'The thing is,' he explained, hooking the door shut with his little finger, 'I've cut myself.'
He set a nervous pace and Murray at his side made sympathetic noises.
'It's the kind of accident that's easily done. I was going to use garlic salt and I banged the container to loosen the salt. Things get damp. And the glass broke in my hand. It's quite a bad cut, as a matter of fact.'
As Murray looked, the cloth streaked with sudden red.
'If you wouldn't mind, I don't much feel like talking at the moment. Perhaps if you could –'
'That's all right. I'll walk you down to the doctor. When you're losing blood, it doesn't do any harm to have someone with you – just in case.'
'Oh, I really don't think there's any need, though it's kind of you. I'm just going in here. Not so far as the doctor. One of my parishioners who's a nurse.'
The house was identical to its neighbours. Murray accompanied him along the path as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and the priest accepted him without further protest. Perhaps he was glad of a distracting presence as he explained to the plump little woman how he had come by his injury.
'Garlic salt?' The woman shook her head. The priest rested his behind on the edge of the kitchen table as she unwound the cloth from his hand. She repeated the words as if memorialising something outlandish. Her attitude towards him was protective, touched with the incredulity one offers a child.
'Mrs Sweeney and her husband – Mary and Willie – are very good to me. I think I eat in their house more often than my own.'
'You should really get stitches in this. At least when you eat with us you get plain wholesome food.'
'Oh, no,' Father Hurtle said, 'not stitches surely? I don't want any fuss.'
'This will sting. I don't see... there's no glass...I don't think, no. That's okay. I have butterfly plasters somewhere... There we go... and there, and one more.' She was wearing an apron and took a roll of bandage from the pocket. As she began to bind the hand, she asked him, 'Do you know where this bandage came from?' She was very pleased with herself and mischievous. 'From the hospital. It's just a small hospital,' she explained, taking account of Murray. 'Well, eighteen geriatric beds and twelve general – heart attacks and things like that to give you a bit of variety. When one of the old people die, you tie up their ankles before the undertaker comes. And when you cut off the bandage, you pop the rest of the roll into your pocket. Then you forget and bring it home with you.' She laughed with delight. 'That's you all wrapped up in stolen bandages, Father.'
But, with a change of mood as they were leaving, she asked him, 'Did you go on Saturday, Father?' She shook her head more in sorrow than anger. 'And wasn't Willie right? Didn't you find yourself being made a fool of by a lot of Communists?'
'They're building a nuclear power station along the coast,' Father Hurtle said, glancing at Murray as they retraced their steps.
'What was happening on Saturday? Some kind of protest demonstration?'
'I hadn't realised the place was so large. They'd hidden it behind a great rampart of earth so that you couldn't see it from the road. I simply hadn't realised.' He sighed, and turned his head as they passed the last of the houses to look at the sea. A white haar was rolling in towards the shore. 'Isn't it strange that we can't vote on what really matters? All those young people on Saturday marching and singing – it won't make any difference. In the evening, I saw them straggling away over the fields like an army in retreat. No country has ever held a vote before it declared war.'
'Did you get anyone to go with you?'
'Two ladies,' Father Hurtle said.
In the presbytery, he offered tea and, as he sipped the delicate fragrant liquid, some of the colour began to come back into his cheeks.
Murray tapped his tongue softly against his palate. 'Lapsang souchow,' he decided appreciatively.
'You know your tea!' The priest was excessively pleased, as if he had been prepared to apologise, and indeed hurried on, 'I don't usually offer it to – I felt the need of it just now. Most people prefer something more familiar, so I don't offer it. I keep it to myself – not selfishness, just that I know it wouldn't be enjoyed. It's my tipple.'
'Mine too.'
'Ah, you live alone.'
Some unexpected acknowledgement not to be admitted passed between the two men. They drank in silence, by accident raising the cup to their lips and putting it down again in unison.
'How can I help you?'
'I'm not a Catholic.'
'No.'
'I'm a private enquiry agent. I've been hired to trace the whereabouts of two children you helped to an adoption – this would be about twenty years ago. It was when you were in Moirhill, the mother was murdered.'
'Annette Verhaeren.' The name came without hesitation. That puzzled Murray. It was twenty years ago, and yet the reaction had been immediate. 'I can't help you.'
'It would be to the children's benefit.' Murray offered the cover story he had devised. 'I've been hired by a relative of the mother. There would be money in it for them, if they could be found.'
'I hope you don't understand what you're trying to do,' Father Hurtle said. 'Surely if I explain it to you, you will give up this thing. Let her children alone. What would you tell them? It's my prayer they have no idea now who their mother was.'
'Have you any right to decide for them?' Murray asked quietly. 'Don't tell me you've never heard of adopted children wanting to find that out.'
'I can tell you about their mother,' the priest said. 'Oh, I haven't forgotten. She was born in Belgium, and during the war – she must have been very young – sixteen perhaps – a German soldier fell in love with her and somehow got her to his parents in Bavaria. He was sent to the Eastern Front for his pains and died somewhere in that confusion. Working all the daylight hours, she was trapped on a farm with his parents who hated her. I was her priest, you see, and she told me these things.' Closing his eyes, he rubbed his forehead as if he was suddenly tired. The fingers were long and thin; like the man himself, to Murray they seemed fragile, as if they might be too easily broken. 'A British soldier rescued her from that – and married her. The marriage lasted on and off for years and it's possible he was the father of the older girl. When I wrote to him, afterwards, after her death, he sent me a letter saying he knew nothing about the kind of life she had been living. He was remarried and had begun a second family. He wanted to have nothing to do with the children. You couldn't blame him.'
'Everybody deserves to be remembered,' Murray said. 'Why shouldn't her children learn about Annette Verhaeren?'
'Do you know where they found her body?' Father Hurtle asked. 'Have you ever lived in a tenement in a place like Moirhill?'
Murray nodded.
'Do you remember the open stone sheds in the common yard at the back of those tenements, the ones they use for storing bins of rubbish? The body was clothed, but the buttons were crammed into the wrong holes - the garments were put on clumsily. The police said she had been beaten when she was naked. They could tell it had been done with a bar of metal – wood would have splintered in her flesh, you see. If it had been started methodically, it had ended in a kind of frenzy. Her body was a bag of broken bones. It was summer and the refuse men were on strike. She was found among the stinking rubbish that had spilled over from the open bins.'
After a moment's silence, Murray sipped at his tea, but it had gone cold.
'You know I can find them without your help,' he said. 'Coming to you is just one way of doing it.'
Father Hurtle got to his feet slowly, as if his body were a burden. 'I'm going for a walk along the beach.'
'Would you mind if I kept you company?'
'No.' Unexpectedly, he smiled. 'But I won't change my mind.' They picked their way down the slope to the shore. The mist now was hiding most of the sea. Their feet sank into the white sand where the wind had gathered it at the beginning of the beach.
'I am sorry you have made your journey for
nothing,' the priest said.
By common consent, they started across the sand to the water's edge. A glance at the priest labouring by his side forced on Murray the unwanted resemblance to Billy Shanks: not just that they were both above average height, both too thin, but something in them flayed and vulnerable; and it was this quality in Father Hurtle which made Murray recognise it as being in Billy too, for it was more evident in the priest, as if he had gone further along a road the two men were to share. When he stopped by the water, Father Hurtle drifted two or three paces apart. The little waves shushing into the sand at their feet made an enclosing and private sound.
'I don't like to remember that time.' The priest's voice came faintly, a white thread almost lost in the sea's noise. The mist was all round them now, and from the far hidden end of the beach there was a sound of children calling. Father Hurtle turned his head towards the sound. 'They're playing truant.' Still looking away, he said, 'I wasn't a success in Moirhill. There was so much unhappiness. If you are ill, you want the surgeon to cut with a steady hand. You want help, not pity. I was full of pity.' Turning his back on the sea, he pointed, seeming in no doubt of the direction although the haar had swallowed the last of the landmarks. 'Over that way is where Duns Scotus was born. I think of that when I'm walking among the new houses here.'
He moved off so abruptly that Murray was taken by surprise. Hurrying in the mist, he strayed on to low rocks covered in tar-coloured seaweed that slithered underfoot. The first slip taking him by surprise shook him, so that he picked his way uncertain of his balance and by the time he caught him up Father Hurtle was already seated on one of a litter of concrete slabs, the collapsed remnants of defences against an invasion. The half circle of children listening to him had something odd in their expressions, something careful, wary, a little blank and cautious. '... When I was a boy at school that was the word we used when someone told tales to the masters. I was just the same as the other boys, I hated a fellow like that.' To Murray, it was strange that the priest's voice had altered into exactly the timbre of the minister's sermons he had been forced to listen to as a child. 'For if you gave in, you know, the masters hated you for it, whatever they said, and just as much as the boys. Don't ever be a clype.'
The children's eyes shifted beyond the priest to question Murray, and with a noiseless gesture like a man shooing geese he urged them away. Released, they scattered and one boy at a safe distance muddled all he had felt into a single cry of animal defiance. At the sound, the priest startled in fright and then at Murray, as if he had forgotten who this man was taking the place beside him on the concrete bench.
'I can't remember the name of the older girl,' he said. 'Poor Annette named her after her own mother. The younger child was called Urszula.'
'Was she named after anyone?'
'It's a Polish name.'
They sat in silence. The children were gone, leaving not even a lingering echo in the mist. It was very quiet; Murray waited for the other man to speak; he was good at waiting. From somewhere on the point behind them a foghorn began a melancholy lowing.
'Not that the names will do you any good,' Father Hurtle said.
'The people who adopted them gave them other names – to make them seem their own.'
'More paper work. When you're tracing someone, that helps.'
'I was poor Annette's priest,' Father Hurtle said. 'Do you think I didn't know who had killed her? I knew his name and his face filth and cruelty. He was her pimp.' Whispering, he leaned closer. 'He beat her with a bar of iron. But afterwards I saw him walking the streets of Moirhill. They said he had been out of the city when it happened. They said he had some kind of protection. No God, no justice. I thought he was under the protection of Satan. But I was ill, when I believed that. I had to leave the city, you see, because I was ill.' Murray felt the warmth of his breath, and perhaps he leaned away for the priest drew back and then got to his feet. 'I can't help resenting that you came here,' he said.
I'm sorry, that should have been easy to say, but Murray sat silent watching him go, a black stripe like a branchless tree, until he lost form in the mist.
23 Jill
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6TH
It was parked on a double yellow line, but Murray had remarked before that the bigger the car the less chance of a parking ticket in this city. He recognised the chauffeur, sitting in a familiar pose with his head tilted forward as if reading a book, and ran up the stairs expecting to find Heathers at the door of the flat or on his way back down. The door of the flat was unlocked as he had left it, not wanting to give Irene an excuse for going away again if she did come; and so, even inside, he still thought he would find him waiting. He walked from the back room and through the lobby to the room he used as an office. Puzzled, he went to the window and inclined his head trying to see if the car was still there. Behind him there came a deferential double knock and a discreet clearing of the throat.
'I hope I didn't give you a fright, sir. The door was open, sir.' Out of the car, the chauffeur was smaller than he had looked at the wheel. The uniform was cut to emphasise the breadth of his shoulders, but it could do nothing about the shortness of his legs.
Cap in hand, he fitted anybody's idea of a servant.
'I didn't think, sir, you'd mind me coming in, sir.' The tough nasal Moirhill drawl sounded to Murray uncannily like Blair Heathers' tone.
'Where's your boss?'
'Oh, he wouldn't be here himself, sir. He's a busy man. He wanted you to get this, though, right away, sir.' The little respectful word, gargled far back in his throat as 'sir', was being repeated too often. He held the envelope but did not come forward, making Murray cross the room to take it from him.
There was a single sheet of paper inside:
“Following our discussion of 14 September, an arrangement was made. That arrangement is terminated.”
'It isn't signed,' Murray said.
'The thing is you've been making a nuisance of yourself. Going to see the wrong people, sir. At the wrong time, like. A time of grief, sir.'
All round, visiting Leo was turning out to have been a mistake. He spread the envelope with two fingers and looked inside.
'Where's the cheque?'
'There was a complaint from the bereaved. And then the police lifted you, and you shot off your mouth to them. It really wasn't what was wanted, sir.'
'You're quite a talker yourself,' Murray said quietly. 'Tell your boss I expect to get paid up till this date. I'll send him a note of my expenses.'
The chauffeur looked at him wisely. 'You do that,' he said.
'Only I've a feeling Mr Heathers has told the police you weren't working for him at all. I can't see him bunging you any more money...sir.' And the grin that had been struggling to escape from the start, came out as he retreated.
It wasn't a conscious decision to go after him. Lightly, as if carried, his body went forward on a reflex of anger so fast that the chauffeur reaching to open the outer door had no chance to defend himself. He caught the man by the back of the neck and lifting him like a doll ground his mouth and nose against the boards nailed across the broken panels.
At his desk, he took a bundle of bills out of their clip and spread them out. Staring at them with unseeing eyes, he kept hearing the sound of feet stumbling away down the stone flights. Nobody owned him. Without anybody's help, he had stopped himself drinking. Among men who cursed as casually as breathing, he made a fetish of being clean-mouthed. Above all, he had learned to control his temper.
Lose that...
When he looked up, there was no way of telling how long Irene had been watching him.
'You should have a fire on in here,' she said. 'It's cold outside and it's getting dark.'
He put on the lamp on the desk, but because its light was focused downward and fell between them it made it harder to see her.
'It's an office,' he said. 'We can go into the other room.'
'It's not any better. Unwashed dishes. A child's game on the tabl
e. You don't make yourself comfortable.'
'Chess.'
'What?'
'It doesn't matter.'
She came forward and took the seat on the other side of the desk. It was the place where clients sat, people who came to him because they were in trouble, and it seemed strange to see her there.
'Here I am,' she said. 'But I don't know why. Couldn't whatever it is have waited until tomorrow at Mum Wilson's?'
'I expected you yesterday.'
'I told you when you phoned I'd come if I could manage. There wasn't time yesterday. And we'll be at Mum Wilson's tomorrow.'
'I waited here for you all day,' he said.
She crossed her legs in the circle of light that fell from the lamp. 'Shouldn't you have been working? I thought you'd be out working on the murders. I thought you might be going to tell me what you'd found out.'
'I don't work for Heathers any more. He sent someone to tell me I was fired.'
'Nothing to tell then. No solutions. I'm sorry.'
'I've been fired before. Heathers today. Somebody else yesterday.'
Bittern, in the morning, phoning to tell him he was off the Foley case – “lack of any visible progress”. Even when he had tried to tell the lawyer about the letter from Mrs Beddowes the stubborn old man had paid no attention.
'Being fired twice in one week,' Irene said, 'you must feel terrible.'
'I've no complaints. I was hired to find a guy who'd run off with his partner's wife – and the profits. I got too involved with other things even to try.'
Reaching up, he re-angled the lamp, turning it towards her face. With an intimate unselfconscious movement, she tidied her hair, raising her elbows and using both hands to smooth it into place. He had never noticed how black her hair was; coarse black hair, thick and glossy like a peasant's; if you ran your hand over it, you would feel it crackle with life under your palm. Almost you would be frightened to stroke hair like that. Undiscomposed, she looked with wide and candid eyes into the light.
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