The Death of an Irish Tinker

Glencree, County Wicklow
August

PETER MCGARR HAD not always been afraid of heights. In fact, he had not known that he was. But this was different.

He was perched 175 feet up—Miss Eithne Carruthers had said—in a giant sequoia that without a doubt had been taller before lightning had struck, shearing off its top and creating what amounted to a nest in the remaining bowers.

It was she who had noticed the crows circling the top, she whose dog had found a human hand by the trunk, she who had rung up the Murder Squad a few hours earlier.

McGarr looked down into the nest.

At first glance it looked as if some immense prehistoric carrion bird had dined upon a sizable repast. Many of the bones were bleached, the skin dried out, the flesh well past the first foul reek of decomposition.

But yet there lay what had been a human being.

Naked on its back with arms and legs stretched out, it had an iron—could it be?—cangue around its neck, like
something from the ancient Orient. And stout shackles on its wrists and ankles. They too looked rather antique and were also made of iron, which was now rusting, like the chains that pulled the shackles tight to lower branches.

It was then that a blast of wind, bucking through the scree of the two tall mountains to the west, struck them. The top of the sequoia heaved and surged, and McGarr held tight, not daring to look down.

In dramatic descent to the east lay a wooded mountain valley, then Powerscourt—the vast demesne and garden of exotic plantings, like the sequoia itself, that had been laid out by Eithne Carruthers’s great-great-great-grandfather, she had told him—and the lush Glen of the Dargle River.

Farther still, McGarr could see the seaside town of Bray with its several tall church spires and massive headland. Toward the horizon was the deep blue water of the Irish Sea.

He could barely breathe, the wind was so strong.

“Chief, you okay?” Detective Inspector Hugh Ward had to shout, even though they were only feet apart. A dark, wiry, and athletic young man, Ward was riding one of the surging bows calmly, easily, with one hand no less. In the other was a camera.

“What I can’t figure out”—Ward had to shout, and still McGarr could barely hear him—“is why he struggled so violently if it was a suicide. And how could he have closed the final shackle if he bound his feet first, then one wrist, the neck, and finally the other hand? How could he have done that—locked the other hand?”

And who was he? There was nobody missing locally or in the village of Enniskerry, a few miles distant. McGarr had checked.

Now he forced himself to look more closely.

The corpse was nearly a skeleton at this point, picked clean easily because of its nakedness by carrion crows, seagulls, the passing hawk, he imagined. The neck hung loosely in the canguelike device, and the mouth had dropped open in a kind of tongueless, toothy leer.

Even the eyes had been pecked from the head. Yet the hair, which was long and flailing in the breeze, was glossy brown and had been sun-bleached streaky. A small man? A large woman?

Surely the pathologist would be able to tell with one glance at the pelvic bone, which was obscured by a dried flap of some internal organ that the birds had declined to consume and what looked like another collection of smaller bones. But all other appendages that might reveal its sex were gone. Only some viscera remained, and the skeleton, which was well made.

Climbing up on the other side of the body and farther out on narrow branches than McGarr would ever dare, Ward pointed down at the wristbone that was closest to McGarr.

The hand was missing. Ward had to shout as loud as he could, as they pitched and heaved in the wind.

“My guess is…whoever did it either tricked him up here on a dare or something, then managed to get those clamps on him. Or they hoisted him up here unconscious. When he came to, he struggled so mightily he fairly well wore away that wrist.”

So it looked. Even the bone had been abraded.

“Later, after the birds and decomposition and all,” Ward went on, “the weight of the manacle on the damaged wrist made the hand come away, and it fell to the ground. In fact, I’d bet with all his struggle he opened up the wrist and bled to death.”

Ward, who was new to the Murder Squad, was only testing his investigative wings. In matters of mortality, McGarr had ceased to bet. Here he doubted they’d ever determine the exact cause of the victim’s death. If he was that. Or she.

One thing was certain, however. At some point before the person died, he had understood or rethought his situation and tried everything he could to free himself from his bonds. His chains. Naked on the side of a mountain in Ireland in winter, perhaps with a wrist opened up and bleeding, he could not have lasted long.

McGarr’s second thought was how altogether romantic the whole scene appeared for a murder, if a murder.

There Ward was above him with the wind flattening his features, fanning back his dark hair, and his one hand gripping the lightning-charred stump of the tree trunk. In all, he looked like some big dark eagle ready to pounce. Or, worse, a vampire. When he spoke, his teeth looked like fangs.

It all smacked of some myth or other that McGarr could not recollect at the moment. The whole scene was bizarre. No, grotesquely bizarre. And if it was murder, the murderer or murderers had to work to get the victim—all twelve or thirteen stone of him, McGarr guessed—up into the perch. Using what?

“Block and tackle,” Ward said, as though having read McGarr’s thoughts. But then, McGarr had trained him.

A blast of wind now struck, and the top of the tree hurtled toward the valley and the ocean beyond. Ward had to avert his head and wait until it subsided.

McGarr felt vaguely nauseated. His brow was beaded with sweat in spite of the breeze.

“See the marks on the bark of the trunk. Just below you.”

A horizontal band of fresh scarring wrapped the tree just below the “nest.”

“With a come-along or a pulley they hauled him up here, no problem.”

Which was overstating the possibility, although the “they” was accurate. It would have taken at least two people, one to pull the rope, the other to guide the unconscious or semiconscious body up through the branches that made the tree so easy to climb.

And once they got him as high as they could by that means—to the line of scarring—there had remained the additional four or five feet into the nest, which would have taken no little strength and daring. Finally, the cangue and shackles had to be fixed and the chains fastened to the branches below.

In all, the murder—if murder—had required time, planning, more than one person, hard labor, and a detailed knowledge of the tree, the house, the estate, and the habits of Miss Eithne Carruthers. As well as some extraordinary animus to have taken such pains to kill in so dramatic a way.

Another possibility was that the murderers had gone to such lengths to make a point or send a message.

Unless, as Ward had mentioned, it had been part of some…rite or other, and the man had climbed the tree willingly, allowed himself to be yoked, only to have second thoughts when it was too late.

The band of scarring on the tree suggested otherwise.

“Well done, Chief,” the climb team leader of the Tech Squad said when McGarr reached the ground. “But don’t expect any combat pay in your packet this week. It’s all in a day’s work.” For them, he meant. Now the Techies would have to remove the shackles, then bag and lower the gruesome cargo to the ground.

“The places we’ve been,” said McGarr, “the things we’ve seen. Sure, it’s a wonderful life.”

The others laughed, and McGarr found it an actual pleasure to walk again—out of the copse and across the wide lawn toward the handsome Tudor-style house built of limestone block.

The short, square man with a long face and an aquiline nose slipped his hands into the pockets of a tan windcheater. A waterproof cloth cap to match was on his head.

Bald now in his early fifties, McGarr kept what hair remained rather long. It was a deep red color and curled on the nape of his neck. His eyes were gray. Glancing back at the tree, he felt rather proud and amazed that he had climbed it, now that he was back on the ground.

“Who would have known about the tree—the condition at the top, how easy it is to climb?” he asked the Carruthers woman in her large modern kitchen, where he found her speaking to her cook.

“Oh, everybody, I suspect. Don’t you watch television?”

When? McGarr thought. His wife sometimes put on the evening news, and he had watched the All-Ireland Final last year. Or was it the year before?

“That tree was in a drinks advert for Veuve Cliquot.” A tall woman well into her sixties, Eithne Carruthers was still lean and athletic. She was wearing a riding costume—tight black jacket and jodhpurs—and her boots had tracked mud over the kitchen tiles.

“First you see a young man and woman on the top of that mountain, drinks in hand.” She pointed out the window. “Then they’re in the top of that tree. Voice-over says, ‘You don’t have to scale the highest mountain or climb the tallest tree to enjoy Veuve Cliquot. But when you do’—at that point you see them sailing a lovely yacht and then finally seated at dinner in the Westbury Hotel—‘celebrate the moment with Champagne Veuve Cliquot.’ They gave me a nice check and a case of their bubbly. It’s quite good. Would you care for a glass?”

McGarr smiled and checked his watch. “It’s rather early. Let me rephrase: Who would have known that they could climb your tree with impunity and be in it for hours without being seen?”

The woman hunched her shoulders. Her eyebrows were plucked, and the taut skin on her cheeks suggested a facelift. “Again, probably anybody. I spend January and most of February with my”—she smiled—“
father
in the Midi. Apart from the groundskeeper, the rest of the staff is on holiday.”

“Who would have known that?”

She shook her head. “The staff, of course, and their families, my near neighbors, and our local guards. I call into the barracks on my way to the airport. But otherwise I don’t make a practice of telling people—shopkeepers and the like down in the village, if that’s what you mean. We had a break-in two years ago.”

“Much stolen?”

She closed her eyes in mock horror. “Only
everything
of any value. Your colleague said they were professionals. They even closed and locked the gate on the way out”

Which was not unusual these days, thought McGarr. Several gangs of well-equipped, highly skilled thieves were operating in the Dublin area. But what they needed were touts—people who knew the habits of the rich, like Eithne Carruthers, and who were willing to say.

“What about the chains and shackles?”

She averted her head. “Enda, my groundskeeper, told me about them.” He had been the first to climb up and peer into the “nest.” “Like something out of the Inquisition. You expect to see that stuff in Spain and Portugal, but certainly not in this country.”

Why not? thought McGarr, thanking the woman and moving toward the door. Ireland had suffered its own Inquisition for close to a millennium with no end in sight.

“Will you keep me informed?”

“If you like.”

“It’s not often one finds a dead person chained to the top of her tree.”

And one who had not wished to die like that. But apart from the approximate age of the corpse, McGarr knew nothing else.

When he got home to his house in Rathmines a few hours later, he placed the folded evening newspaper on the kitchen table and stepped into the pantry.

“Who was the ancient hero who was chained up in the tree for birds to eat?” he asked his wife, Noreen, who was preparing dinner at the stove.

“Prometheus.”

McGarr reached for a glass and the bottle of malt on the sideboard.

“But it wasn’t a tree, and the bird was an eagle that feasted upon his liver. Eternally, since Prometheus was himself immortal.”

McGarr was glad they weren’t having liver tonight. From the aroma in the kitchen he could tell Noreen was cooking her own home-cured pork sausages simmered in seasoned bouillon. She served them with boiled potatoes, pea beans, sauerkraut, and a variety of mustards.

Suddenly famished, McGarr raised the glass to his lips and wished he did not have to go back into the office. But the volume of unsolved cases had increased dramatically along with the burgeoning drug problem, and only plain, dogged police work would close them.

“What was his crime?” McGarr stepped around the door to watch Noreen at work over the Aga that was making the kitchen toasty. It was the hour of the day he enjoyed most.

“It was one of commission: He went too far. Jupiter gave him the order to make mankind out of dirt and water.”

And when he did, he must have had you in mind, thought McGarr. A redhead like McGarr himself, Noreen was a diminutive but well-knit woman with alabaster skin and green eyes.

A full fourteen years younger than McGarr, she managed her parents’ picture gallery in Dawson Street and was a devotee of the arts in every form.

This evening she was wearing a black kimono that pictured a bird of paradise on the back in vibrant detail and black Japanese slippers with brilliant red piping. In all, she looked like a member of some smaller, finer, and more colorful race.

“But Prometheus took pity on our sorry state,” she went on, while moving between stove and fridge, “huddled shivering and fearful in the darkness when night came on. So he stole fire from the heavens and carried it down to us. Of course, it was more than just fire. It was light, heat, and eventually culture and civilization.”

“And for that he got the max?”

“Well, max enough. Nothing was ever the max in the classical world, myths being subject to amendment.” Noreen turned from her labors to regard McGarr: the rumpled
khakis that he’d climbed the “Cliquot tree” in, what amounted to a two days’ growth of beard since he’d been up most of the night before, and the rather full glass in his hand.

“Prometheus himself might have ended his agony at any time,” she went on. “By submitting to Jupiter’s authority and telling old Jupe what he wanted to know. He was a clever lad, you see, who knew a thing or two.
Chief
among which was not to drink more than one of those things in your hand before having tea. And, two, he might spill the beans about how Jupiter would beget a son who would displace him and end the hegemony of the Olympians. Are you with me, tatty one?”