Old God's Time, page 14
‘Billy used to collect blood samples on these cards,’ said Tom. ‘Just a pinprick, there’d be a pack of them, like a deck of playing cards.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Fleming, neutrally.
‘Indeed, yes. We often did the same together, you and me, Jack. For other murders.’
‘Ah, yeah. Of course. As may be.’
Jack Fleming wasn’t doing a great job of hiding his disappointment. Tom didn’t know if he was disappointed in his lousy answer or in the general failure to preserve evidence from the sixties. There must be items at this very moment stuck in obscure drawers and cupboards in a thousand Garda stations. There was never any central place where you could deposit evidence. And clerical staff and station sergeants died, and the stuff would become as hidden and forgotten as Tutankhamen’s tomb.
‘Well, sure,’ said Fleming, ‘the best we can do is take a sample from you. We can hardly dig up Billy Drury.’
‘He was cremated,’ said Tom, with an attempt to lighten the atmosphere.
‘Lord rest him,’ said Fleming.
‘He thought Byrne might have done it, but he didn’t know.’
‘Byrne? I suppose. Maybe. That would be something. Jesus, a murderer and a child molester. You remember nothing about the blood on the soutane? You didn’t take a sample from Byrne?’ said Fleming for the second time, sharp as sharp. Not for nothing promoted. He just wanted an answer, aloud, in words.
‘Oh, I suppose so. Matched Matthews to Matthews? What does the file say? Jesus, I don’t remember. We didn’t get a match for Byrne, I’m fairly sure, or we’d have charged him straight away.’
‘We can check it, we can check it,’ said Fleming, and he joined his two hands together in almost a praying gesture. ‘When O’Casey and Wilson went to see Byrne, he said nothing about the swimming pool and the kids, wouldn’t answer anything about that. Said he would need his solicitor present. So they asked him about the Matthews cold case. Just to warm him up. Wilson is so clever. And Byrne said, much to Wilson’s surprise, he thinks he saw the murderer on the mountain earlier. Said nothing at the time. Had his reasons, he said. Secrecy, his own fucking crimes, I say. Byrne was walking far behind Matthews, who was gone ahead like a mountain goat. This is just what he told the boys. But he saw a man right enough, yes, and some while later, he said, but away in the distance, so he couldn’t be sure, the blur and ruckus of a struggle. And heard Matthews cry out, again and again. Oh, he did. Byrne was scared shitless. He didn’t even go up to the scene, he said. He just knew it was bad, bad. Thought maybe an irate father, you know … And when he went down to the car park to get away, a walk of some two miles, stumbling along on the heather, he found what he thought was the same man he had seen on the mountain, in the car park, and he was very surprised that the man came straight over and said he was a Garda. What was he doing there? On his fucking Sunday walk? He had no idea. He was absolutely terrified, was sure he was next for the chop. Molesters are cowards, Tom. The bloody same man he had seen on the mountain above, he was nearly certain, so what was going on? His head was swirling. So he didn’t know what to do, but he told the policeman his colleague had fallen on the mountain. And at a farmhouse this detective telephoned for back-up, Byrne had to go along with him, a priest of the cloth, respectable, admired, and an hour later, as the light was failing, the car arrived, with two men, including I suppose Drury. And who was that man he said he saw on the mountain? Who was that detective? Well, I don’t need to tell you, Tom.’
‘He never said anything about that at the time,’ said Tom, helplessly, like a cretin. ‘He couldn’t have been surprised to see me. I mean, the man on the mountain, this supposed killer, and him coming over and saying he was a guard. Because he knew me. Me and Billy were over at his house.’
‘It doesn’t say that in Billy’s notes. You went over to their place to interview them?’
‘I thought you just said we did.’
‘No, I said Wilson and O’Casey went over to his present gaff.’
‘Oh, Wilson and O’Casey.’ Well, not the same thing at all.
‘Are you alright, Tom?’
‘No, I’m not, really,’ he said. ‘Not really. What do Billy’s notes say about the call to the guards?’
‘They back up what you’ve always told me, but Billy was your partner, Tom, Billy would have walked across Death Valley for you, with a three-piece suit on and an overcoat.’
‘Ah, Janey. He wouldn’t have covered up a murder for me. No way. And Byrne would have spoken up long since. He would have said something at the time. I remember him, a smarmy little lad with a posh Midlands accent.’
‘He wasn’t going to rock that boat maybe. Too dedicated to his pastime. And didn’t he get another twenty years of it? Whatever you say, say nothing. But he wants to rock it now, because he knows the game is up. He knows it.’
‘That’s exactly it. Tactics. Obfuscation. They’d better put him in Arbour Hill, because in the Joy they’ll have his guts for garters.’
There was another silence. The voices of children playing rose up to them from the gardens.
‘Do you mind if I ask you, did you kill that priest?’ said Fleming.
‘I didn’t kill no priest,’ he said. There was a faint hint of humour in his answer, echoing the double negative that priests were supposed to have offered during penal times when they were captured, to avoid the sin of a lie – ‘I’m not no priest.’ If Fleming caught the joke, he gave no sign of it. A little more air went out of Tom. ‘I wasn’t even there when it happened. Byrne called nine-nine-nine, and the dispatch recognised his name because she was a mate of Billy’s – not a girlfriend, because he had no girlfriends – and she knew how angry Billy and me were about the chief commissioner stopping the investigation, a lot of young guards were angry. So she put through the call to us, and that was the first time I was on that mountain, I drove Billy myself, and then we met Byrne in the car park, he was waiting in great distress, and the daylight going, and he brought us up to the ravine, he was prattling like a turkey, and we both climbed down to the body, me and Billy, and right enough it was a mess. Carnage. Because the rocks were sharp as bread knives and cut him all over. He probably lay there for a good long time and died a slow death. And why didn’t Byrne go down to him in the first place, and see if he could help him? His fucking co-conspirator. The coward. And there were brambles and nettles and all sorts to contend with, but we climbed down, and I am sure we were cut a few times, the both of us, so if my blood or Billy’s blood is on that soutane I wouldn’t be surprised. No one thought I had murdered him, it’s ridiculous. Was he even murdered? He might just have slipped and fallen.’
‘Byrne heard the struggle, saw it. He says it was murder. He says he thinks it was you. Why would he even say that? What would put that in his head? That’s the bit that worries me. Call it a copper’s instinct. Billy’s notes here, they all point towards murder. He calls it a frenzied attack. He says quite clearly there were knife wounds, and even in the sixties the Garda doctor confirmed it. It’s all in the notes. Unsolved murder.’
‘Well, maybe so. I don’t know why Byrne accuses me. Haven’t a clue. Because he’s trying to throw Wilson and O’Casey off their game? Get them off the present day and back to the sixties? Where he’s on happier ground? That man is guilty of terrible things, and Thaddeus Matthews was an evil man that caused great hurt to people. To little girls. To their families. It’s still a great surprise to me to hear of a priest lying. I don’t know why.’
‘And you’d no prior connection to Thaddeus Matthews?’
‘What do the notes say?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘There you are. Billy Drury’s notes will bear me out. You’ve read them already, so you know. It wasn’t me. Why would I kill Matthews? I was angry about the commissioner but I wasn’t that angry. Pervert the course of justice? No. And I wasn’t crazy. If I had done something like that, I’d be in Dundrum to this day. Jesus, Jack.’
‘I know you’ve had a hard few years, and these past times haven’t been kind to you, Tom. I know. But when a bastard like that says something like that, I have to follow up. You give us the blood sample, come in at your leisure, and sure we’ll take it from there.’
This was worse than retirement – it was Purgatory. It was the ten pains of death, it was the seventh circle of hell.
‘Sure I will,’ said Tom, as easily, as smoothly as he could manage. ‘No problem at all.’
Fleming went off then, managing to do so with great bonhomie, in spite of all. Goodbye, goodbye. See you in a few days. Certainly, certainly. Blood sample, blood sample. We’ll get that priest now, whatever happens. World a better place without him. Nick him for sure. You’ll see, Tom. Goodnight, goodnight. Devious bastard. Throw away the key.
He thought of Fleming getting into his nice car after an encounter like that. He wondered what he was thinking. What a thing to bring to your old friend’s door. A new peril of cold cases that he had never foreseen. Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they’re gone. Maybe old God’s time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch. But that didn’t mean it could be summoned back, or should be. He had been asked to reach back into memory, as if a person could truly do that. Could he ever truly tell Jack Fleming what had happened on that mountain? His embarrassment had partly been because he didn’t know, but must once have known, and might never know again, the gospel according to Father Joseph Byrne. It was something that belonged, was locked in, was fatally preserved, in the long-ago, which was now neither true nor false. The real answers to Fleming’s questions were not in his cranium, they existed elsewhere, in the great cloud of unknowing where all human stories congregate. An average life was half a million hours, and so what was the sum of every hour lived by every human person since the dawn of human time? And which of the lost stories was important above all the others? He could have little suspicions about the veracity of every thought he had, every thought. He knew, when he looked at it forensically, like the denizens of the forensics department, in their terrible old office building at the back of Harcourt Street, that the memory of the baby strapped to his potty with his arse hanging out must be a memory not of another child, another suffering baby, but of himself, no longer recorded inside his brain as his own. Something he was now looking at from outside, in order to render it down, defuse it, like a bomb disposal expert might a dangerous bomb, to take himself out of the picture, and allow the tragic child a kind of mercy, an anonymity, where he would be released from pain, and gone, and past.
He knew exactly what had happened, but he couldn’t tell Fleming any of it. Beyond the ken of Fleming. Beyond his own, really. Not because it was incriminating but rather beyond belief – beyond Fleming’s belief. More things in heaven and earth. When June had let out her wail of anguish, she begged Tom to bring her to where she could get a sight of Matthews. She begged him. Her immense distress was not just for the past rushing back to her, all teeth bared, incisors gleaming. But also because the commissioner had stopped the investigation. For years and years he had been the viper in the tall grasses of herself. Then her marriage to Tom, then the children, nearly assuaging everything. Nearly. Like a healing compensation. Not completely, but nearly, nearly. Didn’t she have a gift for ordinary things, the common matters of lives? She saw the use in everything, how the smallest things, the making of scones on a Sunday morning, the onion buns she would often commission him to buy in the Jewish bakery in Portobello, were in the upshot the biggest things. ‘Don’t come home without them buns, sure you won’t, Tom? Or my heart will be broken.’ Stray things, the small events of a human day, the mobilisation of care for the kids, their bumps and bruises, their mysterious aches. The time Tom and herself ferried Winnie down to St Michael’s in Dunleary, Tom with the child in his arms, fearing the little girl might have meningitis, which had popped up in her kindergarten. The pair of them then, banished from the action by the nurse, but managing to look in through a gap in the door as the nurses held Winnie down on a bed, and the doctor did the lumbar puncture. Her tiny form, and the huge doctor, and the huge needle, and the otherworldly white fluid drawn from the spine, the whole discouraging scene backlit by a big metal window in the spartan ward. Merciful God. But the importance of these matters, all strung in a row of time, the precious necklace of the events of their days. Now this old name, Thaddeus Matthews, this old demon, in the person of a forty-five-year-old priest, still in ministry, as invulnerable as you like, roaring up the years to June, breaking something, severing something, like a madman taking a scissors to the Bayeux tapestry and cutting it in two. And he had their address there in the Tolka Basin, their big neat presbytery where they schemed their schemes, seemingly in dark cahoots with each other now, Matthews no longer a solo hunter. With another non-priest priest to advance his ambitions. ‘Let’s drive out there and just have a dekko,’ she said, and it was a Tuesday, well, he had to work, of course, so he said they could do it on Saturday, if she really wanted to, if she still wanted to.
He didn’t remember her moving much again in the time from that Tuesday till the Saturday. She sat in the living room like a bold child told to sit, or a child waiting for someone to come to take her out. An orphan look. He had absolutely no memory himself of any mother or father, but when he was three or so, coming to consciousness as it were, he noticed that not every child where he was was an orphan. Sometimes a mother did come to see a boy, sometimes even a father. Or an aunt, or an uncle. He saw this with his three-year-old eyes, and he started to wait, he started to wait himself for someone to come for him. He waited and he waited, sometimes sitting still just as June did now. Sitting still and waiting. After he gave up waiting he was still waiting, somewhere deep inside himself. Mercy, he was waiting yet maybe. It was fish and chips, then, four nights in a row, brought home by him in the vinegary bags. Salt and vinegar? The bottle of vinegar poised, the big stainless-steel canister of salt. Yeah, yeah. On everything? Oh, everything. Thank you, Luigi. And home to June, as still as a salmon suspended in the current of the River Moy.
Saturday came, and they drove out in their Ford Escort, rare two-door version, to the region where he knew the priests lived. With careful light-hearted questioning of people on the pavements he was directed to the house, winding down the window, asking, winding it up again. Because it was a summer’s day but cold enough. One of that legion of Irish summer days that let you down after the promise of morning, like betting on favourites at the races. He had no idea what to do, this wasn’t policemen’s work, but he contented himself, when he identified the right building, to park in the quiet street, and gaze over at the blank windows.
As it happened they didn’t have long to wait. It was about eleven o’clock when the front door opened and two priests ventured out onto the semicircle of granite at the top of the steps. June’s head went forward, like a runner before the gun, poised you might think for flight, to make a missile of herself somehow. Tom looked hard at her face, because she said nothing, and he needed to read her intention. The two priests came down the steps, dressed in their black soutanes, but with see-through plastic rain gear over them, and, if he wasn’t mistaken, it was hard to see down under the soutanes, sturdy black boots. He saw them when they lifted their skirts daintily to descend, like little girls playing queens. If they did ever meet the English queen, would they bow or curtsy? They walked down their weedless gravel drive, just as carefree as you’d please, and with half-heard talk and laughter climbed into their three-wheel bubble car, and away with them.
‘Do you recognise him, June?’
‘Tom, Tom, follow them, follow them.’
He supposed that was a yes.
‘But, June, do you think so? We don’t know where they’re headed. They might just be going to the shops.’ He was being poisoned now, poisoned by panic.
‘You think they do their own fucking shopping? Follow them, follow them. Quick. They’re getting away … Come on, come on.’
He nosed his leaf-green car out onto the blithe, sun-washed road, and after them. It was no bother to keep a tail on them. Sure he was well used to it. For some reason he wondered if his Smith & Wesson was in the boot, where he had a bad habit of keeping it. As in, against regulations. But still. And anyway, he would hardly need it. But otherwise his mind was strangely blank, like a window at the wrong angle to the daylight. This is for June, he kept repeating, muttering, muttering, like a Buddhist mantra, this is for June. And that fucker there, whose head I can see bobbing about as he drives that stupid little car, he looks like the black dot in a bubble of frogspawn, that creature there, indicating right, and left, and right, little flashing lights, on stalks springing open, retracted, heading to the back of the city now and up onto higher ground, motoring towards the mountains seemingly, is the lousy, filthy, fucking cruel, vicious shite of a man that well-nigh destroyed her, tore through her, a little girl without defences, week after week, his possession and his plaything. Something of the wolf came into him now, he was driving with an altering intent, hunched into the plastic seat, something of the leopard, keeping his expert distance, they wouldn’t have an inkling he was on their trail. How casually he had done this, a hundred times, keeping tabs on the movements of villains, druggies and thieves, but of course this was a different thing altogether. Apart from anything else, he was not used to June being near his work. Always that seven miles that separated Deansgrange and Dublin, between her and the dangers he risked every day. Didn’t bother him much. Ex-army man, he had seen slaughter aplenty. Sticking his neck out for some principle of guardianship, some heartfelt but hard-to-find-words-for principle, but never with her, the heat and the shape of her, in the seat at his side. Nor even the car, for that matter – he never even took the bloody car. It was overwhelmingly strange, and in large part terrifying. Maybe perversely exhilarating too. Was this what shooting heroin felt like? Could she come to any harm? What was she intending? Was the gun in the boot? What did she want him to do?
