Authors: Bartholomew Gill
THE INTERIOR OF Frost’s father’s chemist shop in Sneem was far different from its bright facade. After years of off-center ringing, the bell over the door had cut a deep groove in the wood. A buzzer sounded in back, but nobody came out to greet McGarr. He closed the door and looked around, trying to place the acrid stench that cut right through the pharmaceutical odor that was common to such places.
Dim, cramped, and timeworn, the shop was a warren of narrow aisles with a dusty stock of trusses, corn plasters, and tooth powders that McGarr had not seen in decades stuffed on shelves every which way nearly to the ceiling. The lino under foot was worn to the wood, which shone in an uneven path that bent around obstacles—an umbrella stand of canes; a case of luxury soaps so dusty its lighted contents could scarcely be seen; an obviously new revolving display of brightly packaged condoms—and led to the rear. There McGarr could hear a radio playing.
Cat piss, he decided, following both sound and smell. No, cat piss, tobacco, and the unmistakable odor of old man that McGarr sometimes noted in his own father’s digs in Dublin.
And there he was—M.J.P. Frost, McGarr assumed—asleep in a tattered Morris chair. The cat was in his lap, an ancient wooden radio on a table to one side, and the morning paper at his feet. In back of him was a tall floor lamp
with a tasseled shade. A door that led to an alley in back was open. Not even the cat had opened its eyes.
McGarr flicked back the brim of his hat, lit up a cigarette, and looked around at the array of bottles, jars, boxes, tins, jugs, cartons, packets, and carboys. No space in the long, narrow room, every wall of which was shelved to the ceiling, was unoccupied. Even the chemist’s work surfaces were cluttered. There were no fewer than five scales, one of which looked broken. Pharmaceutical charts had been hung from a wall, chart upon chart, and now comprised a thick mat. The first was dated 1948; M.J.P. Frost obviously threw little away.
Beside the maps were his diplomas from Trinity, Dublin, and his licenses—every one, it seemed, that had been issued in his name.
The file of “Prescriptions Filled” was similarly vast, but stated that Paddy Power had only ever purchased, “Quinidine 0.2 mg. T.I.D.” and “Digitoxin 1.0 mg., Max. dose 2 tablets.” Both prescriptions had been written by Maurice J. Gladden, M.D.
The log of prescriptions filled in the present year—a leather-bound journal that Frost had required all purchasers of controlled substances to sign—showed that Power had bought a three-month supply of quinidine and digitoxin some two months earlier. The only other entries of note were prescriptions for sleeping, again issued by Mossie Gladden, for Gretta Osbourne. They had begun some seven years ago and had continued to the present. The last batch of fifty tablets had been signed for by Osbourne on Friday last.
The tongue-in-groove walnut cabinets beneath the work area were filled with a motley collection of other gadgets, including several devices that were more elaborate but seemed as though they would perform the same function as the pill-making device McGarr had found in Gladden’s mountain cottage. He opened a wide, velvet-lined case and discovered a variety of pill dies; behind another door were carton after carton, open and sealed, of empty ampoules.
McGarr closed the doors and straightened up. Had he seen enough?
He stepped past the old man and peered out the door
into the alley, which could be reached in either direction. A wee lad, who had been kicking a ball against the wall of a garage, stopped to look up at him. McGarr waved.
“If it’s Mr. Frost you’re after, you’ll have to shout. He’s a bit deaf.”
Back at the chair McGarr reached down to shake Frost, but the old man opened his eyes; they were red-rimmed with yellow scleras but looked sharp. “How can I help you, or have you done for yourself?”
“The latter. I just wanted to be sure I shook your hand before I left. You’re—”
“Michael Joseph Patrick Frost, Chief Inspector. Chemist of Sneem, County Kerry.”
McGarr smiled; old-timers were deceiving. “Chief
Superintendent
,” McGarr corrected.
“For how long, I’m wondering after what I read. You should mind politicians like Sean Dermot. This entire
imbroglio
will need an answer. If not a head.
“’Tisn’t a good likeness of you at all.” With a slippered foot M.J.P. shuffled through the morning papers, which were scattered around him on the floor, until he came to a photograph of McGarr that had been taken from the paper’s “morgue,” and should have remained there, McGarr thought. It had been snapped several years back at a funeral. Wearing a dark chesterfield coat, a black bowler, and black gloves, he looked dour and pitiless, like an executioner.
“Have you seen your son, Shane, recently?”
“If you mean did Shane murder Paddy with something from here—” He shook his head, and it occurred to McGarr how much son resembled father. Both had the same long face, the thin, slightly aquiline nose, and pale gray eyes. “Shane would never have done anything like that. First, he lacks the cruelty necessary for the task, and, second, he’s intelligent enough to know that he might have made out acceptably on his own but never in the way he has without Paddy. Paddy was special.”
It wouldn’t be the first time McGarr had seen jealousy as the motive for murder. And then Frost had 20 percent of the 20 percent that Power had been about to ask Irish government creditors to write down. Also, Frost might
have had something to gain by Power’s death; McGarr thought about Nell Power’s wanting Gretta Osbourne to encourage Frost to reopen negotiations with some Japanese. And finally, Power’s death by his own hand was accomplished at some distance from the murderer and therefore could only be imagined to have been cruel.
“Has he been by to see you?”
“Surely. He always stops. First thing when he gets to Sneem.”
“And Gretta Osbourne?”
“She’s an old friend too. The prescription for phenobarbital that Mossie wrote for her is old, as you probably saw. Written some time after she left the burn center in Dublin and came down here to recuperate. It can be refilled whenever she needs. She also has a prescription for Dilaudid, which is a mild sedative. She has bad thoughts about the fire, she says.” He pointed a gnarled finger at a large brown bottle.
“Helps herself?” Dilaudid might have been considered a mild sedative years back when Frost was studying pharmacology; now it was regarded as a strong drug that addicts sometimes used when heroin was in short supply.
“Under my direction when I’m off my feet, as now. I really should sell the place, but I wouldn’t know what to do with my days without it.”
“Where’s the quinidine?”
“Powder or made tablets?”
“Powder.”
The bottle was on the third shelf but easily reached by a tall person. “And digitoxin?”
“Three bottles to the right.”
“Have you used any recently?”
Frost the elder shook his head.
“Were I to ask you not to touch them until a lab team can get here, would you comply?”
“I promise I won’t budge from this spot.”
McGarr nodded. “Pleasure.”
“All mine. I’ve been reading about you for years now, and, here, like to a finale, you’ve appeared.”
My finale or yours? McGarr wondered, the old man being much more aware than he first seemed.
Superintendent Liam O’Shaughnessy was waiting at McGarr’s car. Dressed in a dark three-piece suit and wearing a homburg, he was cut out of the very pattern of the bankers at Parknasilla, even to the manilla folder that he was carrying. It contained the Tech Squad report concerning the samples of photocopy paper that had been taken from the copy machines in Gretta Osbourne’s room, the Parknasilla business office, and from Taosieach O’Duffy’s house.
“No match, I’m afraid. O’Duffy’s machine is even a different make and type. We’re trying to run down the local dealer in Panasonic copiers, since that’s what we’re after. But he’s up in Dublin on business and won’t be back until the weekend.”
So with Frost’s father’s chemist shop virtually wide open, as McGarr had just seen, and Mossie Gladden a practicing physician, the note cards remained their only real lead.
McGarr sat against the fender of his small car and faced the high-gloss facade of the chemist shop, which, having caught the direct rays of the noonday sun, looked like an emanation in pink. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
“Help me with this, Liam. Tell me about murder—what we know, how we should proceed.”
“As it relates to this case?”
McGarr nodded.
O’Shaughnessy thought for a moment. “Murder is almost always an individual act. When it’s not, the conspirators, not trusting each other, either act in concert to make sure blood is on every hand, or hire a third party to carry it out.”
“Not a pill bottle carried in by one person, and then carried out by another?”
O’Shaughnessy had to think for a moment. His clear blue eyes flashed across the pink surface of the chemist shop and fell on the bridge at the other end of the green. “It’s too cute, and of the four suspects—including Nell Power—only Gladden had nothing to lose but a friend, if we can believe him. Frost, Gretta Osbourne, and even the wife had gotten their positions and wealth almost exclusively from or through or because of Paddy Power. And
where is their bond with each other? You don’t commit murder, no matter how easy or painless, with somebody you can’t trust implicitly. There has to be some tie, some glue, some—I hate to use the word—affection, since it probably has to be stronger than that.”
“You mean money.”
O’Shaughnessy cocked his head. “With Frost and the Power woman I’d say just that. They’re too—”
Jaded, McGarr thought. “Worldly,” he said.
O’Shaughnessy nodded. “From what we’ve learned about them so far. And I can’t imagine Gretta Osbourne having much to do with Frost apart from their professional relationship as officers of Eire Bank.”
Officer
ex officio
in Osbourne’s case, McGarr thought. “What about Gladden—could he have stolen the cards?”
O’Shaughnessy shook his head. “If he did, he would have read them immediately and in detail. He would have been able to speak of them today. He might even have taken notes, which he obviously does not possess.”
“Then whoever murdered Power—”
“Stole the cards.”
“And since the cards were given away—”
“Power wasn’t murdered for the cards.”
“Power was murdered for—?”
A horn sounded, startling them. The Garda patrol car that had brought O’Shaughnessy was blocking traffic. “When we know that, well—” O’Shaughnessy opened the door and eased his large frame in.
Well, indeed, thought McGarr.
“IF ANYBODY CAN find out which country gorsoon was plying the Waterville Road last Sunday morning, ’tis Deirdre Crehan,” Rory O’Suilleabhain had said after Gladden’s press conference on the bridge in Sneem. “It’s said a woman’s tongue is a thing that never rusts. Hers is a surgical instrument.”
She was a little shawled lump of a woman with a creased face and few remaining teeth, and she sat in the back of the luxurious rental Merc like a small, crippled bird who was happily caged. Wherever she pointed a gnarled finger, O’Suilleabhain turned. And thus they plied the laneways of cottiers and small farmers while she warbled all the while.
“Isn’t it grand. Who would have thought this morning, when I set off to hear Doctor Mossie rail at the world, that I’d return in the royal plush of this motorcar with them who amount to the future king and queen of the South Kerry Mountains.
“Ah now, Rory—don’t deny me my foresight. You can ask far and near, and them that know me will tell you I’m a bit of a
seanchailleach
, though I’d admit that only to you. I’ve got the gift, don’t you know, and there you sit, more made for each other from the moment you drew breath than any two people I ever laid eyes on. Think of the wonder of it—two massive properties cheek by jowl with two only children, both tall, strong, and handsome.
Have your parents seen you together again? Won’t you make them proud.
“But of course they have. Didn’t I see Rory’s mother standing there watching him put his questions to Doctor Mossie and her shaking her head and saying she didn’t want him going off to Dublin. But then, my loveen.” She reached to touch Bresnahan’s arm on the back of the seat. “You know all about Dublin, good and bad, and can steer Rory right when he gets there.
“Says she to me—and for your ears only, mind—‘You’d think what goes long, goes cold, but from the look of him at her I’d say she’s still a treasured memory in one man’s heart.’”
O’Suilleabhain did not protest, and Bresnahan wondered if, when he had spoken to the old woman earlier, he had put her up to what she was saying. But he only looked away at a heron rising majestically out of a bog, and Bresnahan suspected that Deirdre Crehan would brag for the rest of her days were she able to take any credit whatsoever for arranging the match that had eluded the two families for so long.
“A mother should know. And from the cut of your stylish costume, my jewel, I’d say you’ve learned wonderful much in the city. My word to you is simple and plain: The ebb tide waits naught for noon.” And before Bresnahan could complain that the be-all and end-all of her life was
not
the prospect of marrying Rory O’Suilleabhain, the old woman hurried on, “Now if you look you, you’ll see a sight prettier than any city could possibly hold.”
She pointed a bony hand to the window, where they were presented with an unobstructed sweep of mountain, field, sea, and sky. “There be a storm squall flattening the furze with slanted lashings of driven hail. While but a quarter-mile distant we behold full shafts of livid sun you can count, like bars of gold jeweled with emeralds, there where they’re kissing the fields. And farther on in the turbary, them lateral bands of cut peat? Some brown, some maroon, some black. I once saw something like that in a museum in Dublin, but not real and useful, like here. No. Dead and done with a wet, oiled brush. I’ll not mention the bald mountain there or the dueling tangle of storm
clouds behind it or the sky farther still that’s the color of a bullfinch egg. For you can see that anywhere”—she paused—“in Kerry.
“Tell me you don’t miss that. Tell me that’s not part of your soul,” which thought suddenly filled Bresnahan’s eyes and made her want to snap at the old houri, whose other hand was still on her arm.
But the old woman was too fast and lanced Bresnahan’s anger with the further thought, “And tell me your God and mine is going to make another Kerry—the most beautiful part of Ireland, they say—and put you two in it with three of your four parents alive to see their grandbabies born into beauty and wealth.
Muscha
, you’ve winning prospects, and I only wish I could return in another life as blessed as you.”
They had arrived at another small cottage, the door of which was “standing open to the tender air,” said Deirdre Crehan. Yet again she declined to go in with them, insisting her legs were too weak, though she had walked half the distance to Sneem. Instead she remained in the back of the Mercedes, every so often running her hand over the glove leather of the seats and staring fixedly at one or another of the appointments. Bresnahan could not bring herself to admit to her it was rented.
And so the afternoon wore on to twilight with Bresnahan following the breadth of Rory O’Suilleabhain’s broad back and the narrowness of his waist, which she could not help but admire, to the door of one pensioner’s small holding after another. “God bless all here,” he would say, stepping through the door, and they could not in good form refuse at least something of what was offered without fail in even the most lowly cottage they entered. “Will I wet some tea, or will you have a drop of anything?” Usually they took the latter.
Such that around twilight Bresnahan found Deirdre Crehan, to whom drops had been taken out, fully asleep in the back of the car, and her own head filled with all the sights and sounds that she had consciously pushed from her mind for the past three years and now came flooding back. Until the woman of a small cottage said she was only after hearing her husband and his brother speaking
over dinner about a strange “country man” they had seen on the Waterville Road on Sunday morning.
Neither man was still in the cottage. They could be seen, however, cutting turf in a field about a half-mile distant along a narrow, stony farm road that traced a cliff face where no car could go. Borrowing a pair of Wellies, Bresnahan set off with O’Suilleabhain in the gloaming.
The wild, changeable weather had eased, and the evening came on damp, still, and even warm. Bresnahan had to open the bright orange coat that, she imagined, could be seen—and was being watched—for miles. Above them a quarter-moon was rising with a single, bright star near its cusp, somewhat like a fermata in music. Below them in the sea to the south two boats were netting mackerel, which, like the warm breeze, had been carried in by the ocean storm and were shoaling all up and down the coast, O’Suilleabhain said. “It’s the last the fishermen will see of them til May. I know those men. They’ll work right through the night or until their boats are filled.”
As the two of them stepped through the remaining strong light on top of the cliff, they watched the red, white, and green running lights of the boats scribing careful circles in the jade water. The putting of the engines and even the occasional voice of a fisherman came to them on updrafts that puffed over the edge, as warm as heat from a register.
In the fields they were tracing, Bresnahan could hear the plaintive, puling cries of lapwing. Overhead, swallows and swifts were working the currents, streaking the sky for moths and flies that the warmth had brought. To the west the sun was just slipping beneath a dense band of clouds. Bresnahan kept her eyes on the horizon, as the brilliant tones of crimson and magenta muted through royal blue to the deeper, dun tones of purple and finally an abiding shade of mauve that would in time simply fade into starry blackness. She had seen such nights before.
“Do I take your hand?” O’Suilleabhain asked.
“Do I look as though I need help?”
“Well, I wasn’t considering so much your needs as my own. I thought it might be fun.”
Thought Bresnahan, It might at that. Surely it would set
the tongues of those who might see them wagging, and it would stand as a test. Rory O’Suilleabhain had most likely serviced nine tenths of the accommodating women in three countries, but he had never so much as taken her hand.
His was larger than her own, which was nearly a first, and as hard and stronger yet, she imagined, than her own father’s. And she entertained thoughts of what it might be like to be the chosen and the protected of such a man, though not the captive, which—she suspected—would be the case.
“Do you ever think of me?” he asked, while they were still beyond the hearing of the men cutting turf.
“Not recently, though there was a time,” when she had thought of nobody else. “And you?”
“Well, to be honest—apart from the economic incentive, I haven’t thought of you in years. Now I believe I’ll be thinking of you for the rest o’ me life.”
It was a facile line, thought Bresnahan, and revealed only that O’Suilleabhain was much practiced at this sort of thing. “But
what
beyond the ‘economic incentive’—as you so candidly, if crudely, put it—has changed your opinion?”
“Why, of course—how we’ve changed.”
Still hand in hand, they took a few more steps before Bresnahan said, “Go on—this is all so wonderful, I’m having trouble thinking it’s real. Let’s begin with you. How have you changed?”
“To begin with—I’ve matured.”
“I can see that. When I left you, you shaved once a day. Now it must be twice.” O’Suilleabhain had the sort of dark beard and prominent bone structure that made his cheeks look blue. The contrast with his bright green eyes was startling, and Bresnahan dared not look at him in the half-light that was now diffusing over the reach of the bay.
“I’ve gotten all the…young buck stuff out of me system, so to speak.”
And into somebod(ies) else’s without doubt.
“Now it’s love for me, and nothing less. I’m looking for my mate for life.”
Really, now? Christ—this wasn’t a rush, it was a blitzkrieg.
“And tell me, Rory, do you know what love is?”
“I do. There are two kinds of romantic love. There’s love which is lust. It can strike you heady and hot, and you know what you want and must have. Then there’s the second kind of love.”
Based on “economic incentive,” Bresnahan thought.
“It’s an unfamiliar feeling, at least to me. A kind of”—there was a long pause, while they drew all too near the men making peat—“recognition. You know, that this is the one for you. That she is the one from which your children should come. It’s a more important, better, bigger love than the first, but it’s a double wonder when the two kinds of love are focused on the same person.”
Bresnahan had neither the strength nor the will to resist his moving her hand behind her back and drawing her to him. Her head was spinning from all the “drops” she had taken in the sundry cottages they had visited, and the man she loved had never said any such thing to her. Nor even hinted.
She did manage to take a few quick steps forward, pulling O’Suilleabhain with her, and in the twilight the peat cutters looked up.
“Fine night,” she said, breaking away from him.
“’Tis that, miss. But you should mind the company you keep,” said the youngest of the three, who, as spreader, had the job of pitching the cut and shaped sods to the outermost edges of the turf bank for drying.
“And why is that?” The blade of the slane was about all she could see of the man, who was below them producing the lumps of peat. Like some unusual field animal, the single tooth of its right-angled blade, silvery now with the risen moon, was taking timed and regular bites through the soft, obliging bog that was here seven layers deep. The
meithel
, or turf-cutting team, also consisted of a breensler who piked the sods up to the spreader. Peat was usually harvested in late winter or early spring and disposed of in autumn, unless, of course, it was all in the way of a cash crop that your land would yield.
“Night like this, strange moon and all—the man you’re with sprouts fangs as well as horns, and there’s no telling whose neck he might bite.”
“Not yours, Diarmuid. Which has felt neither soap nor
water in a fortnight.” O’Suilleabhain laughed, his perfect teeth flashing in the moonlight. He then clasped hands with the spreader and introduced Bresnahan, and reintroduced Bresnahan to the men whom she had known all her life. The slanesman even climbed out of the pit to get a look at her. “Big Tom’s girl.” He was the old man they had come to see. “I thought you were with the Guards.”
“She is,” O’Suilleabhain explained, “and
this
is the new uniform.”
The other young men began laughing.
“She’s investigating what happened to Paddy Power.” O’Suilleabhain then began speaking low and fast to the spreader, who started to laugh. “Go over now, she didn’t!
Breathalyzer?
Ruthie—that’s gas. You’re a gem.”
But Bresnahan had asked and the slanesman was telling her what he and his brother had seen on Sunday morning. “It was something to ponder and discuss, I’ll say. We were working our way up to the Waterville Road and West Cove for to make a delivery.” He pointed to rows of peat banks that could be seen stretching off to one side of the bog. “And me and Mick up on an ass rail of turf.
“We had no drink on us to speak of, but when we come to the Rathfield ruin, we stopped.” He meant a former mansion that had been torched by the IRA. “For a call of nature, you know.”
“Like Tarzan,” said the young man who was known as a local wit. “Though the message wasn’t vocal.”
“There I was,” the old man went on with a sigh, “in the ruin behind a wall bent low like, when up pulls this long red car as bright as a hen’s egg. And wasn’t I surprised when out steps a country man. He pulls off a greatcoat and stuffs it in the boot. Next comes his hat, and he isn’t a he at all. No, he’s a her. The Wellies come off next, and then back into the car, and off she goes at a gallop. I don’t think the whole thing took longer—”
“Than it took him to stanch his
nose
.”
The old man inclined his head and smiled, as though to say, what I have to put up with.
“How did you know it was a woman?”
“By her
breathalyzer
, how else?” And the two young men fell all about, laughing.
“Long blond hair. Though, you know, trousers, like yourself is wearing.”
Bresnahan was wearing tights; it was dark, but she wondered how good the old fella’s eyes were. “What make, the car?”