chapter one
Sometime in the sixties old Mr Tomelty had put up an incongruous lean-to addition to his Victorian castle. It was a granny flat of modest size but with some nice touches befitting a putative relative. The carpentry at least was excellent and one wall was encased in something called ‘beauty board’, its veneer capturing light and mutating it into soft brown darknesses.
This premises, with its little echoing bedroom, its tiny entrance hall, a few hundred books still in their boxes and his two old gun cases from his army days, was where Tom Kettle had in his own words ‘washed up’. The books remembering, if sometimes these days he did not, his old interests. The history of Palestine, of Malaya, old Irish legends, discarded gods, a dozen random matters that at one time or another he had stuck his inquisitive nose into. The stirring sound of the sea below the picture window had been the initial allure but everything about the place pleased him – the mock-Gothic architecture, including the pointless castellation on the roofline, the square of hedges in the garden that provided a windbreak and a suntrap, the broken granite jetties on the shoreline, the island skulking in the near distance, even the crumbling sewerage pipes sticking out into the water. The placid tidal pools reminded him of the easily fascinated child he once had been, sixty years ago, the distant calling of today’s children playing in their invisible gardens giving a sort of vaguely tormenting counterpoint. Vague torment was his forte, he thought. The sheeting rain, the sheeting sunlight, the poor heroes of fishermen trying to bring their rowing boats back against the ferocious current into the little cut-stone harbour, as neat and nice as anything in New Ross where he had worked as a very young policeman – it all seemed delightful to him. Even now in winter when winter was only interested in its own unfriendly harshness.
He loved to sit in his sun-faded wicker chair in the dead centre of his living room, feet pointed towards the affecting murmurs of the sea, smoking his cigarillos. Watching the cormorants on the flourish of black rocks to the left of the island. His neighbour in the cottage next door had set up a gun-rest on his balcony and sometimes in the evenings would shoot at the cormorants and the seagulls as they stood there on the rocks innocently, thinking themselves far from human concerns. A few falling like fairground ducks. As peaceably, as quietly, as you can do such a thing. He had not been to the island but in the summer he had witnessed the parties of people going out to it in the rowing boats. The boatmen leaning into the oars, the current ravishing the keels. He had not been, he did not wish to go, he was quite content just to gaze out. Just to do that. To him this was the whole point of retirement, of existence – to be stationary, happy and useless.
That untroubled February afternoon a knocking on the door disturbed him in his nest. In all the nine months he had lived there, not a soul had bothered him aside from the postman, and on one peculiar occasion Mr Tomelty himself, in his gardener’s weeds, asking for a cup of sugar, which Tom had not been able to provide. He never took sugar because he had a touch of diabetes. Otherwise, he had had his kingdom and his thoughts to himself. Although why did he say that, when his daughter had been out to see him a dozen times? But Winnie could never be said to disturb him, and anyway it was his duty to entertain her. His son never came, not so far, not because he didn’t wish to, but because he lived and worked in New Mexico, out near the Arizona border. He was a locum on one of the pueblos.
Mr Tomelty had portioned out his property into segments: Tom’s place, and the Drawing Room Flat, and indeed the Turret Flat, currently – suddenly – occupied by a young mother and her child, who had arrived in the dark midwinter before Christmas, in a rare snowfall. No doubt Mr Tomelty was an efficient landlord. He was certainly wealthy, owning this property, Queenstown Castle, and also an imposing hotel on the seafront in Dunleary, called The Tomelty Arms, an aristocratic sort of name. But his usual guise, at least in Tom’s experience, was that of an age-bent gardener, passing along the path under the picture window with a creaking wheelbarrow, like a figure in a fairy tale. All summer and autumn old Mr Tomelty had looked for weeds and found them and ferried them off to his swelling dunghill. Only winter had interrupted his task.
The knocking came mercilessly again. Now, for good measure, the doorbell. Then again. Tom pulled his bulky, solid form up from the chair, promptly enough, as if answering some instinct of duty – or perhaps merely humanity. But it was also an obscure bother to him. Yes, he had grown to love this interesting inactivity and privacy – perhaps too much, he thought, and duty still lurked in him. The shaky imperative of forty years in the police, despite everything.
Through the glass door he could see the outlines of two men, possibly in dark suits – but it was hard to tell as the big rhododendron behind them lent them an inky halo, and the daylight was losing its grip on things anyway. These were the few weeks of the rhododendron’s heartfelt blooming, despite the wind and the cold and the rain. Tom recognised the shifting-about that the figures were engaged in, even through the frosted glass. People not sure of their welcome. Mormons maybe.
His front door didn’t sit well on its hinges and the lower edge scraped dramatically. There was a regrettable fan-shaped mark on the tiles. He opened it, it released its tiny screech, and to his surprise two young detectives from his old division stood there. He was puzzled, and a little alarmed, but he knew them immediately. Not quite by name, but nearly. How could he not? They were kitted out in that unmistakable civilian mufti that clearly announced they were not civilians. They had the poorly shaven faces of men who rose early and there was an air about them that whether he liked it or not drew him right back to his own early days policing, the unlikely innocence of it.
‘How are you doing, Mr Kettle?’ said the one on the right, a nice big lump of a young man with a brushstroke for a moustache, a touch Hitlerian if the truth were known. ‘I hope you won’t mind us coming out – disturbing you?’
‘I don’t mind, I don’t mind, you’re not, you’re not,’ said Tom, doing his best to conceal the lie. ‘You’re welcome. Is everything alright?’ Many times he had brought unwelcome news himself to people in their houses – to people in their private minds, in their dreamlike privacy, to which he had added only troubles, inevitably. The hopeful, worried faces, the gobsmacked listening, sometimes the terrible crying. ‘Are you coming in?’
They were. Inside the door they said their names – the wide man was Wilson and the other was O’Casey – which right enough he seemed to half-remember, and they exchanged pleasantries about the awful weather and how snug his quarters were – ‘very cosy,’ Wilson said – and then he set about making them tea in his galley kitchen. Indeed it might as well have been on a boat. He asked Wilson to turn on the overhead light and after gazing about a few moments Wilson located the switch and obeyed. The meagre bulb was only forty watts, he must do something about that. He was going to apologise for the books still being in boxes but he said nothing. Then the two young fellas sat themselves down on invitation and they fired the professional bonhomies back and forth through the bead curtains with the happy ease of men in a dangerous profession. Policing always had its salt of danger, like the sea itself. They were fairly at ease with him, but also respectful, as befitted his former rank, and maybe also the loss of it.
Even as they talked Tom felt obliged to whatever gods ruled that fake castle to gaze out occasionally on the copper-dark sea just now getting scrubbed over bit by bit by worse darkness. It was four in the afternoon and night was creeping in to take everything away till only the weak lights of the lamps on Coliemore Harbour would bounce themselves a few yards out onto the water, speckling the darkling waves. The Muglins beacon beyond the island would soon spark to life and even further out, deeper than he knew, away off on the horizon, the Kish Lighthouse herself would begin to show her heavy light, laboriously sweeping the heaving deeps. He thought of the fish in there, lurking about like corner boys. Were there porpoises this time of year? Conger eels coiling in the darkness. Pollock with their leaden bodies and indifference to being caught, like failed criminals.
Soon the pot and the three cups were set on an old Indian side table that Tom had won in a long-ago golf tournament. The really good players, Jimmy Benson and what was that fella’s name, McCutcheon, had been off sick from the flu that was going around at that time, so his meagre talents had carried the day. He always smiled when he thought of that but he didn’t smile just now. The nickel tray improved to silver in the light.
He was mildly troubled that he had no sugar to offer them.
He turned the wicker chair about so he could face them and, summoning again his old friendly self which he wasn’t sure he still possessed, he lowered himself onto the creaking reeds and smiled broadly. He felt a little lock in his smile before it reached the full width of older days. Full welcome, full enthusiasm, full energy, seemed risky to him somehow.
‘We got the heads-up from the chief that you might be able to help us with something,’ said the second man, O’Casey, as if just for contrast a long thin person, with that severe leanness that probably made all his clothes look too big on him, to the despair of his wife, if he had one. Tom at this point was just letting the tea steep in the pot a few moments and his head was moving from side to side. When his friend Inspector Butt had come from Bombay in the seventies to try to probe the strangenesses of Irish policing – no guns, Ramesh could not get over that – he had witnessed that enchanting head movement, and mysteriously adopted it. It went with the table.
‘Well, sure,’ he said, ‘I’m always here to help, I told Fleming that.’ Indeed he had, regrettably, told Detective Superintendent Fleming that, as he went out the door on the last day in Harcourt Street, with a burning headache after the send-off the night before – not from drinking, because he was a teetotaller, but from only reaching his bed in the small hours. Tom’s wife June’s ‘mother’, the dreadful Mrs Carr, had scandalised them both when they were a young couple with kids by insisting those selfsame kids, Joe and Winnie, were in bed by six, until they were all of ten years old. Mrs Carr was a termagant but she had been right about that. Sleep was the mother of health.
‘It’s something that’s come up and he thought, the chief thought, it might be useful to hear your thoughts on it,’ said the detective, ‘and, you know.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Tom, not uninterested, but all the same with a strange surge of reluctance and even dread – deep, deep down. ‘Do you know, lads, the truth is I have no thoughts – I’m trying to have none, anyhow.’
They both laughed.
‘We get that,’ said O’Casey. ‘The chief said you might say something like that.’
‘How is the chief?’ said Tom, striking out for a neutral line of talk.
‘Jaysus, in the pink. You can’t kill him.’
‘No.’
This was possibly a reference to the brush with double pneumonia the chief had endured after being trussed up all night in a Wicklow field by two hoodlums. They had found the poor man more dead than alive. Which just about described the same hoodlums when they were finished with them at the station, God forgive them.
Now he poured the tea and delicately offered them the cups, his large hands determined not to spill any. He fancied Wilson was looking for his sugar lumps but it was not to be, it was not to be.
‘You’ve come out a long way, a long journey, yes, I do understand. But,’ he said. He was going to add something, but found no words in his mouth. It was time they left him alone, is what he wanted to say. Retired men could be let go safely – let the new ones put their minds to the work. All his working life he had dealt with villains. After a few decades of that your faith in human nature is in the ground. It’s a premature burial, pre-dating your own. But he wanted to be a believer again, in something. He wanted to live in his wealth of minutes, the ones he had left anyhow. He wanted a blessed, a quiet time. He wanted—
Outside the window a gull dropped the full height of the frame, a sudden white thing in the corner of his eye, free-falling so abruptly it made him jump. Of course at this time of year the sea wind usually rose up after sundown and lashed away at the walls of the house, catching even gulls off guard. It was so bizarrely white, lit only by the light in the room, so out of control, like a suicide or an executed thing, that it threw him for a moment. But neither Wilson nor O’Casey seemed to have seen it, though they were square-on more or less to the window. All they saw was Tom looking startled. Tom could see Wilson instinctively recalibrating, deciding to change tack. Not come at this head-on like a mad little bull. That was his training in the old depot at the Phoenix Park kicking in. Don’t spook the witness. But Tom wasn’t a witness, was he?
Wilson leaned back into his chair and sipped three times from his cup. Tom thought he probably didn’t like the tea. Not stewed long enough for a copper. Not cold or dead enough. Nor sweet enough.
‘Do you know,’ Wilson said, ‘you’re very cosy out here.’
‘Aye,’ said Tom, still with a trace of the fright in his voice. ‘You said.’
Wilson seemed to make a bid for intimacy. Have a shot at it. Probably thinks I’ve gone gaga, Tom thought. Little to do except peel the plastic off cheese singles. O’Casey drank his tea down in one swift gulp, like a cowboy drinking whiskey.
‘Do you know,’ said Wilson, ‘when my mother died – we were only smallies, my sister and me – my da wanted to move out here. Houses were cheap in the village, but there was no hospital nearby. The nearest thing was Loughlinstown, and my da, you know, he was a night nurse, so . . .’
‘Janey,’ said O’Casey, with the sincerity only allowable in a friend, ‘sorry to hear about your ma.’
‘No, no, it’s alright,’ Wilson said, expansively, generously. ‘I was eleven. My sister, she was only five. It was shit for her.’
Whatever Wilson had hoped to achieve by these intimacies was somewhat stymied by the melancholy that dropped down across his features, as if, despite his resilience at eleven, he was now feeling the sorrow of it, maybe even for the first time. None of the three spoke. There was something much more pitch about the black of the window. Tom thought of tar melting in tar barrels, roadmenders. The lovely acrid stink of it. He would have drawn the curtains, he thought, if he had had curtains. It was what people did in films. He got up and went over to his little table and turned on the lamp there instead. It was a small brown job with a button on the weighted bottom for switching on and off. He had carried that lamp through half a dozen houses. When Joe was a mere baby and finding sleep hard to reach, Tom used to lie on the spare bed with the baby on his chest, and Joe loved to press that very button, over and over, on and off, because he liked the click. Tom used to unplug it in preparation, he didn’t want a disco. It was nice to have the long, warm baby – he was very long even at a year – on top of him, the two of them getting drowsier and drowsier. Sometimes June had to come in and wake him, and lay Joe back in the cot. It seemed like a long time ago, but even now the fluid click gave him pleasure. Ridiculous. He loved his few possessions, he did. He more or less laughed, not a full laugh, a sort of dampened chuckle, because even as he was amused at himself he thought of what Wilson had said. Wilson had left his dead mother floating there in the room, and the old difficulties felt by his sister. He wondered what the sister looked like. It was another stupid thought. He was sixty-six. He wasn’t looking to get hitched. Hadn’t he married a lovely girl. No one could take that from her. She was dark like Judy Garland. That was all done. But policemen, working long hours and routinely dazed after six o’clock, good only for a few male pints in the evening, used to keep a lookout for the pretty sisters of their colleagues, just on the mad chance. As if privy to Tom’s thoughts, Wilson said:
‘My mother was a great beauty.’ He said this with an even voice, no longer inflected by sorrow. He had recovered quickly.
‘You didn’t move house, then?’ said O’Casey.
‘No, no, we stayed in Monkstown, so we did. We stayed in Monkstown.’
Wilson didn’t expand on whether this was a wise or a foolish decision. Tom nearly asked him if his father was still alive, but stopped himself. Why did he want to know that? He didn’t. He supposed the sister must be married by now. He hoped she was alright. For heaven’s sake, why? He knew nothing about her. Her mother had been beautiful, and died. He supposed the sister too might be a beauty. Chances were. He seemed to see the mother in his mind’s eye, ...
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