He woke to what seemed like a dull thud and a splintering of glass, then realised that he’d heard a rifle shot at close quarters. Rolling out of bed, he lay flat on the cold flag-floor, waiting for either a second shot or the sound of retreating footsteps, but he heard nothing except the confused noises of the wind and the rain. With his head down, he crawled across the floor and came on a shard of broken glass with his hand. Someone had fired a shot through the window, and whoever it was might well try again. He groped in the dark for his socks and, unable to find them, put his shoes on his bare feet and laced them. Crouching, he went to the back door and pulled on his overcoat over his pyjamas, took his shotgun from the wall, put two cartridges in the breech, and stuffed four more in his pocket.
As the shot had come from the front of the house, his best bet, he felt, was to surprise the intruder from behind. Gently, he unbolted the back door and slipped outside without a sound. He stood with his back to the barn wall, peering into the darkness on either side, alert for a telltale sound or movement. It was still raining; the water running off the eaves trickled coldly down his neck. He edged forward towards the garden wall, and keeping his head below the level of the coping, made his way stealthily behind the hedge at the front corner of the cottage.
He raised his head, inch by inch, but in the darkness not even the whitewashed cottage was visible. The sky seemed only three feet above his head. He was finding breathing difficult; he was afraid he might cough at any moment. Picking up a stone, he flung it over the hedge so that it landed with a thud on the flagstones by the front door. He listened but no sound followed. There was no point in remaining outside with the wind whipping his ankles and the rain making runnels down his neck and chest. Carefully and soundlessly, he retraced his steps to the back door. He still felt shaken. It was a relief to be inside again out of the rain.
His watch said half-past three; he would have to wait for almost five hours before he could investigate further in the relative safety of daylight. He towelled his hair and neck, poured a stiff whisky, and crouching over the dying fire in his dressing gown, warmed his feet on the hearth. His sense of incredulity was so strong that he could barely put one thought after another. What had he done to arouse such animosity? And in a place at the world’s end, where plain living and plain thinking had made the inhabitants so philosophical that they always put off until tomorrow what they need not do today. Surely it must be the work of some prankster, Cor Mogaill perhaps or someone trying to get Cor Mogaill into trouble.
Whoever fired the shot obviously knew something of his habits. It would have been natural to assume that he slept in the bedroom, as he had done during the summer. It was only since the weather turned cold at the end of October that he began sleeping in the kitchen bed, next to the hearth fire. The people who had access to this piece of intelligence were very few indeed—Nora Hession, Gillespie, Roarty, and Rory Rua—and none of them seemed a likely suspect. He stayed pondering by the fire until well after four. When finally he turned in, he lay with his head at the foot of the bed as a precaution. Though he did not expect to sleep, he dropped off immediately. When he woke around nine, daylight was visible through a round hole in the window blind.
As he expected, one of the panes in the lower sash was broken. There was a hole in the bed curtain and a bullet buried in the wall of the outshot, no more than six inches above the pillow where his head had rested. He opened the front door on which was pinned a sheet from a jotter with a simple warning in red block letters: ‘Hands Off My Maid’.
Surely, he reasoned, this must be the work of a practical joker. Then he asked himself if a joker would have fired a shot of such uncanny accuracy. The only course open to him was to report the incident to McGing.
He sat at the table, lingering over a breakfast he was not enjoying. Everyone, including the practical joker, would now be at nine o’clock Mass, wondering more than likely if the sermon would ever end. On the other side of the window, glimmering light was trying to break through grey mist as in a late Turner. In the garden, droplets were falling from the slender branches of the mountain ash, not the pearly droplets of a bright summer morning but the cloudy droplets of sunless winter. He counted four droplets hanging from the underside of a branch. A thrush lit on the end of the branch and three of the droplets fell, glancing off another branch on the way to the ground. On any other morning he would have delighted in the accuracy of his observation but today it all meant nothing to him. The force that propelled his interest in the minutiae of nature had spent itself like a wave on an upward-sloping shore. He felt angry with himself for having misjudged his ‘friends’. In his enthusiasm for all that was unusual and amusing in the local culture, he probably had romanticised Glenkeel, but surely romanticism was not a crime. In any civilised country not even a desiccated classicist would shoot you for it.
He allowed McGing sufficient time to recover from the tedium of the Canon’s preaching. He found him eating breakfast in his uniform with his cap on the table next to a heaped plate of fried liver, bacon, onions, black pudding, and a mountain of buttered toast.
‘And what can I do for you so early on a Sunday morning?’ he asked.
Potter sat opposite him at the table and accepted a cup of black coffee but declined the offer of buttered toast and marmalade.
‘Someone took a pot shot at me in bed last night, and I should like to know who.’
As if in response to the seriousness of Potter’s news, McGing put on his policeman’s cap but continued eating without raising his eyes from his plate.
‘Go on, I’m listening,’ he said after a lapse of at least a minute.
‘He broke my window, missed my head by inches, and pinned this note to my door.’
‘Hands Off My Maid.’ McGing read through a mouthful of streaky bacon.
‘Do you think it might be Loftus?’ Potter asked.
McGing looked up from his plate at Potter as if he were contemplating the prime suspect.
‘Whatever may be said of Irish parish priests, they don’t go about shooting their parishioners.’
‘Loftus has a motive. He doesn’t approve of my relationship with Nora Hession, and he has told me so in no uncertain terms.’
‘You’re right to mention it. We mustn’t rule out a man because of his collar, but we mustn’t rush into accusations either. Loftus comes from a sporting family. His brother is a doctor and the best shot in the county. Though the Canon might conceivably shoot you on the run, he’d never stoop low enough to shoot a sitting duck.’
Potter took a moment or so to ponder this piece of information. ‘What do you make of it, then?’ he finally asked.
McGing slowly munched a piece of gristle in the bacon and spat it out on the side of his plate.
‘There are two possibilities. Someone did it for fun or someone meant business. There aren’t many people who’d want you dead but there are lots who might want to take the wind out of your sails—just for fun, you understand. We Irish are noted for our sense of humour.’
‘This shot was fired out of personal animus. There’s no other adequate explanation.’
‘I agree with your analysis, Mr Potter. And what is more I have a shrewd idea of the man who did it.’
‘Who?’
McGing poured himself another cup of coffee and began picking at a back tooth with his fingernail.
‘It wouldn’t help you to know at this stage.’
‘It might help me to guard against further attack.’
‘All right then. The prime suspect is Gimp Gillespie.’
‘But he’s my friend!’
‘I say Gimp rather than the Canon for a very good reason. As any psychologist will tell you, it’s more dangerous to come between a man and his fantasy than between a man and his maid.’
‘You speak in riddles, Sergeant.’
‘Gimp may well be jealous. He’s mad about Nora Hession, always has been, but she won’t as much as look his way. Life, Mr Potter, is very unfair, as Nora he
rself has found out. She went through hell for the love of a good-for-nothing brat, and now she’s giving Gillespie the same medicine—she’s out to wreak revenge on the whole male sex. Take care, Mr Potter, you may be next. You think you’re special, but she’ll send you packing when it suits her purpose. In her eyes you’re only so much cannon fodder. No pun intended.’
‘I won’t have my girlfriend traduced in this way, Sergeant.’
‘Suit yourself. In our little republic here every man’s opinion carries the same weight.’
‘But not the same value, surely!’
‘Have you ever heard of the Case of the Tumbled Tramp-cock?’
‘Of course, I have. It’s a classic of detection in these parts,’ said Potter, realising that McGing was determined to go the long way home.
‘Well, there’s an even stranger case, the Case of the Priest’s Maid’s Knickers. They were stolen from the clothesline in the priest’s garden, three pairs belonging to Nora Hession. Naturally, I went down to the parochial house to investigate but the Canon wanted everything swept under the carpet–he wasn’t going to have a scandal about his maid’s knickers in the local paper, he said. The whole thing was best forgotten, probably the work of a passing tinker with three bare-bottomed wives. The Church is not the Law, however, and McGing is nobody’s fool. Unbeknown to Loftus, I began keeping an eye on his garden. Three weeks later, not far off midnight, I caught my bold Gimp jouking under a pear tree, not a hundred miles from a certain clothesline displaying two pairs of Nora Hession’s pink drawers. So I marched him out of the garden and knocked up the Canon.
“What’s all this?” he said, putting his head out of the bedroom window. “Is it a sick call?”
“It’s the law,” I said. “I’ve just caught Gimp Gillespie trying to steal two pairs of your maid’s underpants,”—I couldn’t say “knickers” to the priest. He came down in his overcoat, and I told him I’d found Gimp skulking under the pear tree.’
“And what do you think you were doing in my garden at this hour?” the Canon demanded.
“I came to steal a pear,” said Gimp.
“A pair of what?” asked the Canon.
“I was reading St Augustine’s Confessions before turning in and I came to the place where he steals pears. Well, I couldn’t resist the temptation of the pear tree in your garden, father.”
“I didn’t know Augustine stole pears,” said the Canon. ‘I thought his offence had more to do with unholy loves.”
“He stole pears, too,” said Gimp.
“The Confessions are good Catholic reading. You should be ashamed of yourself to find them an occasion of sin. Tolle lege, tolle lege.”
“Shall I book him, Canon?” I asked.
“Release him,” said the Canon. “Tell him to go his way and sin no more.”
That’s the Canon, no stomach for the law. But I know, as does everyone in the glen, what Gimp was up to in that garden. Now a man who could find a priest’s maid’s knickers so magnetic might well take a pot shot at a man he thinks may have put his hand up them.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Potter, suddenly very English in phrase and posture.
‘Luckily, fetishists are notoriously ineffectual.’
‘You wouldn’t have called this one ineffectual if you’d heard the whistle of his bullet.’
‘You can see the pattern that’s emerging, can’t you?’
‘Which pattern?’
‘Drawers!’ said McGing, going to the window with a mug of coffee, just as detectives do in the movies.
‘Drawers?’ enquired Potter, convinced that McGing was raving.
‘Knickers,’ said McGing, eyeing him as if he were a simpleton.
‘What about them?’
‘First, Nora Hession’s vanishing from the clothesline, then the torn knickers on the tumbled tramp-cock, now a shot at you in the dark. All three are connected, don’t you see?’
‘How?’
‘I must ask you a very personal question, Mr Potter. Has Nora Hession left a pair of her pink knickers at your cottage? If so, or if Gimp Gillespie has reason to think so, we may be on to something.’
‘I can assure you, Sergeant, that I have no knowledge of either the colour or the fabric of Miss Hession’s undergarments.’
‘Then something is rotten in the parish of Glenkeel. For years the only offences here were poaching, after-hours drinking, and the odd run of poteen at Christmas, all of them manly crimes, signs of a healthy community. In the last six months we’ve had robbery, murder, more robbery, and now attempted murder. It cannot be that the population has suddenly turned criminal; it is more likely to be the work of one man, a village Moriarty. Let me tell you one thing: in me he is destined to meet his Holmes, so help me.’
Potter scratched his head and wished for an unimaginative English constable who would make a few notes and draw sensible conclusions.
‘If you know the identity of the criminal, what are we waiting for?’
‘A little thing called evidence. All we have at the moment is hunches. Time is on our side, however. Gradually and unmistakably, I’m amassing the circumstantial details, all of which reminds me, we must hurry to the scene of the crime in case any evidence is overlooked or lost. What about the bullet, for example?’
‘It’s still in the wall, I’m sure.’
‘Good. An amateur digging out a bullet with a penknife might well scratch it and obliterate the rifling marks, all valuable evidence. The bullet will tell us whether it was fired from the stolen rifle. Have you seen the cartridge case?’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t notice one.’
They both got into Potter’s car, and on the way to the cottage McGing delivered a lecture on forensic ballistics of such cogency that for a moment Potter felt he could not be in better hands. McGing was two men in one. The first, who had a mind like a magpie, was a treasury of forensic knowledge. The second, who drew conclusions, was an inept imbecile.
18
Potter dressed with greater care than usual, believing as he did that the success of a shoot depended to some extent on the suitability of the sportsman’s gear. Shooting, like going to the opera, was something of an occasion; it behoved one to look and feel the part. Having put on his thornproof plus-fours, heavy roll-neck jersey, tweed hacking jacket, and balaclava, he looked in the mirror and pronounced the transformation in his appearance a distinct success.
He had done a lot of brooding over the past week, and he was taking the day off in the hope that a morning’s shooting with Roarty would take his mind off his troubles for a few hours. Ever since the pot shot, he had been dogged by feelings of insecurity, troubled as much by a sense of incomprehension as physical fear. Though his friends, particularly Roarty and Gillespie, had shown genuine concern for his safety, he could not help feeling that somewhere in the glen was someone who wished him dead. At times he longed to be back in the London suburbs, commuting to Charing Cross every morning and complaining about the weather, late trains, and irresponsible trade unionists.
He stuffed several handfuls of cartridges into his pockets, hung his side-bag on his shoulder, took his shotgun from the wall, and locked the door behind him. The morning was dry and cold with a north-east wind sharp enough to skewer an arctic fox. A great red sun sat on the saddle of the hill, and as he drove to the village, he found that he could look it in the eye without discomfort, so thick was the haze on the higher hills. As the bar was not yet open, he entered Roarty’s by the back door and found his friend reading a newspaper behind the counter with the shutters up and the lights on. What looked like a halo of tobacco smoke hung over his shiny pate.
‘You’re early,’ Roarty remarked.
‘You said we’d start out before nine.’
‘There’s a bit of a haze. We’ll give it half an hour to clear. Here, have a drink on the house to warm you up. I’m having a quick one myself, just enough to take the tremble off my hand.’
‘It’s fresh out there,’ Potter said.
‘Did you notice the smell on the wind?’
‘I can’t say I did.’
‘You only get it here in October, November and March when the wind is north-east. Crubog calls it a gal phiútair. He says it’s the smell of coal from Derry.’
Roarty came out from behind the counter with the drinks and they sat by the fire and lit their pipes.
‘It’s a good morning for a snipe shoot,’ Roarty said after a while. ‘They’ll be sitting close, and they should be in good condition after a whole week of thaw. They’re always plump after a frosty spell—the worms come to the surface in a thaw, as you know.’
‘They were probably feeding all last night in the full moon.’
‘That’s what I mean. They’ll have full crops this morning, too sleepy to move till we’re well within range. We’ll make two good bags, wait and see.’
‘As Rory Rua says, it isn’t the bag that matters but the places you go to fill it. He reckons that the wild places in the hills leave their mark on a man’s soul.’
‘Rory Rua hasn’t a penn’orth of interest in the ways of wildlife. He sees no farther than the end of his gun barrels and, worse, he eats his game straight from the gun.’
Roarty spat into the heart of the fire. Potter looked at him, surprised by such assertiveness so early in the day.
‘Have you ever shot with him?’ Roarty asked.
‘Once or twice.’
‘He has two rotten molars that stink when he laughs, which is why I always walk on the upwind side of him.’
‘It’s a sportsman’s solution,’ said Potter, noting the slight tremor on Roarty’s hand as he raised his glass. Yet he would swing his gun so fast that it would not matter.
Ever since that unfortunate evening with the Canon, he had been aware of a muddy undercurrent in his relationship with Roarty, and at first he used to wonder if he imagined it all. Did Roarty have some grievous secret that he wished to share but could not find words to express? Or was it just a case of personal guilt at having failed a friend? He would begin sentences and leave them unfinished or perhaps forget what he was about to say. He would invite him to stay for a drink after closing time, as if about to reveal the root of all his sorrows, but nothing ever came of these after-hours heart-to-hearts except sportsmen’s small talk about whether to walk snipe upwind or downwind or use number six or number nine shot. Potter would have liked to help him out of his difficulty but did not wish to appear inquisitive. He simply came to the conclusion that Roarty was unhappy over the way he had deserted the Anti-Limestone Society for the Devil’s Party, or that he was lonely and sought the kind of friendship or meeting of minds he could not have with any local man.
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