Snow Read online

  JEREMIAH RECK

  FAMILY BUTCHER

  QUALITY MEATS

  Instead of passing him by, the van drew to a rattling stop. The driver was a big soft-faced man of sixty or so, with oiled hair brushed sleekly back from a high, smooth forehead. He had glossy brown eyes, the lids of which drooped at the corners – Einstein’s eyes, Strafford thought, at once mournful and merry. This could only be Mr Jeremiah Reck himself. He leaned across the bench seat and pushed open the passenger door.

  ‘Get in, get in, my man,’ he said, with a lordly flourish. ‘Who do you think you are, Scott of the Antarctic?’

  Strafford did as he was bade and climbed up on to the seat. A blast of hot dry air from the heater blew in his face, and at once his sinuses began to sting.

  The driver had turned sideways the better to study his passenger, and now he put out a hand. ‘I am Reck,’ he said. ‘And who might you be, my pale friend, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘My name is Strafford.’

  ‘Strafford with an r?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Ah. Then I believe we’re to have the pleasure, nay, the honour, of your company, tonight.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Strafford said, not understanding.

  ‘At the Sheaf of Barley. I am that Reck.’

  ‘But your sign says—?’

  ‘Yes, I’m that Reck also. Butcher, grocer, publican and guesthouse-keeper. A man of parts, you might say, and you’d be right.’ He joggled the gearstick and released the clutch, the wheels spun on the icy road and then caught hold, and the van leaped forward with a lurch. ‘May I ask, Mr Strafford, what you’re doing out here on these wild ways on such a day as this? Where were you coming from?’

  ‘I was down in the woods.’

  Reck nodded. He had the softly breathing demeanour of certain large slow men who live in contentment with themselves and the world. So great was his girth that the bulge of his lower belly was wedged under the steering wheel. Strafford leaned back on the creaky leather seat. His toes, blown upon by the lower part of the labouring heater, were beginning to warm up.

  ‘Down in the woods, eh?’ Reck said thoughtfully, and hummed a snatch of the tune of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ – ‘dum-t’dum t’dittity-dum’ – and then made a whistling sound by sucking air in through his front teeth. ‘Having a word with the Horrible Boy, were we?’

  ‘The—?’

  ‘Fonsey the Fierce.’

  ‘Yes, I was, as a matter of fact. Is he fierce?’

  ‘I should say so. He’s our Gargantua, or do I mean Pantagruel? It’s many years since I read that book. I know him as the Horrible Boy. It’s a term of affection, you understand.’

  ‘What’s his other name? – or has he got one?’

  ‘Indeed he has. Welch, he is called. You would pronounce it Walsh, but down here, in the County of the Uncouth, we say Welch. His mother was one Kitty Welch – or Walsh, if you insist.’

  ‘Does she still live here, in Ballyglass?’

  ‘No. She’s off in England somewhere. Manchester, I believe.’

  ‘And his father?’

  Reck produced a ripe, rumbling chuckle.

  ‘Well now,’ he said, ‘our Fonsey, you see, is another instance of that rare phenomenon, the immaculate conception. Rare, I say, but the Star of Bethlehem does put in uncommonly frequent appearances over this fertile land of ours, as I’m sure you’re well aware.’

  He paused, and made that sucking sound with his teeth again. It was a kind of whistling in reverse.

  ‘Kitty put him in an orphanage before she went off – she was criticised for it in the town, but what choice had she? – and when he was old enough to use his fists, he became obstreperous and was packed off to a penitential colony in the west, a place called Carricklea, known and feared by all youthful delinquents – no doubt you’ve heard of it? When he came out, years later, the Lady Reck and myself looked after him for a while. I took him on as an apprentice at the butchering, but he hadn’t the stomach for it. He didn’t like poleaxing poor dumb creatures, any more than I do, but I operate on the principle that if you’re prepared to eat them, you must be prepared to murder them. Anyway, came a day and our Fonsey was gone from us at the Sheaf, and the next we heard of him he was living in a caravan down in Ballyglass Wood, minding the horses for Their Worships up at the House. He does the odd delivery for me still.’ He paused again, shaking his large smooth globular head. ‘Poor Fonsey, he lives a hard life, and deserved better.’

  ‘Why did he leave?’ Strafford asked.

  ‘Why did he leave Mrs Reck and myself? Who can say? The ways of the wild are not our ways, and Fonsey is the wilderness itself. The Lord only knows what they did to him at Carricklea. He wouldn’t say, and I stopped asking. The scars showed, however, physical and spiritual.’

  Through a rent in the clouds low in the western sky the setting sun appeared, shedding a dark-gold glare. Reck asked:

  ‘Would it be indiscreet to enquire what business it was you were conducting with young Fonsey, down in the woods?’

  ‘Oh, I talk to a great many people. It’s what detectives do. Dull work.’

  ‘So you weren’t following a “definite line of inquiry”, as they say in the papers?’

  ‘No, no. There are no such lines, as yet.’

  Rounding a bend, they almost ran into a flock of sheep, tended by a boy in a coat that was far too big for him and belted at the waist with a twist of yellow binder twine. Reck stopped the van and the two men sat stranded amid a moving sea of dirty grey fleece. Strafford idly studied the milling animals, admiring their long aristocratic heads and the neat little hoofs, like carved nuggets of coal, on which they trotted so daintily. He was struck too by their protuberant and intelligent-seeming shiny black eyes, expressive of stoical resignation tinged with the incurable shame of their plight, avatars of an ancient race, being herded ignominiously along a country road by a snot-nosed brat with a stick.

  ‘An interesting creature, the sheep,’ Jeremiah Reck observed. ‘“Their cry has not changed since Arcady” – I think I have that right. May I enquire, sir, if you are a bookish man?’

  ‘I read when I have time.’

  ‘Ah, but you should make time. The book is one of our great inventions as a species.’ The sheep passed on, and the butcher engaged the gears. ‘You’re not a native of these parts yourself,’ he said. It was not a question.

  ‘No, but not far off – Roslea.’

  ‘Over beyond New Ross? Well, at least you’re a Wexford man.’

  Strafford smiled to himself, amused by that ‘at least’.

  They drove on. Strafford found soothing the sound of the van’s tyres sizzling in the slush.

  ‘I take it you’ve heard of the death of Father Lawless,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I did, I did. News travels fast, round these parts. What happened to the poor fellow, at all?’

  ‘Well, he died.’

  ‘That’s what you might call an unforthcoming answer,’ Reck said, ‘—if it is an answer at all.’ He whistled for a while through his teeth. It was a thing that could become annoying, over time. Strafford felt he should sympathise with Mrs Reck. ‘They’re saying he fell down the stairs in the middle of the night,’ the butcher went on, ‘but if I were asked, I’d guess there was more to it than that.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Yes. For instance, I wouldn’t think the authorities up in Dublin would send down a detective inspector to investigate an accident, now, would they? They’d have left it to the local man.’

  ‘Sergeant – Rochford, is it?’

  ‘Radford.’ Reck chuckled. ‘Our bold Dan the Man, Sheriff of Deadwood Gulch.’

  ‘I haven’t met him,’ Strafford said, looking out at the snow-clad trees passing by the window. ‘He’s been unwell, it seems.’

  ‘Unwell?’ Reck pursed his lips. ‘Is that so? Hmm.’

  Strafford had already guessed the nature of Radford’s unwellness.

 
; ‘The ’flu, I’m told,’ he said.

  ‘Ah. The ’flu. It’s going round – Mrs Reck had it, but is recovered. I’ve so far been spared, myself.’ He paused, doing his whistle. ‘You know the Radfords lost a son?’

  ‘Lost?’

  ‘He drowned. Only a young fellow.’

  Strafford turned to look out of the window again. A dead son, a father left to his sorrow.

  ‘Very sad,’ he said.

  Reck’s whistle, he thought, was the sound of a singing kettle coming to the boil.

  ‘So Fonsey’s father is an unknown quantity,’ he said. ‘Is that the case?’

  ‘Well, Kitty Welch is bound to know, but she’s not saying. For my part, I have my suspicions, but I keep them to myself. Poor Kitty wasn’t a bad girl, only a little skittish, when the moon was full. You would have to forgive her – though not many did, in this parish.’ He sighed. ‘People can be very censorious, don’t you find?’

  They rounded the bend, and there was Ballyglass House, looming out of the frozen mist off at the end of the winding drive, its chimneys smoking like a battery of cannons.

  Reck drew the van to a halt. The lights were on in the downstairs windows of the house, for the winter afternoon was dying fast in the western sky, where more snow clouds were massing.

  ‘Will you care to dine with us, later?’ Reck asked, in his amiably rounded tones.

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I shall convey that information to M’Lady Reck. Something modest but nutritious, yes? And tell me now, is there anything you will not eat?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I confess to an aversion to the brassicas, myself, and in particular’ – he sank his voice to a shuddering whisper – ‘the Brussels sprout.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll eat anything,’ Strafford said.

  ‘Within reason?’

  ‘Within reason. Maybe I could telephone you to let you know when I’ll be with you?’

  Reck nodded absently, peering through the windscreen at the house.

  ‘A remarkable family, the Osbornes,’ he said, ‘remarkable in many ways. You’ll have met the second Mrs Osborne?’ He paused, still gazing up at the house, nodding slowly and doing his indrawn whistle. ‘And you’ll know the first one died in similar circumstances to Father Tom?’ He turned a lively eye on Strafford. ‘I fear that staircase must be jinxed.’

  ‘Thank you for the lift,’ Strafford said, opening the door. ‘I’ll walk from here. And I’ll see you later. If I’m going to be late I’ll be sure to telephone. If I am late, will you leave out a key?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, I’ll be at my post. The true landlord never sleeps.’ He watched Strafford as he stepped out on to the mixture of mud and snow in the gateway. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe the Horrible Boy, fearsome as he is, would have it in him to murder a priest, him that couldn’t choke a chicken without shedding a tear.’

  10

  The house was set on a rise, and as he approached it along the drive it seemed to loom out over him and open its mock-Palladian wings as if to enfold him in its sombre embrace. He wasn’t so fanciful as to take inanimate objects for anything other than they were. No house was haunted, no ghosts walked. Yet not a full day had passed since a man had died here, stabbed in the neck and mutilated and left to lie in a mess of his own blood and breathe his last. Surely such a violent act should leave something behind, a trace, a tremor in the air, like the hum that lingers when a bell stops tolling?

  He clung to the belief that death was more than mere extinction. His grandfather had been a bishop. The genes will out.

  A bat flitted above him, its wings feathering the encroaching dark.

  He tried to feel how it would have felt, to be stabbed and slashed, to fall and bleed and die. When he was young and still a trainee in Templemore, he had imagined that as a policeman he would be granted a special kind of knowledge. He would learn things that other people didn’t know, things of life and, far more significantly, things of death, and dying. A foolish expectation, of course – to live was to live, to die was to die. It was what everyone did. What was there for a detective to detect that other people weren’t privy to?

  Yes, he had been deluded in believing that at Templemore he would be received into a secret brotherhood, would be introduced, like an alchemist of old, to a body of arcane and secret knowledge. He had thought he would be not as others were, groping their way purblind through the world, dulled against everything except the simplest affects, the ordinary urges. He would be among the elect, above the world and its trivial doings. A fantasy, of course. And yet.

  He had no one, no wife, no children, no lover – no friends, even. Nor had he a family, to speak of – a few cousins he occasionally saw, and an uncle in South Africa who used to send a card every Christmas but then had stopped, having died, probably. There was his father, of course. He thought of him, however, not as a separate entity, but as in some way a part of himself, the tree of which he was an offshoot, and which he would soon overshadow and, in time, outgrow.

  None of this troubled him, or not seriously. He didn’t really know himself, and didn’t care to. His life was a state of peculiar calm, of tranquil equilibrium. His strongest drive was curiosity, the simple wish to know, to be let in on what was hidden from others. Everything to him had the aspect of a cipher. Life was a mundane mystery, the clues to the solving of which were strewn all about, concealed or, far more fascinatingly, hidden in plain view, for all to see but for him alone to recognise.

  The dullest object could, for him, flare into sudden significance, could throb in the sudden awareness of itself. There were clues, and he was their detector.

  It was this train of thought that somehow brought up the image of Geoffrey Osborne’s pale, etiolated wife. He saw her again, saw her, here in the cold blue air of evening, as she had appeared that morning in the kitchen doorway. Standing there, she had seemed not so much present, but to tremble, rather, on the brink of being. As he walked now, stumbling clumsily in someone else’s leaky wellingtons, he found himself saying her name aloud, breathing it out on breaths that billowed like wafts of ectoplasm – Sylvia. It seemed an invocation. A summoning of sorts.

  What was this sensation that was flooding through him, wholly novel and yet somehow familiar? Surely he wasn’t falling in love, with a woman he had seen for no more than a moment? Love? That would knock him clean off his plinth.

  *

  The actual Mrs Osborne, when he encountered her again, was nothing like the daemonic figure of his fevered imaginings in the darkness of the driveway.

  He pulled the rope that worked the doorbell. Mrs Duffy, when she opened the door, gave him an odd look that seemed to him at once complicitous and cautionary. Mrs Osborne, she said, had been asking for him. This made him frown. He didn’t like coincidences – she had been asking for him while he was thinking of her – and he felt a stirring of unease.

  He found the lady herself in a little parlour off the main hall. It seemed to be her private domain, and all her own work. There was a preponderance of chintz and faded silk, and a liberal strewing of cushions and an array of brass pots and crystal vases. Miniature china figurines stood about in attentive poses, got up in capes and crinolines and knee breeches and cocked hats. The overall effect was uncanny, and faintly comical.

  Mrs Osborne was seated on a small, high sofa upholstered in yellow satin. Her dress of dark-blue chiffon had a deep collar, a tight waist, and a wide skirt that fanned out symmetrically on either side of her, arranged just so, its pleats suggestive of the half-shell on which Botticelli’s Venus skims. She wore a string of pearls about her pale neck, and an emerald brooch in the shape of a scarab was pinned to the front of her dress. A small table before her was laid for afternoon tea. There were jugs, silver cruets, bone china cups, little knives, little forks, little spoons. Slices of assorted cakes were arranged on delicate little plates.

  Strafford took all this in at a glance, and his heart san
k. A star of reflected light on the cheek of the teapot seemed to wink at him in spiteful mirth. He felt a flush of embarrassment at the memory of the gusty emotions he had entertained out on the drive. Love me, love my knick-knacks.

  ‘There you are!’ Mrs Osborne exclaimed, her smile showing off two rows of small, even teeth, the top front two of which were lightly flecked with lipstick. She was as frothy and frilled as the gewgaws crowding all round her, and her eyes sparkled and her cheek was flushed. Strafford’s heart plunged a fathom deeper still.

  Mrs Osborne patted the place beside her on the sofa, inviting him to sit. He pretended not to notice. Instead, he fetched a chair, set it down in front of the tea table and sat stolidly upon it. His hostess frowned briefly, displeased by this rebuff, but then managed again a brilliant yet decidedly cockeyed smile. ‘Yes, of course,’ she murmured, ‘of course – this way we can see each other’s eyes. Much more friendly.’

  She seemed to him more than a little mad.

  Her hair, which had hung limp and lank that morning, was done up now in an elaborate eighteenth-century style. A thick braid was set tiara-like above her forehead, and at the sides there were bunches of curls that covered her ears. The heel of Strafford’s sock inside his shoe was still wet. The wetness was warm now, and this was worse than when it had been cold. He wished he could be outside again, in the night’s dank darkness. He would like to have been anywhere that was not this make-believe room, with its crowding trinkets and trifles. He felt like the White Rabbit.

  ‘Shall I be mummy?’ Mrs Osborne asked, and without waiting for him to reply set about pouring the tea. ‘One lump or two?’

  ‘No sugar, thank you.’

  ‘Milk?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Ah. You prefer it black. Good, so do I. Here you are.’

  The cup, when she passed it to him, rattled very slightly in its saucer. He balanced it on his knee, the tea untasted. ‘Mrs Osborne,’ he said, ‘I have to talk to you about last night.’