The Private Wound

by Nicholas Blake

  “But that was an attempt to kill me, surely, not just to frighten me away?”

  “Oh, Kevin was beginning to lose his head by then. I was pushing him hard about the killing of Mrs. Leeson.”

  “You suspected him of it then?”

  “Never a bit. I wanted to break his nerve, so he’d do something foolish over the political conspiracy. And he did.”

  “How was that?”

  “He started telling lies and contradicting himself about that journey down from Galway. We knew he’d gone to Oughterard to consult with one of his associates in the plot—he was being shadowed, but we lost him. You see, he had to conceal the object of his Galway visit: but, when he thought we suspected him of the murder, he was between the devil and the deep blue sea. It was a matter of timing. I won’t go into it all now. But he could only throw dust in our eyes about the Galway visit, if he admitted he was in the near vicinity when Mrs. Leeson was killed. Or vice-versa.”

  “And he’d get off one horn of the dilemma by burning me alive in the cottage and faking my confession?”

  “That’s about the size of it. He didn’t dare betray the political conspiracy. Geogehan’s a firebrand and would have cut his throat. Anyway, Kevin got flustered under questioning about the murder: but it drew his attention off the possibility we might be after him for the other reason.”

  “Things were simpler in my day. We had only the one worry,” said Flurry with a touch of sadness. He began to hum “It’s the most distressful country”—

  I broke in sharply, “So you’ve not had much chance, with all this excitement, to investigate the murder.”

  “Time enough, Mr. Eyre, time enough.”

  “There may be for you; but I’ve got to get home. I can’t sponge on Flurry much longer.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Flurry automatically.

  “You’re going to transfer your war of nerves to us now, are you?”

  “Us?” Concannon’s heavy eyes turned on me.

  “Flurry. Myself. And—” I cut it off.

  “And?”

  “And anyone else you may suspect.”

  I could not say Maire’s name. I simply could not bring myself to put into words my uneasiness about her. I have enough Irish in me to shrink from the word “informer.” I had done enough harm already.

  “I’ve a diver coming from Cork to-morrow,” said Concannon.

  “Have you now?” Flurry’s voice was uninterested, but I felt a new attentiveness in him.

  “To find the knife?” I asked.

  “There’s plenty knives here.” Flurry gestured vaguely round the fishing room.

  “And here’s the ones I took away,” said Concannon, unloading his pocket. “They’ve been tested. Result negative.”

  “So you’ll find the murderer’s knife in that deep pool and hang him on the strength of it? Is that your idea?”

  “We’ll find the knife first, and then go on from there.” Concannon gazed fixedly at Flurry. “Of course, it won’t have your wife’s blood on it still”—the superintendent rapped this out like an accusation; I never liked those calculated brutalities of his—“but I daresay it’ll give us all we need.” Flurry showing no visible reaction, Concannon added, “Aren’t you interested in me finding your wife’s murderer?”

  “Oh, sure I am.” Flurry stabbed one finger in the direction of Concannon’s chest. “But let me tell you, boyo—you’ll be wasting a man’s time leaving him by the Lissawn till your diver comes.”

  The superintendent was disconcerted. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know,” growled Flurry. “That pool’s eight foot deep now, and the water still rising. I’m no bloody swimmer. If you expect me to plunge in to-night and retrieve the knife and hide it somewhere else, you’re an eejut.”

  Concannon gave a grim smile. “I’ll be leaving a man here for all that. I wouldn’t like you to drown.”

  The two men had become antagonists—worthy of each other too—I imagined an invisible salute passing between them. Concannon, I thought, is the sagacious hound, weaving and feinting round the bear—Flurry’s small eyes had a wary glint in them, his huge paw-like hands hung down relaxed. I felt suddenly suffocated by the knowledge that in this duel it was Concannon who would surely win.

  “If you think Flurry could have killed Harriet, you’ll be making the most unforgiveable mistake in your life.”

  “Thanks for the unsolicited tribute, me boy.”

  “It’s very touching,” said Concannon. “And Flurry will say just the same for you, no doubt.”

  “I will. And let me tell you this, Concannon. If ever I swing for anyone, it’ll not be Harriet. Will you take a bet on it?”

  The Superintendent shook his head, with an appraising look at Flurry. They seemed to be trying to outstare each other, like children. Then Concannon said a brusque farewell.

  Flurry watched him through the window as he went to the car. “Look there, Dominic. Just as I thought. He has a fella with him; and the poor sod’ll have to stay up all night watching for me to plunge into the Lissawn. It’s a great shame. We’d best bring out a bed for him.”

  I was in no condition to enter into Flurry’s high spirits.

  “C’mon. Drink up. That’s better. I hope you don’t walk in your sleep.”

  “Why—?”

  “You’re a great swimmer, aren’t you? Don’t go taking a fancy to walking in your sleep and diving into the river. It’d look bad.”

  For a long time that night I could not get to sleep. It was still only the fifth night since Harriet’s death, but that seemed to have taken place in another life of mine, ages back. Murders are seldom solved in a week, I imagine; yet I felt an unaccountable impatience with Concannon. I wanted to be put out of my misery and uncertainty. I could understand the murderer’s state of mind, which leads him consciously or unconsciously to break the log-jam in it by giving himself up, or giving himself away.

  Once again I was possessed by the terror lest I had killed Harriet myself in some paranoiac frenzy. I was the highest up on my own short list of suspects: perhaps Concannon, a patient man, was waiting for me to betray myself. Kevin was now struck off the list. There only remained Flurry, Maire, me, and a shadowy X—the wandering man Maire had seen as she bicycled home, who then appeared to have vanished off the face of the earth.

  I was living now in a total unreality, as if in a vacuum, which made the happy times with Harriet equally unreal. It seemed incredible that I should have treated Flurry all those weeks in so despicable a way: it was not in my character, surely; but it had happened—a game I had played, as I felt now, with dream figures—with Harriet, who had turned me into a dream figure. Father Bresnihan had woken me out of the dream. Or was that a pretentious interpretation? Was it not simply that I had grown tired of Harriet?

  But the dream-feeling obsessed me, as Harriet had done. If now our whole life together had this quality of dream, it seemed more than likely that I had put an end to hers in some sleep of consciousness.

  That dark figure which, Maire said, had blotted out Harriet’s white body—was it X or Flurry, or me; or Maire herself? I fought against the idea that it was any of the last three. Perhaps least of all did I want it to be Flurry, for I had him so desperately on my conscience. Yet it was he, I judged, whom Concannon now had his mind set on.

  It occurred to me at this moment that I had never tried to put myself in Harriet’s place. She is lying on the grass by the river, naked and rather tipsy. I have just left her, having said we must never again be lovers—having refused to make love with her a last time. She is angry, defeated, weeping. Would she not have soon put on her night-dress and hurried back to the house?

  I myself had returned to the cottage and not gone to sleep immediately. Even if my mind had split, and I’d returned to kill her, she would surely not have been there still when I returned.

  Oh yes, she might have gone to sleep, worn out with emotional stress.

  But, if Maire
’s story was true, Harriet had been sufficiently awake to put her arms round the dark figure. If this figure was a strange man, our X, she would not do so: she would yell out and try to run away. If it was Maire herself, armed with a knife, Harriet would not have gone on lying there, like a lamb for the slaughter.

  Flurry then? She opens her eyes and sees her husband standing before her. She would not inevitably cry out or run away. “What are you doing here?” he asks. “I was so hot. I wandered out, and went to sleep.” “Well, get up. You’ll catch your death of cold out here.” “Come, Flurry —” she raises her arms to pull him down or for him to pull her up: she could always twist him round her finger, she thinks.

  But there, my fantasy fell to pieces. Why should Flurry pull out a knife? Why, if he did, hadn’t Maire heard her screaming? Harriet would not have been an easy victim: she was certainly no death-wish girl. If Maire had waited a minute longer, she would have seen the struggle and its end.

  But was there a struggle, apart from the usual sex-gymnastics? … The child she was carrying. Suppose that Flurry rejected her advances or was incapable of responding to them. I could just (but only just) imagine Harriet, in a fury of frustration, taunting him with this child—saying, or hinting, that it was not his. Flurry himself had told me what store he set on having a child by her: he never for a moment seemed to have doubted it was his. The shock of learning it was not would have sent him off his head. Her manner of death—all those little wounds, looked like the work of a madman, of someone striking out blindly again and again in a frenzy, as if the body lying there had become an object of extreme repulsion, a false and loathsome succubus.

  The next morning would show how close I had come to the truth—and how remote from it I had been too.

  Chapter 14

  Because I had slept so little that night, only dropping off at dawn, I did not awake till half nine. There were faint voices from below, and presently I heard the front door opened and footsteps receding through the garden.

  When I got downstairs, I found Concannon’s man chatting with Seamus over breakfast.

  “Hallo,” I said to him. “I thought you were supposed to see none of us jumped in the river.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “Ah, Mr. Flurry’ll be safe enough with the Father.”

  “Father Bresnihan’s after arriving,” Seamus explained. “Flurry took him out fishing. He looks as if he’d seen a ghost. Maybe the fresh air will recover him.”

  I ate the boiled egg Seamus had waiting for me in a cosy, and some soda bread.

  “When will you be relieved?” I asked the young Garda.

  “At midday, please God. Have you any more eggs, Seamus? There’s a powerful hunger on me still.”

  “What’s Father Bresnihan want so early?”

  “I didn’t hear,” said Seamus indifferently. “I was too busy cooking for this fella. Why the hell don’t you go and guard something, Rory?”

  “And I destroyed with midges and the want of sleep? Have you no mercy at all?”

  “Want of sleep, is it? Sure, I wager you’d not an eye open all night.”

  “I did so,” exclaimed the Garda indignantly.

  “And how many ghosts did you see?”

  “Never a one. Only the water, and it boiling up against the great rocks all night. There’s a powerful flood in it off the mountains. Mr. Flurry’ll not be catching anything this morning.”

  “Mr. Flurry’ld draw a fish out of the river of hell, if he had a mind to it. Anyway, it’s overcast and there’s no wind.”

  In a few minutes I walked out into the demesne, picking up Flurry’s old field-glasses on the way. It was one of those morbid mornings when everything seems shut-in, silent, inanimate—a cataleptic trance of nature. Cattle stood about, their heads bowed, stupidly regarding the grass in front of them as if it were an insoluble problem. The birds might have gone into retreat: not a cheep or a flutter from the trees. The only sound was the faint roaring of the Lissawn, away to my left, amplified in the windless air, and presently the noise of a car driving up the avenue.

  It was Kevin’s. I intercepted it, and Maire leant out of the driver’s window.

  “Is the Father here?”

  “Yes, Flurry’s just taken him out by the river.”

  “I rang him last night, but Kathleen said he was too tired to see anyone. And when I rang again after breakfast, she told me he was visiting over here.”

  “Well, there’s no hurry, is there? Get out, and we’ll go and find him.”

  “I must talk to him about Kevin,” said Maire, rather wildly. “I have a terrible load on my mind, Dominic.”

  She drove her car on to the grass beside the avenue, hitting its front bumper against an ash tree, and got out. “I don’t seem able to do anything right nowadays,” she muttered, almost in tears. Her eyes were downcast; what had happened yesterday between her and me might never have happened. The proud face looked frozen.

  A vague idea came into my mind. I would take Maire to the place, overlooking the green spit by the Lissawn, from which that night she had seen Harriet and the murderer—or had seen Harriet and murdered her. I would make her envisage the scene again. Perhaps that would cause her to betray herself. As we walked silently over the grass, I tried to imagine myself pouncing hard on Maire with brutal questions, like a policeman, though what questions I could ask her were not in the least clear to me. I felt myself on the edge of some revelation, nervous and fatalistic.

  “I haven’t had a word yet from the superintendent,” she said out of the silence.

  “They took Kevin on some political charge,” I replied uncomfortably. “Not the murder.”

  “Oh? I don’t understand this at all. Political?” But Maire had no time to ask the questions that must have been crowding to her tongue; for we had arrived at the screen of trees, and were met by a sight so bizarre that for a moment I really believed I had gone mad.

  Fifty yards away, his back to us, Flurry stood at the water’s edge holding a rod. The river hurried and foamed past him. And in the middle of it a black-clad figure floundered, then disappeared from view into the deep pool, and presently emerged again, holding something up in its right hand. I focused my glasses on it. The figure was Father Bresnihan’s, water streaming down his distraught face. Maire gave a cry and made to run forward, but I clamped a hand on her wrist.

  What had led up to this weird scene I can only reconstruct from Flurry Leeson’s statement, which Concannon gave me the gist of next day.

  Shortly before I came down to breakfast, Father Bresnihan had turned up. He told Flurry he must have a talk with him at once, privately. Flurry was just ready to go out and thrash the river, so he asked the Father to accompany him.

  “You’ve heard my brother has been arrested?”

  “Kathleen told me of it.”

  “The poor silly eejut—he over-reached himself. Politics are the ruin of this country. You’re not looking too well yourself, Father. That retreat doesn’t seem to have done you any good. You look like death warmed up, saving your presence.”

  Father Bresnihan made no reply. When they reached the green spit, he stopped.

  “Well, Father,” said Flurry good-humouredly, “have you come to hear my confession?”

  “That is not a subject I like to hear jokes made about,” replied Father Bresnihan automatically.

  “Well then, what do you want of me?”

  The Father turned his eyes full upon his companion. They flared up from the extinguished face. “I have come to make a confession to you, Flurry. It was I who killed your wife.”

  “You?—ah now, Father, you’re not well. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I tell you, I killed your wife. You must believe me.”

  “Sure you’d never do a thing like that. Of course I don’t believe you.” Embarrassed, Flurry fiddled with his fishing gear.

  “Leave that alone and listen to me,” ordered the priest.

  “Be easy. I’ll get the doctor ou
t. He’ll put you right in no time.”

  “Nothing will ever put me right!” It was like a cry from a damned soul. “God will not forgive me. How can I ask you to? All I want is for you to understand me—my actions. Then I shall give myself up.”

  “Very well,” Flurry answered, in the tone of one humouring a lunatic. “You killed Harriet. How did it come about?”

  He sat down on the grass beside Father Bresnihan, who started to tell his story, trying to control his twitching face. Sometimes the Father’s words became a muttering gabble, so that Flurry could hardly make out what he was saying; at others, the beautiful voice slowed and cleared, as if he must convince Flurry at all costs.

  “When I left you that night—you remember?—I thought I’d take the short cut along the river here. I was tired. I needed some air. I’d just got to this spot—it was here, wasn’t it?” Father Bresnihan said, as if he’d only just awoken to the fact. “I came on your wife, lying on the grass. Naked. Shameless. I stood over her, to rebuke her. It was my duty to do so. My duty, you understand?”

  “Of course it was,” said Flurry, humouring him still. “You can’t have naked women lying about all over your parish.”

  “And it was your duty, as I’d told you half an hour before, to keep your wife in order.” Father Bresnihan passed his hand over his face, as if brushing away cobwebs. “The woman was drunk and insolent. Then she tried to clasp me round the knees. I thought at first it was a gesture of supplication. I was wrong. She she she was attempting to seduce me.”

  The Father was now talking to himself—Flurry might not have been there at all. “She disgusted me. The smell of drink on her. The smell of her body.”

  “A powerful ordeal for you, Father.”

  “She would not let go of me. She began a tirade against me. She hissed at me like a serpent. She was in a fury because I had persuaded Dominic Eyre of his evil ways, and he had promised me never again to indulge himself in acts of immorality with her. I told her she was living in mortal sin. It was my duty, though she did not belong to our faith. I told her she was a whore, she would burn with the damned if she’d not change her ways.”