The City of Strangers (41 page)

‘We’d been rowing, which was the usual state of affairs. A lot of crockery had been thrown, along with a lot of smelling salts sniffed and threats of suicide from Medea. She was always under pressure, you see. Pressure from me, pressure from Moloch, pressure from her nerves, pressure from the Hospitals’ Sweepstake about the money she collected for them. Well, enough said about that. She was more than a little naughty on that front. But it was the same old failed life and failed marriage and a son who was the biggest failure of all. It was all hopeless and she wished she was dead, and bla, bla, bla. I went out to get drunk, as any sane man would. It was all quiet when I came back. I thought I’d better say sorry, and try to wheedle the money out of her by crying. Sometimes it works. I found her on the bed. She must have cut her throat. It wasn’t easy to tell. It was such a mess, blood everywhere. You wouldn’t think there could be so much. God, the smell!’

He got up and started to pace slowly up and down the cabin.

‘I did think about the police. I thought about a lot of things. It was disconcerting. She’d been threatening to kill herself since I was eight or nine. The last thing I imagined was that she’d do anything about it. I realised I had to do the decent thing by the old stick. Medea was rather religious in her own way. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know she’d killed herself. Most of all she wouldn’t have wanted Moloch to know. It would have meant he’d won. She said it’s what he’d been trying to do since he left her, get her to kill herself, so he could marry his nurse. I had to find a way to get rid of her. That’s when it came to me, the sea! A Viking burial! If I could clean the place up and get her into the Irish Sea with the Austin. The body would drift off and if the car was found it would be clean as a whistle. No one would know. She would be a mysterious disappearance. Let Moloch put that in his pipe and smoke it!’

He stopped and looked round at Stefan triumphantly.

‘Of course cleaning up all that blood wasn’t easy. Everywhere! I rolled Medea up in a carpet and got her out to the garage and into the car. I drove her out to Corbawn Lane. But there was some idiot parked there, right at the end. And they’d put up some barrier too, God knows what for, so I couldn’t drive all the way. But there was the garden at the house. I could get to the sea there. But the damned car got stuck in the hedge. The only thing was to carry her down and drop her in. But do you know what? The parked car was still there, at the bottom of the lane. I’d have been spotted, even in the dark. I crept along the cliff, to see what the hell was going on. They were copulating of course. I mean, honestly! They were over an hour! I sat in the back with Medea. I put my arm round her and talked to her. It was odd being where we lived when I was a boy, before Moloch and Medea went their separate ways. I don’t think I ever really talked to her after that, or my father. They had each other to destroy, you see. Life was the great battle, the eternal battle. Moloch versus Medea!’

He suddenly sat down again, laughing. Stefan could hear the note of shrillness in his voice again; the real Owen Harris was beginning to fade.

‘Anyway, the copulators eventually finished copulating and drove away. I carried her to the edge of the cliff. I climbed a little way down, and dropped her into the water. The tide was quite high. And that was it. Except that I still couldn’t budge the fucking Austin. I got a lift to Ballsbridge from a very helpful chap and his wife. But the mess there, the –’

He stopped as suddenly as he had started.

There was a knock on the door. The steward looked in.

‘We’ll be taking off again in five minutes.’

As he closed the door Owen Harris looked round at Stefan.

‘Haven’t you got any questions?’

‘No,’ said Stefan simply.

He had a lot of questions, but his orders were that he didn’t ask them.

‘Is that a technique of detection you developed yourself, Sergeant,’ grinned Harris, ‘not asking any questions, I mean? It’s certainly original.’

‘The questions will have to wait for Superintendent Gregory.’

‘Is he any fun?’

‘I doubt you’ll find him a great deal of fun, no.’

‘It’s all going to be very tedious, isn’t it?’

Stefan said nothing; this was the Owen Harris he didn’t want to hear.

‘Do you think I should call character witnesses?’

‘What?’

‘At the trial. People do, don’t they? You wheel out some influential friends to say what a fine fellow you are and you couldn’t possibly have committed unspeakable crimes. You’d be quite surprised how many chaps I’ve encountered, in pursuit of fun as it were, who are rather influential, so many in fact that I could imagine them performing as a kind of chorus for me.’ He frowned a moment then gave a childish grin. ‘I’ll draw up a list –

James Gordon Deale, so fond of rugger,

Loves to scrum down hugger-mugger,

Hairy cheeks, skin like a slug, a

Nicer chap you couldn’t bugger.

Now sixty, Doctor Larry Brady,

Likes to dress up as a lady,

Rotten sex, but still, he paid me

Not to snitch to old Ma Brady.

In Dáil debates A.P.’s not seen,

But in the Gents’ on Stephen’s Green –’

The great propellers of the Yankee Clipper turned and clattered several times; then the engines roared. It was enough to stop Owen Harris in mid flow. Minutes later the flying boat was racing into the darkness, away from the lights of Botwood, cutting elegantly through the waters of the Bay of Exploits.

It lifted into the air quite suddenly, the motors straining and whining, caught in that goose-like moment between clumsy take off and soaring flight. And then the wings were lifted up, effortlessly, by the power of solid air beneath them. And there was only the night outside, and the high horizons of distance, and the low hum of the now calm engines.

In the dim light, Stefan picked up his note pad and started to write down what Owen Harris had said. Whether Superintendent Gregory wanted him to do it or not, that was his job. And Stefan had other things to think about. He needed to see his son again. And he wanted to see the woman who must be asleep on a boat now, somewhere on the ocean below him.

Owen Harris was silent, staring at nothing. He would not speak again until the plane started to descend to the Shannon Estuary and Foynes, hours away on the other side of dawn. He made no sound and no movement, yet Stefan knew that he was crying; but crying for who or for what he could have no idea.

Last night an Irish Times reporter spent two hours in O’Connell Street and other main thoroughfares in the city. He sat in restaurants, rode on tramcars, mixed with the people in the bus queues, and listened; but the one subject about which people were not talking was the war that had started that day. The weather was the favourite topic of conversation. Everyone agreed the like of it had never been seen. Lightning and loud peals of thunder had preceded torrential downpours; roadways were torn up and there was much flooding. In Dublin it was amid thunder and lightning that 40,000 people saw the Kilkenny hurling team beat the best team Cork could field, by one point, at Croke Park, in a match continually interrupted by the weather. Thousands were driven from the uncovered stands, drenched to the skin. Throughout the city, anybody who had been caught out-of-doors had a real experience to tell. Dear Dublin! London, Paris, Berlin and Warsaw are living in fear and terrible dread, but Dublin remains just the same inconsequent, ‘aisy-going’ Dublin.

The Irish Times

Home was not as easy as Stefan Gillespie wanted it to be. The journey to New York had ended in darkness and in things he either didn’t want to speak about or couldn’t speak about. The excitement everyone expected him to show about the city could not be as natural and effusive as it should have been, and despite his best attempts, for the first few days anyway, he felt like he was avoiding the subject that should have been all there was to talk about. His mother and father couldn’t understand his distance, especially when conversation about something, really anything, that was new and bright and full of great things was what the farmhouse kitchen needed, because if Stefan was making a poor job of wanting to talk about New York, Tom Gillespie was making an equally poor job of wanting to listen. Tom knew now that his friends Jane and Alexander were leaving Ireland, along with their mother, and that the path through the woods between Kilranelagh and Whitehall Grove wouldn’t be trodden that summer. It hit him as hard as his grandmother knew it would, and postcards of the Empire State Building wouldn’t soften the blow. He pretended it mattered less than it did, though the long faces and the unnerving silence from all three children told its own story. Both Stefan and Tom were unusually quiet; unusually they couldn’t share what they were quiet about with each other.

Stefan had been working hard since his return. Anything that needed doing that he would normally do at the Garda station in Baltinglass had been left for his return, and a bit besides. And now that he was back Superintendent Riordan, still irritated by his sergeant’s absence in the first place, wanted it all done immediately. Lambing was coming to an end at the farm but there were still long nights to spend in the fields with his father that meant little sleep. And after two meetings with Ned Broy, and with the Garda Commissioner and Commandant Gearóid de Paor of Military Intelligence, he had been instructed to conduct an investigation into Captain John Cavendish’s death in conjunction with G2, in the light of information he had brought back from New York.

It was a delicate inquiry; there were no witnesses; only the uncorroborated statement of a man who appeared to be a German intelligence officer and certainly wouldn’t appear in Dublin to repeat what he saw. Left to himself the Garda Commissioner would have put the whole thing on the long finger for long enough to let it drop off and be forgotten. If nothing could be proved, opening up the sore had little to recommend it. That wasn’t how Gearóid de Paor saw it. John Cavendish had been his friend. Even if it led to nothing he wanted to know what happened.

Now Sergeant Gillespie was in Dublin again. Superintendent Terry Gregory wanted to talk to him about his conversation with Owen Harris on the Yankee Clipper. He had been told before that no one wanted a report from him, and that he was a courier not a detective, but he had put one in anyway. Terry Gregory could do what he wanted with it. Nothing changed Stefan’s opinion that the first story a suspect told mattered, and there should be a record of it at least. Nothing changed Superintendent Gregory’s opinion that the sergeant from Baltinglass was an interfering pain in the arse either.

‘Do you believe this?’ asked Terry Gregory.

He was turning the pages of the report Sergeant Gillespie had sent him. It consisted of not much more than an account of the conversations he had had with Owen Harris at NYPD Police Headquarters and on the flying boat; attached to it was Micheál Mac Liammóir’s scribbled note of the conversation he had had at Centre Street which was even more wall-to-wall nonsense. The superintendent skimmed the pages with a half smile and raised eyebrows that he kept raised throughout. It was less the content that he found funny than the idea there was anything in the way of serious information to be extracted from this bollocks. It puzzled him that Stefan had even bothered to write it all down, let alone type it up and send it to him.

‘When I say, do you believe this, I suppose what I mean is, are you telling me I should take all this bollocks, extract the words “I didn’t do it”, and put it up as some kind of proof of innocence? I can just about see your friend Mr Mac Liammóir being mad enough to see the sense in that, but even four years down among the sheep shaggers can’t have addled your brain that much, Sergeant. Or maybe you’re just doing it to take the piss?’

They sat in a room off Lower Castle Yard at the back of Dublin Castle, where a collection of garages and tightly hemmed-in buildings made up the headquarters of the Garda Síochana’s Metropolitan Division. It also provided the cramped rooms of a Detective Branch that was more or less indistinguishable from the Special Branch that dealt with threats to the security of the Irish state. They were the same cramped rooms that the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s Detective Branch had used, when it too had been virtually indistinguishable from a Special Branch that dealt with threats to the security of the British state. The ceilings were black with more than a century of tobacco smoke; Terry Gregory was adding to it as usual.

‘Do you need to know if I believe it?’

‘I’m interested.’

‘You’ll have a better idea what’s true, sir. And maybe what looks like nonsense might relate to something. If you haven’t got it, you can’t make any judgement. Even if you’re just trying to get into his head –’

‘I’ve spent long enough talking to the man to know that’s the last place I’d want to be. But with friends like you and Mac Liammóir, I don’t know if Harris needs anybody to prosecute him. You two could do a grand job by yourselves. You’ve a man accused of killing his mammy, singing songs, cracking jokes, telling us she was robbing the Hospitals’ Sweepstake, and when he’s not parading the fact that he’s a fairy, he’s explaining that the old lady stabbed herself to death a dozen times and he dumped her in the sea to save her any embarrassment about it. How does that sound as a defence?’

‘It does have its weaknesses, sir.’

‘Then there’s Mr Charles Mawson of the Gate Theatre Company, who is of the firm opinion that Mr Harris couldn’t have killed his mother because he didn’t say a word about it during the six days they shared a cabin across the Atlantic. Mr Mawson does tell us, according to his boss Mr Mac Liammóir, that he’s prepared to come forward as a character witness. Maybe you can imagine a line of questioning when Mr Mawson assures the court that his friend Owen Harris couldn’t possibly have murdered his dear oul sainted mother, who he’d never said a bad word against. “You know Mr Harris well?” “I should do. Haven’t I been up his arse enough times?”’