To the Death

The other was Mick Barton from the Shamrock Café, who had served the stranger, recalled what he was wearing, and directed him to the bus stop outside the Eldon Hotel. Officer Joe Carey had called in and asked if he would be prepared to come to Dublin and spend a day looking through closed-circuit television footage, to try to identify the man to whom he had served two large glasses of orange juice.

“Forget it,” said Mick. “I’m too busy trying to earn a living, not pouncing around all day on wild-goose chases like yourself.”

Joe put him in a cheerful headlock, and told him this was a serious matter. Mick said his neck was probably broken and he’d be suing for a million.

Joe asked how he’d feel about a private helicopter ride up to Dublin, and they would award him two days’ full pay for his time.

“Done,” said Mick. “What time?”

“Tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. Right here in the square.”

“Where’s the helicopter gonna be?”

“Right over here in that field.”

“Oh, jaysus, Joe. I can’t. I forgot. I have a dentist’s appointment.”

Joe sighed the sigh of the profoundly suspicious.

“Of course you have,” he said. “All right, three days.”

“Done,” said Mick. “Final offer?”

“Final offer.”

“I’ll be there.”

0900 Thursday 19 July Dublin

Mick Barton arrived at the Garda Station in style, in the back of an unmarked police car. He was led into a private room, where Ray McDwyer met him with a cheerful “Morning to you, Michael.”

At the back of the room were a projector and an operator. At the front was a large white screen.

“Okay, lad, you know what you’re doing. We are going to show you a steady line of people going through security at Dublin airport getting onto international flights only. We just want you to stop us and identify the man you served the orange juice to on Monday morning.”

“Do I get a bonus if I find him?”

“Absolutely not,” said Ray. “You might make something up, just to get the bonus!”

“Who, me?”

“I’ve only known you since you were three years old. Yes, you.”

Mick laughed, half flattered. He saw himself, after all, as a hard-driving businessman. But suddenly he was dead serious. “Roll ’em,” he said. “If he’s there, I’ll find him. Black T-shirt, right?”

And slowly the projectionist began to run the film, and Mick sat quietly, sometimes leaning forward asking for a pause or a rewind. He worked solidly for three and a half hours, drinking just one cup of coffee, which obliged him to ask, formally, whether it had been percolated in Dachau. Everyone laughed, which Mick expected, being Skibbereen’s established breakfast-bar wit and everything.

He had looked carefully at hundreds of air travelers, and found a couple of marginal candidates, but in the end he always said the same thing, “No, that’s not him.”

They gave him a ham sandwich and an ice cream for lunch, and then settled down to show him the much shorter lines of people disembarking the Irish Sea ferries in England. As expected, they were mostly backpackers and hitchhikers. “Bloody rabble,” observed Mick, but he kept going, checking every person who had sailed from Dun Laoghaire or the Dublin Port Terminal over a two-day period.

He found nothing, not until three o’clock in the afternoon. They were rolling the seventh tape from Holyhead, when Mick asked first for a rewind. Then for a pause. Then he stood up and stepped closer.

And he shoved out his finger, pointing directly at a passenger wearing a jacket and a T-shirt, accompanied by a very good-looking lady who was standing slightly aside.

“You want me to zoom in, Mick?” asked the projectionist.

“Good idea,” he replied. “On the guy in the jacket.”

The image came up bigger. Mick pointed again at the man in the jacket, which was now obviously made of suede or some other kind of soft leather.

“That’s him,” said Mick. “That’s definitely him.”

“One thing, Mick,” interjected Ray McDwyer. “That T-shirt he’s wearing is white, not black.”

“Personally,” replied the kid from the Shamrock Café, “I don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s pink. That’s still him, the thirsty bastard who couldn’t find his own way to Cork City.”

Ray McDwyer chuckled. And Mick added, “I’ll tell you something else, and there’s no charge for this — that’s a very fair piece of crumpet he’s got with him.”

CHAPTER 10

Ray McDwyer looked hard at the image of the man who might have killed Jerry O’Connell for reasons unknown. And he also looked hard at Mick Barton, the local Flash Harry, upon whose memory this entire case rested. Could Mick be trusted? Maybe. Did he have any doubts about this identification? Apparently not.

Ray suddenly viewed the entire scenario with mixed feelings. If Mick was correct, the murderer was no longer in Ireland: he’d gone to England on the two o’clock ferry from Dublin to Holyhead. Right now he could be anywhere. And there were only sixty million people in England.