up with the anchored boat off Lecknacurra, but if it was—how long would it have taken her to get out there?”

“Her speed under power can’t be much, and it would have taken some time to get the launch back up on the davits and the anchor weighed—forty-five minutes at the very least. Closer to an hour.”

“Which would have made it?”

“Nine forty-five. Or ten. Packy’s boat was closer to eleven.”

“In what direction was the boat with the running lights headed?”

“The one off Lecknacurra?”

McGarr nodded.

“West. Round the island.”

“Out to sea?”

“Well, it might have changed course to follow the coast north. You have to go west to round Achill Head.”

Which meant there was no way to tell where the boat was headed.

“A foreign language?”

“Aye, but one. I never heard, and I hear quite a few on the sideband, now that the world is raidin’ our fishing grounds. At first I thought it Danish or Dutch, but I’m sure it was none of them. But, something like that.”

“Would you know it if you heard it again?”

“Whenever I do, I haven’t a clue.”

McGarr’s brow furrowed. “Sorry—I don’t think I understand.”

“Didn’t I tell you? I taped it digitally, like I do whenever there’s a storm, so that there’s an exact record of the time of any transmission. That way, if a boat gets lost, we at least have some idea of its position the last time a signal was sent. The recorder’s over there.” O’Malley pivoted the chair so that his feet pointed at a bank of electronic equipment that had been placed against a wall.

“Might I have a copy.”

“Of course,” said the mother. “I’ll make you one now.”

“It’s only a few words, back and forth, and then a gap and a few more. And a final, like, sign-off. Then not a peep from anybody until four or so, when the other fishermen, going to their boats, found the cart, the car, and Packy’s cottage shot up. Then all hell broke loose.”

McGarr moved toward the view scope. “May I?”

The mother answered, “Work away. But you’ll have to squat. I can’t tell you how long it took us to get the thing to the proper height.”

McGarr hunkered down and stared into the peculiar eyepiece.

“Clem was always after me to get binos. He said they’d be easier on the eyes, but, as you can see, a scope like this is much more powerful.”

McGarr peered into the instrument and was suddenly transported to the jetty at the harbor where the Tech Squad was now conducting their part of the investigation. The optics were so crisp and bright that it was almost as though he were standing there conversing with them.

“Didn’t I see you roust Colm Canning from Packy’s house this morning,” O’Malley went on. “Stormed in there, he did, fists clenched and jaw set. Come out headfirst and legs flying after him.”

McGarr imagined that between the Swarovski, the sideband, and the telephone, there was little that escaped the shut-in. He straightened up. “What’s something, like this, cost?”

“I’ve no idea. Clem bought it—” O’Malley managed to say before his mother cut him off.

“Isn’t it time for your nap, Paulie.”

“A thousand pounds?” McGarr pressed.

“For what—the scope or all of it?”

McGarr nodded encouragingly. “All of it.”

O’Malley let out a short laugh. “Try
tens
of thousands. A man came all the way from Indiana just to measure me.”

“Oh Jesus Christ,” muttered the mother.

“Clem Ford has money then?”

There was a pause, and McGarr could almost hear Paul O’Malley realize he had said too much.