Peeler (4 page)

When she had gone, the men at the table proceeded to discuss locations, numbers of men and armaments. Farrell remained silent, listening in as the other men finalised plans for an ambush he would never see. When this was done, Brennan turned to Mickeen Cope, holding his heavy-lidded eyes on the scout. ‘And what about the other matter?’

Donal Cahill answered. ‘It was there all right, like the lad from the poultry house said. On the hillside, a young woman. Not a stitch on and labelled.’ He looked at the rising flames of the turf fire. ‘We didn’t touch her. I couldn’t have touched her if the Devil himself had given me the order. I don’t know what she done, boy, but it’s not right at all, how she –’

Mickeen Cope cut in on Cahill, as if concerned he might say something he shouldn’t in front of Brennan and Hurley. ‘Peelers arrived shortly after we did. About noon, so my guess is word reached them a day or so after it reached us. They sent a party of tin hats up to the top where we were watching from but they never saw us.’

‘You didn’t shoot?’

‘Thought you wanted all your precious bullets back, Tom,’ Donal Cahill said, smiling.

Mickeen Cope shot Cahill a harsh look. ‘There were too many of them. The whole area’d be too hot for the job on Sunday if we’d fired on them.’

‘How many were there?’ Barry asked.

‘Three police and eight soldiers. I’d say they reckoned on an ambush. They could barely fit the body in the Tender for all the boys they brought. They were Essex.’

‘And the Peelers were from Ballycarleton,’ Cahill said. ‘I recognised one of them. Lazy auld shite called Logan. Had me up years ago for snipping the tail off the Penforth’s bullock in pasture.’

Brennan seemed to consider this, then turned to Hurley. ‘Charlie, are we sure none of ours did this?’

Hurley shrugged. ‘You’re Intelligence, Seán. It’s ye root out the touts. Do we even have a name? Know who the girl is … was?’

The two scouts shook their heads. ‘No, nor heard a peep.’

Barry addressed Hurley and Brennan. ‘We’ve not shot any women yet, have we? Or do we now? We’ve been given damn all direction from Dublin on things like this. Forced to make up rules of engagement as we go along. For all we know, some locals heard she was informing and had her shot.’

‘She wasn’t shot,’ Cope said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She was strangled, I think. And then she was cut, like.’ Mickeen Cope looked away, sipping his tea. He touched his chest to indicate where the young woman had been mutilated.

His partner said, ‘Her throat was black and purple with the bruising, so it was. And her … her chest … butchered. None of ours could’ve done it, I’m telling you. Informer or not, no girl should be left like that.’

Brennan stared at Cahill for a long moment after he’d finished, then turned to Farrell. ‘You’re to start in Drumdoolin, Liam. Seems the most logical place. They’re a useless shower, the Drumdoolin mob, but you never know what some lads might get up to. Talk to O’Higgins, the company commander there. He might know something. See can you get the girl’s name at least.’

Donal Cahill pointed at Farrell with a crust of bread. ‘And you may ask them lazy
dahs
what in the name of God they’re using the six lovely Lee-Enfields we gave them for.’

Hurley and Brennan smiled without warmth.

Farrell moved to speak and Hurley raised his hand to silence him. ‘You’ve always been a clever fella, Liam. You read the papers. The people of the country may want a republic, but they’re hardly ready to tolerate strangling young women to get one. Do what Seán says. It’s now we need you.’

Brennan took over. ‘You’ll billet with Stephen McGowan in Ballycarleton. He’s a solicitor there and one of ours. Works the republican courts outside of Macroom and Bandon alongside his normal Crown business. You’re his new clerk. We’ll get you set up with the proper cover tomorrow, the papers and all. The position will give you the freedom of movement you’ll need. Report to him after you’ve seen O’Higgins. Any questions?’

Farrell thought for a moment. ‘What do I do if I find out what happened, who killed this girl?’

Brennan looked to Hurley and then back at Farrell. ‘Just you get back to us, boy. We’ll deal with it from there.’

***

A late dinner of cold beef and potatoes, smeared with a paste of chutney he’d found in a jar in the kitchen, lodged in O’Keefe’s stomach like a rebuke. He sat at his desk and lit a Player’s cigarette from a dented tin in his drawer, sucking in smoke as if it might calm the foulness brewing inside him.

The letter was waiting for him on his desk. It was his first piece of mail in over a month that wasn’t an anonymous death threat or official missive. He picked it up, his stomach seeming to settle in anticipation of reading it. His sister’s handwriting.

Posting a letter to a policeman was risky. For writing to your Peeler brother you could be marked as a spy. People had been shot for less. Women tarred and feathered. O’Keefe thought of the body out in the cold storage shed. He stood up from his desk and removed his damp tunic and undervest, pulling on a dry vest and thick cotton shirt.

Two desks took up most of the space in the office, pressed against each other in the middle of what had once served as a child’s nursery. Most of one wall to the side of the desks was covered by a cork noticeboard papered with blurry photo-graphs of suspects and a fading, pin-scarred map of West Cork with Ballycarleton district outlined in red wax pencil. There was one window behind O’Keefe’s desk, its steel shutters silent now for lack of wind. Ashes were cold in the grate.

It had been three months at least since he’d heard from Sally, his beloved older sister. She was thirty-one to O’Keefe’s twenty-nine and a schoolteacher in Balbriggan, County Dublin. The town had been sacked little more than a month before by Auxiliaries and Tans from Gormanstown barracks after a head constable and his brother – a sergeant – had been shot in a pub. O’Keefe had contacted Balbriggan barracks as soon as he had heard and had been assured that the school had escaped the burning and that Sally was fine. As long as she was safe, the whole of Dublin could burn. He opened the letter carefully.

Dear brother,

I hope this letter finds you well and in good health –

Before he could read further, Sergeant Jim Daly crowded into the office, all bulk, bluster and pipe smoke. ‘Well now, Seán. Heard you found a wee girl on your travels.’

Slipping the letter back into its envelope, O’Keefe watched Daly slump into the creaking wooden chair at the desk across from his own. Daly lifted his legs, then dropped his huge boots onto his desk, scattering weekly reports, mess bills and half-read issues of
Hue and Cry –
the constabulary newspaper.

‘Nineteen or twenty years old, I’d guess. In a bad way, she was,’ O’Keefe said.

O’Keefe had been promoted from the exam pass list to acting sergeant when his predecessor, Sergeant O’Bannion, had been shot and wounded escorting a prisoner to Dublin. He had taken the sergeant’s exam before the war, back when he’d thought such things as rank and promotion mattered, and was as surprised as anyone when he’d been conditionally promoted in May 1920. His appointment to acting sergeant was dependent on there being no man of longer service or higher examination score available to take up the post in Ballycarleton. Six months later, O’Keefe was still in the job. No right-minded constable volunteered for a posting in West Cork. No more than they’d volunteer for a bullet.

With the acting sergeant’s post came the first-floor office, shared with Sergeant James Patrick Daly. O’Keefe was as tidy as Daly was cluttered, but they had been friends for years, having patrolled the town streets and countryside of the Ballycarleton district before O’Keefe had gone off to the war. They were well used to each other’s habits.

Daly shook his head and took out his pipe and tobacco from his tunic. ‘Poor thing. There’s a line off the wire for you, by the by. Surgeon’s coming Sunday. And look at this.’ He held out a day-old copy of the English
Daily News
. ‘There’s one for you now. The boyos are in the shit, so they are. Shot up a heap of His Majesty’s horses and donkeys up your way. Ambushed some supply wagons. You’d think the Shinners would’ve known better. No way at all to conduct a war, plugging drays. God knows the reading public won’t like it.’

O’Keefe took the paper from Daly and read the story, then skipped to the editorial. Bad enough, it seemed to say, shooting Peelers and Tommies. Slaying innocent nags and asses was taking the conflict to a new and more barbarous level.

He tossed the paper back onto Daly’s desk. ‘An
outrage
, I’d say.’

Daly nodded, continuing to pack his pipe with Walnut Plug. ‘Should finish the IRA off for good. Lost the war with the reading public right there, the bastards.
Heinous crime.
No army can get on with proper killing with the papers shouting “heinous”.’

‘
Heinous
,’ O’Keefe repeated, thinking how, after the war in Europe, words had no way of matching the things men did and saw. The newspapermen used words they had no right to use. It was almost funny. None of the scribblers had landed on V Beach at Gallipoli. He lit another cigarette. None of the scribblers had seen the brutalised body of a young woman left on a hillside.

He shunted aside the black train of thought and looked over to Daly. ‘Have you seen the bossman?’

‘I haven’t, though I can’t say I’ve looked.’

O’Keefe rose and made his way down the hallway to the District Inspector’s office. Walter Masterson was in command of the three remaining barracks in the Ballycarleton district. There had been nine before the Troubles had ignited in earnest, but the more isolated of them had become impossible to defend from attack and had to be absorbed into the larger barracks. Masterson, in turn, was responsible to the County Inspector in Cork city.

The job required that he be out of barracks often, visiting other stations on inspections and supply and manning matters, and reporting on these to the County Inspector. And yet the other two barracks in the district saw about as much of the man as O’Keefe and Daly did. As he’d expected, Masterson was absent from his office and O’Keefe returned to his own.

Daly was leafing through O’Keefe’s patrol diary when he returned. ‘And you thought there’d be nothing up the hills there at all,’ he said.

‘Nothing but an ambush. Instead, we found the girl.’

‘She was labelled?’

O’Keefe nodded. ‘T-R-A-T-O-R’.

Daly exhaled a stream of pipe smoke. ‘All the schoolmasters are slinging Lee-Enfields these days. Spelling in this country’s going to shite and all for the sake of independence.’

O’Keefe didn’t laugh and Daly didn’t expect him to.

‘The queer thing, though,’ O’Keefe said, ‘was how she was tarred and feathered. Only round her waist and hips. And left bare, down around her …’ He wondered how to put it. It didn’t seem right somehow, using any of the common vulgarities and yet, with Daly, it would have been just as odd applying the proper anatomical terms.

‘
Country mile
?’ Daly said, sliding the patrol diary onto O’Keefe’s desk. ‘Pair of feather knickers with the important bits missing?’ Daly rarely stood on the niceties of language.

‘Something like that. It seems too deliberate for your run of the mill “out the tout” job. The girl wasn’t shot, not that I could see. Throttled, it looked like. We’ll know for sure come Sunday, I suppose.’

‘Shinners are short of .303, so they say. Maybe she wasn’t worth the bullet?’

O’Keefe considered it. ‘But she was worth strangling and butchering and stripping naked? Worth setting up on a hillside like a dirty picture?’

‘They’re not all monkish types, the Shinners. Sure, it’s well known there’s a few priests among them and, Lord knows, them padres do be up to all sorts.’

Daly went to Mass with his wife and children any Sunday he could get home. And when he couldn’t get away, he attended in Ballycarleton, no matter that an RIC man had been shot entering church five miles away in Bandon just two months earlier. He was as devout a Catholic as O’Keefe was an atheist, but could never resist a jibe at the priests of the country. O’Keefe imagined that Daly confessed the jibes to his own priest, just for the opportunity to repeat them. A low-minded chuckle was always worth a few laps round the Rosary or the odd Act of Contrition.

‘Jesus, Jim. Only you’d find a way to link the priesthood to a sex crime.’

And as he spoke, O’Keefe became convinced that what they were dealing with was just such a crime. Yes, the young woman might have been murdered for some political reason, some real or imagined slight against the Volunteers. She may have stepped out with a soldier or been seen coming out of an RIC barracks. Perhaps leaving a dancehall on a constable’s arm. But whoever had done the killing had done it in a sexualised way and O’Keefe was willing to bet he had enjoyed it.

***

As a child he’d been told his father was away at the war, fighting the boars. He used to picture him in thick forest, fending off the charging beasts, tusks bared, his father with cutlass and revolver drawn. Like the picture on the painted sign hanging over the door of the Boar’s Head tavern.

His father had been gone for less than a month when it started. At first, his mother used to ask him to go out and play while she and her friend talked about grown-up things. New friends, always with a bottle of something. Soldiers in uniform. Officers, gentlemen, some of them, she told him once, her new friends. Soon she began to forget about him, outside, alone in the dark and he took to sleeping in the hen shed when his mother entertained her friends. He found comfort there. Comfort in the musty, uric smell, in the guttural clucking and dry scratching of the birds. And there was fascination. Eggs dropping from the hens’ backsides, stretching the skin, pushed into the world under a garland of feathers.

***

O’Keefe had slept fitfully, his usual nightmares infused with images of the dead girl on the hill. He rose finally – a fleeting ray of sunshine slicing through the firing slit in the steel-shuttered window – his fatigue bringing with it the resignation he felt about most things since his return from the war, the black cloud of negativity that blotted out hope. That cloud had momentarily broken the previous day, had been blown away by the anger he’d felt for the girl on the hill. But it was back now, sheer habit and force of will the only things driving him to complete his duties in the barracks and then set out for the village of Drumdoolin.

The village sat at the foot of the hills they had searched the day before, hunkering in a valley and bordered by the Bandon river. It was a republican stronghold according to intelligence reports, boasting an active IRA company. To date, none of the company had been lifted for anything other than questioning, indicating that they were either very good or very lucky. Still, as O’Keefe approached the first of the village’s two pubs, he wished he’d brought more men with him.

Constable Aaron Senior, DI Masterson’s batman, was more suited to parade and inspection than a scrap, and O’Keefe had been surprised when he’d volunteered to accompany him that morning. Thin, tidy, with dark hair and eyes, a weak, carefully shaven chin and a thin moustache, Senior was a cadet constable, a young man from a landed family accepted directly into the RIC as an officer. He was currently serving as a constable and would remain so until a head constable’s post became vacant. In the current climate, O’Keefe didn’t imagine it would be long before one came up, if the DI was willing to let go of his personal valet. Rumour had it their fathers were members of the same club up in Dublin. O’Keefe accepted Senior’s offer to accompany him because he couldn’t think of a valid reason not to.

Also in attendance were Keane and Logan, who were waiting by the Ford in uniform, carbines hanging lazily over their forearms. O’Keefe paused before he entered the pub – O’Neills it said over the low door, in faded lettering under a moss-coated thatch. He sensed no danger on the bright Saturday morning. A scan of the street: barefoot children kicking a football against the gable end of the pub, women chatting in open doorways as they swept the steps of their cottages, another carrying a basket of eggs covered in a tea-towel, men leaning on gates, smoking pipes. All of them ignored Logan and Keane.

In the end, it took him less than five minutes. His questions about the girl on the hillside resulted in one verbal response, from the publican himself – a balding man in a stained shirt and collar. ‘And what girl would that be you’re talking of, Sergeant? Sure, we’ve heard of none of our girls dead and lying in the grass.’

Back in the Ford, Constable Senior said, ‘They were lying I suppose?’

O’Keefe shrugged as Keane cranked the hand starter and the car coughed into life. Senior studied him. ‘Do you really think there’s any way to tell if people like these are lying or telling the truth. I hardly think they know themselves.’

Keane climbed into the Ford and they pulled away from the pub, O’Keefe chewing over the meaning of Senior’s words:
people like these.
He could taste the disdain. To Constable Senior, ‘people like these’ were as distantly related to a man like himself as the apes of Africa. And by association, so were O’Keefe, Keane and Logan. Catholic. Irish. The IRA were fighting attitudes such as Senior’s every bit as much as they were fighting the reality of British rule. Their struggle was as much about equality as it was about independence. And where did that leave Catholic, Irish RIC men? It left them as targets, O’Keefe reckoned, as if every dead constable would make any single Irishman more equal, more free.

***

When Major Thomas Mathew-Pare first met ‘O’, the man was performing surgery on a horse.

A chap Mathew-Pare had met in the Dublin Castle officers’ mess – a secret serviceman he’d crossed paths with in Palestine – had commented that O bore a striking resemblance to a little, wicked, white snake. The secret serviceman had also told him that Ormonde had chosen his own codename on his arrival in Dublin. They’d had a good laugh at that one. O for Ormonde. Ormonde de l’Epeé Winter, an artillery man made Chief of Combined Intelligence Services. It seemed a proper War Office plan. When intel had dried up in Ireland to the point of being non-existent, appoint an artillery man to run the show. Nothing surprised Mathew-Pare any more.

He had been summoned to Dublin Castle from where he had been staying for the last week in Beggar’s Bush barracks, keeping the head down, doing a spot of interrogation work for the Auxiliaries in return for their hospitality. The Auxies had got their claws into one of Mick Collins’ shooters, a lad who’d been involved in the massacre of Crown intelligence men the previous Sunday. At present the prisoner was being rested for further questioning.

A young officer dressed in riding gear greeted Mathew-Pare at the entrance to the Castle stables.

‘Sir,’ the officer said, ‘would you be so kind …’ The man sounded worried. ‘Are you here to see the Colonel? Would you be so kind as to enquire after Milly, sir? My mount. She’s been in surgery for hours now and the Colonel insisted he knew what ailed her.’

Mathew-Pare gave the man a kindly smile and assured him that he would enquire.

Inside the stables, O had his shirtsleeves rolled up. He had supplemented the weak electric lights in the stables with several lanterns strategically placed around the stall where he was working. There was a stink of blood, paraffin and fresh bedding hay. O didn’t look up when he spoke. One of his hands held a surgical clamp, the other was inside the horse’s abdomen. ‘One of Henry Wilson’s boys, eh? I thought you lot caught a packet last Sunday, courtesy of Mr Collins.’

Michael Collins’ Squad – his ‘Twelve Apostles’ – had put the lights out on most of them that Sunday. Seven members of Mathew-Pare’s Cairo Gang had been killed. They didn’t get all of them, though. Mathew-Pare and two others had been too good for even Collins and his boys. Later that day the Auxiliaries had killed fourteen spectators at a football match in Croke Park. It was claimed the dead were IRA men. Not that anyone, anywhere, believed that they were.

‘Not all of us, sir.’

‘I’d heard you’re a canny one.’ He twisted the clamp within the horse’s belly.

‘Lucky, sir. Allow me to introduce …’

‘One moment.’

O reached his hand further inside the horse. His forearms were coated with blood. Mathew-Pare watched as he released the clamp and shifted it within the horse’s belly.

Milly was laid on her side, an impressive bay, a noble splash of white on her brow. One of her hind legs was raised and suspended by a rope and pulley, allowing O access to her innards. She was a cavalry horse, Mathew-Pare assumed, having met her master outside – one of the army’s ornaments. Trench warfare had put paid to the notion of any more horses fighting His Majesty’s battles. Bit of a bother, sending a horse over the top of a trench.

‘There,’ O said. ‘No need for introductions. Wilson re-commended you personally. Had a gander at your file.’

O continued to focus on his task, applying a spreader to the incision, cigarette lodged between his lips, a monocle in his right eye, squinting through the smoke with his left. He was a small, wiry sort, with thinning blond hair, a sharp nose and light-blue, hooded eyes. A wicked white snake. Mathew-Pare smiled to himself. ‘Very good, sir.’

‘Nasty business, last week,’ O said. ‘Bloody Sunday they’re calling it. Two fine men from the Royal Veterinary Corps caught it as well. Bloody shame. Shinner Intelligence not up to much, shooting vets in hotel beds.’

‘No, sir,’ Mathew-Pare said, thinking that Shinner Intelligence must be up to something, having plugged ten Crown spooks in
their
beds along with the vets. He kept this to himself. Instead: ‘I wasn’t aware of your skills in the surgical line, sir.’

‘Not many are. Bit of a hobby, veterinary medicine. Pastime, if you like. Came in handy in India.’

‘I’m sure it did, sir.’

O worked in silence for some minutes before speaking again. ‘Thought you’d be best for the job, Mathew-Pare. Hush, hush job for the “hush, hush men”.’ He laughed through his nose, adjusting the spreader and widening the incision.

‘Job, sir?’

‘Yes,’ O said. ‘Not, however, what you might think. Bit of a cushy number this. None of your more sinister skills needed I shouldn’t think.’

‘Glad to hear it, sir.’

‘There’s been a small problem. Some bint, apparently. Isn’t it always? Found dead in the county of Cork. Most likely the Shinners. In fact, let’s just say it
was
the Shinners.’ O looked at Mathew-Pare for the first time since he’d entered the stables, light reflecting in the monocle.

‘Shinners it was, sir.’

‘Kind of thing that would play well on the mainland, don’t you think?’

Mathew-Pare rode along with O’s line of argument. ‘Certainly would, sir. Play well, indeed.’

‘The “Murder Gang” angle pleases readers – notwith-standing the
Manchester Guardian
’s view of things. Repub-lican army? Rebels? Bloody corner boys with stolen Webleys, more like.’

‘Couldn’t agree with you more, sir. One outrage after another.’

‘Throttled the poor bitch to death. Cut off her tits. Poor gal left stark naked on a hillside. Sinn Féin outrage, I’d say.’

‘
Sensational
outrage, sir. And do we have any particular Shinners in mind?’

‘Any will do, just so long as it’s them. I’ve arranged for you to be assigned to the investigation. There’s a young acting sergeant in charge at the moment. Make sure he gets his man, will you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

O grunted and reached once again into the horse’s abdomen.

‘I don’t …’ he laboured inside the horse, ‘… need to stress … the importance of this, do I, Major?’

‘No, sir.’

With a clamp in his free hand, O reached deeper into the beast, twisting, manipulating. The clamp snapped shut, making an audible ‘click’ inside the horse. O carefully withdrew his hands, slick with blood, and stood back to admire his work.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That should about do it, eh?’

Mathew-Pare watched as the abdominal incision dis-tended slightly, then widened as the spreader lost its hold, and the horse’s intestines spilled out in a steaming mass onto the hay-covered floor, sliding over and around O’s feet. The horse began to convulse, its eyes rolling in their sockets. Soon the animal went limp, expelling a last wheezing breath.

‘Will there be anything else, sir?’

Ormonde de l’Epée Winter dismissed him with a bloody wave of his hand.

Outside the stables, Milly’s master accosted Mathew-Pare once again. ‘Milly, sir. Did you …’

Mathew-Pare couldn’t help himself. ‘Milly? Oh yes, Milly will be just fine. Right as rain.’

***

At half-past six in the evening, O’Keefe came into the office after presiding over the routine interrogation of a patrol that had been fired at on the outskirts of Bandon. Only the Tender had been hit, a clean shot through the grill, forcing it to limp back to barracks spraying steam and boiling water from the radiator. He’d radioed Bandon, requesting an army patrol be sent out, but he knew that whoever had shot at the Crossley was long gone by now. The IRA man was probably sipping a pint in some pub, yarning about how he had plugged ten Tans with one bullet. O’Keefe didn’t have time for a pint or stories.

He looked across at Daly, his feet up on the desk as usual. ‘You finish the provisions list and mess bills?’

Much of any RIC sergeant’s day was spent on barracks’ paperwork. The rest was spent ensuring that the constables in his charge were doing their jobs, were in proper uniform and keeping up to date and legible in their patrol diaries. Often, O’Keefe felt that a copper’s job of investigating crime was secondary to signing chits once he’d been promoted to sergeant.

‘Now now, Seán,’ Daly said, puffing on his pipe. ‘That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?’

‘So you haven’t then?’

‘Course I haven’t. I’ve more important things, by far, to be doing than taking grub orders from that rabble downstairs. They may boil their fucking boot leather for all I care.’

Before the Troubles, provisioning had been a simple task, most often done by the one or two unmarried constables who were billeted in the barracks, but since it had become unsafe for police to live in the towns and villages of Ireland, RIC sergeants were now charged with the requisitioning of food. This task was made more difficult by the general boycott against members of the RIC and their families, in place since 1918. Started by local Sinn Féiners in County Clare and approved the following year by the provisional Dáil government, the boycott had spread throughout the country. At first it had been only loosely enforced. The merchants who had done business with the barracks over the years had been reluctant to lose a steady source of trade and had continued to serve the police. But when a shop or two was burned out, most of the businesses began to comply with the order. Which is to say many of them continued to sell their wares to the police but discreetly, not serving them directly or delivering goods to barracks.

This required the barracks to send men to the shops for provisions under cover of darkness and often under risk of ambush or sniper fire. It also required that the exact amount of money be left for goods taken, a concept lost on many of the Black and Tans.

O’Keefe took out the previous week’s lists and mess bills. ‘Here.’ He slid them across the desks to Daly. ‘Just tick the same order as last week and get one of the Black and Scums to collect the money off his mates. I’ll get our lads later and a pair of them can make the run tonight.’

‘Collect from that shower? That’ll be a first. Sure, half of them are Scottish. Blood from a stone …’

‘And that’s coming from a Cavan man.’

Pointing his pipe stem at O’Keefe, Daly said, ‘
Careful
with the money is a different thing from being mean with it.’

‘Some call it careful; others call it tighter than a gundog’s arse.’