‘How about a glass of sarsaparilla?’ she asked, with a straight face.
He wished he had some prop behind which to hide, even if it was only a book. He felt exposed, and was sure he must cut a doleful figure, sitting there dully chewing his food and staring vacantly before him. Why was it so hard to eat one’s dinner alone? Presently he sensed, not for the first time today, that he was being observed. He glanced behind him covertly, under the pretence of studying a faded copy of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence framed high on the wall behind the counter. An elderly fellow in a stained and threadbare suit had put his head around the bar-room door and was having a squint at him. When he saw that Strafford had spotted him he stepped back, withdrawing his head on its tortoise neck from the doorway.
The girl came and offered him seconds. ‘You can have anything you like,’ she said, and gave him a calculated look from under a fringe of her red-gold hair, biting her lip.
He thanked her, and said he could not eat any more than he already had. She lingered, standing over him and very slightly swaying her hips.
‘Don’t mind Matty,’ she said, nodding towards the door. ‘He’s as nosy as an old woman.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘So that’s Matty.’
‘Don’t say you’ve heard of him?’
‘I have.’
‘Well, that’s impressive. And what’s your name, do you mind me asking?’
‘Not at all. Strafford – with an r.’
‘Is that your Christian name?’
‘No.’ He smiled up at her.
‘I’m Peggy,’ she said.
He nodded. His own first name could wait for a later time.
‘I wonder, Peggy,’ he said, ‘if I might ask you for a glass of water?’
She took the tumbler and filled it and brought it back to the table. ‘There you are,’ she said, ‘and mind you don’t let it go to your head.’
And she winked.
It was late, but he was not ready to go up to his room just yet. The whiskey had set up a buzzing in his temples. He rose, pushed open the door and went back into the bar.
The old fellow who had spied on him was sitting on a high stool, with a bottle of Guinness’s porter poured out into a glass that stood at his elbow. He was long and skinny, all sharp elbows and bony knees. All of the lower half of his face was collapsed around a mouth devoid of teeth. He nodded to Strafford as if he had never seen him before. Strafford pointed to the emptied Guinness bottle, the sides of which were streaked with yellow foam.
‘Will you have another one of those?’
‘I won’t,’ Matty said. ‘But I’ll have a small one.’
Strafford signalled to Mrs Reck and ordered the half glass of whiskey. She poured the measure and set it on the bar. ‘There you are, Matty Moran. Aren’t you in luck tonight?’ She turned to Strafford. ‘Mind out for this fellow. He’d drink all night if someone else is paying.’
‘Sláinte,’ Matty said, tipping his glass towards Strafford. ‘Are you not having anything yourself?’
‘Perhaps, in a while,’ Strafford said.
At a table under one of the small square windows two more customers sat, big, red-faced men with colourless eyelashes and hands like hams. They too had nodded a guarded greeting to the newcomer, then gone back to their drinks.
Jeremiah Reck appeared, and took his wife’s place behind the bar.
‘Ah, so you managed to find us,’ he said to Strafford. ‘Can I offer you a welcoming glass? I’m told you’re a whiskey and lemonade man.’
‘No, thanks,’ Strafford said. ‘I’ve just had dinner.’ He looked about. ‘Did someone bring my bag up to the room?’
‘Someone did, indeed. You’ve seen it, the room, I hope?’
‘Not yet,’ Strafford said. ‘I’m sure it will be fine.’ Again he glanced around the bar, feeling at a loss – how much less awkward it would be if only he were a drinker.
Matty was watching him from the corner of his eye. He took a drink of his whiskey and munched on it appreciatively, his collapsed mouth slackly working. Strafford was reminded of Colonel Osborne, and that way he had of jerking his jaw sideways, seeming to chew on something elastically resistant.
Reck, behind the bar, was drying a pint glass and reciting to himself, in the tone of the psalmist, ‘O Lord, thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul, thou hast redeemed my life!’
‘I hear they brought poor Father Tom off up to Dublin,’ Matty said, addressing no one in particular.
Reck glanced at Strafford and winked.
‘There’s nothing Matty doesn’t know,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that so, Matty? We should appoint you the town crier.’
Matty ignored this sally.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘took him up in an ambulance.’ He sniffed. ‘Down here wasn’t good enough for him, it seems.’
Mrs Reck came ducking back through the archway, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Matty Moran,’ she said, ‘will you put your teeth in, for the love of God! I can’t bear the sight of you. Do you know what you look like without them? A hen’s hole.’
Strafford heard himself ordering another whiskey. He knew he would regret it in the morning, but he didn’t care. He even eschewed the lemonade, this time.
Matty brought out a set of pink and yellowed dentures from his pocket and fitted them into his mouth. They didn’t make much of an alteration to his appearance.
Jeremiah Reck was pouring Strafford’s drink when the door opened and a swirl of snow came in, followed by a short spry man in a sheepskin coat, shiny black gloves, and a trilby hat cocked low over one eye. All turned to stare at him, but he ignored them. He removed his gloves finger by finger, and shook the snowflakes from his hat brim.
‘There’s a night!’ he said.
He stopped at the bar and unbuttoned his coat. Beneath it he wore a double-breasted suit that was just a shade too well-cut, Strafford thought, and a regimental tie stuck with a pearl pin. He was in his early forties but clearly imagined himself to look much younger. He might have been a soldier, or a returned colonial, or both. To Strafford’s sceptical eye, yet another actor had stepped on to the stage. And not a convincing one, either.
‘Bloody weather!’ he exclaimed, and grinned, showing off a set of small white teeth the sparkle of which added to the overall impression of mild and gamesome fraudulence. ‘’Evening, Reck.’
‘Good evening, Mr Harbison. What’ll it be?’
Reck’s wife took one look at the newcomer and ducked back out through the archway.
‘Hot whiskey, I think,’ Harbison said, rubbing his hands vigorously. ‘Bushmills, with just a dash of lemon, and plenty of cloves.’ Now he noticed Strafford, off at the other end of the counter, fingering his glass of whiskey, and nodded to him in friendly fashion.
This would be, Strafford thought, Mrs Osborne’s brother, the Freddie Harbison whom Doctor Hafner had mistaken him for that morning – the same one who, if the doctor were to be believed, was barred from Ballyglass House. It was true, he looked every inch the black sheep.
He peered more keenly at Strafford now, quickly registering the tribal markings – the good but shabby suit, the gold watch chain, the narrowly knotted tie. How easily one was spotted, Strafford gloomily reflected. For all their dissimilarities, they were, the two of them, of a class apart.
Reck set the hot toddy on the counter, and Harbison drank off a good half of it in one go.
‘Ah, that’s the ticket,’ he said, giving himself a doggy shake inside his big sheepskin coat.
He drank the rest of the drink in three quick sips and set the glass down with a bang. ‘Same again, landlord!’ he said, with another rub of the hands. ‘It’s a night for the antifreeze.’
He glanced again at Strafford, and moved along the counter, passing by Matty Moran as if he were not there.
‘Mind if I join you?’ he said to Strafford. ‘I know who you must be.’ He pointed to Strafford’s glass. ‘Stand you another?’
‘N
o, thanks,’ Strafford said, rolling the tumbler on its base on the counter. ‘This is my nightcap.’
The two farmers over by the window were whispering together and glancing in Harbison’s direction. One of them snickered. Harbison took no more notice of them than he had of Matty Moran, or of anyone else in the bar, save Strafford.
Reck brought him his second drink, and he clinked his glass against the rim of Strafford’s tumbler.
‘You would be the detective, now, I’m guessing,’ he said. ‘I heard about the demise of the sky pilot. Great excitement, the county can talk of little else.’ He took a swig from his glass. Glances were being exchanged all over the bar. ‘Murdered, so I hear,’ Harbison said, deliberately loud. ‘Bound to happen, sooner or later. Damned fellow had it coming. Caught the killer yet, have you?’
14
Strafford regretted not having gone to bed when he had the chance. Harbison asked Reck to open the snug behind the bar, and invited the detective to join him there. The snug was a tiny brown room furnished with a couple of shabby armchairs and a small low table. There were framed prints on the walls, showing riders in hunting pink galloping full tilt over stylised greensward. The sole source of heat was a single-bar electric fire. Here Harbison, nursing his glass of grog and pulling his greatcoat close around him, settled down in happy anticipation of a night’s talk. Strafford could think of no reasonable excuse to get away. Good manners were a part of his inheritance, like left-handedness or haemophilia.
He knew Harbison’s kind, the minor blackguards in overly good suits tailored in London, speaking in the cut-glass accent of their caste and upbringing, masquerading as hard-riding gentlemen, scions of the few decent families that had stayed on in this benighted country after independence. Clubbable chaps who would do you a favour when they could, and then make sure you spent the rest of your life paying for it. Frequenters of the racecourse and the annual Royal Dublin Society Horse Show, fixed ornaments of the city’s better hotel bars and Jammet’s restaurant on Nassau Street. The gay blades who ran up bills with Mitchells the wine merchants and Smyths on the Green, grocers to the gentry, that gentry of which they considered themselves the last fine flowering.
‘Sorry, haven’t introduced myself,’ the fellow said now. ‘Freddie Harbison. I’m Sylvia Osborne’s brother – I suppose you’ve met her. My place is up in Wicklow, in the mountains. The family seat, don’t you know, ha ha. Bloody awful location, worse than here. And you’re—?’
‘Roslea. Bunclody way.’
‘Ah. Right. Roslea.’ He shut one eye. ‘Don’t think I’ve been there, have I?’
‘I doubt it,’ Strafford said. ‘There’s only my father, and he’s not particularly sociable. I’m not sure we ever were, even when there were more of us.’
‘Right, right,’ Harbison said again, fingering his military moustache. He hadn’t been listening. ‘I didn’t want to discuss it in front of the yokels out there in the bar, but what the hell is going on over at Ballyglass? – or Mount Glassyball, as I like to call it. What happened to the priest? The story is he fell down the stairs – you know that’s how the first Mrs O. broke her neck, years ago? Dreadful business – and now it’s happened again. Someone pushed him, yes? Don’t say it was my mad sister.’
‘Why would you think that?’ Strafford enquired. ‘And why do you think it wasn’t an accident?’
‘Well, it wasn’t, was it?’
‘There’s to be an autopsy in the morning.’
‘Oh, come now. You wouldn’t be here if it was anything except murder. Someone gave him a shove, I’d take a bet on it.’ He shook his head in gratified wonderment. ‘Poor old Colonel! The Osbornes will shut him out for good, this time. Maybe it was him who pushed the padre? There would be a thing – I’ve always suspected he did in the first wife, you know.’
He brought out a cigarette case and proffered it to Strafford.
‘No, thanks.’
‘Don’t smoke, won’t let a chap stand you a drink? You’re not the usual run of detective, or have I been reading the wrong kind of mystery stories?’
The electric fire was drying out the air, and Strafford’s eyes were stinging worse than ever. He was dizzy from the whiskey – he shouldn’t have had one, never mind two – and his brain ached. This day seemed set never to end.
‘Do you see your sister often?’ he asked.
‘Hardly ever,’ Harbison answered. ‘I’m sort of persona non grata out there, as you’ve no doubt heard by now. Not sure what I ever did to earn the displeasure of the master of the house, but he’s made it clear on more than one sticky occasion that I’m not welcome under his roof.’ He paused. ‘You do know Sylvia is batty, don’t you? I mean, really off her chump. She has periods when she’s convinced she’s other people. I don’t know what Geoffrey was thinking of when he married her. She was young, of course – fellows like Geoffrey always go after the young ones. And then, she was on the spot and available, having been the first wife’s best pal, or so she pretended, anyway. I always thought the first one was a bit’ – he held a hand out flat before him and waggled it from side to side – ‘you know. I suppose I shouldn’t say it of my sister, but there was something distinctly iffy between those two, our crazy Sylvia and the first Mrs O. But here I am, talking too much, as per usual.’
He drank the last of his drink, and rose and tapped on the little square serving hatch beside the empty fireplace. When the hatch was opened, he passed his glass through it and asked for another – ‘just whiskey straight this time, I’ve had enough of those cloves, my mouth tastes like a bag of Bull’s Eyes.’
‘Tell me,’ Strafford said, ‘did you come down here this evening all the way from the Wicklow mountains?’
‘God, no. The roads up there are snowed up tight as a nun’s what’s-it. I was in Wexford yesterday afternoon, seeing a man about a horse.’
‘So you were here for two nights?’
Harbison gave him a chary sideways glance.
‘I often put up here, at the Sheaf,’ he said defensively. ‘The grub is decent, and you’ll have seen Peggy the red-head, she’s easy on the eye. But speaking of horses, listen—’
Reck appeared at the serving hatch with Harbison’s glass of whiskey on a dented metal tray.
‘Put that on the slate, will you, Jeremiah my friend?’
Reck said nothing, but catching Strafford’s eye made a long-suffering face.
Harbison took a sip from his glass. ‘Damn it, this is Jameson’s – he knows bloody well Bushmills is my tipple. Do you think he’s trying to make some sort of papish point?’
Bushmills was supposedly the whiskey favoured by Protestants, while Jameson’s was the Catholics’ choice. Strafford thought it absurd, another of the multitude of minor myths the country thrived on.
Harbison put down the glass and lit a cigarette. ‘What was I saying?’
‘Something about a man and a horse.’
‘That’s right, yes. Thing is, the priest had one, Mr Sugar, magnificent beast. Old Geoffrey puts him up at Ballyglass House, free, gratis and for nothing. There’s a young fellow there, looks after the stables, Fonsey somebody. He’s a halfwit, but my God does he know all there is to know about horse flesh.’
‘I’ve met him.’
‘Have you?’ Harbison seemed amazed. ‘Then you’ll know what I’m talking about. I mean’ – he tapped his forehead – ‘as far as this goes, you can forget about it.’ He took another sip of whiskey and made a face. ‘Jameson! Tastes like maiden’s pee. But anyway, the point is, that horse.’
‘What about it?’
‘I was going to make an offer for it, to what’s-his-name, the padre.’
‘Father Lawless.’
‘That’s it, Lawless. But you see my difficulty now.’
‘You mean, now that he’s dead?’
‘Well, yes.’
Strafford fixed his gaze on the fire and its single glowing bar. It kept giving off little sparks, as drifting dust motes landed on the filam
ent. To a microbe, he mused, each tiny burst of fire would seem a vast conflagration, like a storm on the face of the sun. He thought again of the snowy fields outside, smooth and glistening, and over them the sky of stars burning in icy brightness. Other worlds, impossibly distant. How strange a thing it was to be here, animate and conscious, on this ball of mud and brine as it whirled through the illimitable depths of space. A chill ran down his spine, as if the tip of something cold had touched him briefly at the very core.
In his mind he saw the priest lying dead on the floor in the library, his hands joined and his eyes open. No longer conscious, no longer animate.
‘Mr Harbison—’
‘Call me Freddie.’ He sat forward in his chair. ‘Now, about that horse—’
‘Mr Harbison, a man has died, in questionable circumstances, in the home of your sister and her husband. I hardly think this is the time to—’
‘All right, all right!’ Harbison said, giving him an injured look. ‘Life goes on, you know.’ He rose and went to the hatch again – ‘and Bushmills, this time, mind!’
He sat down, pulled off one of his shoes and held his stockinged foot close to the fire’s rust-red element.
‘It’ll be a bloody disgrace if that horse is left with my brother-in-law,’ he said with sudden violence. ‘He doesn’t know the back end of it from the front, for all that he imagines he’s a natural in the saddle. Someone should take the beast off his hands, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be me. The question is, who owns Mr Sugar now?’ He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Did the priest leave a will, I wonder? Probate could take forever, and meanwhile that magnificent animal’s muscles will be turning to jelly for want of proper exercise.’ He put a hand on Strafford’s arm. ‘Now that would be a shame, wouldn’t it? You have to grant me that.’
The hatch in the wall opened, and a hand pushed through it the metal tray bearing the glass of whiskey. Reck’s big face appeared in the opening. ‘On the slate again, Mr Harbison?’
‘Good man,’ Harbison said, taking the glass. ‘And listen, Reck – heard anything about the priest’s horse? You know, the big gelding, Mr Sugar?’
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