Free The Death of an Irish Consul by Bartholomew Gill Page A

McGarr told Gallup what he had learned on the phone:
    —that Browne, like Hitchcock, had worked for ENI.
    —that the two former C.’s of SIS had hired a certain Jamaican, named Moses Foster, who had had access to SIS ketobemidone and was disgruntled with that agency. Because of Hitchcock’s and Browne’s deaths, Foster would become the security chief of the Scottish operation, a very well paying position.
    —that Hitchcock and Browne had been involved in Tartan Limited, a company that was exploiting a discrepancy in the mapping of the ENI oil fields, information to which the two of them would have been privy.
    —that McGarr may have seen Foster both at a Shannon inn two days ago and at the Shannon airport earlier in the day. Both times Foster had been with the same Latin-looking man.
    It was this last bit of information that disturbed McGarr. “If, say, both Hitchcock and Browne had been ferried in by helicopter and Foster was involved in their deaths, then what was he doing in that car? Who is the other man?” McGarr noted the slight tang of salt spray and ozone off the wet rocks below the cliff. The sky overhead was cloudless, and the air, purified by winds of the Gulf Stream, was as clear as any he had ever breathed. Consequently, stars, layers deep, and the merest crescent of a moon lit their path.
    At the house, the other policemen were clustered around the car.
    McGarr looked at O’Shaughnessy, who shook his head. The others had found nothing. They all looked tired.
    McGarr and Gallup walked to the end of the kitchen yard and climbed over a stile in the rock wall. Taking a pocket torch from his raincoat, McGarr searched two adjacent fields until, in a third, he found the grass flattened in a whorl and the tracks of helicopter landing bars in the soft earth. Also, he discovered very good impressions of two pairs of shoes, each person having debouched from sides of the craft. One set, he assumed, had been Browne’s. They were huge. The feet of the other man were tiny, size seven or perhaps eight at most.
    Staring down at the dark earth and dew glistening in the beam of the torch, Gallup said, “They probably needed that Foster fellow for muscle. Whoever owns feet that size is a near midget. He’d have trouble handling Browne even trussed.”
    McGarr asked Scanlon to take casts and ship a set to Dublin.
    Far different from the afternoon was McGarr’s reception now at the Shannon Garda office. Mallon was waiting at the counter with a sheaf of reports, and his two assistants were at their desks, heads bent over their work.
    Mallon handed McGarr a sheet of paper and a carbon copy to Assistant Commissioner Gallup. He explained. “The black man rented the car under the name of Ignacio Garcia, when he arrived here a week ago from London. He used a British passport for identification. I’ve since checked it with the British. It’s false.
    “Since the other man didn’t have to identify himself, I couldn’t find his name, so I sent the Ignacio Garcia name to Detective Sergeant McKeon, who then conducted a computer search for the passenger lists of planes, ships, trains, and border crossings that the Garcia name might have appeared on. I figured that, unless he entered the country illegally, his name would havebeen logged and placed in the memory bank of the computer.”
    This computer process was new to Ireland and one of the many innovations which McGarr had made since becoming chief inspector. It allowed the police to keep tabs on visitors to the country.
    “Here is the list.” He handed another sheet to McGarr and a carbon to Gallup.
    One name caught McGarr’s eye. It was that of Enrico Rattei, the head of the ENI consortium. He turned to Gallup, who had also noticed it. McGarr, thinking back on the seven years he had lived in Italy while working for Interpol, could remember Rattei as looking very much like the man he had seen in the inn the day before and in the car here at the airport just a few hours