Free The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf by Bartholomew Gill Page A

lean back into it and brace their legs to keep from being hurled forward.
    How had Ford and his wife—near octogenarians both, Rice had said—ever managed to leave the house? And why had they remained in such an inhospitable place for “How many years did you say they lived here?” McGarr tried to ask, but the gale swept away his words. What was their support? How had they kept themselves from being prisoners of the wind?
    It was then, as they turned through the first switchback and began to mount the next incline, that the wind ceased abruptly, nearly tumbling McGarr. Rice staggered, then righted himself. “It’s magic, what? This morning I thought me ears would burst.”
    The house had been sited with care in a kind dingle or combe that a stream had cut into the side of Croaghmore.And although still windy there, the swirling breezes lacked the force of the gusts that were wailing overhead.
    “Many’s the time I wondered how man or beast could live in a place like this, seeing it from down there.” Rice pointed toward the ocean. “I fish a bit with the brother-in-law. Now I know.”
    McGarr stopped and looked behind him down the declivity to the beachlike area and the ocean. “Go through the chronology again for me.”
    “Like I mentioned on the phone, Chief—the call came to the barracks in Louisburgh around four in the morning. The two men who fish with Packy O’Malley went to roust him out, since he’s a bit of a character and usually closes the pub. And they found the boat gone and his kip all shot up. That’s when they noticed O’Grady’s car with the doors open and blood everywhere. One of them thought to look in the boot.
    “I got to the harbor around seven, the brother-in-law bringing me out. Word, of course, had spread, and even at that hour the jetty was packed.
    “Says the publican to me, says he, ‘You should speak to Paul O’Malley, he’s got something to tell you.’ ‘Who’s Paul O’Malley,’ says I? ‘A crippled fella who lives on Capnagower.’ That’s another of the hills to the east of the island. ‘Paul can do little else each day but monitor local waters with binoculars and sideband.’ It’s him that told me about the schooner and how Clem Ford would always want to be informed the moment any new boat put in.
    “But, sure, by that time I’d already heard from Jacinta O’Grady, saying that Ford had rung up her husband, asking him to come and sit with the wife while he stepped out for a moment. And to come armed. O’Grady thought it a bit daft, but he left his tea nevertheless, worried, like, about the two old-timers.”
    “And he took along a gun?”
    Rice nodded. “So the wife said. A handgun.”
    “Did Ford mention why he wanted O’Grady to come here?”
    “No—he said he’d explain it all later.”
    “Or where he was stepping out to?”
    Rice shook his head.
    “Do we have any idea of any later times?”
    “Jacinta said she began to get worried when, by midnight, O’Grady hadn’t come home or phoned her. It was then she began ringing him here, but the line was busy or off the hook. Also, the publican said Packy O’Malley stayed as usual ’til closing, which was half ten last night, no later. He also says he saw Packy’s boat in the harbor when he put out the bottles and locked the back door of the pub fifteen minutes later.”
    So, if they could assume that O’Malley’s boat was gone because he was on it, then he left sometime after 10:45. “What’s the connection—O’Malley to the Fords?”
    “She—the wife, Breege—is an O’Malley too, and they’re probably related somehow. But the publican says Ford and Packy got on famously and often had jars together. But other than that—” Again Rice shook his head, then pointed to the drive that was speckled with the same brass 7.62 mm bullet jackets that had littered the jetty at the harbor. “’Tis here that the shell casings begin.”
    And also what McGarr thought of as the “mess” that marked