Authors: Minette Walters
O'Riordans are staying in Winchester until the trial's
over.'
'So we've been told,' the policeman agreed.
Siobhan watched him take a notebook from his
breast pocket. 'Then presumably you were expecting
something like this? I mean, everyone knew the house
would be empty.'
He flicked to an empty page. 'I'll need your name,
madam.'
'Siobhan Lavenham.'
'And your registration number, please, Ms Lavenham.'
She gave it to him. 'You didn't answer my question,'
she said unemphatically.
He raised his eyes to look at her but it was impossible
to read their expression. 'What question's that?'
She thought she detected a smile on his face and
bridled immediately. 'You don't find it at all suspicious
that the house burns down the minute Liam's back is
turned?'
He frowned. 'You've lost me, Ms Lavenham.'
'It's Mrs Lavenham,' she said irritably, 'and you
know perfectly well what I'm talking about. Liam's
been receiving arson threats ever since Patrick was
arrested, but the police couldn't have been less
interested.' Her irritation got the better of her. 'It's
their son who's on trial, for God's sake, not them,
though you'd never believe it for all the care the
English police have shown them.' She crunched
the car into gear and drove the few yards to the
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churchyard entrance, where she parked in the lee of
the wall and closed the window. She was preparing
to open the door when it was opened from the
outside.
'What are you trying to say?' demanded the policeman
as she climbed out.
'What am I trying to say?' She let her accent slip
into broad brogue. 'Will you listen to the man? And
there was me thinking my English was as good as his.'
She was as tall as the constable, with striking good
looks, and colour rose in his cheeks. 'I didn't mean
it that way, Mrs Lavenham. I meant, are you saying it
was arson?'
'Of course it was arson,' she countered, securing
her mane of brown hair with a band at the back of her
neck and raising her coat collar against the wind which
two hundred yards away was feeding the inferno. 'Are
you saying it wasn't?'
'Can you prove it?'
'I thought that was your job.'
He opened his notebook again, looking more like
an earnest student than an officer of the law. 'Do you
know who might have been responsible?'
She reached inside the car for her handbag. 'Probably
the same people who wrote "IRISH TRASH"
across their front wall,' she said, slamming the door
and locking it. 'Or maybe it's the ones who broke
into the house two weeks ago during the night and
smashed Bridey's Madonna and Child before urinating
all over the pieces on the carpet. Who knows?'
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She gave him credit for looking disturbed at what she
was saying. 'Look, forget it,' she said wearily. 'It's late
and I'm tired, and I want to get home to my children.
Can you make that radio call so I don't get held up at
the other end?'
Till do it from the car.' He started to turn away,
then changed his mind. Till be reporting what you've
told me, Mrs Lavenham, including your suggestion
that the police have been negligent in their duty.'
She smiled slightly. 'Is that a threat or a promise,
Officer?'
'It's a promise.'
'Then I hope you have better luck than I've had. I
might have been speaking in Gaelic for all the notice
your colleagues took of my warnings.' She set off for
the footpath.
'You're supposed to put complaints in writing,' he
called after her.
'Oh, but I did,' she assured him over her shoulder.
'I may be Irish, but I'm not illiterate.'
'I didn't mean--'
But the rest of his apology was lost on her as she
rounded the corner of the church and vanished from
sight.
20
Thursday, 18 February 1999
It had been several days before Siobhan found the
courage to confront Bridey with what the detective
inspector had told her. It made her feel like a thief
even to think about it. Secrets were such fragile things.
Little parts of oneself that couldn't be exposed without
inviting changed perceptions towards the whole.
But distrust was corroding her sympathy and she
needed reassurance that Bridey at least believed in
Patrick's innocence.
She followed the old woman's wheelchair into the
sitting room and perched on the edge of the grubby
sofa that Liam always lounged upon in his oil-stained
boiler suit after spending hours poking around his
unsightly wrecks. It was a mystery to Siobhan what
he did, as none of them appeared to be driveable, and
she wondered sometimes if he simply used them as a
canopy under which to sleep his days away. He complained
often enough that his withered right hand,
which he kept tucked out of sight inside his pocket,
had deprived him of any chance of a livelihood, but
the truth was he was a lazy man who was only ever
seen to rouse himself when his wife transferred from
her wheelchair to the passenger seat of their old
Ford.
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'There's nothing wrong with his left hand,'
Cynthia Haversley would snort indignantly as she
watched the regular little pantomime outside Kilkenny
Cottage, 'but you'd think he'd lost the use of both
hands the way he carries on about his disabilities.'
Privately, and with some amusement, Siobhan
guessed the demonstrations were put on entirely for
the benefit of the Honourable Mrs Haversley, who
made no bones about her irritation at the level of state
welfare that the O'Riordans enjoyed. It was axiomatic,
after all, that any woman who had enough strength in
her arms to heave herself upstairs on her bottom, as
Bridey did every night, could lift her own legs into a
car ...
Kilkenny Cottage's sitting room - Bridey called it
her 'parlour' - was full of religious artefacts: a shrine
to the Madonna and Child on the mantelpiece, a foot
high wooden cross on one wall, a print of William
Holman Hunt's The Light of the World, on another, a
rosary hanging from a hook. In Siobhan, for whom
religion was more of a trial than a comfort, the room
invariably induced a sort of spiritual claustrophobia
which made her long to get out and breathe fresh air
again.
In ordinary circumstances, the paths of the
O'Riordans, descendants of a roaming tinker family,
and Siobhan Lavenham (nee Kerry), daughter of an
Irish landowner, would never have crossed. Indeed,
when she and her husband, Ian, first visited Fording
Farm and fell in love with it, Siobhan had pointed out
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the eyesore of Kilkenny Cottage with a shudder and
had predicted accurately the kind of people who were
living there. Irish gypsies, she'd said.
'Will that make life difficult for you?' Ian had asked.
'Only if people assume we're related,' she answered
with a laugh, never assuming for one moment that
anyone would . . .
Bridey's habitually cowed expression reminded
Siobhan of an ill-treated dog, and she put the detective
inspector's accusations reluctantly, asking Bridey
if she had lied about the car crash and about Patrick
never striking his father. The woman wept, washing
her hands in her lap as if, like Lady Macbeth, she
could cleanse herself of sin.
'If I did, Siobhan, it was only to have you think
well of us. You're a lovely young lady with a kind
heart, but you'd not have let Patrick play with your
children if you'd known what he did to his father,
and you'd not have taken Rosheen into your house if
you'd known her uncle Liam was a thief.'
'You should have trusted me, Bridey. If I didn't
ask Rosheen to leave when Patrick was arrested for
murder, why would I have refused to employ her just
because Liam spent time in prison?'
'Because your husband would have persuaded you
against her,' said Bridey truthfully. 'He's never been
happy about Rosheen being related to us, never mind
she grew up in Ireland and hardly knew us till you
said she could come here to work for you.'
There was no point denying it. Ian tolerated
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Rosheen O'Riordan for Siobhan's sake, and because
his little boys loved her, but in an ideal world he
would have preferred a nanny from a more conventional
background. Rosheen's relaxed attitude to child
rearing, based on her own upbringing in a three
bedroomed cottage in the hills of Donegal, where the
children had slept four to a bed and play was adventurous,
carefree, and fun, was so different from the
strict supervision of his own childhood that he constantly
worried about it. 'They'll grow up wild,' he
would say. 'She's not disciplining them enough.' And
Siobhan would look at her happy, lively, affectionate
sons and wonder why the English were so fond of
repression.
'He worries about his children, Bridey, more so
since Patrick's arrest. We get telephone calls too, you
know. Everyone knows Rosheen's his cousin.'
She remembered the first such call she had taken.
She had answered it in the kitchen while Rosheen was
making supper for the children, and she had been
shocked by the torrent of anti-Irish abuse that had
poured down the line. She raised stricken eyes to
Rosheen's and saw by the girl's frightened expression
that it wasn't the first such call that had been made.
After that, she had had an answerphone installed, and
forbade Rosheen to lift the receiver unless she was sure of the caller's identity.
Bridey's sad gaze lifted towards the Madonna on
the mantelpiece. 'I pray for you every day, Siobhan,
just as I pray for my Patrick. God knows, I never
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wished this trouble on a sweet lady such as yourself.
And for why? Is it a sin to be Irish?'
Siobhan sighed to herself, hating Bridey's dreary
insistence on calling her a 'lady'. She did not doubt
Bridey's faith, nor that she prayed every day, but she
doubted God's ability to undo Lavinia Fanshaw's
murder eight months after the event.
And if Patrick was guilty of it, and Bridey knew he
was guilty...
'The issue isn't about being Irish,' she said bluntly,
'it's about whether or not Patrick's a murderer. I'd
much rather you were honest with me, Bridey. At the
moment, I don't trust any of you, and that includes
Rosheen. Does she know about his past? Has she been
lying to me too?' She paused, waiting for an answer,
but Bridey just shook her head. 'I'm not going to
blame you for your son's behaviour,' she said more
gently, 'but you can't expect me to go on pleading his
cause if he's guilty.'
'Indeed, and I wouldn't ask you to,' said the old
woman with dignity. 'And you can rest your mind
about Rosheen. We kept the truth to ourselves fifteen
years ago. Liam wouldn't have his son blamed for
something that wasn't his fault. We'll call it a car
accident, he said, and may God strike me dead if I
ever raise my hand in anger again.' She grasped the
rims of her chair wheels and slowly rotated them
through half a turn. 'I'll tell you honestly, though
I'm a cripple and though I've been married to Liam
for nearly forty years, it's only in these last fifteen that
25
I've been able to sleep peacefully in my bed. Oh yes,
Liam was a bad man, and oh yes, my Patrick lost his
temper once and struck out at him, but I swear by the
Mother of God that this family changed for the better
the day my poor son wept for what he'd done and
rang the police himself. Will you believe me, Siobhan?
Will you trust an old woman when she tells you her
Patrick could no more have murdered Mrs Fanshaw
than I can get out of this wheelchair and walk? To
be sure, he took some jewellery from her - and to be
sure, he was wrong to do it - but he was only trying
to get back what had been cheated out of him.'
'Except there's no proof he was cheated out of
anything. The police say there's very little evidence
that any odd jobs had been done in the manor. They
mentioned that one or two cracks in the plaster had
been filled, but not enough to indicate a contract
worth three hundred pounds.'
'He was up there for two weeks,' said Bridey in
despair. 'Twelve hours a day every day.'
'Then why is there nothing to show for it?'
The don't know,' said the old woman with difficulty.
'All I can tell you is that he came home every night
with stories about what he'd been doing. One day
it was getting the heating system to work, the next
re-laying the floor tiles in the kitchen where they'd
come loose. It was Miss Jenkins who was telling him
what needed doing, and she was thrilled to have all
the little irritations sorted once and for all.'
Siobhan recalled the detective inspector's words.
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