9

The way was steeper on this side of the clearing. Fonsey had pointed him in this direction, saying it would lead him straight to the road to Ballyglass House. He clambered awkwardly up the slope, driving the heels of his boots deep into the leaf mould for traction, afraid he might take a fall. He pictured himself sprawled deep in a patch of brambles with a broken ankle, calling for help in a voice becoming ever feebler, as the winter twilight turned to night and darkness settled over him and he froze to death.

When he got to the road at last, he realised he didn’t know in which direction to turn for Ballyglass House, and stood looking vaguely this way and that, then shrugged and set off to the right.

Frozen grass crackled under his boots. A hunched crow, perched on a high branch, eyed him as he went past and opened wide its black beak and cawed at him.

The road was little used. He had gone what he thought must be at least a quarter of a mile when a cattle lorry came rattling up behind him, and he stopped and stood well in from the verge to let it pass. The driver, seated high up behind the spattered windscreen, sounded his horn at him in cheerful derision.

He walked on. He was cold to the bone. He felt a surge of anger, tinged with self-pity. He should have listened to his father and gone for the law. He would be a successful barrister by now, with a wig and a gown and a starched white collar, strutting about the Four Courts, discussing briefs and exchanging gossip about his clients, and drinking port of an evening in the warmth of a Dublin pub all mahogany and brass and black-and-white tiles. Yes, that was the life he had spurned, and now here he was, trudging along a country byroad in the cutting air of a winter’s eve, sullen and solitary and furious at everything, himself especially.

Now he heard a second vehicle approaching behind him, and he stepped back to allow it to pass. It was an old grey two-door Ford van. High and squat, with its humped back and long, bulbous front grille and staring headlamps set atop broad grey mudguards, it bore a striking resemblance to a moose. Stencilled in large black lettering on the side of the vehicle was the legend:

JEREMIAH RECK
FAMILY BUTCHER
QUALITY MEATS

Instead of passing him by, the van drew to a rattling stop. The driver was a big soft-faced man of sixty or so, with oiled hair brushed sleekly back from a high, smooth forehead. He had glossy brown eyes, the lids of which drooped at the corners – Einstein’s eyes, Strafford thought, at once mournful and merry. This could only be Mr Jeremiah Reck himself. He leaned across the bench seat and pushed open the passenger door.

‘Get in, get in, my man,’ he said, with a lordly flourish. ‘Who do you think you are, Scott of the Antarctic?’ 

Strafford did as he was bade and climbed up on to the seat. A blast of hot dry air from the heater blew in his face, and at once his sinuses began to sting.

The driver had turned sideways the better to study his passenger, and now he put out a hand. ‘I am Reck,’ he said. ‘And who might you be, my pale friend, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘My name is Strafford.’

‘Strafford with an r?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Ah. Then I believe we’re to have the pleasure, nay, the honour, of your company, tonight.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Strafford said, not understanding.

‘At the Sheaf of Barley. I am that Reck.’

‘But your sign says—?’

‘Yes, I’m that Reck also. Butcher, grocer, publican and guesthouse-keeper. A man of parts, you might say, and you’d be right.’ He joggled the gearstick and released the clutch, the wheels spun on the icy road and then caught hold, and the van leaped forward with a lurch. ‘May I ask, Mr Strafford, what you’re doing out here on these wild ways on such a day as this? Where were you coming from?’

‘I was down in the woods.’

Reck nodded. He had the softly breathing demeanour of certain large slow men who live in contentment with themselves and the world. So great was his girth that the bulge of his lower belly was wedged under the steering wheel. Strafford leaned back on the creaky leather seat. His toes, blown upon by the lower part of the labouring heater, were beginning to warm up. 

‘Down in the woods, eh?’ Reck said thoughtfully, and hummed a snatch of the tune of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ – ‘dum-t’dum t’dittity-dum’ – and then made a whistling sound by sucking air in through his front teeth. ‘Having a word with the Horrible Boy, were we?’

‘The—?’

‘Fonsey the Fierce.’

‘Yes, I was, as a matter of fact. Is he fierce?’

‘I should say so. He’s our Gargantua, or do I mean Pantagruel? It’s many years since I read that book. I know him as the Horrible Boy. It’s a term of affection, you understand.’

‘What’s his other name? – or has he got one?’

‘Indeed he has. Welch, he is called. You would pronounce it Walsh, but down here, in the County of the Uncouth, we say Welch. His mother was one Kitty Welch – or Walsh, if you insist.’

‘Does she still live here, in Ballyglass?’

‘No. She’s off in England somewhere. Manchester, I believe.’

‘And his father?’

Reck produced a ripe, rumbling chuckle.

‘Well now,’ he said, ‘our Fonsey, you see, is another instance of that rare phenomenon, the immaculate conception. Rare, I say, but the Star of Bethlehem does put in uncommonly frequent appearances over this fertile land of ours, as I’m sure you’re well aware.’

He paused, and made that sucking sound with his teeth again. It was a kind of whistling in reverse.

‘Kitty put him in an orphanage before she went off – she was criticised for it in the town, but what choice had she? – and when he was old enough to use his fists, he became obstreperous and was packed off to a penitential colony in the west, a place called Carricklea, known and feared by all youthful delinquents – no doubt you’ve heard of it? When he came out, years later, the Lady Reck and myself looked after him for a while. I took him on as an apprentice at the butchering, but he hadn’t the stomach for it. He didn’t like poleaxing poor dumb creatures, any more than I do, but I operate on the principle that if you’re prepared to eat them, you must be prepared to murder them. Anyway, came a day and our Fonsey was gone from us at the Sheaf, and the next we heard of him he was living in a caravan down in Ballyglass Wood, minding the horses for Their Worships up at the House. He does the odd delivery for me still.’ He paused again, shaking his large smooth globular head. ‘Poor Fonsey, he lives a hard life, and deserved better.’

‘Why did he leave?’ Strafford asked.

‘Why did he leave Mrs Reck and myself? Who can say? The ways of the wild are not our ways, and Fonsey is the wilderness itself. The Lord only knows what they did to him at Carricklea. He wouldn’t say, and I stopped asking. The scars showed, however, physical and spiritual.’

Through a rent in the clouds low in the western sky the setting sun appeared, shedding a dark-gold glare. Reck asked:

‘Would it be indiscreet to enquire what business it was you were conducting with young Fonsey, down in the woods?’

‘Oh, I talk to a great many people. It’s what detectives do. Dull work.’

‘So you weren’t following a “definite line of inquiry”, as they say in the papers?’ 

‘No, no. There are no such lines, as yet.’

Rounding a bend, they almost ran into a flock of sheep, tended by a boy in a coat that was far too big for him and belted at the waist with a twist of yellow binder twine. Reck stopped the van and the two men sat stranded amid a moving sea of dirty grey fleece. Strafford idly studied the milling animals, admiring their long aristocratic heads and the neat little hoofs, like carved nuggets of coal, on which they trotted so daintily. He was struck too by their protuberant and intelligent-seeming shiny black eyes, expressive of stoical resignation tinged with the incurable shame of their plight, avatars of an ancient race, being herded ignominiously along a country road by a snot-nosed brat with a stick.

‘An interesting creature, the sheep,’ Jeremiah Reck observed. ‘“Their cry has not changed since Arcady” – I think I have that right. May I enquire, sir, if you are a bookish man?’

‘I read when I have time.’

‘Ah, but you should make time. The book is one of our great inventions as a species.’ The sheep passed on, and the butcher engaged the gears. ‘You’re not a native of these parts yourself,’ he said. It was not a question.

‘No, but not far off – Roslea.’

‘Over beyond New Ross? Well, at least you’re a Wexford man.’

Strafford smiled to himself, amused by that ‘at least’.

They drove on. Strafford found soothing the sound of the van’s tyres sizzling in the slush.

‘I take it you’ve heard of the death of Father Lawless,’ he said. 

‘Oh, I did, I did. News travels fast, round these parts. What happened to the poor fellow, at all?’

‘Well, he died.’

‘That’s what you might call an unforthcoming answer,’ Reck said, ‘—if it is an answer at all.’ He whistled for a while through his teeth. It was a thing that could become annoying, over time. Strafford felt he should sympathise with Mrs Reck. ‘They’re saying he fell down the stairs in the middle of the night,’ the butcher went on, ‘but if I were asked, I’d guess there was more to it than that.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Yes. For instance, I wouldn’t think the authorities up in Dublin would send down a detective inspector to investigate an accident, now, would they? They’d have left it to the local man.’

‘Sergeant – Rochford, is it?’

‘Radford.’ Reck chuckled. ‘Our bold Dan the Man, Sheriff of Deadwood Gulch.’

‘I haven’t met him,’ Strafford said, looking out at the snow-clad trees passing by the window. ‘He’s been unwell, it seems.’

‘Unwell?’ Reck pursed his lips. ‘Is that so? Hmm.’

Strafford had already guessed the nature of Radford’s unwellness.

‘The ’flu, I’m told,’ he said.

‘Ah. The ’flu. It’s going round – Mrs Reck had it, but is recovered. I’ve so far been spared, myself.’ He paused, doing his whistle. ‘You know the Radfords lost a son?’

‘Lost?’

‘He drowned. Only a young fellow.’ 

Strafford turned to look out of the window again. A dead son, a father left to his sorrow.

‘Very sad,’ he said.

Reck’s whistle, he thought, was the sound of a singing kettle coming to the boil.

‘So Fonsey’s father is an unknown quantity,’ he said. ‘Is that the case?’

‘Well, Kitty Welch is bound to know, but she’s not saying. For my part, I have my suspicions, but I keep them to myself. Poor Kitty wasn’t a bad girl, only a little skittish, when the moon was full. You would have to forgive her – though not many did, in this parish.’ He sighed. ‘People can be very censorious, don’t you find?’

They rounded the bend, and there was Ballyglass House, looming out of the frozen mist off at the end of the winding drive, its chimneys smoking like a battery of cannons.

Reck drew the van to a halt. The lights were on in the downstairs windows of the house, for the winter afternoon was dying fast in the western sky, where more snow clouds were massing.

‘Will you care to dine with us, later?’ Reck asked, in his amiably rounded tones.

‘I hope so.’

‘I shall convey that information to M’Lady Reck. Something modest but nutritious, yes? And tell me now, is there anything you will not eat?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I confess to an aversion to the brassicas, myself, and in particular’ – he sank his voice to a shuddering whisper – ‘the Brussels sprout.’ 

‘Oh, I’ll eat anything,’ Strafford said.

‘Within reason?’

‘Within reason. Maybe I could telephone you to let you know when I’ll be with you?’

Reck nodded absently, peering through the windscreen at the house.

‘A remarkable family, the Osbornes,’ he said, ‘remarkable in many ways. You’ll have met the second Mrs Osborne?’ He paused, still gazing up at the house, nodding slowly and doing his indrawn whistle. ‘And you’ll know the first one died in similar circumstances to Father Tom?’ He turned a lively eye on Strafford. ‘I fear that staircase must be jinxed.’

‘Thank you for the lift,’ Strafford said, opening the door. ‘I’ll walk from here. And I’ll see you later. If I’m going to be late I’ll be sure to telephone. If I am late, will you leave out a key?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that, I’ll be at my post. The true landlord never sleeps.’ He watched Strafford as he stepped out on to the mixture of mud and snow in the gateway. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe the Horrible Boy, fearsome as he is, would have it in him to murder a priest, him that couldn’t choke a chicken without shedding a tear.’