Games of the Hangman (3 page)

As they
emerged from the dank atmosphere of the forest, Pooka whinnied with pleasure
and made as if to break into a canter.
 
Fitzduane let her have her head, the canter became a gallop, and they
thundered along the cliff and then swung into the grounds of Draker.

Fitzduane's
head cleared with the burst of exercise.
 
He knew that the next sequence of events would not be pleasant.
 
It had crossed his mind to keep on
riding.
 
Home wasn't too far away.

The trouble
was, although he did not yet fully appreciate it, Rudolf von Graffenlaub's
death had moved him deeply.
 
His
instincts were aroused.
 
The tragedy had
happened on his own ground at a time when he was reassessing his own direction
in life.
 
It was both a provocation and a
challenge.
 
His peaceful haven in the
midst of a bloody world had been violated.
 
He wanted to know why.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

It had been
years since Fitzduane had visited the college.

He entered a
heavy side door that stood ajar.
 
Inside,
there was a flagstone hall, a door, and a wide wooden stairway.
 
He climbed the stairs.
 
There was a door off the landing at the top,
and through it he could hear the sound of voices and laughter and the clinking
of spoons against china.
 
He turned the
handle.

Inside the
large paneled, book-lined room about two dozen people in the mix of casual and
formal clothes beloved of academics were grouped around a blazing log fire,
having their morning coffee.
 
He felt as if
he were back at school and should have knocked.

An elderly
gray-haired lady turned around at his entrance and looked him up and down.
 
"Your boots," she said with a thin
smile.

Fitzduane
looked at her blankly.

"Your
boots," she repeated.

He looked down
at his muddy boots.
 
The floor was inlaid
with brass in runic patterns.
 
Shades of Anglo-Irish literary revival and a Celtic Ireland that
never was.

"Would
you mind removing your boots, sir?" said the gray-haired lady more
sharply, the smile now distinctly chilly.
 
"Everybody does.
 
It's the
floor," she added in a mollifying tone.

Fitzduane
noticed a neat row of outdoor footwear by the umbrella stand at the
entrance.
 
Too taken aback to argue, he
removed his muddy riding boots and stood there in his wool socks.

"Hi,"
said a fresh voice.
 
He turned toward a
lived-in but still attractive brunette in her mid-thirties.
 
She was tall and slim and wore round granny
glasses and had an aura of flower child of the sixties gone more or less
straight.
 
She had a delicious
smile.
 
He wondered if she had a little
marijuana crop in her window box and how it — and she — endured Irish weather.

"Hi
yourself," he answered.
 
He didn't
smile back.
 
Suddenly he felt tired.
 
"I'm afraid this isn't going to make
your day," he said quietly.
 
As he
was telling her his story, he handed her Rudolf's identity card.
 
She stared at him for what seemed to be an
age, uncomprehending, and then her coffee cup crashed to the floor.

Conversation
stopped, and all heads swiveled in their direction.
 
In the silence that had fallen over the room,
it took Fitzduane a moment to realize that the pool of hot coffee was slowly
soaking into his socks.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

It was not
necessary for Fitzduane to return to the scene of the hanging, and he knew it,
yet back he went.
 
He felt proprietorial
toward Rudolf.
 
He had found the body, so
in some strange way he was now responsible for it.

Perhaps a half
dozen of the faculty went with Fitzduane to the old oak tree.
 
Rudolf still hung there.
 
Fortunately for the nervous onlookers, the
body had stopped swaying in the wind and now hung motionless.

Fitzduane was
aware that in all probability some of the people present had some previous
experience with death, even violent death.
 
Yet the hanging, with all its macabre history and connotations of ritual
punishment, had a very particular impact.
 
It showed on their faces.
 
One
teacher who could not contain himself could be heard retching behind the trunk
of a sycamore tree.
 
The sound seemed to
go on and on.
 
Several others looked
about ready to join him.

A long
aluminum ladder was brought up at a run by two fit-looking young men.
 
The sight of them reminded Fitzduane that
pupils at Drake spent a great deal of their time in outdoor activities.
 
In a casual conversation some years earlier,
one of the lecturers, since departed, had remarked, “We try to exhaust the
buggers.
 
It's the only way we can keep
them under control.”

Many of the
students, Fitzduane recalled, came from troubled, albeit rich
backgrounds,
and a good number were old enough to vote, to
be conscripted, or to start a family.
 
Doubtless some had.
 
All in all,
it seemed a thoroughly sensible precaution to keep them busy rushing up and down
cliff faces and being blown around the cold waters of the
Atlantic
.

They waited in
the gloom of the forest to one side of the old oak tree until the police and
ambulance arrived.
 
It took some
time.
 
There was no police station on the
island.
 
The nearest was at
Ballyvonane
on the mainland, some fifteen kilometers of
potholed road away.
 
There were attempts
at conversation governed by some unspoken rule that the hanging itself should
not be discussed.
 
Fitzduane, standing
slightly apart from the group as befitted the bearer of bad news, chewed on a
piece of long grass and made himself comfortable against the supporting
contours of a not-too-damp outcrop of rock.

He was curious
to see what the police would do.
 
A man
was dead, and dead from violence.
 
There
had to be an investigation.
 
There
wouldn't be one in
El
Salvador
,
here bodies were dumped unceremoniously on rubbish dumps
by death squads, or in
Cambodia
,
where so many millions had been slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge that one extra
body was of no significance.
 
But this
was home, where violence was rare and different, more caring standards
prevailed.

Two guards
arrived:
 
the local sergeant — well known
to Fitzduane — and a fresh-faced youngster not long from the training barracks
in Templemore by the look of him.
 
Their
heavy blue uniform trousers were tucked into farmers' rubber boots, and their
faces were shaded and impassive under dark blue uniform hats.
 
The sergeant, Tommy Keane, had his chin strap
in position and was puffing slightly.

It would be
untrue to say that there was no examination of the scene of the incident; there
was.
 
It lasted perhaps sixty seconds and
consisted of the sergeant's padding around the tree a couple of times, staring
up at the hanging body as he did so, his boots leaving a perfect trail of
cleated prints in the soft ground, obscuring with official finality any
previous marks.

Fitzduane's
gaze drifted back to the body.
 
It's
feet, limp and slightly parted, were shod in
surprisingly formal dark brown shoes polished to a military gloss.
 
He wondered if Rudolf had spit-shined his
shoes that morning — and if so, why?

The ladder was
placed against the tree.
 
The sergeant
tested it a couple of times, placed the young guard at the foot to hold it
securely, and climbed.
 
He removed a
bone-handled folding knife from the pocket of his uniform raincoat and opened
the blade.

Knife in hand,
he surveyed the gathering.
 
Silhouetted
in that way above the body, he reminded Fitzduane of a print he had seen of an
eighteenth-century execution.

"Hugo,
give us a hand," said the sergeant.
 
"Let's cut the lad down."

Automatically
Fitzduane moved forward and stood just under the corpse.
 
There was the brief sawing sound of the blade
against taut rope, and the body fell into his waiting arms.

He clasped it
to him, suddenly more disturbed than he would have thought possible at the
absolute waste of it.
 
The torso was
still warm.
 
He held the broken body, the
head disfigured and hideous, flopping from the extended neck.
 
He would often think of that moment
afterward.
 
It seemed to him that it was
the physical contact with that once-so-promising young body that forced him
into the resolve not to be a bystander, not to treat this death as one more
item in a long catalog of observed violence, but to find out, if at all
possible, why.

Other hands
joined him, and the moment when he had the dead boy in his arms alone was
over.
 
They prepared to set the body on
the ground; a thick plastic bag had already been laid out.
 
As Fitzduane lowered the shoulders onto the protecting
surface, a long moan emerged from the hanged boy's bloodstained mouth.

They all
froze, shocked, unwilling to contemplate the same unpalatable thought:
 
Had Rudolf von Graffenlaub been quietly
strangling while they all stood around making awkward conversation and waiting
for the police?

The long, low
moan died away.
 
It was a sound that
Fitzduane had heard before, thought it was nonetheless unsettling for
that.
 
"It's the air," he said
quickly.
 
"It's only the air being
squeezed out of his lungs as we move him."
 
He looked around at the circle of greenish white faces and hoped he was
right.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Half an hour later he sat in front of the sergeant in the library
of
Draker
College
, which had been commandeered as
an interview room for the occasion, and made his statement.
 
He looked at the mud drying on the guard's
heavy boots and the crisscrossing of muddy footprints on the inlaid floor.
 
Standards were dropping.

"You
don't look great, Hugo," said the sergeant.
 
"I'd have thought you'd be used to this
kind of thing."

Fitzduane
shrugged.
 
"So would I."
 
He smiled slightly.
 
"It seems that it's different on your
own doorstep."

The sergeant
nodded.
 
"Or the
last straw."
 
He puffed at an
old black briar pipe with a silver top over the bowl to protect it from the
wind, and from it emanated the rich aroma of pipe tobacco.
 
He was a big, heavyset man, not many years
from retirement.

"Tommy,"
said Fitzduane, "somehow I expected more of an investigation before the
body was cut down.
 
The
immediate area being roped off.
 
An examination by the forensic people.
 
That sort of thing."

The sergeant
raised a grizzled eyebrow.
 
His reply was
measured.
 
"Hugo, if I didn't know
you so well, I might be thinking there was just the faintest tincture of
criticism in that remark."

Fitzduane
spread his hands in a gesture of apology.
 
"Perish the thought," he said, and fell silent.
 
The look of inquiry remained on his face.

The sergeant
knew Fitzduane well.
 
He chuckled, but
then remembered the circumstances and reverted to his professional manner.
 
"Don't go having any strange thoughts,
Hugo.
 
The site round the tree had been
well trampled by you lot before we ever showed up.
 
Anyway, I've had thirty-four years in the
Guards, and I've seen my share of hangings.
 
They've always been suicide.
 
It's
just about impossible to kill someone by hanging without leaving signs, and
there are easier ways of committing murder."

"Was
there a note?"

"No,"
said the sergeant, "or at least we haven't found one yet, but the absence
of a note means nothing.
 
Indeed, a note
is an exception rather than the rule."