The Private Wound (15 page)

I was sitting at my desk when Concannon arrived with the Charlottestown sergeant. His politeness had retreated to a great distance.

“Good morning, Mr. Eyre. May we come in? I have some questions to ask you.”

“Please do.”

(Don't say more than you need. Don't be gushing. Don't be unnatural.)

“Will you tell us your movements last night? From six p.m., say, to six this morning.” His voice tilted up at the end.

“Well, I had dinner at the Colooney. Then I drove back here. After that there were no movements, except climbing up to bed.”

The sergeant was writing busily.

“What time did you go to bed?”

“About ten-thirty.”

“You had no visitors before that? You were alone here?”

(Time to show a little curiosity.) “Yes. Why? Was someone prowling around after me? I thought all that was over.”

The eyes in Concannon's fair-haired, square head were almost dark-blue in the shadowy little room. Every time I looked up, they were fixed on mine.

“Did you have an assignation with Mrs. Leeson last night?”

“No. Not
last night.
(Clever.) Why? Does she say I did?” (Not so clever, perhaps.)

“You admit she is your mistress?”

“Yes.
Was
my mistress.”

Concannon's eyes sparked. “Why do you say ‘was'?”

“Because I've broken it off with her.”

“When did you do that, Mr. Eyre?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“She came to see you here?”

“No. It was in the demesne. She was exercising a horse. I said I must have a talk with her: I'd come to realise our association was wrong. She rode off and left me.”

“What made you ‘realise' this, Mr. Eyre?”

“Father Bresnihan did. I had a long talk with him the night before last.”

“Did you now? I see. You met Mrs. Leeson in the demesne. You told her then you wished to break it off?”

“No. I said I must have a serious talk with her. The breaking-off was still in my own mind only. But she
may
have suspected my intention. I'd told her several times that she and I were not suited for a permanent—for marriage.”

“I see. And when do you propose to have this serious talk with her?”

“Well, I was rather funking it. (Careful.) She's not gone and done—anything silly?”

“Why do you ask that?”

(Impatience legitimate here.) “Well, for goodness' sake, Mr. Concannon! You'd hardly be asking me all these questions about her if all was well at Lissawn House.”

He was evidently a little taken aback. (Now don't get over-confident.) There was a pause.

“Did Mrs. Leeson seem to you a suicidal type? Has she ever threatened—?”

“Good lord, no. She'd be the last person to— You said, ‘
Did
she seem'?” My voice shook a little: this was not acting. “You'd better tell me, hadn't you?”

Concannon's eyes pierced into mine. “Harriet Leeson was found dead early this morning.”

This must be a murderer's most difficult moment. How can any simulated reactions—shock, amazement, incredulity, horror—possibly ring true to a trained policeman? But the words “Harriet” and “dead” brought the live Harriet unbearably into my mind, put her deadness to me as if for the first time, so that my response was genuine.

“Oh, no!”

Concannon and the sergeant surveyed me in silence, as the wound of my grief broke open and I wept. After a while I pulled myself together.

“But she'd never kill herself. It's incredible.”

“She did not. She'd been stabbed a number of times, on the breasts and stomach,” said Concannon flatly. “Her body was lying by the river. A curious thing is that there was a lot of dried blood on the grass beneath her, yet she was lying on her back when Seamus found her. He says he did not turn the body over.”

“On the grass? Not that grassy spit which runs out into the Lissawn? A hundred yards from the house?”

“That's the place.”

“We—we often went there,” I said, broken with true emotion.

“At night? You had no assignation to meet her there last night?”

I shook my head.

“You didn't make one, and then decide not to keep it?”

“No.”

“Then what was she doing there,
stripped,
with a night-dress close by her?” asked Concannon in a pouncing way.

I shrugged my shoulders. The sergeant's ears were growing redder and redder.

“Did she strip for anyone but you?—and her husband of course?”

“I hope not. She did
tell
me that she'd had another lover here.”

“And who would that be?”

“Kevin Leeson, she said.”

“Glory be to God!” ejaculated the sergeant. “Asking your pardon, sir.”

“But I never knew if she wasn't just trying to make me jealous,” I added. “Tell me one thing. Did she suffer?”

“The blow that killed her pierced the heart. But there were others first, by the bleeding. There'll be an autopsy, of course.”

(And then they'll find she was pregnant. The biggest nail in my coffin. Or will they?)

Concannon started the questioning again, calmly and ruthlessly, trying no doubt to trap me into contradictions, or just to fray my nerve. After another hour of it, he relaxed. “I've some men coming any minute. Have you any objection to them searching the cottage, Mr. Eyre?”

“None at all. I'm getting used to searches.”

He gave me a wintry smile. “And you'll not be moving out of the district till our investigations are over.”

“No. I only hope they won't take so long as your investigations into the attempt to murder
me
.”

The sergeant's bovine face was brick-red. His Irish puritanism had been outraged by all this talk about sex and naked women.

“Will I clout him one, sir?” he suggested to Concannon.

“You will not.”

When the two plain-clothes men from Galway arrived, they were certainly thorough. Under Concannon's eye they went through every article of clothing in the cottage, poked into every hole and corner: later, I noticed they were quartering the little patch of garden, turning over the rubbish dump, examining my car.

“Well?” I asked Concannon when at last they were finished.

“The results are negative, Mr. Eyre. I hope they'll continue so, as far as you're concerned. Can you tell me anything more now?”

“I've nothing more to tell you.”

He gave me a strange look. “You know, if Mrs. Leeson had been expecting you last night, it'd account for a lot that puzzles me. Was she apt to walk out in her night-dress in the dark hours?”

“Only to meet me. So far as I know.”

“Would you call her a promiscuous woman?”

“An experienced woman, certainly. But promiscuous? — Oh, for God's sake, leave me
alone,
” I burst out.

At the door, he turned. “Flurry Leeson is in a terrible bad way, Mr. Eyre.”

He gazed at me austerely, like a Judgment angel, and went out to his car.…

It was not till the evening of the next day that Flurry sent for me. I found him sitting in the kitchen with Seamus. He looked a wreck, a charred derelict, his face more than ever the colour of dead ash.

“This is a dreadful thing, Flurry. I don't know how to—”

His lack-lustre eyes regarded me.

“All right, Seamus.”

Seamus sent me an indecipherable look, then left the room.

“Give yourself a glass. You'd best pour another for me: my hand is shaky.”

I did so.

“I can't believe it,” he muttered. “I can't yet believe it.” His eyes swivelled upward. “They're burying her on Friday. You'll company me?”

“Of course.”

“You were a friend of hers. She set great store by you.” He lifted a quavering hand. “Mind you, I'm not asking more.
I don't want to know anything more.
Y'understand me?”

I nodded dumbly.

“Maybe she
was
a bitch. That's my affair. I'll not have any damned priest coming here telling me I must control her. I loved that woman, Dominic. I loved her, y'understand. She could have gone to bed with my own brother, if it'd make her happy. So long as it brought the light into her eyes. We understood each other. Sure I know this place hadn't much to offer her. But I gave her everything I could. She was all I had.”

Those were his words. I'll never forget them. On paper they look maudlin. But they filled me with an agonising contrition. That I should have thought Flurry had beaten up that man in the pub for losing him the bet! I should have realised, when I saw him rush on to the race-course and cradle her in his arms. Now he was teaching me the meaning of love. This shambling, provincial alcoholic had loved Harriet in a selfless way which put me to shame.

So I thought, abashed by the dignity behind his words,
utterly convinced by them. I wanted to blurt out a confession there and then. But how could I burden his sorrow, piling my own remorse on top of it?

“I'm just after hearing from Concannon. Harry was pregnant.”

I stared at him, appalled.

“She'd told me—a month or two back—hinted she was that way. And I didn't believe her. I—it'd been so long, y'see. I never thought I was able for it,” he mumbled, gazing into his whiskey, almost inaudible. “I laughed at her.
Laughed
at her!”

My mind was in utter confusion. So Harriet had already taken out her insurance policy; she'd deceived me when she said she could always put it on Flurry,
if
the worst came to the worst. Or was the child really Flurry's, and she using her pregnancy to blackmail me into marriage? I stared round the shabby kitchen. Already it had the makeshift look, like a transit camp's, of a place where men are living alone.

“It might have changed our life—a baby,” Flurry resumed. “I'd always wanted one.” His watery grey eyes suddenly turned to granite. “So now I've two lives to take revenge for.”

“Revenge?”

“I'm telling you, Dominic. Whoever did this,
whoever
did it, I'll find him and I'll kill him. After that, I don't mind what happens to me.”

“But—”

“What have I to live for now?”

A silence.

“It must be someone living nearby. Seamus says there wasn't a tinker within ten miles that night. There was no strangers in Charlottestown at all.”

I remembered Flurry and the Tans, and shivered inwardly.

“I wish I could do something,” I said vaguely; then took a plunge. “Concannon suspects me.”

“You? Dear God, what'll the man be saying next?” Flurry gave a ghost of his wheezing laugh. “D'ye mean it? I believe you do.”

“I suppose it's natural for him to—”

“But you were fond of Harry.”

“I loved her.”

It was out at last. I felt an overwhelming relief.

“Of course you did,” said Flurry—but a little uneasily. I had to make it crystal clear.

“I mean, she'd—she'd been my mistress. I'm sorry.”

His eyes swerved from mine. He seemed sunk again in stupor. I could hear the kitchen clock ticking through the long silence. At last he spoke.

“Now I don't want to talk about that. Didn't I tell you so?”

But I had a compulsion to go through with it now. I told Flurry the whole story of the night Harriet was killed—how Father Bresnihan had persuaded me I must put an end to the affair, how I had met Harriet by the river, and found her dead there the next morning. Flurry listened to me in silence.

“Was it you killed her?” he said at last. “Tell me the truth.”

“It was not.”

“You swear to it?”

“Yes. But ever since I've felt responsible. If I hadn't left her—”

“Never mind about that.”

“I didn't dare tell Concannon I'd been out by the river that night.”

“Well, I won't inform on you,” said Flurry with the shadow of a smile.

The disagreeable thought flashed across my mind—if
Flurry had killed Harriet himself, I'd now put myself in his power: he had only to tell Concannon what I'd just confessed. Or, more likely, take the law into his own hands.

It was the moment of truth between Flurry and myself. He shook his great grey head like a tormented bull. I could not see him as the murderer of his wife. But he had an animal cunning and a history of violence.

“Father Bresnihan will tell you about the talk I had with him.”

“No doubt he would. But he's just after going into retreat, Seamus tells me.” Flurry looked at me unseeingly. “If he'd not gone blathering on that night, I'd maybe have walked out to find Harry before it—— But what with the drink and his homily, he had me finished. He'd hardly set out walking home before I was snoring in bed. I was still asleep at half six next morning when Seamus beat on my door. He'd just found her.”

“He was out early.”

“Seamus doesn't sleep well since the Trouble. He was very young then. Sometimes he gets up and wanders about the demesne, in the night or the dawn. Concannon chased him about it. He's searched through Seamus's clothes and things. But sure, he'd no more do such a thing than I would. Not Seamus.”

In the fading light, the fuchsia and the bank of montbretia outside the window were turning monochrome.

“I'm glad you don't think I could have—you'd have every right to suspect me, Flurry.”

“But you were fond of her.”

The simplicity of it took my breath away. “Yet an Irish writer said that every man kills the thing he loves.”

“Ah, that's all cod. Y' haven't the steel in you, Dominic. If you'd seen the wounds—but of course you did. No one strikes a woman like that, but in a rage of jealousy or a great passion of—— Ah no, I'm not an intellectual, but
I can see a fist when it's raised up before my nose. Sure you'd no reason to be jealous at all. And you're a man wouldn't lose control of his passions—they'd never be strong enough for you to have trouble mastering them.”