NINETEEN
Of the rooms Brond had filled with his presence, this was the shabbiest. Wearing a black overcoat that seemed too big for him, he sat in a tangle of blankets on a narrow bed. The room looked worse because of the neat respectability of the rest of the apartment. Primo had led me through past a woman and a young girl busy folding clothes into two open suitcases. As the woman looked up – pale round face, too tired to be any longer pretty – Primo said, ‘It’ll be all right Beth,’ and I knew she was his wife and the girl must be his daughter.
Once, hitchhiking, I had slept overnight in a doss house, which should have been an adventure but had left me feeling desolate. This room was like that, despite being neat enough and clean; it was a bleakness of the spirit. The only decoration was a photograph in a cheap wood frame hung over Brond’s head on the wall behind the bed. The photograph seemed to have been torn from a magazine and was deeply creased as if at one time it might have been carried folded in a wallet. Putting stuff like that on the wall was the kind of thing children did or what my parents would have called ‘the lowest of the low’, meaning those who were poorer than we were and feckless in their poverty.
‘Notice how human they are,’ Brond said, following my gaze to the photograph. ‘The little scrubbed sac naked between their legs like innocent testicles. Very human, helpless and detestable.’
‘Like Kilpatrick,’ I said, ‘or him.’ The newspaper on the bed lay open to display stately carriages in procession.
Primo made a sudden gesture at the corner of my vision and my mouth dried with fear. It had been he who had fetched me from Margaret Briody’s but we had travelled in the car in silence. I could have taken my chance to tell him what he had to be told, but I had thought first I wanted to confront Brond.
‘Or Muldoon,’ Brond said. ‘He was human enough surely.’
He got up and went over to the window. A restlessness flowed out of him I had not sensed before. Staring down as if watching something below, he asked, ‘You like Irish jokes? I remember. What about this one?’ He put a finger to his forehead in a parody of recollection and then tapped it on the air like a schoolmaster. ‘What do you call a man who sticks his finger up an Irishman’s arse? . . . No? A brain surgeon.’
He turned and came back to the bed.
‘Isn’t that the kind of joke you like?’
I picked up the newspaper.
‘Primo killed him – or you did,’ I said. ‘Primo was there though. He had to be to pull open the safety door. I’ve never met anyone else who could do that.’
Brond, not at all upset, looked on kindly.
‘You know, it’s silly to make yourself unhappy about that woman – the not so young woman – you called her . . .’
‘Jackie.’ Primo rumbled the single word.
‘We’ve all been foolish about some woman. It’s of no significance. Be grateful that you’re normal.’ His mesmerist’s hands formed a circle from which the abnormal were excluded. His hands made a language more absolute than speech. ‘It’s good to have feelings like that. You’re at a lucky age. It’s sad that she has to think of you as her husband’s murderer.’
I winced from the ugly word.
‘It was an accident.’
Brond smiled his kind smile and waited.
‘I want to see her. I could make her understand.’ The same fatal urge to accuse them came over me more recklessly. ‘If you won’t let me explain to her, I can explain to the police.’
‘An odd choice of a Lonely Hearts Bureau.’ Brond’s laughter sounded easy and genuine. I had felt that kind of release into laughter after finishing a diet of examinations or coming to the end of a visit home.
‘It was Primo and you at Riggs Lodge. You killed the old man there. You killed him and tied him with the same rope you used on Peter Kilpatrick.’
‘We never touched the boy Kilpatrick. Not when he was alive.’ It was Primo who thought that was worth denying. ‘Leaving him in that shed was a right Fenian trick.’
‘It was Kennedy who did it, don’t doubt that,’ Brond added. ‘And for the same motive that made him attack you. Unfairly in your case, of course – you don’t seem ever to have succeeded in getting his wife to bed.’
He dirtied the pity I felt for Jackie. I wanted to tell him what I felt for her – that I had never wanted to – he made everything confused.
‘No,’ I said. ‘They were tied with the same rope. The police told me that. Why use the same rope on the old man?’
‘The people I work for,’ Brond said, sounding unctuous, ‘wanted an act of terrorism that would make the public detest those who were accused of it. In any case, the old party in question,’ he tapped the newspaper with its images of a hearse and dignitaries and nodding plumes, ‘had become a confounded nuisance. Rash committments to business friends in Africa that were threatening to find their way out into the light . . . There’s an economy in such matters. His death solved one problem, and if it could be made to forestall another – the risk, however remote, of the natives here getting restless – so much the better.’
What was it the Canadian strategist at Professor Gracemount’s party had called Scotland? A valuable piece of real estate . . .
‘I understand,’ I said, but then I looked at Primo who was listening, and I didn’t understand at all. How could he accept this?
‘Do you?’ Brond asked. ‘I wonder if you really do. Those people I work for wanted a mischief, you know. If I hadn’t arranged it, there are others who would have managed something . . . not so elegant, perhaps. But that length of rope which worries you so much cleared away all our difficulties. I saw it at once, and Sawney agreed with me.’ He nodded at the big man, and, as late as that, I learned Primo’s real name. ‘We would give them the assasination they were demanding. We would let them break their scandal. We would even let them produce some poor misguided devils of dupes for a trial. But then, when all three rings of the circus are performing beyond recall, the defence will receive evidence which ties their murder case to that of a young man called Kilpatrick.’ He smiled disquietingly. ‘It’s possible at that point you might find yourself briefly the centre of attention. But don’t worry – the next stir of the pot will be to provide the defence with proof that both murders were committed by an obscure bookie’s clerk and lodging-house keeper called Kennedy. They’ll search for him – but he’s hidden where they’ll never dig to find him.’
I could see it all falling out as he described. He made it so easy to believe in him, even for me who knew better.
‘The damage then will be entirely the other way. All kinds of questions – about the preparation of the trial, about the prosecution’s carefully marshalled evidence – come next.’ But then I heard his tone alter, the subtlest of changes, as he said, ‘We could even provide the information that he was really Michael Dart – an Irish terrorist. A sleeper. This man who has disappeared – presumably gone on the run again. Sawney thinks that information wouldn’t help what we want to do. He’s right, but it’s there to be used. Anyway, the result is going to be very different from what my employers anticipated. Sawney and I see a little victory coming.’
As Sawney-Primo’s breath sighed in the silence, I heard that false note in Brond’s voice so clearly, like a secret he wanted me to share. He stood up, buttoning the black coat to his throat. I realised he intended to leave and that I would be alone with Primo.
‘As far as you are concerned, it’s over,’ he said smiling. ‘I make you that promise.’
No prison, no trial, no disgrace; not again that desolate time of going through bright streets as a prisoner? Had he that power? It came into my head that when a piece was taken en passant in the game of chess, the piece that took it was only another pawn like itself. In the old black overcoat, hesitating at the door, Brond dwindled. I would have passed him in the street without a glance as an elderly man down on his luck.