on the same hillside two years before, his bones broken and smashed, his head spiked like an animal in a slaughterhouse, just as Susan’s head had been spiked?
It was only a few minutes before Hannah came back out to fetch him. He went into the house. Brian Field stood by the fireplace, hands clasped tightly behind him, like the last time Stefan was there. It felt as if the cantor had been standing there all that time, knowing he would come back to say, no, she didn’t go anywhere, Mr Field; her bones are scattered on the mountainside. Stefan expressed his sorrow for the old man’s trouble, with the handshake that always accompanied those words and, as ever, when the words were said and the hand-shaking done, there was nothing else to say.
‘I should see her,’ said Brian Field very quietly.
‘She’s been in the ground a long time, Mr Field. I’m not asking you to identify your daughter now, not from the remains. It might be best — ’
‘I should see her.’ He simply repeated the words. ‘I should see her.’
‘I’ll go with you.’ Hannah put her arm through his. All at once the composure on the old man’s face was gone. There was a look of anguish.
‘Her sisters — ’
She tightened her grip on his arm.
‘We’ll telephone. Rachel can be here from London in no time.’
The cantor shook his head slowly; he didn’t want to telephone.
Stefan recognised what he saw in that anguish. He remembered it well enough. Each person you tell makes death more real; each word of telling takes away the little breath of life that still survives inside your heart.
They stood over the body as it lay on the mortuary slab. They were the only people in the building. There were no questions to ask. Not now. It was the necessary business of death. Brian Field’s fingers trembled as he took the blue kippah from his pocket. He put it on his head. He trembled again as he tried to fix it there with a hairgrip. Hannah took it from him and slid it on. He seemed unaware she was doing it. Stefan’s eyes were fixed on the hairgrip. It was exactly the same as the two lined up on his desk, with the compact and the lipstick and the purse and the pens and the comb from Susan Field’s handbag. And then quite suddenly, strong and clear, somewhere between singing and speaking, the cantor’s voice filled the mortuary. ‘Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw. Amein.’ May his name be exalted and sanctified in the highest. ‘B’allmaw deev’raw hir’usei.’ In the universe created according to his will. ‘V’yamlih malhusei b’hayeihon uv’yomeihon. Amein.’ May his kingdom swiftly come in our day and in the days of the house of Israel. Amen. As he continued, each amen was echoed more quietly by Hannah. Stefan watched her. He could feel how much it mattered to her. Sometimes you didn’t have to believe it for it to matter.
Stefan and Hannah sat in Neary’s in Chatham Street and said very little. She didn’t talk about what had happened to Susan, only about their friendship, half-remembered events, unfinished stories, times and places and people she was trying to bring back, just for a moment. Some of the time she said nothing at all and for a while he felt he had to speak. When he tried to ask her about herself, about Palestine, about what she did, where she lived, her replies didn’t tell him anything. Eventually she shook her head and laughed.
‘You don’t have to say anything when there’s nothing to say.’
‘I’m sorry. I should know that. It was always my line.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘When Maeve died, and afterwards, for ages. I couldn’t move for people talking to me. It was as if they’d organised themselves into shifts. One went and there’d be someone else. If it wasn’t my mother or father, it was a stream of neighbours, or some cousin or aunt I hadn’t seen for years. “Whatever you do, don’t leave him on his own. And keep him talking!”’
‘It’s only because people care.’
‘And Jesus, how they care! They all felt so bad about how I felt I ended up comforting them! I swear I’d never seen some of them in my life.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’ she said, still smiling.
‘Sometimes people need to know when to shut up.’
‘So are you going to shut up now?’
‘If that’s what you want, Hannah.’
‘I suppose I’m running away from all that a bit.’ She was more serious again. The strain in her face couldn’t be hidden by a smile for very long. ‘All the people I know, the people we grew up with. It’s like you said. They’ll be in and out of Lennox Street tomorrow, and we’ll sit and say the same things, over and over. I will do it, of course I will. I will sit there. But not tonight.’
Stefan nodded.
‘Sometimes it was easier being with people I didn’t really know.’
‘That’s not what I meant, Stefan.’
He was aware it was the first time she had called him that.
‘It doesn’t feel like I don’t know you.’
Stefan reached out and took her hand. She held his hand tightly.
‘It doesn’t for me either. It hasn’t from the first time we met.’
‘Time, please! Let’s have you two out of here!’ The barman’s voice boomed across the room in their direction. The glasses were rapidly snatched off the table. They looked round, laughing. The bar had been full when they came in two hours earlier. Now they were the only people left.
As they walked out of the pub towards Grafton Street it was bitterly cold. The long street of Christmas shop windows was almost empty now.
‘Do you want to get a taxi, Hannah?’
He was already turning towards Stephen’s Green and the taxi rank.
‘No.’
‘I’ll walk home with you then.’
‘I don’t think I’ll go home,’ she replied quietly, gently, her eyes fixed on his. She was shivering. She put her arm through his, pulling herself closer to him. It was not what he expected, but it wouldn’t be true to say he hadn’t thought about it, and suddenly it seemed not unexpected at all. Perhaps it had been clear from the beginning, to both of them, and now there was a need for comfort that had pushed away all the reasons why it wouldn’t happen. There was nothing they needed to say to each other. They turned away from Stephen’s Green and walked on, down towards Nassau Street.
10. Red Cow Lane
The next morning Stefan Gillespie took the train to Carlow Town. It was a journey to a familiar place; the nearest big town to Baltinglass. Until Naas, the railway followed the route he took going home, but where the line branched away towards the Wicklow Mountains, he carried on now to Kildare Town and the flat plain of the Curragh and down into the neat pastureland of County Carlow. He fixed his mind on the day’s work, but it wasn’t easy. It was one thing to tell himself he expected nothing from Hannah after the night they’d spent together; it was another to believe it.
Her mood had been very different that morning. The questions about Susan’s murder had come faster than his answers. Why was he holding things back? Why was he trawling the streets of Dublin when he should be on the boat to England by now, across the Channel, and on a train to Danzig? Wasn’t it the priest he needed to question about Susan above everything else? And he knew it was. He also knew why nobody, from the Garda Commissioner down, would be rushing to buy his train ticket. He was investigating the deaths of a woman and a man that a lot of people, his superiors among them, would rather had lain undiscovered on the mountainside at Kilmashogue. Then, quite abruptly, the questions had stopped. She had to go. She walked across to him and kissed him. She rested her head on his shoulder. It was an expression of support, and something more, of tenderness. And then the room was very empty. She was gone.
As Stefan looked out from the train at the green fields of Carlow, Hannah Rosen was making tea in Brian Field’s kitchen, steeling herself for a long day talking to all the people who would come through his door. But in her
