The Death of an Irish Politician by Bartholomew Gill Page B

our son—was just at the age when a party with free booze would invariably draw a bunch of freeloading blowhards he thought brilliant. So Leona gave parties.” Horrigan stubbed the cigarette butt into the ashtray. “She never seemed able to discriminate about people who weren’t exactly Irish, exactly her age, and exactly from her station in life.”
    “But about you?”
    “Yes, goddammit! About me she could give you a litany of my personal failings that would run to volumes, but about that collection of fairies and sycophants, moochers, drunks, and plain old con men she couldn’t learn a thing. She became embroiled in some organization that had its base in the Bogside and its financial support in London. From the money she spent, I would believe she alone was its backer.”
    “How much?”
    “Forty-seven thousand pounds! You couldbuy a bloody tank for that much! I often wonder how much of it was pissed over bars on its way from Euston Station to Belfast.”
    “Much of it, no doubt,” McGarr said. He was acquainted with the habits of professional quasi-revolutionaries. It was a bunko game much practiced by a certain type of Irishman in London.
    Horrigan poured himself another drink. “You know, she was always swinging between feeling guilty for having so much money to feeling inadequate that she hadn’t had the money for very long at all. I told her that if the money bothered her so much I’d put some in a blind bank trust and she could go back to Cork and live the simple life.”
    “And?”
    “Oh, Christ! It’s gotten so I can’t open my mouth in her presence. She called me a cheap bastard who with ill-gotten millions would deny her and her children the necessities of life.”
    McGarr stood, walked to the sideboard, poured himself another drink, and raising the glass to his mouth, looked directly into Horrigan’s eyes. He asked, “Did you try to murder Bobby Ovens? Is that why you called me here? I’ll find your fingerprints on that winch handle, blood spatters on your clothes, you know.”
    Again Horrigan was surprised that McGarr had jumped ahead of him. He looked away,out the French windows, into the courtyard below. “No, I didn’t. Of all her…‘flings,’ I think I liked him the best. At least he was genuine and not interested in her money.”
    “I understand she’s a beautiful woman.”
    “Yes, she is that. Perhaps too beautiful.”
    “Younger than you?”
    Horrigan was now becoming drunk. His eyes were filling. “Not in years.”
    “Do you think she tried to murder Ovens?”
    Horrigan tried to take a big sip from the tumbler. The fluid splashed on his upper lip. He coughed. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he explained, “I got a telephone call from her Friday night. She wanted to know what I could do to hush up the whole thing. She told me she didn’t do it but said the whole situation would prove terribly embarrassing for all of us, me included, should all the facts be known. I told her I couldn’t do a thing. She berated me, as usual, for being spineless and, you know, ‘bourgeois.’”
    “Where is she now?”
    “I don’t know. I had the call traced and the operator told me it came from a coin box in Dublin.”
    “Do you know about the flat in Ballsbridge?”
    “I do now.”
    “You mean since you checked the running log in my office. That’s what you were doing in the Castle, wasn’t it?”
    Sheepishly, Horrigan nodded his head.
    “Then your telling me that somebody stole the report was phony.”
    “No. Somebody stole it.”
    “But not the IRA. What reason would they have for wanting to ruin you? When you come right down to it, you’re their best friend in the present government. Already some of the investigating officers have leaked enough information to the press to implicate them. When the report comes out, they’ll just say some fanatic did it.”
    Horrigan shook his head. “No, not the IRA, at least from what I can learn from the sources I have in the