12

Strafford found Dominic Osborne in the drawing room. Ballyglass was built on generous Victorian lines, and must have boasted twenty-five or thirty rooms, but over the years the family had hollowed out of it a compact bourgeois dwelling, consisting of little more than the kitchen, the dining room, one halfway habitable drawing room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a separate, undependable lavatory, while the rest of the place was allowed to sink into a state of timeless fixity, like the unvisited rooms in a museum where were kept the exhibits no one cared to look at any more. Strafford’s father had effected an even more radical reduction of Roslea House, and these days hardly ventured beyond what used to be his study but which gradually he had transformed into an all-purpose bolthole, installing in it a double bed, the one he and his wife had slept in during the years of their brief marriage, a gas burner, a paraffin stove, as well as a number of decorated chamber pots, part of a collection assembled by a forgotten forebear.

It was dark by now. The curtains had been drawn and the electric lamps switched on. The Osborne heir was settled in a deep armchair by the fire, with a tray with tea things on a small table beside him, and a medical textbook open on his lap – he was a second-year medical student at Trinity College in Dublin. The Labrador that earlier had shaken itself and sprayed the hall with drops of melted snow was stretched out at the young man’s feet, as fat and torpid as a seal. The fire was burning busily, and the air was heavy with the scent of flaming birch logs.

Looking up as Strafford entered, the young man frowned. The dog too lifted its big square head.

‘Ah, I’ve been looking for you,’ Strafford said. ‘Not disturbing you, I hope?’

Dominic shut the book and put it on the floor beside his chair. ‘I’m not disturbed. I suppose you want to – what do they say? – to grill me about Father Tom?’

‘Well, grill is hardly the word,’ Strafford answered. ‘That’s only in the pictures.’

‘A light roasting, then?’

Strafford smiled. He approached the fire and held his hands out to the flames. ‘That’s only what the big boys do to the little boys at boarding school.’

‘I won’t be of any help to you,’ Dominic said coldly. ‘I heard nothing of what happened in the night. I’m a deep sleeper.’

‘Yes, so is everyone else in the house, it seems, except your mother’ – the young man stared – ‘sorry, I mean your stepmother.’

‘Yes, she creeps about a lot, in the wee hours.’

‘I don’t sleep well myself, usually, so I sympathise with her.’

‘I’m sure she’d be very gratified to know that,’ Dominic said, with pointed sarcasm.

Seen close to, he was not as convincingly handsome as he had appeared when Strafford had looked down on him that morning from the banisters at the top of what everyone in the house referred to as the back stairs. He was good-looking, certainly, with that straight jaw and his father’s chill blue eyes, but there was something uncertain about him, something incomplete and evasive. What was he, twenty, twenty-one? Trinity had given him a swagger that still wasn’t quite convincing, and possibly never would be. No, he was not quite the thing, this young man.

He was dressed like his father, indeed markedly so, in tweed jacket, cavalry twill trousers, checked shirt and spotted bow tie. The toecaps of his shoes gleamed in the firelight like chestnuts fresh out of their husks. Any day now, if he hadn’t already done so, he would take to pipe-smoking, and getting drunk with the chaps from the rugby club on Saturday nights. He would drive a two-seater, and talk disparagingly of girls, and shoot crows in the copse, wherever it was, and plight his half-hearted troth to some landed family’s horsey daughter. None of that would entirely convince, either. In Dominic Osborne, something, some undefinable finish, would always be lacking. There would always be something amiss.

On the other hand, he was a medical student, Strafford reminded himself, and as such he would know just where the jugular was. Could it have been a scalpel that did for the Reverend Thomas J. Lawless?

‘Mind if I sit down?’ Strafford asked of the young man, and without waiting for an answer settled himself in an armchair on the other side of the hearth. ‘It’s proving to be a long day.’

‘Is it? Not for Father Tom, it’s not.’

‘Well, no.’ A log fell silently asunder in the fireplace, producing a burst of sparks. ‘I suppose you’ve known him most of your life, yes?’ 

Dominic gave a languid shrug. ‘I wouldn’t say that. I’m not sure I knew him at all, really. He was always round the place, of course.’

‘“Round the place”?’

‘Daddy – my father – liked him, or liked him being here, anyway. He was company, I suppose. They had interests in common – huntin’ and shootin’, all that.’

‘Not to your taste, that kind of thing?’

‘Is it to yours?’

‘I live in the city now. Not much opportunity.’

‘Maybe not for hunting, but for shooting, surely? You are a detective, after all.’

Strafford smiled. ‘Unarmed.’

‘Hmm.’

The log in the fireplace shifted again, putting on another little fireworks display. Strafford thought of the frost-bound world beyond the house, of the snow-covered fields and the bare black trees, all suspended in a vast and frozen silence. And then, of course, he thought of death.

‘Did you know your mother?’ he asked.

‘What?’ Dominic stared at him again. ‘Did I know her? Of course I knew her.’

‘What age were you when—?’

‘I was twelve. You’re aware that she fell down the back stairs, the same one that—?’

‘Yes—’ He had been about to remark on the coincidence, but stopped himself. It would hardly be in good taste.

The young man turned away and gazed into the fire. The dog at his feet had fallen heavily asleep, and began to twitch and whimper. Strafford was always struck by the fact that dogs should dream. How could they, since they were supposed to have no memory?

‘I was the one who found her,’ the young man said, still facing the fire. The leaping flames were reflected in the pupils of his eyes, making them appear deep black. ‘It was night that time, too, with everyone asleep.’

‘But not you.’

‘What?’

‘You must have been awake. You heard her fall.’

‘Yes, I heard her.’ He shifted in the chair abruptly and looked directly at the detective. ‘Are you going to ask how it was, then, that I didn’t hear the priest when he went tumbling down the same stairs, while I was in the same bed as that other night long ago?’

‘No.’ Strafford sighed. The fire was making him feel drowsy. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe he fell.’

‘Oh?’

‘He was still on his feet, until he made it into the library.’

‘A different sound entirely, then,’ Dominic said. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of his chair. When he spoke again his voice resonated strangely, as if it were coming up out of some deep, echoing chamber.

‘We were on a train once,’ he said, ‘years ago, in France, the four of us, my mother and father, my sister and me. It was one of those new diesel ones, very fast – an express, I suppose – travelling from Paris all the way down to the south. We were approaching Lyons, I think it was Lyons, when we hit something on the line. It made an extraordinary noise, a sort of clattering all along beneath the carriages. I thought we’d run into a level crossing, and that it was the noise of the wooden gate splintering and the broken bits tumbling under the wheels. The driver must have taken his foot off the – what do you call it, the dead man’s brake? – because after the collision we just coasted for, oh, it must have been a mile or two, going more and more slowly, until finally we drifted to a stop. I shall never forget the silence that fell then. It was almost as ominous as the sound of whatever it was that had broken up underneath us.’

He rose from the chair and fed another log into the flames. He remained there, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, gazing down into the fire, remembering.

‘We had to wait for hours until another train came and collected us and took us on to Nice. Next day it was in the papers – two girls in a town the train was passing through had made a suicide pact and stepped out in front of the speeding engine. It was their bones that we’d heard, breaking up and spinning along the track, under the wheels.’

He stopped, and sat down again, and leaned his head back against the chair once more, and once more closed his eyes. ‘It’s a thing I’ll never forget. I can hear it still, the sound of those bones, rattling along the track like skittles.’

The dreaming dog was giving sharp little high-pitched barks and fluttering its lips like a horse in a lather.

‘I’m sorry,’ Strafford said.

‘For what? – for the girls who killed themselves, or for my mother?’ He leaned an arm down and patted the sleeping dog’s fat flank. Strafford watched him.

‘Were you close, you and your mother?’ he asked.

The young man gave an ugly little laugh. ‘Haven’t you read Freud? Aren’t all sons close to their mothers?’ 

‘Not all of them. Not always.’

‘What about you, have you got one? – a mother, I mean.’ Dominic leaned forward with his fingers laced together in his lap, studying the detective. ‘I suspect you lost yours early too, like me. Am I right?’

Strafford nodded. ‘Yes. Cancer. I was younger than you – I was nine.’

They fell silent. They were both gazing into the fire now. Strafford thought of his mother. Strangely, he didn’t think of her very often, not as often, certainly, as he thought of his father. But then, his father was still living, and the living require more thought.

She had died, his mother, at this time of the year, in a downstairs room, much like this one, where a sofa had been turned into a makeshift bed for her. She would watch the birds outside on the lawn for hours on end, the thrushes and blackbirds and robins. The magpies in particular fascinated her, with their strange, clicking cries. She would smile and declare that they were all greedy beggars, the robins especially. ‘Imagine being a worm,’ she would say, in her reedy voice – the cancer was eating steadily into her oesophagus – and shake her head in sympathy for all weak and crawling creatures.

Strafford remembered the smell of medicine in the room, and the stifling warmth, all the windows shut and the air as dense and cloying as wetted cotton wool. She used to have him bring her the brandy decanter from the sideboard in the dining room, wrapped in a newspaper. By that stage she was allowed all the brandy she could drink, though it pleased her to pretend it was their secret, hers and his. 

He sat upright in the chair, pushing these recollections to the side of his mind. How they cling, he thought, the dead.

‘Tell me about last night, will you?’ he asked, clearing his throat.

Dominic shrugged. ‘What is there to tell you? I’m sure by now you’ve heard everything there is to hear.’

‘Oh, I’m sure I haven’t. Anyway, I’d like to know your version.’

After a pause, the young man spoke.

‘I came down from Dublin on the afternoon train. Matty had borrowed the Recks’ van to collect me from the station—’

‘Matty?’

‘Sorry. Matty Moran. He works, if that’s the word, at the Sheaf of Barley. My father borrows him now and then, to trim the hedges, keep the rats down – odd jobs. If you’re staying at the Sheaf you’re bound to run across him, since he as good as lives in the bar there. That will be a treat for you.’ He suddenly made a jester’s unfunny face, drawing his mouth down at the corners. ‘Matty is a Ballyglass “character”, I’m afraid. One of many.’

‘Was Father Lawless here when you arrived?’

‘Yes, he’d come over for lunch, I believe, and then couldn’t get back, because of the weather.’

‘Did he spend a lot of time here? – generally, I mean.’

‘Well, we stable his horse for him—’

‘Yes, I know,’ Strafford said, interrupting, trying not to sound impatient. He always found it a tedious business, extracting information from those too dim or distracted to offer it unprompted. Only the guilty were garrulous. ‘So he was here quite frequently, yes?’ 

‘Yes, I suppose he was a bit of a fixture. Why? Is that significant?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He liked it here. Why wouldn’t he? Free bed and board, civilised people to talk to, if you don’t count my sister. I don’t think he should ever have become a priest. He wasn’t suited to it.’

It was said with amused disparagement. What had this young man made of the priest who shouldn’t have been a priest? So many questions to be asked, so many stones to be turned, in search of what might wriggle out from under them.

They were silent for a while, listening to the hiss and crackle of the fire. It was Dominic who spoke.

‘Your job,’ he said. ‘I’m curious. It must be like trying to assemble a particularly intricate jigsaw puzzle, putting the pieces together, looking for a pattern, and so on?’

‘I suppose so, in a way,’ Strafford replied. ‘The trouble is, the pieces don’t stay still. They tend to move around, making patterns of their own, or what seem to be patterns. Everything is deceptive. You think you have the measure of things, and then it all shifts. In fact, it’s more like watching a play, one in which the plot keeps changing—’

He stopped, and with his fingernails tapped a rapid tattoo against his front teeth. Yes, he thought, yes, that was what had been nagging at him, from the moment he had first arrived at Ballyglass House. Everyone seemed to be in costume, seemed to be dressed for a part. They were like a cast of actors milling about in the wings, waiting to go on. There was Colonel Osborne – he must have spent an hour in front of the looking-glass, rigging himself out as what he was or what he wished to seem to be – country squire, hero of Dunkirk, handsome still despite his years, wielder of a straight bat, blunt, bluff and safely dim. And here was his son, got up to look as much like him as could be managed, in tweed and twill, brown brogues and checked shirt, with his hair slicked back military fashion. There was Lettie, too, when Strafford had first encountered her, togged out in jodhpurs and riding jacket despite the fact she never got on a horse. And there was Mrs Osborne, who so far had played at least two roles, first as the madwoman in the attic, and then, in that absurd tea party charade, as a pert young royal, with Queen Elizabeth pearls and her blue frock and clipped vowels.

Why, even apple-cheeked Mrs Duffy was all too plausibly the stock family retainer.

But for whose benefit had they got themselves up to be so thoroughly convincing that, like even the best actors, they didn’t quite convince? And who was it that had called them together and allotted them their parts in the shadow play?

Or was he imagining it all? There was always the danger, in his job, of seeing things that weren’t there, of making a pattern where there wasn’t one. The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.

Yet a man had been murdered, and someone had murdered him. That much had happened. And the person who had done the deed was hiding somewhere here, in plain sight.

Dominic spoke now, breaking in on the detective’s thoughts. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why did you decide to become a detective?’ 

‘Why?’ Strafford looked away, suddenly self-conscious. This was the question he most disliked, and found most difficult to answer, even when he asked it of himself. ‘I don’t know that I can remember,’ he said now, evasively, his eyes on the fire. ‘I’m not sure that I did decide – I’m not sure anyone decides anything. It seems to me we drift, and that all our decisions are made in retrospect.’ He paused. ‘Why did you opt to study medicine?’

Now it was the young man’s turn to look away. ‘Like you, I don’t know. I probably won’t stay the course. I can’t see myself in a white coat, dispensing placebos and peering up people’s bums.’

‘What would you prefer to do?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Be a beachcomber, on an island somewhere, anywhere, just so long as it’s not here.’ He looked about the lamplit room, with its shadowed corners. ‘The house is haunted, did you know?’

‘Yes, your sister told me. What sort of ghosts do you have?’

‘The usual kind. It’s all nonsense, needless to say. The dead don’t come back – why would they? Anywhere would be better than this, surely.’

He reached down for his book on the floor. Strafford took the hint.

‘Sorry,’ he said, making to rise, ‘I should leave you to your studies.’

‘Ah, yes, my studies,’ the young man said, with a sardonic laugh, sounding more like his sister than surely he would care to know.

Strafford was on his feet now, but still he lingered, with his hands in his pockets. The dog, half waking, raised up a little and looked at him, then let its head fall back on the carpet with a thud.

‘A last question, Dominic, if you don’t mind. May I call you Dominic?’

‘Suit yourself. And go ahead, ask whatever you like.’

‘Who was here, who was in the house, the night your mother died? Do you remember?’

The young man looked up at him quickly, with a puzzled frown. ‘The night my mother died? Why do you want to know? It was years ago. I was a child.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Strafford assumed what he thought of as his most disarming smile. ‘Can you remember, though, who was in the house?’

‘No one in particular. Daddy, my sister – she was only, I don’t know, seven or eight.’

‘Mrs Duffy?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. And we had two maids then, they had rooms in the attic. I can’t remember their names.’

‘And that was it? No one else?’

There was silence, and then from outside in the darkness there came a faint, soft, slipping sound. A section of snow, Strafford thought, must have slid off of the roof. Was a thaw setting in? Then there would be slush, first foe of the sleuth in search of clues.

‘I believe she was here,’ Dominic said.

‘“She”?’

‘Miss Harbison, as she was then. My stepmother-to-be.’

‘Your stepmother?’ Strafford said, startled. He had the sense of another soft slippage, but not outside this time. ‘She was here when your mother—? I don’t understand.’ 

From the hall came the hushed, reverberant note of a struck bronze gong.

‘Yes,’ Dominic said with a shrug. ‘She was a friend of my parents. Didn’t you know that? Well, a friend of my mother’s, anyway, supposedly. That was the dinner gong, by the way. Will you be eating with us? I wouldn’t advise it, frankly – are you familiar yet with Mrs Duffy’s cooking?’

Strafford said nothing, only smiled. He was thinking of the steak-and-kidney pudding.