The search party assembled on the lawn in front of Ballyglass House. They were an ill-assorted bunch, as Strafford saw with a sinking heart. There were three Guards, in capes and wearing balaclava helmets under their peaked caps, and along with them half a dozen members of the Fire Brigade, in oilskins and helmets, three or four pimply youths from the St John Ambulance Brigade, a Scoutmaster from Wexford going by the unfortunate name of Higginbottom, and a solitary Boy Scout, a hulking fellow with a bronchial cough, who was immediately sent home for fear he would get pneumonia. A dozen or so civilian volunteers had turned up, ghoulishly cheerful types. They were farmers and farmhands, a retired bus driver, a grocer’s assistant and a Corporation labourer. And somebody’s mother, very fat, in wellingtons and a man’s cloth cap.
There was a festive air to the occasion. The men stood clustered in groups, smoking cigarettes and cracking jokes. Colonel Osborne had contributed three bottles of Algerian wine, which Mrs Duffy had made into a punch, with cloves and strips of orange peel and slices of apple, and which she carried out in a metal tea urn and set down on an upturned wooden crate at the foot of the front steps. Kathleen the scullery maid distributed an assortment of glasses, mugs, teacups and even a couple of jam jars. Colonel Osborne, in an army greatcoat and leather leggings, stood with Strafford on the top step outside the front door and surveyed the scene with some bemusement.
‘It’s like the morning of a hunt,’ Osborne said. ‘They could be drinking stirrup cups.’
The sky was clouded but the air was clear, although now and then a solitary flake of snow fluttered down uncertainly, like a drunken butterfly. On the drive were parked two Garda cars, an ambulance, a tractor, an earth mover and a jeep.
Lettie came back from Wexford with her stepmother’s prescription. She offered to join the search, but her father forbade it – ‘For goodness’ sake, you could catch your death of cold, a slip of a thing like you!’ – and she stamped off into the house, swearing under her breath.
The last of the punch had been drunk and the search was about to start when Sergeant Radford turned up, in his own car, a rattly old Wolseley with a fender missing. He wore a sheepskin coat and a woollen hat pulled down over his ears. His cheeks and nose were blotchy and bright-veined, his eyes watery in a nest of wrinkles. He was a sick man, lost in grief. His son was not three months dead. He greeted Strafford with a nod, and pointedly ignored the Colonel.
‘Are you sure you should be out?’ Strafford said. ‘You don’t look well.’
Radford shrugged.
‘What was that everyone was drinking?’ he asked peevishly. ‘Punch? And I suppose it’s all gone.’
He took charge, splitting up the search party into pairs and assigning them directions. The Colonel went off to the stables, saying he had to tend to the horses, and that he would join the search later. He didn’t fancy plodding the fields with a crowd of locals. He had a position to maintain, after all.
Doctor Hafner arrived as the party was moving off. He rolled down the window of his car and called out to Strafford to know what was going on. Strafford told him.
‘That’s awkward,’ Hafner said, ‘losing a man. Should I borrow a pair of boots and join in? Not that I’m much good in open country. Anyway, I’m here to see her ladyship.’
Strafford wondered if he came every day. Such assiduous attentiveness to a single patient was surely beyond the call of duty. He looked at the fellow’s bristling eyebrows, his sharply knowing eyes, his burly hands clutching the steering wheel. Would Sylvia receive him, too, in her parlour, reclining on the yellow sofa, with a blanket over her bare knees? Would she show him, as she had shown Strafford, the chilblain on her little toe?
Strafford and Sergeant Radford set off down the drive together. Radford was smoking a cigarette, which of course made him cough.
‘I don’t like this,’ he panted, when the coughing fit had passed. He wiped his mouth with the back of a gloved hand.
‘You don’t like—?’
‘Searching, like this.’
‘You needn’t have come.’
Radford was looking about and scowling.
‘It’s a couple of months since we lost our lad,’ he said, with seeming inconsequence. He began to cough again, and threw the cigarette away half-smoked.
‘How did he die?’ Strafford asked.
‘He rode his bicycle over to Curracloe strand one evening and walked into the sea. We searched for him all night.’
‘What age?’
‘Nineteen. He was going to be an engineer, had a scholarship to the university.’
They were passing by the line of parked vehicles. The fire engine smelled of oil and cooling metal.
‘Do you know why he did it?’ Strafford asked, and wondered if it had sounded callous.
Radford didn’t answer, only shook his head.
They came to the gate at the end of the drive. Strafford looked to right and left. The flakes of snow were more numerous now, blowing this way and that on the blued air. Some of them were managing to fall upwards. The wind was light. A brumous glow lay on the fields. Strafford saw the figure of a young man walking into waves, striding forward effortfully and swinging his arms.
‘Which way do you want to go?’ Radford asked.
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
‘It doesn’t make much difference. We’re not going to find him, you know that as well as I do.’
‘You found your son.’
Radford shook his head again. He was gazing off in the direction of Mount Leinster, a squat white cone on the horizon. He turned left, and Strafford turned with him.
‘As a matter of fact, we didn’t find him,’ Radford said. ‘Someone reported seeing him in Curracloe earlier that night, so we searched the shoreline, the dunes, the road up to the village. Three days we kept at it. I knew there was no hope. A week later he was washed up on the shore out at the Raven Point. I had to identify him.’ He glanced sideways at Strafford. ‘Ever seen a body that’s been in the water that long? No? Count yourself lucky.’
Reck’s van approached behind them, its springs and mudguards rattling. Strafford glimpsed through the misted side window a big pallid face and a shock of red hair. It was Fonsey. He kept his eyes on the road as he drove past, and didn’t slow down.
Radford tramped along, stoop-shouldered. His coat was so bulky he had to hold his arms out at an angle from his sides. He looked like a retired boxer, punch-drunk and exhausted.
‘Laurence was his name,’ he said.
‘Your son?’
‘Wouldn’t let us call him Larry. His mother used to tease him. Gentleman Jim was her name for him. Told him he thought he was too good for us. They were close, the boy and his mother.’ He pointed a thumb back over his shoulder. ‘He used to go up there, to the House. Played tennis in the summer – there’s a court out at the back – parties at Christmas. The Osborne girl used to invite him. She was sweet on him – what’s her name?’
‘Lettie?’
‘I couldn’t see anything there for him. A Garda sergeant’s son and His Lord High Majesty Osborne’s daughter? Ah, no.’
‘Could that have been the reason why he—?’ Strafford began, but stopped.
‘Why he did away with himself? No. She was sweet on him, but I don’t think’ – he hesitated a second – ‘I don’t think it worked the other way.’
They came to the bend in the road where the barn owl had flown into Strafford’s headlights. It was snowing steadily now. They stood together in the shelter of a thorn tree. Mount Leinster had disappeared in the falling whiteness.
‘This is a waste of time,’ Radford said.
‘Yes, I know. I imagine the others will have given up by now, anyway.’
They turned and set off back the way they had come.
‘I’m sorry about your son,’ Strafford said.
‘Aye. He was a good lad. I don’t think his mother will ever get over it.’
Neither spoke again until they had come to the gate and were walking up the drive. The firemen had returned, and were gathered around the engine, peeling off their oilskins and cursing the snow, preparing to depart.
Strafford spoke to the driver. They had combed through Ballyglass Wood, the man said, and had found nothing. They would come out tomorrow again, if the snow cleared. Strafford thanked him, and waved farewell to the other men.
Radford had got behind the wheel of his ancient Ford. ‘Sorry about your man,’ he said. ‘We’d never have found him in this weather, and anyway the daylight will be gone soon. Probably he took shelter somewhere.’
Strafford shook his head.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
‘You think he’s gone?’
‘Yes. I shouldn’t have called out all these men. It was a waste.’ The snow was getting under the collar of his coat. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
Still Radford made no move to shut the car door. He had started the engine and was giving the accelerator little jabs with his foot, making the engine whine.
‘What will you do?’ he asked.
Strafford looked away, frowning. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Will we try again tomorrow?’
‘I doubt it would be worthwhile.’
Radford, facing the windscreen, nodded. He was thinking of something else – his son again, probably.
‘You know you said about the priest being popular?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘He was – and a lot of people were popular with him.’ He revved the engine again, sharply this time, and it gave a shriek of protest. The wipers were having a hard time dealing with the snow. He turned them off, and Strafford leaned over the bonnet and used his glove to make a clear patch in the glass. ‘My son, my boy, he was popular with him,’ he said, still looking straight ahead. ‘Very popular, with the reverend father, he was. That I know for a fact.’
He put the car into gear then, slammed shut the door, and drove off down the potholed drive, the car rocking on its springs.