Himself(71)

Desmond nods, hesitantly. ‘He would have, yes.’

Johnnie gets to his feet and saunters to the nearby flowerbed scratching his flute. He begins to dress, lifting one thin limb, then another, into spectral linen and tweed.

Mahony forces himself to say it. ‘And her body?’

Desmond shakes his head. ‘When we came back there was no sign of it. Thomas looked.’

One question leads to another. ‘Where did it happen?’

‘In the forest.’

Mahony’s heart pitches. He wants to cover his ears. Or shout. Or punch the stricken man sitting next to him into the ground. He does none of these things.

‘Whereabouts in the forest?’ Mahony says, his voice cold, calm.

‘I don’t know.’

Mahony speaks slowly, trying to make sense of it. ‘And you never told anyone what had happened that night? What Thomas saw?’

Desmond starts to cry again. ‘I couldn’t. I’d made a promise to him.’

Then Mahony remembers: the child found in the arms of her father, the husband running out of the door, never to be seen again.

‘What if Thomas had killed her? Did you ever think about that?’

‘He couldn’t have.’ Desmond’s face is bewildered. ‘She was already gone when he found her.’

‘And you believed that?’

‘Thomas was a good man. He took me fishing as a boy.’

‘Jesus, Desmond, he took you f*cking fishing?’

Desmond looks at Mahony. How can he describe Thomas as he’d known him, with his slow smile and his hat pulled down? The hand-tied flies Thomas would make for him and the patient catechism that took place on peaceful banks, on the wild brown trout and the salmon, on the weather and the water.

‘Thomas would never have hurt his own daughter,’ Desmond says.

Mahony can’t trust himself to talk.

They sit in silence. Mahony lights another fag and smokes it through to the end, bitterly. Desmond sits next to him, demolished.

‘But not to tell a soul?’ says Mahony. ‘A young girl murdered and you tell f*cking no one. You’re going to have to help me out with this one, pal.’

‘I wanted to, but Thomas said that they mightn’t believe us, that they might say we did it.’

‘Why would they say that, Desmond? Give me a f*cking reason.’

Desmond can’t look him in the eye. ‘I’d been involved with her.’

Mahony stares at the man in horror, as the thought of Shauna in the forest with her dress up to her elbows rolls through his mind. ‘Oh Jesus Christ, you’re my father.’

‘No.’ Desmond shakes his head. ‘I’m not. I was with her before that.’

Mahony breathes out. He searches in his pocket for another fag with his heart jumping. This man will kill him.

‘Orla had been asking me for money. I’d just got married, Mahony. She threatened to tell my wife. What I’d done with her was illegal.’

Mahony regards him with amazement. ‘For f*ck’s sake, Desmond.’

Desmond starts crying again.

Johnnie yawns and takes out his pocket watch.

‘Get your boots on,’ says Mahony. ‘You’re coming with me.’

‘Where to?’

‘To find Thomas Sweeney.’

Johnnie starts to roll up his sleeves.

In the library Mrs Cauley is woken by a loud rumbling sound. She opens her eyes in time to see a billowing avalanche of soot spew from the fireplace and roll towards her.

She watches with wonder as the cloud of soot comes to a halt at the foot of her bed. It hangs there for a while, arranging itself into a denser patch of a darker pitch. The morning light catches the particles as they move, giving the cloud a showy kind of shimmer. Mrs Cauley leans forward and pokes it with her walking stick. It quivers for a moment then reforms.

An excitable person, thinks Mrs Cauley, with a cracked sort of nature, would remark on the fact that the soot is taking on a definite kind of shape there. Mrs Cauley scratches her scalp as a wolfhound-shaped cloud of soot cocks its head to one side and looks back at her.

Something catches Mahony’s eye: a waist-high blur moving parallel to him in the field beyond. When Mahony stops, the blur stops too.

‘Let me take a piss, Desmond.’ Mahony walks over and the blur draws nearer to waver behind a stone wall.

He stares at it. ‘Ida?’

Her face is unfocused, blurred. All Mahony can really make out is the blue of her cardigan and a blotch of bright hair. Her voice comes to him low and hissy. ‘Get away. Go home. You will get hurted. He will hurt you.’

Mahony glances over his shoulder. Desmond is holding the map at arm’s length and squinting through a lopsided pair of glasses. ‘Wha’ him?’

The blur dances, its voice an angry sob. ‘You’ll get hurted. To death even.’

Mahony realises that Ida is stamping with frustration.

‘We’re going into the forest to look for Thomas Sweeney.’

‘No.’

The blur suddenly fades.

‘Ida?’

He can’t see her but he knows that she’s still there and that she’s frightened. He can feel it. He can feel the careful step of her foot on broken twigs and the folding of her dimpled knees as she crawls further inside a sprawling hawthorn. He knows that she is hunkering down and covering her ears. He can almost hear her hum her happy tune.