That left the third possibility: disposal by burial. The easiest course would be to bury him in the garden, possibly under the dead conifer, but if there was to be an investigation, the garden would be the first place McGing would look. He would have to bury him in the bog, the least obvious place he could think of. He would drive out the Garron road for two miles, take the right-hand bog road and bury the body in the centre of the moor, well away from the areas where turf was now being cut. It was a lonely spot. The nearest house was three miles away, and the likelihood of being seen was remote. The only danger was the possibility of meeting another car on the main road, returning perhaps from a dance in Dunkineely. He thumbed hastily through the Dispatch, but there were no ads for dances in any of the local towns. Nevertheless, you never knew what late-night straggler you might meet on a country road, and his silver car was known to everyone in the glen. He would need an excuse, and what conceivable excuse could he have for driving towards Garron at one o’clock on a Sunday morning? A sudden gripe, a severe stomach pain occasioned by a Black Bush too many? That surely would explain the need for an urgent visit to Dr McGarrigle. And if he was seen, he could always say that the pain had abated when he was halfway there and that he had come home without seeing the doctor. It was not the best of excuses but it would have to do.
He opened the back door to have a look at the night sky. The clouds in the east seemed darker and closer. The air was still heavy, hanging like an invisible net over his head, laden with the scent of snuff-dry hay from the surrounding fields. Though already one o’clock, there was light in several of the cottages on the south mountain; he would have to wait until two before venturing out. The heavy night air weighed on his shoulders like a burden of unbearable thought.
Ploddingly, he climbed the stairs and opened a volume of Britannica. He lay on his side on the bed, sipping an orange juice and scanning a page. Murder. See Homicide. A failure to call a spade a spade? The article on Homicide was disappointing in its lack of detail, probably the work of some verbose criminologist rather than a scholar with first-hand experience. It occurred to him that a discerning news editor might welcome the account he himself could now write—a story that would tell of the murderer’s grim sense of inevitability as he looks down on the sprawled body of his victim, the out-going hatred he felt an hour ago now turned inwards on himself.
From youth he has been conditioned by novels, stories, plays and films based on the axiom that crime does not pay; that if anyone pays, it is the criminal himself. Eyeing the cooling body, he cannot help but wonder if he himself will be one of the rare exceptions. Yet he knows that with the aid of the arcane resources of forensic science, his enemy’s body could become more formidable in death than it ever was in life. After months of obsession with the victim, now he is truly alone, facing the instinctive condemnation of every decent citizen, the impersonal tenacity of the police in their investigations, and possibly the relentless treadmill of the courts, while all he has to ensure his survival is his cunning and intelligence. For a moment he wondered if he were intelligent enough.
On this night of all nights he needed to anticipate every contingency. Were there possibilities he had not considered, simple things he may have overlooked? He had not taken account of the moon, for example, which was only two days before the full. If the sky should clear, he would have to bury Eales in ghostly but too revealing light. He must make sure to remain on the alert; dig with one eye on the sky. Another indication of his disabling abstraction was the way he had looked up the Donegal Dispatch when he should have known that there was never a dance in Dunkineely on a Saturday.
He had written down eight options. Now the intimation of an unknown ninth tantalised him beyond all endurance, his freedom of action circumscribed by his inability to extend through imagination his gamut of choice. The man who is most free is the man who is aware of most possibilities, and in the past he had prided himself on being such a man. Now the effective possibilities open to him had shrunk from eight to one. And the remaining one was not particularly attractive.
For a moment a ninth possibility illumined the internal darkness; he would smash his front window, break open the till, hide the money, and pretend that Eales had been struck down by a burglar. It had the advantage that he could go to bed at his usual hour and get up in the morning at his usual time. He would listen to the radio over breakfast, and after a black coffee laced with a stiff Bush, ‘discover’ Eales and ring the police. That, however, might lead to awkward questions. Why hadn’t he heard the crash of breaking glass and the rumpus that must have ensued? Murder, he remembered, was better concealed than advertised. His ninth possibility had disintegrated like so much gossamer. Again he was back to only one.
Having considered a possible ninth, he was now harassed by the thought that there might be an unknown tenth. In the kitchen he stared stonily at his notebook with its list of possibilities, but they stubbornly refused to multiply. He had always seen himself as bright, at least a deal cleverer than most of his customers. Now when intelligence most mattered, he was faltering. Many people confused intelligence with a retentive memory, or the ability to remember how things are done and imitate or reproduce precisely what they already know. The truly intelligent were a race apart, as distinct from the rest of humanity as a ram is from a ridgel. Their incisiveness went straight to the core of every crux and their capacity for dispassionate reasoning carried them far beyond the bourn of past experience. Their ability could be described in one word—analysis. That in a word was his present failure: an inability to analyse a situation. Or was it perhaps a failure of imagination?
He put a match to the incriminating note of options and ground the ashes into powder with the poker. He changed into an old pair of trousers that he used for painting, a dark shirt that would not show up in moonlight, and a pair of wellingtons that would keep out the bog water.
Remembering the odious lust finger, he went to Eales’s bedroom and found it under the perfumed pillow. Now he would sleep soundly. The lust finger would never again agitate his dreams. He took Eales’s hold-all from the wardrobe and stuffed into it the glossy sex magazine, the puce pyjamas, Eales’s toothbrush, toothpaste, razor and shaving lather, a spare shirt and three bottles of deodorant. This latter, he told himself, was a brilliant stroke because Eales would not have gone as far as the door without his deodorant. Not quite analysis that, he would concede, but rather ingenious, nonetheless.
Premature self-congratulation was to be avoided, though. The time for hubris, if there was one, was tomorrow morning or in three years or so, when Eales would be as remote in history as a fossilised pterodactyl. He would not fossilise, however. Bogs were noted for their powers of preservation. Five hundred years from now some slow-thinking turf-cutter would unearth him with his slane, a time capsule preserved by tannin, the date of the magazine in the hold-all providing a perplexing terminus a quo for the rural constabulary. He was pleased by the coolness of his thinking. He knew he should feel remorse but he didn’t. All he felt was a nagging worry that he had forgotten something or that something might go wrong at the last minute.
It was two by the clock when he came downstairs again. Time to make a move now that the glen was abed. Quietly, he opened the door of the garage, lifting it slightly in case it should drag on the concrete floor, and put the hold-all and the unresisting Eales in the boot of his car. The body had hardly cooled. Rigor mortis had not yet set in though the skin had already begun to lose its elasticity. It was difficult to believe that this limp deadweight, this inedible carcase, this uneconomic commodity, had once been the man who threatened the peace and sweetness of his mind. It seemed unreal, far too good to be true. He half-expected him to open one eye and recite once more his favourite verse:
If ever I marry a wife,
I’ll marry a landlord’s daughter,
For then I may sit in the bar
And drink cold brandy and water.
With a sudden chill of the spine he remembered t
hat his car battery was almost flat. If he used the self-starter, the whole village would realise, as they turned in their beds, whose car was giving trouble. He opened the off-side window and pushed the car into the road, facing it down the hill that ran out of the west end of the village. He would have to start it on the run when he was clear of the houses, double back around the Block, and take the Garron road without re-entering the village.
He was about to move off when he remembered that he’d forgotten the spade. Brilliant! He went back to the garage and took a spade and a slane for good measure as well as a torch in case he should have need of it. He put the car in second gear and with his foot on the clutch pedal moved off down the slope. Halfway down as he began to gather speed, he let in the clutch. The engine fired at once, and he was off with a song of achievement in his heart.
The Garron road climbed steeply out of the glen for the first mile. He drove in third with the accelerator to the floor, enjoying the cool rush of the night air though the open window. He looked down on the retreating glen to his left. Not one light along the whole length of the north mountain. The ever-vigilant McGing with his back to his wife was probably dreaming of suggilation, saponification, and a score of other forensic arcana that to his chagrin mattered little in booking men for poteen-making or cycling without a light on their bicycles, offences that he considered beneath the consideration of a serious policeman like himself. If only he knew what a golden opportunity he was missing.
Soon he was making straight for the black clouds in the east, the heathery hills stretching darkly on either side. Once he had to change down to second thanks to two foolhardy wethers asleep in the dead centre of the road. Then suddenly after a sharp bend he had reached the flat plateau of bogland that separated the twin parishes of Glenkeel and Glenroe. He turned off the main road on to a narrow bog road that was little better than a dirt track, the rushes along the selvage brushing the wings and the doors. The swinging rays of headlamps came over the crest of the hill to his left. He stopped and switched off his lights while he waited for the car to pass down the main road to the glen. He had got off the Garron road just in time.
Wondering whose car it could be, he parked where tractors usually turned. As he switched off the engine and the lights, the dense blackness of the night rushed up to his very eyeballs. The moor was quiet, the sky low and opaque, and the air heavy and clammy. He strained his ear to listen but neither animal nor insect stirred. Yet he did not feel alone. It seemed to him that a thousand invisible eyes were staring at him out of the darkness. For reassurance he kept telling himself that the whole bog was asleep; that he alone was abroad.
He took the body from the boot, hoisted it on his shoulder so that the arms dangled at his back, gripped the legs and hold-all in his right hand while holding the spade and slane in his left. He stepped gingerly over the narrow drain that ran alongside the road and set off across the bog, treading slowly in case he should trip over a stump of oak or stumble into a hole or drain. It was so dark that he could not make out the turf stacks until he was right beside them. Soon he was on the open moor, which stretched before him flat and featureless for two miles. He would bury Eales in the centre, in an out-of-the-way spot untrodden by human foot, except perhaps that of a sheep farmer in search of a straying ewe or wether. He nearly jumped out of his skin as a flushed snipe rose with an eerie ‘scape’. It was a hard summer on the poor buggers. They favoured damp or marshy ground but even the bogs were now quite dry.
When he had walked about a mile, he tested the ground with his boot and laid down his load with a sense of well-earned relief. After urinating at some length he began paring the top sod from a patch of about six feet by three, just wide enough to allow comfort in the digging. The entangled roots of the mountain grass were so tough that he had to put all his might behind each drive of the spade. Soon the sweat was making runnels down his forehead and into his beard but still he worked like a man possessed until he had dug out two spits and could turn to the slane which he preferred to the spade. In spite of four months of dry weather, there was a surprising amount of water in the lower levels of the bog, and before long his shirt and trousers were filthy from rubbing against the sides of the grave.
When his shoulder was level with the brink, he stopped digging. He put Eales lying on his back on the bottom with the hold-all resting on his chest and the plastic bag still adorning his head. As it would have been hypocritical to pause and say a heartfelt prayer over the remains, he filled the grave and put the top sods back in place. Finally, he tamped down the sods with his boot and stood for a moment over his handiwork, savouring the spring of the earth underfoot. It was one of those rare occasions when a memorable insight might be in order, but all he could think of was that in next to no time Eales would be shooting up the most picturesque of bog cotton.
What he now wanted most was to get home without mishap and pour himself a quadruple whiskey. An overwhelming tiredness had begun to creep up his legs and arms but he made his way back doggedly to the car with the slane and spade on his right shoulder. As he neared the spot where he had parked the car, a ragged splotch of ghostly light appeared in the southern sky. The moon showed a veiled face for a fleeting moment, and something resembling a movement caught the tail of his eye. Had it vanished behind the nearest turf stack? His grip on the spade tightened as he stole across to the spot. He leaned against the stack listening for the faintest stir or sound. He walked round the stack. It was his over wrought imagination. There was no one there. Who on earth would be abroad at this hour? Someone stealing a neighbour’s turf? Even that was highly unlikely. With an effort of will he put the disquieting thought from mind. Reaching the car, he changed out of his dirty clothes, stowed them in the boot, and put on a clean shirt and trousers.
It was almost four o’clock when he got home. As he closed the garage door, a great raindrop stung the back of his neck. He took no notice but went straight to the bar and poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey. There were several things he should do; wash the floor where Eales had fallen, have a bath, and burn the trousers and shirt he had worn at the interment. Otherwise, in the event of an investigation he might find it difficult to explain how they had become so turf-caked. However, he decided to put off until tomorrow what he need not do that night. He would get up in time for eleven o’clock Mass and open the pub as usual at twelve, as if it were any normal Sunday, presenting to his customers a picture of composure and light-hearted bonhomie. Then in the holy hours between two and four, when all good Catholics were at lunch, he would attend to what was necessary.
He longed to sleep and forget, but now that the action of the night was over, his mind was racing madly, dwelling on minutiae, and even questioning his good judgement. He put Schumann’s cello concerto on the gramophone and lay on the bed, sipping the whiskey and listening to the recurrent sadness of the first movement, wondering if Schumann could have anticipated with eerie insight the entangled state of his thoughts. He needed ambiguous music, sounds that would bring glimpses of heaven while hinting at the darkness in life’s bottomless well. In this respect Schumann was the composer par excellence, particularly the Schumann of the cello concerto. Never was the struggle between light and dark, between conscious and unconscious, keener than in Schumann; yet it was not expressed as a struggle but as a fusion of opposites that tantalised the mind with the suggestion of other less ‘imperfect’ musical possibilities. Listening to him was like looking into a well after a pebble had disturbed the water: a precise reflection threatened to form while the water continued to tilt and sway, distorting the image, teasing the mind in search of facile symmetry. Yet as you looked, it was possible to gain an indistinct idea of the reflection. Though the image was broken, it was recognisable as something remote yet deeply personal.
With a gratifying awareness of rhythmic abridgement, he closed his eyes while his fingers clasped the tumbler on the bedside table. He opened his eyes again, aware of nothing but a searing pain in his rectum, a keenl
y stinging pain that had made him taste salty tears running down his cheeks into his mouth. He must have slept. The record had finished and he could not remember having heard the last movement. He ground his teeth and pressed hard as if pressing would expel the pain. Was this to be his earthly punishment, a summary visitation of the unvanquished enemy, followed by total colostomy to prolong a life no longer worth prolonging? God Almighty! As a punishment, it was more appropriate to buggery than homicide. Bent in two, he groped his way in the dark to the toilet and sat on the naked bowl, too absorbed in his pain to lower the wooden seat. What he now desired was an elephantine defecation, to discharge in one thundering avalanche this fundamental ache that threatened the very roots of his reason. He pressed and pressed to no purpose. Surely no civilised deity would sanction as condign punishment a phantom crap to plague and torture till the end of time! If there was such a thing as divine justice in the world, this wasn’t it. He pressed again until the blood rose to his face. Unannounced and unexpected, a blistering fart, like a shot from a gun barrel, ripped through his rear, dispelling in a moment all but the memory of pain. What heavenly relief! It was as if he had been reprieved at the point of death. The absence of earthly pain was paradisal pleasure. Eales would never again feel pain. But neither would he feel this pleasure. What he had done was not a perfect solution. He had placed a greater value on Cecily’s purity than on Eales’s depraved desires, and what father—certainly not a heavenly father—could blame him? Human life by its very nature was imperfect, as every theologian knew. He had merely taken the least imperfect path.
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