Snow

by John Banville

  ‘Yes, if they knew about it,’ Strafford said. Hackett chose to pretend not to have heard.

  ‘By the way,’ the Chief said, clearing his throat, ‘there was another stain on the priest’s trousers, apart from blood.’

  ‘Oh? What was it?’

  ‘Semen.’

  Strafford tapped his nails against his teeth.

  ‘Just semen?’ he asked. ‘Nothing else? No traces of female fluids?’

  ‘No.’

  They were silent for some moments, then Hackett spoke again.

  ‘Go and see McQuaid,’ he said. ‘It’ll be the usual guff: discretion vital – preserve the good name of the Church – save the reputation of the son of one of Mother Ireland’s finest heroes. Tell him what he wants to hear. Have you encountered him before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then watch out. He’s smooth, and he’s not stupid – far from it, whatever you might think. Oh, and listen, I wouldn’t tell him about, you know, the stain on the priest’s trousers.’

  ‘Tell me, Chief, am I supposed to solve this case, or am I not?’

  Hackett cleared his throat, making an angry rumbling that in the receiver sounded like muffled thunder. ‘What do you think I sent you there for?’

  ‘It strikes me everyone would be happier if the thing was left alone. Is that what the Archbishop is going to tell me, in his smooth, unstupid way?’

  ‘Just go and talk to him, will you, Detective Inspector? Will you do that? I’d be grateful, really, I would.’

  Hackett wasn’t good at sarcasm.

  ‘Right, sir,’ Strafford said, sarcastic in his turn. ‘I’ll get up there tomorrow.’

  ‘Today, lad. Today.’

  ‘All right. I’ll leave now.’

  He hung up. His ear throbbed from the pressure of the receiver against it, and the background hubbub on the line had left a buzzing sensation in his head. He pushed the curtain aside – the odour of dusty velvet was another echo out of his childhood – and stepped into the hall. For a moment he felt dizzy. The house around him seemed suddenly a maze from which, whatever way he turned, he would find no way out.

  Yes, he should have been a lawyer. He wasn’t cut out to be a policeman. Too late now to change. He felt at once ridiculously young, a sort of monstrous child, and at the same time hopelessly old.

  The Dublin road, when he reached it, was almost clear of snow, and the going was easier than on the side roads he had been travelling since he had arrived in Ballyglass. He turned the heater to its highest. When he tried to make the wireless work, he got only a jumble of static, worse than the noise on the telephone line.

  There was very little traffic. Solitary crows, blacker than black, flapped across fields of unblemished snow. A herd of piebald cows stood in a muddy corner under the scant shelter of bare trees.

  A car had skidded on the bridge at Enniscorthy and was slewed across both lanes of the road, and he had to wait while it was being moved. He left the engine running. There must have been a crack in the exhaust pipe, for the car soon filled with fumes, and eventually he was forced to switch off the ignition. In the ticking silence he watched the river flowing under the low arches of the bridge in a roiling, dark-silver surge. He tried to identify repeating patterns in the way it flowed, but couldn’t. Further on, where the river had room to widen, the water slowed down, and whirlpools formed on the brimming surface, formed, and then swallowed themselves. The snow, where it stopped at the edges of the banks on both sides, was folded under like a thick woollen blanket.

  He thought back over the exchanges with Hackett on the phone. Did the Chief really want this case to be solved? Or had he been sent to Ballyglass merely to go through the motions of investigating the priest’s murder, reach no conclusion, and return to Dublin after a few fruitless days, write up his report and file it safely away on a high shelf, where it would rest undisturbed and be forgotten, the pages yellowing and the cardboard folder curling at its corners? Reality wasn’t as it was in the movies, he reminded himself, and the majority of murderers were never caught. Maybe he should just wrap the thing up and go home. Rosemary Lawless was the only one truly affected by the priest’s death. Even her sense of grievance would dissipate in time.

  But no – there was such a thing as duty, even if carrying it out was futile. He had been assigned to a case, and he was bound to prosecute it until he reached a resolution, or failed. Harry Hall and his henchmen, as Hackett had called them, might not care a fig who the killer was, and Hackett might fear the consequences of the mystery being solved. But he wasn’t Hackett, and certainly he wasn’t Harry Hall. Forces were ranged against him. The Archbishop would wag a finger at him before pressing it to his lips to counsel discretion, but Strafford was impatient of being discreet. A man had been attacked, brutally – it was only in the politer detective novels that the victim ended up on the library floor without first having passed, albeit briefly, through a living hell of agony and anguish – and had died. He deserved more than a few mendacious paragraphs in a newspaper.

  The stalled car had been towed away from the bridge, and the lorries in front of him began to move, trumpeting like elephants and snorting blue-grey clouds of exhaust smoke. He started the engine and jiggled the gearstick, engaged the clutch, and drove on. The windscreen was misted on the inside, and he had to keep rubbing at it with the side of his hand.

  He had no illusions about the task facing him. Hackett had sent the wrong man, perhaps deliberately. Strafford wasn’t good at solving puzzles, everyone knew that. His mind wasn’t made that way. He was what the Chief called a trudger. Probably he shouldn’t have been promoted, but left as a Garda on the beat. His people weren’t imaginative, and neither was he. The priest’s death might be an inconvenience to everyone, to the Osbornes, to Hackett, no doubt to the Archbishop, too. Was he the only one who took it as an affront? He couldn’t grieve for the dead man, as Rosemary Lawless was grieving, but it wasn’t grief that was required of him. He had lost faith long ago in the notion of justice, but might he not make kind of a reckoning? That wasn’t too much to ask, surely.

  A mile outside Ballycanew he ran into a patch of ice and felt the tyres lose hold, and for a second or two the car seemed to leave the road and take to the air as it glided gracefully to the left and mounted the grass verge, and the engine coughed and died. Strafford let his hands fall from the wheel and swore. He would have to flag down a passing motorist, go back to the town he had just come through and call for assistance. He swore again, more violently this time. He didn’t often swear. It was a matter of upbringing. He had never heard his father utter an oath or use a four-letter word. There were other, subtler ways of cursing the world and one’s fate in it.

  He had expected to have to get out and use the dreaded starter handle. However, the car was a sturdy and resourceful little beast – he had nicknamed it Warthog – and he had only to turn the ignition key once for the engine to cough itself back to life, with a shake and a shudder. He drove on.

  The Archbishop’s house stood at the end of a zigzag of ever narrower laneways that culminated in a muddy track with a grassy ridge along the middle of it. Strafford got lost repeatedly, and had to stop a number of times to ask for directions, once at a pub and twice at a farmhouse – the same farmhouse on both occasions, as it turned out, to the rich amusement of the farmer and the farmer’s wife. The house, when at last he got there, presented to him a forbidding frontage. It stood on a bleak promontory, facing the sea. It was a low-built pebble-dashed bungalow with blank windows and a narrow front door that made Strafford think of a coffin. He had to get out to open a black iron gate that gave on to a short gravelled drive. To his left, a flock of sheep was scattered across a snowy slope. On the other side, down a flight of rough stone steps, a beach curved away northwards, soon dissolving into a ghostly sea mist.

  In a shed beside the house was parked an enormous black Citroën – this time, Strafford thought of a hearse. The car’s windows had fringed cloth blinds that could
be pulled down to ensure archiepiscopal privacy. The windscreen glass was so thick Strafford wondered if it might be bulletproof. Perhaps the thought was not so far-fetched, Strafford reflected, given the recent, sacrilegious slaughter of Father Tom Lawless.

  The door was opened by a small elderly man of vaguely ecclesiastical aspect, with watery eyes and a cluster of broken veins high up on each cheekbone. He wore a long black tubular apron, the string of it wound twice around and tied in a double knot at the front. Strafford gave his name, and the man nodded and said nothing, only took his coat and hat and gestured for him to enter. He led the way down a dim passageway, at the end of which he opened another door on to a nondescript room in which a coal fire was burning. Two identical, buttoned leather armchairs stood one on each side of the fireplace, and between them was set a small square table with carved and curlicued legs. Above the mantelpiece there hung a framed reproduction of a painting, in fleshy pinks and creamy whites, of an impossibly comely, soft-bearded Jesus, tilting his head languidly and pointing two stiff fingers at his bared and profusely bleeding, flame-fringed heart. The Saviour’s expression was both mournful and accusatory, as if to say, See what you did to me? His father called this portrait, prints of which were on display in every other parlour in Catholic Ireland, The Bearded Lady.

  ‘His Grace will be with you shortly,’ the little man said, and went out, shutting the door behind him noiselessly.

  Strafford looked out at the tin-coloured sea and a sky of clouds like trodden-on chalk dust. Gulls wheeled and swooped out there, vague chevron shapes, like wisps of cloud come loose.

  The door opened behind him and the Archbishop came in. He was chafing his hands, and for a moment Strafford was reminded, incongruously, of his first sight of Sylvia Osborne, when she entered the kitchen at Ballyglass House, doing the same thing with her hands.

  ‘Good day to you, Inspector. It was good of you to come, in such inclement weather.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Your Grace.’

  The Archbishop was a spare, trim person with concave cheeks and ears that stuck out. He had thin lips and a fat, fleshy nose too big for his face. His eyes were small and keenly alert, the lids somewhat swollen and pulpy. He wore a fulllength cassock, with a broad silk sash wrapped around his midriff, and, on the crown of his long narrow head, a crimson silk skullcap. Another player steps on stage, Strafford thought grimly, though this one would know his part to the last aside. The man extended his archbishop’s ring for Strafford to kiss, but seeing Strafford had no intention of doing so he altered the angle of his hand and used it to point to one of the armchairs, as if that was what he had meant in the first place. Smooth, that had been Hackett’s word for him. Oh, very smooth, and smoothly sinister.

  ‘Sit down, Inspector, please. May I offer you a glass of sherry?’ He touched the bell push beside the fireplace. ‘Such harsh weather! I came down only for a little break, and I’m sorry now that I did. This is a summer residence, and there’s no keeping out the draughts and the freezing gales that come in off the sea.’ They seated themselves, facing each other. Strafford noted the toes of the Archbishop’s crimson velvet slippers, peeping out from under the hem of his cassock.

  ‘Yes,’ Strafford said, ‘it’s certainly cold.’

  The Archbishop regarded him with a wintry smile. ‘Ah well, we mustn’t complain. The weather is another of the trials it pleases God to impose upon us, for the good of our souls.’

  Strafford was uncomfortably aware of those sharp little eyes scanning him intently.

  ‘I’m sorry it took me so long to get here,’ he said. ‘A car was stuck on the bridge at Enniscorthy, and then I skidded off the road at Ballycanew.’

  ‘Oh, goodness me! Are you all right? You weren’t hurt? Was your car damaged?’

  ‘No. I got it going again easily enough.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  There was a tap at the door and the little man in the apron appeared again. The Archbishop addressed him as Luke, and asked him to bring sherry – ‘the Oloroso, please.’ The little man nodded, and withdrew. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without poor Luke,’ the prelate said. ‘He had a bad time in the war – the first war, that is. Shell shock. He has been with me for longer than either he or I can recall.’

  There followed a silence. The Archbishop turned his head aside and looked into the heart of the fire, where a lump of burning coal was making a sharp whistling sound. From outside could be heard faintly the mewling of the gulls, and, fainter still, the soft plashing and hissing of waves on the shoreline.

  ‘Such a terrible business, down at Ballyglass.’ The Archbishop put his hands together, with his thumbs linked. His hands were as bloodless as his face.

  ‘Yes, terrible,’ Strafford said.

  Luke the servant came back with the sherry bottle and two tiny, ornate glasses on a wooden tray covered with a lace doily. There was also a plate of Marietta biscuits.

  ‘Will you be wanting anything else, Your Grace?’

  ‘No, not for now, Luke, thank you.’

  ‘Then I’ll go into Gorey. We’re in need of eggs.’

  ‘Of course, Luke, of course’ – again that cold, dry smile, for Strafford’s benefit – ‘we can’t afford to be without eggs!’

  Luke nodded, and again withdrew, again closing the door behind him carefully and without a sound. He might have been shutting the door of a vault.

  The Archbishop poured from the bottle and passed a glass to Strafford. They drank. The sherry was dark and dry, though somewhat treacly in texture. Strafford thought it must be good, though he was no expert.

  ‘These little glasses,’ the prelate said, holding his up at eye level, ‘were a gift from Cardinal Mindszenty, all the way from Budapest. They came by diplomatic bag – you know, of course, that the Cardinal is living at the American embassy in Budapest, where he was granted asylum after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. He’s likely to be there for some time to come, if the newspaper reports of the state of things over there are to be believed, and I have it on good authority that they are. The poor man – another of the Church’s persecuted warriors for peace.’

  Strafford knew about the warlike Mindszenty and his opposition to the Communists, about his imprisonment and torture. He also knew of the accusations against him as a Nazi enthusiast and an implacable anti-Semite. He supposed the mention of his name was intended as a test of some sort, but if it was, Strafford declined to meet it, and said nothing. He took another sip of his sherry.

  He heard from outside the growl of the Citroën’s engine starting up.

  ‘Your Grace, may I ask why you sent for me?’

  The Archbishop held up both hands in feigned shock.

  ‘Oh, but I didn’t “send for you”! I mentioned to the Garda Commissioner – Commissioner Phelan, do you know him? A good man, a sound man – I mentioned to him that it might be well for you and I to have a chat.’ He turned his eyes to the fire again. ‘Poor Father Lawless.’

  ‘Are you aware of the details of how Father Lawless died?’

  ‘Indeed I am. Commissioner Phelan telephoned me today, after he had the results of the post-mortem. A dreadful sin has been committed. Dreadful. Father Tom, God rest his soul, was one of the most popular priests in the diocese, and in the whole county – indeed, it’s not too much to say that he was known throughout the length and breadth of the country. His death is a great tragedy. Will you have another drop of sherry? The fire is not too hot for you? We could push our chairs back a little, perhaps. I feel the cold increasingly, these days.’

  ‘Your Grace, there was a story in the Irish Press today—’

  ‘And the Independent, too. Though not, I notice’ – he pursed his lips – ‘in the Irish Times. I imagine the Times would be your paper? I understand you’re one of our separated brethren.’

  ‘My people are Protestant, yes, if that’s what you mean,’ Strafford said. ‘I only saw the Irish Press.’

  ‘The report in the Inde
pendent was much the same.’

  ‘No doubt, and no doubt equally – shall we say incomplete, as you’ll know, from your talk with Commissioner Phelan.’

  The Archbishop set down his glass.

  ‘I imagine,’ he said, ‘that would be due to the fact that the post-mortem results only came out this morning, while the papers would have been printed last night.’ He leaned back in his chair, set his elbows on the arms of it again and joined his fingers together at their tips. ‘People so often forget,’ he said, gazing up at the ceiling, ‘that what’s in the papers is always yesterday’s news. The wireless, of course, is supposed to be much more up to the minute, but I notice often the broadcast news is little different to what appears in the papers. Indeed’ – he leaned forward with a conspiratorial smile – ‘I suspect the people in Radio Éireann themselves depend on the daily papers for their news more often than they’d care to admit. Or am I being bad-minded? What do you think?’

  Strafford too put down his glass, with half the sherry undrunk. He could feel the stuff sticking to his teeth.

  ‘Doctor McQuaid,’ he said, ‘I’ll be submitting my report on Father Lawless’s death in the next day or two. I’ve already conveyed my preliminary findings, by way of a colleague, to my superior in Dublin. You say the post-mortem results came out this morning. They didn’t.’

  ‘No?’ the Archbishop murmured. ‘But I thought—’

  ‘That’s to say,’ Strafford went on stolidly, ‘a highly selective version of them was released to the public. Father Lawless didn’t die from a fall. You know how he did die, if Commissioner Phelan gave you a full account of the pathologist’s findings. When the papers get hold of the real facts of the case—’

  ‘“When”?’ the Archbishop said softly. He was gazing at his steepled fingers, with a deliberately preoccupied expression. ‘I like to think there’s only one thing I have in common with the gentlemen of the press, and that’s curiosity. There’s a “story” here, as they’d say, a tragic story but also a sensational one, and they will go after it, you can be assured of that. They wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t. But will they find it, Inspector, their sensational story? Will they find it, do you think?’