by Jess Kidd
Mrs Moran shakes her head. ‘I saw it all you see. There he was, a decent young man trying to make a go of it, and the last thing he needed was to be hooked by your one and her dirty ways.’
‘You’re talking about my mother there, Mrs Moran. You’d do well to remember it.’ Mahony speaks low and soft, but it’s his expression that startles. Cold-eyed and with a smile that says he could climb over the table and finish Mrs Moran off with his bare hands.
Her jowls wobble with indignant alarm. ‘I meant no offence.’
‘None taken.’ Mrs Cauley nudges Mahony. ‘Is there?’
Mahony nods imperceptibly but drops his terrible smile.
‘There now,’ says Mrs Cauley. ‘Please continue in your own words, Mrs Moran.’
Mrs Moran narrows her eyes. ‘I only say it how I saw it, Mrs Cauley.’
‘And isn’t that the best way, Mary?’
Mrs Moran takes a sly gander at Mahony. ‘But if you’d prefer I dressed it up a bit? Tidied the corners?’
‘Not at all, Mrs Moran. We are grateful for your honesty,’ says Mrs Cauley with a rigid smile.
Mrs Moran, vindicated, allows her jowls to settle. ‘Well, Orla kicked herself down off the crates and walked up to me in that brazen way she had about her and she said, “Jesus, will you get down off your cross and let Mrs Moran get up there?” And I said, “You should be ashamed of yourself talking about the good Lord in that manner.” And she gave me such a smirk and turned on her heel and was off throlloping down the road. At the end of the road she turned and roared out like a fishwife, “I’ll be seeing you, Tadhg. Don’t you forget to meet me later.”’
Mrs Cauley glances at Mahony. ‘And that was the last you ever saw of her?’
‘It was. But I’m not sorry about that. Nor did I ever think on her again.’
‘Did you never wonder what happened to her?’
‘Mrs Cauley, if you had a bad tooth you wouldn’t send it a postcard when it was pulled out of your head, would you? I was just relieved she’d cleared off. What became of her, God himself only knows.’
‘You’ve been very helpful, Mary. If you remember anything else will you let us know?’
Mrs Moran nods and gets up from the chair. At the door she turns and smiles treacherously at Mahony. ‘It’s a terrible shame that one was your mammy, for you seem like a decent individual.’
Mahony accepts a hip flask and Mrs Cauley accepts a lit cigarette.
‘Tadhg, though?’ says Mahony.
‘Why not Tadhg?’
‘I wouldn’t have said he’s the murdering type.’
‘That’s what everyone says about the murdering type.’ Mrs Cauley inhales. ‘Of course it’s not bloody Tadhg; he’d have told the whole of Ireland he’d murdered her by now. But let’s put him down on the list. Jesus, just for the sake of having a name.’
Mahony nods.
Mrs Cauley looks closely at him. ‘How’re you holding up?’
‘Let’s just get through it.’
‘That’s the spirit. Any dead ones coming through yet?’
‘Haven’t we enough with the living?’
Mrs Cauley watches as Mahony runs his fingers through his dark hair.
‘I’m sorry you have to hear all this, kiddo. Will we stop for today?’
‘We won’t. We’ll keep going, aren’t we a fierce team?’ He catches her look and smiles; there’s a world of pain in his eyes. ‘I’m grand. Tell Shauna to bring the next one of these horrors in.’
Mrs Cauley feels something she hasn’t felt in a long time. She curses the smoke for bringing tears to her eyes.
Chapter 9
April 1976
Shauna sweeps the empty village hall and Mahony stacks the chairs and collects the plates and glasses. Mrs Cauley shifts the cards laid out on the table in front of her as if she is divining an indifferent fortune. She is annoyed that a fair few prominent citizens of Mulderrig have evaded interrogation. And she is annoyed at having missed Mary Lavelle’s performance, for a cracked mind often gives a true picture.
Miss Mulhearne missed it too. She is just emanating from the broom cupboard as Mahony comes down the corridor looking for a mop. She flits back inside and toys with the idea of keeping the mice company as they gnaw the wasted beams in the roof space above. Mahony walks into the cupboard, shuts the door and props the mop under the door handle. He turns over a bucket and sits down for a smoke. Miss Mulhearne decides to stay.
At first Mahony feels her as a cool, soft presence behind him. As his eyes adjust to the dark, Mahony can make out her mild-eyed face by the light of the small window high above him. She stands very still, with her hands clasped together low, and she makes him feel calmer than he has felt all day.
Mahony smiles at her. ‘Do you come here often?’
She nods.
‘Do you like the people, the plays?’
‘I like poetry,’ she whispers.
‘I don’t know about poetry but I’ve got a couple of dirty limericks you’re welcome to.’
Miss Mulhearne sighs, almost audibly. ‘I can’t remember any poetry really. I just know it was beautiful. I think I remember that Yeats wrote beautiful poetry, but all the words have gone.’
‘Are you always here?’
‘I teach here. But all the children have gone too.’
‘Everything goes. That’s how this whole thing works.’
Mahony draws bitterly on a cigarette. Miss Mulhearne moves imperceptibly nearer, as if to comfort him. A companionable silence fills the broom cupboard.
‘The mice are still here,’ she eventually says, very softly.
Mahony smiles in the dim light. ‘I’ll come back with some poetry then.’
Tadhg offers to run them back up to Rathmore House. He’s bursting to tell the Widow about his role as Michael James, a publican playing a publican! There’s goodness in that alone and she must approve of him helping to raise money for the church there.
On the way out of town Tadhg pulls the car up next to a roadside shrine.
It’s a peaceful spot, with a grand view of the bay and the forest just across the road. It appears to suit the Mother of God, a strapping six-foot statue with a healthy colour. Her magenta face beams above robes that fall in folds of lancing cerulean blue. A stone grotto has been built around her to protect her from the elements.
Tadhg gets out of the car and takes a wrapped platter from the boot. With effort he bends down and pushes the plate onto the shelf beneath the plastic flowers that bloom perennially and the pot plants that come and go.
‘I didn’t know the Holy Mother liked a sandwich,’ says Mahony.
Shauna smiles. ‘It’s for the fella who lives up in the forest.’
Then, on second thoughts, Tadhg goes back and throws down a couple of cigarettes.
‘Tadhg isn’t the only one at it.’ Shauna looks out of the window. ‘Daddy has me leaving all sorts there for him. Soap, pipe cleaners, you name it.’
Tadhg levers himself back into the driver’s seat and starts up. ‘Wha’? Who’s this?’
‘Tom Bogey,’ says Shauna.
Mrs Cauley turns her head and peers over the passenger seat. ‘He’s a wood-kerne, a hermit, a speechless bard.’
Tadhg gives her a funny look. ‘He’s unravelled in the head only.’
‘Apparently so,’ says Mrs Cauley coyly. ‘Only I’ve never had the pleasure and neither has anyone else. You see, Mahony, Tom sees no one and no one sees Tom.’
Mahony raises an eyebrow. ‘Is that the case? How do you know that he exists?’
‘Because Jack Brophy says he does. He’s in cahoots with him.’ Mrs Cauley widens her eyes. ‘They go out skinning badgers and roasting squirrels together.’
Tadhg wipes his face with his handkerchief and starts the motor. ‘That’s some class of an imagination you’ve got there, Mrs Cauley. Don’t listen to a word of it, Mahony. Jack looks out for the poor guy, that’s all.’
Mrs Cauley shrugs. ‘And would Jack know w
hat Tom the bogeyman has squirrelled away in the forest? He may have more than a couple of pipe cleaners up there by now.’
Tadhg rolls his eyes. It’s evident that he holds no truck with their investigations ever since his refusal to be interviewed by Mrs Cauley, claiming to be neither a murderer nor a slanderer.
‘What’s Tom’s story, Tadhg?’ Mahony leans forward with his hand on the back of the driver’s seat.
Tadhg looks at Mahony in the rear-view mirror. ‘The guy served with Jack’s father in the war and was some class of hero. But he came out of it badly; what he’d seen shattered him. It ruined him for people, so he sought consolation in nature. That’s the only story I know and that’s from Jack himself.’
‘So he’s up there just roaming around? And Jack lets him?’
Mrs Cauley shoots Mahony a sly look. ‘Why not? When the notion of Tom Bogey keeps the bad boys and girls out of the forest and away from all the no good they could be getting up to in there. For there Tom would be, hiding and spying amongst the trees, and reporting straight back to Jack Brophy.’
Tadhg frowns. ‘Tom keeps himself to himself and the village lets him, and that’s all there is to it, Mahony.’
‘He’s been around for a while then, Tadhg?’
‘Been up there near thirty years.’
Shauna nods. ‘Longer maybe.’
And Tadhg turns up Elvis singing ‘In the Ghetto’ on the radio and, because no one can argue with that, the conversation is at an end.
Chapter 10
April 1976
Mrs Cauley looks at the map spread over her knees in disgust. ‘They saw us coming, the feckers.’
She’s had five sherries.
Shauna sets out the hot water, a fresh towel and the medicated soap.
‘I’ve plotted their evidence on this map here, Shauna, and it demonstrates that Orla Sweeney was in eight different places at the approximate time she disappeared. I know she slung it about a bit, but even so.’
Mrs Cauley pushes the map away. ‘She was seen leaving town walking in five different directions whilst simultaneously boarding the bus to Ennismore, with and without a suitcase, a vanity case, a baby and a pram. All on a day when there was no bus to Ennismore because Bridget Doosey was lancing a boil on the bus driver’s arse.’
Shauna tuts and folds up the map. She gathers the rest of the papers into a pile and dumps the lot on the footstool next to the bed.
Mrs Cauley shakes her head. ‘How can I apply ratiocination to this dissembling shower of bastards?’
‘Apply what?’
Mrs Cauley grits her remaining teeth. ‘Logical thought, the process of elimination. Even Marple would be at a loss in this town. Jesus, they couldn’t tell the thing straight if their lives hung on it.’
Shauna takes a clean nightdress from the press. ‘Don’t get yourself worked up now. What did Dr McNulty say to you about getting worked up?’
Mrs Cauley, grumbling, removes her wig. ‘How can I bring reason to bear when Mulderrig doesn’t conform to reason?’
Shauna shakes out the wig and smoothes it onto the stand. ‘Why don’t you take the statements from the most trustworthy witnesses and go from there?’
Mrs Cauley snorts.
Shauna takes a soft brush from the drawer to brush out Mrs Cauley’s few bits of hair round the back of her head. ‘There are still people you haven’t interviewed, Mahony said.’
Mrs Cauley nods. ‘Jimmy Nylon, for one; he was seen walking with Orla up towards the forest on the day she disappeared. There were three separate sightings of that.’
Shauna looks at her. ‘Jimmy Nylon, really?’
‘Oh, I know, Shauna. He’s a malignant little fecker but I doubt he’s capable of murder.’
‘Not unless Orla was a pint.’
Shauna unbuttons Mrs Cauley’s dress and lifts it over the old woman’s head.
‘Then there’s Tadhg.’ Mrs Cauley narrows her eyes. ‘Mary Moran described him as a handy young fella with a fiery temperament. What’s more, Orla had arranged to see him later that day.’
‘Well, I don’t think Tadhg is Mahony’s daddy, or the murderer. You know he can’t keep a thing to himself before he’s off blathering it around town.’ Shauna drops a flannel into the basin. ‘Do you know he told Annie Farelly that you pretend to be asleep whenever she visits?’
‘Did he now?’ Mrs Cauley grins.
Shauna lifts Mrs Cauley’s arm and begins to soap her armpit. ‘Do you really think something bad happened to Orla?’
Mrs Cauley nods. ‘I’d bet money on it. I told you what was in that note. She was a little troublemaker, so they finished her off.’
‘It’s awful. In a place like this?’ Shauna rinses out the facecloth and gives Mrs Cauley a quick wipe down. ‘Poor Orla, and poor Mahony, with him being an orphan and all that.’
‘Don’t you worry about Mahony. He’s just the fella to apply a good swift kick right up this town’s arse. You just watch him – he’ll be taking a run up to it.’
Shauna drops the flannel in the bowl and reaches for a towel. ‘I’d say it would be more of a swagger with Mahony.’
Mrs Cauley smiles grimly. ‘Either way, that lad won’t stop until he gets the truth.’
Chapter 11
April 1976
‘Now that’s just bloody horrible,’ says Bridget Doosey.
On the back doorstep is the corpse of a recently deceased ginger cat with its head wedged in a wicker basket.
Bridget kicks open the lid of the basket and bends down to study the cat. ‘Merle did right to call me.’
Its tongue hangs out of its mouth, swollen and black.
‘Cream scones: poisoned. Something industrial.’ Bridget takes a card from the basket and holds it up between her rubber-gloved fingers. ‘And they weren’t meant for this poor little bastard.’
Mahony’s name is typed on it.
‘I’d watch your back from now on, lad. It looks like your mother’s fan club has reassembled.’
Mahony notices the cat, now dead, prancing in the flowerbed, snapping at a fly.
‘Any ideas who?’
‘Take your pick, Mahony. Your mammy wasn’t a crowd-pleaser and now here you are poking your coulter where it’s not wanted.’
‘Even so.’
‘You were dreaming of a different kind of welcome.’
‘They seemed friendly enough.’
‘Did they? Well, now you have the measure of them.’ She looks at him closely. ‘It could get rough. This town’s as twisted as tits on a bull.’
Mahony frowns. ‘Are you saying I should stop asking questions?’
‘I’m saying that you might not like the answers.’
The cat stretches, shakes its dim tail through a series of exclamations and walks through the wall.
Chapter 12
April 1976
Mulderrig is asleep under the awning of the night sky. Above her, stars can be seen, now and again, through the inked smudges of ragged clouds.
By day Mulderrig appears respectable, a solid fat-ankled mammy dressed in patchworked fields. But at night, when Mulderrig lies down under the moon, she’s gypsied to the nines, be-ringed and braceleted with fairy forts. And the moon looks down at her and smiles, tracing the dark waves of her forest and lighting the curved spine of her river all the way down to the bay.
Tonight Mulderrig is silent but for a moth beating against the window of a filthy cottage with a dolmen view. Where Bridget Doosey snores under a catskin quilt, busy spring hoeing and planting kittens in her garden. They wrinkle their little noses and mew as she sprinkles them with golden rainwater. She rubs her hands; soon she’ll have tortoiseshell cabbages and tabby kale.
Mulderrig is silent but for the scuttle of rats in the basement of Kerrigan’s Bar. In his bedroom above, Tadhg wallows heavyweight under a blanket of crisp packets on white pillows of stout foam. He’s dreaming of screaming eels. He catches one with a fresh perm. She bites him, hard.
Mulderrig
is silent but for the chime of a time-haunted clock in the fortified bungalow where Annie Farelly sleeps the fitful sleep of an old-lady-killer. She dreams only of dentures; they’re coming for her. Snapping.
Mulderrig is silent but for the soft song of shale and the lulled ocean, heard in the bay-view bedroom where bachelorised Jack Brophy lies snug in housekeepered pyjamas. But does he dream? His slippers will tell you that when Jack lies down he enjoys the deep slumber of the upright. He only moves once, to turn the alarm clock off, at daybreak, just before it rings.
Mulderrig is silent but for the bats that sing in the key of darkest sonar as they spool in and out of the attic of Rathmore House. Where Mrs Cauley sleeps in her magical library, hairless and open mouthed, fat-bellied and spindle-armed. She’s treading the boards again tonight, all night.
In her little turret room Shauna switches her legs like a cricket. She dreams only of Mahony. He’s taking her under the washing line. She watches the hard-boiled dishcloths dance above her as he licks her ear rind, and she wonders what the neighbours will say.
And where is Mahony?
He’s bollock naked in his bed with his boots by the door and his jacket over the chair until morning.
He’s frowning.
He is back in the forest of his memory.
He’s with Tom the bogeyman; they sit in a circle of bracken.
Tom has a bag. He opens it and beetles come running.
The beetles run lightly along Tom’s crossed legs. They thread between his fingers.
Tom has gifts for Mahony. Found in the forest and kept only for him, until his return.
He lays them down one by one.
Look.
He has a sleek tibia, satin to the touch.
He has a pair of eyes like newly split conkers. A deep wet brown.