billowed over his face. There was no sound from within the farmhouse but the dogs barked as if in response to the call. I tugged at the skirt of my raincoat so that I could get one leg over the window-sill. The policeman pushed me gently to one side. 'This is my patch,' he said. 'I'm used to the kind of things that might be about to happen.' He smiled.
I suppose all three of us had done that kind of thing before. I covered him. Mann remained outside. We went through every room and inevitably there was the silly feeling when you look under the beds. 'No one at all,' said the policeman as he opened the last cupboard and rapped its wooden interior to make sure there were no hollow sounds. I went over to the window, raised it and called down to Mann in the yard to tell him the house was empty. By that time he'd taken a quick look around the out-buildings.
They too were empty. The rain had almost stopped now and from this upstairs window I could see miles across the flat countryside of Kells, to where a dying sun was making a pink sky above the lakes of Meath. I saw the farm dogs too. They were wet and miserable, sitting on the manure heap behind the stables. 'Look at this,' called the policeman from downstairs. I went down to find Mann there too. They were both sifting through the ashes that buried the hearth. They had found some pieces of stiff plastic, about the size of a postcard. A dozen or more of them had fused together into a hard plastic brick. That had prevented their destruction in the flames. Mann picked a small white block from the ashes. 'What's this?'
'A fire lighter,' said the inspector. 'A compound of paraffin wax. They are used to start domestic fires. They'll get the coal or peat going without the need of paper or wood.'
'Is that right,' said Mann. He sniffed it. 'Well this baby didn't ignite. If it had done, we wouldn't have found anything at all.'
'Well, now, you can tell me something,' said the inspector. 'What is this laminated plastic?'
'Microfiche,' said Mann. 'Microfilm's little brother. Microfilm is on reels, and just dandy for someone who goes to a public library to read
'I'll want to take some of this with me,' said Mann. 'Just a sample. O.K.?'
'As long as you leave enough for the lab to tell us what kind of material it is.'
'This is all classified material from U.S. Government sources,' said Mann.
'Why here?' said the policeman.
'The Irish Republic is accessible — your passport checks are perfunctory, and now the Russkies have got an embassy here the place is crawling with agents. With Ireland in the E.E.C., there are few restrictions on Europeans entering. From the United Kingdom there's no check at all. Come on, feller, you know why.'
'I suppose you are right,' said the police inspector.
'Yes, I am,' said Mann. He put a couple of microfiche cards into his wallet.
'Will you hear those dogs,' the policeman said to me. 'I was brought up on a farm. My father would have sold dogs that fled when strangers entered the house, and howled their lungs out behind the raspberries.'
I got to my feet without answering, and went to the front hall. I picked up the phone, to be sure it was connected, and put it down again. Then I unbolted the massive front door. It must have been a century old and designed to withstand a siege. I stood in the porch and stared out across the fields. Cow dung had been spread across the grassy fields, and a few rooks were striding about and pecking it over. They were fine big birds, as big as vultures, with a shiny blue sheen on their black feathers. But most of the birds were in the sky — hundreds of them — starlings for the most part, wheeling and sweeping, great whirlpools of birds, darkening the pink evening sky, chattering and calling and beating the air forcibly enough to make a constant whirr of noise.
'Phone up your people,' I said finally. 'Get a police doctor and some digging equipment. There will be three bodies, I imagine… the people who call themselves Gerding… buried where the dogs are baying.'
The policeman said, 'So that's why the dogs are howling out there in the rain. I should have guessed that, I've lived in the country. I'm sorry.'
'Forget it,' I said. 'I've never lived in the country but I know the kind of bastards we're dealing with.'
This man Reid-Kennedy?' said the policeman.
'Panel truck to move the micofiche machine… waders and waterproof jacket to shield his clothes from blood splashes… two extra gallons of gas to burn papers, and God knows what other material.'
'But why leave the telephone connected?'
'We're not dealing with teeny-boppers,' I said. 'He didn't i want the telephone engineers arriving in the middle of his ' shenanigans.'
The Irish police inspector said, Then your man is a foreigner; an American most likely. Our lads have learned better than to fear interception at the hands of over-prompt telephone engineers.'
Mann looked at him to see whether he was being sarcastic but, having failed to decide, gave no more than a grunt, and turned back to his microfiche. Almost as suddenly as they had begun, the starlings swooped, settled and went silent. Now there was only the sound of the dogs.
Chapter Thirteen
From the air, it looks like a clutter of fancy boxes, washed up on to a tropical shore. But Miami's ocean was blue and inviting and its sky cloudless. Regardless of all those jokes about the Bahamas being where Florida's rich people spend the winter, arrive in Miami straight from an Irish January and you begin to realize that the oranges are not so stupid.
Downtown Miami may be the usual gridiron of office blocks, shopping plazas, city hall and war memorial. Downtown Miami may be like that, if you ever find it amongst the tower hotels. But the Reid-Kennedys didn't live in downtown Miami, and they didn't live in any of the hotel towers either. They enjoyed a five-acre spread of waterfront, with a Spanish-style eight-bedroom house — and an appropriate number of Spanish-style retainers to keep it polished — a garden filled with tropical flowers and a place to moor the fifty-foot motor cruiser. And if it was the right sort of conversation they needed, they could summon the light-blue Rolls-Royce with the uniformed driver, and go to the Yacht Club which was about one hundred and fifty yards along the waterfront. Mr Reid-Kennedy was still 'on business in Europe' but Mann decided to spread some alarm and despondency through the household.
'If you are a friend of Henry-Hope, we are just delighted to see you,' said his mother. She called her son Henry-Hope. If he'd come back here to live with them, he would have become Henry Hope Reid-Kennedy, which sounds like a good reason for staying in Paris.
There was soft music playing and the woman reached behind her to a fluffy pink toy dog and the music went very quiet. I wondered whether that was a product of the Reid-Kennedy radio company. She smiled at us. She was in her middle forties, but a lot of expensive facials, lotions, massage and steam baths had been devoted to keeping her thirty-nine. It had almost succeeded. For some people, middle age brought a softening of the features, but her skin was tight rather than flabby, and there were white lines along the bone of her nose and her jaw. Yet there was no mistaking the beauty that she had once been, and her imperious manner suggested that she hadn't forgotten it either. She stroked the head of a white poodle she was nursing. 'Yes, if you are friends of Henry-Hope, we are just delighted to see you.'
She said it in such a way that we knew that if it turned out that we were not friends of her son, she would arrange for us to be roasted in hell: very slowly. She smiled again as she looked at the heavy woollen suits that Major Mann and I had chosen for a Christmas in Virginia, and at the shapeless tweed hat that Mann had bought at Dublin Airport. She was wearing pale-pink silk lounging pyjamas, with a Dior label twisted to face outwards. The poodle's collar was Gucci.
'You were a major in the American army?' She took a delicate sip at the bright red drink that was in a cocktail glass at her elbow.
'Signal Corps, Ma'am.'
'Oh, Signal Corps,' said the woman as if that explained everything. It was about this time that the servant decided that we were not 'borrowing money or selling encyclopedias. She departed silently.
'Although we have met your son and talked with him, it would be falsely representing ourselves unless I told you that we are here to make inquiries about your husband, said Mann. He held his hat in both hands and turned it
