Peeler (2 page)

O’Keefe lowered his gaze. The hips and pelvic area of the body were painted with tar and carefully covered with a profusion of feathers. At first glance these appeared to lend an element of modesty to the body, except that, on closer inspection, O’Keefe realised that the victim’s genitalia had been left open and exposed.
Left on display,
O’Keefe thought, stooping to examine more closely for obvious signs of sexual assault and finding none apparent.

‘She’s been tarred and feathered?’ Keane’s voice was a welcome intrusion.

‘She has, but not in any way I’ve seen before.’

O’Keefe recalled other women he had attended in the district who had been tarred and feathered by the IRA. It was usually a slapdash affair – the woman held down while scalding tar was smeared onto her skin. Handfuls of feathers were then scattered over her as she writhed in pain. And almost always, the woman had her head shaved, marking her as a ‘whore of the Crown’ for having the audacity to keep company with soldiers or policemen. No, he thought, this was something different from the common branding of a woman as a collaborator or spy, despite the feathering and the crude sign laid over her chest. Informers were often shot and ‘labelled’.
Spies and Traitors Beware. SPY – Shot by Order of the IRA.
O’Keefe had seen the signs before, but never misspelled.

He squatted again and placed his hands under the young woman’s left shoulder, lifting the body slightly, noting the purple stippling of the skin on her back, buttocks and the backs of her thighs. He made a note in his diary to ask the surgeon about this at the post-mortem, but he was fairly certain that this indicated that the young woman had been left on her back in the hours immediately following death. It would also mean that the body had been posed as it was after rigor mortis had left it. Otherwise there would have been greater evidence of lividity in the lower calves and heels owing to the downward slope of the hill. Pure speculation, of course. He would have to wait for confirmation. Before the shooting war had started, a doctor would have attended the scene of a murder, along with the assigned investigators. Now, O’Keefe thought, there was no doctor in the whole of County Cork who would risk his life to attend such a scene.

Letting his eyes scan back up the body, O’Keefe noted a single pearl earring worn in the left ear and the ugly, purple-brown bruising around the girl’s throat. At least he wouldn’t need to wait for the post-mortem to determine cause of death. Asphyxiation by manual strangulation. The wounding to the breasts, he guessed, had been done after death. O’Keefe formed the assumption that the girl hadn’t been killed on the hillside since there were no marks in the earth around the body. Throttling someone to death was a brutal act, requiring strength and a relentless commitment. O’Keefe had seen it in the war and shuddered at the memory. Ammunition spent, bayonets still sheathed, men battering and strangling each other as if to repudiate all the savage advances of modern warfare. No, he decided – and scratched it into his diary – the girl had been killed elsewhere and brought to the hillside.

He stood and climbed to the ruins of the cottage, some twenty-five yards away. Grey stone showed through the time-faded whitewash and O’Keefe had to stoop to enter the abandoned dwelling. Inside, he stayed to the left of the empty doorframe where roughly half of the thatched roof remained standing. Even in the gloom he could see fresh ashes in the fireplace and, in a corner, a makeshift table of rotting planks set on rocks from the crumbling wall. There was staining on the table, but it was difficult to tell what it was. Blood? He didn’t think there was enough of it to be from the girl, even if she had been mutilated after she was strangled. And there was no sign of any tar, feathers or a bird carcass in the room. Even if the killer had done his work here, foxes and the wind would have carried away any trace of the birds used; the tar, he imagined, the killer would have carried away in the bucket or tin in which he had brought it. O’Keefe imagined the cottage was used by local farmers as a shelter while they were tending their sheep and that there was no way of knowing if the murder had been committed within, but he decided to photograph the interior anyway, just to be safe. He had worked seconds and thirds on several murders in the past year and a half, but had never worked lead. He would cover his tracks. Photograph and measure, note anything and everything. Catch the devil in the detail.

Returning to the body, he entered its location, the time of its discovery and the constables present at the scene in his diary, making a note to get the name of the Lance Corporal and his men later. Then he drafted a description of the body, making careful mention of the tar and feathering and the misspelled sign, the bruising at the throat and the deliberate pose. He described the body as facing east, towards the village of Drumdoolin. Without looking up, he asked Keane to get the tape wheel and measure off the distance from the boreen to the body and then from the body to the
cottage.

About ten yards down the hill, Keane stopped and turned back.

‘Sergeant, do you think I should get a blanket from the Tender to cover her up? It doesn’t seem right, her being … left out like that.’

The young constable rose in O’Keefe’s estimation.

‘You’re right. Get a blanket from the medic’s kit. We’ll cover her after I’m done with the photographs.’

Keane nodded and jogged down the hill to the Crossley.

O’Keefe knelt beside the body and unpacked the camera. As he stood up, he had the uneasy sensation that he was being watched. He glanced down the hill at the Tender. The Essexes had stood down and were eating tinned rations and smoking around the Crossley. None of them paid him any heed. Unable to shake off the feeling, he looked up to the boulders at the crest of the hill. Above them slate-coloured clouds lowered in the sky, shunting, reshaping, exposing the odd blast of blue. He noticed a lone kestrel suspended on a shaft of wind, hunting, and remembered the old saying:
Long before you’ve seen the kestrel, the kestrel has seen you.
He gave the surrounding hills a final scan and saw nothing to account for his unease. Sudden motion. O’Keefe’s gaze shot back to the kestrel, the bird dropping from the sky on its prey like a mortar round, and ascending again, something small and dead in its talons.

***

With the Lance Corporal’s reluctant help, O’Keefe had the body carried down the hill on a litter and organised a search of the hillside and boreen. He watched as the cold, tired soldiers lolled through the task in the desultory manner he had expected. Shaggy-fleeced sheep oversaw the search impassively until the soldiers came too close, then scattered, trotting a few yards away to safety.

As they began loading the body onto the Crossley for the return to barracks, it suddenly became apparent how it had been brought to the hillside. Logan spotted it first. Not wanting to have anything to do with the body, he had strolled some yards away from the Tender and was filling his pipe when he saw the tracks.

He called O’Keefe over. ‘You might want a gander at this.’

Logan pointed to the side of the path, fifty feet behind the Tender. The earth in the ditch was churned and scraped from its bottom to its rim in two parallel strips. O’Keefe could picture the scene. A motor car, attempting to turn on the narrow path, its rear wheels rolling back into the rain-soaked depression; the driver spinning the wheels in an attempt to free the car but succeeding only in burying the wheels deeper into the soft, boggy earth. And on the opposite rim of the ditch, there were footprints, the earth heel-gouged where someone – the killer, O’Keefe would swear it was him – had attempted to shove the car free. The footprints, however, were indistinct, the topsoil too loose and loamy to hold a good impression.

It was Logan again who spotted how the car had been shifted. ‘See here, Seán, how they done it, got the motor out.’

Clear as day, O’Keefe thought. The car’s wheels spinning away the covering of loose earth on the rim of the ditch and digging down to the thick, black mud beneath. Impressed in this mud was the perfect negative image of a slat of wood. O’Keefe thought of the scraps of wood in the ruined cottage and the crude sign on the girl’s chest. Or perhaps the killer had the wood in the car already. It was common enough for motorists, particularly those outside the cities, to carry a plank or two of wood in the boot to aid them in their negotiation of the largely unpaved, and often muddy, roads of rural Ireland. Here, the wood had been placed under one wheel – there was only evidence on one of the two tracks – to give enough traction for the car to get over the rim of the ditch. The forward momentum would have taken care of the rest.

Logan’s blue eyes smiled and his privet hedge of a moustache moved around his pipe stem. O’Keefe called to Keane.

‘Keane, get the camera kit. We need a shot or two of this.’

The Essexes chorused a groan and lit cigarettes, slumping to the ground, reluctant to climb into the Crossley with the body until it was necessary. O’Keefe ignored them. He smiled back at Logan, the scar on his face tensing, something savage in the smile underneath the fleeting joy of discovery.

***

The Crossley drew up in front of the barracks in fading daylight. Some fool of an official in Dublin Castle had been quoted in the
Cork Examiner
some months previously as saying that Ballycarleton RIC barracks was ‘as near to impregnable as any barracks in Ireland’
.
O’Keefe was sceptical of the claim and glad that it had yet to be tested.

It was situated to the north of the town, on Macroom Street, between a feed warehouse and grazing fields owned by the local creamery. Across the rain-softened road from the barracks – a wide stretch with a water pump, trough and hitching post for horses in its centre – was the normal array of businesses found in any small Irish town: five pubs, a draper’s shop, grocery, solicitor’s office, newsagent’s, undertaker, cabinet maker, petrol pump and garage. A redbrick hotel built in 1904 towered above these establishments at the end of the thoroughfare.

The barracks building was a sturdy, two-storey house set back from the road, with an attached yard, purchased for the RIC from the widow of a cattle dealer in 1886. There was room in the barracks for ten police to work and be billeted comfortably. At present, twenty-four men – a district inspector, head constable, two sergeants, nineteen constables and Tans, and a retired constable – resided in the building.

Until Easter 1919, the building had been recognisable as a former domestic dwelling. It was built of solid grey stone, fitted with three windows on the first floor and two on the ground floor flanking the main entrance. However, recent events had transformed it into a fortress. Its windows were closed over with steel shutters, the outside world visible only through firing slits, called loopholes. A section of roof had been cut away and sandbagged so that a Lewis machine-gun could be fired from the barracks’ highest vantage point in the attic. The front garden was a tangle of barbed wire choked with ragwort and overgrown bramble.

The main access to the barracks was through a solid steel gate operated by an armed sentry in a sandbagged post. This gate opened onto a yard of worn cobbles, the whole of which was enclosed by a ten-foot-high brick wall, festooned with more barbed wire. To the rear of the yard and forming the back wall, original cowsheds and stables had been converted into a garage, a cottage billet for two constables and a cold storage room for meat and produce. The cold storage room contained a recently installed refrigeration unit, paid for out of the District Inspector’s family coffers. It was here O’Keefe intended to place the body of the young woman until the post-mortem.

The Crossley driver blasted the horn three times and waited. O’Keefe jumped off the tailgate and approached the sandbagged sentry post, finding it deserted. He slipped his baton from his belt and rapped on the gate, making sure he was covered by the bulk of the rumbling Crossley. As he waited, O’Keefe turned and cast an anxious glance at the row of houses and shops some fifty yards across the road. A lone, tethered horse dipped its head in the public trough. A woman carrying a basket of groceries hustled past the back of the Tender, avoiding his gaze. Dusk had arrived and there was a damp chill in the air.

O’Keefe’s muscles tensed and his heartbeat jabbed at his ribs. He banged on the gate again, then slipped his baton back into his belt. He unholstered his Webley revolver, keeping it low at his thigh, and decided that he would have to discommode the soldiers once again. Approaching the passenger side of the Crossley cab, he asked the Lance Corporal to deploy his section about the Tender. The Lance Corporal smiled and elbowed the Crossley driver. Turning back to O’Keefe he said: ‘Why don’t you ask them your fucking self, Sergeant?’

O’Keefe ordered the men out of the Tender. The men groused and swore, and one of them flicked a cigarette end dangerously close to O’Keefe’s face as he turned away from the back of the lorry. He would never find the man who had done it, but some bastard, he thought, was going to pay for the vacant sentry post. O’Keefe drew his baton again and beat a tattoo on the steel. He checked the road behind him for a second time, half-expecting a sniper’s bullet to snap out from behind lace curtains through the waning light.

Keane appeared delighted with the chance to heft a loaded weapon in earnest and was hunkered down behind one of the Tender’s wheels. His special model RIC Lee-Enfield carbine was raised to his shoulder, aimed now at the windows across the muddy street, now at the horse lifting its head from drinking, hot breath streaming from its nostrils. Logan stood upright, lazily resting his carbine on the bonnet of the Tender while he continued a one-sided conversation concerning race-fixing in his home county of Mayo with a young, nervous-looking squaddie. O’Keefe slammed again on the shutter, thinking how Logan wouldn’t have lasted a hot minute in the war for all his blather.

‘Get the head down, Logan.’

Logan waved O’Keefe’s words away with his pipe stem. ‘Ah sure, we’re grand as we are, Seán.’