Snow

by John Banville

  ‘If there’s a trial, yes, I think you’ll have to testify.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just – couldn’t you just not say anything? My father—’

  They came to the crest of the slope and stopped. They could hear, faintly, the sound of the telephone ringing in the house.

  ‘I’ll try to keep you out of the worst of it,’ Strafford said. ‘I can’t promise anything. It will be up to the courts.’

  The young man nodded.

  ‘I’m going to give up medicine,’ he said. ‘I’m not cut out to be a doctor.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d like to travel. I have some money, from my mother. I want to see Greece, the islands. Maybe I will become a beachcomber. That’s a life that would suit me.’ He looked down, and scuffed the snow with the toe of his boot. ‘I suppose you’re disgusted?’

  ‘No. It’s not part of my job to pass judgement. I just investigate. That’s my only duty.’

  ‘Very convenient,’ the young man said, with a bitter smile.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  Now Dominic turned to him pleadingly. ‘Are you sure you can’t just – you know – keep silent? What good will it do for all this to come out, all the things I’ve told you? He’ll still be dead.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that, I’m afraid.’ He paused. ‘Those photographs,’ he said quietly, looking away. ‘The ones he brought for you to look at. You’re not interested in that kind of thing any more, are you?’

  Before the young man could reply, Mrs Duffy appeared on the front steps and called out to him.

  ‘Inspector! Come quick! There’s someone on the phone, looking for you.’

  Strafford strode off across the snow-covered gravel and followed the housekeeper into the hall. She pulled back the black velvet curtain and handed him the receiver.

  ‘Hello? Strafford here.’

  ‘Your man, Jenkins,’ Sergeant Radford said. ‘He’s been found. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Where?

  ‘The Raven Point.’

  26

  After Radford had hung up, Strafford called Hackett’s office at the Pearse Street barracks, but he wasn’t there. When he tried his home number, the phone was engaged – off the hook, probably. Even Hackett took Christmas Day off. Strafford called Pearse Street again, and told the desk sergeant to send a squad car out to Hackett’s house with news of Jenkins’s death.

  Colonel Osborne had just returned from church. He offered Strafford a drink. He smelled of hair pomade and eau de cologne. Strafford asked for a whiskey, but only held it in his hand and forgot to drink it. His brain was numb.

  ‘Another death!’ the Colonel exclaimed, shaking his head. ‘I tell you, you should round up those tinkers over at Murrintown. Did I see you with Dominic, by the way? Lettie, of course, still hasn’t made an appearance. And you missed Hafner, he just left. That man, such devotion to duty! How many doctors do you know would make a house call on Christmas Day? Stay to lunch, will you? Turkey and ham, all the trimmings. Mrs Duffy comes into her own at Christmastime.’

  Strafford got the car going and was at the Sheaf of Barley by noon. There was the smell of turkey here, too.

  ‘Joe told me what happened,’ Mrs Reck said. ‘I’m so sorry. And in our van, too!’

  Her husband, she said, had gone out to the Raven Point. He had taken her car, and brought Matty Moran with him, for company. ‘Poor Joe, he’s very upset. He’s feeling very guilty over not reporting the van missing.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Strafford said. ‘I saw it on the road, yesterday.’

  ‘What, our van?’

  Yes, he had seen the van, and had seen who was driving it. He knew now without doubt who it was had done the priest to death. And he guessed the reason why. Father Lawless had been chaplain at Carricklea industrial school.

  He went up to his room and lay on the bed. It was cold, and he kept on the big black borrowed coat. It was almost dried out by now. He would hold on to it for the moment, and be glad of it. It would be cold at Raven Point.

  The bed smelled of Peggy. He turned on his side and put a hand under his cheek. A wedge of cold sunlight was shining in at the window. He hadn’t been responsible for Jenkins. Jenkins should have been able to look after himself.

  He had asked Radford, who was out at the scene, to come in and pick him up here at the Sheaf. Now all he could do was wait. He buried his face in the pillow and breathed in Peggy’s scent. He felt something small and hard pressing against a rib. It was a pearl. They played jackstones in Mongolia, he thought – or was it Tibet?

  Radford arrived in the battered Wolseley. He looked no better than he had the previous day. His eyelids were swollen, and the whites of his eyes were a liverish yellow, and bloodshot, too. He made to put a hand on Strafford’s arm but then drew back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Strafford nodded, forcing a smile. He felt empty.

  Radford drove at speed over roads sparkling with frost, but still it took them more than an hour to reach the Raven Point. They had left the Wexford road at a crossroads in some small village and set out across the marshlands. It was flat and featureless terrain, with frozen bog holes and ponds fringed with stands of dried sedge. Curlews rose out of the heather, sending up their desolate cry. The sun seemed impossibly shrunken, a flat gold coin nailed to the sky low down at the side. The winter day had begun already to decline.

  They saw the parked ambulance and the black squad car from a long way off. Two Guards were there, in their peaked caps and blue serge overcoats.

  Sergeant Radford drew the car to a stop, and he and Strafford sat motionless, gazing before them through the windscreen. Then they got out. The sea was off to their left, and they heard the soft pounding of waves.

  Reck’s van was stopped a little way off the road, leaning at an angle, the front wheel on the passenger side sunk to the axle in the marshy ground. The two Guards saluted. One of them was the desk man Strafford had tangled with at the barracks in Ballyglass. What was his name? Fenton? No, Stenson. He had been smoking a cigarette but now he threw it away. The other was a big stolid fair-haired fellow, who stood off to one side and said nothing. He saluted. Stenson didn’t.

  The ambulance driver sat on the running board of his vehicle, smoking a cigarette. He looked cold – everyone looked cold – and fed up. Reck and Matty Moran had been here and gone.

  Strafford approached the van.

  ‘It was found by two fellows out shooting duck,’ Radford said behind him.

  ‘Where’s Jenkins?’

  ‘In the back.’

  Strafford sighed, and turned to Stenson. ‘Let me have a look.’

  But it was Radford who came forward and pulled open the van’s rear door. It shuddered on its hinges.

  Jenkins lay on his side in a huddle behind the driver’s seat, half covered by a jute sack. There was blood in his hair.

  ‘He took it full on the crown of the head,’ Radford said. ‘A hammer, or something blunt, anyway. Three blows, maybe four.’

  Strafford stood with his hands buried in the pockets of the borrowed greatcoat, impassive and silent. Then he asked, ‘Any sign of Fonsey?’

  ‘Fonsey?’ Radford said, frowning.

  ‘Yes. I saw him, with the van. He was driving.’

  The two Guards looked at Radford. He gave his head a shake, as if to dislodge something from an ear.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Fonsey.’

  Strafford turned. ‘There was no sign of him?’ He shrugged. ‘There wouldn’t be, of course,’ he said, addressing himself. ‘He’d be long gone.’

  ‘There were no tracks leading back to the road,’ Garda Stenson said.

  ‘Did you look in the other direction?’ Strafford asked.

  ‘There’s only the sea out there,’ Stenson replied.

  Strafford looked at Radford. He was thinking of the drowned son. Young men walking into the sea. Radford didn’t return his look.

  ‘Cover him up,’ Strafford said to no
one in particular. He turned to the ambulance driver. ‘Where did you come from?’

  ‘Wexford,’ the driver said. He was a thick-set fellow with heavy black eyebrows.

  ‘If you take him, you’ll have to bring him to Dublin. Can you do that?’

  The driver looked at Radford, and then at Stenson, and shook his head. ‘I was told to bring him to the County Hospital.’

  Radford put a hand on Strafford’s shoulder. ‘Let him do that, and leave the body in the ambulance until your people can collect it.’

  Strafford turned again to Stenson. ‘You had a good look round?’

  ‘Myself and Garda Coffey here made an initial investigation of the interior of the van’ – he was rehearsing for his day in court – ‘and located various items, but none of them were connected with the fatality.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Stenson slid his eyes in Sergeant Radford’s direction, then turned back to Strafford. He began to say something, but Radford cut him off.

  ‘There’s no sign of a weapon,’ he said to Strafford, ‘and not much blood, either. He was killed someplace else and driven here.’

  Strafford nodded. He moved past the others. He smelt the smoke on Stenson’s breath.

  There was a sort of track, and he walked along it, the frozen mud crunching under his tread. He kept going, and after a little way the track petered out, giving on to a narrow stony beach littered with seaweed. The tideline was fringed with ice. He stood for a minute gazing over the sullen, waveless water. He could hear the curlews crying behind him. There was a strong smell of salt and iodine. He might have been standing at the edge of the world.

  He turned and walked back. ‘Let’s go,’ he said to Radford.

  The old car bumped along the track, its shock absorbers groaning. The ice on the bog holes on either side shone like mercury in the last of the sunlight.

  ‘This is where your son was found, isn’t it?’ Strafford said.

  ‘Yes,’ Radford answered. ‘He was washed up here.’

  ‘Did Fonsey know him?’

  ‘I suppose they’d have seen each other about the town, or when Larry was at Ballyglass House.’ Larry. Strafford remembered Radford saying his son didn’t allow his parents to call him by that name. Radford read his mind. ‘It’s how I think of him, God knows why. He’s Larry, now.’

  ‘What about the priest? You said your son knew him well?’

  Radford waited a beat before replying. He was moving his palms back and forth on the rim of the steering wheel.

  ‘That priest,’ he said at last, ‘was a cancer. He deserved what he got.’

  Strafford thought about this for a while. ‘Why didn’t you report him?’ he asked. ‘Everybody seems to have known what he was up to.’

  Radford gave a hard little laugh.

  ‘Report him to who? Maybe you haven’t heard – you don’t “report” a priest. The clergy are untouchable.’ He did that ugly laugh again. ‘Hasn’t anybody reported that to you?’

  ‘Even when they’re a cancer, and preying on the young?’

  Radford sighed.

  ‘The most that could have been done,’ he said, ‘would have been to get him transferred. That’s all the Church ever does, when one of theirs lands in trouble. Then he’d just get up to his old tricks somewhere else.’

  Strafford folded his arms and leaned back in the seat. ‘Fonsey,’ he said, ‘and your son, and the boy up at the House.’

  ‘Young Osborne?’ he said, then nodded. ‘Of course. That was why the priest was up there all the time.’

  Strafford looked out of the window at the passing landscape. After a long silence Radford asked, ‘How did you know it was Fonsey?’

  ‘I told you, I saw him in Reck’s van. But I knew already, I think. Fonsey was at Carricklea, and so was the priest.’

  They came to the end of the marshlands and bumped up an incline and turned on to the main road.

  ‘Where do you want to go to?’ Radford asked.

  ‘We’d better have a look at Fonsey’s place. He might even be there.’

  They travelled the rest of the way to Ballyglass in silence. Then Strafford gave directions. They parked at the spot where Jeremiah Reck had stopped to offer Strafford a lift.

  They got out of the car.

  ‘We go down this way,’ Strafford said. ‘It’s steep, mind your footing.’

  There was blood in the snow again outside Fonsey’s caravan, but this time it wasn’t rabbit’s blood. There was a hatchet, too, with blood and hair on the blunt back of the blade.

  Strafford looked about, shaking his head. ‘Who was it said they’d scoured these woods?’

  The door of the caravan was unlocked. They went inside. Strafford, the taller of the two, had to duck his head going through the doorway. More blood here, a lot of it. Jenkins’s blood.

  ‘Fonsey must have surprised him,’ Strafford said. ‘Had he found something?’

  ‘This, maybe.’

  Radford used his handkerchief to pick up a knife with a long blade worn thin by years of sharpening. ‘Flensing knife,’ he said. ‘Butchers use them.’ He put the knife back on the Formica table hinged to the wall. Then he said, ‘Jesus, what’s that?’

  On the floor under the table there was a smashed cut-glass tumbler, out of which had spilled what looked like a fistful of rotten meat, bruised and blackened and purple in places. Radford squatted on his heels and probed at the sticky mess. ‘Jesus,’ he said again, more quietly still.

  They both knew what it was they were looking at.

  Radford took a deep breath.

  ‘This is what Jenkins found,’ he said, ‘this, and the knife. And then Fonsey arrived.’ He got to his feet with a grunt and studied the blood on the floor, on the walls. ‘Looks like your case is solved, all right.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose, yes. But how did Fonsey get into the house?’

  ‘We’ll ask him, when we find him.’

  ‘When we find him,’ Strafford said. ‘Yes. When we find him.’

  They made their way up the icy hillside, among the silver birches. In places the going was so slippery they had to haul themselves hand over hand from tree to tree. When they got to the road they stood to rest for a moment, breathing heavily. Then Radford turned away and leaned forward with his hands braced on his knees and vomited on to the ground. He straightened up again, wiping his mouth. ‘Sorry,’ he said. He cleared his throat and took in a long gulp of air. ‘What do you want to do now?’ he asked.

  ‘Drive me back to the Sheaf of Barley, will you? I have to phone Dublin.’

  He called Hackett at home and got through this time. They spoke of Jenkins. There was not much to say.

  ‘The newspapers have been on to me,’ Hackett said.

  ‘About Jenkins?’

  ‘Someone told them he’d gone missing.’ Stenson, Strafford thought. ‘And I told them to bugger off – I’d advise you to do the same.’

  Then Strafford told him of what he and Sergeant Radford had found in the caravan.

  ‘God almighty!’ Hackett said hoarsely. ‘I’m just after getting up from my Christmas dinner.’ He paused. ‘The poor fellow’s tackle, balls and all, in a whiskey glass? That was a nice Yuletide present for you to stumble on. What about the young fellow, what’s he called, Fonsey Welch – any news of him?’

  ‘My guess is he’s dead, too.’

  ‘Christ, we’ve a bloodbath on our hands. I’m coming down – they’re sending a squad car for me now.’

  ‘I’ll meet you at Ballyglass House.’

  ‘Right. And Strafford—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Merry Christmas.’

  Next day, Fonsey’s body was found washed up on the beach at the Raven Point. There was ice in his hair. His eyes were open, the eyelids frozen. Strafford thought of the barn owl that had flown at him out of the snowy darkness that night on the road, of its flat white face and wide-spread wings
, and of its eyes, too.

  CODA

  SUMMER, 1967

  He didn’t recognise her, at first, when he caught sight of her crossing the hotel lobby.

  It was – what? – ten years and more since he had seen her last. She wore a flowered summer frock that didn’t suit her. It was too short, showing off too much of her slightly bowed legs. She had straightened her hair. From a stark white central parting it hung down on either side of her face, and was turned up at the ends in what he thought was called a ‘kick’. Her sandals were of a shiny shade of electric blue and cross-laced halfway up her calves. Ancient Greece was the fashion of the moment. A big canvas satchel was slung over her shoulder, and a pair of enormous black-framed sunglasses were pushed up into her hair, movie-star style.

  He knew her by her walk, a more graceful version of her father’s rolling military slouch.

  His first instinct was to dodge behind a potted palm that stood to one side of the revolving main door. What would he say to her? What would they say to each other? But how ridiculous it would be if she spotted him crouching behind a plant. He hesitated, and then it was too late. She saw him, and stopped.

  He had been wandering aimlessly about the hotel for a good half-hour, unable to find a place to settle. The Horseshoe Bar was loud with braying politicians, and the air of genteel melancholy in the lounge was less than welcoming. He had booked a table for a solitary dinner. It was still early, however, and the restaurant was deserted, and he didn’t care to think of himself sitting there alone, in the midst of all that glass and silver and starched white linen.

  The early summer evening outside was a blaze of smoky gold sunlight, and he could hear the blackbirds whistling in the trees across the road, behind the black iron railings of St Stephen’s Green. The soft loveliness of the light, the birds’ passionate warbling, the busy coming and going of guests and the smell of cigar smoke and women’s perfume, all this only served to depress him. He thought of cancelling the table and going home, but couldn’t face the prospect of an empty house, and sardines on toast. And so, with his hands sunk in his trouser pockets, he ambled listlessly here and there, from the lounge to the bar, from the bar to the restaurant – where still not a single table was occupied – until he caught sight of her, and the past rushed forward and stopped him in his tracks.