Redemption - Leon Uris [79]
“Is that why Kevin called off the investigation of the factory? Did Roger Hubble pay him to set me and the others up in business? Is that it?”
“I don’t know,” she croaked.
“Say what you will, I’ve been betrayed by Kevin O’Garvey and probably Andrew Ingram as well. Well…I’m not taking their path. Kevin will tell me, the minute he returns from London, if he made the deal with Roger Hubble. We are going to close that fecking factory down. As for you, Maudie, stop, quit. Don’t go work there another day. I’m bloody sick of Conor Larkin!”
He felt her hand on his bowed head.
“That’s the way they do it, mon. If a golden one like yourself or Garvey shows you mean to take them on, they merely ease you into their system.”
“Maudie…Maudie…don’t go back into that factory.” “Soon, Conor, soon.”
28
What force, what combination offerees, could generate enough power to drive Conor Larkin out of Ireland?
Was it the fire at the Witherspoon & McNab shirt factory?
What was overdue to happen, happened. In the mining towns and out on sea you’re struck numb with fright when the disaster whistle screams ugly. As the whistle pierces over and over and over you move into desperate action gravitating in a run toward the trouble, gasping prayer, heart close to a burst, the most vile of fears consuming yourself.
The first thin spirals of smoke eked through the cracks into the air. Then came the blasts like cannonades shattering glass for a mile around, felling the on rushers, covering their ears as a hundred tongues of fire leapt from the factory windows.
There! On the rooftop! Women and children had gathered screaming their terror, dropping to their knees in prayer.
Fire bells! Whinnying, frothing horses!
Neither ladders nor water horses could reach the roof.
“They’re jumping!”
Conor and his mates pinned Myles McCracken to the ground as Maud leapt. Conor rushed over to pick her up. She broke in half. Myles and Maud’s unborn child splattered like a broken egg on the paving stones.
A blue and orange ball billowed over the top floors in an all-consuming inferno. Within the building, the hollow cast-iron pillars splintered, cracked, then burst apart, and the factory gave up quickly and collapsed.
With the broken corpses laid out on a streetside morgue, another hour and another of water, pumping the River Foyle dry, poured in on the sizzling remains until the firemen could inch in.
Human fragments, skulls, a braid of hair, charred rosary beads, a shoe, bits, pieces, teeth, glasses, rings. Forty children under teen age…sixty pregnant women…a hundred and fifty-four, maybe more, maybe a few less…
Hail Mary…
Too few positive identifications. A common grave. Perhaps God would recognize them.
What could drive a Conor Larkin from Ireland? Was it the sudden and unexplained disappearance of Kevin O’Garvey?
Where did Kevin go? Why? What did Kevin know? Did they do away with him? Did he flee? We have to have Kevin O’Garvey or there is no chance of justice in Bogside…if there ever was, anyhow. Kevin man, where are you, now?
Would disgust over the cover-up have driven Conor Larkin out of Ireland?
Martin Mulligan, a vagrant, was picked up for arson. Mulligan had worked at the factory stables years earlier, had been fired, and had sworn he was going to wreak vengeance. Mulligan signed a confession that several Catholic constables swore to at the inquiry. The next morning, after confessing, Mulligan was found hanged in his cell. It was deemed a suicide.
Twenty witnesses at the inquiry testified that Mulligan