Snow Read online

  He went out to the hall and tried on a number of the pairs of wellington boots standing under the coat rack, until he found a pair that fitted him at least approximately. Then he put on his coat and hat and knotted his scarf at his throat and stepped out into the cold white glare of the winter afternoon.

  The snow had stopped, but from the big-bellied look of the sky it was certain that there was more to come.

  He walked around by the side of the house, pausing now and then to get his bearings. The place in general was seriously in need of repair and renovation. The frames of the big windows were decayed and their putty was crumbling, and there were cracks running up the walls where growths of buddleia had lodged, their branches leafless now. When he looked up, craning his neck, he saw how the gutters sagged, and the way the protruding edges of roof slates had been splintered and left jagged by countless winter storms. A warm wave of nostalgia washed over him. Only someone who had been born and brought up in a place like this, as he had, could know the particular, piercing fondness he felt before the sad spectacle of so much decay and decrepitude. Helpless nostalgia was the curse of his steadily dwindling caste.

  He came to the fire escape that he had seen earlier, through the other side of the French window on the first floor. Down here, the rust damage was much worse than it was higher up, and he was surprised the thing was still standing. The snow was undisturbed around the base of it. No one had climbed these steps recently – no one, he felt sure, had climbed them in a very long time. Heaven help anyone on the upper floors caught unawares by fire. He had a special fear of being trapped in a burning building – what a way to die that would be!

  Now, for the second time that day, he sensed that he was being watched. He turned his head this way and that, squinting against the blinding glare of the pristine white lawn stretching away to the edge of a dense wood. He wondered if this was the copse Lettie had pointed out to him earlier, from the drawing-room window, where the timber had been felled. But no, it was too extensive to be called a copse. The black-branched trees seemed to press forward with desperate eagerness, as though they might at any moment break through the barbed-wire fence that was its border and make their determined way, hobbling along with their roots dragging, across the open expanse before them, to crowd about the house and thrash their limbs furiously against its defenceless walls. As a countryman, Strafford had a healthy respect for Mother Nature, but he had never been able quite to love her. Even in adolescence, when he read Keats and Wordsworth and became a pantheist, he had preferred to watch the grand old lady’s cavortings from a safe distance. Nowadays, he saw behind the birdsong and the blossom only the endless and bloody struggle for dominance and survival. As Superintendent Hackett liked to say, doing his horny-handed son-of-the-soil routine, when you spent your day dealing with criminals, it was hard at night to love the little foxes.

  By now he was convinced he wasn’t alone out here, but his eyes were still dazzled by the contrast between the snowy lawn and the dimness of the trees beyond, and he could see no one. Then something moved, in a way that no wind-blown branch or bird-disturbed tangle of twigs would move. He put up a hand to shade his eyes, and made out what seemed to be a face, although at such a distance it was no more than a pale smudge against the darker background of the trees. But yes, it was a face, surrounded by what looked like a rusted halo of hair. Then suddenly it was gone, as if it had never been there. Was it a person he had seen, or only a trick of the snow-light reflected against the mud-brown depths of the trees?

  He felt all at once both exposed and isolated. Who was the watcher, himself or the one who had been there and then vanished?

  He set off across the lawn. The snow was deep, and each footprint he left behind him was filled at once with a wedge of shadow. When he came to the spot at the perimeter of the wood where he had seen, or imagined he had seen, the figure watching him, he found a stand of bracken had been trodden on and crushed. He clambered over the barbed wire and pushed forward into the trees.

  It was sheltered in here, and there were only scant patches of snow on the ground, too few and too scattered to register the trail of whoever it was had gone before him. There were no pathways, yet instinct guided him onwards, deeper and deeper into the wood. The tips of twigs whipped at him, and immense arcs of bramble reached out their thorned antennae and snagged his coat and the legs of his trousers. He pushed on, not to be daunted. He was nothing but a hunter now, his nerves stretched, his mind empty, his breathing shallow and the blood fairly racing in his veins. He felt the thrill of being afraid. The watched watcher, the hunted hunter.

  He spotted something glinting darkly on a leaf, and reached down a fingertip and touched it. Blood, and it was fresh.

  On through the sullenly resistant trees he pushed, watching out for more droplets of blood, and finding them.

  After a little way he stopped. He seemed to have registered the sound before he heard it. Ahead of him, someone was chopping something, not wood, but something like it. He stood and listened, taking in distractedly the smells around him, the sharp scent of pine, the soft brown savour of loam. He went forward again, more cautiously, thrusting branches out of his way and ducking to avoid the briars. He might have been the hero in a fairy tale, hacking his way towards the enchanted castle in the magically still and frozen forest.

  Briar rose – Rosa rubiginosa. From where had he dredged that up? It fascinated him, the things his mind knew without knowing it knew them.

  He was cold by now, seriously cold. His trench coat was absurdly inadequate out here. Shivers ran through him, and he had to grit his teeth to keep them from chattering. One of the borrowed wellington boots, the left one, must have a split in it, for he could feel an icy wetness seeping into the heel of his sock. He felt ridiculous. It was as if he had been lured into the wood only to be laughed at and made mock of.

  The ground sloped suddenly, and he almost slipped on the half-frozen mush of sodden leaves underfoot. He paused to listen. All he could hear was his own laboured breathing. The chopping sound ahead had stopped. He went on again, down the slope, skidding and sliding, grabbing at low-hanging leafless branches to keep himself upright. At last he came to the deep heart of the wood. Here, a kind of twilight reigned. He could feel his heart pounding in its cage. Think no thought, he told himself, merely be, like an animal. His years as a policeman had taught him to be not fearless, only to disregard the fact of being afraid.

  The gloom began to lighten, and in a moment he came to the edge of a clearing, a sort of hollow basin at the very bottom of the wood. A carpet of snow had settled here unhindered, on this open ground.

  In the middle of the clearing there sat, or rather squatted, an ancient caravan, painted green, with an impossibly narrow door and a low rectangular window at the back. Strafford experienced a faint shock of recognition. His father had acquired one just like it, when one summer he conceived the idea of taking the family on a touring holiday to France. Nothing had come of this plan, of course, and the thing had been left to rot in the stable yard, canted forward dejectedly and resting on the tip of its tow bar. This one was wheel-less, its paint was peeling, and the back window was webbed over with the grime of years. How it had got here, so deep into the wood, he couldn’t think. At one corner of its rounded roof a tall metal chimney stuck up, crooked and comical, like a battered stovepipe hat, chugging out sluggish puffs of dirty-grey smoke.

  A sawn-off block of railway sleeper was set as a step in front of the door.

  On the ground, to the left, there was a circular, ragged bloodstain, some three feet in diameter. The fresh blood, so stark against the snow, put Strafford in mind of something that it took him some moments to identify. It was the Wicked Stepmother’s blood-red, flesh-white, irresistible apple. He did not think it would be a sleeping beauty, reclining on her virgin couch, that he would find here today.

  He stepped out of the shelter of the trees and crossed the clearing. The soles of his rubber boots squeaked in the snow. The s
ound, impossible to suppress, would alert whoever might be inside the caravan to his approach.

  The door was fitted with an old car-door handle, pitted and scratched. Strafford lifted a hand and made a knuckle, but before he had a chance to knock, suddenly the door was flung open, with such force that he had to step back smartly on to the snow to avoid being struck.

  A figure loomed bear-like before him. It was a figure he recognised. Big shoulders, broad brow, red hair the colour of bronze in the light of the doorway. Fonsey, the feral boy, in dungarees, hobnailed boots, a soiled woollen vest and the leather jacket with the moth-eaten fur collar.

  It took Strafford a moment to recover. He introduced himself by his surname only. Young men of the likes of Fonsey were leery of policemen. Strafford glanced at the bloodstain on the ground. ‘Been hunting, have you?’

  ‘I have permission,’ Fonsey said. ‘I wasn’t poaching.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were poaching,’ the detective answered. ‘It was just’ – he glanced again at the stain in the snow – ‘with so much blood, it must be some big beast you caught.’ He moved forward and set one foot on the makeshift step. ‘Look, do you mind if I come in for a minute? It’s cold out here.’

  He could see Fonsey calculating how unwise it would be to refuse him entry, and deciding it was better not to find out. He was young, probably no more than eighteen or nineteen, suspicious, and vulnerable despite his bulk. He was missing a front tooth. The rectangular gap looked very stark and black, like the mouth of a deep cave seen from the far side of a valley. It was, Strafford thought, the most unnerving thing about him.

  The caravan inside smelled of paraffin and candle grease and rancid meat, of sweat and smoke and dirty socks. Under the window, on a table there – it was hardly more than a Formica-covered shelf, hinged to the wall and braced on two front legs – a skinned and spatchcocked rabbit was laid out on a sheet of butcher’s paper, ready to be cooked.

  ‘Not so big a beast after all,’ Strafford observed. Fonsey gazed at him, frowning, not understanding. Strafford smiled. ‘I’m interrupting your dinner.’

  ‘I only lit the stove a minute ago,’ Fonsey answered. The missing tooth gave him a faint, whistling lisp. He nodded towards a pot-bellied stove, behind the sooty window of which a weak flame was sputtering. A few cut lengths of wood had been set leaning in a circle against its bulbous sides. ‘I’m waiting for the sticks to dry out.’

  He had shut the caravan door, and now in the enclosed space the foetid odours pressed in on Strafford. He tried to breathe through his mouth, but still the smells were there.

  He took in the place at a glance. Everything seemed to have been whittled down in order to fit in the confined space. There were two narrow bunks, facing each other on either side of the rear window, a tall, shallow cabinet of shinily veneered wood, and a pair of ancient bentwood chairs. At the front end of the room there was a sort of cramped little kitchen. On a small table with long legs stood a miniature cooker connected by a rubber tube to a yellow gas canister underneath the table. There was a sink, and a draining board with hooks above it on which to hang cups and a few cooking utensils.

  Strafford felt the hulking boy watching him, and heard him breathing. He turned to him, taking in more fully the bagginess of the dungarees and the stains of various hues on his vest, and a pang of pity ran through him like a tiny quick electric charge. Fonsey. From Alphonsus, that would be. He looked like a big baffled child, a waif lost down here in the depths of the wood. How had he come to this, living alone in this desolate place?

  And the parents who had burdened him with that ridiculous name – Alphonsus! – what had become of them?

  ‘You heard what happened at the house?’ Strafford asked. ‘You know a priest was killed?’

  Fonsey nodded. His eyes were a soiled shade of yellowish green, with incongruously long lashes, curving upwards, like a girl’s. On his broad forehead there was an angry rash of pimples, and there was a running sore at one side of his lower lip that he kept picking at. To the other smells he added his own raw tang, a blend of leather, hay, horse-dust and swarming hormones.

  His hands were huge, and redly raw from the cold – he had just come in from butchering the rabbit. Would they be capable, those hands, of stabbing a man in the neck and mutilating him where he fell? But hands are only hands, Strafford reflected. Would Fonsey himself have it in him to murder a priest?

  A draught from somewhere brought a particularly gamey whiff from the table where the rabbit lay in a small, purplish heap.

  ‘Tell me, Fonsey,’ Strafford said, in a conversational tone, ‘where were you last night?’ He glanced about again, in a purposely distracted manner. ‘Were you here? Did you sleep here?’

  ‘I’m always here,’ Fonsey answered simply. ‘Where else would I be?’

  ‘So this is your home, is it? What about your family, where do they live?’

  ‘Have none,’ the boy said, without emphasis, stating the bleak, bald fact for what it was.

  He had suffered in his life, that much was clear. Strafford could sense the boy’s dull, abiding anguish. It was almost a smell, like the thick, flesh-warm stink of the meat on the table.

  ‘Are you from the town?’ Strafford asked. Fonsey looked blank again. ‘I mean, were you born here, in Ballyglass?’

  The boy turned his face away and muttered something under his breath.

  ‘What was that?’ Strafford was keeping up a friendly, soothing tone.

  ‘I said, I don’t know where I’m from.’

  There was nothing to say to that.

  Strafford had assumed at first that the boy must be mentally slow. He saw now, however, that despite his shambling gait and hulking frame – he was built top-heavy, like a buffalo, and was so tall he had to bend his head to fit under the low ceiling of the caravan – he was deceptively alert, with even a glint of cunning. He was a creature in hiding, hoping the hounds might eventually pass by and go in search of likelier game.

  Strafford held out his hands to the stove. It was giving off only the faintest glimmer of warmth.

  ‘Did you know Father Lawless?’ he asked casually. ‘Father Tom – did you know him?’

  Fonsey shrugged. ‘I’d see him around the place. He have a horse here. Mister Sugar. Great bloody beast’ – he pronounced it baste – ‘seventeen hands, with a mad eye on him.’

  ‘Did you look after him? – Mr Sugar?’

  ‘I look after them all, all the mounts. That’s my job.’

  Strafford nodded. He could feel the boy willing him to be gone.

  ‘So you didn’t have much to do with the priest,’ he said, ‘with Father Lawless, other than to look after his horse. Did he talk to you, at all?’

  Fonsey frowned, and his eyes went vague, as if it were a trick question. He touched a fingertip to the sore on his mouth. ‘How do you mean, talk?’

  ‘Well, you know – did he chat to you, did you talk together about horses, and so on?’

  The boy slowly shook his great round head, with its broad brow and its tangle of matted curls. His hair, in the dimness of the caravan, had deepened in colour, and gleamed like burnt toffee now.

  ‘Chat?’ he said, as if it were a new and novel word. ‘No, he didn’t chat to me.’

  ‘Because, you know, he had a reputation for being very – well, very outgoing and friendly.’

  There was a pause, then Fonsey gave a low snicker, pursing his glistening pink lips and touching his finger again to the weeping cold sore on his lip.

  ‘Ah, sure, they’re all that,’ he said. ‘The priests are all friendly.’

  And he laughed.

  9

  The way was steeper on this side of the clearing. Fonsey had pointed him in this direction, saying it would lead him straight to the road to Ballyglass House. He clambered awkwardly up the slope, driving the heels of his boots deep into the leaf mould for traction, afraid he might take a fall. He pictured himself sprawled deep in a patch of brambles with a broken ankl
e, calling for help in a voice becoming ever feebler, as the winter twilight turned to night and darkness settled over him and he froze to death.

  When he got to the road at last, he realised he didn’t know in which direction to turn for Ballyglass House, and stood looking vaguely this way and that, then shrugged and set off to the right.

  Frozen grass crackled under his boots. A hunched crow, perched on a high branch, eyed him as he went past and opened wide its black beak and cawed at him.

  The road was little used. He had gone what he thought must be at least a quarter of a mile when a cattle lorry came rattling up behind him, and he stopped and stood well in from the verge to let it pass. The driver, seated high up behind the spattered windscreen, sounded his horn at him in cheerful derision.

  He walked on. He was cold to the bone. He felt a surge of anger, tinged with self-pity. He should have listened to his father and gone for the law. He would be a successful barrister by now, with a wig and a gown and a starched white collar, strutting about the Four Courts, discussing briefs and exchanging gossip about his clients, and drinking port of an evening in the warmth of a Dublin pub all mahogany and brass and black-and-white tiles. Yes, that was the life he had spurned, and now here he was, trudging along a country byroad in the cutting air of a winter’s eve, sullen and solitary and furious at everything, himself especially.

  Now he heard a second vehicle approaching behind him, and he stepped back to allow it to pass. It was an old grey two-door Ford van. High and squat, with its humped back and long, bulbous front grille and staring headlamps set atop broad grey mudguards, it bore a striking resemblance to a moose. Stencilled in large black lettering on the side of the vehicle was the legend: