The Death of an Irish Politician (3 page)

“Hold your tongues. That’s Peter McGarr, the detective.”

“I don’t care who he is. He’s in
our
bar now and should dress appropriately.”

Livid, McGarr squeezed into the seat of the snug beside Sheila Byrne. Most of the patrons were now chuckling, looking back at McGarr and shaking their heads.

“Mornin’,” he said to the pretty young woman.

Noreen, Ward, and a man who introduced himself as Brud Clare comprised their party.

“Never mind them, Inspector,” said Sheila, pulling his arm to her chest, “I think you look…dashing.”

Ward couldn’t help himself now, and shielding his face behind Clare’s shoulder, began a stifled laugh that made the others smirk.

“Watch it, boyo,” said McGarr, “or you’ll find yourself tracking vagrant tinkers in Donegal.”

“Mr. Clare,” said Noreen.

“Brud.”

“What can you tell us about Bobby Ovens and the
Virelay?
”

The old man who had made the first comment about McGarr’s shorts was still staring over at them, his eyes twinkling. His jaw swirled as he worked a plug of chewing tobacco. When McGarr looked up at him, he nudged a companion and began laughing again.

Hughie Ward had made sure the boatyard boss was well into his cups by the time the McGarrs arrived, and Clare was now voluble. “Not one whole hell of a lot. The facts are these.” He straightened up and blinked his watering eyes. He was a small man whose calloused hand—the nails black with caulking pitch—bent around his porter glass like a casting. A lit cigarette bristled from between the first two fingers. Above the bar, the television announcer began listing the race en
trants. Clare kept his eyes on the box while he spoke.

“He came into the yard about thirteen months ago. The engine of the boat was blown, shrouds busted, had a leak only a man with a strong right arm might contain. Sailed her right into the ways single-handed and doused sail.” He leaned over the table so he could talk past Ward and Sheila Byrne. “That’s a lot of boat for one man.

“It seems—now and I’m only specalatin’, you know—he sailed her from someplace on the other side. I say this because everything he owned was manufactured over there.”

“You mean Canada or the United States?” McGarr said, if only to show the others he wasn’t still outraged.

Clare blinked once, pulled on his cigarette, and redirected his gaze to the screen. “The engine itself is the strangest case I’ve run up against in forty-two years at the yard. It sprung an oil leak while he was motoring in a calm not far from Galway. Again, I say this not because Ovens told me so, but because I’ve seen his charts—”

“Which have a transatlantic route that ends on the Isle of Inishmore.”

Eyes still on the screen, Clare twisted his head to one side, which is a sign of concurrence in the Dublin area.

McGarr had become aware of Sheila Byrne’s taut breast on his arm. He turned to her and
she smiled at him. His wife, however, noticed this, and when he glanced at her, she too smiled, but wryly, and looked up at the horses that were jogging through the paddock and onto the track.

“Most sailors would have despaired. It was the late spring and the western coast of this country is treacherous. Somehow, the man had a store of graphite lubricant aboard, which, after he fixed the oil leak, he melted down, mixed with whatever motor oil he had left, and poured into the crankcase of the ship’s diesel. You see, as long as he kept the engine hot, the graphite wouldn’t seize. Have you seen the galley?”

McGarr nodded, now realizing that the charring had resulted from no ordinary grease fire.

Noreen was exulting. She had been right; graphite was the base of some types of gun oil.

“Eventually, his fuel ran out. I’ve got the engine in the yard, if you’d care to look.”

The horses had begun lining up for the race.

“What sort of man is he?”

“Different, entirely,” said Clare. “He put the boat in with me and asked us to work on it whenever the press of other yard business wasn’t severe. That’s just the sort of job we like—keeps the crew busy, the yard making money. Everything he wanted done, a complete fitting out. When the big boss asked him
if he could pay, the man said, ‘I’ll pay you. It may take time, but you’ll get your money,’ in such a way we believed him. I was there, I heard him. That man doesn’t say much, so that when he does, it’s got punch.”

With a shout that caused all the bar patrons to look up, the horses got off.

Clare had to raise his voice and speak directly to McGarr. “And so sometimes when we
were
slack, we had a full gang of men, maybe a half dozen or more, working on that boat. Because the law keeps an alien from working a job that an Irishman might take, the bloke was prohibited from working along with us. He sold his compasses, sextant, and binoculars and rented a garage on Loretto Avenue, about a quarter mile from here. Using whatever scrap lumber he could scrounge and some old tools, he began making furniture, beautiful stuff that sold to all the nobs in Ballsbridge as quickly as he could produce it. It was miraculous what he could knock up from nothing. Often we’d take a couple dozen bottles of stout over to his spot after closing and he’d still be working away.”

“Did he drink heavily?” McGarr asked.

The horses had completed a half lap and the bar crowd was roaring at the screen. Clare cupped a hand to his ear.

“Drink?” McGarr repeated.

“I’ve got one, thanks.”

“No
—Ovens
drink?”

“Rum,” said Clare, “but not then. It wasn’t until later he started hitting it early in the day. Before that he was steady, and for a short time almost managed to keep pace with the work on the ship.”

“Did he have a wo-man?” McGarr enunciated precisely.

Several men standing near their table turned and looked at him, then at Sheila and Noreen, who winked. One man raised an eyebrow and turned back to the screen. Horses were serious business in the Dolphin, which no woman or the mention of her should breach.

“I’m coming to that. None of us thought so at first, and one man tried to fix him up with his sister, you know, home to dinner and all that. About the time we had repaired the hull, applied bottom paint, and refloated her, two things happened that changed him completely. Ovens was then way behind, over a thousand pounds, on his payments. First, on a Friday afternoon a big Mercedes pulled into the yard so fast it must have slid ten feet when the woman at the wheel hit the brakes. She got out, ran up to him, and he took her behind a boat where we could hear her talking to him in a loud voice. He got in the car and drove off with her.

“Next morning, a Saturday like this, she returned. I was the only boss on the job. She wanted to know if
Virelay
was fit to sail. I said she was fit but not right, if you know what I
mean. She was still a mess and the engine had yet to be overhauled. We were waiting for parts from the Caterpillar company, an outfit from the States.”

Two men pushed themselves closest to the television and began hitting the bar, calling out the name Spindrift.

“She then asked to see the boat’s account, which I told her I could not do since it was a private business matter between the yard and Bobby Ovens. To be honest, she was a lovely-looking woman and her smile had a special plea in it. But when she said she wanted to pay the balance, that was another matter altogether—if we could collect ten shillings on the pound for every debt that’s owed us, we could pay our own bills—and so I showed her the tab.

“She opened her purse and paid over seventeen hundred pounds in notes so crisp I thought they was counterfeit. She asked me to estimate how much the rest of the work would cost, and I said that much again. Once more she divvied out the sum without batting an eye. Then she asked me if I knew who she was. I had seen her face, mind you, but couldn’t decide on where.

“She slapped a hundred pounds on the desk to help me forget and walked out.”

“What did she look like?” asked McGarr.

“I forget.”

“We could take you downtown, you know.”

“I know, but you won’t.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Tall, small, heavy?” Noreen asked.

“Suffice it to say she was—present company excepted, of course—probably the prettiest woman in all of Ireland, although I’m not sure to this day she’s Irish.”

The horses had just entered the third lap of the race, and the shouts and curses were dizzying.

Clare continued. “But the strangest thing happened when Ovens found out. When the big boss told him of his fortune, it was like somebody stole his spunk. He stood there dazed, then asked where a good grog shop might be. That’s when he started on the rum. He wouldn’t let us tighten a spring line on the ship in a storm, just mooned over the thing like it was dying and there was nothing nobody could do. After a while, the boss got sick of seeing him, paid him off the credit balance, and asked him to clear out, which he did in the neatest bit of sailing I’ve ever seen. He tacked back and forth through the fleet of prams and sailing dinghies, against both wind and tide, then eased off and ran her south with the wind.

“Later, I saw her docked at the Killiney Bay Yacht Club, and him on the dock, staring at the boat in that same dazed way, you know.”

“Which garage is it on Loretto Avenue?” McGarr asked.

Suddenly, in the stretch of the final lap, the lead horse fell after vaulting a hurdle. The contenders, right behind, also stumbled, and the bar crowd hushed so totally the silence seemed louder than the former uproar.

“Third garage on the right. Wooden frame, white, and kind of tumbledown,” said Clare in an ordinary tone that was audible throughout the bar.

McGarr thanked Clare.

The TV announcer said, “And there, near the edge of the track, is number thirty-one—let me check my roster—” That horse, way on the margin of the hurdle, jumped clear of the pile-up and surged into the lead. “Fine Haven, a dark horse if there ever was one at fifty-six to one.”

Standing, McGarr shouted, “Come on, Fine Haven!”

The entire crowd turned to him as he and Noreen left. McGarr knew some of these men had wagered as much as a week’s earnings on this race. “And what are
you
drinking tomorrow, Paddy?” he said to the old man who had made fun of his short pants.

Using the phone in the turf accountant’s shop next door, McGarr asked the desk sergeant at the Dun Laoghaire Garda barracks to seal the garage that Ovens had used as his work shed. He also asked the Garda to keep an eye on the place.

But on the dock of the Killiney Bay Yacht Club, where weekend boaters were toting gear and supplies aboard their yachts in anticipation of perhaps the last fine weather of the season, McGarr felt very conspicuous. “Count it the last time I’ll attempt to dress out of character in
this
country,” he said to Noreen.

The yacht-club members seemed comfortable in their clothes. None of the men wore shorts, certainly not a fisherman’s sweater, nor the canvas boating shoes the McGarrs had on. Also, most of them were tanned, or even if fair, at least burnt. Gardening in the backyard and a daily round of tennis had given Noreen a delicate tan, but McGarr, whose work kept him in his office or in pubs or trains or automobiles or indoors, was as pallid as only a red-haired Celt can be.

Hubbard, the steward, didn’t conceal his mirth as McGarr approached. “Disguised today, I see.”

That small statement browned-off the inspector. The jibes of the bar crowd in a working-class pub he could tolerate, but it was not the same from a self-conscious snob like Hubbard. This man wanted to make him feel uncomfortable and out of his depth. Secure in his image as chief inspector of detectives as he had been yesterday, McGarr might have suffered the criticism of a dozen Hubbards, but today he felt like a clown, mucking about in a getup more suited to a beer party in some
body’s backyard than the docks of this yacht club. Noreen pulled on his arm as though wanting an introduction.

McGarr said, “I never asked you if Ovens has a lady friend.”

“Not all of us are so fortunate.” Hubbard touched the peak of his yachting cap and smiled at Noreen.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Has he?”

“Of course not. The man was something of a wretch. Interesting to a jaded sensibility, I should think.” He smiled at McGarr as though retasting his breakfast. “But, you know, he was rather raw.” Hubbard retained that most damnably superior smile and made it appear he was talking more to Noreen than the inspector.

A cabin cruiser, made heavy with a large party on its afterdeck, hooted twice to the club launch, which piped back. The glare off the water made Noreen shield her eyes with her hand. McGarr had begun to swelter. There wasn’t the hint of a breeze in the lee of the clubhouse.

“Did you ever hear him speak of a woman?”

“As I told you yesterday, I didn’t
speak
to the man beyond the business of collecting our dock fees.”

“Did he claim an Irish address?”

“He didn’t claim any address.”

“Did you ever see him talk to anybody?”

“If I did, I took no notice.”

“How long was he here?”

“Regrettably, two full months and running.” Hubbard pointed toward
Virelay
, where a group of people on the dock were examining the bloody sails and afterdeck.

At that moment, Billy Martin passed, saying, “Good morning, sorr. I mean you, Inspector, of course.”

Hubbard said, “I thought I told you to clean up that mess or ferry that blasted barge out to a mooring where it will be less of a sideshow.”

“By your leave?” Martin asked McGarr, and then explained to Hubbard, “The law
is
the law, sir. This morning’s
Independent
says foul play is not yet ruled out in the investigation of Mr. Ovens’ injuries.” A tightly rolled newspaper stuck from Martin’s back pocket.

“Not just yet, please, Billy. I’d like to take another look.” McGarr felt he had missed something yesterday and perhaps on the boat. The afternoon had been too balmy, or the feeling in his Dublin Castle office too relaxed, or the prospect of a brief, routine investigation on Killiney Bay followed by an excursion to the Khyber Pass so inviting that McGarr hadn’t gathered every essential detail. Maybe the feeling was just the unease his present garb gave him, or maybe the fact that the eccentric Ovens had now become something of an enigma about whom he desired to learn more. In any
case, he had ruled out the possibility that the injury was accidental. The doctor’s opinion coupled with the mystery of the woman who had paid Ovens’ yard bill had set McGarr’s suspicions on edge. Something was not quite right here at the scene of the attack, and McGarr knew not what.