She looked flustered but got up. At the door, she asked, ‘Would you be wanting some tea?’
Before we could answer, Briody told her, ‘No. We’ll have our chat first.’
He waited until the door had closed and then, in a different tone, wondered aloud, ‘The University? Is that what you told my wife?’
It seemed to me Brond deliberately waited to let him take the next step.
‘I know the young fellow there. According to him, he’s a friend of Margaret’s. He’s here and then yesterday Margaret appears looking as if the world had stopped. Now three of you. What’s it about?’ He made a calculation then, like a light switching on as the notion took him. ‘Police! Is it police, you are?’
Brond waited appreciatively.
‘Not ordinary police,’ Liam Briody said. It wasn’t a question.
‘We’re interested in Margaret,’ Brond said at last.
‘She’s done nothing wrong.’
I admired that. The tone was very different from what I had taken to be his casual mocking attitude towards her.
‘I’m very willing to believe that,’ Brond said. ‘Although, of course, it’s not something that’s settled – not at this stage – not yet.’
‘She’s a good girl,’ Briody said sturdily, but he was no kind of match for Brond, who pressed people into the shape he wished.
‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with Michael Dart?’ Briody asked. Suddenly he looked like the old dealer in horses who came over from Cork to the market my father took me to as a boy; he would spit on his hand and shake with the man he was getting the better of to show the deal was made. He was a great one, that old man, for trading to and fro – giving to get, what you wanted for what he needed.
That was how I heard the story of Kennedy, who Briody told us was in reality a Southern Irishman called Michael Dart.
‘His father had been a hard core man who’d taken the gun with De Valera against the Free State. But that was a long time earlier – and this was before the new troubles and the new deaths. Then, in the North they went quietly collecting their welfare benefits and unemployment money; while in the Republic most of us were too busy trying to live to worry about the Border. But Francis Dart, Michael’s father, would still be arguing and living the old battles. Michael took in the talk of dead heroes with his mother’s milk. I think he must often have been with the Hound of Culann sitting at the knees of Sencha and Cathbad instead of labouring in the mud of a poor farm. When he was fifteen it came to be known that he was one of four that had boobytrapped an RUC post on the far side of the border. They blinded a fellow of twenty or so – a man with a young family. Both the hands on him were blown off by the same bomb. Michael was marked from that time on, and it’s true that some of the foolish young men thought he was a hero . . . It must be hard to be a hero when you’re only fifteen.’
‘How long did it take him and who did he kill?’ Brond asked.
Briody blinked at him.
‘You’ve worked it out. The last day I saw him I met him in the street. I wasn’t sure if I should speak with him for he and my brother had had hard words. I asked after his father – poor man, he was dead within the month, and I wouldn’t say Michael’s trouble wasn’t the larger part of it. Two days later the news was all over Ireland. Michael Dart and two others had raided a bank in Dublin. Something went wrong. The chief of them – an old fellow the boy looked up to – got into a panic. He made a hash of it somehow and they couldn’t get to the car and then he took a bullet in the leg. The third fellow threw down his weapon and ran for it. Michael stood over the old fellow and fought it out. He got to the car – God knows how for he had to carry the old one. Before night they’d recovered the car – with the old one sitting up dead in it for he must have taken another wound while the boy was carrying him. Michael Dart was away and one Garda dead and another fit for nothing after that with a bullet in his lung. I’ve heard tell the third fellow, the one who ran for it, was found dead later and that might have been Michael’s work too.
‘It must all have been planned the day I spoke to him, yet you would never have known for he was so merry and talkative. He was a reckless boy who could call birds down from the trees with the charm of him.’
He looked at us puzzled.
‘I knew him at once. Though he looked forty years older if the truth were known.’
‘Twenty years on the run will have rubbed off his charm,’ Brond said.
‘I’ve no doubt that’s true.’
After Briody we sat not talking. Brond seemed content to wait. Primo stood behind him – every so often he half turned to look out of the window. I was watching him when he leaned forward to check outside and then back so as not to be seen. I knew that someone must be at the back door. A minute later I thought I could hear voices and then that I was imagining them.
‘Was that what you wanted?’ Briody asked. His voice trembled, which upset me for he was a fine solid man, who had done nothing to have Brond set against him.
The noise of voices came loud, one dominant, a woman’s voice sharp and angry yet with that timbre so right it could be no one but Margaret. Next moment she was in the open door and looking at me as if I was alone in the room. Her face was full of hate.
‘Why aren’t you in prison? Oh, it’s not fair that you should be here.’
‘What’s he done?’ Briody asked, alarmed. What’s he done to you? was what he meant. And I almost shouted out, We only slept in the same bed. Nothing happened.
‘You killed him,’ she said, never taking her eyes from me. I had never seen such loathing. ‘Oh, I can’t understand or imagine it.’
But I was innocent of the death of the old politician. They had not needed to tell me it was his bony skull and noble skeleton that had been murdered in the hotel bed. Who else would cause such excitement? Even my father when he heard of it, though he would not be capable for any reason of tearing a human being to pieces, might manage a moment of hatred.
‘How could anybody do that?’ Margaret wondered. ‘To leave him out in the cold place to die.’
Then I knew she was talking about poor Kilpatrick and had been told that I had killed him.
FOURTEEN
When we came to Jackie’s house, Brond dealt brutally with her.
‘He has no right,’ I said, without believing it since Brond seemed to have the power to do whatever he wanted, ‘he has no right at all to go tramping round your house.’
Jackie huddled in a chair that seemed too large for her, and Primo gave less sign of having heard me than a rock in the Trow burn at home. He was not watching us but was simply there, while overhead Brond’s limping step passed from room to room.
She had been puzzled to see us on her doorstep. She started to ask me some question but Brond laid his hand on the door and with a steady pressure took it back out of her hand. Without haste he crowded her back and, Primo behind me, I had no choice but to follow him. It must have seemed to her like an assault of men. We filled the hall. Brond walked through into the front room and she followed him as if mesmerised.
‘Is your husband in the house?’
She shook her head.
‘He’s in serious trouble. Did you know that?’
‘Trouble?’
‘You know he’s done something. What’s the point of lying about it? Are you a political activist as well?’
‘Politics?’ She said it like a word in a foreign language and then stupidly, touchingly, said, ‘But he works for a bookmaker.’
‘Well, he’s miscalculated the odds this time,’ Brond said with the heavy humour of the dullest, most brutal of policemen, and Primo smiled.
Now, returned from searching upstairs, he began again, ‘Where is he? Out planting a bomb somewhere?’
She was astonished but behind that something else as well; as if, perhaps because she was Irish, only the mention of that word in this nightmare began a nightmarish possibility of sense.