The City of Strangers (7 page)

‘But there was money, wasn’t there?’ continued Stefan.

‘There was a bit Mrs Harris had from working for the Hospitals’ Sweepstake. She did a lot of that, but they only paid her expenses. It’s meant to be charity. She had an office in a room at the back of the house, and a secretary came in sometimes to do a bit of typing. That’s it. There wouldn’t have been any sort of living in it at all. Money was the main topic of conversation at Herbert Place, well, how Mrs Harris never had any was.’

‘She had a brand new car!’

‘She did so,’ said Dessie, ‘and in a shoebox on top of the wardrobe in her bedroom, she had a box with six hundred and seventeen pounds in it.’

‘That doesn’t make much sense.’

Dessie shrugged; it didn’t.

‘So where did that come from?’

‘Same place as the car.’

‘Doctor Harris didn’t buy her that then?’

‘No. She bought it herself.’

‘And –’

‘And what? Nobody seems bothered about it at the Castle.’

Stefan was surprised. He would have wanted to know.

‘So Harris killed his mother because she wouldn’t give him the money he wanted, and then left six hundred pounds sitting on top of the wardrobe?’

‘The assumption is he didn’t know it was there.’

‘But he did get the money to pay for the boat to New York?’

Sergeant MacMahon shrugged again. Although he had offered no opinions, Stefan knew that he didn’t think much of the investigation.

‘Couldn’t he have got that from the father?’

‘No. The old man thinks he’s a waster. As for the acting, it’s a joke as far as he’s concerned. I’ve only seen the old feller once. Superintendent Gregory brought him to Herbert Place. I wouldn’t say he had much to do with them any more, the lad or his mother. He gave them both an allowance of some sort, as little as he could get away with, that’s the word.’

Stefan Gillespie was looking down at the hedge and the tyre tracks.

‘Did anyone know she had money?’

‘She was always short. Bills were never paid. But she had cash when she wanted it. No one else is very interested in what the maid had to say, but Mrs Harris bought clothes she never wore and paid a lot for them. She was fond of fur as well. And when she bought the Austin Seven she paid cash. When she went out to a restaurant with her friends she didn’t just go anywhere. And she always paid her share too.’

‘You got on well with the maid, did you?’ smiled Stefan.

‘They had her sitting around at Dublin Castle long enough.’

‘So where does she think the money came from?’

‘I wasn’t in on any of the interviews.’

‘But you asked her, Dessie, come on!’

‘She doesn’t have much doubt about it. The old lady was fiddling the Sweepstake. She collected up the money that came in from abroad. It went to a post office box, but the post office delivered it to Herbert Place. Some days there’d be sackfuls, from all over, England, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, cheques, postal orders, and cash. Hundreds of pounds. She took the cheques into a bank in Baggot Street, cashed the postal orders, and then delivered it all to the Sweepstake office. She kept accounts, but I don’t know how they were checked. It wouldn’t have been hard to skim a bit off.’

‘And Superintendent Gregory isn’t looking at that?’ asked Stefan.

‘They’ve decided they know what happened. The eejit son killed her and chucked her in the sea. It’s as far as anyone needs to look. Or wants to.’

Stefan was puzzled, even after everything Dessie had said.

‘And how many detectives are there on this?’

‘They’re looking for the body, Sarge.’ Dessie laughed again. He was still calling Stefan ‘Sarge’, though he was now a sergeant himself; old habits. He was enjoying this conversation; old habits, old times. ‘Nobody’s got any doubt about what happened. I don’t know whether Owen Harris really thinks he’s coming home for a chat, but I’d say he could be coming back for the long drop. As for the Sweepstake business, it’s nothing to do with anything, I’ve been told. I’m not saying they’ve got it wrong, but no one wants to know any more. If he was here he must have been here with the body.’

Stefan nodded. Maybe there were other things to find out. Maybe for some reason there were things to find out that nobody really wanted to look into. But there were enough facts to make it hard to see beyond Owen Harris killing his mother and dumping her body out here.

He looked at the sea for a moment. He knew the smell of all this now. There were people who mattered in it. There were lids to be kept on things. There was a show to put on at New York’s World’s Fair that was far more important than a squalid and brutal murder in Ireland. There were reputations riding on it. There were newspaper headlines that Ireland’s hard-earned money had bought. Now there was the country’s Hospitals’ Sweepstake too; it brought in money the country didn’t have, to pay for hospitals it desperately needed, money from all over the world; it was money that would dry up in the face of newspaper headlines about laziness, incompetence, fraud. Stefan could see now why the investigation was in the hands of the Special Branch.

There was a crime to solve that seemed to have an easy, ready solution. But it had to be solved in a way that meant it was contained and controlled. Special Branch was there to make sure there was no spillage. He was a part of the politics now.

The Garda Commissioner was sending him to New York because he could bring Harris back to Ireland with the lid firmly on; without giving him the slightest idea he might be coming home to hang.

‘Enjoying yourself, Sergeant Gillespie?’

Stefan turned at the sound of a voice behind him. Introductions were unnecessary. Superintendent Gregory knew who he was, that was clear.

‘It’ll be a treat for you, coming all the way to Dublin on the train.’

Terry Gregory was in his mid-fifties, his face round and red in the way that marked out detectives who spent more time in the pub than the office. He wore a black overcoat that was too small for him, a brown trilby that was too big. The smile on his face was temporary; it would change to a sneer shortly. But the smile, like the imminent sneer, advertised displeasure.

Behind him stood two detectives in belted raincoats and hats, like leftovers from an IRA demob sale. They were there because Special Branch superintendents never travelled alone. It would not be their job to speak.

‘So, you’ve been specially asked for by Mr Mac Liammóir?’

‘It seems that way, sir.’

‘Close to him are you?’

‘I’ve met him.’

‘You’d be well advised to guard your backs with this one, lads.’

The two detectives laughed; that was one of their jobs.

‘Still, you’re down in Wicklow with the mountainy men and the sheep shaggers, so maybe you’ll be just the man to take our Mr Harris in hand. So what’s it about, Sergeant Gillespie? That’s what I’d like to know. What are you doing here, and why the fuck is Ned Broy sending you to New York? You’re only a culchie station sergeant who couldn’t make it as a detective.’

‘I’m here because I’ve been told to be here, sir.’

‘And I’ve told Ned Broy what I think about it.’

‘He did say something about that.’

‘I see, you think you’re a clever fucker as well, do you?’

Stefan said nothing. Gregory turned to Dessie.

‘And what the hell are you doing?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ replied Detective Sergeant MacMahon.

‘No, nothing is what I told you to do, Dessie, but what you’ve been doing is taking our farmer’s boy on a scene-of-crime tour, as if he’s got something to do with this investigation.’

He swung round to Stefan again; any trace of a smile was gone now.

‘I don’t like people interfering with what I do. I don’t care if they come from Garda HQ or the Taoiseach’s office, it pisses me off. Now they’re coming from the poofs’ paradise at the fucking Gate Theatre. I’m stuck with you because Ned Broy hasn’t got the balls to tell the politicians where to put it. So this is what you do, Stevie boy. You get the plane, you look out the window with your eyes agog, and you go to New York. You get back on the plane with Harris and sit next to him until you get off at Foynes next week. I’ll be there, and when you’ve handed him over to me, you get the next train back to Baltinglass. In between you don’t ask him anything, you don’t talk about what happened, about Mrs Harris’s death, about how he killed her, what he did with the body, where he went, who he saw, who he spoke to. You do nothing that could fuck this up. You’re the courier and he’s the parcel. Is that clear enough?’

‘I’d say so. But what do I do about him talking to me?’

Superintendent Gregory had given Sergeant Gillespie his orders. He wasn’t asking to have a conversation about it. ‘You tell him to shut up too.’

‘What about the Gate?’ asked Stefan quietly but insistently.

‘Would you like me to write it down, Sergeant?’

‘He’s got friends there. He’s been with them since the day after the murder. He’s been shut in a hotel room with some of them since he agreed to come back to Ireland. Wouldn’t you want to know what he’s been saying?’

‘I’m sorry, Stevie, I didn’t realise Ned told you to take over.’

‘It’s a simple question, sir.’ Stefan allowed his irritation to show.

Terry Gregory walked forward until he was only inches from him. For the first time he spoke very quietly. The whiskey was strong on his breath.

‘You might not have much of a job down there, Sergeant, but if you screw this up, you’ll be sitting on an island off the Atlantic till the day you draw your pension. Nobody wants to know what you think. Now fuck off.’

He spun round and strode rapidly across the grass. The Special Branch detectives followed him. There was only the sound of the sea breaking slowly, rhythmically on the rocks below. Dessie MacMahon too started back towards the house.

Stefan was still for a moment. It was a peaceful place. The thought of what had happened barely a week ago seemed to collide in his mind with the image of a small boy playing in the garden, running down to the sea. He looked at the boarded-up French windows and remembered a photograph on the bloodstained wall at Herbert Place. He had barely noticed it, yet it had stayed in his head; a boy, freckled, in shorts and a white shirt and sandals, smiling by the same big windows, wide open then, pulling a wooden cart full of sand.

Stefan heard the buzz of the plane, searching for any signs of Leticia Harris’s body. He turned and walked on after Dessie.

*

It was just starting to get dark as Stefan Gillespie walked through the fields on the western side of the farm at Kilranelagh, across the Moat Field towards the woods that abruptly fell down the steep escarpment on the far side of the townland. The sheep were thick-coated and filthy with the winter’s rain; the grass was bare and poached, still waiting for the spring flush to show. He noted a ewe hobbling painfully, another down on her knees trying to find some grass worth eating. He had meant to help his father with the foot rot at the weekend; he wouldn’t be here.

He could hear the sound of children’s voices, and he altered his course down the slope towards the high mound that sat just beyond the corner of the field, a cluster of trees rising out of the woods, higher than everything else around it, looking down at the narrow gash of rock and earth and scrappy hazel woodland that was the steep-sided valley they called Moatamoy, after the mound itself.

It was no more than a smooth, round hillock, with a flat top full of twisted trees and brambles and ivy. Eight hundred years ago the top had been surrounded by a wooden palisade. A Norman village of grass-roofed, wattle-and-daub-and-stone houses had clustered at the corner of the field below it, indistinguishable from the grass-roofed, wattle-and-daub-and-stone houses of the Celts the palisaded motte was there to protect its inhabitants from. The Anglo-Normans who had lived here had sometimes fought the people around them, sometimes traded with them, sometimes killed them, sometimes married them, until eventually they had been absorbed into their surroundings so completely that they became, in the words that would always define them, níos Gaelaí ná na Gaeil iad féin, more Irish than the Irish.

Now the sheep grazed where the village had been, but the motte was still a castle, at least in the minds of the children who played there.

Stefan could pick out the voices as he climbed over the wire fence into the ditch that surrounded the motte. Tom’s first of all, shrill and enthusiastic and, it couldn’t be denied, with more than a hint of bossiness about it when the game was his game. He could hear the voices of the Lessingham children, Alexander who was seven, Jane who was ten, and the voice of the Lawlors’ son, Harry. Stefan started up the slope of the mound and found himself grabbed forcefully from behind; an arm was round his neck, holding him.

‘Surrender!’ The words hissed into his ear.

‘I surrender! Just don’t choke me!’

As the arm released him he turned, coughing and spluttering, to see a woman laughing at him.

‘Be quiet,’ she whispered, ‘and we’ll see if we can creep up on them.’

He nodded and smiled. He was used to it. For a moment the woman looked at him, and he looked at her. They were standing very close among the trees. He bent forward and kissed her lips. It was fond rather than passionate, but its familiarity told a deeper story.

At thirty-four Valerie Lessingham was a year older than Stefan. She lived with her children in the big house across the valley from the Kilranelagh farm. Her husband, Simon Lessingham, was an officer in the British Army, serving with his regiment in East Africa. He had been away for more than two years; absence had not made Valerie’s heart grow fonder. There had been cracks in their marriage for a long time; the fact that he was away so much was an excuse not to face them, as it was an excuse not to face other things. Like the cracks in the crumbling house they lived in, and the bigger cracks in the management of the estate that surrounded it, draining money out year after year and bringing nothing back. Lack of attention wasn’t a solution to those problems either.

Neither Valerie nor Stefan had looked for what had happened quite suddenly between them. They had come together for the simple reason that their children played together; their children were more the entire focus of their lives than they cared to admit. And so it happened.