Anglo-Irish Murders (13 page)

‘I don’t care about that,’ said McNulty. ‘It’ll die a death. What’s important is the Pratt investigation.’

‘Have you learned anything from the interviews?’

‘Nothing yet, but I want to keep an open mind. Dublin wants me to conclude it was an accident, but I won’t till I’m ninety-nine percent sure. I haven’t yet been able to get hold of the maintenance lad who had charge of the flagpole.’

‘Where’s Billy’s body?’

‘In the local morgue awaiting the autopsy. Not that it’s likely to tell us anything. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’

***

The intention all along had been to leave people free to do what they liked on Sunday evening. As previously arranged, Steeples was picked up by his friends and taken to an evening service followed by a family get-together, while the MOPEs and Kelly-Mae were taken off to a local republican club. Kapur excused himself and disappeared to his room.

‘So what are you going to do with yourselves?’ asked Pascal O’Shea of the rest of the gathering as they clustered in the bar.

‘Any ideas?’ asked the baroness.

‘I’ve heard there’s a céilí on in the local,’ said O’Shea. ‘It’s a good pub and it might be a bit of a laugh.’

Hamish Wallace and Okinawa brightened up, Gibson and Pooley looked alarmed and Taylor looked deeply worried. ‘In view of the tragedy, would attending such an event not seem very hard-hearted?’

The baroness, who had been brightening up even more, shook her head. ‘Nonsense, Charles. If you’re embarrassed, you can say you wanted to stay here saying prayers for Billy’s soul but that you felt professionally obliged to examine the local culture.’

‘How would you feel about it, Willie?’ asked Amiss.

‘I’m that fed up at the minute,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t mind getting out of here.’

The baroness clapped him on the back. ‘Good man, Willie. Right, all of you. I want no nay-sayers here. Let’s get going. Though first I’m going to change. I have the very garment for the occasion.’

***

‘It’s striking, I grant you,’ said Amiss, circling the baroness as she stood impatiently in the hall. ‘But I thought you didn’t approve of the ersatz?’

‘Nothing ersatz about this.’

‘I suppose you’re right.
Outré
is a better word. I don’t associate kaftans with County Mayo. And it’s just such a very vivid green. Then there’s the gold…what are they?’

‘Harem pants.’

‘I look forward to seeing what the locals make of it all.’

‘They won’t know what to make of it, but they’ll be faintly flattered.’

‘And I see from your footgear that you mean business.’

‘Much as I deplore many aspects of modernity, I acknowledge that trainers have their place.’

‘You’re certainly an arresting mix of the old and the new.’

She looked at her watch. ‘Come on. Where is everyone? Rout them out and let’s get this show on the road.’

Chapter Thirteen

The pub, about whose unspoiled attractions O’Shea had eulogised in the car, was all he had promised and more. There wasn’t a tourist in sight—just a few dozen young and middle-aged couples and a scattering of unattached youngsters and perhaps half-a-dozen solid citizens with red, lined faces who were, O’Shea explained, what were known as mountainy men. ‘Some of these guys mightn’t see a soul from one end of the year to the other. This lot would be the sociable element who come down for a feed of pints once a week and look in at the céilí maybe in the hope of finding a bride.’

He surveyed his companions, now arranged comfortably around a long wooden table. ‘What’ll you have, Jack?’

‘A pint of stout, of course.’

‘Robert?’

‘Lager, please. Now don’t start, Jack. I’ll drink what I like.’

O’Shea took orders from everyone and disappeared for a while. He returned five minutes later with a tray, bearing a pint of lager for Amiss, pints of stout for himself, the baroness, O’Shea, Hughes, Taylor and Wallace and half-pints for Pooley and Simon Gibson. Okinawa had opted for a large whiskey, which O’Shea and Wallace were also having as chasers.

‘
Sláinte mhait
—and thank God we’re not fond of it,’ said O’Shea, whose first swallow lowered the level of the black liquid by a third and whose second halved the amber.

Taylor made a face. ‘You don’t seem to be enjoying that stout,’ said Amiss.

‘I don’t really like it,’ whispered Taylor.

‘Why drink it then?
Noblesse oblige
?’

‘Really, Robert, you make me sound patronising. It’s just that it seems offensive to refuse what is, after all, the national brew.’

As he spoke, a be-aproned woman emerged from the back of the bar and placed on it a vast platter. The baroness looked up and an expression of ecstasy crossed her face. ‘Crubeens. Bliss!’

‘Crubeens?’ asked Amiss.

‘Pigs’ trotters. The greatest delicacy in Ireland. Greater even than their oysters, if you force me to a choice. Go on, Charles, you’re nearest. Grab that plate.’

As clearly reluctant as he was obedient, Taylor departed and returned several minutes later with a tray containing a platter piled high with trotters, along with plates, cutlery and napkins. The baroness, who was almost slavering, grabbed the largest trotter. ‘Get rid of those knives and forks and all the rest of that unnecessary paraphernalia. This is good peasant food. Let’s behave like good peasants.’

Okinawa, Hughes and O’Shea followed suit. Taylor caught Amiss’ eye and then unhappily reached out for a trotter, put it on a plate and started to work gingerly with a knife and fork.

‘Cheer up, Charles,’ said Amiss. ‘Look on the bright side. It could have been pigs’ eyes.’

The evident enjoyment on the faces of their companions gave Amiss and Pooley the courage to investigate a trotter apiece. The baroness stopped eating long enough to berate Gibson, the only defaulter. ‘Come on, Simon. Even yellow-bellies like Robert have passed this test. What’s wrong with you?’

Gibson shook his head impenitently. ‘Sorry, Jack. The ancestral stomach. Becoming a Catholic doesn’t magically get rid of the old taboos. I could no more eat pig than Chandra could eat cow.’

‘Hmm. That doesn’t explain why you’re doing so badly with your Guinness.’

‘Alas, being a Jew is usually inhibitive of the enjoyment of vast amounts of alcohol.’

‘I know that,’ said Amiss. ‘My ex-girlfriend was afflicted by hideous moderation. You lot are brought up with too civilised an approach to alcohol to understand why people get drunk.’

Gibson sighed. ‘I can’t imagine what it would be like to be an Irish Jew. Or do they get a special social dispension from pig and drink?’

‘Speaking of which,’ said O’Shea. ‘Will it be the same again?’

‘Not for me,’ said Gibson.

‘Nor me,’ said Pooley, who had made only a slightly greater impression on his Guinness. A few of the others, including Amiss, indicated more half-heartedly that they’d rather wait a while, but their protestations were brushed aside.

***

By ten o’clock, the pattern for the evening was clear. There seemed to be a common acceptance that Gibson and Pooley were allowed to skip several rounds, but that this applied to no one else. Amiss was one of those permanently battling with the backlog of drinks arrayed in front of them. The musicians—two fiddlers, an accordian-player and a man with a bodhrán
*
—had arrived by now and having had a couple of pints, were getting ready for action. The bodhrán player uttered a few words of welcome and the music began.

Within a few minutes the pub was alive with people dancing what had been announced as ‘The Walls of Limerick.’

‘Let’s join in,’ said the baroness.

‘Why?’ asked Amiss. ‘I thought all Irish dancing was anathema unless it consisted of a drunken old man…’

‘Céilí dancing is different. Like country dancing in general, it is for letting off steam and encouraging sexual intercourse. I’m all in favour of it. I hope you’ll prove a worthy partner.’

‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘You’re no fun. Pascal?’

‘Never could dance,’ O’Shea answered hastily. ‘Never, never, never, never.’

The dance seemed so fast, demanding and complicated that even Taylor could not be bullied into acceding to the baroness’ impassioned demand for a partner. She surveyed them with contempt. ‘So much for you,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to find a beau among the natives.’ And carrying her pint she crossed the floor to a table of mountainy men and sat down with them.

‘The Siege of Ennis’ called the drummer. ‘Take your partners for The Siege of Ennis.’ Watched with fascination by her discarded comrades, the baroness leaped up and held out her hand to a tall man in wellingtons. Pausing only to drain his pint and wave at the barman, he took her hand and they joined the nearest group assembling themselves for a set.

Okinawa was mainly lost to them from then on, for although he returned for more whiskey rations from time to time, he was intent on filming the entire céilí. The dancers responded by cavorting ever more energetically in the hope of impressing him and posterity.

As the evening went on, Amiss struggled desperately to stay sober, but every time he refused a round he was ignored and when he drank slowly O’Shea or one of the other urgent drinkers would accuse him of being a party-pooper.

‘When is closing time?’ he asked, as the eighth round arrived.

‘About an hour ago,’ laughed O’Shea.

‘What?’ cried Taylor. ‘You mean we’re breaking the law?’

‘In this country licensing laws are more honoured in the breach than in the observance, I think you’ll find,’ said O’Shea. ‘Jaysus, you couldn’t finish a céilí at 10:30 and all those people having driven miles for it.’

‘Dinna fash yourself,’ said Wallace thickly. ‘You Anglo-Saxons are slaves to yourselves.’

‘But what about the taxis? Surely they were booked for closing time?’

‘Not at all. Pascal told them not to have a bother on them till midnight at the earliest.’

A look of sheer misery crossed Taylor’s face. ‘I haven’t got the kind of stamina necessary for this kind of life. I’m already exhausted from two late nights.’

‘Me too,’ said Gibson, Pooley and Taylor, as the baroness arrived red-faced but triumphant to order a round for her ex-friends before returning to her new.

‘The Stack of Barley’ bellowed the drummer, and the baroness took to the floor, this time in the company of a man in hobnailed boots.

‘She’s certainly approaching this
con brio
,’ said Gibson.

‘If a touch unorthodoxly,’ said Pooley.

‘I don’t want to watch,’ said Amiss. ‘I might feel somehow responsible.’

‘Another round,’ said Wallace.

‘Please, please no,’ said Amiss. ‘I’ve got three pints of lager lined up here and I simply can’t drink them. My stomach doesn’t have the capacity. I’m English, remember.’

‘Why don’t you move to the hard stuff then?’ suggested O’Shea. ‘There’s a limit to how much you can drink of that ould lager. All that gas isn’t good for you.’

‘Well, just a small one,’ said Amiss nervously, ‘with plenty of water.’

‘Sure, sure,’ said O’Shea. ‘That’ll be grand.’ And off he went to order a round of doubles.

***

Amiss was enjoying himself hugely when the taxis arrived. His group had been joined by several locals who seemed full of wit, spontaneity and merriment. The jokes and quips came even thicker and faster than the drinks. Amiss felt he had never been in better company in his life. When Gibson whispered to him that a taxi had arrived, he indignantly waved him away. His last memory of the evening was of O’Shea and the baroness on the dance floor performing what seemed to resemble a wild mazurka. Amiss and his colleagues led the crowd in thunderous applause.

***

It took a few minutes for the shrilling of the phone to penetrate Amiss’ consciousness. Fumblingly, he picked up the receiver and held it to his ear. ‘Yes,’ he croaked.

‘Wake up, wake up.’

Amiss groaned. ‘Oh, God, Ellis. What time is it?’

‘Time to get up. And I want to talk to you. I’m on my way.’

Amiss looked at his watch, cursed, crept out of bed as quickly as seemed prudent and headed for the bathroom. By the time Pooley knocked he was out of the shower. ‘What is it?’ he asked, as he opened the door and resumed towelling himself.

‘I’d better fill you in on last night.’

Amiss returned to the bathroom and began to apply toothpaste to toothbrush. ‘But do I want to be filled in on last night? That is the question.’

‘You need to be.’

As Amiss began to brush his teeth and tried to suppress the feeling of dread, Pooley perched on the bath. ‘Well, that was certainly a memorable evening in the island of saints and scholars. Cheered me up, too, since up to now I’ve been feeling utterly useless.’

Amiss brushed on.

‘All I’ve been doing is sitting around saying nothing while all these tenth-raters fight amongst themselves and socially I’ve spent most of my time fending off questions about my mysterious millionaire from the sort of people whose only interest is trans-Atlantic freebies. Which of course is most of them.’

Amiss spat out the toothpaste and rinsed his mouth. ‘True,’ he said, dully.

‘So it was good to be useful last night. Most of you wouldn’t have got to bed without me.’

‘Oh, God.’ Amiss looked at him with that nervous expression that the drunkard gives the sober friend the morning after. ‘How bad was it?’

‘In what sense?’

‘On a scale of one to ten, how embarrassed should I be?’

‘Depends on how easily you’re embarrassed.’

‘For God’s sake stop being playful, Ellis…that is Rollo. You know bloody well what I mean.’

‘All right, all right, calm down and don’t worry. Bearing in mind how some of the others were, I think you’d get away with five out of ten.’

Amiss looked at the razor and then at his right hand and, rather nervously, began to shave. ‘Just tell me what happened. When did we leave the pub?’

‘About two. Apart from Simon and Charles, who left not long after midnight.’

‘Did we go voluntarily?’

‘Well, no, not really. Most of you were keen to make a night of it and the remaining locals—not to speak of the publican—were enthusiastically concurring in the idea. You can’t fault them on the hospitality front.’

‘No trouble from the police?’

Pooley snorted. ‘Well, let’s just say that their notion of law-and-order isn’t exactly mine. I mean there was a moment when the music stopped, we were all instructed to be quiet and the lights went out. That, it emerged, was because the local guard had rung to ask for this display of reverence for the law. We were told that since a local deputy became Minister for Justice he’s become rather officious.

‘Mind you, it was pretty difficult to keep Jack quiet. She kept demanding that we ask him in and get him to dance, but fortunately he wasn’t trying to hear any disturbance so he didn’t.’

‘So what brought the evening to such an early end?’

‘Me being a killjoy, really. I couldn’t see any hope that left to yourselves you would stop before dawn or later, so I bribed the taxi drivers to say they were going home and threatened you all with a five-mile walk in the dark through the pouring rain.’

‘Who was left?’

‘Who do you think?’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Hamish, Pascal O’Shea, you, Jack, oh yes, and Willie and Oki.’

‘Did we come quietly?’

‘If reluctantly. There were elaborate and affectionate fare wells which went on for the best part of half-an-hour and extricating Jack from her friend with the wellies at one stage seemed an insuperable problem. They clung to each other like Romeo and Juliet.’

Surprised that he had so far managed to shave without incident, Amiss directed his attention to the right side of his face.

‘The real problems began at the hotel. I should have thought to hire the taxi drivers to give me a hand in getting everyone to bed.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Oh, you weren’t so bad. Indeed, with Oki—who admittedly, was red-faced, giggly and no longer able to point his camera—you made an effort to help me carry Hamish to bed. Jack helped too, which is why we dropped Hamish in the lift, but we got him to his bedroom eventually.

‘But then Jack insisted on accompanying us downstairs to help with Pascal, who had passed out on the hall carpet. She felt that this was an appropriate moment to serenade him with a spirited rendition of “Thy tiny hand is frozen.”’

Wiping the soap off his miraculously uninjured face, Amiss began to cheer up. ‘I’ve experienced her once or twice in Pavarotti mode. Not that she can carry a tune.’

‘No. But she’s got good lungs. And she
thinks
she can carry a tune.’

Amiss nodded. ‘That’s true. Sober or drunk.’

‘Doesn’t suffer from a lack of self-belief, our Jack,’ said Pooley, as he followed Amiss into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, clearly looking forward to the next part of his story. ‘You, Pascal and Willie were all on for another drink—as was Oki, insofar as he could get any words out through his giggles—but Jack suddenly decided it was time for bed and disappeared without another word. I suspect she felt miffed that we were insufficiently appreciative of her aria.