Page 87 of Road Trip
“Not this time,” Angela said. “I deputized Maddie to supervise. And you know how precise she is with everything. She’ll have her meat thermometer at the ready.”
A long tablecovered in a red-and-white-checked tablecloth had been set up on the patio, and now a dozen or so Grogans were seated on folding chairs, passing platters of hamburgers, bratwurst, and side dishes.
Liam steered her to two empty seats at the end of the table, beside his cousin Maddie and her husband. “Mads, you remember Maeve, right? And Jamie, this is my friend Maeve.”
“Hello,” Jamie said shyly. He glanced over at his wife, and then back to Maeve. “So nice to meet you.”
“And you,” Maeve said. Jamie was in his late forties, she guessed. He had a long, narrow face, was balding, and his wire-rimmed glasses and white dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves lent him a vaguely professorial look.
“Mads tells me you’re curious about the IRA raid at Tarrymore. I’m not sure how helpful I can be. Liam says this has something to do with a portrait that was among the paintings that were stolen?”
“Yes, a portrait of Lady Geraldine Fitzhugh is what I’m specifically interested in.”
He nodded. “How much do you know about the robbery?”
“Really, only the basics I learned from newspaper clippings and local gossip.”
“Right,” he said, removing his glasses and wiping them on a napkin. “So I’ll tell you the version I pieced together, over the years.”
Maddie stood. “I’ll go suss out the pudding situation, shall I? While you two talk?”
“Lovely,” Jamie said, launching directly into his story.
“My mother’s given name was Margaret, but she was called Peggy. Her father, my granddad, was a solicitor, in the city.”
“You mean London?”
“Yes. They were well-fixed, and my mum was their only child. She was quite bright, always very interested in science. She was keen to go to university, at Oxford, where she’d applied and won a scholarship to study chemistry, but my granddad was an old-fashioned sort and didn’t see the need for well-bred girls to fill their heads with formulas and numbers and such when they were only supposed to marry well and produce a respectable number of grandchildren for him to dote on. But my mother was a stubborn sort. Finally, she wore Granddad down, and along she went to Oxford, which is where her life… changed.”
“How so?”
“How do most good women come to a sorry ending?” Jamie said. “It was the ’70s, and that was a time of tremendous upheaval in Ireland, and England. She met a man at Oxford named Danny Dwyer, who happened to be a member of the IRA. He was the one who radicalized her and recruited her to join the gang.
“She’d have been a valuable asset,” Jamie said, “because she looked like what she was, up until then, a sweet, well-bred, freckle-faced lass. But that sweet-faced girl knew how to shoot—my granddad owned a country estate in the Cotswolds, so she was hunting rabbit, deer, and partridge before she was a teen. And her chemistry background was helpful too—for building bombs.”
Maeve was riveted by Jamie’s story. “So that’s how this Peggy became Starr?”
“In a nutshell. At some point, her lover, Dwyer, came back to Dublin, and she followed. Not long after she joined up, three members of their gang were sent to prison, charged with bombing a postoffice where two people, including a postal worker, were killed. The gang needed to do something quickly—because what if the jailed members decided to rat out the rest of them? They wanted them out of that prison.”
“So—an art heist?” Maeve asked. “Seems far-fetched.”
Jamie’s laugh was mirthless. “If brains were dynamite most of those mopes couldn’t even have blown their own noses. Supposedly Danny Dwyer came up with the idea—to kidnap a wealthy family and demand a huge ransom, and the release of their pals. Somehow, they latched onto the Rossingtons. My mum was supposedly the one who suggested that the gang kidnap the family’s art collection instead.”
Maeve wished Therese were with her right now, to take down notes and ask questions. “Go on,” she said.
“There were four of them: my mum, Starr; her boyfriend Dwyer; plus another man, Eddie Keane; and one more, a young guy who was to be the driver and lookout.”
“And your mother, she was the one who knocked at the door to the Tarrymore servants’ entrance?” Maeve asked.
He nodded. “The butler tried to resist and got a pistol-whipping from Dwyer as his thanks. His jaw was broken, but he did take them to the study, where the lord and his lady were watching the BBC. Keane, the other gang member, hit Lady Rossington in the face with his gun. Then they tied them up, stole the art, and made their getaway.”
Maeve was picturing the portrait gallery at Tarrymore, remembering the study, with its paneled walls and worn leather sofas, faded oriental carpet and rows and rows of leather-bound books. Hard to believe that such a terrifying crime could occur in such a stately setting. But then she remembered a more ghastly crime, a murder, had happened in that same mansion fifty years earlier, the night her great-grandmother had taken flight to emigrate to the States.
“That’s an incredible story. Like something out of a caper movie. The tour guide at Tarrymore said the thieves were apprehended pretty quickly. How did that happen?”
Jamie looked down toward the other end of the table, at his wife, who was busy filling plates with slices of cake. “Do they have schoolchildren memorize poetry in the States?”
“They did in Catholic schools. I can still recite almost all of ‘Song of Hiawatha,’ and bits and pieces of various Robert Frost poems,” Maeve said.
