The Death of an Irish Lover (20 page)

“Well then, back here where it won’t show. The perm is new.” Moira O’Rourke turned around and lifted the back of her hair so McGarr could pluck a few hairs on the nape of her neck.

“And I’m afraid you’ll have to repeat everything you just told us to Detective Superintendent McKeon here. In a formal statement,” McGarr added, slipping the hairs into an envelope.

“How long will that be?” Turning back around, she seemed put out.

McGarr canted his head inquiringly.

“I mean, I have produce in the bins on the footpath, and no Grace to mind the shop.”

“And perhaps an engagement?” McGarr motioned to her costume.

“What if I do? I’ve done nothing wrong here, nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Then you won’t mind speaking with Detective McKeon.” McGarr turned for the door.

“Aren’t you going after her?” Moira O’Rourke demanded.

“After whom?”

“After the bitch, Gertie McGurk. She was there. Without a doubt she had a key. And if I know anything about her, there was something for her to gain by Pascal’s death.”

McGarr turned to Ward and Bresnahan. “You two come with me.”

And to Noreen, “I’ll try to be back by tea.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Bray.” It was time to interview the only other party who was still alive and had been near the scene of Pascal Burke’s murder. Apart from Moira O’Rourke.

The town in County Wicklow about a dozen miles south of Dublin had been a fashionable seaside resort early in the nineteenth century, with a long esplanade tracing the shore, wide streets, and the eminence of Bray Head, which rises out of the Irish Sea to nearly eight hundred feet.

As a child, McGarr had spent many Sundays in Bray, since his mother’s brother, John, had owned a house on the seafront. Back then, the uncle and his neighbors never thought it necessary or wise to visit Dublin, which was viewed as a distant and squalid metropolis.

Now Bray was either yet another suburb of Dublin or a small city in its own right, McGarr mused, as Bresnahan turned the car off the highway and wheeled slowly past a shopping center, office buildings, and row after row of businesses that had been the sites of houses or woods when McGarr was a child.

“It’s the laneway up ahead on the left,” Ward said. He had a computer on his lap with a map on the screen.

Sitting in the back, McGarr removed his Walther from its holster and checked the action. After its bath in the Shannon, he had cleaned and lubricated the usually dependable weapon. But it was older than he, and he knew of handguns that had failed because of metal fatigue.

“I want you two to remember that we’re here to make two arrests and conduct an interview,” he remarked, slipping the Walther into the pocket of his mac and reaching for the Street-Sweeper, a highly portable, 12-gauge, automatic shotgun. “Not for revenge.”

Yet he saw Bresnahan’s eyes meet Ward’s; they were still smarting from the incident with the eels.

“Just a couple of IRA thugs poking a bit of fun,” said Bresnahan, under her breath.

“A big person could overlook that,” Ward chimed in. “Let it go. Sure, it’s their warped background, what they know of society and the police, that made them do it. Otherwise, they’d be jokin’ at the bar, like everyone else.”

“And mind the child,” McGarr advised further, sliding shells into the weapon. “She’ll be about someplace.”

They had already discussed strategy. Bresnahan now pulled the car in and only McGarr got out, adding, “And if later they complain—and you know them, they will with the whole anti-Republican thing—you two could be in trouble.”

“Yes, Father,” said Bresnahan. “We’ll just have to will them into the car.”

“By the power of suggestion,” Ward put in.

“No touchy, no feely—sounds boring, doesn’t it?”

McGarr closed the door. Years ago, he would have burst into the scrap yard and beaten every bit of information out of the Frakes
before
they were ever formally interviewed, which would occur after their hospital stay.

But all that had changed after several court rulings that had disposed large sums of money on career criminals, several with IRA backgrounds.

Suddenly chilled after the warm car, McGarr tightened his fedora on his brow and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his mac. In one, he had placed the Walther; in the other, the Street-Sweeper.

Driving toward Bray they had debated who should make the first approach, Bresnahan and Ward being eager to make the collar. But McGarr was certain that
the night of the attack on the car, the two had been watched by the Frakes probably through the night-seeing scope of the Kalashnikov, whereas he was almost certain neither of the brothers had got a good look at him, during the altercation at the old mill.

It was night, they had been in pain, and costume and setting were everything. Here McGarr looked like some little old man, which, of course, was what he was. And he doubted the Frakes’s egos would allow them to believe that a bald, pudgy codger had kicked their arses.

The large wooden gates to the scrap yard were closed, but a small door was open a crack. Pushing it back, McGarr stepped in.

Vast clutter greeted him. There were heaps of various metals rusting and corroding in piles that seemed to have been placed randomly around the large yard; avenues of crushed cars lined the walls.

Catching sight of McGarr, a Rottweiler in a tight pen began a chorus of hoarse barks, and a bearded man popped his head out of the open door of a battered caravan of the sort placed at building sites.

“Be right with you,” he called out. “Don’t come any farther. I’ll be right there.”

McGarr kept advancing.

“You! I told you to stay there,” the man roared when he reappeared, jumping down from the caravan.

Maybe forty, he was large and round. Reddish hair sprouted from the open front of his grease-stained coveralls that were so tight-fitting he could not possibly be armed. A ginger beard made his lips seem very red and wet.

“You deaf?” There was an Ulster burr to his speech.

McGarr stopped. The man’s anger could mean only
one thing—either one or both of the Frakes were in the caravan with him. Or there was something in there that he did not want the public to see. Like a gun.

“What’s your problem?” he asked when he reached McGarr.

His stomach was now nearly touching McGarr; but the closer, the better. “It’s with my car. There’s a part missing, and I think you might have it.”

“Which part?”

“The injector, but there’s also a strange sleeve that Mercedes put on their diesels back in the sixties. Maybe if you see it….” The strategy being to get as many out of the yard as possible before going in after the Frakes.

“I don’t know what made you think I sell parts. This is a commercial operation.”

“But I see you’ve got the very same car—the diesel Merc over there. And I’ve come all the way from Monaghan Town. If you’d just have a look. Jaysus—I’ve been everywhere.”

The large man let out a sigh. “If I have it, you’ll have to take it out yourself. I never heard of a sleeve on a Mercedes injector.”

“A factory modification,” said McGarr, letting the man step by. “Makes the car all the more valuable. As a collector’s item.”

“Really? You know about these things?”

“In detail.”

McGarr followed him through the yard and out the narrow door into the street.

“Where’s the car?”

McGarr pulled the Walther from his pocket and slammed it into the man’s temple. “Get down on your knees and slide onto your belly.”

“What? Fook off. You’re not going to use—” When the man’s hand jumped for the gun, in one motion McGarr chopped the butt down on his wrist and kicked his legs out from under him. “That’s not quite the knees, but it’ll do.”

Bresnahan and Ward were now beside him.

“You have a name? Some ID?” McGarr asked, slipping the gun back into his mac.

“Fook you, arsehole—that’s me name. And who’re you to ask?”

“FYI, FY Arsehole,” Ward put in, “we’re the police.”

“You stupid shit,” Bresnahan said through a laugh.

“Where are they?” McGarr asked.

“Where are who?”

“See?” said Bresnahan. “The proof is in the pudding.”

McGarr scanned the street to make sure there would be no witnesses, before lashing out with his foot. It caught the man in the lower back. Howling in pain, he rolled over, his face coming down hard on the slate of the footpath.

“So much for the power of suggestion,” said Ward.

McGarr hunkered down. “Let’s start again. You have a name?”

“Muldoon.”

“The Frakes in there?”

“Yah.”

“Where?”

“Donal is in the caravan.”

“And Manus?”

“Last I knew he was in the cottage in back with his little girl. Bad wrist and all.”

“Are they armed?”

“Of course.”

“With what?”

“That I’ve seen? Handguns, and Donal has a Bull Pup.”

Said Bresnahan, “Now, there’s news.” The Steyr AUG Bull Pup was a rapid-fire military assault rifle that was also equipped with a sniper scope.

“They go out at all?”

“They don’t dare.” For good reason, his tone seemed to imply.

“Phone in the caravan?”

“Yah—but he won’t answer it.”

“Answering machine on it that he can hear?”

“Answering
service
—for security.”

“Phone in the house?”

“Same deal.”

So asking Donal to come out to lock the door in the gate was not possible either. And Donal was the problem, McGarr believed, after his experience with the Frakes in the old mill on the Shannon. Manus—with his injury and his daughter—might be reasoned with.

But knowing that Donal was armed with an automatic weapon changed everything; now virtually any tactic could be justified.

“What’s their pull with you?”

“Old mates.”

“You own this place?”

“After a fashion.”

Which probably meant that in some way Muldoon had extorted the yard from its rightful owner.

But McGarr knew what had to happen. “Muldoon—we need your cooperation.”

“For?”

“A bit of consideration, when it comes to sentencing.”

“Sentencing for what?”

“Harboring fugitives, for openers. Then there’s the place itself and how, after your fashion, you happen to be ensconced here. And even if you do own it, there’s the Bull Pup. Added to your past, I’m sure you’ll be wanting consideration. Who knows, you might even get some today.”

Muldoon thought for a moment, then, “How long will they be going away for?”

“A long, long time.”

He raised his body off the slates. “I never wanted them here in the first place. They forced themselves upon me.”

Force obviously being the language of currency among them.

Muldoon shook his head. “Donal. He’s bent, Donal is.”

Who, looking out from the caravan a few minutes later, saw Muldoon step into the yard and unlock and open the large doors that permitted cars and lorries to enter the yard.

Leaving again, Muldoon returned with Bresnahan and Ward in front of him, their hands raised. In his right hand, Muldoon held McGarr’s Walther, unloaded, of course.

Donal appeared in the doorway, looking like a larger, better-built version of Muldoon, coveralls included. The assault rifle was in his hands.

“Big Red! We meet again. How’d you fancy them eels? And is this the wee fella you were about to throw a leg over there in the car? I’m happy you saved yourself for me.”

“And you,” she shot back. “I see you hired yourself out.”

The large man’s brow furrowed; it was the only part of his swollen face that seemed unbruised.

“As a punching bag.”

Ward began chuckling.

“Tell me—was it a wee old man about so high who kicked your unlovely arse from pillar to post? My bet? He can do it again. In fact, I think I can hear him coming. I’d run, were I you.”

Which was when the unmarked Garda car burst through the open passageway and bolted toward them, Bresnahan, Ward, and Muldoon throwing themselves to the side as McGarr bore down on the old caravan.

Frakes did not know what to do, how to react. But the assault rifle was in his hands. Snapping it up, he squeezed off a clip at McGarr, who threw himself across the seat.

Before the car slammed into the caravan, sending it hurtling back into the yard where it toppled over and struck a stack of crushed cars. That teetered, the metal whining, before toppling over and burying the caravan.

Already, Ward had sprinted toward the cottage in back, while Bresnahan had followed the car and caravan with her weapon raised.

Her immediate concern was for the assault rifle; if Frakes still had the Steyr AUG, he could dominate them with its firepower.

But she had watched as Frakes had been jettisoned from the doorway of the caravan by the force of the crash, and she found him on his hands and knees, struggling to get up.

The assault rifle was a few feet away; Bresnahan walked over and picked it up. “Donal?” she asked. “Say, ‘Big Red—I’m so sorry for the eels.’”

He raised his head to her, and she repeated her request. “Say it!” A sharp stomp bowled him over.

“Big Red,” he began, and she led him through the contrition.

After the crash, McGarr had snatched up the Street-Sweeper from the floor of the car and scrambled out to join Ward, one on each side of the cottage door.

It was an ancient stone structure with tiny windows and a low door, and the formerly thatched roof had been replaced by corrugated metal that had rusted out in places.

“Do we wait for Rut’ie and the rifle?” Ward asked.

McGarr shook his head; the Street-Sweeper was an ideal close-quarters weapon. “I’m sure she has her hands full.”

“And all the fun.”

“Ready?” Raising the shotgun, McGarr rapped the butt against the door. “Police! Throw out your weapons and come out with your hands on your head.”

“I’ve only one good hand, and it’s holding my child. I’m coming out.”

Stepping well away from the door, McGarr and Ward kept their weapons before them, as Manus Frakes ducked out the low door, his daughter in his arms. His other hand lay limp by his side, no sling, no cast.