The Private Wound (10 page)

“Not a word. By the mercy of God, I saw you in time. C'mon, the strand'll soon be covered. My car's at the bottom of the lane. Can you walk that far?”

“Someone hit me on the head last night, and—”

“That can wait. C'mon now.” Father Bresnihan pocketed his penknife, and carrying the severed rope, helped me to the landward edge of the strand. We forded the river there, and got into the car. He drove off straight away. On the way back to Charlottestown, he told me that he'd been up all night in a cottage on the hillside, comforting the widow of the man whose funeral cortège I had seen: she was now mortally ill herself.

I tried again to express my thanks. Extreme peril, if one survives it, makes one babble. Father Bresnihan cut me
short. “It was providential, as you say.” He looked at me sidelong. “I hope you'll profit by it. Providence may not give you another chance, Dominic.” Well, he had every right to moralise. “I'll stop at Sean's garage to see if he can do anything about your car. A team of horses might drag it out yet, after the tide's gone down. That bit isn't the true quicksand, or you'd not be here now.”

I thought the Father might improve the hour by reference to spiritual quicksands, but he forbore.

He put me to bed in his own house. After the doctor had examined my head, and told me I would live, I sank into a deep sleep. I must have slept round the clock; the next thing I knew was Kathleen, the housekeeper, waking me with a breakfast tray. “It's a soft day, Mr. Eyre. I hope you're feeling better now. The Father says will you get up by midday if you're able for it. The Garda Siocthana'd like to be having a word with you.…”

A soft day it was, but only climatically. When I walked into the little garden at the back to try out my legs—they appeared to be in working order—I felt the fine Irish rain, which always seems to have been poured through holes, infinitesimal in diameter, of the rose of a celestial watering can; threads of rain, all but invisible, which alight on one's face with the touch of spider-web filaments.

I came in soon. A pot of coffee awaited me in the study. I had not finished my cup when Father Bresnihan entered, a man in a suit of green thorn-proof tweed behind him, and made the introductions. It was my first meeting with Superintendent Concannon. He had a square-ish head, a pale and rather ascetic face (he might well have been an intellectual, a Maynooth-bred priest or professor, I thought), and a manner almost deferential.

After a few civilities, he told me they'd managed to get my car hauled out of the sand yesterday. It had been
thoroughly examined, and Sean was now at work on it, to try and make it serviceable again.

“I take it you found no fingerprints.”

“There's quite a few, on the parts the sea didn't cover. You had a narrow escape, Mr. Eyre.”

I noticed Concannon's habit of tilting his voice up at the end of a sentence, giving to a statement the effect of a half-concealed question.

“You've had trouble before, the Father tells me. Did you inform the police?”

“Yes. After the last episode, I had a talk with the sergeant here. He doesn't seem to have got anywhere though.”

“Casey? Ah, he's an eejut,” said Concannon disloyally, smiling at Father Bresnihan and myself. It struck me that openness and informality must be very different from English police methods: nor, for the matter of that, would an English detective have allowed the local vicar to sit in on an investigation.

“Well now, we must hear all about it Are you quite sure you feel able for some questions, Mr. Eyre? Good. I'll just get Cathal in to write it all down. If you'll allow me, Father?”

Concannon called through the door. A uniformed man came in, sat down and produced a note-book. I was led through the previous episodes—the search of my cottage and the shot from behind the bushes—Concannon helping me along with an occasional question. “There was nothing stolen? … Was there anything in your papers a fella'd be hunting for? … How long between the shot and your getting back to Lissawn House?”

When we came to the events of two nights ago, Concannon made me describe in great detail what had preceded them. I told him about going to Kevin Leeson's house, the contretemps in the lavatory and what I had overheard there, the pleasant evening which followed.

“How long was Mr. Leeson out of the house after he'd shown you back into the drawing-room?”

“Five minutes about. Perhaps a little longer.”

“And what time did you leave?”

“Quarter to twelve.”

“You're sure of that?”

“Yes. I looked at my watch and was surprised to find how late it was.”

“Then you drove straight back to your cottage. You didn't stop on the way?”

“No. Straight back.”

“Did any other vehicle pass you?”

“No. I've thought about this. It was physically impossible for Kevin to have arrived at the cottage before me.”

Concannon gave me a curious look. “Why should he want to harm you?”

“Why should anyone?”

“But Mr. Leeson could have made arrangements with someone else during those five minutes or so he was out? Is that what's in your mind?”

“He
could
have, no doubt. But why on earth should he be gunning after me?”

“‘Gunning'?”

“A figure of speech,” I snapped irritably.

“I'm aware of the metaphor,” Concannon replied with a touch of ice. “And you can't think of any other reason why someone should be gunning after you?”

“No.”

Father Bresnihan, who had been sitting quite silent, studying his fingers, looked up. “That is not true, Dominic.”

It was a very awkward moment. I knew it would be likely to arrive sooner or later, but I'd hoped it would somehow have been postponed. There was nothing to be done now but plunge in boldly at the deep end.

“Father Bresnihan thinks,” I said, not looking at him, “that I've been paying too much attention to Mrs. Flurry Leeson.”

The point of the shorthand-writer's pencil broke. A faint blush appeared on Concannon's face. The Father nodded at me approvingly.

“And have you, Mr. Eyre?” asked Concannon mildly.

“I like her very much, and I've been seeing her pretty often. Living nearby. She and her husband have both been very kind to me.”

“I see. And you think your intentions have been misinterpreted,” said Concannon silkily, his voice tilting up at the end.

“The Father seems to think so.”

Father Bresnihan's mouth twitched angrily, but he made no comment.

“Are you suggesting, then, that Mr. Flurry Leeson is behind these attacks upon you?”

“Certainly not. I think it's wildly improbable.”

“A jealous husband?” Concannon let his voice trail away.

What could I answer? that Flurry was a complaisant cuckold?

“He has never shown me any signs of that,” I said. “But no doubt you'll be finding out where he—and Kevin and everyone else were—two nights ago.”

“I've already taken statements from them, Mr. Eyre.” Concannon leant back, lacing his arms behind his head. “Have you a passport, Mr. Eyre?” he asked negligently.

“Yes. But not here. You don't need one for Ireland.”

“I suppose, as a writer, you travel a good deal. Local colour—that class of thing.”

“I've been to France. And Italy. And once to Greece. But—”

“Nowhere else in Europe? Germany?”

“Good lord no! Not with that Nazi gang in control.”

“A godless lot of sinners they are,” said Concannon. “You wouldn't object to sending for your passport and letting me see it.”

“Of course not. But what on earth has this to do with—?”

“You'll do that, then. I'm most grateful to you, Mr. Eyre. And now we'll have to think how we can best protect you. Won't we, Father?” Concannon added cosily.

“Protect? You think it might happen again?”

“It might so. Have you a gun?”

“No. I didn't come over here expecting to get involved in shooting matches.”

“Sure you didn't.” Concannon's intelligent face broke into a purely boyish grin. “We'd best have the Father give one of his hell-fire sermons next Sunday, warning his flock against the sin of murder.”

Father Bresnihan appeared to take this quite seriously. For myself, the word “warning” threw a fantastic idea into my mind. The Father's arrival in the nick of time to rescue me from the car—had it not been suspiciously pat? Perhaps he had organised the whole thing, not to kill me, but as a last warning. It was a bit strange that it should happen on the night he was sitting with the sick widow in her cottage on the hill. Of course, he would have needed an accomplice to stun me and drive me to the strand. But he was a man of absolute authority among his people; and his fanatical zeal against sexual irregularity was well established.

Hardly had this passed through my mind when I saw its grotesque absurdity. I must be suffering a delayed reaction from the knock on my head.

“So you're going back to your cottage?” asked Concannon.

“Yes. I'll bolt the door at night. If I remember to.”
It was bravado, of course. Like many timid people, I sometimes had the urge to provoke the crisis which I felt lying in wait for me, to get the thing over with. Concannon gave me an undeserved look of admiration.

“Very well then. We'll be keeping your cottage under surveillance for a while, till I get to the bottom of that assault on you.” He gazed at me reassuringly. “You're not a very curious man, Mr. Eyre, are you?”

“How do you mean?”

“Aren't you interested in the statements I took from your neighbours?”

“I thought that was the sort of thing the police kept under their hat.”

“Oh, we have
secretive
policemen over here. As well as secret police. But I'm not the one nor the other.”

Concannon now told me that, according to their statements, Flurry and Harriet were in bed when the assault took place, Kevin and his wife were going to bed. Seamus O'Donovan had said he was asleep, but he slept alone in a room above one of the Lissawn outbuildings, so there was no one to corroborate his evidence. The man of the cottage a hundred yards down the road from mine said he'd been woken by a car passing along the road about midnight, and before he went to sleep again had heard a car passing in the opposite direction.

“And now I want you to make me a list of all the other people you've met since you came to Charlottestown. And you'll write at once for your passport. But there's another thing; the most important. If you'll be good enough to help me with this.”

“Yes?”

“I want you to think back over all the conversations you've had since you came to Charlottestown—” Concannon was looking at me with a most serious, urgent expression—“and tell me of any occasion when you felt the
person you were talking to seemed specially inquisitive about yourself.”

“That'd apply to pretty well everyone I've met.”

“Ah, we're a nosy lot. Aren't we, Father? What I have in mind, Mr. Eyre—it's hard to define—but any man or woman who seemed to think, or maybe you gave the impression unwittingly, that you're not the man you give yourself out to be—a writer holidaying over here. Someone you felt was pumping you, to draw out your real identity.”

“A nice metaphor,” I replied. “But I really can't—”

“Take your time, Mr. Eyre. There's no hurry. It might have been in a shop, in the street, a chance encounter you thought nothing of at the time. In the Colooney bar. Anywhere. You have it now?” he added with a touch of excitement.

A bell had rung loudly in my mind. Colooney bar. I have an excellent verbal memory: so I was able to tell Concannon, almost word for word, that bit of my conversation with the Colooney manager the first night I was here.

“Haggerty asked if I was in business or government service. I answered, ‘A sort of business. A one-man business.' I didn't want it put about just then that I'm a writer: and I was a bit irked by his inquisitiveness. Then he asked if I kept a shop. And I replied, just to mystify him, ‘a very closed shop.' A curious expression came over Haggerty's face—”

“Describe it.”

I tried to do so.

“And then?”

“The Leesons—Flurry and his wife—came in, and the conversation ended.”

“The man you overheard talking with Kevin in the study—could that have been Haggerty?”

“Definitely not. Quite a different voice.”

“Did you have any talk with Haggerty since?”

“Oh, quite often. But only the time of the day, gossip, that sort of thing, in the bar.”

Concannon glanced at the Father. “So
that's
it! He's a simple-minded fella, Haggerty, isn't he?”

“He is,” said Father Bresnihan. “But he likes to think he's crafty.”

“Exactly.”

“What
is
all this?” I exclaimed irritably.

Concannon smiled at me. “Don't you see the impression your words would have on a fella like Haggerty?”

“No, I don't.”

“What you let slip in front of him—what he
thinks
you let slip—was that you're some class of spy: a British spy.”

“Good God!” My mind raced like a propeller out of water.

“There was a lot of West Britishers—if you'll forgive the expression, Mr. Eyre—in the Dublin Castle intelligence service in the bad old days.”

“But—”

“And the British'd want to find out just what's going on over here now, wouldn't they?—what's the feeling about neutrality? whether some of the extremists wouldn't welcome a German intervention?”

“Sure they'd never do that,” protested the Father.

“But they'd use any opportunity to push the Taoiseach into getting back the Six Counties. And a war between Germany and England would be their moment. Naturally, the British'd want to know the strength of that feeling.”