The Third Policeman

by Flann O'Brien

  ‘Would it be Mick Barry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Charlemagne O’Keeffe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sir Justin Spens?’

  ‘Not that.’

  ‘Kimberley?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bernard Fann?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Joseph Poe or Nolan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘One of the Garvins or the Moynihans?’

  ‘Not them.’

  ‘Rosencranz O’Dowd?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would it be O’Benson?’

  ‘Not O’Benson.’

  ‘The Quigleys, The Mulrooneys or the Hounimen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Hardimen or the Merrimen?’

  ‘Not them.’

  ‘Peter Dundy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Scrutch?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lord Brad?’

  ‘Not him.’

  ‘The O’Growneys, the O’Roartys or the Finnehys?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That is an amazing piece of denial and denunciation,’ he said.

  He passed the red cloth over his face again to reduce the moisture.

  ‘An astonishing parade of nullity,’ he added.

  ‘My name is not Jenkins either,’ I vouchsafed.

  ‘Roger MacHugh?’

  ‘Not Roger.’

  ‘Sitric Hogan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not Conroy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not O’Conroy?’

  ‘Not O’Conroy.’

  ‘There are very few more names that you could have, then,’ he said. ‘Because only a black man could have a name different to the ones I have recited. Or a red man. Not Byrne?’

  ‘No.’

  Then it is a nice pancake,’ he said gloomily. He bent double to give full scope to the extra brains he had at the rear of his head.

  ‘Holy suffering senators,’ he muttered.

  I think we have won the day.

  We are not home and dried yet, I answered.

  Nevertheless I think we can relax. Evidently he has never heard of Signor Bari, the golden-throated budgerigar of Milano.

  I don’t think this is the time for pleasantries.

  Or J. Courtney Wain, private investigator and member of the inner bar. Eighteen thousand guineas marked on the brief. The singular case of the red-headed men.

  ‘By Scot!’ said the Sergeant suddenly. He got up to pace the flooring.

  ‘I think the case can be satisfactorily met,’ he said pleasantly, ‘and ratified unconditionally.’

  I did not like his smile and asked him for his explanation.

  ‘It is true,’ he said, ‘that you cannot commit a crime and that the right arm of the law cannot lay its finger on you irrespective of the degree of your criminality. Anything you do is a lie and nothing that happens to you is true.’

  I nodded my agreement comfortably.

  ‘For that reason alone,’ said the Sergeant, ‘we can take you and hang the life out of you and you are not hanged at all and there is no entry to be made in the death papers. The particular death you die is not even a death (which is an inferior phenomenon at the best) only an insanitary abstraction in the backyard, a piece of negative nullity neutralized and rendered void by asphyxiation and the fracture of the spinal string. If it is not a lie to say that you have been given the final hammer behind the barrack, equally it is true to say that nothing has happened to you.’

  ‘You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?’

  That is about the size of it,’ said the Sergeant.

  I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.

  The next important thing that happened in the day-room was the entry of Policeman MacCruiskeen. He marched in to a chair and took out his black notebook and began perusing his own autographed memoranda, at the same time twisting his lips into an article like a purse.

  ‘Did you take the readings?’ the Sergeant asked.

  ‘I did,’ MacCruiskeen said.

  ‘Read them till I hear them,’ the Sergeant said, ‘and until I make mental comparisons inside the interior of my inner head.’

  MacCruiskeen eyed his book keenly.7

  ‘Ten point five,’ he said.

  ‘Ten point five,’ said the Sergeant. ‘And what was the reading on the beam?’

  ‘Five point three.’

  ‘And how much on the lever?’

  ‘Two point three.’

  ‘Two point three is high,’ said the Sergeant. He put the back of his fist between the saws of his yellow teeth and commenced working at his mental comparisons. After five minutes his face got clearer and he looked again to MacCruiskeen.

  ‘Was there a fall?’ he asked.

  ‘A light fall at five-thirty.’

  ‘Five-thirty is rather late if the fall was a light one,’ he said. ‘Did you put charcoal adroitly in the vent?’

  ‘I did,’ said MacCruiskeen.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Seven pounds.’

  ‘I would say eight,’ said the Sergeant.

  ‘Seven was satisfactory enough,’ MacCruiskeen said, ‘if you recollect that the reading on the beam has been falling for the past four days. I tried the shuttle but there was no trace of play or looseness in it.’

  ‘I would still say eight for safety-first,’ said the Sergeant, ‘but if the shuttle is tight, there can be no need for timorous anxiety.’

  ‘None at all,’ said MacCruiskeen.

  The Sergeant cleared his face of all the lines of thought he had on it and stood up and clapped his flat hands on his breast pockets. ‘Well now,’ he said.

  He stooped to put the clips on his ankles.

  ‘I must go now to where I am going,’ he said, ‘and let you,’ he said to MacCruiskeen, ‘come with me to the exterior for two moments till I inform you about recent events officially.’

  The two of them went out together, leaving me in my sad and cheerless loneliness. MacCruiskeen was not gone for long but I was lonely during that diminutive meantime. When he came in again he gave me a cigarette which was warm and wrinkled from his pocket.

  ‘I believe they are going to stretch you,’ he said pleasantly.

  I replied with nods.

  ‘It is a bad time of the year, it will cost a fortune,’ he said. ‘You would not believe the price of timber.’

  Would a tree not suffice?’ I inquired, giving tongue to a hollow whim of humour.

  ‘I do not think it would be proper,’ he said, ‘but I will mention it privately to the Sergeant.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘The last hanging we had in this parish,’ he said, ‘was thirty years ago. It was a very famous man called MacDadd. He held the record for the hundred miles on a solid tyre. I need to tell you what the solid tyre did for him. We had to hang the bicycle.’

  ‘Hang the bicycle?’

  ‘MacDadd had a first-class grudge against another man called Figgerson but he did not go near Figgerson. He knew how things stood and gave Figgerson’s bicycle a terrible thrashing with a crowbar. After that MacDadd and Figgerson had a fight and Figgerson – a dark man with glasses – did not live to know who the winner was. There was a great wake and he was buried with his bicycle. Did you ever see a bicycle-shaped coffin?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is a very intricate piece of wood-working, you would want to be a first-class carpenter
to make a good job of the handlebars to say nothing of the pedals and the back-step. But the murder was a bad piece of criminality and we could not find MacDadd for a long time or make sure where the most of him was. We had to arrest his bicycle as well as himself and we watched the two of them under secret observation for a week to see where the majority of MacDadd was and whether the bicycle was mostly in MacDadd’s trousers pari passu if you understand my meaning.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The Sergeant gave his ruling at the end of the week. His position was painful in the extremity because he was a very close friend of MacDadd after office hours. He condemned the bicycle and it was the bicycle that was hanged. We entered a nolle prosequi in the day-book in respect of the other defendant. I did not see the stretching myself because I am a delicate man and my stomach is extremely reactionary.’

  He got up and went to the dresser and took out his patent music-box which made sounds too esoterically rarefied to be audible to anybody but himself. He then sat back again in his chair, put his hands through the handstraps and began to entertain himself with the music. What he was playing could be roughly inferred from his face. It had a happy broad coarse satisfaction on it, a sign that he was occupied with loud obstreperous barn-songs and gusty shanties of the sea and burly roaring marching-songs. The silence in the room was so unsually quiet that the beginning of it seemed rather loud when the utter stillness of the end of it had been encountered.

  How long this eeriness lasted or how long we were listening intently to nothing is unknown. My own eyes got tired with inactivity and closed down like a public house at ten o’clock. When they opened again I saw that MacCruiskeen had desisted from the music and was making preparations for mangling his washing and his Sunday shirts. He had pulled a great rusty mangle from the shadow of the wall and had taken a blanket from the top of it and was screwing down the pressure-spring and spinning the hand wheel and furbishing the machine with expert hands.

  He went over then to the dresser and took small articles like dry batteries out of a drawer and also an instrument like a prongs and glass barrels with wires inside them and other cruder articles resembling the hurricane lamps utilized by the County Council. He put these things into different parts of the mangle and when he had them all satisfactorily adjusted, the mangle looked more like a rough scientific instrument than a machine for wringing out a day’s washing.

  The time of the day was now a dark time, the sun being about to vanish completely in the red west and withdraw all the light. MacCruiskeen kept on adding small well-made articles to his mangle and mounting indescribably delicate glass instruments about the metal legs and on the superstructure. When he had nearly finished this work the room was almost black, and sharp blue sparks would fly sometimes from the upside-down of his hand when it was at work.

  Underneath the mangle in the middle of the cast-iron handiwork I noticed a black box with coloured wires coming out of it and there was a small ticking sound to be heard as if there was a clock in it. All in all it was the most complicated mangle I ever saw and to the inside of a steam thrashing-mill it was not inferior in complexity.

  Passing near my chair to get an additional accessory, MacCruiskeen saw that I was awake and watching him.

  ‘Do not worry if you think it is dark,’ he said to me, ‘because I am going to light the light and then mangle it for diversion and also for scientific truth.’

  ‘Did you say you were going to mangle the light?’

  ‘Wait till you see now.’

  What he did next or which knobs he turned I did not ascertain on account of the gloom but it happened that a queer light appeared somewhere on the mangle. It was a local light that did not extend very much outside its own brightness but it was not a spot of light and still less a bar-shaped light. It was not steady completely but it did not dance like candlelight. It was light of a kind rarely seen in this country and was possibly manufactured with raw materials from abroad. It was a gloomy light and looked exactly as if there was a small area somewhere on the mangle and was merely devoid of darkness.

  What happened next is astonishing. I could see the dim contours of MacCruiskeen in attendance at the mangle. He made adjustments with his cunning fingers, stooping for a minute to work at the lower-down inventions on the iron work. He rose then to full life-size and started to turn the wheel of the mangle, slowly, sending out a clamping creakiness around the barrack. The moment he turned the wheel, the unusual light began to change its appearance and situation in an extremely difficult fashion. With every turn it got brighter and harder and shook with such a fine delicate shaking that it achieved a steadiness unprecedented in the world by defining with its outer shakes the two lateral boundaries of the place where it was incontrovertibly situated. It grew steelier and so intense in its livid pallor that it stained the inner screen of my eyes so that it still confronted me in all quarters when I took my stare far away from the mangle in an effort to preserve my sight. MacCruiskeen kept turning slowly at the handle till suddenly to my sick utter horror, the light seemed to burst and disappear and simultaneously there was a loud shout in the room, a shout which could not have come from a human throat.

  I sat on the chair’s edge and gave frightened looks at the shadow of MacCruiskeen, who was stooping down again at the diminutive scientific accessories of the mangle, making minor adjustments and carrying out running repairs in the dark.

  ‘What was that shouting?’ I stuttered over at him.

  ‘I will tell you that in a tick,’ he called, ‘if you will inform me what you think the words of the shout were. What would you say was said in the shout now?’

  This was a question I was already working with in my own head. The unearthly voice had roared out something very quickly with three or four words compressed into one ragged shout. I could not be sure what it was but several phrases sprang into my head together and each of them could have been the contents of the shout. They bore an eerie resemblance to commonplace shouts I had often heard such as Change for Tinahely and Shillelagh! Two to one the field! Mind the step! Finish him off! I knew, however, that the shout could not be so foolish and trivial because it disturbed me in a way that could only be done by something momentous and diabolical.

  MacCruiskeen was looking at me with a question in his eye.

  ‘I could not make it out,’ I said, vaguely and feebly, ‘but I think it was railway-station talk.’

  ‘I have been listening to shouts and screams for years,’ he said, ‘but I never surely catch the words. Would you say that he said “Don’t press so hard”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Second favourites always win?’

  ‘Not that.’

  ‘It is a difficult pancake,’ MacCruiskeen said, ‘a very compound crux. Wait till we try again.’ This time he screwed down the rollers of the mangle till they were whining and till it was nearly out of the question to spin the wheel. The light that appeared was the thinnest and sharpest light that I ever imagined, like the inside of the edge of a sharp razor, and the intensification which came upon it with the turning of the wheel was too delicate a process to be watched even sideways.

  What happened eventually was not a shout but a shrill scream, a sound not unlike the call of rats yet far shriller than any sound which could be made by man or animal. Again I thought that words had been used but the exact meaning of them or the language they belonged to was quite uncertain.

  ‘“Two bananas a penny”?’

  ‘Not bananas,’ I said.

  MacCruiskeen frowned vacantly.

  ‘It is one of the most compressed and intricate pancakes I have ever known,’ he said.

  He put the blanket back over the mangle and pushed it to one side and then lit a lamp on the wall by pressing some knob in the darkness. The light was bright but wavery and uncertain and would be far from satisfactory for reading with. He sat back in his chair as if waiting to be questioned and complimented on the strange things he had been doing.

 
‘What is your private opinion of all that?’ he asked.

  ‘What were you doing?’ I inquired.

  ‘Stretching the light.’

  ‘I do not understand your meaning.’

  ‘I will tell you the size of it,’ he said, ‘and indicate roughly the shape of it. It is no harm if you know unusual things because you will be a dead man in two days and you will be held incognito and incommunicate in the meantime. Did you ever hear tell of omnium?’

  ‘Omnium?’

  ‘Omnium is the right name for it although you will not find it in the books.’

  ‘Are you sure that is the right name?’ I had never heard this word before except in Latin.

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘How certain?’

  The Sergeant says so.’

  ‘And what is omnium the right name for?’ MacCruiskeen smiled at me indulgently. ‘You are omnium and I am omnium and so is the mangle and my boots here and so is the wind in the chimney.’

  ‘That is enlightening,’ I said. ‘It comes in waves,’ he explained.

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Every colour.’

  ‘High or low?’

  ‘Both.’

  The blade of my inquisitive curiosity was sharpened but I saw that questions were putting the matter farther into doubt instead of clearing it. I kept my silence till MacCruiskeen spoke again.

  ‘Some people,’ he said, ‘call it energy but the right name is omnium because there is far more than energy in the inside of it, whatever it is. Omnium is the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden inside the root of the kernel of everything and it is always the same.’

  I nodded wisely.

  ‘It never changes. But it shows itself in a million ways and it always comes in waves. Now take the case of the light on the mangle.’

  ‘Take it,’ I said.

  ‘Light is the same omnium on a short wave but if it comes on a longer wave it is in the form of noise, or sound. With my own patents I can stretch a ray out until it becomes sound.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And when I have a shout shut in that box with the wires, I can squeeze it till I get heat and you would not believe the convenience of it all in the winter. Do you see that lamp on the wall there?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘That is operated by a patent compressor and a secret instrument connected with that box with the wires. The box is full of noise. Myself and the Sergeant spend our spare time in the summer collecting noises so that we can have light and heat for our official life in the dark winter. That is why the light is going up and down. Some of the noises are noiser than the others and the pair of us will be blinded if we come to the time when the quarry was working last September. It is in the box somewhere and it is bound to come out of it in the due course inevitably.’