The Lazarus Bell, an Irish Murder Mystery

by Patrick Dunne

  Groot ordered a starter of wild smoked salmon with capers and soda bread, I opted for eel-and-bacon kebabs, and we both chose a main course of baked pike stuffed with freshwater crayfish in a cream sauce. We discussed the wine list for a while and decided on an Albariño from Galicia, on the basis that it would suit the cream sauce and was from a rainy climate, which by a not-too-serious chain of deductions we estimated would make it perfect for pike. And we ordered a glass of fino sherry each, as an aperitif and to accompany our oily starters.

  Groot raised his glass of sherry and I followed suit. ‘A toast to those beautiful eyes of yours,’ he said. ‘But first you have to decide – are they African lilies or Cape plumbago?’

  ‘The second one sounds like something I don’t want to eat.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful, chalky-blue flower – the shade your eyes turn when you smile.’

  ‘You know your flowers, then.’

  ‘Shh. Don’t tell Finian.’

  I laughed. ‘OK, I’ll go for the plumbago.’

  ‘My choice as well,’ he said.

  We sipped our drinks.

  ‘Of course, a proper Celtic beauty would have had her eyes compared to an Irish flower with an equally odd name,’ I said. ‘The bugloss – it grows wild here. But I should warn you, it’s a bit prickly.’

  He smiled and said, ‘And what were the other attributes of the Celtic woman?’

  ‘“An oval face, broad above and narrow below. Her skin was as white as the snow of a single night, her cheeks as red as the foxglove. Her eyebrows were as black as a beetle’s wing and her teeth were like a shower of pearls between her vermilion lips. The colour of her hair seemed like the yellow of the flag iris in summer water-meadows, or like red gold that has been polished, and she was tall and slender as a silver birch…” So you can see it’s more or less me, even to the beetle-black brows, but unfortunately I also have beetle-black hair – the curly edition. And it also goes a teensy bit wrong in the tall-and-slender-birch department – I’m more the bonsai version.’

  Groot laughed. The waiter was just arriving with the starters. After Groot had squeezed some lemon juice onto his smoked salmon, I suggested he twist some black pepper onto it.

  ‘Mmm…that certainly brings out the flavour. I guess the Irish should know a thing or two about salmon. It’s an important creature in Celtic mythology, isn’t it?’

  ‘As a symbol of knowledge, yes. In fact, the legendary Salmon of Knowledge lived in the river running past this very restaurant. The famous warrior Finn McCool acquired the gifts of knowledge and foresight by accidentally burning his thumb on the salmon while cooking it, and then putting his thumb in his mouth.’

  Groot prodded his salmon with his finger and held it up. ‘If I lick this now, will it give me prophetic powers?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. Anyway, I guess nowadays the salmon is more a symbol of lack of foresight.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘To me it represents the way we’ve mistreated the oceans and the rivers. The wild ones are hunted with drift nets in the Atlantic, then they have to get through draft nets across the river estuaries, then there are the anglers, the poachers and the pollution…and then, if you listen to Arthur Shaw, when you finally get to eat one, it doesn’t taste as good as it did when he was young. But on the other hand, if you eat the farmed variety, you’re not only definitely missing out on flavour, but in danger of poisoning yourself with dioxins and PCBs if you eat more than a few bites a week. But hey, don’t let me put you off your food.’

  He laughed and said, ‘You won’t,’ and proceeded to eat a slice of smoked salmon with what seemed added relish. ‘And I try not to feel guilty, either. I find the idea of a predator with pangs of conscience ridiculous. I don’t want to go through life feeling that every sunset is tainted by polluted skies, or that because one summer’s different from another it’s a reason to panic about global warming. That doesn’t prevent me feeling stupid, though. It’s a dumb predator that kills off all its prey or destroys its environment. Filoviruses, for example – lethal but short-sighted, like ourselves…’ He glanced to his right as a waiter seated a couple at the table beside us.

  ‘Did one of them kill Terry Johnston?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t a VHF, after all. I think I know what it was, but I need more time to prove it.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Groot flicked his eyes to his right. I glanced in the same direction and saw that the couple at the next table were both staring silently into space. Groot evidently thought they were eavesdropping.

  ‘Later. Maybe we can take a walk along the river?’

  ‘Sure. Let’s do that.’

  The waiter poured wine into Groot’s glass, and I watched as he took in the bouquet and then delicately and sensually swished a mouthful around his teeth and tongue. Not always the most attractive of procedures to observe, but watching him doing it was unexpectedly stimulating.

  ‘What brought you into medicine in the first place?’ I said, trying to sound detached. Groot nodded to the waiter, who poured the wine, removed our plates and departed.

  ‘You could say it ran in the family. And there was a missionary tradition that fed into it, too. My father devoted much of his life to eradicating tuberculosis in the townships, so it broke his heart to see Aids sweeping through the same areas and reactivating the TB he thought they’d defeated. But I have to confess, when I became a pathologist I had no great ambition to save the world from anything. Then, when the new Police Service was launched in 1994, I guess the dogooder gene kicked in and I signed up. I thought I could make a difference, in a world that had seen the forces of law and order used against the people rather than on their behalf.’

  ‘And is that how it worked out?’

  ‘For a while. And then a case came up—’

  The waiter had come with our main courses, and we sat back as he served us our plates of baked pike.

  ‘Any pike lore?’ Groot asked me.

  ‘You’d need Finian here for that,’ I said. ‘He’s the expert on local history and folklore.’

  ‘A folklorist, eh? And certainly the most creative gardener I’ve ever met. He’s quite a package, your Finian.’

  I blushed slightly, but I wasn’t sure if it was the possessive ‘your’ or the term ‘package’ that I didn’t like. Probably both. Or maybe it was the way Groot was gazing intently into my eyes, as if searching for some weak point in my commitment to Finian.

  Groot poured more wine and we began to eat. He asked me about my family, and I explained that my brother was a paediatrician living in Chicago, married with one child, and that my father was in a nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients and had been in poor health for the past couple of months.

  ‘Sorry to hear that. You’re obviously very fond of him – as I was of mine,’ he added wistfully. He shrugged off the momentary change of mood and replenished our glasses.

  I was putting some fishbones aside and remembered something Arthur Shaw had told me about the pike’s head – which, I had been glad to see, did not form part of our dish. ‘I’ve just remembered a fishy superstition. The pike has a cross-shaped bone in its head that used to be worn as a charm against witchcraft.’

  Groot frowned. ‘In a strange way, that brings me back to what I was telling you about my work with the SAPS. There was this case – the bones of Hannes Rall, a former National Party politician, had been dug up. They were crushed and used to make a brew that was being sold as a muti cure for Aids. I was brought in by the SAPS occult-crime unit, to examine what was left of the skeleton. The unit had been set up to tackle what seemed to be a growing problem in the new South Africa – not so much bones being dug up, but people being killed for them. That’s when I began investigating murders that were suspected to have been carried out for the harvesting of body parts.’

  He drank the last of his wine and was about to pour more for both of us, but discovered the bottle was empty. ‘More wine?’

  I made
a face. A bottle each? You don’t have to drink as much as he does, Illaun. Let him kill himself, if he wants to. I was getting tipsy.

  ‘OK, you go ahead,’ I said, waving him on, but knowing I would be sharing it too. I felt like Count Dracula’s guest: This man is charming but could be very bad for you.

  Groot signalled to the waiter and resumed his story. ‘I saw some grim things over the next couple of years – the worst ones involved children. But after a while it seemed to me that the unit’s activities were becoming more like a witch-hunt, seeing Satanic influences everywhere. Not that I’m into devil-worship, mind you.’

  How about vampirism? ‘Was that why you left the Police Service?’

  ‘Why I left the unit, yes. Leaving the force had more to do with my feelings about the justice system. And with my father’s death.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘He was killed for his watch. No – worse than that: for not being able to tell the time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Groot served us both from the second bottle and took a longish sip before continuing. ‘Five years ago he was walking along a street in the centre of Jo’burg when a young black man stopped and asked him the time. My dad’s watch had stopped the day before – he was intending to buy a battery for it – but he still had it on his wrist. So when he said he didn’t have the time, the guy got enraged and tried to pull the watch off Dad’s wrist. Dad struggled with him, and the guy pulled out a gun and shot him in the stomach. As my father lay bleeding on the pavement, the perp tore off the watch, looked at it and then threw it on the ground and shot Dad again – in the head this time.

  ‘At the trial, the defence suggested that my father knew well that parading about with a valuable watch in a lawless part of the city was unwise, and that he should have just handed it over. They also claimed that their client, a drifter from one of the townships, had Aids and was irrational due to brain lesions. He was found guilty of manslaughter. Because the judge reckoned that, with his illness, he wouldn’t last long in prison, he gave him what he said amounted to a life sentence – three years. He was let out after one. And, just in case you misunderstand, the judge was white.

  ‘To my mind, it was a classic case of overcompensating for a guilty past. My father didn’t deserve to be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. As if there wasn’t already enough irony in the fact that he was killed by one of those people he had devoted his life to healing – the sick and deprived. It made his life and all he had done meaningless, somehow.’ Groot’s voice had taken on a bitter edge. He finished off what was in his glass and poured himself a hefty refill.

  I accepted a thimbleful. ‘What a dreadful thing to happen,’ I said. ‘But it didn’t undo all the good your father had done. The people he helped back to health were his legacy.’

  Groot sighed. ‘You’re right, of course. Sometimes it’s just hard to keep things in perspective.’ He raised his glass to me. ‘I hope you never lose yours.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve got a whole new situation in this country now, with immigration. I’ve heard that it’s not too long since there were practically no people here from the developing world, apart from students. Now, I believe, there are towns where a fair chunk of the population is of foreign extraction. Among them you’ll find people who want to stick rigidly to their own customs and beliefs – which is OK until they get to be a sizeable minority. Then you may be faced with a situation where a substantial number of people who’ve come to live in your country don’t subscribe to your legal code, your political system or your cultural values.’

  ‘Which sounds to me like the way European colonists behaved towards the indigenous peoples of Africa in the first place.’

  ‘Touché. But if that was not the way to behave, then why tolerate it of any colonising culture?’

  ‘It depends on what you mean by colonising.’

  ‘Let’s use the infectious-disease model. I guess we’d both agree that European methods were often brutal and bloody, a bit like Ebola.’

  I nodded.

  ‘But you can colonise by stealth, too, like Aids. Look – don’t get me wrong. I’m just throwing out the topic for discussion. And, from what I’ve gathered in my short time here, discussing the subject in a rational way is the last thing that anyone seems to be doing.’

  Not for the first time, I was confused by Groot’s observations. Without his credentials as an anti-apartheid activist and his family’s past, one might suspect him of being a racist. Or possibly developments in South Africa of late had turned him into a disillusioned idealist. But perhaps, too, his immersion in a post-colonial, mixed-race culture qualified him to see and say things that needed to be said, even if they sounded harsh to my inexperienced ears.

  ‘Would you like to take that walk along the river?’ I asked.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We walked down a flight of wooden steps at the back of the restaurant, onto a gravel path running parallel to the river. We were heading towards the downstream side of the same bridge Fran and I had been painting on Saturday. We stopped briefly and looked down on the river as it flowed past below us, picking up blue highlights from the light still in the sky even though it was well past ten o’clock.

  ‘I’m just thinking of those drownings today,’ said Groot. ‘This is the same river, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. The Boyne.’

  ‘Do you swim in it?’

  ‘Not since I was very small. The places around here where it was safe to bathe were destroyed by a disastrous undertaking called the Boyne Drainage Scheme.’

  ‘You sound pretty annoyed about it.’

  ‘I guess I’ve been infected by Finian’s father. He never lets a day pass without mentioning it.’

  ‘Funny word, that – infected. We usually think of it as having negative connotations, but we describe laughter as infectious, and it can also be used to describe the effect of another person on our emotions.’ He stopped and reached out for my hand as we walked along side by side. ‘Know what I mean?’ he said, squeezing it gently.

  ‘Let’s stick to the negative connotations for now,’ I said, withdrawing my hand and folding my arms. ‘You said you think you know what killed Terry Johnston.’ I was relieved it came out so calmly. I was flustered, but I didn’t want him to know it.

  We sauntered on towards the bridge. ‘Uh, OK. Let me say straight off that I’m speculating. An autopsy in a case like this can’t be conclusive. It will have to be confirmed in the laboratory. First of all, I’m satisfied that the Aids diagnosis was correct – the evidence was there: the upper lobes of the lungs were riddled with cysts, a kind I’ve become all too familiar with in recent years. Then I noticed there were larger, pus-filled cavities in the rest of the lungs, as well as multiple abscesses in the liver, spleen and kidneys. The lymph nodes in the chest were swollen to the size of grapes; some had burst. There was also a lot of bloody fluid in the lungs and in the abdominal cavity. I went through the patient’s charts and discussed his symptoms with the staff: fever and confusion, acute pulmonary infection, necrotising pneumonia, pustular ulceration of the skin, abrupt onset of septicaemia.

  ‘Here was a disease that had elements of a fungal infection, of haemorrhagic fever, TB, plague even. But none of these had shown up in blood or pus cultures. Then I heard about the boy who’d been brought in, and that he’d been playing in the cemetery where the spill had happened. So I asked myself: what disease can mimic others, is known to be picked up from soil or stagnant water, is notoriously opportunistic in adults with underlying conditions like diabetes or HIV, but also attacks healthy children? There’s an obvious candidate – melioidosis.’

  It sounded like a mild throat infection, not the suppurating, organ-dissolving horror he had just described.

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘It’s a bacterial infection that enters the body through mucous membranes or broken skin, or by inhalation of dust or water particles. Ther
e have been some cases of person-to-person infection, including venereal transmission. Laboratory identification is also the only sure way of diagnosing it, but the organism – Burkholderia pseudomallei – is a difficult bugger to culture, especially in the early stages. And yet there are people who can identify it in the lab by a sweet rotten smell, although sniffing the plates isn’t recommended. So, as I said, I’m speculating. As well as which, there’s a significant problem: melioidosis is found only in the tropics.’

  We stopped as I let that sink in. ‘So how could it be here? In an Irish cemetery? And in a coffin buried in the Middle Ages?’

  Groot threw his hands up in the air. ‘I have no idea.’

  We continued on towards the bridge. The river was no longer reflecting the fading sunlight; instead, the moon was bobbing on its surface and being carved into segments by the ripples. I looked up and saw it was almost a quarter-moon, the curve and pallor of its face reminiscent of a Venetian mask.

  ‘I tracked down the boy’s friends,’ I said. ‘The doctors thought they hadn’t been playing inside the barriers, but that’s wrong. I discovered they all were. So why have none of the others got sick?’

  ‘That seems puzzling. But melioidosis has an extremely variable incubation period, ranging from days to decades, so they might well have been infected.’

  ‘There’s another possibility, isn’t there?’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That the soil at the cemetery wasn’t contaminated, and that Stephen Bolton came into contact with this organism in some other way.’

  ‘That’s probably wishful thinking at this stage, Illaun. But I admit it’s a slim possibility.’

  We were close to the old stone bridge. By walking under the last arch, we would come to a set of steps that would take us up to the road, and we could return to the restaurant that way if we desired. But before we reached the arch, a man in dark clothing was conjured out of the shadows under the bridge and came towards us.