The South Lawn Plot

by Ray O'Hanlon

  Manning fingered through the papers and letters, looked again at his watch. He took a pencil in hand but just as quickly put it down. The clock chimed. It was two o'clock. His appointment, if it could be described as such, was at three. The bastard could wait in the rain, he thought.

  He sat back in the rickety chair and swallowed another mouthful of tea. Would he miss the place if he went ahead and sold it? Sure he would. But he had never quite felt that it belonged to him. Even now, with his father gone, it could never be really his, or his mother's. It would always be Joe's retreat, or the hiding place of a complete stranger, someone who could start from scratch and, like his father, invest an entirely new thirty years of contemplation, scheming and late night solitary tippling behind its foot-and-a-half thick walls.

  Manning shivered. He rose from his chair and stretched out his arms. On wet days such as this, he always felt his bones shrink a bit. It was the inescapable bloody damp. He walked the few paces to the fireplace. The turf fire in the iron grate was in need of immediate replenishment.

  Dropping to his knees, he took a sod from the basket and threw it on the still glowing ash. He loved the smell of burning turf.

  He grabbed a second sod and threw it on to the now reviving fire. A cloud of turf dust exploded in the grate and an ember reached his eye. In the few moments of pain he was back in history class, final year in school and old Clinch rambling on about the Fenians and Pearse. The teachers who marked the exams were all patriots, he said. They all spelled their names in Irish and wanted to see good students pay homage to Ireland's martyred dead. He had laughed at Clinch, they all had. But, as it later turned out, neither the martyrs nor their propagandists were to be so easily dismissed.

  He got up and stepped slowly along the wall crowded with the framed photographs, old Joe's hall of family fame.

  Long dead relatives stared at him from their formal poses. One was dressed in a uniform, British army. He was a family legend from his mother's side, a token amid all the Manning greats. Great Uncle Willie. Lost up the Khyber Pass. Dead at the hands of the Pathans. Never seen again. But mentioned in dispatches. Brave Uncle Willie.

  Uncle Willie stared down at Manning. Manning stared back. God bless Uncle Willie, he thought. Died for king and country, they had said. But really, as his father has never failed to point out, it had been the king of another country. He needed air. He covered the few steps to the door and pulled down his father's battered Barbour coat. Even at close to six feet tall and over 200 pounds, Manning still swam in the rainproof. His father had been larger than life, and large in it.

  Throwing on the coat, he opened the door and stepped into the drizzle. He sucked down a deep gulp of saturated air and zipped up the Barbour as far as it would go. He would walk up the mountain, find out what they wanted and tell them to go to hell. Get it over and done with, see Pender off in the morning and make his final decision on the house. It was simple, really.

  Then he saw her again.

  Manning had been unable to sleep much despite the cool evenings and the ocean air. He had remained awake into the early hours thinking of his father, dearly departed, more or less, a year now.

  But it wasn't just that. There was the matter of the young woman, her smile, her puzzlement, the question in her eyes, the moment of absolute realization. And there she was now, standing by the gate, waiting for him, smiling.

  She watched Manning as he hunched his shoulders. He did his best to ignore the apparition but slowly turned his eyes. She smiled, looked puzzled, concerned and then fixed him with the question. Manning rubbed his fingers into his eyes and stamped his feet. She was gone. He comforted himself with the thought that at least the ghost, memory, vision or whatever it was, was confined to his native soil. She, it, had made no appearances in Washington. No visa, he thought, and laughed out loud.

  He covered the few steps to the rusty gate and pulled it open. To the left, the stone pocked lane ran down the hill to a point where it met asphalt. To the right, it became narrower as it cut through a run of fields surrounded by stone walls before giving way to heather and tussock covered upland and the upper reaches of the mountain.

  Manning turned right and walked past dripping fuchsia and hawthorn bushes towards the mountain track. One more day, maybe two, and he would head back to Dublin, stay with his mother for a night and catch a flight back to the States. There was no need to consider any longer. He had a wife, child and career to take care of. What was past was past.

  As if to confirm the soundness of his plan, Manning quickened his pace. The thicker vegetation gave way to open pasture in which a few soaked sheep nibbled at grass that was already reduced almost to the roots. His father had often lectured the idiotic animals on the evils of overgrazing and had complained of the negligence of farmers who seemed more phantom around these parts than human flesh.

  These hills had been his father's personal court, nature his judge and jury. As a younger man, a boy, Manning had, on those rare visits that included his mother, walked behind the great man as he jabbed his finger at a meandering seagull or scampering rabbit.

  Not a few cases had been won in court with arguments perfected on walks from the house to the top of the mountain and back. Manning could hear his father now, loquacious even in his isolation, hammering home the final nails into the prosecution's coffin as twelve angry rabbits looked on from a safe distance.

  Manning made quick time up the slope. He was in his early forties but that, he would remind himself almost daily, was merely his extra late thirties. He still managed to get up a head of steam over the last half mile of his twice- weekly five-mile run. And now he was pumping his arms and pushing against the stony track with quads honed hard on muddy football fields. He could still do it, he thought, the mountain in one continuous stretch, no rest stops.

  He was close now to the top and paused only momentarily at the flat rock that topped the Hag's Tailbone, a slope that fell about a hundred feet and then curved upwards briefly only to give way to nothing but air and a straight plunge to a jumble of rocks another three hundred feet below, rocks that had been in place since the death throes of the last ice age.

  The track turned to the left and was now a clearly visible strip of trammeled earth leading all the way to the summit, its rock pile and the small white wooden cross that was painted every summer, and replaced every four or five, for as long as any of the locals could remember.

  Manning poured it on. His heart was doing double time. But this was good, a needed purgative. His father would have approved of the tempo, if not the silence of the climber.

  A final few yards, a last push and he had reached the summit. This was not a high mountain by world standards. It looked big because it rose its almost 2,000 feet starting from sea level. Its summit afforded an uninterrupted view north to the bay and the distant town, south towards Galway, east towards the uplands of Mayo and west, well, west was America, his home for almost two years, and at least a couple more.

  It was on this piece of ground that Manning had once stood motionless and at rapt attention as his father recited, word for word, Robert Emmett's speech from the dock, only to follow it with the Gettysburg Address and the best lines from Kennedy's inauguration speech.

  The last time they had been together here, Joe Manning had spoken of history. Consider, he had said, if the theory about the butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world and causing a hurricane on the other was applied to history. Consider an action in one century and its possible effects in another. What if someone had been in the book depository and had disarmed Oswald? What if someone had shot Hitler dead in Munich? The key thing, he had said, was in the knowing that someone, or something, was destined to have significant historical ramifications. You had to spot history's titans while still in chrysalis form.

  “And then what?” the son had asked the father.

  “Just get out of the bloody way,” his father had replied.

  The son's mind had wandered just as it was do
ing now as a cloud rolled in from the ocean and wrapped itself around the summit. Manning wanted to believe that this moisture on his face was a gift from nature, but he could not for long ignore his tears. He had held it in for all the months. But they were coming freely now, his very own Atlantic squall.

  Manning allowed himself the release though he knew that not all his tears were for his father. He bowed his head and quickly rubbed his eyes dry when he heard the cheerful salutation from behind him.

  He glanced over his shoulder. The bent figure of the man was traversing the last few meters of the mountain's south slope.

  Looking north again and down towards the house, Manning could just about make out another figure approaching the garden gate. Pender.

  He lifted his eyes and stared at the horizon, visible again after the shower.

  But if one squall had passed another was about to hit. This one, he knew, would not be born over an ocean, though it would most assuredly spring from a sea of troubles.

  6

  NICK BAILEY WAS EARLY AT HIS DESK, earlier than he could remember, earlier than anyone in the newsroom who noticed cared to remember.

  Bailey was not known for precise time keeping. The news editors would have little bets as to whether or not he would show up in this fifteen-minute interval or the next. Nick Bailey didn't quite fit into the Post's ordered shift system. But he was a good reporter, good enough for his tardiness to be tolerated, more or less.

  His presence at such an unusual hour naturally raised a few eyebrows. And Trevor Worth was the one colleague who moved rapidly beyond facial expression and asked questions.

  Worth, after all, was Bailey's mate. Which is to say they shared cigarettes.

  Worth opened his probe with a suggestion that Bailey must be hiding from either a woman demanding his body, or the landlord demanding the rent. Bailey countered with a few seconds of silence. His eyes leaned closer to his computer screen.

  “Sod off, Trev,” he said, punching the keys harder still with his forefingers.

  Worth tried another tack.

  “Nice lead this morning Nick. Must have sold a bundle.”

  This was true, Bailey thought. He had taken his usual underground train, though at the now record earlier hour. This presented an opportunity to check out his fellow tube riders.

  A rough survey of their newspapers gave up a dominant combination of the Sun's royal rubbish, a Mirror lead on a drunken soccer star, and the Post's Deadfriars exclusive.

  And it was indeed such a thing. Bailey scanned the few remaining broadsheet titles and noticed nothing that would take away from the fact that the Post, and more importantly he himself, had actually bagged a good one.

  The text of the story ran on page five. Bailey's top was propped up by Henderson's background material on the Calvi affair.

  There were, in addition, a couple of paragraphs at the bottom giving something of the history of Blackfriars Bridge. Post readers had been offered the intriguing fact that the bridge had been given a cameo mention by H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds. This little gem was Percy's contribution. And given that he was the last reporter to handle the story there had been nothing to stop him from slipping in a byline for good measure.

  And this he had done, the old codger.

  “So why are you here now?” said Worth.

  Bailey leaned back in his chair. He had slept little and was feeling the effect. Still, what the inspector had told him was more than enough for a follow up. Bailey had allowed his imagination to run a bit. He had started dreaming up all manner of conspiracies that would lead to a string of front-page exclusives. But Trevor Worth had shattered the moment.

  “If I tell you I'll have to kill you,” said Bailey. “But if you get me a coffee, maybe I'll tell you and yet spare your miserable life.”

  “On it. Crude or refined?”

  Nobody in the newsroom had quite worked out the mystery of the office coffee. Either some small furry creature had upped and died in the coffee machine, or it was simply the London tap water, already consumed too many times over and recycled before it hit the bottom of a Morning Post coffee mug.

  “Crude mate,” said Bailey. “Like one of your better jokes.”

  Worth went off to carry out his mission. Bailey stared at his screen. Plaice had said that he would have a name on the dead priest for tomorrow's edition. But it would naturally go out to everyone else through normal channels.

  The other death was still a mystery. And still his if he had read Plaice correctly. He wasn't all the way to linking the demise of one priest in London and another down in the sticks. There was a possible tie-in, but Plaice was a long way from being certain. He had suggested to Bailey that what information he had, and what he could add to it today, would be his to run with for a day or two.

  There was nothing certain, nothing openly stated. But Plaice, and Bailey was certain of this, was clearly forming the idea in his mind that there was a connection between the two dead padres.

  “Coffee's up.” Worth had returned with reinforcements. Deb Smith and Charlie Chilton grabbed chairs and crowded around.

  “Nick pulling a late one and up with the lark. Have they tested you for banned substances?”

  “Only the coffee, Charlie,” Bailey replied.

  Deb Smith said nothing but stared at Bailey with a slightly amused look. Bailey was certain, or thought he was, that she fancied him. But he was off the ladies for the moment. That moment being all of two weeks since his last relationship floundered, rather publicly, in a Chinese restaurant.

  “Look, everybody,” said Bailey, “I appreciate the congratulations and all that but really there's nothing much else to tell right now. The best part of the whole bloody story was the Calvi bit. Right now we've got some old monk who had a bad day, an even lousier night and somewhere along the line a severe lapse in faith. It might be a three par follow up tomorrow morning and nothing more than that, right?”

  Nobody said a word. Charlie Chilton saw a light flashing on his phone and was fast out of his seat. Deb Smith folded her arms and kicked her feet out. Trevor Worth asked him for the zillionth time if he wanted sugar with his tar.

  “Okay,” said Bailey. There might be a link to another death that just might be suspicious. Now that's all I know. Go do your work.”

  Triumphant, Deb Smith got up and walked in what could only be described as a provocative fashion over to Charlie Chilton's desk.

  Trevor Worth nodded, apparently satisfied. “I'll watch this space,” he said before heading back to his cubicle.

  “This place is bloody unbelievable,” Bailey said loudly enough for more than his immediate inquisitors to hear.

  He took a mouthful of the foul brew, grimaced and leaned closer to his screen. Henderson would be here in less than an hour. Plaice had better call soon with something, anything.

  Tim Plaice was not thinking of calling anyone. He had been fussing around his office for much of the afternoon, moving his bits and pieces into new formations. He was more than a little tired. It had been a late night.

  Plaice's quarters were small for an officer of his rank. His office was precisely half of what had once been a room twice the size. Budgetary requirements had precluded an extension to the station, so offices had been consolidated or partitioned. He had been promised a bigger space. The promise was now close to two years old.

  Plaice had long since noticed that no matter how dire the financial realities for the Metropolitan Police, there seemed to be an endless supply of funds for sheetrock.

  Plaice was not a particularly tidy man. Indeed some of his colleagues considered him sloppy. But today he had things in order. Or so he thought.

  His office knickknacks were in rows, triangles and squares, military style. The wall to his right held various books and files. He had blown off clouds of dust and propped them up. The wall to his right was dominated by a notice board with more pins than notices on it, and the obligatory photograph of the queen. Beside this was a smaller portra
it of Princess Diana. It was Tim Plaice's slightly defiant gesture. He had always fancied himself a bit of a rebel.

  Right behind Plaice's desk was the single window. Straight ahead was the door, and standing in it was Detective Sergeant Samantha Walsh.

  “Step in, Sam, take a seat,” said Plaice.

  Walsh nodded and covered the couple of steps to one of the two chairs in front of Plaice's desk.

  “Be with you in a moment,” said Plaice, pretending to scan a piece of paper.

  He gave up the pretense and looked up at Walsh.

  “You've read the file, and probably the paper. The priest, the dead priest,” he said.

  “Oh yes, guv, both of them. It's an odd one for sure. Do we have anything nailed down?”

  “Not really,” Plaice said. “But there's a whiff of something about it. I'm not quite sure, but I have a strong feeling there might be more.”

  Walsh nodded.

  “Sam,” said Plaice, “you've got a few days coming haven't you?”

  Walsh shrugged, then nodded.

  “You can say no, of course, but I'm going to ask you a favor.”

  “Yes,” said Walsh.

  “The other priest, the one who fell over the cliff in Cornwall a while back. I want to run that one over again, be sure that it was an accident.”

  “You would like me to go down and sniff around,” said Walsh.

  “Just for a couple of days. It's very nice down there. My parents took my sister and I there for holidays in the summer once or twice in that very area.”

  Walsh smiled.

  “Indeed, Plaice went on, “I remember the cliffs rather well. My father was always warning me to stay away from the edge. And that was easy enough because the pathway was some yards from it.”

  “Are you going where I think you're going with this?”

  “Well, it's a funny thing,” said Plaice. “The cliffs where this priest took a tumble are dangerous enough, but you really have to go out of your way to put yourself in harm's way.”