Still, he had his regrets. He’d become so fond of having her around that he couldn’t help worrying that she might get restless and leave for a better-paid job. Now more than ever he needed Eales’s lust finger, and he deeply regretted having interred it with its owner. But had he interred it? He really could not recall. His memory had gone to pot. So where was it now? Still in the bog or under Potter’s pillow? If only he knew the right address, he could order one for himself. The address was given in Eales’s sex magazine, which was also with Potter, at least according to his first bogmailing letter. He would have to think of a way of getting his hands on one. It was the kind of novelty that Susan would appreciate. Besides, the name would appeal to her sense of fun.
Strangely, in spite of his best efforts, he never dreamt of her. The pattern of his preoccupations condemned him to dream only of Florence. Night after night she exhausted him by her insatiability, treating him as an unreliable dildo, humiliating him whenever his battery ran flat. One night he went in uncircumcised and came out without his foreskin. He looked for it between the sheets but it was nowhere to be found. The horror of it dismasted him on the spot. ‘I want my foreskin back,’ he shouted. ‘And I won’t rest till I’ve found it.’
‘You’ll find it where you left it,’ she scoffed. ‘All you need is a key to the chamber.’
His dreams had convinced him that he owed his impotence to Florence. If she had been a normal, healthy woman like Susan, he would never have been gripped with this fear of uncharted recesses. Perhaps he should have read medicine. All that clinical dissection of cadavers, both male and female, would have demystified the whole horrifying business. He would have had a scientific name for everything. He would know the function of every cog, lever and sprocket, and the knowledge of both name and function would have made him invulnerable. The famed Dr Johnson had once said that the sole end of writing was ‘to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ As with writing, so with knowledge. His impotence was nothing more than the impotence of ignorance, which would account for his sense of the world being a place of nameless fears. The most prevalent male fear, as he well knew, was vaginal fear. Dr Eustace Chesser must have realised that when he called his book Love without Fear. He’d overheard Potter mention it in a literary discussion with Gimp. Perhaps he should arm himself with a copy. Judging by what he’d heard, it would make for comparatively light reading after the avoirdupois of Britannica.
This morning, as he was standing outside the pub, he had a visitation from fear of a different sort. He’s been looking idly at a red van coming up over the Minister’s Bridge, when suddenly an apprehending hand on his shoulder sent a tremor down his spine. He looked round and there was Flanagan, the principal light-keeper in full uniform. He must have seen him with the tail of his eye, and had associated the uniform with the law. The incident was an eye-opener, living proof of the enervating sense of insecurity with which he had been living for the past two months, a feeling that Potter’s latest letter had done nothing to mitigate. It read:
Dearest Roarty:
Knowing why you stole the Canon’s Remington puts me one move ahead in the end game. I’ve left a sealed envelope with my solicitor which is to be handed over unopened to the police should anything unusual or unexpected happen to me. Nuff said?
Bogmailer.
He had read the note five or six times, seeking every conceivable nuance of meaning, but still he was not impressed. It was a clumsy attempt at bluff, clumsy because dead men don’t tell tales. Potter could set down in black and white how he had witnessed the murder; he could give the location of the body and the name of the murderer; but he could not ensure conviction. There would be suspicions and questions, admittedly, but he would arrange to have satisfactory answers. And since he was paying the blackmail in cash rather than by cheque, there was nothing that might connect him with the blackmailer. Potter was in for a rude awakening though. Come to think of it, ‘awakening’ was hardly the word. A possible solution was within his grasp, yet his questing mind refused to rest. He was glad of one thing, however. The burglary was keeping McGing fully occupied. He had practically forgotten about the murder; he talked of nothing but the stolen rifle.
‘If only I had the tools of the trade, I could solve this crime in a day,’ he’d said over his morning black-and-tan. ‘There are ways and means,’ he nodded knowingly. ‘The thief, careful though he was, left a trail of electrostatic footprints on the carpet. All I need do is sprinkle polystyrene beads on the floor. They will stick because of the electrical charge left by the feet, and the magnetised beads will show the size and shape of his shoes.’
‘So why don’t you do it?’ Roarty asked.
‘No cooperation either from Sligo or Dublin. Where are the polystyrene beads to come from, if not from them? And the cigarette butts I sent off for analysis probably ended up in the dustbin. No one wants to know about a stolen rifle. Only murder makes them sit up and take notice.’
‘Surely, you’re not saying we need another murder?’ Roarty said seriously.
‘Well, of course not. But speaking purely as a detective, I’m inclined to say it would help. Murder, like its concomitant hanging, concentrates the mind wonderfully.’
‘There must be clues you haven’t noticed,’ Roarty reasoned. ‘Fingerprints, for example?’
‘There aren’t any. I’ve dusted every inch of the room. The only fingerprints I found belonged to the Canon and Nora Hession. We’re dealing with a cunning intelligence here, a veritable Moriarty. He probably had the foresight to wear gloves.’
‘If you catch him, your name will be made.’
‘I’m convinced that when I catch him, I’ll have caught the murderer. Oh, he’s a cool one, drinking half a bottle of malt Scotch and smoking seven cigarettes before leaving the scene of the crime.’
‘He must be very self-confident to be so contemptuous of the law,’ Roarty mused.
‘My policeman’s instinct tells me there’s worse to come. But what really worries me is the amount of time I’m devoting to him.’
‘Isn’t that your job?’
‘I read recently in an American book on criminology that detectives spend less time on the cases they solve than on those they don’t.’
‘You mean that the more time you spend on a case the less chance you have of solving it?’
‘I mean that a case that’s capable of solution will be solved quickly.’
‘In other words only easy cases are solved?’
‘But what is an easy case?’ asked McGing, beginning to enjoy the interest of his interlocutor.
‘An easy case must surely be one where the identity of the criminal is obvious.’
‘An easy case for one policeman may well stump another. Horses for courses, policemen for criminals... that’s the secret. A criminal may go scot free for years until he happens to run up against the right—or for him, the wrong— policeman.’ McGing looked at Roarty as if he’d said more than he should.
‘I don’t understand?’
‘A policeman with the right affinity, a man who can peer into the dark convolutions of the lawless mind and even anticipate its next move. The great Sherlock Holmes solved his cases by logical deduction, but in my view reason without intuition is not enough. In the perfect detective what we criminologists call the cognitive and the intuitive are perfectly balanced. Both are necessary because one nourishes the other. A man who is deficient in one is therefore deficient in the other. I don’t think I’m being immodest when I say that I’ve got more intuition than Holmes.’
‘By the look of things, you need every ounce of it in this parish,’ Roarty said encouragingly.
‘Isn’t that why I’ve been discussing it with you? You’ve just given me a new line of enquiry.’
‘How come?’
‘I mustn’t tell you, not yet,’ said McGing, straightening his cap and leaving with a wave of the hand.
At five minutes to eight Roarty and Potter left the pub
for the parochial house. The Canon himself in sombre canonicals opened the door and ushered them into the parlour where Cor Mogaill, Rory Rua and Gimp Gillespie were deeply ensconced in one of the two sofas on either side of the fire. The Canon, tall, craggy and red-faced, with a noticeable economy of phrase and gesture, offered them a choice of beer or whiskey. They made small talk about the weather while he poured the drinks and showed the seriousness of the occasion by his silence. Occupying the armchair directly in front of the big turf fire, he stretched two long legs, exposing white woollen socks beneath the turn-ups of his black trousers, and put the fingers of both hands together as if he were about to deliver himself of a prayer. Cor Mogaill looked at Roarty, who in turn looked at Potter. For a moment the silence held them all in the paralysis of uncertain expectation.
‘Will you open the proceedings, Canon, or shall I?’ Potter enquired, breaking the Canon’s spell in smithereens.
The Canon stared at him and then at the others before clearing his throat, as he usually did in the pulpit before a sermon. Roarty sipped his whiskey and wished he had brought his hipflask. After all, it might be possible later to nip out to the lavatory for fortification as opposed to evacuation.
‘As your spiritual director, I didn’t ask you here to preach to you,’ he began. ‘I invited you here to share some of my thoughts on the new church so that as reasonable men of God we might part in agreement. When I first came to Glenkeel, the roof of the old church was leaking, the seats worm-eaten, the floor uneven, the windows rotting, and the altar a disgrace to its exalted purpose. What must I do, I asked myself. Renovate or rebuild? I knew that either way the burden of the cost would weigh heavily. Then one evening, as I was walking by the sea, I looked into the clouds above the sunset and saw a modern church, a simple structure, a cone on a cube, and I knew I had my heaven-sent answer.’
‘It’s a vision that only a very holy man could have,’ Rory Rua said. ‘I’ve spent my life on the sea and I never once saw a cone on a cube in the sunset. It just goes to show.’
‘What does it show?’ Cor Mogaill asked.
‘Divine intention,’ the Canon offered. ‘We must acknowledge the possibility. As a man of the cloth in a sinful world, I knew there would be difficulties. I knew I would have to face those who cannot envisage a church without a steeple. I knew I’d be vilified, just as Pope Julius II was vilified for introducing Michelangelo’s terribilità into the Sistine chapel.’
‘I hope you’re not comparing a mathematical cone on a cube with the ornate ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,’ Cor Mogaill asked.
‘What I saw in the clouds was a simple church, built from simple materials, a church that conveys something of the austerity of the lives of our saintliest coenobites. A church that in its outline reflects the simplicity of the life we live here.’
‘Then why have you put a big expensive window in the west transept reaching almost to the floor?’ Cor Mogaill demanded. ‘I find it distracting, to say the least.’
‘If you came to Mass more often, Cor Mogaill, you might get used to it. I will only add that it has a divine purpose. If you look out, what do you see? Nothing but the tombstones of the graveyard, reminding you of the imminence of your end.’
‘You’re right there, Canon. The very same thought came to me last Sunday at Mass,’ Rory Rua enthused. ‘I thought the tombstones had invaded the church.’
‘But it isn’t enough to remember death. You must fear death, feeling the force of timor et tremor and of William Dunbar’s best-known poem:
Our pleasance here is all vane glory,
This fals world is bot transitory,
The flesche is bruckle, the Fend is sle:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
I needn’t translate, because the English of Dunbar, thanks to the Ulster Plantation, is near enough the dialect you all speak—excepting Mr Potter, of course.’
‘We’ve heard all that before,’ Cor Mogaill said. ‘We’re here to discuss the limestone altar and the ideals of the Anti-Limestone Society.’
‘I’m coming to that.’ The Canon held up his hand but not in blessing. ‘The old wooden altar was beautifully carved and lovely to look at, but it is now worm-eaten beyond repair. The dust it sheds falls into the chalice whenever I uncover it during Mass. The new altar is one of stern austerity, in keeping with the bare brickwork of the screen and the naked concrete blocks of the walls. Can anything be simpler and more pleasing to our Creator than stone created by His own hand?’
The Canon looked at each of them in turn, as if challenging them to disagree. Potter looked at Roarty, who was looking into his empty glass.
‘You have made an eloquent case for your new church and altar, Canon,’ he said, having realised that he was to be the spokesman for the opposition. ‘I don’t question the sincerity of your motives, but your arguments fail to meet the fears and doubts that drove your parishioners to found the Anti-Limestone Society.’
‘A handful of my parishioners.’
‘Like me, Canon, you’re a stranger in the glen, a “blow-in”, to use the local phrase. A bird of passage, here today and possibly in another parish tomorrow. You may be well-meaning, but you do not have to live a lifetime with the mistakes you’ll leave behind. That, unfortunately, is the lot of your parishioners. Those who have been born in the glen and will spend their lives here are better qualified than I to remind you of what the old altar means to them. I think Tim Roarty, who was born and bred here, unlike either of us, can do that better than any of us.’
Roarty had been observing with fascination how the Canon’s face turned a deep crimson on hearing Potter’s mellifluously stinging tones. The blood rose into his cheeks, spreading down through his jowls and neck to disappear beneath the tight, white collar. It was the face of a man who was accustomed to being addressed in tones of servility, and who saw in Potter an injurious threat to his undisputed autarchy.
‘The wooden altar is not a priceless treasure like the Chalice of Ardagh or the Book of Kells,’ Roarty began. ‘It is rather a piece of local history, carved by local craftsmen whose direct descendants are still coming to Mass on Sunday. It has seen four or five generations of glen people come and go; it has seen their baptisms and marriages, and finally their funerals. It has become an intrinsic part of the experience of every man and woman in this parish. Now this icon of local history is to be put on the fire and replaced by a nondescript “table-top” altar of the kind you see in every nondescript town in Ireland. We founded the Anti-Limestone Society to ensure that we are not shorn of a vital part of our history. We are not anti-clerical, Canon, but we will not be led like lambs to the shearing pen.’
Potter listened with head bent as Roarty said his piece. It was well said, yet in a curious way it missed the mark. His delivery sounded so much like the Canon’s that he wondered if Roarty would have made a better canon than the real one. Roarty was an enigma. No one knew what he truly believed. And he suspected he didn’t believe in the Anti-Limestone Society either. Was he one of those unfortunate men who were born to believe in nothing? He liked Roarty but he would never understand him.
‘The table-top altar is not my invention,’ the Canon said. ‘It is a feature of the new Roman liturgy that has emerged from the great debates of the Second Vatican Council.’
‘Codology, not theology,’ said Cor Mogaill, rising to his feet and addressing them all as if he were speaking from the back of a lorry at the hustings. ‘Ask any theologian, Canon. The Last Supper, and therefore the first Mass, was celebrated at a wooden, not a limestone, table.’
‘Will you pipe down, Cor Mogaill, and give your arse a chance,’ Rory Rua shouted, pulling at Cor Mogaill’s sleeve. ‘We can discuss our differences without insulting the Canon.’
‘The Canon can look after himself,’ said Loftus severely. ‘You are both at fault. You, Cor Mogaill, for your intemperate language and you, Rory Rua, for referring to a part of our anatomy that is foreign to the subject we are discussing. Your reference to
the Last Supper, Cor Mogaill, might have come more appropriately from a man who came to Mass every Sunday and received the Sacraments regularly!’
‘HOOA! HOOA! HOOA!’ said Cor Mogaill, with upraised fist.
‘I didn’t invite you here for an unseemly quarrel, but to put to you what I shall describe as a modest proposal,’ the Canon said. ‘For some time now I’ve been observing with interest the operations of Mr Potter’s firm Pluto Explorations Inc. But first I must recount a piece of local history, which some of you in your enthusiasm for your Anti-Limestone Society may have overlooked. From the seventeenth century the mineral rights and the surface rights of the south mountain have been held by the Church of Ireland, which for Mr Potter’s benefit can be translated as the Tory Party at prayer in Ireland.’
Roarty observed a twinkle of delight in the Canon’s eye which he construed as nothing less than a twinkle of mischief. He had rested his taurine head against the back of his chair and folded his arms over his capacious stomach, as if confident that the tenor of the discussion was his to manipulate. Roarty leaned forward in case he might miss something, and he noticed that Rory Rua and Gimp Gillespie were doing likewise. The Canon cleared his throat and continued:
‘For three hundred years local farmers paid a rent to the Church of Ireland for grazing rights on the mountain, which for a reason I haven’t been able to establish was discontinued in 1926. On taking legal advice I discovered that you local farmers have acquired at least what may be called “squatters’ rights” to the grazing in the fifty years that have elapsed since 1926. The more complex question, and therefore the more costly to determine, is whether you have also acquired other rights in the mountain. Now Mr Potter’s firm has secured a five-year option on the disused mine with the right to take up a 25-year lease at £5,000 plus a modest royalty if mining of barytes should restart. We all know which party has the best deal: it is Mr Potter’s firm. There is no doubt about the party with the worst deal: it is you local farmers whose rights have not been consulted.’
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