The New Policeman (15 page)

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It was a long walk up to Eagle’s Rock, at the foot of which lay the woods where J.J., in his own world, had smelled tobacco smoke. J.J. was dreading it, particularly when he realized that Bran, despite the best efforts of Aengus to stop her, was determined to go with them. But once they got out onto the road that cut across the plain below the mountains, J.J. forgot about the journey. The sun was warm and bright and the lush, green farmlands were so unspoiled that it made J.J. aware, for the first time, of how drab and tired his own world was becoming. If it wasn’t for the socks, it would have been perfect. There hadn’t been many in the village, but on this road there seemed to be even more than there had been on his way in from Doorus. He wanted to ask Aengus about them, but
there were other things that seemed more important.

“I still don’t get the bit about immortality,” he said. “If you live forever, then you must be immortal.”

“No,” said Aengus. “If we were in your world now and a bus came flying round that corner, it could kill me just as easily as it could kill you.” He shuddered. “I hate buses,” he said.

“Me, too,” said J.J. “Especially these days. They’re always late.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” said Aengus. “But there’s a good enough reason for the immortality misunderstanding. We don’t go across as much as we used to. At least we didn’t”—he waved both arms in the air—“until all this. But there was a period in your history when we used to come and go more freely. Thing is, you’d meet someone over there and come home again, and then when you went over and bumped into them again thirty or forty years might have passed in your world.”

The information made J.J. uneasy again, but he was too curious about too many things to pay the feeling any attention. “I thought you weren’t allowed to go there,” he said. “I thought you had an agreement.”

“We cheated,” said Aengus. “We had to.”

“Why?”

“Because of our children. If we wanted to reproduce ourselves, and most people do, you know, we had to use your world to do it.” Aengus was having difficulty keeping his pipe lit, and he stopped to puff at it for a minute, then went on. “We love this world. Anyone who sees it does. But it has its drawbacks. Life without time is perfect when you get to my age, but it’s not much use if you want to do a bit of growing up.”

“I see what you mean,” said J.J. “If there’s no time, you never get any older.”

“Spot on,” said Aengus. “Pregnancies need time and so do births, but most of all, babies need time to grow up.”

“So you have to go over there to live when you have children?”

“Not exactly,” said Aengus. “We could, technically, but who wants to get fifteen or twenty years older if they don’t have to?”

“How do you do it then?” said J.J.

“Did you ever hear of changelings?” J.J. nodded. The word gave him the creeps.

“What did you hear about them?” said Aengus.

“That the f—that the fairies used to take someone’s baby and leave one of their own in its place.”

“You didn’t think it was true, did you?” said Aengus.

“Of course not,” said J.J. In his primary school they had done a huge project, gathering together folklore from the old people in the village and the surrounding farms. They had collected dozens of fairy stories, several of them about changelings. It had never occurred to him that there could be anything other than imagination behind them. He still couldn’t believe it. That word “fairies” was getting in the way.

“Well, it is,” said Aengus. “It’s not so easy these days, of course, what with hospital births and burglar alarms and baby monitors and all that malarkey. But we still get the odd few across.”

“Don’t they look different?” said J.J. “In the stories I heard the babies were all ugly little creatures.”

“Everybody thinks their own baby is beautiful and everyone else’s is ugly,” said Aengus. “But what can people do, when it comes down to it? Who’s going to believe them if they kick up about it? And a baby’s a baby when all’s said and done. They just have to get on with it.”

J.J. hesitated before he asked the next question, afraid to hear what the answer might be. “What do you do with the babies that you take away?”

“That’s not so hard,” said Aengus. “We put them in a basket, take them a few counties away, and leave them on someone’s doorstep.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” said J.J. “Why don’t you save all the hassle and just leave your own babies on doorsteps?”

“We’re fussy, that’s why. We choose our foster parents carefully. We don’t want to leave our children with just anyone, you know.”

“But you don’t care about other people’s children,” said J.J. spitefully.

“Caring is another of those things like worrying,” said Aengus. “We’re useless at it. We just don’t get enough practice.”

But he seemed to care about Bran, judging by the way he stopped every hundred meters or so to let her catch up. He did it again now, and while they were waiting, he began to examine a dark green sock that was hanging, among others, on a nearby bush. “That’s not a bad one,” he said, taking it down and trying it against the ones he was wearing. They were, J.J. couldn’t help noticing, not just odd, but different colors.

“What do you think?” said Aengus.

“It doesn’t go with either of them,” said J.J. “What
is the story with all these socks, anyway?”

“Ah,” said Aengus, putting the sock back on the bush and trying out another one. “That’s another leak. The sock leak.”

J.J. laughed incredulously. “A sock leak?!”

“What did you think?” said Aengus irritably. “That we went over and stole all these socks from you people and scattered them all over the place?”

“Well, no,” said J.J. “But—”

“It’s the washing machines that cause it,” said Aengus. “Or maybe the dryers. No one knows why.”

J.J. remembered the pillowcase in the hot press at home, stuffed to bursting with odd socks. Some of them had been waiting for years to be reunited with their lost partners. Helen had tried to throw them all out once, but Ciaran hadn’t let her. He said that if she did, the others were sure to turn up again immediately. “Sod’s law,” he called it.

“Why do you just leave them there?” said J.J.

“Who’s going to pick them up?” said Aengus. “Apart from when they feel like a change of socks?” He changed one of his own, as if to demonstrate, hopping on one foot as he did it. “Besides,” he went on, “they’re useful markers for us.”

“Markers for what?” said J.J.

“There’s so many new houses going up on your side that we can’t keep track of them. There’s a danger that one of us could go over and find ourselves in the middle of someone’s kitchen. Or worse. But the socks tell us where the new houses are. We don’t mind them really.”

Bran had caught up and plonked herself down in the road, but she had to get straight up again as Aengus and J.J. moved off. Before long they came to where the Moy Road crossed the New Line and Aengus paused there for a while, looking around and listening.

“What are you looking for?” J.J. asked him.

“Nothing in particular,” said Aengus. “But crossroads are leaky places. You never know what you might find.”

“Is that why we used to have dances at the crossroads?” said J.J.

“It is,” said Aengus. “You’re catching on at last.”

He led the way across the New Line and up the mountain road that led to Colman’s church and Eagle’s Rock. J.J.’s house was nearby, over to the right. The drive opened off the New Line farther down, but it would be easy for them to get to it across country from where they were, and it wouldn’t take long. He
would have liked to see what it looked like in this world, but when he proposed the idea Aengus shook his head.

“Maybe we can go back down that way,” he said. “I don’t want to waste time.”

“Well, that’s progress,” said J.J. “Maybe it’s you who should be giving me the worrying lessons.”

Ahead of them the road ran through thickets of hazel, which seemed, from the sounds of it, to be full of woodpeckers.

“We don’t get many of them on our side,” said J.J.

“Many what?” said Aengus.

“Woodpeckers,” said J.J.

“Is there a woodpecker?” said Aengus.

“Can’t you hear them?” said J.J.

“What I’m hearing isn’t woodpeckers,” said Aengus. He took the fiddle case from his shoulder and handed it to J.J. “Will you hold on to this for a while? I have a bit of business to take care of.”

“What kind of business?” said J.J.

“Just business,” said Aengus, but his eyes warned J.J. not to ask any more about it. “Stay on the road now, you hear me? Don’t go into the woods whatever else you do.”

“Why not?”

“Leprechauns,” said Aengus. “The place is thick with them.”

“Leprechauns?” said J.J., coming to the realization that the sounds he was hearing might not, after all, be woodpeckers. “What would they do to me?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Aengus irritably. “Make shoes at you or something. Just keep to the road, all right? When you see the pigeon on the gate, stop and wait for me there.”

“How do you know there’ll be a pigeon on the gate?” said J.J.

“Because there…” Aengus hesitated. “Good point. Everything’s different now, isn’t it? Wait at the oak tree then. I don’t suppose that will have gone anywhere.”

He disappeared among the trees. J.J. was tempted to follow and find out for himself about leprechauns, but now that he thought about it there was something sinister about those sharp little machine-gun bursts of hammering. And if he got into some kind of trouble there would be no chance of finding the time leak. It would be better to play safe.

He walked slowly so that Bran, who was making heavy weather of the hill, could stay with him. If what Aengus had told him about the changelings was true,
and he had to admit that it made perfect sense, did that mean that the other old stories were true as well? Did the fairies dance in the ring forts at night? Did people hear leaks there, and go to sleep, and wake up to find that seven years had passed? Did Aengus and the others visit bad luck on people who took stones from the forts, or who built their houses on the paths they used, or who failed to leave out milk for them when they were used to getting it?

Milk? J.J. couldn’t imagine Aengus getting shirty about a glass of milk. He looked down at Bran, still battling on behind him. If she was who Aengus said she was, did that mean that Fionn was here as well? Were the Fianna walking around in these gray hills with their broadswords and their beards? J.J. had read all those old stories in primary school, but he couldn’t remember any of them now, apart from his favorite one, about Diarmuid and Gráinne. There were sites scattered all over the country that were supposed to have been beds where the two lovers had lain together. Was there a chance that they could still be out there somewhere, condemned to spend eternity fleeing the wrath of Fionn?

PIGEON ON THE GATE

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The case of the missing teenager had come to a standstill. Extensive inquiries and searches had turned up nothing. Now, to add to the disquiet in the locality, Anne Korff seemed to have disappeared as well. The police, after looking into the matter, refused to make any connection between the two incidents. Anne Korff’s house was locked up from the outside. It was undisturbed. Wherever she had gone, she had taken her dog with her. Unlike J.J. Liddy, she was an adult, and if she chose to go away without telling her friends, that was her concern. There was no evidence of a crime, and there was no reason to investigate.

The villagers were of a different opinion. They kept their doors locked at all times, and few of them ventured out alone at night. The pubs were quiet and
closed on time. The local teenagers were subdued and had no inclination to prowl the streets or even to drink scrumpy around the back of the primary school. There was nothing whatsoever for a policeman to do in the village, but it was imperative that one should be seen there. The new guy was given the job.