The Death of an Irish Lover by Bartholomew Gill Read Free Book Online Page A

“Liam—will you buzz us through?” he asked one of the other barmen as he moved toward the hinged flap of the bar. There was a door just beyond.
    As McGarr moved toward it, an obviously drunken older man in a cloth cap and tattered jacket turned to him. “I hope Benny and his mates breaks yehr fookin’ legs fer yeh, yeh city cunt.”
    When another man whispered something, trying to shut him up, he roared, “I don’t give a shite who he is—Nelligan himself—he’s a city fook, and Benny and Manus will chuck his arse in the river where it belongs. They’re just the b’ys to do it.”
    After Independence in the early twenties one Brian Nelligan had headed up the notoriously brutal Special Branch of the Garda Siochana that had focused on rooting out the even-then-outlawed IRA.
    But the statement jarred McGarr’s memory, causing him to remember who Benny Carson was or, at least, had been: an IRA section chief who had spent a record number of years in solitary confinement in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison.
    McGarr tried to recall Carson’s story that had been much covered in the press. Something to the effect that he was the child of a mixed marriage, which had been highly controversial in the Ulster of Carson’s youth, and he had sided with his Catholic mother’s family after his Protestant father had abandoned them.
    It was thought that, given his name, Carson believed he had to prove himself more completely than others in that organization, even after he had been arrested for…could it be? Murdering two Royal Ulster Constabulary policemen in the North. McGarr would have to check, but he thought so.
    Later—after his release from prison on a legal technicality, McGarr now also remembered—Carson had gone on to become one of the IRA’s chief tacticians. But that, too, was years ago. And here he was now decades later in charge of a busy bar in the Midlands of the Republic. Why? Or, rather, how? McGarr thought of Tallon, who had to have known of the man’s past when he hired him. Or could their connection be more complicated still?
    At the door, Carson signaled to one of the other barmen, who reached for a button near the pigeonholes on the back bar and buzzed them through.
    “So, what brings you here, Chief Superintendent?” Carson asked as they climbed the wide stairs.
    McGarr waited until they got to the top. “Put your hands on the wall and spread your legs.”
    “What?” Carson asked incredulously.
    McGarr spun the older man around and shoved him toward the wall. “Hands. And feet.” He did not know if the charges against Carson in the North had been justified—at the time, many people had been falsely convicted and imprisoned—but he would take no chances.
    “Whatever you’re about, you don’t want to do this,” said Carson, as McGarr patted him down.
    Apart from a billfold and a sizable ring of keys, his pockets contained only a pen, a comb, and two objects that felt like clasp knives, one in either front trousers pockets.
    “You should mind your manners. I’m not without friends. D’y’know who I am?”
    “A cop killer, twice over. Or are you threatening me?”
    “Call it what you will, it’s fact. You should be wary.”
    “What’s fact—that you killed two cops?”
    Carson did not reply.
    “Step over to that chair and empty the contents of your pockets.”
    “I will, but I won’t forget this. Your day will come.”
    The object in Carson’s left pocket was a shiny chromed waiter’s tool with a corkscrew, a bottle-cap opener, and a small knife to cut off wine bottle top-wrap. The second was indeed a clasp knife with a rosewood grip; it had a marlinspike on one end, a stout four-inch blade on the other.
    “That your shank?”
    “Let me give you a bit of advice—it’s none of your fookin’ business what it is. Like the man said downstairs, you should get in your fookin’ car and get the fook out of here, while you can.”
    Suddenly angry—perhaps because of what had