The Forgotten Holocaust

  ‘Then you’ll know who its director is,’ Erin said.

  ‘Uh-huh. Sure. Everyone in Tulsa knows that.’

  ‘I’m her personal assistant. I answer directly to her. It’s a rewarding job, but I have a lot of responsibility and it gets stressful sometimes.’

  Get in line, Morrell’s expression was saying.

  ‘My boss and her husband own a cabin out on the east shore of Oologah Lake,’ Erin went on. ‘Three days ago …’

  He listened as she went on with her story. It wasn’t long before his look of boredom vanished completely. He wasn’t looking at his watch any more. The leg stopped swinging. He shifted into a more alert posture, watching her intently and the crease in his brow deepening. He looked as if he was having trouble keeping his jaw from gaping open. By the time she’d told the whole story, he was off the desk and pacing the room in agitation. ‘You’re sure?’ he kept asking her.

  ‘If you don’t believe me, watch the video,’ she said, placing a hand on the backpack. ‘It’s all here. Everything I just told you.’

  Morrell stared at her for several intense seconds, then held up a hand. ‘Wait here and don’t move. I’ll be right back.’ He strode hurriedly out of the room, shutting the door hard behind him.

  Erin waited in the empty room for a couple of minutes before the door burst open again. She looked up to see a large, square-shouldered man enter the room, with Morrell in his wake. He was several inches taller than the detective, and twenty years older, with thinning silver hair and a severe, granite face. His cheeks were flushed red with broken veins and his nose looked as if it had been broken at least twice in his life. He wore no jacket. A large black revolver hung heavily from the tan leather shoulder holster strapped over his shirt. Old-time cop, old-time six-gun. His sleeves were rolled up to expose the thick, gnarled forearms of a lumberjack. He planted himself in front of Erin and scrutinised her coldly.

  ‘I’m Chief O’Rourke,’ he said in a gravelly voice. ‘I want you to repeat to me what you just told Detective Morrell here.’

  Feeling small in her chair, Erin peered up at his intimidating bulk. ‘You want me to start over from the beginning?’

  ‘Just from where your employer said you could use the cabin on Oologah Lake. Why was that?’

  ‘Why did she let me use it?’ Erin shrugged. ‘Because she’s a nice person and we get along, I guess.’

  ‘Heart-warming. Keep going.’

  ‘I’d been complaining about feeling tired, and she said I could use it to get away for a weekend, unwind. She said the place would be empty, her husband was away in Boston on business, their son Sean was canoeing in Canada with friends and their daughter Amy was in Paris studying at this fancy cookery school. When I said my car was having problems, she offered for the family driver, Joe, to take me there in the Cadillac. So off I went, all happy with myself, looking forward to doing some running. I already told all this to Detective Morrell.’

  ‘Running?’ O’Rourke asked, as if this gave him grounds for deep suspicion.

  ‘Came fourth in the Tulsa city marathon last year, and I’m meaning to better that this November, to help raise funds for the Desert Rose Trust. But that’s not what you want to hear, is it?’

  ‘No, I want to hear what happened next, every detail.’

  ‘What happened next was I hung around there all evening, didn’t do a lot, went to bed. I woke up hearing voices. I snuck out of bed, thinking it was intruders. I had my handgun with me and—’

  ‘You have a carry permit for that?’ Chief O’Rourke interrupted.

  Erin frowned. ‘Is this about them or about me?’ she wanted to snap at him. She kept her voice level and asked instead, ‘You want to see it?’

  ‘Later. Go on.’

  ‘But it wasn’t intruders. They’d let themselves in the door with a key, and a few moments later I realised why. Angela’s husband wasn’t in Boston, he was there using the place to entertain a bunch of business associates. Or so I thought. One of them was a man with a beard. Caucasian, dark hair, forties.’

  ‘The victim,’ Morrell explained.

  ‘You didn’t get a name?’ O’Rourke asked Erin without glancing back at his colleague.

  ‘I never heard it mentioned. There wasn’t exactly a lot of conversation going on from the point I joined the party, you know? Then soon afterwards, an argument broke out. They grabbed hold of this bearded man and threw him on the floor and—’

  ‘Hold on,’ O’Rourke cut in. ‘They?’

  ‘The two goons. I don’t know what you’d call them. Heavies. Henchmen. They started beating the crap out of the guy with batons, like the ones that cops and security guards use. Then he ordered them to take him outside.’

  ‘He?’ O’Rourke cut in again.

  Erin nodded. ‘Yes, he. Angela’s husband. He said, “Not here”, like he didn’t want blood on the rug or something. So these two thugs, they got hold of the bearded man and kind of dragged him out the door to the veranda. That’s where they shot him.’

  ‘How many shots were fired?’ O’Rourke asked.

  ‘I can’t say for sure. Three, four. They didn’t kill him at first. It was like they were playing with him. Torturing him, just for the fun of it. He was watching the whole time. Then he took out a gun. It was a big old revolver, like that one.’ Erin pointed at the weapon in O’Rourke’s shoulder holster. ‘Maybe a forty-four. Except it was bright, not blued. Stainless steel or nickel, I can’t say for sure.’

  ‘Know your hardware, Miss Hayes,’ O’Rourke said, looking at her penetratingly, and so intently that his pale grey eyes never seemed to blink.

  ‘My daddy taught me to shoot,’ she replied.

  ‘You like your weaponry, huh?’

  Erin looked at him. What was O’Rourke doing, trying to paint her up as a gun nut? ‘I’m a woman in the modern world,’ she said. ‘One who’d rather not wind up a victim.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ O’Rourke said, waving his hand impatiently. ‘Save it. What happened next?’

  ‘Next? He aimed it at the guy and fired.’

  O’Rourke gravely pursed his lips. ‘You’re saying he personally shot the guy. Pulled the trigger himself. Deliberately.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been more deliberate,’ Erin said. ‘He shot the guy right in the back of the head from just a couple of feet away. Then he ordered the other two guys to take the body away, cut it up and get rid of it.’

  ‘Cut it up? He said that?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘You know what, he might have said “chop his ass up”. If you want an exact quote.’

  O’Rourke caught the pointed tone of her words and gave a snort. ‘Okay. And how did he sound when he was instructing them to do that?’

  ‘He sounded just like himself.’

  ‘Sober?’

  ‘Stone cold.’

  ‘Calm and rational?’

  ‘Like he did it every day,’ Erin said. ‘The way you’d ask the help to carry out the trash.’

  ‘So you’re saying he was in charge of this whole deal.’

  Erin understood that O’Rourke was being extremely careful to confirm every detail of her story. Under the circumstances, she’d have done the same. But did he believe her? She tried to read his expression and could see only a severe glower. She nodded vehemently. ‘Absolutely. The whole time. Everything that happened, happened because he ordered it. No question.’

  ‘And you’d testify to that?’

  ‘So would the video,’ she replied. ‘It’ll prove everything I just told you.’

  O’Rourke exhaled noisily through his nose. Stepped away from Erin and exchanged a quick glance with Morrell. ‘And you haven’t told anyone else about this?’ he asked her after a moment’s heavy silence.

  ‘Nobody, not even my boss. I just spent the last two days hiding in a goddamn motel room wondering whether to call her. I decided against it. Now I’m here.’

  ‘You understand the seriousness of this allegation, Miss Haye
s?’ O’Rourke said.

  ‘Look, I’m not an idiot,’ Erin replied, fighting to contain her frustration. ‘I know what it means. I know how bad it sounds and what the implications are for this whole city. But I also know what I saw. The man I witnessed ordering the beating and shooting of this other man, and then blowing the guy’s brains out himself, personally, of his own volition and free will or whatever the hell the law calls it, is the husband of my boss, Angela McCrory.’

  The cops were silent, staring.

  Erin said, ‘He’s Finn McCrory, the mayor of Tulsa.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ben’s first glimpse of the derelict mansion was the craggy remnants of its east wing that appeared over the brow of the hill as he approached along the lonely country road. The mid-afternoon sun was bright and hot now that the rain had passed over, and he drove fast with the windows open, catching the scent of heather and the distant salt tang of the sea. As the car sped over the top of the hill and began the winding descent towards Glenfell House, the full extent of the place’s ruined state came into view.

  He had driven by this lonely spot once or twice before, during the time he’d lived in Ireland. And he’d heard the age-old legends from the leathery, salty grey-bearded old men who hunched over whiskies and pints of the black stuff in the back rooms of pubs, fixing their glittering eye like Coleridge’s ancient mariner on anyone who’d listen, and not leaving much choice to those who wouldn’t.

  From one generation to the next, nobody had ever known for sure who’d really started the fire of September 1851 that had gutted the west wing and brought down part of the roof: the most enduring tale was that it had been Lord Edgar Stamford himself, gone mad and intent on burning the place to the ground and himself with it.

  If that was true, then the suicidal part of his plan had succeeded, even if Stamford hadn’t been much of an arsonist and the fire had burnt itself out before it could claim the whole house. According to the more colourful legends, all that had remained of the burly six-foot-six hulk of the much-disliked lord was a half-roasted corpse identifiable only by the gold family ring on one blackened, claw-like hand and the engraved pocket watch they’d found in a charred waistcoat pocket. So the story went, the reason that nothing had ever been done to save the gutted mansion from falling into total ruin was the legacy of its association with Stamford’s harsh and despotic rule over the peasant tenants who’d worked his land, and died on it like flies during the Great Famine of ’47. Memories like that would take another five hundred years to die.

  Glenfell House itself was dying much faster, as Ben was reminded when he rolled the BMW up outside and got out to wander about the grounds. Over a hundred and sixty years of decay had reduced the place to a melancholy shell. It was common knowledge locally that much of its crumbling stonework and more than a few roofing slates had found their way into the construction of a good many of the county’s farmhouses, cottages and outbuildings during the twentieth century. The endlessly cycling seasons had done the rest. Autumn and spring rains had rotted the timbers to black stumps, winter frosts had driven deep cracks into the stone floors, from which the summer sun had coaxed thick growths of nettles and brambles that encircled the ruins like barbed wire. They hadn’t kept everyone out, though, judging by the empty spirits bottles and beer cans rolling in the dirt and the remnants of a fire. What the roofless mansion lacked in shelter for the vagrants who loitered here, it made up for in privacy. Nobody else ever came near the place any more.

  Ben wandered about the desolate site for a few more minutes, kicking a can around in the dust and thinking about Kristen’s notebook in his pocket. Then he walked back to the car, fired up the engine and spun it around in the opposite direction, heading for the small market town of Glenfell, two miles west.

  Back in the heyday of Lord Stamford’s little empire, the town had been surrounded by a plethora of even tinier hamlets and primitive rack-rent smallholdings, now mostly swallowed up by its expanding outskirts. To say it had been a poor area back then was no understatement. Among its older greystone buildings was the former workhouse, where during the famine years forty or more orphaned children a week died from malnutrition or disease, the living and the dead often hard to tell apart and lying together in the same beds for days at a time. Ben had heard all the stories, unforgotten scars on the history of this and so many other towns and villages across Ireland.

  As if to symbolise happier times, the grim old stone workhouse had long ago been turned into a thriving country store where farmers’ pickup trucks came and went, and its yard was now a car park where Ben left the BMW as he went off in search of St Malachy’s church. On his way there, he passed the town’s famine memorial, a marble slab that had been erected nearly a hundred and twenty years after the tragedy it commemorated. Ben paused to gaze at it, then walked on.

  It was just after five as he entered the coolness of the church. It wasn’t big, and it wasn’t especially pretty either, but there was a still, echoey serenity to the place that Ben found familiar and comforting. He tried to remember the last time he’d been inside a church, and realised how long it had been: a painful little reminder of how lapsed a Christian he was. But he could at least console himself, from a glance at the empty pews, that he wasn’t the only one around here who’d been neglecting God.

  The sound of his footsteps drifted up to the high ceiling as he paced slowly around, pausing for a moment to look at the plaque on one wall dedicated to the 8,348 men, women and children whose skeletons had been unearthed from the mass famine grave discovered outside Glenfell in 1922.

  Walking away from the plaque, he went over to sit in a pew facing the altar, bowed his head and tried to summon up devout thoughts. None in particular came to him, so he just said the words that were in his heart.

  ‘Here we go again, Lord. It’s been a while, I realise that. I don’t try and talk to you as often as I should. Maybe that’s why you keep putting trouble in my path, when all I ever wanted was a life of peace. I don’t know why else you would. I only know I didn’t ask for this. So please don’t judge me for the things I have to do, and please give me the strength I need to do them well. That’s all I can ask of you now.’

  He broke off as he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, and glanced round to see the priest walking in. He was old and stooped, with a kindly smile appearing as he saw Ben sitting there. As if not wanting to disturb one of the faithful at their prayer, he began to turn away.

  ‘Father Flanagan?’ Ben said, getting up.

  The old priest paused in his step and looked at Ben, still smiling. ‘I’m Father Flanagan. I didn’t wish to interrupt you. That sounded like a very heartfelt prayer.’

  ‘I’ve been saying it a long time,’ Ben said. ‘I sometimes don’t think he listens.’

  ‘He always listens,’ the priest said, putting his hand on Ben’s arm.

  ‘In any case, it’s you I came to talk to,’ Ben said. ‘If you have a moment.’

  ‘Of course. How may I help you?’

  Ben couldn’t bring himself to give a false name this time, but his piety didn’t extend to telling the whole truth, or much of it at all. He told the priest that he worked for a research foundation that was doing a project on the history of the Great Famine, and was taking over from his colleague who’d suddenly been taken ill.

  ‘She was here a few days ago and I’m trying to pick up the pieces. I think you saw her, spoke to her?’

  The priest took in Ben’s description of Kristen, and nodded. ‘Yes, she was asking to see the old parish registers. Struck me as a very meticulous young lady. Asked me if the records were accurate. I replied, as far as I know they are. Why shouldn’t they be? But, oh dear, did you say she’d fallen ill? Nothing too serious, I hope.’

  ‘Pretty serious, I’m afraid,’ Ben said.

  ‘What a pity. What a terrible pity. Such a sweet child. So what is it I can do for you, Mr … Hope, was it?’

  ‘If it’s not imposing, father, perhap
s if I could view the same records she did, it might help me make sense of her notes. I’d ask her myself, but …’

  ‘I understand, of course. Dear me, what a shame. Imposition? Not at all, not at all. Come with me, my son.’

  Leading him around a crunchy gravel path to the back of the church, Father Flanagan took a large iron key from his pocket, unlocked a peeling old door and showed Ben into an office that was like taking a step back into history. The place looked as if it had been gathering dust since about 1750, and it probably had. A powerful odour of damp hung in the air.

  ‘This is where all the old records are still kept,’ the priest said with a regretful look, waving an arm at stacks of ancient, yellowed registers on sagging shelves. ‘Births, deaths, marriages, even emigration records dating back to the century before last. Nowadays a lot of parish records are going online, but I’m afraid that’ll be my successor’s job. I’m not one for all this new technology. Don’t even have a television, can you believe that?’ He gave a sad, wizened smile, then seemed to catch his mind wandering and snapped himself back to the present. ‘Now then, the records. I can barely remember the last time anybody wanted to look at them. Now I get two come along in a week. Such are the mysteries of life. What was it you were after?’

  ‘The information my colleague left me was pretty incomplete,’ Ben said. ‘She was interested in the life history of a particular member of the parish here.’

  ‘I do remember her saying so,’ Father Flanagan said, scratching his white head. ‘But sure, for the life of me, I can’t recall the details. What was this person’s year of birth?’

  ‘1809,’ Ben said.

  ‘Hmm. That is a long way back. If it’s here, you may have to dig for it. What was the name?’

  ‘Padraig someone,’ Ben said.

  Father Flanagan looked at him. ‘That’s all you have, Padraig someone who was born in 1809? My son, have you any idea how many Padraigs have lived in this parish over the centuries? You’re talking to one of them.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyhow. All yours, and good luck. Take as long as you need, and bring me back the key when you’re done.’