Peeler (26 page)

‘And what if I can’t find him? Or he won’t come with me?’

Halloran finished the rest of his pint in long, thirsty gulps. Farrell’s stout sat untouched.

‘You’re one of the Intelligence boys. You’re supposed to be intelligent.’ Halloran stood and clapped Liam on the shoulder.

‘Wouldn’t …’ Farrell lifted his stout and then set it back down, unable to meet Halloran’s eyes, ‘wouldn’t they be better sending someone like yourself to collect him. I’m not certain …’ There was too much he was uncertain about to continue.

‘Sure, if they sent someone like me, Liam, he’d know what was coming and we’d never see him again. You, he might talk to. You’re meant to be a good man with the words, boy. Now’s the time to use them.’

He turned then and left Farrell staring at his untouched pint.

***

Katherine Sheehan rounded the corner of her cottage, coming from the direction of her sheds as O’Keefe was leaning the Trusty on its stand in front of the stone wall. The sun had broken through the clouds, lending some brief warmth to the day. He paused to adjust his collar and button his jacket.

She didn’t see him immediately and O’Keefe watched her as she walked up the path, smiling to herself as if she were remembering something fine and light in the past, swinging the bucket she carried in rhythm with her stride. She was a beautiful woman, he thought for a second time in as many days; graceful, unadorned. He tried to picture her in a stylish hobble skirt and patent leather pumps, her hair swept off her face, a faint dusting of rouge and lip paint, and decided she would look no finer dressed to the nines than she did in the patched, heavy work skirt and man’s collarless shirt she was now wearing. Sensing his gaze, she turned and recognition stole her smile, banished the fond memory that had put it there.

‘It’s you back,’ she said, as if she were speaking to a husband returned from a three-day skite, wages gone, a shoe missing.

O’Keefe’s spirits plummeted. He had hoped she would be happier to see him. But then, why should she be? What had he brought her the last time he had come here but a cold reminder of the evil that guttered outside her door? He was a fool. He could have sent Keane if he really wanted to ask the woman about the feathers found on Deirdre Costelloe’s body. And as for the Skelly brothers, he had yet to decide what to tell her about them.

‘It’s me back,’ he said, taking a cake box from where it was hanging on the Trusty’s handlebars with one hand, his briefcase dangling from the other, waiting for an invitation to open the gate. ‘I was wondering if you could help me. It’s about the girl we found.’

Katherine Sheehan put her hands on her hips. She looked as if she was about to order him away from her property. ‘Was the help I gave you last time so good you’ve come for more?’

O’Keefe nodded. ‘It might have clarified a few things. I’m not sure yet.’

‘What help is it you need this time?’ Her voice was sharp, with no warmth in it.

He fumbled with his briefcase, the cake box cradled in one arm. ‘Would you take this, Mrs Sheehan? I brought it for you, for your family. In return for your kindness the last time I called. I …’ He ran out of words and smiled dumbly.

‘And you expect me to fetch it from you?’

‘No, no.’ He tried to open the gate but again his full hands prevented him. Balancing his briefcase between his raised knee and elbow, he tried once more and dropped the briefcase, spilling some papers onto the road. ‘Sorry,’ he said, setting the cake down in the gravel and replacing the papers in the briefcase as neatly as he could.

Katherine Sheehan shook her head, amusement, if not yet warmth, showing on her face. ‘Stay where you are and I’ll get the gate. Whatever you’ve brought will be in bits if I don’t take it from you.’

She opened the gate and held it for him. O’Keefe handed her the box. ‘For you and the boy, Mrs Sheehan … and Mr Sheehan.’

‘I’ll put this inside and you can ask me your questions in the sheds. I’ve work to do, Sergeant.’ O’Keefe waited outside the cottage while she went inside. When she returned, he followed her silently to the cowsheds. Entering, she picked up a pitchfork from where it was leaning against the wall and began to muck out the stall, turning over the stale bedding and then tossing it in the general direction of the doorway where he was standing. He moved out of her way. She heaved another forkful in his direction. ‘You could make yourself useful and find the barrow.’

O’Keefe set his briefcase down and retrieved the wheelbarrow from its resting place against the hen house. Hens pecked in the dirt between the stones in the yard. ‘Have you a shovel or another fork? I could give you a hand.’

‘You’ll get no wages working here, Sergeant.’

He smiled. ‘I don’t mind. Sure, it’s seldom enough I get outdoors for any exercise.’

‘And you’ll ruin that fine suit of clothes.’

‘No bother, Mrs Sheehan. Where should I toss it?’

She stopped to wipe her brow with her forearm. ‘There’s a shovel in the last stall, and you can empty the barrow around the back. Hang your jacket on the post if you’ve ever a mind to visit a dance hall again.’

O’Keefe laughed. ‘Dances are much too dangerous for Peelers these days.’

‘Sure weren’t they always, Sergeant?’

They worked together without speaking until Katherine Sheehan set her fork against the slat board wall and O’Keefe did the same with his shovel. The stall now smelled of fresh bedding, a rich, wheaten odour that reminded him of the horse stables at his father’s Dublin Metropolitan Police barracks when he was a child.

She turned to O’Keefe and, for the first time since she had opened the gate, looked directly at him. ‘Hope the work didn’t raise any blisters, Sergeant?’ Her voice was light and cut through with gentle mocking.

‘I’m a regular beast of burden, Mrs Sheehan. That’s why they made me acting sergeant.’ He held up his hands for inspection and to his surprise she took them in her own to examine them.

‘Fine soft hands, Sergeant. You’ve never done an honest day’s labour in your life until today.’

‘Not since I was a boy, and even then I dodged it best I could. Why else become a copper?’

She smiled and then the smile faded. ‘I read that men from the cities and towns, men with soft hands like yours, when they went to the war, they raised blisters on the inside of their trigger fingers.’ She made her thumb and forefinger into a gun and fired. ‘And these blisters hardened to calluses over the months. And they say these calluses take years to go away, so that even now, back at their desks, they can still feel the weight of their guns, the weight of every time they pulled the trigger when they lift their pens.’

She lightly brushed her thumbs over the pads of his index fingers.

‘I wasn’t there long enough to get the calluses. I was wounded two and a half weeks after the landing and was laid up for a nearly a year with blood poisoning in the Army Hospital in Cork. Spent more time in bed than I ever did fighting.’

She nodded and looked up at him. ‘You’ve the calluses, still, Sergeant. Just not on your hands.’

He didn’t know what to say.

She squeezed his hands. ‘When you’re able, you’ll tell me. I want to know what happened at V Beach. What happened to my Gerard.’

He looked into her eyes and nodded. After a moment, she smiled again and said, ‘Come on then and we’ll cut that cake. I had a peek at it and it looked scrumptious.’ She smiled and laughed. ‘I’ve never any call to use that word.
Scrumptious
!’

The smile was like a blow to the chest for O’Keefe and he thought suddenly that there was very little he wouldn’t do to make Katherine Sheehan happy.

‘I hope it tastes as good, considering the trouble I had buying it.’ He smiled at her. ‘Nobody in the bakery would serve me so I took it from the case and boxed it myself, leaving its cost on the counter.’

She laughed again. ‘Victims of the same boycott, Sergeant. Yourself and myself.’

Her husband was sitting at the fire and took no notice of their coming into the cottage.

‘Fine day,’ O’Keefe said to him and received no response.

He felt a pang of guilt entering the man’s house, sitting down in anticipation of sharing the cake he had brought, not for him or even, if he was honest, for his son, but for Katherine Sheehan. He watched her as she prepared the tea, his eyes following the graceful slope of her shoulders, the strong, straight back, the narrow waist and full, round hips.

‘I’ve nothing better than tea to offer you, Sergeant.’

‘Tea’s grand, Mrs Sheehan.’

Shifting his gaze back to Gerard Sheehan, O’Keefe noted he was still a handsome man, despite the vacancy in his eyes. He looked like a full-forward on a Gaelic football team – long and rangy, likely to be quick in the turn. His hair was combed, neatly parted and he’d been shaved recently. Katherine Sheehan took good care of her husband. His admiration for the woman increased, along with the guilt that had wedged itself under his ribs. They ate in silence, constrained by the brooding presence of the man by the hearth. O’Keefe wondered if he was using the husband’s mug.

At one point Katherine Sheehan said, ‘I saw the paper. About the girl on the hill. Is it true, what was written?’

He told her it was, more or less.

‘And will you find him?’

‘If I’m lucky or I’m let.’

He didn’t elaborate and Katherine Sheehan finished her tea without speaking. She walked him to the gate.

‘You never asked me what you came for, Sergeant.’

Resting his briefcase on the seat of the Trusty, he took out a manila envelope holding samples of the feathers taken from Deirdre Costelloe’s body. He handed them to her.

‘These feathers were found with the body. I was wondering what kind of bird they came from. Birds. The surgeon thought they came from different birds.’

The sun succumbed to afternoon cloud. O’Keefe buttoned his jacket against the cold as she turned over the feathers, examining each one closely.

‘I don’t know these feathers, Sergeant. I only keep common laying hens, myself. Perhaps they’re from some other type of fowl?’

‘I’m a city lad, Mrs Sheehan. I might know if they were from pigeons.’

She smiled at that. ‘A city lad. And now so far from the city.’

‘Your son’s coming up the road.’

‘Back for his tea from my sister’s. He loves it over there. Life is normal. There’s a baby just starting to walk and an uncle who’s kind to him.’ She watched the boy’s approach, a tiny figure on the empty road, seeming to have forgotten about the feathers in her hand. ‘I pity the poor dote. He’s a lonely child with no brothers or sisters of his own.’

‘More cake for him, so.’ O’Keefe smiled and she looked at him and smiled back sadly.

‘You might try asking at Burleigh House about the feathers. I’m sure you know it. Just outside of Upton. The Major keeps exotic fowl. He might be able tell you where these came from. Or else the big poultry house on the Toureen road. They might know.’

The boy saw them and stopped, some hundred yards away, watching. O’Keefe returned the feathers to the envelope. ‘There was another reason I wanted to see you, Mrs Sheehan.’

‘Call me Kate,’ she said, with sudden urgency. ‘Just now. Before the boy comes. Call me Kate.’

‘The men who … who hurt you …’

‘Say my name, Seán.’

‘I found them, Kate.’

She put her finger to his lips, silencing him. ‘That’s all I need to know.’

He nodded. He understood. Katherine Sheehan stepped away and called out to her son. Without looking at O’Keefe, she said, ‘Go now, Seán. Find the ones who killed that poor girl on the hill.’

***

In the end, it was Seamus Connors who found Farrell.

Farrell had visited the Connors farm outside Crossbarry where Seamus’ parents, having denied seeing their son in months, fed him tea and shortcake biscuits in their homey kitchen. ‘Sure, why would he be mad enough to come home?’ they asked him, with the countryside round their prosperous farm riddled with Tommies and Tans. The last thing their Seamus would want was for them to be burned out, for some auld thing they claimed he’d done. But he had come home.

‘Farrell.’

Farrell heard his name called as he cycled past a derelict cottage on the side of the Kinsale road. Bringing the bicycle to a squeaking stop, Farrell turned in the saddle to see the man standing on the road under a cloud-mottled sky, openly, as an innocent man might. Farrell had a mind to peddle away. Let the Peelers or one of the hard men like Halloran apprehend him. But curiosity, as much as a sense of duty or pride, compelled him to stay.

He wheeled his bike over to Connors. Up close, there was something feral about the man, as if he had cast away a small bit of his humanity with each man he’d killed. There were dark circles under his eyes and his skin was the colour of putty. He was dressed in mud-spattered corduroy trousers and the same British army tunic he’d been wearing at the training camp. The tunic had wine-dark stains on the sleeves which told Farrell that he had worn it at Kilmichael as well. His angular chin and jawbone were shadowed in grey-flecked whiskers.

‘Looking for me, Farrell?’

‘Yes, I was.’ Farrell cleared his throat. ‘Your mother and father – they’re afraid their house will be burned in reprisal for some of the things you’ve done.’ He corrected himself. ‘For some of the things they say you’ve done.’

‘Some of the things I’ve done.’ Connors turned his back on Farrell and disappeared into the derelict cottage. Farrell followed, wheeling his bicycle off the road and concealing it behind the overgrown hedgerow. For all he knew, the lanes and boreens in the district were still thick with Crown forces.

Connors sat down on the lip of the hearth. There were recent ashes in the grate, as if the cottage was used by wandering men, itinerants looking for shelter from the weather. To Farrell, it was exactly the kind of place patrols would search first in any sweep of the countryside. Connors took a half-full bottle from his pocket, uncorked it and drank deeply, gasping as he lowered it.

‘I haven’t had a drink for two years, boy.’ He held the bottle out, but Farrell waved it away.

‘Your mother and father said the fields are riddled with soldiers. This place isn’t safe.’