4

Strafford wandered about in the downstairs rooms for a while, getting his bearings. This was what he always did at the start of an investigation. He needed to fix in his mind the geography of the place where the crime had been committed. It was a matter of noting the details of the situation and arriving at a point of view. Then he could incorporate himself into the scene, like a cut-out cardboard figure in a stage designer’s maquette, not moving but himself being moved. The notion of being at once a part of the action and above it appealed to him, he wasn’t sure why. Playing at God, his girlfriend, Marguerite – his former girlfriend, rather – would have said, with one of her sour looks. Marguerite was a person of few words. Her face said more than any words would have expressed. She should have been a mime artist, Strafford often thought, not without a flare of malice, sharp and brief as a match flame.

There were two drawing rooms, one to the right and one to the left of the front door. Only the one on the left showed signs of being lived in. A log fire was burning in the grate, and there were books and newspapers scattered about, and cups and saucers and glasses on a low table, and someone’s tartan scarf was draped over the back of an armchair. How familiar it all was to him, the shabby furniture and the vague clutter, and that faint smell of must and damp that all old houses give off. It was in rooms like this that he had spent his childhood years. Old impressions had a way of holding fast.

He went and stood in the bay of a big window that looked out on bare trees and the snow-covered lawn and the curve of the rutted drive leading down to the main road. There was a hill in the distance, capped with snow. It looked unreally neat and picturesque, like a decorative scene on a Christmas cake. The hill must be Mount Leinster, he thought. Behind it the sky was heavy with purplish, leaden clouds – more snow was on the way.

Strafford tapped the nails of two fingers against his front teeth, a thing he did when he was distracted, or deep in thought, or both.

Harry Hall was right, this case was a weird one. It had the potential to land him in a great deal of trouble, if he didn’t take the greatest care and handle it just the right way.

What that way was, or indeed what exactly the trouble that menaced him might be, he couldn’t say, yet. But priests just didn’t get murdered in this country, and certainly not in places like Ballyglass House. The Catholic Church – the powers that be, in other words – would shoulder its way in and take over. There would be a cover-up, some plausible lie would be peddled to the public. The only question was how deeply the facts could be buried. The violent death of a priest wasn’t a thing to be ignored entirely, like the packing off of a troublesome youth to an industrial school, or the consignment of a pregnant girl to a convent laundry.

Yes, a weird one. He knew very well that was why Hackett – Detective Chief Superintendent Hackett, his senior officer in Dublin – had put him in charge of the case. ‘You know the lie of the land down there,’ Hackett had said on the telephone that morning. ‘You speak their lingo, they’ll talk to you. Good luck.’

In this case he was going to need more than luck, which was a thing he didn’t believe in, anyway. You make your own luck, or it’s made for you, by accident.

Something now, some ancient instinct, told him he was not alone, that he was being observed. Cautiously he turned his head and scanned the room. And then he saw her. She must have been there when he came in. In these old houses you only had to keep still and stay quiet in order to fade into the background, like a lizard on a stone wall.

She was curled up under a brown blanket on an old sofa in front of the fire, with her knees drawn up to her chest and arms wrapped around her shins. Her wide eyes seemed enormous – how had it taken him so long to feel, in that fabled spot between his shoulder blades, the force of their scrutiny?

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see you there.’

‘I know. I was watching you.’

All he could see of her were her face and her forearms, since the rest of her was hidden under the blanket. She had a broad brow and a sharp chin, and those eyes that seemed as big as a lemur’s. Her wiry hair surrounded her face in a mass of unruly and, by the look of them, not particularly clean curls.

‘Isn’t it disgusting,’ she said, ‘how your thumb gets all white and shrivelled when you suck on it?’

Strafford smiled. ‘Do you suck your thumb?’

‘Only when I’m thinking.’ She held up her hand for him to see. ‘Look at that – it’s as if I’d just been dragged out of the sea.’ 

‘You must be Lettie,’ he said.

‘And who are you? No, let me guess. You’re the detective.’

‘That’s right. Detective Inspector Strafford.’

‘You don’t look much like a—’ She stopped, seeing his already wearying expression. ‘I suppose people are always telling you you don’t look like a policeman. You don’t sound like one, either, with that accent. What’s your name?’

‘Strafford.’

‘I mean your first name.’

‘It’s St John, actually.’

The girl laughed.

‘St John! That’s almost as bad as mine. They call me Lettie, but I’m Lettice, really, believe it or not. Imagine giving a child a name like Lettice. It’s after my grandmother, but all the same.’

She was watching him closely, her eyes wrinkled in sly amusement, as if she expected him at any moment to perform some wonderful trick, to stand on his head, say, or levitate. He remembered, from his own youth, how a new face in the house always seemed a promise of change and excitement – or of change, anyway, since excitement was a thing so rarely experienced in their kind of household, hers, and his of old, as to seem the stuff of extravagant fantasy.

‘Do you like to watch people?’ he asked.

‘Yes. It’s amazing what they get up to when they think there’s no one looking. Thin ones always pick their noses.’

‘I hope I didn’t, before I noticed you.’

‘You probably would have, given time.’ She paused, fiddling with a knot in the blanket. ‘It’s really thrilling, isn’t it? – a body in the library! Have you solved it yet? Will you be calling us all together at dinner time to explain the plot and reveal the killer’s name? My money’s on the White Mouse.’

‘The—?’

‘My stepmother. Sylvia, queen of the headhunters. Have you met her? You might have, but not noticed, since she’s practically transparent.’

She threw the blanket aside, rose from the sofa, stood on tiptoe and clasped her hands together high above her head, stretching and grunting. She was tall, lean, dark of complexion, and slightly bow-legged – her father’s daughter. She was not at all pretty, in any conventional sense of the word, and she knew it, but her knowing it, evident in her clownishly slouchy demeanour, gave to her, paradoxically, a certain sulky allure. She was wearing jodhpurs and a black velvet riding jacket.

‘Off for a gallop, are you?’ Strafford enquired.

The girl let her arms fall to her sides. ‘What?’ She glanced down at herself. ‘Oh, the outfit. No, I don’t care for horses – smelly brutes, and liable to bolt, or bite, or both. I just like the get-up. Very slim-making, and comfy, too. These used to be my mother’s – my real mother, that is, who died – though I had to have them taken in quite a bit. She was a big girl.’

‘Your father thought you were still asleep.’

‘Oh, he gets up at sparrow fart himself and thinks anyone who doesn’t is’ – here she fell into a startlingly convincing impersonation of Colonel Osborne – ‘a damned layabout, don’t-ye-know. Honestly, he’s such an old fraud.’

She picked up the blanket, draped it over her shoulders and stood beside him at the window. They both looked out at the snowbound landscape.

‘My God,’ she said, ‘the frozen bloody wastes. Oh and look, they’ve cut down more trees in the copse.’ She turned to Strafford. ‘You know, of course, we’re as poor as church mice? – half the timber is gone, and the roof is going to cave in any day. It’s the House of Usher.’ Struck, she paused, wrinkling her nose. ‘I wonder why church mice should be thought of as poor? And how could a mouse be rich, anyway?’ She drew the blanket close about her. ‘I’m so cold!’ She gave him another sidelong, playful glance. ‘But of course, females are always cold, aren’t they, in their extremities. That’s what men are for, to warm us up.’

A shadow moved in the window and Strafford turned from the girl in time to see a hulking boy in rubber boots and a leather jacket walking past, doing a sort of clumsy goose-step in the deep snow. He had freckles and a thick shock of tangled hair, so darkly, deeply red it was almost the colour of bronze. The sleeves of his jacket were too short, and his exposed wrists gleamed more whitely than the white snow all about him.

‘Is that your brother?’ Strafford asked.

The girl gave a shriek of laughter.

‘Oh, that’s priceless!’ she cried, shaking her head and making the dark curls bounce, her laugh turning into a gurgle. ‘I can’t wait to tell Dominic you thought Fonsey was him. He’ll probably take a horse whip to you, or something – he has an awful temper.’

The boy was out of sight by now.

‘Who’s Fonsey?’ Strafford asked.

‘Him’ – she pointed – ‘the stable boy, I suppose you’d call him. He looks after the horses, or he’s supposed to. He’s part horse himself, I believe. What do you call those creatures there used to be in ancient Greece?’ 

‘Centaurs?’

‘That’s it. That’s Fonsey.’ She gave another hiccup of laughter deep in her throat. ‘The centaur of Ballyglass House. He’s a bit loony’ – she put a finger to her temple and made a screwing motion with it – ‘so watch out. My name for him is Caliban.’

She was looking at Strafford again, with those enormous grey eyes, clasping the blanket to her throat as if it were a cloak.

‘St John,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve never met a St John before.’

Strafford was batting his fedora against his thigh again. It was another of his habits, another of his tics, of which there were many. Marguerite used to say they drove her mad.

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’ve some things to do.’

‘Hunting for clues, I suppose? Sniffing cigarette butts and peering at fingerprints through a magnifying glass?’

He began to turn away, then paused.

‘How well did you know Father Lawless?’ he asked.

The girl shrugged. ‘How well did I know him? I don’t know that I knew him at all. He was always hanging around, if that’s what you mean. Everyone thought he was a card. I never took much notice of him. There was something oogey about him.

‘“Oogey”?’

‘Oh, you know. Not at all pious or preachy, took a drink, life and soul of the party, all that kind of thing, but at the same time always on the lookout, always watching—’

‘The way you do?’

She narrowed her lips into a line. ‘No, not the way I do. Like a Peeping Tom – that kind of oogey.’ 

‘And what do you think happened to him?’

‘“Happened to him”? You mean, who stabbed him in the neck and cut his goolies off? How should I know? Maybe it wasn’t the White Mouse. Maybe she and the Man of the Cloth were getting up to monkey business together and Daddy knocked him off in a jealous rage.’ She put on her father’s voice again, jutting out her lower lip. ‘Damned cheek of the feller, comin’ in here and havin’ at my missus!’

Strafford could not help but smile.

‘I don’t suppose you heard anything in the night?’ he asked.

‘You mean, did I hear His Reverence getting it in the neck? ’Fraid not. I sleep like a log – anyone will tell you that. The only thing I ever hear is the Ballyglass ghost rattling his chains and moaning. You know the place is haunted, I suppose?’

He smiled again.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’ll see you again before I leave.’

‘Yes, in the dining room, no doubt, for cocktails at eight. Murder at the Mansion, and all that. I can’t wait.’ He was already moving away from her, laughing softly now. ‘I shall wear an evening gown and a feather boa,’ she called after him. ‘And I’ll have a dagger in the top of my stocking!’