‘And you went with him?’
That caught her by surprise.
‘I suppose you might say that.’
‘Your father didn’t relent, where your brother was concerned?’
‘They didn’t speak for years, the two of them. Anyone else would have been proud to have a son in the priesthood. Not Daddy.’ She gazed off into the mist. ‘I believe he lost his religion after all that cruel fighting in the wars – he was in the 1916 Rising, in the War of Independence and then the Civil War. He must have seen terrible things. “I’ll pray for you to be at peace,” those were Tom’s last words to him, before he went off to the seminary.’
She stepped away from Strafford, to the brink of the stony ledge.
‘It took a long time for Daddy to reconcile himself to the fact that someone had stood up to him and got away with it.’ Her nose was red from the cold and her eyes were watering – or were those tears on her cheeks? She didn’t seem the weeping kind. ‘I suppose all this is foreign to you – the fight for freedom, all that? I’m assuming you’re not a Catholic.’
‘Protestants fought in all those wars you mentioned,’ he said, ‘and not a few of them on the nationalist side.’
‘Yes, and your people suffered too, and weren’t thanked for it. I’m well aware of that. We all suffered. I sometimes wonder if it was worth it – if independence, so-called, was worth even one life.’ Suddenly, to his surprise, she smiled, for the first time since his coming here. ‘I must say,’ she said, ‘you were a surprise, when you turned up out of the blue. Do you mind me asking why you became a policeman? Most of the men recruited for the Guards, when the Force was set up, were former gunmen, after all – the people who killed your people.’
Far off, the clouds parted for a moment, and a shaft of sunlight struck through the mist like a searchlight, but was soon doused. More snow was on the way, he could feel it.
‘Perhaps, like your brother, I felt I had to take a stand, make a break for freedom.’
He heard himself say it and knew it wasn’t true. But why then had he ‘joined up’? He didn’t know. He must have known, once, but if so he had forgotten. Sometimes he thought he should give up policing and try something else – but what? He had never wanted to be anything in particular, until somehow he hit on the idea of ‘going for the Guards’, which was how he learned to put it. His father had been at first amused, then baffled, then angry, though of course he would not say so.
‘Freedom?’ Rosemary Lawless said now, seizing on the word. ‘Tom wasn’t free. Oh, he played at being the new kind of priest, going all over the place and seeing people, staying at their houses – Ballyglass was his favourite, of course – riding to hounds, all that kind of thing. But that wasn’t him. That was only how he wanted people to think he was, while all the time he was someone else.’
‘I see.’
She pounced again. ‘Do you?’ she almost snarled. ‘Do you see? I very much doubt you do.’
‘No,’ he conceded, ‘I’m sure you’re right. I’m not very good on people and why they do the things they do. Which is not very good, in a detective.’
He smiled, but she took no notice. They had turned and were walking back the way they had come. The path was so narrow that in places they had to go in single file. A cattle truck went past on the road below them, the same one, by the look of it, Strafford thought, that had driven up behind him yesterday and honked at him derisively.
‘He had secrets,’ Rosemary Lawless said. ‘I could see it in his face, the way it would change sometimes. When I looked at him I saw two people, the priest that everyone knew, Father Tom, the life and soul of the party, and then the other one, hiding in there, behind his eyes.’
‘Do you think he was unhappy?’
‘I think he was in torment.’ She was impassive, her dull grey gaze fixed straight before her. ‘I said it already,’ she went on, ‘he should never have gone for the priesthood. But once he was in, that was it. I don’t believe he fully realised, before he went, that he was letting himself in for a life sentence. All he could think of was getting away from Daddy, by whatever means.’
She stumbled on a loose piece of rock and he put a hand under her elbow to support her. She righted herself, and drew away immediately from his touch.
‘Did you try to persuade him away from the priesthood?’ he asked.
‘Me?’ she scoffed. ‘Who ever listens to me? Anyway, I was young, I had no voice in the house. Daddy had this smile he would put on whenever I spoke up about something, a little sort of twitch at the side of his mouth, that’s all it was, but, oh my, it said so much about what he thought of me.’
They were almost at the house now, descending the last of the slope, and the ground underfoot was a treacherous mixture of mud and ice and slippery gravel. Strafford watched the figure in black making her way ahead of him. She was trapped, just like her brother, but his had been a roomier cage.
She was fumbling for the keys in the pockets of the outsized overcoat she was wearing. ‘This was Tom’s coat,’ she said, ‘his Sunday best. Someone might as well get some use out of it, and it might as well be me. It still smells of the Churchman’s cigarettes he used to smoke. He joked that maybe he could get them to pay him to do an advertisement for them: “A Churchman’s for a churchman.”’ They were on the doorstep, and now she turned to him, with a sudden, intense light in her eyes. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened to him?’ she said. ‘Are you going to show me that much respect?’
17
He spared her the worst of it, more out of cowardice than consideration. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her what had been done to her brother as he lay dying. What would be the point of her knowing that detail? With luck, she would never hear of it – no newspaper in the country would dare print such shocking facts.
What he did tell her was bad enough. As he spoke, he stood by the coke stove in the kitchen, batting his hat against his thigh, while she sat on the straight chair with her ankles crossed and her hands clamped on her knees. She wept without tears, her shoulders heaving, now and then letting fall a harsh, dry sob.
‘But who would kill him like that, sticking a knife in him?’ she wailed softly, looking up at him in a kind of desperate wonderment. ‘He never did any harm to anybody.’ She closed her eyes, and he saw the traceries of tiny blue veins in the stretched, paper-thin lids.
‘I told him,’ she said bitterly, ‘I warned him not to be going to that house, not to be mixing with those people and trying to pretend he was one of them. They only laughed at him behind his back. Colonel Osborne was forever telling people how he allowed Tom to keep his horse in the stables there, letting them think he wasn’t charging him, while in fact Tom was paying him through the nose for the privilege. They’re great at that kind of thing, the Protestants, lording it over us and pretending everything they do for us is a favour, and then pocketing our money without a word of acknowledgement.’ She stopped, and her brow coloured a little. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but it’s true.’
He said nothing. He felt no resentment. Both sides in this troubled country had their cause for bitterness.
A robin redbreast flew on to the windowsill and stood with head aslant, as if to eavesdrop. He had seen a robin yesterday, too, somewhere. It was the time of year for them. Christmas. Yule logs. Holly wreaths. Loneliness.
I, said the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin.
‘You felt your brother had secrets,’ Strafford said, in a mild and purposely distracted tone, for Rosemary Lawless was just as liable to take fright as the bird outside on the sill. ‘Do you know what they might have been?’
She shook her head, tight-lipped.
‘He didn’t talk to me,’ she said. ‘He used to, when he was young. He was afraid of Daddy – we both were – and sometimes he’d say something about that.’
‘What would he say? – what kind of thing?’
‘Just – oh, just that he couldn’t sleep, thinking about him.�
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‘Did your father beat him?’
‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘He never laid a finger on him. Or on me. He was never violent like that. Only—’
‘Only?’ he prompted.
‘He didn’t need to hit us. All he had to do was look at us, that was all.’ She shifted on the chair, and when she spoke again it was as much to herself as to him. ‘They were very close, you see, the two of them. It was funny. Tommy was afraid of Daddy, and yet he was – yet he was attached to him. There was a bond between them that excluded other people, me especially. They were like – I don’t know. Like a magician and his assistant.’
The robin flew away. Random flakes of snow drifted past the window, swaying as they fell.
Snow falls absent-mindedly, Strafford thought, absent-mindedly.
‘Was that what you meant when you said he was in torment?’ he asked.
She looked up, frowning. ‘What? What do you mean, torment?’
‘You said it earlier, that your brother was in torment. That was the word you used.’
‘Was it?’ She looked at her hands gripping her knees. The knuckles were white. ‘Isn’t everybody in torment, more or less, in this world? My father, too, he must have been tormented, otherwise he wouldn’t have—’ She stopped, still staring at her hands.
Strafford waited, then said, ‘Wouldn’t have what, Miss Lawless? What wouldn’t he have done?’
‘He would have let poor Tom sleep at night, instead of making him worry and fret.’ Her voice sounded faraway and dreamy.
They were silent for a moment, as if at the passing of some dark thing in the air.
‘You haven’t mentioned your mother.’
‘Haven’t I?’ She had begun to rock herself back and forth on the chair. It was a tiny movement, almost imperceptible, in time perhaps with her heart’s metronome.
‘Mammy didn’t get a look-in, not where Tom and my father were concerned. I’m only a piece of furniture, she said to me one day, I remember it. She was standing there, just there where you’re standing now. She was looking out of that window. It wasn’t like today, it was summer, the sun was shining. I was sitting at this table, doing my homework. History. I was always good at history. She was so quiet I’d forgotten she was standing there, behind me, and then suddenly she said it, with no more feeling than if she was commenting on the weather: I’m only a piece of furniture.’
Strafford looked down at her. He had the feeling something had occurred that he had missed. It was something to do with the priest and his father. Something she knew without knowing she knew it. Something she had suppressed.
‘And she’s still alive, yes?’ he asked. ‘She’s still living, your mother?’
‘Yes,’ Rosemary Lawless answered dully.
She said nothing more for a long time, then a sort of shiver ran through her, from her shoulders all the way to her crossed ankles.
‘What am I going to do?’ she said, with a new, quick urgency. ‘What am I going to do, now? They’ll put me out – there’ll be a new parish priest and I’ll have to vacate the house. Where will I go?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps you might live with your mother? You know what they say about home, that no matter what happens or what you do, when you go there they have to take you in.’
Suddenly the woman laughed, shrilly, flaring her nostrils and letting her teeth show.
‘Oh, yes,’ she cried, ‘oh yes, where Mammy is, they’d take me in there, all right. She’s in the madhouse, up in Enniscorthy. All are welcome, there.’
18
He drove as fast as he dared through the town and out on to the Ballyglass road. His pulse was racing, and his palms were moist on the steering wheel. There was a nightmare he had, it recurred with awful frequency, of being trapped in the dark in what seemed to be a sort of fish tank, filled not with water but some heavy, viscous liquid. To escape from the tank he had to clamber up the side, his fingers and toes squeaking on the glass, and heave himself over the rim and squirm off into the darkness over a smooth, slimed floor.
The snow was falling heavily, coming down in big flabby flakes the size of Communion wafers and lodging in icy clumps around the edges of the windscreen and making the wipers groan against the glass. The frozen mist was thicker now, so that he had to press his face close to the windscreen, squinting and blinking, until his chin was almost resting on the top of the steering wheel.
When he looked at the dashboard clock, he was surprised to see that it was only a little after eleven. Since his arrival the previous day in Ballyglass, time had become a different medium, moving not in a seamless flow, but jerkily, now speeding up, now slowing to an underwater pace. It was as if he had strayed on to another plane, on to another planet, where the familiar, earthbound rules had all been suspended.
He thought of telephoning Hackett and asking to be taken off the case, this case in which he was floundering, and in the slime of which he might drown.
The priest’s death had seemed at first just another crime, much like any other, except more violent than most. It had not been long before he realised how mistaken that first impression had been. Everything was upended, everything swayed and wallowed. He was in the tank again, up to his neck, and each time he managed to get himself out and flop on to the floor he was scooped up by invisible hands and tossed back in.
He arrived at last at the Sheaf of Barley. He went into the bar. The place was empty, and had the mysteriously dishevelled air that bars always have at that time of day. He should phone Hackett and ask his advice. Hackett would help him, would bring him to his senses, those senses he felt he was in danger of losing.
The encounter with Rosemary Lawless had shaken him, in a way he didn’t quite understand. He had felt, in that cold stone house, and then out on the cold hillside, the touch of something that was new to him, something impalpable that yet was vividly there, like a freezing fog. Was it evil he had encountered, at last? He had never believed in evil as a force in itself – there was no evil, he always insisted, there were only evil deeds. But was he mistaken?
He went up to his room and lay down on the unmade bed, still in his overcoat. Going down that morning for breakfast he had left the window open a crack, to air the room, and now it was so cold he could see his breath, rising above him like billows of thin, quickly moving smoke.
He had slipped into a restless doze when he heard the door opening, and he jerked upright as if he had been pulled by a string. For a second he didn’t know where he was – why was there all this white light around him? – but then he turned and saw Peggy in the doorway, looking at him in surprise and seeming about to laugh. She had a stack of folded linen over her arm, and was carrying a bucket and a mop.
‘Oh, pardon me,’ she said in a tone of mock accusation. ‘I thought you were gone out.’
He rubbed a hand roughly over his face, grimacing. Then he rolled off the mattress – the bed was uncommonly high – and set his feet unsteadily on the floor. He felt distanced from himself. This, he imagined, must be what it would be like to be drunk.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice slurring. ‘I did go out, but now I’m back.’
Peggy snorted. ‘Well, I can see that for myself!’
She dumped the linen on the bed and put down the mop and the pail. He felt shy and slightly ridiculous in her presence. She had a way of tucking in her chin and looking at him with a teasingly humorous light in her eyes.
‘Do you sleep here?’ he asked, and went on quickly, ‘I mean, have you a room here, that you stay in?’
She pointed a finger towards the ceiling. ‘Up there. And I’d hardly call it a room – more a cupboard with a cot in it.’ She gave a throaty chuckle. ‘You should come up and see it some time. I only stay there when I’m working late. I live over at Otterbridge, with my Ma and Da.’
‘So you slept here the night before last?’
‘I did.’
‘I wonder if you heard anyone going out, late? It would have been long aft
er midnight.’
She shrugged her plump shoulders. ‘I never hear anyone or anything – I sleep like the dead. Anyway, who would have been going out in the middle of the night, in this weather?’
‘I thought Mr Harbison might have had somewhere he needed to go to.’
Peggy snorted again. ‘Him? Most nights he’s so far gone in drink he can hardly get up the stairs, and certainly not back down them again. And I’d say we won’t be seeing much of him today, either. He’s a terrible man for the booze.’ She sat down on the bed, with her hands on her knees. ‘Were you comfortable last night?’
‘What?’
‘Is it all right for you, here? Is the bed all right? There’s two more rooms that are empty, if you want to look at them.’
‘No, no, thank you.’ He had retreated to the window, from where he watched her out of the corner of his eye. ‘Mrs Reck put a hot-water bottle in the bed for me.’
‘No she didn’t – I did.’
‘Oh, it was you, was it? Well, thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Strafford looked out of the window. The snow had stopped again, and an icy miasma hung over the fields. There was no wind. There hadn’t been any wind for days, he realised. It was as if the world had come to a gelid standstill.
‘I wish I could talk like you,’ Peggy said.
He looked at her over his shoulder in surprise. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I’ve always wanted to have a nice accent, like yours. I sound like a tinker half the time.’
‘But you don’t!’ he protested. ‘You don’t at all!’
‘Yes I do. You’re only being nice.’
‘No, I mean it.’
‘Oh, go on! You’re such a fibber.’
She smiled at him. She had spread her palms on the mattress, and was leaning back a little, with her elbows straight and her shoulders lifted, swinging one foot. He folded his arms and set a shoulder against the window frame.
‘What about Mr Harbison,’ he asked teasingly, ‘do you like his accent? I’m sure he speaks much the way I do, no?’
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