The Private Wound (19 page)

“So, you see, that car journey of his should be investigated. If he falsified the times, it would—”

“I'll look after that.”

The sun, in the unpredictable Irish way, had burst out from the hopeless day and was shining slantwise through the
window. I could see Concannon gazing at me, with that guarded look turned faintly quizzical now on his austere face. He might have been a Jesuit receiving the notions of a not-too-bright neophyte on a theological question.

“Well, if that's all you—”

“Ah no. You've been a great help, Mr. Eyre. I'm grateful. But you know, if it's jealousy in it, we have another candidate.”

“Have we?”

“Maire Leeson was jealous of her husband enough to go stravagueing the countryside after him just because he was an hour or two late.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, you don't think
she
would kill anyone?”

“And why not? I got the impression, when I questioned her, that she was a repressed woman—but with hidden fires banked down, you know. Her husband is too cold a man to lose his head and commit a crime of passion.” Concannon paused to light one of his rare cigarettes. “I believe you're the same, Mr. Eyre, at bottom.”

“Thank you very much!” I replied, inordinately vexed. At least, I had not told him Maire's movements that night after waiting about on the main road. Then I remembered the drunken tramp she had seen. Should I divulge this? No: it was just the story a woman would make up to divert suspicion, had she herself killed Harriet. And I trusted Seamus to unearth this tramp, if anyone could.

We talked desultorily five minutes more. Then Concannon rose to go.

“How much longer do I have to stay here?”

“Till I've ended my investigations, Mr. Eyre,” he replied neutrally.

“And when will that be?”

He shrugged.

“But damn it, I may be the next target.”

“You'll come to no harm; so long as you're under Flurry Leeson's protection.” …

A few hours later I was in the fishing room at Lissawn House. Flurry and I were already well away with the whiskey. It was a queer sort of wake, the night
after
the funeral, in an empty house, two mourners talking in fuddled tones about the woman who should have set them at each other's throats. Flurry was drinking to forget her: I drank to obliterate the suspicion Concannon had planted in my mind, that Flurry might have murdered her.

“What was that fella Concannon after?” he said, picking the thought out of my mind.

“He thinks you could have killed her. The silly sod.”

“Does he now? Well, he'd have the right.”

“I told him it was bloody ridiculous.”

Flurry hefted a rod, then laid it back on the table beside him. “He was trying to drag something out of you?”

“He was. And to make me admit I'd been with Harriet the night she—”

“But you didn't?”

“You're the only person who'll ever know that, Flurry.”

“And I'm not telling,” he replied, and loosed an uninhibited belch. “It's queer, us two sitting here talking about her. Bloody queer. If you read it in a book, you'd not believe it. Ah well, women are the devil—God rest her soul.”

At some stage in the evening, Flurry brought in bread and cheese. At another, he inveighed against the reporters who had been pestering him. “There's no privacy to-day at all at all. Them fellas'll be peering over the recording angel's shoulder at the Day of Judgment to see what he has written down.”

“They won't read anything very bad about you, Flurry.”

“Except murder, maybe,” he said sombrely.

I was suddenly sobered. “But it was in war you killed.”

“To hell with the Tans! I'm not talking about them.” He gave me a cunning look. “And I'm not talking about Harry either, whatever Mr. Bloody Concannon may think. It's the fella who killed her. I'll have his blood on my hands.”

“Why don't you leave him to the Law?”

Flurry spat into the fireplace. “The Law?—the Law! I'll not let him slip me that way.”

“Flurry, you're tight. You'll think better of it as time goes on. D'you want to be hanged yourself?”

“I want to lay my hands on that fella. Sure what else have I to live for, now Harry's gone?” His watering eyes turned to me. “What sort of a man d'you think I am?”

“I think you're a lazy man, an easy-going man at heart. You have a romantic urge to violence; but violence is against your nature. So you have to plunge into it blindfold. You're a soft-hearted man really, and you resent that—you want an excuse for turning your heart to stone.”

Flurry had gazed at me with increasing astonishment during this analysis. “Well, for God's sake! Never did I hear such desperate crap. Dominic, you're the one is tight. I can't make head nor tail of what you're saying.”

“Nor can I, now you cast doubt upon it. But tell me this—I wouldn't have asked it if I wasn't drunk—why didn't you strangle me when I—when I told you my secret?”

“Secret?”

“When I told you I'd been with Harriet the night she was murdered?”

There was a long pause. Flurry seemed to be assembling his thoughts. “I nearly did, you know. But I'm not such a fool as I look. I worked it out for myself that no guilty man would dare make that confession to me and put his life in
my
hands. Sure you didn't have to tell me that part of it, did you now?”

“But—”

“Wait a while. In the bad times once, I had to question a man we suspected of betraying two of his friends to the Auxiliaries. He denied it. He put on a great show of grief for his friends—they'd been tortured and shot. But it didn't ring true. I knew in my bones it was not honest grief. Yours was. And yours felt like an act of true contrition. Now I'm talking like Father Bresnihan. To hell with it! This is a bloody dismal wake. We should have a song. D'you know ‘The Boys of Wexford'?”

So I sang as much of it as I could remember, Flurry beating time on the table and joining raucously in the chorus. I went on to “The Harp That Once,” and then found myself singing “She Moved Through the Fair,” which reduced Flurry to tears. At some point Seamus must have come in, for I remember him supporting Flurry's sagging figure and bellowing voice in some revolutionary songs.

Finally Flurry collapsed into a chair. “That's better. That's more like it. He's a grand voice, hasn't he, Seamus?”

“He has.”

“No bloody keening about this wake. Did y' ever hear the keening, Dominic?”

“No.”

“A god-awful din. Like a pack of wolves baying the moon. It'd freeze your bones.”

“When did you ever hear a pack of wolves, Flurry?” asked Seamus.

“I'll hear it when the bailiffs come.”

“Which reminds me—”

“Ah, get out with you, Seamus! I'll have no long faces at this wake. Drink up. D'you know, boys, it's the first time I've been able to get drunk since Harry—— I must have a drink on that.”

I laboriously thought back. It was only the fourth day since Harriet's death. It seemed an age.

“Well, we all loved her. To Harry, rest her soul!”

We drank solemnly.

“And now I drink to Dominic. May the devil fly away with the roof of the house where you and I are not welcome!”

“And here's to Seamus,” I said. “Seamus, I bequeath you my Connemara tweed hat. I can't say fairer than that.”

“I take it kindly, Mr. Eyre.”

“You're welcome.”

“That terrible old lid?” said Flurry. “Is that the best you can do for him? Sure there's not anny old tinker'd be seen dead in it.”

“Which reminds me—”

“Ah, shut up, Seamus!”

“No. Let the man speak. He has something of moment to connumicate—communicate, I should say.”

“I couldn't find hide nor hair of that tinker Mrs. Kevin says she saw. No one in the town set eyes on him.”

“Why should they? They'd be all in bed, that time of night,” said Flurry.

“And so should I be.” I looked at my watch. It said nearly one o'clock. I rose, only to fall against the table.

“Dominic, you're drunk.”

“Will I walk you home, Mr. Eyre?”

“You will not,” roared Flurry. “He's staying here the night.”

“Oh but—”

“I'll take no denial. D'ye hear me?” Seamus winked at me. “The commandant'll take no denial.”

“All right then. Thank you, Flurry.”

“Tha's better. For a West Britisher, I don't mind you at all. Drink up now and shame the devil.”

It was nearly two o'clock before we retired. Flurry led me to a small room next his own. “There's something
wrong with that bed, me boy,” he said, gazing bemusedly at it. “What is it now?”

I cudgelled my reeling brain. “There's no bedclothes on it.”

“By God, you have it.”

He reappeared with a bundle of sheets and blankets in his arms. He and I weaved around the bed, making it up.

“Is there anything else you'll be needing?”

I thought hard again. “Yes. Pyjamas.”

He returned with a pair of his own. “Good night now, and thank you for keeping me company to-day. Sleep well.”

I didn't. Unaired sheets are the worst somnifuges. I felt the damp creeping into my bones, as I tossed and turned. Presently I threw off the sheets and wrapped myself in a blanket. But all the liquor I had drunk over-stimulated my brain. I lay there with my eyes open, first to prevent the walls circling round me, and then, after I had them quietened down, thinking of all the times with Harriet, of the mystery I was caught up in, of Flurry's strange personality and incalculable behaviour. Was I lying in bed next door to a murderer? Surely not. He was a man whose simplicity baffled me: but he was not a simple-minded man. He had the intuition, I reflected, of a first-class military leader; and the ruthlessness of a guerrilla. But one thing was sure—he had loved Harriet with a love which transcended jealousy.

The uncurtained window appeared to grow light. Dawn already. I lit the candle and looked at my watch. Only five to three. I went to the window. At first it seemed as if some distant trees in the demesne were on fire. Then I saw the flames were well beyond them. And at that moment I heard running feet on the avenue. A man hurdled the stile into the garden, shouting.

“Joyce's is burning! Ring the brigade!”

I rushed into Flurry's room. He was snoring loud. But
at the touch of my hand (I was to remember this later), he came full awake.

“Ring the brigade, Flurry. My cottage is on fire.”

He was half-way down the stairs before I had collected my own wits. The man was banging on the front door. When I let him in, I saw he was the neighbour of mine who lived a hundred yards down the lane from me. He was so out of breath, he could not speak at first. I heard Flurry's voice on the telephone at the back of the hall. Then he rushed back. “They'll be on their way. Hallo, Michael. Dominic, throw on your clothes.”

It was only then that I noticed he himself had not undressed.

A few minutes later, running breathlessly, we were at the cottage. A few neighbours stood on the track, admiring the flames. The thatched roof was burning cheerfully, giving off an occasional burst of smoking straws which floated down on our heads. The upper windows had cracked in the heat; the two little bedrooms up there must be red-hot.

“Why the hell can't you lousers do something!” bawled Flurry! “Get a ladder and some buckets!”

“It's no good at all, Mr. Flurry,” said a man. “Sure the place must have gone up like a bomb. It was a raging furnace when we arrived.”

I made a dash for the door, unlocked it and plunged in. The smoke downstairs blinded me and the heat was hellish, but I groped my way to the table, snatched up my MSS and diary, and staggered out. A few moments later, the upper floor collapsed with a crash. Smoke and sparks billowed out through the open door, and a torch of flame shot up thirty feet above the room. I unlocked my car door, and the men helped me push the car out of range of the conflagration.

A few minutes later, two antiquated fire-engines arrived. Jets of water were directed at the roof, which hissed at them with derision. I began to shiver uncontrollably. Flurry, excitement in his eye, gripped my arm.

“That's a monster of a blaze. Aren't you glad you slept the night with me?”

“Why was it the top floor caught? I don't understand it.”

The other appliance which had arrived could not use its ladder against this inferno.

“If there's anyone there,” said the chief fire officer, “he's destroyed.”

“The cottage was empty.”

“Did you keep much petrol in it? That's not a natural blaze.”

“No. I didn't keep any.”

“It looks like arson to me, then. We'll have a search to-morrow, when we've got the place damped down. Though it'd be a miracle if we found anything. Is this gentleman a friend of yours, Mr. Leeson?” added the officer, with a somewhat suspicious look at me.

“He is, and I'm taking him home to bed. He's worn out, can't you see?”

I drove Flurry back to Lissawn House. “That was a great end to the wake,” he said heartlessly.

“Oh, marvellous.”

“Kevin'll be wild, losing his cottage and five pound a week.”

“A month. But look here, Flurry, not a soul knew I'd decided to spend the night with you. If someone did set the place on fire, he'd assume I was in it. And how would he get in? The door was locked.”

“He'd have a key then.” Flurry did not seem to grasp the implications of this.

“And locked up again behind him? To make sure I couldn't get out? The windows are far too small to climb through.”

“You must have left something burning then.”