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  They heard a far-off knocking at the front door.

  ‘That’s probably Jenkins,’ Strafford said. ‘Detective Sergeant Jenkins, my second in command. They told me he was on his way.’

  2

  The first thing everyone noticed about Sergeant Jenkins was the flatness of his head. It looked as if the top of it had been sliced clean off, like the big end of a boiled egg. How, people wondered, was there room for a brain of any size at all in such a shallow space? He tried to hide the disfigurement by slathering his hair with Brylcreem and forcing it into a sort of bouffant style on top, but no one was fooled. The story was that the midwife had dropped him on his head when he was born, but it seemed too far-fetched to be true. Oddly, he never wore a hat, perhaps on the principle that a hat would flatten his carefully fluffed-up hair and spoil the attempted camouflage.

  He was a young man, still in his twenties, serious in manner and dedicated to his job. He was bright, too, but not as bright as he believed himself to be, as Strafford often had cause to note, with a certain sympathy. When something was said that he didn’t understand he would go silent and watchful, like a fox scenting the approaching hunt. He wasn’t popular on the Force, which was reason enough for Strafford to like him. They were both outsiders, a thing that didn’t trouble Strafford, or not much, though Jenkins hated being isolated.

  When people told him teasingly, as for some reason it amused them to do, that what he needed was a girlfriend, he would scowl and his forehead would redden. It didn’t help that his name was Ambrose, which was bad enough, but made worse by the fact that everyone, with the exception of himself, knew him as Ambie. Hard to seem a man of consequence, Strafford acknowledged sadly, when your skull was as flat as an upturned plate and your name was Ambie Jenkins.

  He had come down by squad car, which had turned in the driveway and departed just as the three-man forensics team arrived in their black van. They’d greeted him, and the four of them had tramped up the front steps together, trailing plumes of breath-smoke in their wake.

  Strafford and Jenkins greeted each other. They had worked together before. Strafford liked the younger man, but got back no more than a grudging respect. He supposed Jenkins held his religion against him, as did most of the Force. A Protestant and a Garda officer – it even sounded wrong.

  The forensics team comprised Hendricks the photographer, a thick-set young man with horn-rimmed spectacles. Willoughby, the fingerprint expert, a notorious drinker. And their boss, the chain-smoker Harry Hall.

  Strafford had worked with these three before. Privately, he knew them as Larry, Curly and Moe. They stood in the flagged hallway stamping the snow from their boots and blowing into their fists. Harry Hall, the butt of a cigarette stuck to his lower lip with a curved inch of ash clinging to the tip, eyed the antlers and the blackened portraits on the walls and gave one of his smoker’s laughs.

  ‘Jesus Christ, will you look at this place?’ he wheezed. ‘Next thing Poirot himself will appear on the scene.’ He pronounced it Pworrott.

  A couple of uniformed Guards had also arrived in a squad car, one tall and the other short, mouth-breathers, both of them, just out of the Garda training college at Templemore and trying to hide their inexperience and gaucheness behind defiant, chin-jutting stares. There wasn’t really anything for them to do, so Jenkins told them to stand in the hall on either side of the front door and make sure no one entered or left without proper authorisation.

  ‘What’s proper author—?’ the tall one began, but Jenkins fixed him with a dead-eyed look and he said no more. When Strafford had led Jenkins and the forensics boys off to the library, the tall Guard looked at the shorter one and whispered, ‘Proper authorisation, what’s that when it’s at home?’ And they both chuckled, in the cynical fashion they were trying to learn from the old hands on the Force.

  Harry Hall took in the bookshelves, the marble fireplace, the mock-medieval furniture.

  ‘It’s a library,’ he muttered incredulously to Hendricks. ‘It’s an actual fucking library, and there’s a body in it!’

  Forensics never gave their first attention to the corpse; it was an unofficial part of their professional code. Hendricks was at work, however, the flashbulbs of his Graflex popping and fizzing and leaving everyone in the room light-blind for a second or two after they had gone off.

  ‘Come and have some tea,’ Colonel Osborne said.

  The invitation had been directed pointedly at Strafford alone, but Sergeant Jenkins either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He followed the two men as they went out of the room. They went along a dim hallway and entered the kitchen.

  ‘Will they be all right in there?’ Colonel Osborne asked of Strafford, nodding back towards the library.

  ‘They’ll be very careful,’ Strafford answered drily. ‘They don’t usually break things.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean – that’s to say, I just wondered—’ He frowned. He was filling the kettle at the sink. Outside the window the bare black branches of the trees were laden along their tops with strips of snow that glistened like granulated sugar. ‘It all seems a bad dream.’

  ‘It usually feels like that. Violence always seems out of place, which is hardly surprising.’

  ‘Have you seen much of it? Murder, that kind of thing?’

  Strafford smiled mildly. ‘There isn’t any other kind of thing – murder is unique.’

  ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ Osborne said, though it was obvious he didn’t, quite.

  He put the kettle on the stove, had to look for matches, found them at last. He opened cupboards and stared into them helplessly. It was plain he hadn’t spent much time in the kitchen over the years. He took three mugs from a shelf. Two of them had cracks down the sides, like fine black hairs. He set them on the table.

  ‘What time was the body found—?’ Jenkins began, but stopped when he noticed the other two men looking past him. He turned.

  A woman had come in, without making a sound.

  She stood in a low doorway leading off to another part of the house, with one hand folded tensely over the other at the level of her waist. She was tall – she had to stoop a little in the doorway – and markedly slender, and her skin was pinkly pale, the colour of skimmed milk into which had been mixed a single drop of blood. Her face was like that of a Madonna by one of the lesser Old Masters, with dark eyes and a long sharp nose with a little bump at the tip. She wore a beige cardigan and a calf-length grey skirt that hung a little crookedly on her hips, which were no broader than a boy’s.

  She wasn’t beautiful, Strafford thought, but all the same something in her frail, melancholy looks pressed a bell deep within him that made a soundless, sad little ping.

  ‘Ah, there you are, my dear,’ Colonel Osborne said. ‘I thought you were sleeping.’

  ‘I heard voices,’ the woman said, glancing from Strafford to Jenkins and back again with expressionless eyes.

  ‘This is my wife,’ Osborne said. ‘Sylvia, this is Inspector Strafford. And—?’

  ‘Jenkins,’ the policeman said, with heavy emphasis, and the trace of a resentful scowl. He didn’t understand why people couldn’t remember his name – it wasn’t as if he was called Jones, or Smith, or something equally common. ‘Detective Sergeant Jenkins.’

  Sylvia Osborne gave the men no greeting, only came forward from the doorway, chafing her hands against each other. She had an appearance of being so cold, it seemed she might never have been warm in her life. Strafford was frowning. He had thought at first she must be Osborne’s daughter, or a niece, perhaps, but not, certainly not, his wife – she looked to Strafford to be at least twenty, if not twenty-five, years younger than her husband. In which case, he thought, she had to be a second wife, since there were grown children. He wondered what had become of the first Mrs Osborne.

  The kettle on the stove sent up a shrill whistle.

  ‘I met someone on the stairs,’ Mrs Osborne said, ‘some man. Who is he?’

  ‘Probably one of mine,�
�� Strafford answered.

  She watched as her husband poured boiling water into a big china teapot.

  ‘Where’s Sadie?’ she asked.

  ‘I sent her to her sister’s.’ Osborne glanced at Strafford. ‘Housekeeper. Mrs Duffy.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’ his wife asked in a bewildered tone, wrinkling her pale forehead. All her movements were slow and effortfully deliberate, as if she were wading under water.

  ‘You know what a gossip she is,’ Osborne said, avoiding her eye, and then murmured in an undertone, ‘not that her sister isn’t one, too.’

  Mrs Osborne glanced aside, putting a hand to her cheek.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ she said faintly. ‘How could he have got into the library, when he fell down the staircase?’

  Again Osborne glanced at Strafford, with an almost imperceptible quick little shake of the head.

  ‘I imagine that’s what Inspector Strafford’s man is trying to discover,’ he said to his wife, over-loudly, then softened his tone. ‘Will you have some tea, my dear?’

  She shook her head, and, still with that dazed expression, turned and wandered out through the doorway she had entered by, her hands still clasped at her waist and her elbows pressed against her sides, as if she were in danger of collapsing and had to hold herself upright.

  ‘She thinks it was an accident,’ Osborne said quietly, when she had gone. ‘Didn’t see any point in enlightening her – she’ll know the truth soon enough.’

  He handed round the mugs of tea, keeping the uncracked one for himself.

  ‘Did anyone hear anything in the night?’ Sergeant Jenkins asked.

  Colonel Osborne looked at him with some displeasure. He was surprised, it seemed, that a fellow who was clearly from the lower ranks should think he had the right to speak without first asking permission of a senior officer.

  ‘Well, certainly I heard nothing,’ he said shortly. ‘Dominic might have, I suppose. My son, Dominic, that is.’

  ‘What about the others in the house?’ Jenkins persisted.

  ‘No one heard anything, so far as I know,’ the Colonel replied stiffly, peering into his mug.

  ‘And where is he now, your son?’ Strafford asked.

  ‘He took the dog for a walk,’ Osborne said. His expression suggested that even to him it sounded incongruous, to say the least. Here a dead man, there a dog in need of walking.

  ‘How many people were in the house last night?’ Strafford asked.

  Osborne turned his eyes upwards, moving his lips as he counted silently.

  ‘Five,’ he said, ‘including Father Tom. And there was the housekeeper, of course. She has a place’ – he nodded towards the floor – ‘downstairs.’

  ‘So, that’s you and your wife, your son, and Father Lawless.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Four, by my reckoning. You said there were five, not counting the housekeeper?’

  ‘And my daughter, did I not mention her? Lettie.’ Something passed fleetingly over his face, like the shadow of a cloud skimming across a hillside on a windy day. ‘I doubt she heard anything. She’s a deep sleeper. In fact, all she seems to do is sleep. She’s seventeen,’ he added, as if this explained not only the girl’s sleeping habits but a great deal else besides.

  ‘Where is she now?’ Strafford asked.

  Colonel Osborne took a sip from his mug and made a wry face, whether at the taste of the tea – it was so strong it was almost black – or at the thought of his daughter, Strafford couldn’t decide. He laid his two palms flat before him on the table and pushed himself to his feet.

  ‘I’d like to see the room where Father Lawless slept last night,’ he said.

  Jenkins too was standing now. Colonel Osborne remained seated, looking up at them, and his hitherto brisk and sceptical manner faltered for a moment, and for the first time he seemed uncertain, and vulnerable, and afraid.

  ‘It’s like a bad dream,’ he said again. He gazed almost pleadingly at the two men standing over him. ‘I suppose that will pass. I suppose it will soon start to seem all too real.’

  3

  Colonel Osborne ushered the detectives out of the kitchen. Harry Hall appeared, lighting a cigarette inside the shelter of a cupped hand.

  ‘Have a word?’ he said to Strafford.

  The detective looked at him and tried not to let his antipathy show. Not that it mattered – the two men disliked each other, for no particular reason, and didn’t let it interfere with their work. They really didn’t care enough about each other to fight. All the same, the tension between them was palpable, and Colonel Osborne frowned, glancing from Harry Hall to Strafford, and from Strafford to Jenkins, with a look of puzzled enquiry.

  ‘A word?’ Strafford said.

  Harry Hall said nothing more, only turned and walked out of the room. Strafford hesitated a moment, then followed.

  In the library, Hendricks was fitting a new roll of film into his camera, while Willoughby, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, was kneeling by the door and listlessly dusting the knob with a soft sable brush. Harry Hall sucked worriedly at his cigarette.

  ‘This is a weird one,’ he said in an undertone.

  ‘Would you say so? – I was beginning to think something of the sort myself,’ Strafford answered. Harry Hall only shrugged. It always puzzled Strafford that his irony so often went unnoticed.

  ‘He was stabbed upstairs and made it down here somehow,’ Harry Hall was saying. ‘I suppose he was trying to get away from whoever it was that attacked him. My guess is he got in here and fell – he’d already lost a bucket of blood – and that he was lying here when his tackle was cut off, balls, prick, the whole shebang. Which we didn’t find, by the way. Someone must have kept it for a souvenir. Clean cut, with a razor-sharp knife. A professional job, by the look of it.’

  He made a hissing sound as he drew on his cigarette, and turned to look at the corpse. Strafford was wondering absently how it could be that someone, anyone, should have notched up a sufficient number of castrations to be considered a professional. Were there professional castrators, outside the realm of animal breeding?

  ‘As you can see,’ Harry Hall went on, ‘someone tidied him up. The blood was swabbed from the floor, but not till after it was dry.’ He snickered. ‘Some job that must have been.’

  ‘And when would the job have been done?’

  The big man shrugged. He was bored, not only with this case, but with his work in general. He had seven years to go before retirement. ‘First thing this morning, probably,’ he said, ‘given that the blood was dry. The stair carpet was washed too – the stains are still in it.’

  They stood in silence for some moments, gazing at the body. Hendricks was sitting on the arm of a high-backed chair with his camera on his lap. His work here was done, and he was taking a break before moving upstairs to start shooting there. Of the three of them, Hendricks gave the impression of being the keenest at his job, while in fact, as Strafford knew, he was the laziest of the lot.

  Willoughby was still kneeling by the door, still dusting away. He, like the other two, knew the crime scene had been thoroughly compromised, and that their work would surely prove a waste of time. Not that it mattered to him.

  ‘The housekeeper,’ Strafford said, brushing that wing of hair away from his eyes, ‘she’ll be the one who cleared up, or did her best to, at any rate.’

  Harry Hall nodded. ‘On orders from Colonel Bogey, I presume?’

  ‘Osborne, you mean?’ Strafford said, with the ghost of a smile. ‘Probably. Old soldiers don’t like the sight of blood, so I’m told. Brings back too many memories, or something of the sort.’

  They were silent again, then Harry Hall came a step closer to the detective and lowered his voice still further. ‘Listen, Strafford, this is not good, this thing. A dead priest in a houseful of Prods? What are the papers going to say?’

  ‘Probably the same thing as the neighbours,’ Strafford answered absently.

  ‘N
eighbours?’

  ‘What? Oh, the Colonel is worried there’ll be a scandal.’

  Harry Hall again gave a small, sour laugh.

  ‘I’d say there’s a fair possibility of that, all right,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Strafford murmured.

  They stood there, Harry Hall working at the last of his cigarette and Strafford stroking his lean jaw thoughtfully. Then he walked over to Willoughby. ‘Anything?’

  Willoughby rose from his knees in weary stages, grimacing. ‘This back of mine,’ he gasped, ‘it’s killing me.’ There were beads of sweat on his forehead and on his upper lip. It was nearly noon, and he was badly in need of a drink. ‘There’s prints, of course,’ he said, ‘four or five different sets, one of them bloody, which I suppose it’s safe to say would be the reverend father’s.’ He lifted his lip at one side in what was meant to be a grin but looked more like a snarl. ‘Must have been one strong boyo, to get himself from the landing down to here.’

  ‘Maybe he was carried.’

  Willoughby shrugged. He was as bored as the other two. They were, all three of them, bored and cold and eager to get the hell out of this big chilly gloomy bloody place and head back as fast as their black van would carry them, and the snow would permit, to their cosy quarters in Pearse Street. They were Dubliners – being in the country gave them the jitters.

  ‘What about the candlestick?’ Strafford asked.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Any prints on it?’

  ‘Haven’t tested it yet. I had a quick look – seems to have been wiped clean.’

  ‘This is going to be heap big trouble,’ said Harry Hall, slowly shaking his head from side to side. ‘A lot of fingers could get badly burned here.’

  Strafford looked at the nicotine stains on the big man’s meaty hands.

  ‘Did someone call for an ambulance?’ he asked.