“Casey? Ah, he’s an eejut,” said Concannon disloyally, smiling at Father Bresnihan and myself. It struck me that openness and informality must be very different from English police methods: nor, for the matter of that, would an English detective have allowed the local vicar to sit in on an investigation.
“Well now, we must hear all about it Are you quite sure you feel able for some questions, Mr. Eyre? Good. I’ll just get Cathal in to write it all down. If you’ll allow me, Father?”
Concannon called through the door. A uniformed man came in, sat down and produced a note-book. I was led through the previous episodes—the search of my cottage and the shot from behind the bushes—Concannon helping me along with an occasional question. “There was nothing stolen? … Was there anything in your papers a fella’d be hunting for? … How long between the shot and your getting back to Lissawn House?”
When we came to the events of two nights ago, Concannon made me describe in great detail what had preceded them. I told him about going to Kevin Leeson’s house, the contretemps in the lavatory and what I had overheard there, the pleasant evening which followed.
“How long was Mr. Leeson out of the house after he’d shown you back into the drawing-room?”
“Five minutes about. Perhaps a little longer.”
“And what time did you leave?”
“Quarter to twelve.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes. I looked at my watch and was surprised to find how late it was.”
“Then you drove straight back to your cottage. You didn’t stop on the way?”
“No. Straight back.”
“Did any other vehicle pass you?”
“No. I’ve thought about this. It was physically impossible for Kevin to have arrived at the cottage before me.”
Concannon gave me a curious look. “Why should he want to harm you?”
“Why should anyone?”
“But Mr. Leeson could have made arrangements with someone else during those five minutes or so he was out? Is that what’s in your mind?”
“He could have, no doubt. But why on earth should he be gunning after me?”
“‘Gunning’?”
“A figure of speech,” I snapped irritably.
“I’m aware of the metaphor,” Concannon replied with a touch of ice. “And you can’t think of any other reason why someone should be gunning after you?”
“No.”
Father Bresnihan, who had been sitting quite silent, studying his fingers, looked up. “That is not true, Dominic.”
It was a very awkward moment. I knew it would be likely to arrive sooner or later, but I’d hoped it would somehow have been postponed. There was nothing to be done now but plunge in boldly at the deep end.
“Father Bresnihan thinks,” I said, not looking at him, “that I’ve been paying too much attention to Mrs. Flurry Leeson.”
The point of the shorthand-writer’s pencil broke. A faint blush appeared on Concannon’s face. The Father nodded at me approvingly.
“And have you, Mr. Eyre?” asked Concannon mildly.
“I like her very much, and I’ve been seeing her pretty often. Living nearby. She and her husband have both been very kind to me.”
“I see. And you think your intentions have been misinterpreted,” said Concannon silkily, his voice tilting up at the end.
“The Father seems to think so.”
Father Bresnihan’s mouth twitched angrily, but he made no comment.
“Are you suggesting, then, that Mr. Flurry Leeson is behind these attacks upon you?”
“Certainly not. I think it’s wildly improbable.”
“A jealous husband?” Concannon let his voice trail away.
What could I answer? that Flurry was a complaisant cuckold?
“He has never shown me any signs of that,” I said. “But no doubt you’ll be finding out where he—and Kevin and everyone else were—two nights ago.”
“I’ve already taken statements from them, Mr. Eyre.” Concannon leant back, lacing his arms behind his head. “Have you a passport, Mr. Eyre?” he asked negligently.
“Yes. But not here. You don’t need one for Ireland.”
“I suppose, as a writer, you travel a good deal. Local colour—that class of thing.”
“I’ve been to France. And Italy. And once to Greece. But—”
“Nowhere else in Europe? Germany?”
“Good lord no! Not with that Nazi gang in control.”
“A godless lot of sinners they are,” said Concannon. “You wouldn’t object to sending for your passport and letting me see it.”
“Of course not. But what on earth has this to do with—?”
“You’ll do that, then. I’m most grateful to you, Mr. Eyre. And now we’ll have to think how we can best protect you. Won’t we, Father?” Concannon added cosily.
“Protect? You think it might happen again?”
“It might so. Have you a gun?”
“No. I didn’t come over here expecting to get involved in shooting matches.”
“Sure you didn’t.” Concannon’s intelligent face broke into a purely boyish grin. “We’d best have the Father give one of his hell-fire sermons next Sunday, warning his flock against the sin of murder.”
Father Bresnihan appeared to take this quite seriously. For myself, the word “warning” threw a fantastic idea into my mind. The Father’s arrival in the nick of time to rescue me from the car—had it not been suspiciously pat? Perhaps he had organised the whole thing, not to kill me, but as a last warning. It was a bit strange that it should happen on the night he was sitting with the sick widow in her cottage on the hill. Of course, he would have needed an accomplice to stun me and drive me to the strand. But he was a man of absolute authority among his people; and his fanatical zeal against sexual irregularity was well established.
Hardly had this passed through my mind when I saw its grotesque absurdity. I must be suffering a delayed reaction from the knock on my head.
“So you’re going back to your cottage?” asked Concannon.
“Yes. I’ll bolt the door at night. If I remember to.” It was bravado, of course. Like many timid people, I sometimes had the urge to provoke the crisis which I felt lying in wait for me, to get the thing over with. Concannon gave me an undeserved look of admiration.
“Very well then. We’ll be keeping your cottage under surveillance for a while, till I get to the bottom of that assault on you.” He gazed at me reassuringly. “You’re not a very curious man, Mr. Eyre, are you?”
“How do you mean?”
“Aren’t you interested in the statements I took from your neighbours?”
“I thought that was the sort of thing the police kept under their hat.”
“Oh, we have secretive policemen over here. As well as secret police. But I’m not the one nor the other.”
Concannon now told me that, according to their statements, Flurry and Harriet were in bed when the assault took place, Kevin and his wife were going to bed. Seamus O’Donovan had said he was asleep, but he slept alone in a room above one of the Lissawn outbuildings, so there was no one to corroborate his evidence. The man of the cottage a hundred yards down the road from mine said he’d been woken by a car passing along the road about midnight, and before he went to sleep again had heard a car passing in the opposite direction.
“And now I want you to make me a list of all the other people you’ve met since you came to Charlottestown. And you’ll write at once for your passport. But there’s another thing; the most important. If you’ll be good enough to help me with this.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to think back over all the conversations you’ve had since you came to Charlottestown—” Concannon was looking at me with a most serious, urgent expression—“and tell me of any occasion when you felt the person you were talking to seemed specially inquisitive about yourself.”
“That’d apply to pretty well everyone I’ve met.”
“Ah, we’re a nosy lot. Aren’t we, Father? What I have in mind, Mr. Eyre—it’s hard to define—but any man or woman who seemed to think, or maybe you gave the impression unwittingly, that you’re not the man you give yourself out to be—a writer holidaying over here. Someone you felt was pumping you, to draw out your real identity.”
“A nice metaphor,” I replied. “But I really can’t—”
“Take your time, Mr. Eyre. There’s no hurry. It might have been in a shop, in the street, a chance encounter you thought nothing of at the time. In the Colooney bar. Anywhere. You have it now?” he added with a touch of excitement.
A bell had rung loudly in my mind. Colooney bar. I have an excellent verbal memory: so I was able to tell Concannon, almost word for word, that bit of my conversation with the Colooney manager the first night I was here.
“Haggerty asked if I was in business or government service. I answered, ‘A sort of business. A one-man business.’ I didn’t want it put about just then that I’m a writer: and I was a bit irked by his inquisitiveness. Then he asked if I kept a shop. And I replied, just to mystify him, ‘a very closed shop.’ A curious expression came over Haggerty’s face—”
“Describe it.”
I tried to do so.
“And then?”
“The Leesons—Flurry and his wife—came in, and the conversation ended.”
“The man you overheard talking with Kevin in the study—could that have been Haggerty?”
“Definitely not. Quite a different voice.”
“Did you have any talk with Haggerty since?”
“Oh, quite often. But only the time of the day, gossip, that sort of thing, in the bar.”
Concannon glanced at the Father. “So that’s it! He’s a simple-minded fella, Haggerty, isn’t he?”
“He is,” said Father Bresnihan. “But he likes to think he’s crafty.”
“Exactly.”
“What is all this?” I exclaimed irritably.
Concannon smiled at me. “Don’t you see the impression your words would have on a fella like Haggerty?”
“No, I don’t.”
“What you let slip in front of him—what he thinks you let slip—was that you’re some class of spy: a British spy.”
“Good God!” My mind raced like a propeller out of water.
“There was a lot of West Britishers—if you’ll forgive the expression, Mr. Eyre—in the Dublin Castle intelligence service in the bad old days.”
“But—”
“And the British’d want to find out just what’s going on over here now, wouldn’t they?—what’s the feeling about neutrality? whether some of the extremists wouldn’t welcome a German intervention?”
“Sure they’d never do that,” protested the Father.
“But they’d use any opportunity to push the Taoiseach into getting back the Six Counties. And a war between Germany and England would be their moment. Naturally, the British’d want to know the strength of that feeling.”
I was bewildered still.
“You see, Dominic, if the English Government thought we were going in against the North, with or without German encouragement, it would give them an excuse to invade us first. It’s the Treaty Ports they’d be after.”
“I see your point, Father. So it’s not my alleged immoral life, but my espionage activities, which have made me your parishioners’ target,” I said nastily.
“It would account for your cottage being searched,” said Concannon. “But not necessarily for the other episodes. Did you ever visit Galway Bay or Clifden, with your great big field-glasses?”
“I often go into Galway. And I drove up to Clifden once. With my great big field-glasses. What an innocent bird-watcher has to put up with! But they’re not Treaty Ports, are they?”
“They could be used. By smaller vessels.”
“I think the whole thing’s absolutely mad,” I said with exasperation. “Confound your politics! It’s all so—so amateurish.”
“Dominic, there’s no one so amateurish over here as an amateur politician. And no one so professional as a professional one.”
“You have it, Father.” Concannon gazed at me broodingly. “Michael Collins now—he had a short way with Castle spies. Maybe you ought to take the first aeroplane back to England.” That upward tilt again at the end of the sentence.
I suddenly had a strong intuition—or was it a delusion?—that this calm, intelligent policeman was reserving judgment about me, that he had not convinced himself I was not a spy. It was an unpleasant sensation. Never before had I felt so completely a stranger in the land of my birth.
I decided I’d go into the attack. “If I am a spy—and I see you’re not sure about it yet—duty would obviously require me to stick it out here. If I’m not, commonsense should tell me to go home at once. Well, I’m staying. Yet I’m not a spy. I’m just an Anglo-Irishman—beg your pardon, West Britisher—who doesn’t like being pushed around. The Garda are welcome to investigate me: but also they’re in duty bound to ensure that I’m not murdered.”
A damnably pompous speech, but at least it had the effect of disconcerting Concannon.
“We know our duty, thank you, Mr. Eyre,” he said stiffly. “I would like to take your fingerprints now, so we can eliminate them from the others on your car.”
“By all means. But haven’t your criminals over here learnt yet about the use of gloves?”
“We’re a backward nation, Mr. Eyre.” He smiled forgivingly.
Father Bresnihan had the last word. “There are criminals and criminals, Dominic. Like there are sinners and sinners.”
Chapter 7
The next day I returned to the cottage. Sean had miraculously got my car running again. The front door was not locked; the key was in the drawer where I’d always kept it, my MSS on the table. I had a sense of anticlimax, ruffled by an occasional wave of fear. Would there be another attack? What form would it take? Concannon had told me he was putting a plain-clothes man in the cottage up the road, and indeed for a week or so I was to come across a man—or rather, a succession of men—desultorily filling in the potholes or trimming the roadside grass. And I heard footfalls at night, patrolling round the cottage from time to time. No doubt these were not local men: they would have been sent from Galway or Ennis. But, in a district like ours, everyone would know in a few hours they were not road-menders.
That first afternoon I walked over the fields to Lissawn House. Flurry and Harry were in the kitchen, drinking tea. Flurry clapped me on the shoulders.
“Dominic! How are you! This is a great moment, a solemn moment. The returning hero. They ought to make a fillum of your hairbreadth escape. We must drink to it, Harry.”
He lumbered out to fetch the whiskey. Harriet threw herself into my arms. “Are you all right? Did you get my message?”
“No, love.”
“That damned priest! I bet he destroyed the note. No, it’s all right. It was quite pure—just a message of sympathy from Flurry and myself.” She looked up anxiously into my eyes, felt the back of my head. “My God, what a bruise! Are you really—?”
“G’wan, Harry. Give him a kiss. He deserves it,” came the voice of Flurry from the door.
“I was just feeling this lump on his head. It’s a whopper.”
“I bruise easily.”
She gave me a smile of complicity. “All right, I will. I’ve fallen for the wounded hero.” And she kissed me quickly, full on the lips, in front of Flurry. I was embarrassed; yet her recklessness was flooding into me again like a tide.
We talked a while. I had to relate the whole story to them. Harriet’s eyes were sparkling. “At last something has happened in this dead-alive hole!”
“Thanks very much, Harry. I just hope somebody else’ll provide your entertainment next time.”
“Next time?”
“D’you think your local assassin won’t have another shot at bumping me off?”
“Boo, you’re not windy?”
The pale grey eyes in the ashen face glanced at me uneasily. Was it the look of a would-be murderer who had failed? Or that of a lazy man who didn’t want to be involved in trouble?
“I don’t know at all at all. I had a word with Seamus, but he’s heard nothing about who the fella might be. Has Concannon any ideas about the—the—what the hell’s the word?—the motive?”
I told him the theory that I’d been taken for a British spy. The notion excited Harry’s childish mind. Flurry was unimpressed and said, “You a spy! God help us, what’ll they think up next?” I was obscurely annoyed by this. It was not the first time Flurry had made it clear that, in his mind, I was no man of action.
“You’d better come and live up here for a bit. Seamus and I—you can hire us as bodyguards.”
“Thank you. But I wouldn’t think of giving you the trouble.”
“Now he’s in a huff. You don’t really fancy yourself at the cloak-and-dagger stuff, do you, Dominic?”
That damned Irish intuition again. A slob like Flurry had no right to it.
“Ah well,” he continued remorselessly. “If you’re determined to set up as a lone wolf, at least you’d better keep your door locked. Keeping the wolf inside the door. That’s a good one, Harry.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” I mirthlessly replied. “You know it’s interesting about the key. How did the man who lay in wait for me inside my cottage the other night know that the door would be unlocked?”
“Nobody locks his door here.”
“Not even at night? Not even when he’s suspected of being a British spy? The point is, they couldn’t bank on the door being unlocked. So they’d have a key, just in case. Who would have a duplicate key? The lock was changed when your brother did up the cottage.”
Flurry gave his boisterous bellow of laughter. “Sure that’s great! Isn’t it killing, Harry? So the Mayor it was who bumped you. It’s a lovely idea. But Kevin’s a coward. He’d no more—”
“Kevin couldn’t have done it himself. He could have had it done, though.”
Flurry had a sobered look. “But why in mercy’s name?”
The Private Wound Page 8