The Death of an Irish Politician by Bartholomew Gill Page A

asked me here.”
    Horrigan stood and walked to the window as if he wished to heighten the confessional nature of the exchange. He drew on the cigarette and blew out the smoke immediately. “What can I tell you about Leona?”
    McGarr, perhaps because of the Ovens case, had not quite understood the minister’s pronunciation of the name. “Excuse me, what is her name?”
    Horrigan turned to him. “Leona. Do you know her?”
    McGarr shook his head.
    The minister turned back to the view of the courtyard. It had begun to rain and the sky was slate. “When we first married, we were poor but plucky. Both fresh out of university—she teaching national school here in Dublin for money that wouldn’t keep a friar in holy water, me trying to scrounge up legal work. I prosecuted my first case against the Dublin County Council when my maiden auntslipped on a puddle of ice in front of her flat and broke her hip.”
    “Children?”
    “Three and grown. The youngest is a senior sophister at Trinity, of all places.”
    “When did you begin living apart?”
    Horrigan turned his head sharply to him. He honestly couldn’t remember. He walked to the table, picked up his glass, and then went to the sideboard. “Maybe fifteen years ago. The youngest was walking, I remember, and just about to enter kindergarten. We never talked about her leaving me, mind you, or about separation, living apart, or divorce. I had begun to make big money a few years before that, and we started adding a place here, a suite of rooms in London. We bought a boat.”
    “What kind?”
    “All kinds. She traded boats, bought, sold, rented, leased them in such multiplicity I don’t know what we own right now myself.”
    “You don’t sail yourself?” McGarr was now fitting the pieces of what the minister was telling him into the Ovens case. He wondered why the man had really called him here like this. Could it be that he had attacked Ovens and, definitely a nervous type, couldn’t wait for the investigation to uncover his wife’s involvement with the man?
    Horrigan chuckled into the whiskey glass. “I would have liked to sail and now realize thatfor the sake of my marriage I should have, but I either told myself I didn’t have the time or really didn’t have it. Another thing is the training. I tried it once, but I was born a Dublin guttersnipe. Do you know the sort of person who sails in Ireland, Peter?”
    “I know the sort of person who sails.” McGarr thought briefly of Ovens, who was an American, and then Horace C. K. Hubbard. McGarr had tried unsuccessfully to know some of the people who had sailed on the Riviera. To him they were different—ignorantly exclusive, inveterately romantic, eccentric.
    “They’re born to it. In her own way, my wife was too. Her father used to build boats for them at Cobh, and because of that they accepted her in a patronizing way, if you know what I mean. Later ”—Horrigan raised his voice—“they accepted her because she could buy and sell the lot of them with the small change in her checkbook!” Merely talking about this situation seemed to anger Horrigan, but McGarr wished he knew the man better. There seemed to be just the slightest bit of affectation in his speech, a small touch of the histrionic in his gestures.
    McGarr sipped from his whiskey.
    Now Horrigan was leaning against the sideboard. “And so ours became one of the first of what they now call an ‘open’ marriage. She did her thing, as the saying goes, and I mine. Hers included several downright rotters. Ihired Hugh Madigan—do you know him?”
    McGarr nodded. Madigan was a private detective with offices in London.
    “He told me that much. Along the way, about the time our oldest son became a research student in London, it became fashionable for certain ‘Anglo-Irish’ intellectuals—and I use both terms advisedly, Inspector McGarr—to champion the causes of the Bernadette Devlins of the North. Leona had money, you see, and Eoin—that’s