He caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror above them. Tiredness weighed on his features. He had been jowly since his late twenties. Now aged thirty six, he sometimes felt he looked like a forlorn bloodhound, especially when fatigue darkened his eyes.
A movement in the reflection startled him.
“Are you the G2 fella?” a voice asked.
Ryan turned. A man wearing a shabby suit and overcoat stood in the doorway. He held up his open wallet.
“Detective Garda Michael Harrington,” he said, returning the wallet to his pocket. “I was told you’d be visiting us, but I didn’t expect you for a day or two yet.”
Ryan extended his hand. “I wanted to get a head start, see the room before too much time passed.”
Harrington stared at the offered hand for a moment before shaking it. He held a manila folder in the other. “Fair enough. I’ve got this report for you. If you want a look at the body, it’s over at the Regional Hospital.”
Krauss’s naked body lay on the steel table, eyes closed, dry lips slightly pursed and parted as if locked in an eternal whisper. A Y-shaped incision traversed his torso, from the greying cloud of pubic hair to his shoulders. It had been neatly stitched after his organs had been returned to their rightful places. Below his navel was a hole, scorched and puckered.
Another line of stitches started behind one ear, ran across the top of his head, and terminated at the other ear. Ryan pictured the pathologist slicing the scalp, peeling it forward until it covered the eyes like a mask, sawing out a section of the skull, and finally removing the demolished brain.
It had been on Ryan’s eighteenth birthday that he first saw the inside of a man’s skull. A mist-shrouded field in Holland, some miles north of Nijmegen. Ryan couldn’t remember the corporal’s name, only that his head had opened like a crushed melon, bone and blood tearing away, the grey within.
He had dropped to the ground, the damp of the mud seeping through his uniform, and crawled to the hedgerow twenty yards ahead, certain beyond all doubt his own brain would be smashed out of his head at any moment. When he reached the others, the sergeant said, “Wipe your face off, lad.”
Ryan had reached up, felt the wetness and grit there, and vomited on himself.
He was no longer so squeamish.
On a drainer by a large sink, two acrylic glass vials held the deformed bullets. Ryan lifted and examined each in turn.
“We dug one out of the headboard,” Harrington said. “It went through the intestine and the kidney and out the back. The other was still in his head. The quack fished it out, said the brain was like jelly. He had to ladle it out. I didn’t understand that. There’s a hole blown out at the other side of his head from where the bullet went in, there was stuff on the wall, but still the quack found that inside him.”
“Gases,” Ryan said. “They expand inside the head and push outwards. If the killer used a suppressor, the bullet would have lost velocity. That’s why it didn’t exit the skull, and why the other only got as far as the headboard.”
“Ah,” Harrington said, doing a poor job of feigning interest. “Well, you live and learn.”
Ryan had read what little information the report contained as Harrington drove him over to the hospital. The only identifiable fingerprints in the room belonged to Krauss. The rest were a faded mishmash of traces left by Mrs. Toal and every guest who had stayed in the room over recent days. It seemed the killer had touched nothing with bare fingers.
A few possessions lay on a plastic tray. The lighter and cigarette case drew Ryan’s attention. He took a pen from his pocket and used it to turn the case, the light picking out the fine lines of the engraving.
Harrington noted Ryan’s interest. “I suppose that’s why a G2 fella’s looking into this.”
Ryan did not reply.
“There used to be a man rented a farmhouse out towards Boleybeg, a German. He stayed there about six or seven years. There was all sorts of talk about him. I remember when he left, his cleaner told me she’d seen a swastika on his wall, and a painting of Hitler. I didn’t believe her.”
Harrington waited as if hoping Ryan would express some surprise. When Ryan didn’t, Harrington continued.
“Then there’s this Skorzeny, the Austrian, living in Kildare. I saw him in the newspaper, shaking hands with some bigwigs at a party. I’d never support the British, but what them Nazis did wasn’t right. I don’t like them coming and settling here just because we’re soft on them.”
“I’ve seen enough,” Ryan said.
CHAPTER FOUR
“What are you doing landing in on us this late?” Ryan’s mother asked.
“I was passing,” Ryan lied. He had pulled over at Athlone and agonised for five long minutes. In the end, he had headed north to Carrickmacree in County Monaghan instead of going straight back to Dublin.
The shop front stood in darkness when Ryan approached along Main Street. He steered the Vauxhall to the rear of the block and parked behind the small van his father drove when he delivered bread and milk around the town. He let himself into the yard and knocked on the door.
“You’d better come in, then,” his mother said. She stood back and allowed him to enter the small hallway.
Ryan’s father stood at the top of the stairway, a dressing gown over striped pyjamas, thick socks on his feet.
“Who’s that?” he called.
“It’s Albert,” Ryan’s mother said as she climbed the stairs towards him. Ryan followed.
“At this time?”
“That’s what I said.” She looked back over her shoulder. “If you’d telephoned, I could’ve had something on for you.”
Ryan never warned his parents in advance of a visit, and he always arrived in darkness. It had been ten years since there’d been any trouble, but still he remained cautious. They had nearly lost the shop after the petrol bombing. Before that, it had been Mahon and his cronies shouting insults in the street, stones thrown at windows, paint slashed across the glass once. Business had dwindled, almost to the point of his father having to admit defeat and leave the town, but enough of the locals had resisted Mahon’s pressure to boycott the shop to keep its doors open.
But the fire had been the worst of it, a last desperate act by a man too bitter and full of hate to let Albert Ryan’s transgression go, and he had stayed away for a full year before returning.
On occasion, he wondered if he would have joined up and gone to fight for the British if he had known the cost to his parents. Every time, he dismissed it as foolishness, knowing a boy of seventeen could have no such wisdom even if granted the foresight. He had stolen the money from his father’s safe to buy passage from Carrickmacree across the border to Belfast, then made his way to the nearest recruiting office, never once thinking of his mother’s tears.
Now he sat at his mother’s table with a mug of steaming tea, butter melting on a slab of toast. He hadn’t the appetite what with the mortuary’s low odours still lurking in his nasal passages, but he ate anyway.
Once the plate was clear, he asked his father how business was.
“Not the best,” his father said.
“Why?”
His father fell silent, staring into his mug. Instead, Ryan’s mother answered.
“It’s the Trades Association,” she said. “And that auld bastard Tommy Mahon.”
She covered her mouth, shocked at herself for uttering such coarse language.
“What did they do?”
Ryan’s father looked up from his tea. “Mahon decided he wanted me out of business for good, so he set his son up with a wee cash-and-carry down the way. He got his friends in the Association to have a word with some of my suppliers. Now I can’t get milk or bread. The only meat I can get is from old man Harney and his sons. They butcher their own animals out at their farm. The only eggs I can get is what I can buy when I’m out on my rounds.”