‘I shouldn’t be ashamed of the shot. I’ve culled deer in the Highlands. I think I know what I could do at sixty yards. In culling deer the shot that kills comes at the end of a long and skilful stalk. It’s the logical outcome of a whole afternoon’s endeavour. But shooting a seal while he is sunning himself on a rock is like shooting a sitting duck. It shows no sense of sportsmanship or fair play.’
‘It shows a sense of humour,’ said Roarty, drawing a hip-flask from his pocket. ‘Will you be having a swig?’
‘No, thank you. I don’t drink Irish whiskey and, besides, I’ve had the forethought to bring my own.’
‘The perception of catastrophe again. Can it be possible that we’re both pessimists?’
‘We’re sceptical realists, my dear Roarty. We see each other as we are.’
Roarty cut the engine and they both enjoyed the contents of their flasks while the ravenous mackerel and terror-stricken sprat played all around them.
‘I’d swear my Redbreast tastes stronger out here. It must be the air, heady with the smell of fish oil.’
‘I’ve seldom seen an evening as glorious as this.’
‘It isn’t over yet. We’ll go back to Éaló na Mágach with the thickening of the light, when the pollock will be feeding on the surface.’
‘So the light-shy pollock turns pelagic in late evening?’
‘Now that’s a new one on me,’ said Roarty. ‘I hadn’t thought of the humble pollock as a headstrong heresiarch.’
‘Pelagic, not pelagian.’
‘Touché,’ said Roarty.
The sun was going down behind them and the wind had acquired an edge that prompted Roarty to put on his Aran pullover.
‘Look at that sky; there are weeks of fine weather ahead of us.’ Roarty picked up a mackerel and took a knife from his hip pocket. Holding the mackerel in his left hand, he cut a long thin strip of skin with the edge of the knife held towards the tail. Then he took a cork from his trousers pocket and laid the piece of mackerel skin on the cork with the skin side down. Finally, he put the point of the hook through the thin end of the strip, and held it up for Potter to see.
‘A work of art,’ Potter said. ‘You could easily mistake it for a silver tadpole.’
‘It will be very killing in about twenty minutes.’ He handed the cork and knife to Potter and restarted the engine. They both trolled their lines on the surface without the leads as they made for Éaló na Mágach. The sun had set and the darkening water flickered uncertainly in the afterglow. Roarty was right about the feeding habits of pollock in late evening. By the time the light had begun to fade fast, they had caught four or five each, most of them good-sized fish between four and six pounds.
‘Not a bad evening’s work,’ Roarty said, setting course for the slip with open throttle. The shoreline in front of them was dark and the last dregs of pinkish light in the west were draining away.
‘There is something I’ve been meaning to bring up,’ Potter said, having abandoned his struggle to light his pipe. ‘Everyone I meet here has one thing on his mind, the new chapel, an unsightly cube with a cone on top in a village that should have a traditional church with a spire. Everyone thinks it’s an eyesore—a disgraceful monstrosity—but no one has the courage to say so out loud. We’ve had crude geometrical architecture in London for the last forty years, and Londoners have learnt to live with it. London is not Donegal, however.
People who make a living from land and sea, in step with the swing of the seasons, have a right to better. Londoners have been brutalised by an anonymous bureaucracy that has fallen prey to every current and eddy in fashionable architectural “thinking”. Here, thank heavens, we live in a place whose only connection with the world of ideas is your Britannica—’
‘The 1911 edition,’ Roarty emphasised.
‘Here the villain is not faceless but larger than life. And we—you and I—can bring him to heel. The cube and its cone are already standing, and now it’s too late to pull them down. But we can still do something about the limestone altar, which is yet to come. The wooden altar from the old church is good enough for this “new gazebo”, to use Cor Mogaill’s favourite phrase. It was carved by craftsmen in an age of craftsmanship, so why discard it for a block of cut limestone that no one wants except the Canon? The wooden altar goes back to the time of the Famine. It was paid for with money that could have been used to buy food for the starving and dying—I am only quoting local gossip—yet this memorial to the inhumanity of organised religion is to be put on a fire while a block of polished limestone—a convenient tabula rasa—is to be erected in its place. Everyone knows this, everyone says this, yet no one has the courage to say, “Enough”.’
‘So what are you proposing?’
‘What we need is leadership. We must insist that the old wooden altar be preserved, if only as a reminder of more austere and possibly truer times, and as a memorial to craftsmen who lived on diseased potatoes. There is plenty of feeling. There is plenty of tinder. All we need do is to set a match to it.’
‘I’m with you all the way, but have you considered the Canon?’
‘He is the villain. It is his mania for building and his obsession with Pope Julius II, the employer of Raphael and Michelangelo, which has made the village of Tork look like a Bauhaus exhibition.’
‘He’s a crafty old fox. We’ll have to tread carefully.’
‘That’s why I’ve confided in you. I’m a stranger here. If I organise the opposition, he will brand me an English communist and discredit what we’re trying to achieve. I’m only too willing to help, but I mustn’t be seen to lead.’
‘And what would you have me do?’
‘Call a meeting and get all your regulars to come to it.’
‘We’ll need a committee.’
‘You and I will direct without seeming to. As a sop to democracy, we’ll rope in Gimp Gillespie, Cor Mogaill—I wish you had more pronounceable names—and Rory Rua.’
‘I don’t think Rory Rua would make a good committee man. He’s too opinionated to listen to anyone. Just because he takes The Irish Times every day, he thinks he knows it all.’
‘In that event it may be politic to make sure he is one of us. Better to have him pissing out of our tent than into it,’ Potter said.
‘I bow to your superior sense of strategy.’
Roarty cut the engine and Potter rowed slowly into the darkened cove. Having winched up the boat, they put the fish into two sacks and carried them up the steep path to the road.
‘See you at the pub.’
Potter drove off, pleased with the evening’s work. He was now on the way to giving the Canon his comeuppance in accord with the reforming spirit of English Lollardism.
11
After closing time he and Susan gutted the pollock in the kitchen. Though Susan had never cleaned a fish before, she was quick to learn. Before they had finished, she could dispose of a backbone and swim bladder as readily as Roarty.
It had been an instructive evening for him as well. Now he felt certain that Potter was his man, if only because of his reference to a hand or head as a further instalment, which tallied with the threat in the blackmailer’s second letter. It was all such a pity. He liked Potter for his intelligent and entertaining conversation; and good conversationalists were sufficiently rare to make one reflect before reducing their number. Sadly, their number would have to be reduced, simply because he could not afford to pay £50 a week forever more.
Already he had considered staging an accident should an opportunity arise. However, Potter’s perception of catastrophe might make an ‘accident’ difficult to contrive. He could have left him stranded on the rock if it had been closer to nightfall. To have done so with two hours of daylight to come would have been nothing less than idiotic. A sheep farmer might have spotted him from the cliff tops, and anyhow the villagers knew that they had gone fishing together. He was fully aware that expunging Potter wouldn’t be easy. He could not poison his drink without risk of
exposure, and he was unlikely to get a chance to hit him over the head with a volume of Britannica. The murder weapon would have to be a rifle or shotgun, and because bullets bore rifling marks and cartridges the mark of the firing pin, he would have to find a gun other than his own. Better to wait for a week or two until the shooting season began in earnest, by which time an ‘accident’ would fall within the bounds of possibility.
He was pleased about Potter’s interest in the old altar, though he could not imagine how it had arisen. He did not believe for a moment that Potter merely wished to commemorate ‘craftsmen who lived on diseased potatoes’; nor did he believe that he was striving out of the goodness of his heart to save Donegal from the fate that had overtaken London. Whatever his motives, he welcomed his interest. Now they would both have a goal in common. As conspirators against the Canon, they would spend more time together, which might provide him with the desired opportunity.
There were other advantages. Involvement in something impersonal like committee work was what he needed to take his mind off McGing. He would find himself immersed in lively discussion, with less time on his hands to brood over his dreadful secret. He would be engaged with other men in a common pursuit, which would knit his life to theirs and alleviate the loneliness he had come increasingly to feel.
The murder investigation had reinforced his sense of isolation. It was a drawn-out ordeal he would not willingly re-endure. First came question after question, and then the reiteration of questions he had already answered, while McGing took down his every word in a book he ominously called ‘my little black book’. The detectives dusted the bar for fingerprints and scoured every room for blood prints, egged on by McGing who kept reminding them that ‘all we need is a milligram of dried blood and we’re there’. He could tell that he was under suspicion, though the chief detective had assured him that their questioning was pure routine. There was nothing routine about the way they let loose their Alsatians in his garden, nor in McGing’s pompous talk about trace elements, somatic and molecular death, and the effects of refrigeration on hypostasis (whatever that was).
The homicide squad stayed in the glen for four days, interviewing everyone Eales had known, poking about in back gardens, dredging loughs and rivers, examining fridges and freezers, and scouring the wild places in the mountains. Wherever they went, McGing travelled with them, ostensibly as their guide over unfamiliar terrain but in reality to pester them with unnecessary and frequently bizarre suggestions. When they left defeated, he took it as a personal affront. He told Roarty over his morning black-and-tan that he believed the murder had been committed out of a desire to tantalise and provoke him.
‘Why else should the murderer send me his victim’s foot?’ he asked. ‘Not content with having committed the perfect murder on my patch, he had to let me know he committed it. Well, he’s making a mistake. I have two years to go before retirement, and I intend devoting every single day of them to solving a crime that has defeated the experts.’ Roarty believed him; there would be no peace, no let up, while McGing was on duty.
All was not ill-luck, however. It was fortunate, for example, that the letter for Eales had not arrived while the homicide squad was on the premises. As the envelope was typewritten, he was tempted to take it straight to McGing, but curiosity prevailed. He steamed it open to discover that it was from Cecily, asking Eales what had happened, demanding to know when he was coming to London. It was just as well that he had opened it. If McGing had seen it, the motive for the murder would have been laid bare. He burnt Cecily’s letter but not the envelope, knowing as he did that the postman might well tell McGing that there had been mail for Eales. Ingeniously, he took a brochure for cat meat which Eales had had some months before and stuffed it in the envelope, then resealed it and gave it to McGing.
‘Would you care for a nightcap, Susan?’ he asked when they had cleaned the last of the fish. Feeling lonely and deflated after the excitement of the evening, he thought it might be soothing to put his feet up and talk to her before going to bed.
‘I’ll have a gin and tonic,’ she said brightly. ‘It will be nice to have a drink in peace and quiet.’
He went to the bar humming a tune from Schumann’s Piano Quintet and came back with a tray of drinks and a bowl of salted peanuts. Susan was sitting on the old horsehair sofa, examining her fingernails. He put the tray on the low coffee table in front of her and sat down wearily beside her. She was cheap to run; she did not drink much, not as much as Eales, just a bottle of beer before lunch, which made her burp, and one or two gin-and-tonics in the evening, which made her giggly and giddy. She was an innocent sort of girl who never asked awkward questions. She was always affable, always willing to help, with always a calming word for tricky customers. She was barely twenty, and though you wouldn’t call her plain, you wouldn’t call her pretty either. Solidly built with big, well-rounded breasts, he found her oddly attractive, and as far as he knew she had no steady boyfriend. Looking now at her full lips as she smiled, he wondered what she’d say if he kissed her. Maybe she’d never been kissed. Except possibly on bonfire night or on the way home from a winter ramble in the wildness of the mountains, and then by a silent sheep farmer with the rain making runnels in his stubble.
Sitting beside her on the sofa had an effect on him that he hadn’t experienced since he was a young man. She had a sturdy body with a round belly that protruded slightly beneath her belt, breasts that threatened to overflow, and strong, muscular legs, all of which lured him into that pleasantly seductive penumbra between the known and the unknown. They were sharing a house in which they were alone together. She had her own room; she was as free as a bird, and she seemed happy doing whatever needed to be done in the kitchen and the bar. Was it possible that in time she might come to accept him as an occasional visitor to her bed? He would benefit from a good tumble; it would take his mind off his troubles and have a rejuvenating effect on his thickening body. And it might help dispel morning low spirits, a condition that often persisted until he’d had at least three quick shots of what Potter called ‘the amber elixir’. He put his arm round her shoulders. She turned and smiled, which he took to be a sign of genial fellowship.
And fifteen arms went round her waist
(And then men ask, Are barmaids chaste?)
It was no good. He couldn’t remember the name of the poet. His memory was like a sieve these days.
‘You prefer gin-and-tonic to whiskey?’ he said.
‘Yes, I do. Gin-and-tonic makes me think I’m by the sea on a warm day with a breeze coming over the water.’
‘But you always have a glass of beer around lunchtime.’
‘Beer makes me burp, which is fine in the morning. In the evenings I like to think of the sea.’ Again she smiled, as if she was making fun of him.
‘I’m the same,’ he said. ‘In the morning after a breakfast I don’t really fancy, I often enjoy a beer and a good burp–what Dr McGarrigle, God save us all from his attentions, calls a “therapeutic eructation”.’
‘But you drink whiskey most of the time.’
‘That’s just to maintain the correct alcohol level in the blood.’
‘Potter drinks nothing but Glenmorangie,’ she said reflectively.
‘He’s a good customer. Do you like him?’
‘He’s very deep. He always says less than he means. I often wonder what Nora Hession makes of him.’
‘I often wonder what he makes of her.’
She looked at him quizzically and laughed. Her breasts rose for a moment, stretching the fabric of her bodice. ‘They’re both deep,’ she said. ‘Deep people are hard to fathom.’
He longed to lay his head on her breasts and close his eyes on the world. She was wearing a low-cut cotton dress, and as she moved on the sofa the light and shadows played delicate games along the curves of her breasts with the darkest shadow in the valley between. He tried to think of a joke that would make her laugh so that he could watch her breasts heave again like two great
jellies and re-experience that helpless longing he used to feel as a young man with out-of-reach girls he fancied. He told her how Budgeen Rua got his name and he mimicked Potter saying ‘Cor Mogaill’, but she only smiled with the whitest of teeth and never heaved a breast at all.
‘Are you right handed or left handed?’ he asked as a last resort.
‘Left handed.’
He took her right hand, her destiny hand, and ran the nail of his forefinger along the line of life at the base of her thumb.
‘Good news. You’ll live to be a great age, but I can’t tell you where.’
‘What are you up to now?’ she asked.
‘I’m feeling your mounts. You’ve got seven of them and the most interesting is the Mount of Venus. It’s very fleshy, a sign that you have love and music in abundance.’
‘Where is my Mount of Venus?’
‘There.’ He pointed to the base of her thumb, inviting her to feel it for herself.
‘It is very fleshy. I hope you’re right.’
‘Believe me, it’s true.’
‘You gipsy!’
As she laughed, her breasts like a cornucopia of fruit threatened to spill from her dress. Unable stand the tension any longer, he drew her head onto his shoulder and put his free hand on her breast. It was not in the least jelly-like to the touch but round and full like a grapefruit, with a strong nipple rising inside her dress. No wonder Potter had begun calling his pub ‘The Bristols Bar’.
‘Tell me about the mountain,’ he said, caressing her breasts, his fingers now inside the cotton.
‘It’s very lonely. All you can see is one hill behind another and white roads running over them and maybe a house here and there and six or seven sheep grazing on a slope with their backs to the wind. And all you can hear is the wind whistling in the heather.’
‘So you like living here in the village?
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