Colonel Osborne ushered the detectives out of the kitchen. Harry Hall appeared, lighting a cigarette inside the shelter of a cupped hand.
‘Have a word?’ he said to Strafford.
The detective looked at him and tried not to let his antipathy show. Not that it mattered – the two men disliked each other, for no particular reason, and didn’t let it interfere with their work. They really didn’t care enough about each other to fight. All the same, the tension between them was palpable, and Colonel Osborne frowned, glancing from Harry Hall to Strafford, and from Strafford to Jenkins, with a look of puzzled enquiry.
‘A word?’ Strafford said.
Harry Hall said nothing more, only turned and walked out of the room. Strafford hesitated a moment, then followed.
In the library, Hendricks was fitting a new roll of film into his camera, while Willoughby, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, was kneeling by the door and listlessly dusting the knob with a soft sable brush. Harry Hall sucked worriedly at his cigarette.
‘This is a weird one,’ he said in an undertone.
‘Would you say so? – I was beginning to think something of the sort myself,’ Strafford answered. Harry Hall only shrugged. It always puzzled Strafford that his irony so often went unnoticed.
‘He was stabbed upstairs and made it down here somehow,’ Harry Hall was saying. ‘I suppose he was trying to get away from whoever it was that attacked him. My guess is he got in here and fell – he’d already lost a bucket of blood – and that he was lying here when his tackle was cut off, balls, prick, the whole shebang. Which we didn’t find, by the way. Someone must have kept it for a souvenir. Clean cut, with a razor-sharp knife. A professional job, by the look of it.’
He made a hissing sound as he drew on his cigarette, and turned to look at the corpse. Strafford was wondering absently how it could be that someone, anyone, should have notched up a sufficient number of castrations to be considered a professional. Were there professional castrators, outside the realm of animal breeding?
‘As you can see,’ Harry Hall went on, ‘someone tidied him up. The blood was swabbed from the floor, but not till after it was dry.’ He snickered. ‘Some job that must have been.’
‘And when would the job have been done?’
The big man shrugged. He was bored, not only with this case, but with his work in general. He had seven years to go before retirement. ‘First thing this morning, probably,’ he said, ‘given that the blood was dry. The stair carpet was washed too – the stains are still in it.’
They stood in silence for some moments, gazing at the body. Hendricks was sitting on the arm of a high-backed chair with his camera on his lap. His work here was done, and he was taking a break before moving upstairs to start shooting there. Of the three of them, Hendricks gave the impression of being the keenest at his job, while in fact, as Strafford knew, he was the laziest of the lot.
Willoughby was still kneeling by the door, still dusting away. He, like the other two, knew the crime scene had been thoroughly compromised, and that their work would surely prove a waste of time. Not that it mattered to him.
‘The housekeeper,’ Strafford said, brushing that wing of hair away from his eyes, ‘she’ll be the one who cleared up, or did her best to, at any rate.’
Harry Hall nodded. ‘On orders from Colonel Bogey, I presume?’
‘Osborne, you mean?’ Strafford said, with the ghost of a smile. ‘Probably. Old soldiers don’t like the sight of blood, so I’m told. Brings back too many memories, or something of the sort.’
They were silent again, then Harry Hall came a step closer to the detective and lowered his voice still further. ‘Listen, Strafford, this is not good, this thing. A dead priest in a houseful of Prods? What are the papers going to say?’
‘Probably the same thing as the neighbours,’ Strafford answered absently.
‘Neighbours?’
‘What? Oh, the Colonel is worried there’ll be a scandal.’
Harry Hall again gave a small, sour laugh.
‘I’d say there’s a fair possibility of that, all right,’ he said.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Strafford murmured.
They stood there, Harry Hall working at the last of his cigarette and Strafford stroking his lean jaw thoughtfully. Then he walked over to Willoughby. ‘Anything?’
Willoughby rose from his knees in weary stages, grimacing. ‘This back of mine,’ he gasped, ‘it’s killing me.’ There were beads of sweat on his forehead and on his upper lip. It was nearly noon, and he was badly in need of a drink. ‘There’s prints, of course,’ he said, ‘four or five different sets, one of them bloody, which I suppose it’s safe to say would be the reverend father’s.’ He lifted his lip at one side in what was meant to be a grin but looked more like a snarl. ‘Must have been one strong boyo, to get himself from the landing down to here.’
‘Maybe he was carried.’
Willoughby shrugged. He was as bored as the other two. They were, all three of them, bored and cold and eager to get the hell out of this big chilly gloomy bloody place and head back as fast as their black van would carry them, and the snow would permit, to their cosy quarters in Pearse Street. They were Dubliners – being in the country gave them the jitters.
‘What about the candlestick?’ Strafford asked.
‘What about it?’
‘Any prints on it?’
‘Haven’t tested it yet. I had a quick look – seems to have been wiped clean.’
‘This is going to be heap big trouble,’ said Harry Hall, slowly shaking his head from side to side. ‘A lot of fingers could get badly burned here.’
Strafford looked at the nicotine stains on the big man’s meaty hands.
‘Did someone call for an ambulance?’ he asked.
‘It’s on the way from the County Hospital,’ Harry Hall answered. ‘Though when it’ll get here is anybody’s guess, in this weather.’
‘It’s only snow, for God’s sake,’ Strafford said with a flash of irritation. ‘Why must everybody keep going on about it?’
Harry Hall and Willoughby exchanged a look. Even the mildest outburst by Strafford was taken as another sign of his aristocratic aloofness and general disdain for the people it was his distasteful duty to have to work with. His nickname, he knew, was Lord Snooty, after a character in one of the schoolboy comics. He wouldn’t have cared about any of this, if it weren’t that his reputation as a toff added to the difficulties of his job.
‘Anyway,’ Harry Hall said, ‘we’re done here.’
‘Right,’ Strafford responded. ‘Thanks. I know there wasn’t much you could do, given the—’
‘We done all we could,’ Harry Hall cut in heavily, narrowing his eyes. ‘I hope that’s what you’re going to put in your report.’
Strafford was tired of these Three Stooges, and was as eager to be shot of them as they were to be gone.
‘Has Doctor Quirke been informed there’ll be a corpse on the way up to him?’
Doctor Quirke had recently been appointed State Pathologist.
Harry Hall looked at Willoughby and smirked.
‘He’s away,’ Harry Hall said.
‘Oh? Away where?’
‘He’s on his honeymoon!’ Hendricks said. ‘Woo-hoo!’