Peeler (6 page)

The woman waited for O’Keefe to say more and when he didn’t, she turned away. O’Keefe turned his eyes too, away from her husband at the fire. He noticed the cottage’s similarity to every labourer’s cottage he had ever entered. A wooden table draped with an oilcloth, the centrepiece of the main room in which he stood. A fireplace and next to it a cast iron range for cooking. To the right of this was a tall dresser filled with mismatched china, a wedding photograph in an ornate frame, a few books and a postcard of the sacred heart, and a paraffin lamp hanging from a beam, cast a gentle, yellow light on the room. There was a set of rough-cut stairs to the left of the fireplace, leading to a loft. Every inch of space in the cottage was used for living. He noticed last the cheap, framed print of the martyrs of the 1916 Rising on the bare, white wall beside the dresser.

The irony of it, he thought: a country where a woman could revere the dead heroes of one vain uprising and then be assaulted by local ‘heroes’ of the same organisation several years later, because she had sold eggs to Irish policemen. Where was the logic in it? Where, for that matter, was the logic in his own desire for a home-ruled, independent Ireland and yet his taking a wage to hunt the men who thought murder was the surest way to achieve this?

The woman’s child – small and delicate-looking, with a pale complexion and tousled blond curls – was dunking a crust of buttered soda bread in a steaming bowl of stew.

‘You’re a fine big lad,’ O’Keefe said to him. ‘And what age are you?’

The boy lowered his head and continued to eat in silence. His mother busied herself at the range, shifting pots from one ring to another. ‘He’ll be five in January. He doesn’t talk much either, so he doesn’t. Not to strangers.’

O’Keefe could understand why, if the poor child had witnessed his mother’s assault. He forced himself to smile. ‘I’d say he’s a divil running the fields and the hills. Fine life in the country for a young fella.’

The woman turned to O’Keefe. She was younger than he had expected, not at all like the egg-monger he had conjured in his mind when he’d read Murray’s report. Katherine Sheehan was a fine-looking woman. Tall, with thick, light-brown hair pulled into a loose bun off her face, her cheeks flushed rose with the heat from the range. Good country stock, O’Keefe’s father would have called her and laughed as his wife scolded him.

‘Fine life,’ she said, ‘when his mother can put meat on his plate.’

O’Keefe nodded, still standing, holding his helmet and goggles in front of him. There was a soft pop of turf from the fire and the kettle hanging there began to sing in a low whistle. ‘I was hoping to ask …’

‘When the boy’s finished his tea.’

‘That’s grand, Mrs Sheehan.’

She looked hard at him again, a rigorous, assessing gaze that made his face flush. ‘And do you prefer standing to sitting, Sergeant?’

He smiled at her, genuinely this time. ‘I’ll sit, so. Thank you.’

Katherine Sheehan turned back to the range and returned with a bowl of hot stew and a hunk of bread. ‘You’d better be getting that in you while you’re waiting. You’re too thin to look a proper Peeler.’

He ate with relish, his and the boy’s spoons against their bowls the only sound in the small kitchen. When the boy had finished, he disappeared up the stairs to the loft, a rabbit, O’Keefe couldn’t help but think, taking to its hutch. ‘I’m sorry about your husband …’ he began, feeling a sudden urge to tell her about his own brother. His throat tightened again and he looked away.
Jesus, O’Keefe, what’s wrong with you, man?
He clenched his fists under the table, searching for something to say.

‘Not as sorry as myself, Sergeant.’

O’Keefe was silent for a moment. He cleared his throat. ‘Thanks again for the feed, Mrs Sheehan. Lovely, it was.’

‘It keeps the wolf from the door. Which is why you’re here isn’t it? Come to ask about the wolves who came to my door?’ Hands on her hips, direct gaze, proud stance.

‘I … yes.’ He took his notebook from his trenchcoat pocket and, as he did, the woman folded in on herself and collapsed into the chair across from him. She was exhausted. Any fool could see it, O’Keefe thought.
What am I doing here?

He wrote the date, time and location of the interview while Katherine Sheehan took a McIvor’s boiled sweets tin filled with loose tobacco from her apron and rolled a cigarette. She lit it then and exhaled at the ceiling. Women in the city smoked cigarettes. It was becoming more fashionable by the day, but countrywomen, if they smoked at all, did so rarely in front of strangers and usually then, they smoked a pipe. This woman’s smoking was bold, an act of defiance and O’Keefe had to stop himself from watching her.

She slid the tin across to him. He smiled. ‘Thanks, I will. Must stop, but there’s always tomorrow.’

‘Why?’

He looked up from rolling. ‘Why?’

‘Why would you bother stopping?’

‘Well, they’re bad enough for the chest.’

‘So are bullets.’

He licked the paper. ‘So they are. I’m hoping not to catch one.’

She studied him for a moment. ‘You have to think that, don’t you, Sergeant?’

‘Sure, the pay’s good,’ he said, lighting up.

‘Not good enough to die for.’

He shrugged. ‘Somebody’s got to do it.’

It was another common saying in the Peelers, repeated so often it had lost its meaning. It was used by men who felt, like O’Keefe, that there wasn’t much else they could do. He’d heard it during the war as well. Why take that beach, that hill, that trench?
Somebody’s got to do it.
One of those somebodys had been Katherine Sheehan’s husband. Another had been his brother.

They smoked in silence, using the upturned tin lid for an ashtray. Katherine Sheehan stared into the fire and O’Keefe took the opportunity to study her more closely. She had clear blue eyes, long lashes, a long, strong neck. He could see where her dress had been mended. The stitch marks of the hard-working poor, he reflected. The thrift and fatigue. The meatless stews and early mornings. She yawned and O’Keefe watched her fingers go to her mouth. They were long and graceful, the skin hard and cracked from work around the smallholding. They were the hands of a pianist or a harpist under a sentence of hard labour.

She held her eyes to the flickering firelight as she spoke. ‘So why come here, Sergeant – after curfew?’ She turned to him. ‘Looking for eggs for the barracks, are you?’

‘No, no. I need to ask –’

‘Questions. So you said.’

O’Keefe looked down to his notebook, wondering where to start. He had Murray’s file on the crime tucked into the Trusty’s saddlebag. An apology was as good a place to start as any. ‘First, let me tell you how sorry I am about what happened. At any other time we would have been able to make an arrest. Find the person, the people, who hurt you.’

He was indeed sorry. The RIC should have been protecting the people of West Cork. Policing. Instead it spent its days behind sandbagged gates and steel-shuttered windows or haring around the countryside in Crossley Tenders and armoured cars with carbines and army escorts, while decent people were left victim to thugs with stolen guns and pig rings.

Katherine stubbed out her cigarette and rolled another.

‘At any other time, Sergeant, it wouldn’t have happened. My Ger would have told those bastards where to take themselves. He was a fine, strong man who took nothing from no one. You should have seen him before the war got through with him.’ She looked over to her husband. If the man had understood anything, he gave no indication. It was like having a ghost in the room, O’Keefe thought. She lit her new cigarette and turned back to O’Keefe, her voice growing in passion.

‘Any other time there would be no boycott and no cornerboys with guns to tell me who I can or can’t trade with. Young thugs who’d hold a woman down and …’

There was real anger in her voice. Perhaps the terror of the crime had left her. The terror of memory replaced by rage. Perhaps she would help him. Perhaps she would let him help her.

‘Mrs Sheehan, I understand you’re –’

‘You understand, do you? Were you in the war, Sergeant?’ She reached across the table suddenly and touched the scar on his face. O’Keefe turned away and she let her hand fall to the table. He looked over at the silent husband, the man’s eyes still fixated on the low flames of the fire. He felt the heat of her fingertips where she had touched him.

‘Yes, I was. Gallipoli. With the Royal Dublins. Your husband?’

‘The Dirty Shirts. Royal Munsters. V Beach, they called it.’

O’Keefe turned back to her. ‘I was there. He was lucky to come off it. A thousand-odd Irish lads didn’t.’

‘I wonder was he lucky? I pleaded with him not to go, that we’d be grand with the farm here.’

‘A lot of women told a lot of men the same thing, I’d say.’

She smiled bitterly. ‘He said we could use the money and that the Kaiser couldn’t be running into the small nations of the world as if he owned them. Said it wasn’t right and that Irishmen needed to do their bit to stop him. And he believed Redmond when he said the Irish serving in the war would help bring Home Rule to Ireland. Fool that he was.’

O’Keefe nodded but said nothing. He imagined the man might have half-believed the reasons he’d given.

‘The truth was Ger never liked the farming. He loved town and the fairs and the hubbub of the city. He’d been to Dublin and came home saying there was no place on earth like it with its bustle and life.’ There were tears in her eyes now. ‘The truth was we were not enough for him – myself and the boy. That man wanted to see the world. And he saw it, so he did. Saw too much of the world.’

‘Many men did, Mrs Sheehan. Saw every ugly bit of it.’

There was a flash of intensity in her eyes. She leaned for-ward and wiped her eyes with her hands. ‘What was it like, Sergeant? On that beach. What was it like?’

It was his turn to stare into the fire. Memory rose up and lapped at his consciousness. Turquoise sea turned red with blood, fading to pink with the shushing tide. Bullets like a hailstorm, Turkish machine-gun rounds so thick in the air, you could see them. Men face down in the water, floating, rising and falling with the gentle heave of the surf. Good men torn to pieces. Men half in the water, half in the boats or on the pontoon bridge leading them to the shore from the
River Clyde
. Curious sharks beginning to nose the dead in the blood-dense water. His brother …

‘What was it like?’

The room had closed in on them, the woman’s husband lost to distant violence, leaving the woman and himself alone with the dying fire and the pain of a war nearly two years finished but never really finished. The two of them bearing the scars of it.

‘Mrs Sheehan, how many men came here that night?’

‘Please,’ she said.

Her husband had closed his eyes and looked as if he were dozing. Suddenly, the fever of wanting to know left Katherine Sheehan and she leaned back in her chair. ‘Sergeant, why are you here? What does this have to do with anything – what happened to me? Sure, they’re shooting two of you Peelers a week. Shot dead that poor sergeant going into Mass in Bandon. If you can’t catch the boys killing your own, why do you give a tinker’s about the ones who hurt me? I’m a “traitor” after all. I should be dead by rights, shouldn’t I, Sergeant? I should consider myself lucky.’

Lucky, O’Keefe thought. The woman was right: some-times it wasn’t the ones who lived who were lucky. But the woman had her son; that was something.

‘I’m here because I found a young woman on a hillside yesterday.’

‘A girl on a hillside. Not so lucky then, was she?’

He looked hard at her. ‘No. She was dead. Left there exposed for anyone to see. Someone had hurt her too, Mrs Sheehan. And I want to find the men who hurt her – who murdered her.’

‘And you think it might be the same men?’

‘I’ve no idea. But I’ve nothing else to go on.’

‘And so you thought you’d start with me.’

‘I thought there might be a connection. The Volunteers don’t usually harm women.’

‘Making me one of the lucky few.’

It occurred to O’Keefe then that the woman might be unhinged. The loss of her husband’s sanity, of her livelihood, the violation she’d suffered – these had been just enough to bear without the likes of him coming into her house and asking her to relive it all.

‘How many men were there, Mrs Sheehan? You could help me.’

She stood and walked over to the range, taking a pan from one of the cold rings and placing it in a basin of water on the floor. Then she turned back abruptly to face O’Keefe. Her voice wavered.

‘Two men. Do you know how to pierce a pig’s nose, Sergeant?’

‘I –’

‘You take a long needle and you scorch it against infection. Did you know that? But sure, a pig’s worth more than the likes of me. They didn’t bother with the scorching.’

‘Mrs Sheehan –’

‘And then you hold the pig down, Sergeant. Two men, sometimes three for a big sow, one that fights, and drive that needle through the flesh, just run it out the other side so there’s a clean hole for to hang the ring.’

She was growing frantic. O’Keefe felt the same at times and his heart could bled for her. He stood up.

‘Mrs Sheehan, you don’t have to –’

‘Why don’t you call me Kate, Sergeant? Those boys did, when they held me down and put a needle through the flesh of my backside.
Kate
, they said,
you like that, Kate? You need to do what you’re fucking told, first time round, Kate
, they said.’

The anger left her then and she started to weep. She gathered her apron in her hands and covered her face.

‘Mrs Sheehan …’

‘Go,’ she said. ‘They’re not the same men at all. Away with you, out of my house.’

There was nothing he could do for her at that moment. He looked to her husband then, still unmoved, eyes closed, a thin tracery of spittle on his chin reflecting the firelight. O’Keefe left her with her memories, closing the cottage door gently behind him, her demons still loose and roving the hills and villages. She has her son at least, he thought, kicking the Trusty to life, adjusting his helmet and goggles. She’d keep going for him. But what did he himself have? What hope? A meagre one at best – catch the bastards who had killed the girl and left her on the hillside. Maybe find the men who had hurt Katherine Sheehan. Show the woman that justice hadn’t gone entirely from Ireland. It had just lost its way for a time.