Still, was her caution a natural instinct to avoid getting involved with dealings with authority or something more?
* * *
Denis Field had been feeding his two greyhounds in their run at the back of his cottage. His pleasant-faced wife offered to call him, but Cronin was a believer in acting swiftly and in catching people on the hop whenever he could.
Field was reticent and Cronin bit back his frustration. This town was divided into incessant gossips whose meat and drink were the doings of their neighbours and men like this who took caution too far.
For all that, Cronin took to him. He was in his seventies, weather-beaten, and closed, but his eyes were a bright blue, and in them and the way he talked to his dogs, Cronin saw kindness. A much underrated virtue, kindness.
“I’ve brought some sad news, I’m afraid, Mr. Field.” He talked on quickly before the man began to imagine even worse news. “It’s your boss, Simon Crowe up at Inishowen House. He was attacked earlier on this evening. He’s dead, I’m afraid.”
“Simon…Mr. Crowe…what the devil?”
He turned to the run for a moment, not for any suspect reasons, Cronin felt, but to process the information.
“Do you want to come into the house?”
Field came out of the run and pushed in the bolt.
Cronin didn’t really have time to go in the Fields’ house. He wanted to get back to Inishowen House and wind things up there and then get home to his bed for a few hours. He’d managed to telephone Harriett and without alarming her had told her that he’d be late. If she was still up when he got in, he’d fill her in. News like this would be all over the town, all over the county before morning. He’d already been rung up by the Cork Examiner and a man from RTE.
But, he couldn’t offend this man. Denis Field was a friend of Crowe, and from what he’d gathered so far, they were thin on the ground. Also, it was intriguing. Class distinction was rampant in Ballytiereney, and though you did see alliances because of common interests in horses and dogs and so on, this was still unusual. Apart from their age, what would these two have in common?
He declined tea, there was only so much of the stuff you could stomach. He and the other man sat down at the kitchen table.
“Are you sure, I can’t offer you something? Maybe a drop of something?”
Cronin shook his head. It made him unpopular at times, especially among some of his colleagues, but he had a rule.
“You’ll be wondering how Simon Crowe and myself got friendly?”
Maybe not so reticent.
“When he first moved back here, twenty, no nearer to thirty years ago, I had a run-in with him. I shouldn’t be telling you this, probably but…well, I was doing a bit of poaching.” He shook his head.
“I don’t know why I’m apologising. It was the hungry twenties, and I’d lost my job. You could call it poaching, or you could call it just doing my best in the circumstances to feed my family.”
Cronin nodded his head. You’d have to be an idiot, not to have some sympathy, with the man’s view. But, it wouldn’t do to go down a side-lane about the rights and wrongs of wealth and privilege.
“Anyway, I got caught, gun under my arm and a couple of pheasants in a bag. We had a hot and frank verbal exchange.”
Cronin restrained himself from raising any eyebrows at the man’s use of words. You should never underestimate how well-read and knowledgeable these country people could be.
“I wasn’t in the mood to be hauled over the coals by what I saw as an upstart and an incomer. With hindsight, I was foolish and could easily have found myself in front of the bench—the last thing that would have helped my wife and family, but I argued the toss with him. Unlike many other of the landowners, farmers, and gentry, he saw my argument. At least he was a big enough man to not only see it but to admit it. He was a flawed character, but when the chips were down, on that night, in the wood, he showed another side.”
“He let you off,”
Denis shook his head, frowning.
“I wouldn’t put it like that. But, technically, maybe…he didn’t pursue it, didn’t involve yourselves and didn’t even throw his weight about by warning me off ever doing it again. I think he knew I wasn’t going to abuse the thing, tell all my friends that he was a soft touch or sell what I came into.”
“Still and all, Mr. Field. It was an unusual stand to take, especially all those years ago. How did you come to be working for him?”
“Years later. His health wasn’t so good. He’d had some young lads from time to time, fly-by-night young fellas from the town who were often more trouble than they were worth and he got to the point when he couldn’t be watching them.” He came round here to the house, one day, out of the blue. I wasn’t sure it was my sort of thing, but it wasn’t full-time, it was outside in the air, and I got the impression he’d just let me get on with it, which he did, in fairness to him.”
“How would you describe the man, Mr. Field?”
Cronin’s shoulders felt tight as knotted wood. It was interesting, the story of how the men had met but it was still years ago, and something from the present must have caused the murder unless Crowe was a random victim. Cronin didn’t think he was.
“We have a brutal murder on our hands, Mr. Field.”
“Look, my name is Denis. It makes me feel awkward with you ‘mistering’ me.”
“All right. I’m shooting in the dark if you don’t mind the expression—at least at the moment, and I’m looking for anything, any hint of threat around Simon Crowe, any disputes you know about, any loiterers around the place, well, anything unusual at all.”
Denis Field looked away, his gaze unfocused. He was either remembering something or wrestling with something in his conscience. He was a man of principle. Tricky.
“Look, I’m not asking you to be an informer or anything.”
Denis Field’s bark of a laugh was sharp, almost shocking. “I think that’s exactly what you are asking me to do.”
He smiled, then. “I’m joking. Don’t worry. There’s informing, and there’s doing the right thing. You’re looking for someone who is dangerous, roaming the countryside, probably. Needs putting behind bars.”
A silence fell and Cronin, out of nowhere felt treacherously, deeply tired. He got up with the pretext of stretching his legs.
“I think you’ll find the answer in the town. Not a stranger. I might be wrong, and I’d put money on it that I’m speaking out of turn. But Crowe was an awkward bugger when he first came to Ballytierney. In a funny way, maybe that’s why he reacted in the way he did when we had our dispute. It was that he didn’t know the rules of life in a small town. So, he didn’t know who was a secret drinker or who was carrying on with a neighbour’s wife…oh… loads of stuff. Old disputes. Who hadn’t spoken to who for the last twenty years.”
“So, he’d speak out of turn?”
Jack shook his head.
“Not exactly. Not setting out to cause trouble. But, he wouldn’t be guarded, put any brakes on it. You see the man had lived in a different part of the world; more dog eat dog, I would imagine. Small town rules meant nothing to him. Not at first, anyway. As time went on, he wised up.”
“Who were his friends?”
“Oh, superintendent, who do you think? The great and good of Ballytierney, of course. Yourselves, or the man that went before you—the doctor, priests, headmaster, the old major. The type you’d expect.”
* * *
“The canon has a migraine and asked if I’d take him up a cup of tea. Is that all right, Miss Cahill?” Father Tom stood at the kitchen door.
It was all right. She was glad that he was staying out of the way and not making her even more on edge than she already was. But, it was unusual. Apart from one or two bouts of flu, the canon didn’t do this sort of thing. In fact, you could set your watch by his arrival downstairs each morning at seven thirty, and every single morning, he told her that he’d just said his Divine Office. As if she needed to k
now.
She put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster. A person could usually manage a bit of toast, even with a headache.
Father Tom looked tired, in the way a young person looked tired. Dark shadows and pallor somehow more stark against young, unblemished skin.
“A shock for us all. Are you all right, Father?”
For the first time ever, she thought how odd it was to address a young lad like this, in that way. He brought out the maternal instincts in her.
“I’m fine, Miss Cahill.”
He didn’t look it. His colour had come back, and now his face was an almost ochre-red. Whatever about the canon, Father Tom didn’t look well.
She felt for him. It was his first parish, and he’d been unfortunate in being sent somewhere where the parish priest looked upon the junior priest as easy prey—cannon fodder, you might say.
“Is Father Stephen up and about?”
No sooner had she said the words than he came in also looking drawn and turned in on himself, barely uttering a greeting.
“You’ll need to say mass, this morning, Tom. The canon has me lined up for a whole load of jobs. We will have a visit from Inspector Cronin too, straight after breakfast. He’s already spoken to the canon, on the telephone.”
Maggie glanced at the big kitchen clock, high up on the pale-yellow wall. Eight-thirty. Inspector Cronin wasn’t letting the grass grow. He wouldn’t though. Maggie didn’t know a lot about him. She should pay more attention sometimes when Abina was gossiping. He had an invalid wife, but Maggie wasn’t sure what was wrong with her. Something chronic that meant she didn’t often leave the house. She was big friends with Abina, and despite the fact that she didn’t appear to have a lot of time for Harriett Cronin’s husband, Abina wasn’t above swanking about it, what an important job he had.
Father Stephen ate slowly and loudly, crunching toast with shredded marmalade and looking fixedly at the Cork Examiner. He never turned the page. He was a strange man. Sometimes, Maggie wondered about him, and his background, and how his mind worked. You got the impression with Father Stephen that it all bubbled away under the surface. He was a closed man. It wasn’t all that unusual in a priest. They weren’t supposed to go around the place being big personalities. Maggie had read about ciphers somewhere, people whose main role it was to bring others out of themselves. The thing was with Father Stephen you couldn’t even tell whether he did that. He was somehow…blank.
Maggie turned the tap on full blast. Letting her mind drift off like this was not going to help anyone.
* * *
“You had a bad night?”
He kept his voice neutral. You never knew with Harriett. She could accuse him of not asking, of not caring then at other times, she hated any reference to her arthritis. Funny, with a condition like arthritis. It was commonplace and you half-listened as old people grumbled about arthritis and their aches and pains, and you thought nothing of it. It didn’t sound serious, just an irritating part of getting old. But, most people didn’t know the half of it. Harriett had been thirty and had just had their daughter when she had been struck down with it.
It had been that as well, struck down, sudden and shockingly severe. It had eased of course, and a pattern had emerged, times of being in severe pain and confined to bed, times where the symptoms receded, and life was almost normal.
“I heard you come in. Very late, wasn’t it? Early hours of the morning. Not another session in The Small House?”
He clenched his teeth, and his jaw ached. Once that had happened. It must be all of five years ago. A very late night, an awful lot of drink. Would she ever forget it?
“No, not The Small House,” he kept his tone light, but then blurted out what he had been going to break gently.
“Old Simon Crowe was murdered in his bed.”
“Wha- wha?? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
She clutched her chest like a woman in a bad Hollywood film, a stage Irish thing. She wasn’t being over-dramatic. She was shocked, and he was a bastard to do it to her—deliberately.
“Yes, don’t worry, though, Harriett. We don’t think it was a random attack. He had enemies, we think.”
“What a terrible thing. His wife? Was she there, in the house, when it happened? Is she all right?”
“She is. Shocked, as you would expect, but not hurt. I’m sorry, Harriett. I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. It’s just…”
He clamped his mouth shut. What was the point of saying that she should let his drunken night go, that every time she threw it at him, it put another few inches of distance between them? In his soul, he knew that a lot of her anger and frustration was about her disability. He was here. Where else could she direct it? Especially now that their daughter had removed herself altogether from her mother’s line of fire—and from his life too. No. He would shut down that line of thought. That really was a dead-end road to go down.
“You’ll be very busy so, over the next days?”
“I will but, don’t worry. We can…”
But, she was talking over him.
“I’ll be fine. Abina is coming over, and she’ll spend the day with me. If I’m able, we’ll both go to the Mass tonight. Mrs. Brosnan’s husband said he’ll give us a lift, all three of us.”
Dig, dig, Will Brosnan had a nice nine-to-five job with the council as a clerk.
He squashed it down though the impulse to be sarcastic back—to say that, of course, Abina would be all too pleased to step in and show how a dutiful person should behave amongst the inflicted. It would achieve nothing and lead to further bitterness.
* * *
“Oh, what is wrong with that bloody man?” Elizabeth didn’t temper her voice. Gerry wondered if she even cared whether her father heard her. Whatever he said to her or however he shouted and tried to control her, she’d just shrug and sometimes, unbelievably, laugh in his face.
Then, the tendons in his neck would stand out, and his eyes would bulge and Gerry would close her eyes waiting for an outburst. But, somehow with his daughter, he could just about keep his temper under control. Didn’t mean that Gerry’s heartbeat didn’t race with terrible tension and that she didn’t wish with all her heart that Elizabeth would shut up. Then, maybe she wasn’t the daft one. Her cheek and bravado gained her more respect than Gerry’s own treading on eggshells.
Now, Elizabeth looked across the kitchen table at her; clear-eyed and full of self-belief. And contempt for her mother. Gerry sighed, took a few deep breaths through her nose. What she’d give for a morning in bed. A book, the wireless, or even just sleep. But, that would be the rocky road to—what? The whole edifice collapsing, maybe. The family.
“Your dad has a lot of responsibility, Elizabeth. People depend upon the decisions he makes. It can be tiring, and it can be worrying. You can’t always expect him to be in top form.”
“Oh, please, Mammy, I’m not a child. I know he’s the bank manager and that he has to make big decisions; well, big for Ballytierney anyway.”
Gerry caught her breath. This girl never failed to throw her. Gerry had no concept of a big fish in a small pond when she’d been Elizabeth’s age. How did this fifteen-year-old girl get to be so wise and even cynical?
“But, he’s been like an ould bear with a sore head since the meal at the canon’s; since that old man was killed, actually.”
Her clear green eyes stared at her mother as if she was cross-questioning her.
“Everybody was upset by that, Elizabeth. Surely, that’s to be expected. It was a terrible thing to happen and thank God, not something that happens in Ballytierney more than once in a lifetime.”
“Well, it just did, and Dad is taking it badly. Did he know him well or something?”
“Mr. Crowe was a customer in the bank, and I suppose, yes, in the sense that everyone in the town knows each other, your dad knew Mr. Crowe. Anyway, isn’t it time you were on your way to school. Is Sheila calling for you?”
“Yeees! Doesn’t she always?”<
br />
She got up, slowly, flicking her hair and checking her reflection in the mirror over the stove.
“See you, mother, dear.”
In a lightening change of mood, bad-humoured fathers and murdered old men, dismissed from her consciousness, Elizabeth, placed a hand on her mother’s tightly-tensed shoulder, bestowing a crumb of affection.
“Be off with you.”
Gerry smiled. Frank had left for work and the day was her own. What she would have given once upon a time, to be able to say that. Years immersed in the routines of small children, and it was such trouble, trying to go anywhere, that she stayed in. That had led to trouble, eventually, to feeling that she didn’t want to leave the house, at all. But, that was the past. It did no good raking over the past.
That had flashed into her mind when she’d said to Elizabeth about things not happening in Ballytierney. They didn’t very often, but you shouldn’t confuse not being acknowledged to not happening. An awful lot of things were hushed up in the town. Gerry closed her eyes and pressed her fingers into her eye sockets.
Being here without the children wasn’t the answer today. If only she could drive. There was no point in following that line of thought. Her husband didn’t believe in woman drivers. Well, not in his wife driving, anyway. He wasn’t above using sweeping statements to keep her where he wanted her. He didn’t have a problem with that woman with the loud voice that he was chatting to at the point to—point races, back in June. She’d driven a van, a horsebox, and a tractor, by her own account and Frank had been all impressed.
Gerry got up and started to clear the table. She could and would get out of the house. She had her two legs and could walk, into the town. Her thinking was calmer when she walked. She could make it in time for morning mass. The place would be full this morning, everyone wanting to talk about what had happened.
The road was quiet, the autumn colours just beginning. Ballytierney could startle you at times with its serene beauty. It didn’t have the drama of the ring of Kerry or west Cork—well it didn’t have the sea. But, nature was everywhere, and the town was friendly and quiet enough to highlight the green and lushness instead of conflicting with it. There was the river Tierney, too, calming when you took a moment to stop on one of the several bridges that crossed it and stare into its depths.
The Body at Ballytierney Page 5
