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  BOGMAIL

  Patrick McGinley

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  www.apollo-classics.com

  About Bogmail

  A REDISCOVERED CLASSIC OF IRISH LITERATURE, THIS DARKLY COMIC TALE TELLS OF MURDER AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

  Set in a remote village in the northwest of Ireland, Roarty, a publican and former priest, kills his lecherous bartender and buries him in a bog. When Roarty begins to receive blackmail letters, matters quickly spiral out of his control.

  Alive with the loquacious brio of his pub’s eccentric regulars, and full of the bleak beauty of the Donegal landscape, Patrick McGinley’s rural gothic novel is a modern masterpiece.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Bogmail

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About Patrick McGinley

  More from Apollo

  About Apollo

  Copyright

  For my grandson William.

  1

  Roarty was making an omelette from the mushrooms Eamonn Eales had collected in Davy Long’s park that morning. They were good mushrooms, medium sized and delicately succulent, just right for a special omelette, an omelette surprise. He had chosen the best mushrooms for his own omelette; the one he was making for Eales was special because it contained not only the mushrooms from Davy Long’s park but also a handful of obnoxious, black-gilled toadstools which he himself had picked on the dunghill behind the byre. He was hoping that four of them would be enough to poison his lecherous barman; he dare not put in any more in case he should smell a rat.

  Eales was a fastidious feeder who never touched bacon rind or pork crackling or the thin veins of white fat that made the best gammon so tasty. He never ate the frazzled fat of grilled lamb chops and sirloin steak, nor the crisp earthy jackets of baked potatoes. Normally, he would not have blamed him for avoiding the latter because the jackets of some farmers’ potatoes were rough with scabs and excrescences. Roarty’s potatoes, however, were different, grown lovingly in the sandy soil by the estuary and as smooth to the touch as sea-scoured beach pebbles. The man who was not moved to eat the jackets of such potatoes was nothing if not a scoundrel. He was blind to the beauties of life and the true delights of a wholesome table. He was probably a man who harboured evil thoughts against his neighbour, someone from whom wise men all would lock up their daughters, at least those of them who still retained their maidenheads. The outcome was inescapable: Eales must be destroyed.

  The toadstools were a brilliant idea, better than the ragwort which was his first thought and which would have had serious shortcomings as a poison. Sergeant McGing had been talking in the bar about its toxic properties only last week, and if traces of the weed were to be found in Eales’s alimentary canal by the pathologist doing the post-mortem, McGing might put two and two together.

  ‘How did the ragwort get into the stomach of the deceased?’ he would ask with unselfconscious pomposity. ‘After all, Eales was not a cow.’ Ragwort was not the kind of thing that got into a man’s stomach by accident whereas a toadstool might. Eales had picked the mushrooms himself, and it was all too possible that in his haste he had picked a few wrong ones. Roarty would sorrowfully admit to having made the omelette but since a motive for murder could not be pinned on him, he would go free. It would be a perfect murder, executed cleanly with the minimum of fuss and exertion, better than the needless spilling of blood which was for stupid men who could not control their passions.

  Eales, in the sickly yellow waistcoat he wore on weekdays, was perched on a high stool behind the bar, reading the racing results to Old Crubog. He was barely twenty, tall, swarthy and narrow faced with an uncommon self-possession that showed in his unconcealed assumption that other people existed only for his amusement. Old Crubog, the sole customer, was listening intently, head tilted and an untouched pint of stout before him.

  ‘Your tea is ready,’ Roarty called from the kitchen doorway.

  Eales folded the newspaper, placed it on the counter before Crubog, and dived hungrily past his landlord.

  ‘The paper’s wasted on me, I’m afraid. I’ve left me specs behind,’ said Crubog, taking a long sip from his glass and smacking two puckered lips that collapsed over his loose false teeth. ‘The first this afternoon,’ he said, his watery eyes brightening with eager pleasure.

  Roarty leaned over the counter and listened to him praising times past while in a remote chamber of his mind he wondered when Eales would kick the bucket. Would he go out like a light after he’d eaten? Or would he struggle manfully through the evening and quietly slip away in his sleep during the night? To get rid of him so easily, so perfectly, seemed too good to be true.

  With his hand on the stout pump, he looked out of the west window at the sharp evening sunlight on the sea, a plain of winking water with not even a flash of foam around Rannyweal, the submerged reef that reached from the south shore almost halfway across the bay. It had been a glorious summer, the best anyone, except Old Crubog, could remember. Not a drop of rain had fallen since Easter, and it was now the first week of August. The corn was only half its usual height, and the potatoes, though floury, were meagre in both size and numbers. The farmers had been grumbling since June, and the parish priest, who was a farmer himself, had taken to praying for rain at Mass on Sundays. Only the tourists, turf-cutters and fishermen were happy. It was a good summer for publicans too, however. Never had he seen men so thirsty in the evenings; never had he sold so much ale and stout. There was always someone in the pub from morning to night, always someone with a thirst that needed slaking. Noticing that the stout shelf was almost bare, he brought in two crates from the storeroom and placed the bottles in three neat rows in readiness for the evening swill. Then he poured himself a large Irish whiskey and water and said to Crubog, ‘It’s a rare day when you don’t see it breaking white over Rannyweal.’

  ‘They were good mushroom, those,’ said Eales, returning from the kitchen. ‘I’ve never enjoyed better.’

  ‘I thought some of them tasted a bit strong,’ said Roarty.

  ‘Imagination. Mine were perfect.’

  ‘Where did you get them?’ asked Crubog.

  ‘In Davy Long’s park. I picked every one of them myself,’ Eales boasted.

  ‘It’s the foremost place for mushrooms.’ Crubog spoke with authority. ‘You’ll never find a bad mushroom in Davy Long’s park, every one as juicy as a Jaffa orange.’

  He left Eales and Crubog to talk and wandered out behind the house, the sight of the withered conifer banishing all thought of mushrooms from his mind. He filled two buckets of water from the outside tap and poured them on the roots of the dying tree. The cracked earth drank the water as if it were a thimbleful, and he carried six more bucketfuls, dogged and determined but with a black sense of hopelessness in his heart. He had planted the supposedly evergreen tree seventeen years ago, on the day Cecily was born and his wife had died. During its first winter a storm from the west uprooted it one night but he put it standing again with a supporting stake, and it grew with Cecily, tall, dark green, and tapering with branches that drooped with a h
eaviness of needles. He came to associate the growing tree with the changes in Cecily: the subtle change in the shape of her nose at six, which even he could not find words to describe; the darkening of her flaxen hair at nine; the lengthening of her spindly schoolgirl’s legs; and finally the bulging of her breasts. She was a sweet-natured girl, not unlike her mother in looks and yet so different. Though he’d never kissed her even as a child, he felt close to her. Now he could not think of her without a twinge of foreboding. He had been right to send her to London at the time. Now he could hardly bear the thought of her so vulnerable and so far away. Since the tree had begun to wither he had been unable to think of her without holding his breath.

  As he grasped a branch above his head, brittle needles turned to dust in his hand. The branches had begun to curl while the dark green had given way to lighter green with a yellowy tinge, yet he refused to believe that her tree would die. All the other trees in the garden were thriving, possibly because of their deeper roots. He had chosen to plant a conifer because it was not deciduous. If only he’d realised that it was sensitive to drought. If only he’d noticed the lightening of the dark green in time.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Allegro, one of Eales’s cats, spring onto the low bird table. He bounded across the garden and caught the miserable creature by the neck but he was too late—the sparrow in its mouth was already dead. Eales was evil. He regretted the day he had so innocently made him his barman. His insinuating leer should have alerted him as he sauntered into the bar on a summer evening with a knapsack on his back and a black cat under each arm. He introduced one as Allegro and the other as Andante, thinking it funny, no doubt. The effrontery of him, introducing his cats as if they were people!

  ‘A pint of porter,’ he had said. ‘And a job if you’ve got one.’

  He should have known then that a man who goes about with two black cats was not a man to tangle with, but he needed a barman and none of the locals wanted the job.

  ‘What brings you to me?’ he asked.

  ‘I made enquiries in the pub at the other end of the village and they said you might have work for me. I’m no slouch, I’ve pulled pints before.’

  He was a good barman, quick to read a slow customer’s mind and quick to give change on busy evenings, popular with the regulars and industrious even when there was little to be done. But there was something unnatural in the slinky way he looked at you. He was secretive, sharp-tongued, over-confident, without one intimate friend. Though he went out with every girl who would look twice at him, he behaved as if he would not even consider the possibility that one of them could ever become his wife.

  He had an unnatural sense of humour as well. On his day off he would put a plate of bread crumbs on the bird table and sit by the kitchen window waiting for Allegro or Andante to pounce. He had deliberately placed the bird table near the flowerbeds so that they might provide cover for his cats. And whenever one of them caught a bird, he would laugh and slap his thigh. Then shaking both fists, he would shout, ‘Good old Allegro. Second kill today.’

  One evening at the end of May, Roarty had watched him shaking the sycamore until a little nestling fell from an upper branch. The poor bird, paralysed by fright, could make only the most feeble attempt to fly, while the two parents in the nearby ash were scolding furiously and Eales went off laughing to find his cats. Roarty was so horrified that he got out the ladder and put the fledgling back in the nest. He was climbing back down when Eales returned with Allegro and Andante and saw the white and yellow stain on his shirt sleeve.

  ‘That’s the thanks you get for rescuing a scaldy, bird shit on your sleeve.’

  That was proof enough. Eales was evil. Eales must be destroyed.

  Throughout the evening he kept a watchful eye on him but there was not a sign of him weakening. Never had he seemed so alert, pulling pints as if it were a funeral day and joking and arguing with Old Crubog, the know-all fisherman Rory Rua, the Englishman Potter, Cor Mogaill Maloney, and the journalist Gimp Gillespie who could talk the hind leg off a donkey without uttering a word of the truth. It was a good evening for business, though. The bar was packed, the farmers arguing about the storm clouds that were piling up in the east, overloading the air with humidity. Some shook their heads and said they’d expect rain when they saw it, but Crubog with all the authority of his eighty years said that he’d never seen a sky that had the makings of a bigger rain storm.

  2

  The following morning Crubog was his first customer, complaining of the rain storm that never came.

  ‘Did you see what happened?’ he said. ‘The clouds travelled right across the sky from east to west. That rain fell on the sea where it was least wanted.’

  Roarty pulled a pint of stout for him and took a crimped pound note from his trembling hand. After he had given him sixty-two pence in change, he poured out a large whiskey and placed it on the counter beside the pint.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ Crubog asked.

  ‘Nothing that can’t wait,’ said Roarty with a distant look at Rannyweal and the blueness of the bay.

  ‘Whenever you put up a drink on the house, I know there must be mischief on your mind. Do shláinte, a chailleach!’

  ‘Sláinte na bhfear, is go ndoiridh tú bean roimh oíche.’

  Crubog raised the glass and poured the neat whiskey down his throat. The action was certainly one of pouring rather than drinking, Roarty thought. He had watched his Adam’s apple, and it hadn’t moved.

  ‘There’s nothing like neat whiskey first thing in the morning for clearing out the old tubes. If only a man could afford it...’

  ‘You could if you had a mind to,’ Roarty confided.

  ‘How?’ asked Crubog, flattening the single tuft of hair that sprang from the top of his otherwise bald head. It was like a tuft of withered couch-grass, and he had split it in two and combed one strand down over each ear. He was an uncommon sight, small, thin, and sun-tanned—and cunning as an old dog-fox.

  ‘I’ve told you before. All you have to do is sell your land.’

  ‘And how much are you offering today?’ Crubog showed a sly hint of interest while treating the subject as a familiar joke.

  ‘The same as last week. Four thousand is a fair price. It would keep you in whiskey while there’s breath in you.’

  ‘That’s a point of view, but I’ll admit it’s a sore temptation.’

  ‘Then what’s stopping you?’

  ‘You’re not the only one who’s hungry for my land. Rory Rua for one has his eye on it.’

  ‘Rory Rua’s a bighead. He’s all talk.’

  ‘If I sell, it will be to a farmer, like me and my father and grandfather before me. Land is for tillage and grazing. What would the likes of you be doing with it?’

  ‘And what would Rory Rua be doing with it? He’s more of a fisherman than a farmer.’

  ‘He has two cows and two heifers, and he’s thinking of buying a bull. A bull needs scope. Will you be buying a bull?’

  ‘I have no plans. I might stock it or use it for tillage, depending on how the cat jumps.’

  ‘If you want to buy it, you must first tell me what you’d do with it. That would be part of the bargain.’

  Crubog was impossible. Roarty had been pouring him a morning whiskey for the past four years without extracting even a promise to sell. It made no sense. All Crubog had to live on was his pension, while his land lay under the crows without earning him a penny. He wouldn’t mind if it was fertile land. His six-acre farm was a waste land of rocks, but what interested Roarty was the ‘large mountain acreage’ that went with it. He had heard from a friend in Dublin that the Tourist Board was going to build a scenic road across the hill right through Crubog’s land, and he could foresee the day when the roadside would be lined with week-end cottages and tourist chalets. If he owned what Crubog called ‘my large mountain acreage’ when the road came to pass, he would stand a good chance of making a killing.

  ‘Well, I must collect my pe
nsion,’ said Crubog, sucking the froth of his pint from the very bottom of his glass. ‘You needn’t worry, I’ll be back to leave some of it with you before dinnertime.’

  Roarty poured himself his second whiskey of the morning. The bar was empty, and the demon Eales had gone to Killybegs for the day. He looked out at the sea, which was the same as yesterday and the day before. Bored, he took his glass upstairs to Eales’s bedroom. The window was open but there was a smell in the room, not an unpleasant smell but still a smell – the smell of used lotions and talcum powders. Not a wholesome, daytime, manly smell but a smell that brought to mind the reeking manoeuvres of the night. The room was tidier than his own, the low dressing table covered with an assortment of bottles and hair brushes. The vanity of the man! The misplaced conceit! He certainly looked after his mangy carcass. Always washing his hair and having baths, yet his feet smelt like a midden. The toadstools had failed; he was up at six, chirpy as a lark, calling to Allegro and Andante before the dawn chorus had quite ended. What next? Foxglove? McGing had said that you could make digitalis from the leaves provided you gathered them at the right time.

  But what was the right time? He felt dwarfed by the height of ignorance; not even Britannica had the answer. He would have to think of something before Saturday. Another omelette with a bigger surprise perhaps?

  Moving to the bed, he lifted the pink counterpane, then the perfumed pillow. Underneath, rolled in puce pyjamas, was a glossy sex magazine, wherever he’d got it, full of colour pictures of naked beauties in the most inviting poses, offering their air-brushed bottoms and fannies, or swooning with closed eyes as they crushed pneumatic breasts between their hands. His head swam from the jostling of unthinkable possibilities. He glanced at the letters page. Troilism. Fellatio. Cunnilingus. It was all there, the whole mad circus of the aberrant world. Eales was a citizen of that world. Eales must be destroyed.