Free The Death of an Irish Politician by Bartholomew Gill

extraordinary. A tall man whose paunch had fallen, David Horrigan grasped a whiskey in his right hand and stared into it as though trying to divine some mystery at the bottom of the glass. The minister, however, did not drink. And although the bar with its flagstone floor and shaded windows was cool, Horrigan’s brow was beaded with sweat. Because of the recent change in government ministers, McGarr didn’t know the man well and wondered why he was away from his office on a working day and why he had asked McGarr to meet him here, outside Dublin.
    Plainly, Horrigan hadn’t expected Noreen to be along and her presence irked him. His pleasantries seemed forced. At length, he asked her if he might have a word with McGarr alone, and leaving her to lunch in the dining room with the publican’s wife, whom Noreen knew from her days at University College, Dublin, the minister for justice and McGarr climbed a flight of stairs to his suite on the second floor, which Horrigan explained so: “Like you, Peter, I grew up in Dublin on Clanbrassil Street near the Four Courts. Like yours, my family was poor. I’ve been going through your dossier, which I took the liberty of lifting from the files a few moments after you left the Castle Saturday afternoon.”
    “Gerald told me everybody had left.” Horrigan’s office was not in Dublin Castle but onSt. Stephen’s Green, and whereas the minister was responsible for the Garda, as a politician he did not normally have free access to their files.
    “I was hoping it would seem that way.” Horrigan was nervous, and his hand shook as he fit the door key into its lock. “Where was I?”
    “Hotel living.” McGarr was now on his toes in every sense. Seldom had he ever allowed a governmental officer of Horrigan’s rank to engage him in such familiar conversation. Much political in-fighting was transpiring in Dublin mostly because of the differing approaches to the trouble in the North. Horrigan had made no bones about his position: a united Ireland controlled in Dublin. He wanted England to purchase at market price the land and real property of any Scotch-Irishman who couldn’t live with a Dublin-based government, and then have England set up a program of resettlement back where Cromwell’s campaigners had come from, across the Irish Sea in Scotland and northern England. He wanted the Dublin government to repudiate the 1937 constitution that had declared a special relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and Ireland and had prohibited divorce and contraception. McGarr thought this an interesting but naïve plan, impracticable and designed only to put Horrigan in office. It had proved tremendously popular.
    Horrigan swung the door wide and McGarr stepped into a room appointed not in standard hotel gauche but rather a period setting that McGarr judged as accurate and tasteful as any of the mansions he had visited during his many burglary investigations. Most of the pieces were Chippendale originals. A finely detailed oriental rug with blue and green patterning on a beige background covered most of a parquet floor. The windows were French, specially constructed in the recent past. Brilliant linen drapes gathered the light from the courtyard. “My father was a farrier who worked for the Shelbourne Hotel whenever they had too much work for their own man to handle. I, being the oldest, was let out as a step-and-fetch-it, bootblack, you know what I mean.” Horrigan had opened a sideboard that contained a number of crystal decanters below. “And I said to myself that if some day I could afford it, neither house nor farm nor boat nor castle would be my abode. Nothing but a hotel for me with hot-and-cold running servants, a kitchen, bar, stables, and lots of company. And so here I am. Malt?”
    “Please.”
    Horrigan poured McGarr a generous drink and dropped the stopper back into the neck of the decanter.
    McGarr was trying to remember the details of this man’s life. His address in