The Death of an Irish Tinker (21 page)

Why hadn’t he phoned up? What had made him forget?

The Benelli 500 shotgun was where he had left it, right by the boots of the Mohawk one on the edge of the tub. Seeing his eyes light on it, she kicked out, and the gun slipped into the swirling water. “Oops—I hope that doesn’t ruin it. But you’ve got others.”

Behind the girls, the door to the drying room was open, which was the cause of the draft. In it stood Lo-Annh, smiling.

“Go ahead,” the Mohawk one insisted. “Take a guess why we’re here. No invite. Didn’t even fookin’ knock.” She shook her absurd head. “Fookin’ Knackers, no fookin’ manners.” Her green eyes were bright, but her smile the Toddler recognized, having smiled it himself on occasion. No mirth, no warmth. It was the smile of cold control.

He shrugged. “Does it matter? You’re trespassing. Get out.”

The Mohawk one closed her eyes and laughed a bit. “You’re gas, you are. Whoever said you were clever? Here’s another. See if you can answer this. Know what those are?” She pointed to the shears. “We thought we’d use these”—from her back pocket she pulled a pair of surgical shears of the sort that were used to castrate rams—“but we took a vote: too good, too fine for the likes of you.” She tossed those in the tub too.

In spite of himself the Toddler felt his gonads tighten yet more. He smirked. “You can’t. You won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because the police must know you’re here.”

The Mohawk nodded. “Now, there—that’s brilliant, that is. They do, they know we’re here.” Her green eyes fixed his. “With their blessing. However would you think we got here so quickly?”

The Toddler blinked; he knew.

“They showed us the way.”

McGarr. Not playing by the rules. After Lo-Annh was lifted, he’d cut her a deal.

Which was when the Toddler lunged for the Mohawk one. If he could just get her head in his hands, maybe he could keep the others at bay long enough to make the lift. Even if they’d already taken the precaution of disabling his cars, they hadn’t dropped here out of a bubble; they had to have a vehicle of some kind outside.

And did! One hand clamping down on the back of her bristly head, the other clutching her under the chin.

Somebody swung a club and struck his shoulder.

“Do that again, and I’ll snap her neck.”

“He’s bluffing. He can’t snap her neck.”

“No, he’s not,” said the Biddy’s daughter. “Me ma told me on the phone: He’s a trained killer. With kicks and chops.”

“Back off now! Back off!” the Toddler roared, raising himself out of the swirling water and stepping out of the pool. “Everybody into that corner—quick! Quick!”

He had already formulated his plan; he knew what he must do. “Go!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, as loudly as the DIs had screamed at him at Pendleton.

And they jumped, quickly.

“You won’t get far,” said the daughter.

“Won’t I? Why not?” He lifted the Mohawk one off her feet, and she began choking, her hands clawing at his. “You know something I don’t?” At the door he flexed his biceps and snapped his hands forward and back. Once. Then threw the dead Mohawk girl into the pool.

Slamming the door, he locked it, then watched through the glass as the gaggle of Knacker cunts wailed and jumped into the water to try to save her. One vomited; another ran at the door with a slane and smashed at the glass, breaking it.

But they’d not get out. The door was heavy, insulated to keep in the heat, and sheathed in Formica. The window was only a foot square.

“Bastard!” she roared. “You miserable fookin’ bastard!”

Aye, and more, thought the Toddler. He could ring up the guards and say he’d been attacked in his bath and had killed the bitch in self-defense.

Or, on the other hand, he could just kill them and say he’d been attacked in his bath. He’d decide which while dressing. Naked, wet, and no longer threatened, the Toddler was now getting a chill. Turning toward his dressing room, he saw—too late—a figure in front of him with something raised over his head.

McGarr swung the chair made out of some heavy wood—teak or oak—that broke as it slammed down on the Toddler’s head and shoulders. Yet he only fell to his hands and knees.

McGarr’s foot came up, catching him under the chin and toppling the man into the door.

“Open up! Open up! Let us have him! He fookin’ murdered Rita just now. Let us fookin’ have him!”

Bresnahan reached for the key.

“Careful,” said McGarr. “He’s still moving.” The Toddler’s face was streaming with blood.

Giving him a wide berth, Bresnahan reached over and slipped the key into the lock and turned it. From the inside the girls began throwing themselves at the door, struggling to push it open with the Toddler’s weight against it.

Feeling the pressure, still conscious enough to realize what would happen to him if they got it open, the Toddler spun around and threw his hands onto the panel. But he began slipping, sliding in his own blood, which was thick now on the tiles of the drying room.

McGarr signaled to Bresnahan, and she moved around the margin of the room, staying well away from the man and the door.

“McGarr!” the Toddler roared. “Help me! Name what you want—anything! Everything! You can’t just let me die!”

In the doorway McGarr said, “Hannigan would. I’ll tell him what you said, your last words. He’ll be relieved.”

There was a thump as the girls collectively threw themselves against the door, which opened maybe a foot, something like a bench being shoved into the gap.

The Toddler kicked at it with his foot. “Then at least fuckin’ shoot me!”

Why, when there was a more elegant Toddler-like solution to his problem already in play?

“You’re a bastard, you know that? A bastard!”

High praise from one who knew whereof he spoke, thought McGarr.

The Toddler slipped and fell to his knees.

The door opened yet more, and a hand with a pipe in it reached around and smashed at his hands.

Turning suddenly, he let go of the door and tried to stand and rush from the room. But again he slipped in his blood and went down.

And they were on him—hacking, swinging, punching, stomping. His face, his neck, the groin, the wound.

Oney Maugham was the last out of the doorway, shears in hand. “Wait!” she shouted. “Don’t kill him. Don’t! It’s too good, too easy.”

In the lift on the way down to the ground floor, McGarr said to Bresnahan, “Come back tomorrow, straighten things up,” so there’d be no evidence of who might have murdered him, he meant. Not even the dead girl, whose corpse would be taken back to her own people and not left there for the police, if McGarr knew anything about Travelers.

“Tomorrow, if Hughie’s any better, I’ll drive back down to Midleton, have a talk with the head man.”

“McDonagh,” Bresnahan put in.

“And the father and mother.”

“Maggie and Ned.”

“Who knows, with the right legal help, this place might be theirs.”

A WEEK AND a day later a telephone caller to the Murder Squad asked to be connected to “Peter McGarr, please. It’s Eithne Carruthers of Riverhouse, Glencree. I think he’ll remember me.”

Ruth Bresnahan took the call. “I’m afraid the chief superintendent is unavailable.”

“What about Detective Ward?”

“The same, but I know who you are.”

“You do?” The woman seemed pleased.

Bresnahan introduced herself, adding that she had been on staff when the woman had phoned twelve years earlier.

“Then you know all…that about Archie?”

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“It’ll be apparent when you get here.”

An hour later the woman pointed toward a copse near the base of the mountain in back of her estate. “You see, it’s happened again.” A small cloud of crows was circling the tallest tree. “I only hope and pray it’s nobody I know.”

Bresnahan’s wish was the opposite. And was granted some hours later, when she reached the top of the “Cliquot” tree with the help of two Tech Squad climbing specialists.

For there was (or had been) Desmond Bacon, the Toddler, shackled into the “nest” at the top of the giant sequoia that was bobbing, swaying, surging in the stiff breeze. Already the crows had dined massively on his corpse, having removed his eyes and most of his face, the flesh of his arms and thighs.

In a phrase, he was “half picked over,” said one of the Techies. “The castration probably occurred before he succumbed. But as you can see from his wrists and ankles, it didn’t kill him by itself. He struggled for some long time to produce that damage.”

Which could not have been long enough, thought Bresnahan. She only wished McGarr and Ward could have been present to view the corpse. But she had thought to carry up a camera with her, and there would also be the Tech Squad photos.

“What’s this—the family thing?” Bresnahan asked some days later when Ward was about to be released from hospital into the care of his son and…well, his son’s mother.

Who had the audacity to reply, “Well, I hope you can imagine that Lugh is concerned about his father. And it being summer holidays, he’ll have the opportunity of being with him more than usual, while Hughie’s recuperating.”

And you? What opportunity will you have? thought Bresnahan. She had never seen the woman—Leah Sigal or Lee Stone or whatever she called herself—looking so vibrant, there was no other word for her.

With her lustrous hair, which had been made rather darker in recent days, her sparkling china blue eyes, and, well, the shapely rest of her that had been primped, pampered, and provided with the most stylish costumes that Dublin possessed (and she doubtless could afford!), the “L. Ward” aspirant (Bresnahan was certain) looked as though she had knocked a decade off her fully thirty-nine years. Ruth had checked; not for nothing was she a detective.

“Then the shop—my shop—doesn’t require a great deal of my time, and his wound
is
draining.” The round from Biddy Nevins’s large-caliber weapon had come very close to Ward’s heart. “He’ll need a nurse.”

Precisely, thought Bresnahan. And not you who—from all she could learn—had not so much as gone out with another man between having Ward’s baby and telling him about their son fourteen years later. It was as though she had been waiting for him and him alone all that time.

Talk about
true
love! And now look at her—preserved, as by suspended animation, and right back in his life. Big time. “May I have a word with yehr mahn?” Bresnahan asked in her broadest impression of the Dublin accent, which was natural to the other woman in spite of her Ph.D. and jewelry and antique expertise.

Bresnahan couldn’t help herself. Basically a country girl from Kerry in spite of her now-urbane exterior, she could feel herself beginning to hate the other woman. And to hate herself for so doing, knowing the approach was exactly wrong. Ward would continue his relationship with his son regardless, and she could not be seen to get into a mood or throw a fit every time he did. “Alone, please. Door closed.”

Leah Sigal’s smile did not change one bit, further angering Bresnahan. “Of course. Certainly. Take all the time you need. We’ll wait downstairs in the lobby. Come along, Lugh.”

But as she closed the door, her china blue eyes met Ward’s. Briefly, pointedly. The situation was not good, Bresnahan gauged.

And she was left alone with the man she had
virtually
been married to for a decade. In the common law sense. Whom she still very much loved and wished to
possess
in the strict sense. Could the opportunity have passed? It felt like that.

She eased herself onto the bed that Ward would need help getting out of. Not only was there the gruesome drain, but he was still weak, and—to be utterly truthful—medicine,
nursing, wounds were not Ruth’s thing. “What gives here?”

Ward said nothing; he did not know himself. He had nearly died; it had changed him. He was suddenly, totally, irrevocably old, or at least more mature. The aspects of his former life that had interested him, from a new car or a new suit to a holiday in Majorca or winning in the ring, were as nothing now.

What did attract him, however, was putting his own stamp on life—personally, professionally, privately, which he thought of as how he spent the free hours of his days. He would no longer squander that time doing things that were expected of him. By other people. He would do only what he wished.

“Has she said anything to you, made any representations?”

Nor would he lie, so he said nothing.

“Oh, then, she has.”

Again nothing.

Were there now tears in Bresnahan’s smoky gray eyes? There were. “Look, if you want to get married that badly,” she blurted out, “we’ll get married. Have babbies. I’ll quit; we’ll get a house here in town. After all, it’s silly to have that big place down in the country without babbies.”

She meant the large and picturesque farm down in Sneem, in Kerry, that she had inherited from her father. “We’ll have a family, do the
right
thing, so.” It was as if she were trying to talk herself into it. “What say?”

She couldn’t look at him, and he didn’t say.

After a while she just got up and left the room.

Slightly over a month later, when Chief Superintendent Paul Hannigan of the Drug Squad returned from his summer holidays in Portugal, he found that—miraculously—the cloud that had been hanging over him was gone.

“The Toddler bit it,” said Sergeant Tom Lyons, one of Hannigan’s subordinates, and an impertinent, dangerous chap in every regard, Hannigan had long thought.

Lyons twirled a newspaper down on Hannigan’s desk. “He’s dead. They found him up in the Cliquot Tree, just like Mickalou Maugham was a few years back.”

Hannigan stared down at the paper, afraid to touch it, afraid Lyons might say more. Hannigan had purposely kept himself out of touch in order to postpone what he was certain would be the inevitable inquiry into the business on—

“The Raglan Road?” Lyons dropped another newspaper on his desk. “All dead. Tag Barry, Cheri Cooke, Biddy Nevins. And you’ll never guess who shot her, the Biddy.”

If Hannigan held his breath any longer, he’d burst.

“Ward.”

He let it out in a puffy blast. “No. Go ’way. You’re coddin’ me.”

“After—get this—she shot him with a forty-four. Upper chest. Right through the lung.”

“And he plugged her?’

“Head shot. Dead before she hit the floor. But McGarr helped—pumped at least three or four shots into her himself, thinking she was the Toddler.”

“Now I’ve heard everything.” Hannigan felt as if he could jump out of his skin. The wee, wonderful bollocks McGarr had put his foot, his arse, his entire career in the effing jam, he had.

Which would make any allegation against Hannigan re the Toddler ludicrous, coming from a man who had shot and killed the Toddler’s victim and target. “Ward, now. Tell me about Ward. Is he—”

“Serious? Critical? Was. But he’s on the mend. Athlete, very fit. The wound, the circumstances, the loss of blood would have killed any other person. But they say he’ll never box again. The shoulder and all.”

Hannigan looked away. Well, he thought, you can’t have everything. “A shame. A desperate shame, so it is. Jaysis. What about the Tod…ler,” he added, not wishing to sound too familiar. Or flip. “Who did him? The Knackers?”

Lyons shrugged.

“McGarr investigating?”

Again.

They both knew there wouldn’t be much of a search, if any. “And why? Him bein’ a scourge, a downright pestilence.” Hannigan liked the last word, which made him feel, you know, high-minded and intelligent. He remembered something else. “What’s the saying? Strike one Tinker, and you strike—”

“—the whole clan,” they completed together.

“Sure, we used to say that, down the country, don’t you know? And look how long they waited to get back for Maugham. Didn’t they get the bastard finally?”

When we couldn’t, thought Lyons, because of you.

“Excellent!
Excellent
!” Hannigan could scarcely contain himself or wait to leave. In spite of the mountain of work that had piled up on his desk in a month, he just had to get out of there and
celebrate
!

“Come ’ere, Tom. Can I share somethin’ with yeh?” Share was a word that Hannigan’s son, who’d had a bit of a go with the drugs, used these days himself. In recovery, Hannigan hoped. “I’ve got a touch of Montezuma’s revenge.” It seemed to fit; weren’t all the Latin people greasers of one sort or another?

“And I’m to see me sawbones at”—he pulled out his pocket secretary and flashed it open and shut—“wouldn’t you know I’m fookin’ late as it is?” Hannigan stood. you paw through this…” He almost said “shit” and laughed, but the man would take it wrong. “Just chuck out anything not important.”

Not waiting for Lyons’s reply, Hannigan steered the prow of his paunch around the desk and out of the cubicle, singing to himself, Freedom! Ah,
freedom
!

At the Horse & Hound, which was his fourth stop—the drive across Dublin being a minefield of enticing pubs when on a toot—Hannigan got yet another pleasant surprise.

The owner took him aside. “See that bottle?” He pointed to a liter bottle of Hogan’s Own in a glass case. “It’s yours.”

Hannigan’s head went back. “Ye’re jokin’ me.”

“No. Remember the last time you were in here, right before you went away. You were with the other chief superintendent, the one whose assistant got shot.”

“And also shot one of me suspects. Killed the bloody bitch outright.” Hannigan began laughing and laughing, letting all his joy at his luck out. He thought he’d explode.

But the barman was humorless, so he was, and didn’t even smile. “Indeed. Well, to continue, you two no sooner left than in walked this little Oriental woman. At first I thought she was a child trying to sell me something, and I nearly threw her out. But didn’t she place the bottle on the bar and hand me this slip of paper?”

Hannigan took it from the man. It said:

“And didn’t she—the little woman—splash out the ten quid and leave? I could hardly believe it. Extraordinary. I didn’t know what to say.”

Hannigan shook his head; he sighed; he smiled. “I do. I say, ’twas a great day for the both of us.” Hogan’s Own. It was McGarr’s brand all right, and one of the best whiskeys that Dublin had ever produced—aged in old sherry cask to give it flavor and hue. Aged for a decade at least.

“I’ll have me one, I will. Instanter, as we used to say in Synge Street. A large glass with ice, please.”

When the glass arrived, Hannigan added, “I hope you put the forty quid in your pocket. You know, no register, no government, no tax to pay.”

Again the man said nothing. And wouldn’t to the police, him being a tight-arsed publican in every way.

Ah, well, there were those who could look out for themselves and those who couldn’t get out of their own way, Hannigan quipped silently. Like McGarr and Ward. He began chuckling again. Jaysis, he wished he’d been a bluebottle fly on the wall to watch it. He raised the glass.

Sure, he’d miss the monthly stipend from the Toddler. But sooner or later he’d make an arrangement with whoever filled the little bastard’s spats. And he’d again have the few hundred-odd quid tax-free to make life enjoyable. “Will you have one yehrself?” he asked, knowing that too was impossible, given the man.

Who only glanced at him.

“Then I make a toast to meself, I do. To Peter effing McGarr, God bless him, and to me mither’s uncle Bill, God bless him wherever he is. And we suspect the worst!” Hannigan drank off a goodly swallow from the large glass, thinking how good it tasted like that.

Which was free. He’d have a snootful, he would. Get fookin’ locked and laugh his arse off at them two—McGarr and Ward—and all the other gobshites who toddled around like priests with scarcely enough in their pockets for a decent session.

Until Hannigan turned to make use of the toilet, and the room began spinning. Christ, have I had that much? He managed only two steps before he found himself suddenly on the floor looking up, and two people—no, four—no a crowd of faces staring down. He couldn’t talk; he couldn’t move; he couldn’t even blink. Or, now, breathe.

“And there Hannigan had called it Montezuma’s revenge,” Sergeant Tom Lyons said to McGarr over the phone the next day.

“After the bloody Aztec king who conducted all the human sacrifices?”

“Aye, but didn’t Hannigan have the wrong country altogether?”

“Though the right type of man.”

Lyons waited.

“Montezuma being an earlier class of Toddler.”