scrupulous and valuable.
“Okay, what I’m going to tell you, you cannot say to anyone until this case breaks for me, do you understand?”
“Says you.”
“No, I’m serious. And then I will tell you everything, on condition you leave me out of it. Because it’s people’s lives and deaths here. Including your parents.”
She looked down the bar for a moment. When she turned back, her face was set, her eyes grave. She nodded.
“Okay. I spoke to a retired Garda detective today who worked the case of your mother’s murder, who was promoted to inspector at its conclusion. Now, he wasn’t saying anything explicitly. But he was certainly unhappy with the outcome. What he seemed most especially uneasy about was the idea that Casey acted alone. He pointed to the disparity between your mother’s and father’s injuries, the fact that not only was Casey a pupil of your mother’s and a player on the rugby team coached by your father but he was also the child of a servant in the Howard household whose school fees were being paid by the family.”
“Are you saying Sandra and my father…”
“I’m not saying anything. And neither was he. These are hypotheses-”
Martha O’Connor nodded impatiently, as if to say, “I know how this works, keep the bullshit for civilians.”
“Okay, so the boy seems to have been encouraged to see himself as a favorite of Sandra’s. Apparently some of his classmates felt there was a good deal more than favoritism involved. So we have the possibility that Sandra is-”
“Fucking him.”
“And in the process, training him to do as she wants. Casting her Sandra-spell, as you put it. And what she wants is for Dr. Rock to become available. Which of course involves finding a way to get your mother out of the picture.”
“And in this hypothesis, is my father involved?”
“That’s one possibility. He would have worked with Casey on the rugby field. He seems to have been an inspiring man, is that so?”
“People say so. For a ten-year-old girl, unless she’s very unlucky, her daddy’s always an inspiration, he’s her entire world. But people always said, in the world of rugby particularly, Dr. Rock was a mighty man. A hero to the guys.”
She made the world of rugby sound like a childish place, and her lip curled with irony when she said “Dr. Rock,” but despite that, the pain she still felt at his absence was evident.
“It’s not necessary though, Sandra could easily have trained him herself. She took the long view: once Audrey was dead, she’d work on Dr. Rock and reel him in.”
Martha sat openmouthed.
“You know, I had always wondered…not that I wished him dead, but it didn’t make any sense that Casey’d kill her and let him live.”
“Afterward, the Howards paid Stephen Casey’s mother off. Bought her a house.”
“For her silence? You mean she knew they’d killed her son?”
“No, she knew he’d killed your mother. And had then committed suicide. They paid her off so she wouldn’t ask any inconvenient questions.”
“Like why? What was in it for him?”
“Exactly.”
“And what was?”
“We have to assume-again, falling in with what is only a hypothesis-that Sandra cast some kind of spell, maybe that your mother stood in the way of Dr. Rock’s happiness, and only by killing her could he be free.”
“That’s a bit weak, isn’t it?”
“Is it? For a seventeen-year-old who went ahead and did it? It might have been enough.”
“Well, yes, I suppose, the fact that he did go ahead and do it…”
“Were your mother and father happy?”
Martha took a long drink of her beer.
“I was ten years old, remember,” she said.
“I know. A good age to think whatever you like, without censoring your thoughts. Did you ever feel glad it was just you and your father? And did that make it so much worse when Sandra came on the scene? I know you might feel like it’s some kind of betrayal to talk like that, but I’m just trying to get at the logic of it, of what might have seemed plausible-to Sandra, to Stephen Casey, maybe even to your father.”
Martha stared into her drink. In a low, awkward voice that sounded like she was reading a prepared statement, she said, “Yes, I was happy when it was just the two of us; my mother wasn’t a very giving person, and resented the affection my father showed me; when he got together with Sandra, what became obvious to me was that they were sexually very attracted to each other, they were doing it all the time; and then I began to feel that hadn’t been the case between my dad and my mother. Did that make Sandra’s presence even harder to take? For a girl who still believes her daddy is her prince? The fuck do you
Martha drained her pint and looked for the barman, but he was nowhere to be seen; she turned back to me and shook her head.
“I’ve been paying a talking-cure woman for the last five years, and I haven’t come close to telling her what I’ve just told you.”
“She was probably too chicken to ask straight out if your da killed your ma.”
“You’re in the wrong line of work, Ed Loy. Where’s the barman? Pat?”
Martha’s face and manner were somber in repose, but she worked them over with a big girl’s forced jollity. The beer was eating into the jollity, however, and I didn’t want to lose her.
“Don’t get drunk,” I said. “Remember, you promised to show me yours.”
“Drunk on beer? Not me, I have hollow legs.”
Pat materialized at the bar, a mask of jaded skepticism on his ruddy round face.
“Do you have any food?” I said.
“No,” he said. “We have toasted sandwiches.”
I ordered two ham and cheese and more drinks.
“And now,” I said, “Dr. John Howard, please.”
“Dr. John Howard. Actually, I was exaggerating his importance. The disappointing thing is how typical he was of the Irish Catholic doctor of the age. The Church’s willing enforcers. If Ireland had been in the Eastern bloc, we would have been riddled with secret police. We’d’ve had more police than people. I love this thing that we’re supposed to hate informers, of all things, Jesus, we’d give up our own children so long as we could do it in secret. Anyway, the Church couldn’t have carried out its antisterilization, antiabortion, anticontraception policies without the enthusiastic participation of the medical profession. Just like secret police and informers, when you have the laity doing it for you, it means you don’t have to keep reminding them. I guess the fact that Howard advised several ministers on public health-care policy means he’s become a kind of symbol of it all, the king who must be retrospectively dethroned. But in reality, and as much as I’d dearly love to single out the head of the Howard family for particular opprobrium, he’s the same as all of those guys-a stethoscope in one hand and a crucifix in the other. He was just more successful than they were. And with the Howard Clinic, he saw that private medicine was never going to die here, that there’d always be money to be made, and prestige to be garnered, from keeping the upper tier open and the comfortable class in good health.”
The sandwiches arrived, and I fell on mine. It wasn’t very nice, but English mustard took care of that, and it was hot and it qualified as food, and as I’d seen two men murdered since the last time I’d eaten, it suddenly felt reassuring simply to be alive, and hungry, and able to do something about it. Martha pushed her sandwich toward me, and I slathered it with mustard too.
“What about the hysterectomies and the symphis…I’m sorry, I can’t pronounce-”
“Symphisiotomies. Yes, well, there’s no doubt these were barbaric practices, but it’s not as if he was the only one, and it’s not as if that just happened back in the bad old days in black and white when no one knew any better than to beat children with leather straps and bugger them in industrial schools and presbyteries. These things were going on in the nineteen eighties, into the nineties, when the Church was losing its grip entirely. I’m not
