The Searcher(123)
“Give us a proper look,” Mart says. He leans in and peers at Cal’s nose from various angles. “I’d say that’s broken.”
“Yeah, me too. It’s straight, though, or as straight as it ever was. It’ll heal.”
“It’d better. You don’t wanta lose your good looks, specially not now. What’s the story on the arm? Didja break that too?”
“Nah. I think I cracked my collarbone. Gave my knee a pretty good whack, too.”
“Sure, it could’ve been worse,” Mart says philosophically. “I know a fella up near Ballymote that fell off his roof, the exact same as yourself, and didn’t he break his neck. He’s in a wheelchair to this day. His missus has to wipe his arse for him. You were lucky. Didja go to the doctor?”
“Nah,” Cal says. “Nothing they could do except tell me to take it easy for a while, and I can do that myself for free.”
“Or Lena can do it for you,” Mart says, the grin creeping back onto his face. “She won’t be happy if you’re out of commission. Better rest up and mind yourself, so you can get back in the saddle.”
“Jeez, Mart,” Cal says, biting back a grin and getting very interested in his toe poking at a chair leg. “Come on.” Under the chair is a towel stiff with dried blood.
When he looks up, he looks into Mart’s eyes. He sees Mart think about saying he had a nosebleed, and then think about saying a nameless stranger staggered in with a mysterious wound. In the end he says nothing at all.
“Well,” Cal says, after a long while. “Don’t I feel like the idiot.”
“Ah, no,” Mart reassures him charitably. He stoops to pick up the towel, bracing himself on the chair-back and grunting, and stumps unhurriedly across the kitchen to put it in the washing machine. “No need for that. Sure, how would you know the lie of the land, and you a stranger?” He closes the washing machine door and looks up at Cal. “But you know now.”
Cal says, “You gonna tell me what happened?”
“Leave it be,” Mart says, gently and firmly, in a voice Cal has used a hundred times to tell suspects that they’ve come to the end, to the place where there’s no choice left, no journey and no struggle. “Go home to the child and tell her to leave it be. That’s all you need to do.”
Cal says, “She wants to know where her brother is.”
“Then tell her he’s dead and buried. Or tell her he done a runner, if you’d rather. Whatever’ll make her leave it.”
“I tried that. She wants to know for sure. That’s her line. She won’t budge off it.”
Mart sighs. He pours detergent into the washing-machine drawer and sets it going.
“If you don’t give her that,” Cal says, “she’s gonna keep on coming till you have to kill her. She’s thirteen years old.”
“Holy God,” Mart says disapprovingly, glancing over his shoulder, “you’ve an awful dark mind on you altogether. No one’s got any intention of killing anyone.”
“What about Brendan?”
“No one intended to kill him, either. Would you ever sit down there, Sunny Jim, you’re giving me the fidgets.”
Cal sits at the kitchen table. The house is chilly and smells of damp. The washing machine pulses in a slow, rhythmic trudge. Rain trickles steadily down the windowpane.
The kettle has boiled. Mart pours water into the Dalek and swirls the tea bags with a spoon. He brings over the mugs and the teapot, then the milk and sugar, and then lowers himself into a chair, joint by joint, and pours the tea.
“Brendan Reddy was headed that way anyway,” he says, “as fast as he could run. If it hadn’t been us that done it, it woulda been someone else.”
“P.J. noticed his anhydrous getting swiped,” Cal says. “Right?” The walk to Mart’s has raised a vicious throbbing in his knee. He feels a weight of dull anger that this should have landed at his feet today, of all days, when he’s in no condition to handle it with skill.
Mart shakes his head. He shifts one hip, painfully, and pulls his tobacco out of his pants pocket. “Ah, God, no. P.J.’s an innocent, sure. He’s not unfortunate or nothing, but he’s got no suspicion in him. That class of carry-on wouldn’t even occur to him. I’d say that’s why Brendan chose his farm to begin with.” He spreads out a cigarette paper on the table and starts carefully sprinkling tobacco along it. “No: P.J. was told.”
Cal says, “Donie.” Apparently he’s been everyone’s fool around here, even that fool Donie’s. He should have seen it straightaway, back in the fug of body smells and smoke in Donie’s room. He knows how the Dublin boys found out that Brendan had been snared, too. Donie understands the ways of trouble well enough to sow plenty of it himself, when he wants to.
“It was. Donie and Brendan never got on, even when they were little lads; I’d say he leaped at the chance to do Brendan a bad turn. Only the feckin’ eejit went and told P.J., instead of coming to me, the way he woulda done if he had the brains of an ass. And what did P.J. do only call in the Guards.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Cal asks, giving Mart something to argue with. “That’s what I’da done.”
“I’ve nothing against the Guards,” Mart says, “in their place, but I didn’t see what they’d contribute to this situation. We’d enough of a mess on our hands already, without them traipsing about the place asking questions and arresting all round them.” He rolls the paper into a stingy cigarette, squinting carefully to keep it even. “Lucky enough, they took their time arriving. Enough time that P.J. came up to tell me the news, and I was able to make him see sense. Myself and P.J. sent the Guards off about their business, and I rang another coupla lads—lads that live alone, that wouldn’t have to explain themselves to anyone—to get back P.J.’s anhydrous meanwhile.” He cocks an eyebrow at Cal over the rollie, as he licks the edge. “You know the place, sure.”