The Discourtesy of Death

by William Brodrick

  ‘You haven’t used that name since the accident,’ she said, smiling again, a tone of reproach in her voice. ‘We both know why. It would make us both sad. But every time you’ve spoken to me, I’ve expected to hear it … and it never came. Only now’ – her smile seemed to spill over from her mouth, lighting up her face, like one of Timothy’s sudden flashes of feeling … only Jenny’s wasn’t a rush of emotion, it was deep, something more than a sentiment or sensation. She seemed profoundly contented – ‘only now, I want to hear the name again. Because it’s me. It’s me in relation to you. Say it, please … now.’

  Involuntarily, Michael cast an eye over his daughter, taking in the prostrate figure covered by blankets, her toes raising two small mountains at the base of the bed.

  ‘Nimblefoot,’ he said.

  ‘Again.’

  ‘Nimblefoot,’ stammered Michael, feeling emotion wrench his throat, the throat that had been wrenched so often that he was staggered he could still feel anything at all; stunned that the grip to his neck always felt like an awful, new experience. ‘Happy birthday, Nimblefoot.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ replied Jenny. She was nodding, as if to remove doubts he hadn’t expressed. ‘From now on, you think of me as Nimblefoot … like in the old days.’

  Michael held his daughter’s hand in both of his, struck by an alarming, foreign wonder. ‘Why, Nimblefoot … why?’

  ‘Because the tide has come in.’

  Michael blinked uncertainly, remembering the stranded boats on the Orwell at Pin Mill. The red sails. The ropes drooping towards the ochre sand. The green rumpled sheets of algae. You asked me to untie your laces … to let you go …

  ‘You said the tide always comes in,’ repeated Jenny, ‘and it has done. The tide, at last, has come in.’

  Emma’s heels echoed on the tiling outside the kitchen.

  ‘How’s my birthday girl?’ she sang, an ache in her voice. And before Jenny could reply, Emma pulled up a chair, talking ten to the dozen about a male Rottweiler with a urinary tract problem. She’d carried out a radical surgical procedure corresponding to a sex change. His many problems were over. Before the story was out, Bryan arrived with his old leather doctor’s bag that he never opened. Except this time he did, pulling out some party poppers. After a quick medical examination, they all trooped back into the room and everyone stood around the bed, all of them firing the multi-coloured streamers over Jenny’s blinking, radiant face. It was like a send-off. Folk yelling and waving from the quayside after the champagne had been smashed on the prow. Michael watched her from afar, as if he’d walked to the end of a lonely pier. He ate a slice of cake slowly, his eyes smarting from the bite of zest and syrup. They welled up with a deep and secret relief: the tide had come in. At long last, the tide had come in for his girl.

  Helen had eventually made a herb tea for Jenny and she sipped it appreciatively, though Michael was convinced that she – like everyone else – hated the stuff, and would have preferred to pour it down the sink. An hour or so later, Nigel and Helen left, followed by Doctor Ingleby.

  ‘I’ll speak to Jenny on my own, now,’ said Emma. Her eyes were heavy with summoned cheer, the sparkle she’d once brought to the officers’ mess.

  ‘I’ll wait outside,’ replied Michael.

  He kissed Jenny on the forehead and then went outside and looked up at the stars. But he saw the sandy mouth of a river. A wind was blowing life into the red sails. The ropes were lifting on the tide.

  Michael packed, paid his bill and set off for Polstead. The Browning and silencer were in the glove box, the Billingham camera bag in the boot, along with the tarpaulin and the stapler. On the passenger seat, fitted with new batteries, lay Father Doyle’s tape recorder.

  When Michael had first come to Southwold he’d learned pretty quickly that if he was to shoot Peter, he would have to follow Jenny’s story all the way from her accident to the night of her death. It was the only way to summon the anger he felt at Peter for his treatment of Jenny, throughout her life. No party could make up for what she’d lost.

  That painful journey was now complete.

  Similarly, if he was actually to pull the trigger with a steady hand, he’d realised that he’d have to go back to Belfast and the interrogation of Eugene; he’d have to cross the border and face everything that he’d never told Danny Carpenter, the joiner who put people back together. That second journey was almost over. He was almost there.

  It was time to press PLAY. Time to hear the clang of a spoon on a pot or a pan.

  38

  Night was falling fast. Anselm drove slowly, his mind blank and heavy, like saturated blotting paper, incapable of holding another thought or idea. When the door had opened at Long Melford, he’d been trapped by a suspicion that he couldn’t reveal. Now he’d been empowered. In this most difficult of cases, he’d been given strength by a child.

  ‘Timothy,’ Anselm had said, a warm hand on each of the boy’s shoulders. ‘Leave this with me, do you understand?’

  He’d nodded.

  ‘I’m familiar with this kind of thing.’ Anselm had smiled confidence. ‘I know what to do and what to say. I know when and I know how. There is a right time.’

  A nod.

  ‘When Aunt Helen and Uncle Nigel get back, tell them I called, but I think it would be best if you kept our conversation between ourselves. Remember what I said about handling the truth? That sometimes it requires cooperation? Well, that is how I’m going to move forward. I’m going to speak to the ones who don’t like truth as much as you do.’

  Anselm parked in a lay-by just outside Lavenham. Set back well off the road stood a medieval house, leaning dramatically to one side. Outside lighting revealed white window frames, grey timber supports and plaster washed a deep, salmon pink. The front door, a sequence of bolted planks, stood buckled within arched shoulders that held up a covered entrance. Anselm knocked hard, his heart beating violently. More so than in any case he’d ever handled at the Bar, when he’d really known what to do and say – along with the when and how.

  ‘Terribly sorry, but we’re Anglican,’ said Emma Goodwin, looking down as if to check whether Anselm was holding a collection plate. ‘Haven’t got a penny on me.’

  ‘I’m not here to talk about ways to God,’ said Anselm. ‘Oddly enough, that’s not my strong suit. Neither is the cost. I’m here to speak about your daughter.’

  Emma Goodwin frowned, one hand rising to grasp the join on her white blouse.

  ‘I know who you are,’ she said, paling. ‘You’re that monk … the detective.’

  ‘I’m something else, actually. But may I come in? I think we need to talk.’

  Emma Goodwin didn’t offer tea or cake. She brought Anselm into the kitchen, drawing back a chair at a long table, and then walked to the far end of the room. Spot lighting from between the beams lit the polished distance between them. She stood with her back to the sink, arms folded. You are guilty, thought Anselm, instantly. This is what the first-timers did when they’d been banged away on remand – the ones who fancied their chances in court. They rarely sat at the table in the prison visiting wing. They got up and walked as far away as possible, talking to their advocate from a safe distance, as if he might smell the lack of moral hygiene. A light directly over Emma Goodwin’s head cast a shadow beneath her brows, hiding her eyes, blacking out the sockets. Her mouth was slightly open. She looked terrified and terrifying. Anselm sat at the proffered chair. He didn’t speak immediately because he was waiting for Michael to arrive. When he didn’t come, Anselm said:

  ‘If at all possible, Mrs Goodwin, I’d like to talk to your husband as well.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Will he be back?’

  ‘No.’ She’d snapped the word as if it were a lid on a box. She continued, as if to explain what she was hiding: ‘Not today, anyway. A few days off. A holiday.’

  Anselm thought for a moment, calibrating his mind to the incongruity. A holiday? On the day Peter was
released? When Timothy would need his family around him. When—

  ‘Why are you here?’ Emma Goodwin’s voice was abruptly shrill. She wanted him to go – just like the first-timers when told they didn’t have a cat’s chance in hell. ‘What do you want?’

  Anselm knitted his fingers and leaned his arms on the table. In a friendly, don’t-worry voice, he said, ‘May I call you Emma?’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘So we can talk about Jenny,’ replied Anselm. ‘It might be easier if we’re on first-name terms.’

  Anselm stared compassionately at the figure by the sink. She was hunched, clutching her arms as if she were totally naked.

  ‘Mrs Goodwin,’ began Anselm, cautiously. ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Never. Ever. Are you finished now? I think it’s time you went.’

  Anselm stood up and shuffled to the door, head down, like he did when he was brooding in the cloister. When he’d stepped outside, beneath the beamed portico, he turned around, driven by an impulse he could not contain: a certitude that now was the time to be mercilessly direct.

  ‘Mrs Goodwin,’ he said, talking to the cowering woman at the entrance to the kitchen. ‘I know how Jenny was killed.’

  Anselm had skipped all the preliminary stages required before such a brutal declaration could be uttered. He’d made a number of assumptions about Mrs Goodwin’s character – that she was as intellectual as she was emotional; that she was skilled at ending conversations she didn’t want, using mock hysteria, if need be, to fend off the dull-witted; that she wasn’t scared of a crown court judge or reporters or a monk who’d appeared once in the Sunday Times. That she was an inconsolable mother. Anselm’s ruthless announcement brought them both back into the kitchen, Anselm to a chair, and Mrs Goodwin standing far off, arms folded by the sink.

  ‘You know?’ she asked, after fumbling for a cigarette.

  ‘I do.’

  She struggled with a box of matches and lit up, swinging her head away as the fumes burned her eyes. After a pause, she breathed in deeply, and then appeared ready to faint, her mouth dropping open as the blue smoke burst out of her lungs.

  ‘I said I know, Mrs Goodwin,’ asserted Anselm, evenly. ‘I’m not guessing. I’m not adding up bits of evidence. I’m here to talk about the truth you’re hiding.’

  Mrs Goodwin’s features began to work. Her nerves were out of control.

  ‘Your husband isn’t here,’ said Anselm, as if that might give her some reassurance. ‘You can speak freely. I’m not here to condemn you, or him. Or anyone else.’

  Their eyes met along the length of the room. After holding Anselm’s mild stare for as long as she could, Mrs Goodwin looked askance, drawing smoke through the stub so fiercely that her cheeks became hollow. She glanced back, with a flash of confusion and defiance.

  ‘You can’t prove anything.’

  ‘I can. And I might. But I would prefer your cooperation.’ Suddenly, Anselm thought of the ill-timed holiday. He coughed lightly – a bad habit picked up in the Old Bailey when he’d sensed blood.

  ‘Where is your husband, Mrs Goodwin?’

  ‘None of your damned business.’

  ‘I would like to talk to him, too.’

  ‘He’s abroad.’

  ‘Abroad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Holland.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Harlingen.’

  Anselm appraised the desperate, dejected woman. How was he going to help her? How to persuade her to stop this very serious fooling around?

  ‘Where is Timothy?’

  ‘You’ve no right to barge in here. You’re a trespasser. You’re a—’

  ‘Mrs Goodwin, I’m very much on your side. Where is Timothy?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Asleep.’

  ‘Would you wake him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course you won’t. Because he’s at Nigel and Helen’s.’

  Mrs Goodwin dropped the cigarette on the floor as if she’d burned her fingers. A hand came to her mouth. Instinct controlled Anselm’s response. He sensed something more alarming than a hidden truth.

  ‘Now, let’s forget about Harlingen,’ he suggested, kindly, feeling his heart stab against his chest. ‘Where is your husband?’

  Mrs Goodwin began to shake. She dropped her arms to her side, her whole body shivering as if she’d been pulled out of the freezer. She was gabbling quietly and shaking her head. Anselm rose slowly and approached her very gradually, one hand moving from chair to chair, coming closer as he spoke. A blue thread of smoke spiralled from the floor.

  ‘I know the burden you carry,’ he said, apologetically. ‘Put it down, now. It’s far too heavy. Let me help shift the weight.’

  He’d reached the end of the table. Mrs Goodwin was mouthing sounds, her oval face drained of blood, her eye sockets hideously blue as if she’d been beaten.

  ‘Let me talk to your husband,’ he murmured, holding out his hand as if to show he meant no harm.

  Mrs Goodwin replied so quietly that Anselm didn’t hear. He came a step closer, leaning his head to one side. He could smell her perfume and her stale, naked terror. His foot crushed the tiny smouldering stub.

  ‘Speak up,’ he whispered.

  ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘It’s never too late.’

  ‘He’s going to die.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now … tonight.’

  Anselm raised a darkened eye.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s got a gun.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘I can’t contact him, he’s on the road …’

  Mrs Goodwin didn’t finish her sentence. She was blinking erratically, her eyes glazed with complicity. Slowly, she reached for the packet of cigarettes. Unseeing, she placed the filter between her lips and felt for the box of matches. Anselm didn’t even hear the strike of phosphorus along the sandpaper. He was outside, running down the dark lane to the car parked in a lay-by.

  39

  Michael drove slowly along the shadowed lanes, the hedges black against the allure of darkness. The day was over. People were heading home. Heading back to their families. An unremarkable routine, played out everywhere, today and tomorrow, just like yesterday. Everyone did it. Except some. They never return. They disappear. Sometimes they vanish without trace. Others, they turn up in the back of beyond. Like Liam. They’d taken him to South Armagh where the IRA had a dedicated interrogation centre. A cow shed. They’d have stabbed him with a needle in Belfast and he’d have woken up in the middle of nowhere. A farm with prison cells. Quiet, rolling hills. Animals tearing at the bleak fields. They did that when the security people thought the tout had a lot of explaining to do. They wanted to take their time and get to the bottom of things. There’d been no point really. As Father Doyle had prophesied, Liam sang like a canary as soon as he’d smelled the cow dung and silage. The big lads hadn’t even had to string him up. They’d known from experience when a tout had told them everything. He’d still been a kid, caught with his trousers down.

  Michael’s right hand felt for the machine. Bile rose like mercury in a thermometer. He pressed PLAY …

  Michael had been back in Belfast a week when the phone rang to say there was a priest at the front gate. He’d got a message for Michael. After the operation in Donegal, Michael didn’t fly back to Edinburgh. Abandoning the palaver of shifting identities, he’d driven straight back to Belfast, torched the jalopy a mile from his barracks, and walked back to base with the Billingham bag slung over his shoulder. Looking pale and ill, he’d told his colonel that it served him right for trying to have a quiet drink in Scotland. Liam had not turned up for the meeting on Saturday as planned. And now, the following Wednesday, Father Doyle was at the gate.

  Michael bro
ught the priest to an interview room. It was bare save for a table and two chairs. The walls were green. The windows glazed and covered with heavy wire netting.

  ‘What did you do after I left you?’ commanded the priest, sitting down. He placed a tape recorder in the middle of the table. ‘What did you do about Ó Mórdha? I’ve heard nothing on the news.’

  ‘And you won’t.’

  The haggard priest was large and imposing, a black brooding presence, with arms folded. He wasn’t like Nigel, cultivated, articulate and ready to spar with words. He was a bruiser who delivered bread for the journey.

  ‘What have you done?’

  Michael resented the direct question. But there was something remorseless about those dark eyes. He seemed to be staring through a grille as if they were both in the dark.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The priest’s hand strayed to the tape recorder.

  ‘You didn’t arrest him?’

  Michael folded his arms, feeling cramped. It was as though the walls had moved in to squeeze his shoulders. The central light was glaring but Michael narrowed his eyes as if to penetrate the gloom.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Michael wiped his mouth. His understanding of things was realigning. He’d thought the priest had expected an … executive action. The removal of Ó Mórdha. He’d thought Father Doyle had gone down Eugene’s road, for the sake of long-term peace, and brought a message to Michael. And Michael had taken the same route to Donegal, thinking this priest was just another pilgrim on the road, resigned to a difficult journey. But he wasn’t. Michael had misunderstood him; thought he’d seen into the priest’s tortured mind. But he hadn’t. Father Doyle’s thick finger had come to rest on PLAY.

  ‘Did you know that Liam was holding guns?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  Michael didn’t answer so the priest took it for another ‘Nothing’.

  ‘Well, they came back while you were on holiday.’