The rain plopped through the leaves, dripping down onto the old man’s head, ebbing across his deeply creviced face to the tip of his chin and, finally, to the ground. But he didn’t notice. He didn’t notice anything, his mind too preoccupied replaying memories in crystal-sharp clarity, as if they were of yesterday. A gust of wind threw needles of cold against his skin. Old age had made his body feeble now, sensitive to chills. But he paid no notice to that either. It was the memories that tormented him. Memories of love and loss, and mostly of Emily Tuffy, the only woman he had ever loved… until now.
The older he became, the even clearer those memories seemed. Of the Lilac Ballroom, just outside Cross Beg, as real as if it were before his very eyes, its grey walls rising out of the boggy ground. Despite its pretty name, it had been an ugly building, with a high rectangular wall to the front, a long flat roof to the back and a row of small dirty windows all around. Nothing but a damp cavern, except on Saturday nights when it was transformed, when the crystal globes turned, reflecting the spotlights with cascades of twinkling orbs that shimmered across the mass of heaving, sweating bodies beneath. A thousand people or more filled the Lilac on those Saturday nights, and they travelled there by bus and car, bicycle and foot, in wind and rain, from every corner of the county.
But the Lilac Ballroom was nothing but a ruin now, the roof long since caved in, its walls covered in ivy and wild brambles.
Eddie sighed, and thought, If only I could go back.
He closed his eyes and imagined he saw her again. Emily Tuffy, standing on the opposite side of the hall. It was summertime, the ballroom like an oven. She wore a green summer dress, black shoes, the lights glinting on the silver buckles, and her hair held up with a single pin. He had been able to feel the heat beneath the fabric of her dress as they waltzed, his hand secure on her waist, lost in the moment he had waited for all week. It was only a matter of time before he would ask her to marry him. But Eddie was a cautious man, and first he had to be sure of his job at the meat plant, and that his father would sign over the farm as he’d promised. Then, when all was in order, and only then, would he ask.
He knew now, with the value of hindsight, he shouldn’t have waited. That had been a mistake. Because he had lost her. She had gone to America, fed up with waiting. He should have asked, should have followed his heart, and trusted that everything would work out. If only I could go back.
But he could not go back. It was too late for that.
He shook his head, trying to untangle his jumbled-up thoughts. But now he had a second chance. Was it possible? The thought was enough to allow him a slight smile. He felt it in his pocket, reassuring himself with the touch of the small velvet-covered box. Once more he smiled. A second chance? Maybe. Just maybe, it was not too late.
Today he would not make the same mistake. Today he would take his chance. Today he would ask her – oh, what a beautiful creature she was – to be his wife. Yes, she was younger than he, by many years it must be said, but it could be her second chance too, to escape the misery of her life. No longer was he worried about getting a job in a meat plant, like he had when he’d been courting Emily. He had been prudent with money. Some even said he was rich. More than anything, he wanted to change her life, to make a difference, and he knew he could do it. He could do it, if given the chance. In return, all he wanted, for however long he had left on this earth, was an end to this terrible loneliness, to be able to share the love that was in his heart, to be able to bring happiness to another’s life, and so add meaning to his own.
The wind stirred, bringing with it a memory. He and Emily had taken the bus to Clifden, eaten in the Café Continental, on the first floor of a building by the square, from where they could see the harbour and the sea beyond. They had eggs and sausages with a big pot of tea and thick slices of soda bread. Tourists were amongst the diners, the different languages spoken a reminder of the great world that existed beyond the horizon. She had told him then that he was the sweetest man in the whole wide world, the type of man any woman would want to spend her life with. ‘You remember that time?’ she said. ‘When I was poorly and you came to see me. There was a terrible storm, but still you came. You brought leeks, carrots and mutton. You made it into a broth because I couldn’t eat.’
She had leant over the table and kissed him full on the lips. He had loved her more than anything. He understood now that look on her face, her big brown eyes tender and questioning… When? It was the time, she was communicating to him, to ask her to marry him. He did not know it then, but he knew it now. He had made the mistake of thinking that Emily Tuffy would wait forever. She did not.
And it was then he heard it. He turned slightly, peering back over his shoulder, caught a fleeting glimpse of… something, long and black, moving fast through the air towards him, so fast. Like a bird, but without wings. Closer now, almost upon him… He closed his eyes, braced for the impact.
And he thought of Emily Tuffy, her pretty face, but no longer smiling, instead staring, a spectator, helpless, watching…
Whack!
He heard the dull sound and with it came the searing pain to his face and mouth. He made a short noise in response, a low, anguished oommpph. He crumpled to the ground, and there was a loud crack as his old hip broke in two, and with it a shooting pain so intense it momentarily overwhelmed the pain he felt in his face. He lay there, his left leg at a grotesque angle. But he did not make any other sound. He tried to, but nothing came from his shattered mouth.
His vision began to dim, the force of the blow to his face rupturing the minute blood vessels behind his eyes. But then he felt he could see it again, that black shape, moving towards him. Fast. So fast…
And once again he saw Emily Tuffy, her arms reaching for him.
Whack.
And again…
Whack.
And again…
Whack.
Detective Finnegan Beck was running. Literally. He had already partially completed one loop of the course he had set himself, which was from his house into Cross Beg, along by the river to where the street lighting ran out, then back again. One loop. Less than three miles. That was all. But already he was near to collapse. He stopped, doubling over, hands on knees, drawing air into his burning lungs with short, hollow gasps. This was too much to expect. To open an engine to full throttle when it had been cruising for so long. It was enough to blow a gasket, or at the least a heart valve.
He stayed bent over for a while, waiting for his pulse to settle, then straightened and moved his hands to his hips, closing his eyes, concentrating on each intake and exhale of breath. Trying to think of nothing. But the thoughts were forcing their way back in, along with them the mocking voices that had woken him at 3 a.m.
Finally, his breathing returned to a gentle rhythm, and he opened his eyes. His legs felt strangely hollow, and he was glad for the diversion this sensation gave him. He looked about. Of course, it would be too much to expect that a taxi might be passing at this early hour of the morning. It was. Beck started to walk back along Bridge Street, towards home. He had tried, and tomorrow he would try again. Who knows, he might manage to complete the entire loop.
A trickle of weak light was seeping from the thick grey sky. But was this enough, his early morning jogging, or was he fooling himself? He turned onto Main Street, the buildings ahead like cardboard cut-outs against the hazy light of the new day. A sudden sense of panic began to take hold, and he pushed back against it, telling himself to relax. He made his way along the deserted street, the sole actor on an empty stage. On either side, the trees along the pavements were draped in dresses of twinkling Christmas lights. By now his body should be cooling, but still he sweated.
Beck stopped. The world was silent and completely still, like a painting, and a feeling came to him that he was trapped, here, inside this scene, inside this painting. There was no escape.
Stop it, what’s wrong with you?
But he knew the answer to that.
Are you trying to fool yourself?
Again.
Possibly.
Beck knew he was close to the edge.
Just then, the intermittent flashing of a blue light attracted his attention, shimmering across the facades of the buildings, reflecting on the damp street. He heard the snarl of an engine in high gear and looked back along Main Street, saw a patrol car approaching at speed the wrong way along the one-way thoroughfare. As it continued he stepped into the road, stood there, motionless. The car was mere feet from him when it screeched to a halt. The driver’s window wound down. A head emerged, that of Garda Fergal Dempsey.
‘Boss. Jesus. I could have hit you. What’re you standing there in the middle of the road like that for? Seriously, I could have run you over.’
Beck’s adrenaline rush began to subside, and he walked to the rear door and yanked it open, got into the car, leant forward.
‘Get on with it, Dempsey… I presume this is a real emergency, at this hour?’
‘Of course, boss,’ Dempsey said, stabbing the accelerator. ‘At this hour, ya.’
Beck gripped the front seats tight to stop himself from falling back as the car took off.
There was that particular patrol-car smell, of leather and sweat, mixed in now with the faint aroma of stale sick. Beck didn’t recognise the other officer in the passenger seat – which was not a surprise. Cross Beg was a staging post, a short-term stop on the transfer totem pole. No one came here unless they had to. Like him.
‘Just got the call,’ Dempsey said. ‘Postman, name of Jamie McLoughlin, says he found a body. Blood everywhere, is the way he described it.’
Beck shivered, the sweat finally beginning to dry into an icy balm on his flesh. Why was it that patrol cars were incapable of warmth? Either metaphysical or actual? Did they purposely interfere with the heaters at the central depot when the cars were delivered from the manufacturer? Which, Beck had to admit, might not be such a bad idea, when you thought about it.
‘Address?’
‘Corish. It’s a townland. Left turn just before the pub, Mullaney’s. The property is at the end of the track from the main road, about three quarters of a mile in. The postman says he’ll be waiting for us in his van at the side of the road.’
They went through a red light at the end of Main Street and swung onto the roundabout. Dempsey took the second exit and floored it, catching Beck unawares, flinging him back into his seat. Where he was content to stay. He didn’t speak. If there was anything else he should know, they would have told him. He was just glad to have something else to think about, even if that something was a murder.
The postman was parked, as he’d said, at the side of the road near the pub. They picked him up and took him in the patrol car back to the scene. He was sitting now beside Beck in the rear of the car. Jamie McLoughlin was in his late twenties, a little on the chubby side. Beck tapped a finger on the back of the driver’s seat, staring through the windscreen into the funnel of light from the headlamps, two red dots reflecting back at him.
‘That’s the dog,’ the postman said, his voice an almost inaudible whisper. ‘Eddie’s sheepdog. Max.’
Beck was silent, his eyes raking over the illuminated shapes – the corner of a stone shed, the rusty bucket of a tractor, the edge of a patch of high grass along the side of the gravelled yard – finally settling on the dark shape on the ground containing the two red reflectors, next to which was another dark shape, this one more substantial: the body of Edward Kavanagh.
‘He was howling. The dog that is,’ the postman said, like he was in a trance. ‘That’s what got my attention. So I walked over. Jesus.’
Beck opened the door. ‘Stay here,’ he said, getting out. The cold air stung his skin. The squad car was parked before the metal grating between two gate posts that marked the entry to the farmyard.
He crossed the cattle grating, stepping from one rung to the next along the edge, began walking towards the reflected dots of the dog’s eyes, making them his reference points, the gravel crunching beneath his trainers. As he drew closer he could distinguish the shape of the animal, noted its head rested on its crossed front paws, that its eyes were turned upward, peering at him. Beck stopped. He turned his gaze to the mound lying next to it, clearly definable now as an elderly man’s body, covered in a layer of glistening frost, his arms flat by his sides. He noted immediately the positioning of one leg, as if the hip bone had been snapped out of its socket and tossed to one side, which in a way, maybe it had.
Dempsey got out of the car and Beck heard the crunching sound as he began walking towards him.
‘Don’t,’ Beck called, his voice as sharp as the cold, still air.
Dempsey stopped abruptly and looked at him.
‘I wasn’t going to,’ he said, crouching down. He made a clicking noise with his tongue. ‘Here boy. Here boy. Come on, good dog.’
But the dog wouldn’t move. It continued looking at them, its head on its crossed paws, its eyes pitiful.
Beck stepped a little closer, staring at the victim, noting now the halo of blood about his head. In the growing light it had taken on a viscous appearance, like a crimson oil slick. He noted the man’s hair too. It hung down over one side of the face, the top half drenched in blood. He found himself thinking elderly males don’t usually have hair like this man’s. This hair was thick and full. Beck imagined, for some reason, the man probably wore it combed back normally. He concentrated on the front of the face. It was angled upward, as if the victim had been trying to see behind him. There had to be something back there, a piece of wood, a stone, to hold it in that pose. Beck could see the outline of the eye socket, pushing against the old, liver-spotted skin, like it would slice through at any moment. The new day still felt unsure of itself, the light hanging above the ground, as if not confident enough to fully settle. But coupled with the lights of the headlamps there was enough now for Beck to fully distinguish the bushy eyebrows, the almost translucent eyelashes. He allowed his gaze to wander, across the flash of frigid, grey dead skin – the dried blood smeared about it like the shadow of receding water at the edge of a tiny lake – to the eye socket, minus its eye, instead filled with a substance that had the appearance and consistency of watery porridge. Across the forehead was a long, deep laceration, but the slight upward angle of the head had ensured that the blood had flowed backward. The pool of it behind the head, he surmised, the result of an impression in the ground acting like a reservoir while the body bled out.
Beck stiffened. He stood there, rigid, bent slightly as if against the wind. He could see what he had not seen in all these years, what his mind had chosen to block, or at least, to obscure – what, no matter how hard he tried, had eluded him. But now, as he stared at the victim lying before him, the way the head was turned, looking back, as if searching for meaning, he saw it again: the face of his dead father.
He turned slowly, took an unsteady step forward and exhaled with a long, loud whoosh. He shook his head, as if trying to shake the image free, turned on his heel, his gaze taking a full sweep of the yard, focusing with such effort that it created a sensation like a thumb being pressed in on either side of his head, right next to his eyes. He told himself this was his only opportunity to see the scene as it was. At this moment. As the killer might have seen it too. While the body was where it had fallen, and everything was as it had been. His eyes scanned the farmyard, and he noticed a mismatch of fresh tyre prints across the frozen muddy surface, as well as two sets of footprints, one an animal’s – the victim and his dog, most certainly. The victim, walking to his death. He glanced behind the body, across the grass, to a low hedge. Beck wondered at what lay beyond that. Had the killer come from that direction?
He looked at Dempsey. ‘Back to the patrol car. This farmyard – all of it – is now a crime scene.’
Beck wanted to roar, something, anything to clear the image from his mind, to send it back to the frozen wastelands where it belonged. But it would not budge, and he watched as the image altered, like a camera zooming out, revealing the remainder of Edward’s body, lying on the hard ground, in that same pose, the human equivalent of a swastika. With a subtle change here and there, that could be his father lying back there. And the image swept him along, taking him back to that time…
Beck’s mother had played the piano. Played it so well, in fact, she had been invited to join the Connaught Regional Orchestra – long since disbanded – for their concert in the National Concert Hall in Dublin on one occasion. A review the following day, in no less than The Irish Times, had called her performance a virtuoso. Afterwards, returning to her humdrum life in a small Irish town must have been difficult. His father didn’t care much for music – he was strictly a football and horse racing man. Chalk and cheese really, the two of them. In fact, they had nothing in common; certainly, they should never have married.
Beck remembered his father, always dressed either in his garda uniform, or his off-duty ‘uniform’, wool trousers and a plaid shirt.
His mother, on the other hand, always took great care in her dress. She had worn slim-fitting pants before any woman in the town had, and her clothes were always colourful, her lips and nails always painted, and, no matter what the occasion, high heels were always worn, even if merely going to the shops.
It was as if she were making a statement: I’m better than this.
She was attracted to his father, he guessed, because here was a man with a steady disposition and, more importantly, a steady wage. Such things mattered back then. While the attraction for him, his father… well, that was obvious, she was beautiful and everything he was not.
His mother gave piano lessons most evenings in what she called the music room at the back of the house, the sound of tinkling piano keys played out of scale wafting from behind the closed door. All her students went on to become excellent players.
Beck remembered his parents never talked much, and when he was perhaps just five or six, they stopped talking to each other altogether. Instead, they communicated by passing notes to one another through either himself or his sister, Helen. It all seemed perfectly normal, even if it wasn’t, of course.
One day Beck came home from school to find his mother sitting at the kitchen table in her dressing gown with the fake fur collar and cuffs. Footsteps sounded on the stairs, heavy steps, heavier than his father’s, and Mr Donegan appeared in the kitchen doorway, dressed in a garish purple three-piece suit with a watch chain across the front. He owned a factory for the manufacture of plastic buckets and dustpans. Being a factory owner made Mr Donegan a high-flyer in the bird cage that was Newglass, the town where Beck came from. But Mr Donegan also had a great interest in music, and he sang in the town choir. They said his voice had the most beautiful tones. If he’d wanted, he could have been a professional tenor, that’s what they said.
‘Talk to you soon, Ann,’ he said, smiling. A small man, a little on the heavy side, with a smiling face, a round head and closely cropped grey hair.
His mother smiled too, before looking to her son. Beck remembered her eyes lingered on him, as if trying to tell him something. He knew what that was, now. When his father came home from duty that evening, however, Beck just knew not to breathe a word about it.
Superintendent Wilde emerged from his car and strode towards the gateway.
‘Everything is as we found it,’ Beck said.
‘You were running?’ Wilde asked, looking Beck over, taking in the tracksuit and trainers.
‘Yes. Came straight here.’
‘At this hour? One extreme to the next with you, isn’t it?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. Woke up at 3 a.m., tossed and turned until half six, finally got up and went for a run. The postman starts his shift about then. The victim’s house is among the first on his route.’
They were standing by one of the pillars. In the cold light of the new day the track from the main road was clearly visible. Also visible through the hedgerow and trees and across a field on his right, maybe a hundred yards distant, was the roofline of a house, a chimney at one end, smoke rising into the air.
Wilde followed his gaze. ‘A neighbour?’ the superintendent said.
Beck checked his watch. The assumption seemed obvious enough that it didn’t require stating. It could hardly be anything else.
‘I’ve only been here twenty minutes and it’s just starting to get light,’ Beck said. ‘I don’t know what’s what, not as yet.’
Wilde was silent. He looked through the gateway, beyond the blue-and-white crime scene tape loosely tied across it.
‘There’s two other houses on this actual road,’ Beck said. ‘We took a witness statement from the postman who found the body. According to him, the victim is Edward Kavanagh, an elderly farmer, lives alone.’
Wilde nodded. ‘Where’s the postman now?’
‘He’s gone home. I spoke with his boss. We’ll talk to him later, but not now, he’s pretty shaken up.’
Wilde nodded again.
‘Ballinasloe SOC will be here imminently,’ Beck added. ‘The Technical Bureau as soon as they can too. And a request has been made to district for more personnel.’
‘So, how many we getting?’
‘F. . .
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