Bogmail Read online

  ‘After a month of badgering farmers about their ragwort I sometimes wish I were in London with Scotland Yard solving rape and murder cases by the dozen.’

  ‘But isn’t it pleased you should be that we’re all so law-abiding!’

  ‘It’s a policeman’s paradox. His job is to prevent crime but he isn’t content unless he’s investigating it.’

  ‘Do you think he encourages it by his presence?’

  ‘Not in Glenkeel. In the country, I’m convinced, all crime is imaginary. People don’t act out their fantasies as they do in the city. The last known crime in these parts (forgetting after-hours drinking which we won’t mention) was five years ago, the Case of the Tumbled Tramp-cock.’

  ‘With the torn knickers?’

  ‘The very one. And who solved it, I ask you?’

  ‘Every Glenkeel man knows the answer to that,’ Roarty smiled.

  ‘The other two guards blamed the two young tourists who were camping in the next field but I told them different. Do you know how I solved it?’

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘No semen on the knickers,’ said McGing solemnly. ‘Some of these young fellows know no forensic.’

  ‘It was a tricky case,’ said Roarty who was enjoying the conversation from his position of unassailable security.

  ‘It was an easy one for the right policeman. Look at the facts. Old Crubog wakes up one morning to find one of his tramp-cocks knocked flat, looking for all the world like a makeshift bed with a pair of torn knickers on top of it. It has rained heavily in the night and the hay is ruined, £10 worth, a tidy sum to an old-age pensioner. Young Garda McCoy investigates, finds footprints leading to the next field where two teenagers from Derry are camping in the rain. He comes back to the barracks thinking he has solved the case until I breathe the pregnant word ‘semen’.

  “But maybe he took her knickers off before he laid her!” says he. “Why should he tear them off”, says I, “if they’re camping happily in the next field?” ‘‘A fetishist,” says Garda McCoy triumphantly. ‘‘A practical joker,” says I, “and a local man, too. This was done to make Crubog think the younger generation are sex maniacs. The lads are always filling his head with stories.” And I put my cap on my head and went straight to the man that did it.’

  ‘Cor Mogaill Maloney.’

  ‘Imagination is what a policeman needs, not logic. A born policeman has a criminal imagination. The only difference between him and the criminal is that he uses his imagination to solve rather than commit crime.’

  McGing took a long draught from his pint and winked at Roarty.

  ‘A policeman,’ he continued, ‘feels closer to the criminal than to the most law-abiding citizen. It’s the tie between the hunter and the hunted. You’re a sportsman. You must agree that a good hunter knows his quarry.’

  ‘A good sportsman is first and foremost a naturalist.’

  ‘And a successful policeman is first and foremost a criminologist—he gives his days and nights to the study of the criminal mind. Though I say so myself, it’s a pity I never got a chance. Oh, if only there was a Moriarty in Glenkeel. I’ve got the nose, you see. But what’s the good of a nose if there’s no one to leave a...’

  ‘Spoor,’ suggested Roarty.

  ‘Spoor indeed,’ said McGing, shaking his head sadly.

  There was a thud in the hallway as Doalty O’Donnell put down his postbag.

  ‘You’re late,’ said McGing magisterially.

  ‘A heavy post. It took over an hour to sort.’ Doalty untied the string on a bundle of letters.

  ‘Let’s see what you’ve got today,’ said Roarty.

  ‘Nothing but bills,’ Doalty said apologetically. ‘It’s something I’ve been noticing lately, the increase in official mail and the falling off in private correspondence. A postman’s pleasure is easily measured when all he delivers is bumf.’

  Roarty looked perfunctorily through the handful of brown envelopes. One from a bottling firm, one from the Electricity Supply Board, one from a record club, and a tatty one that had been used before and restuck with sellotape. Though somewhat affronted by the crude script, he tore it open out of curiosity and felt his legs go limp as he read.

  ‘Doalty is right,’ said McGing. ‘The telephone has murdered the art of letter writing.’

  Roarty mumbled a reply and placed a whiskey glass under the nearest optic, his mouth nauseatingly dry. ‘That reminds me,’ he said, heading for the kitchen. He asked Susan to mind the bar for ten minutes and went straight upstairs. Weak at the knees, he sat on the edge of his bed and reread the letter, pausing unnecessarily over the large block letters, written no doubt with a matchstick:

  Dear Roarty

  Eales is transplanted but not his magazine which I’m still enjoying. If you want to keep his whereabouts from McGing pay £30 a week into Acc No 319291 Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin 2. Pay in notes not cheques and begin in three day’s time August 13th and oblige

  Yours sincerely and seriously

  Bogmailer

  Ps. I’m fond of your pub. It’s the best in Tork. It would be such a pity to lose you.

  6

  Roarty was so shattered that he could not think. He went about in a noonday trance, pulling pints and giving change mechanically, making small talk without knowing what he was saying. He wolfed down his lunch with one unseeing eye on the dead conifer in the garden. When he had finished, he couldn’t recall what he had eaten. He left Susan in charge of the bar and went fishing in the hope that it might steady his nerve.

  He didn’t fancy the river where he’d be bound to run into other anglers. With his trout rod on his shoulder, he climbed the hill towards the more secluded loughs, forcing himself to concentrate on the familiar features of the landscape: grey ditches of lichened stones built in more straitened times, sheep pens and makeshift dipping troughs, clumps of fern and rushes, a solitary foxglove sheltering in a river bank, pools of reddish-brown water where he had fished for eels as a boy. The reddish-brown water was the ruamheirg for which there was no word in English, and he listened to its liquid music falling in a miniature cataract on smooth stones. Further upriver in another pool, fronds of brown dirt wavered among the pebbles at the bottom while the surface was speckled with red-and-gold-and-silver scum in a kind of iridescence.

  He walked along poached sheep tracks with heaps of sheepshairn like shiny black peas; past a patch of kindly grass near an old lime kiln; past the mound of rushes where a snipe always rose; past spongy hollows lying unexpectedly in firmer ground; past pools with thick foam churned brown between stones, clotted froth, swirling, swirling, froth that would give you warts, or so his mother used to tell him as a boy. Here and there the stones were covered with a green alga, cál leannógach, another word that formed part of the comic consciousness of the glen.

  Having reached the top, he sat down gratefully on a clump of heather. Beneath him lay the wide open glen—a feast of which he could not partake. He tried to recapture the delight he normally took in the scene, knowing that today he was a mere onlooker, no longer a celebrating participant. The bottom of the valley with its patchwork of fields; the north mountain irregularly dotted with whitewashed cottages; the village of Tork where he himself lived, a sorry straggle of mediocre houses, a blot on the beauty of the landscape; the sickle-shaped strand in the west and the greeny blue of the sea beyond—all were so many disparate parts that failed to come together in a satisfying whole. A wild bee hovering over a clump of heather roused him. He plucked a handful of moss and, putting it to his nose, inhaled the smell of newly cut peat, which he remembered so well from boyhood.

  On the hilltop was a plateau where his father used to cut turf before he opened a bog in the Abar Rua. Now it stretched before him, a carpet of light and darker brown streaked by washed-out greens. The ancestral bog was now a waste land, the old sites of turf stacks like raised graves, mounds of peat mould overgrown with rushes while here and there a whitened stump of bog fir protrud
ed above the heather. The bog-face was scarred by winter frosts and running water, and broken down by the hooves of mountain sheep. Tufts of heather grew in crevices and the marks of the slane denoting the different spits had vanished into eternity, blown to dust by Atlantic winds. In a moment of searing lucidity he had a vision of centuries passing swiftly while the long pull of his own desperate existence seemed never ending.

  As a distraction he began listing things that caught his eye as he walked. Ahead of him the ground dipped to form twin basins in which lay two lakes, the Lough of Gold and the Lough of Silver. He reached the larger of the two, the Lough of Silver, first. A wind from the west was ruffling the surface of the water, making the waves boil among the black stones on the lee shore, producing a continuous singing that differed noticeably from the rhythmic wash of sea waves. He walked out along a little causeway of stepping stones, keeping an eye on the belt of sunlight that traversed the water to a little inlet on the left full of churned white froth streaked with brown. To his right was a patch of water weed, the leaves pointing with the wind to the eastern shore.

  On the far side of the lough a solitary water bird was sailing before the wind, its black body high in the water, its long neck gracefully arched. He retraced his steps to the shore and lay down to watch the bird. It sat too high in the water to pass for a cormorant, and it had none of a cormorant’s nervous vigilance. It was drifting peacefully before the wind, looking to neither right nor left, its gaze fixed on the water below its crop. He could not but feel that it was a stranger to these parts, perhaps even a bird of ill omen. When it reached the eastern shore, it rose against the wind and with slow flapping returned to the windward side of the lough. Then, as if whiffing for fish, it sailed back before the wind once more, only to repeat the performance when it reached the eastern shore.

  Roarty pulled the letter from his pocket and spread it out before him on the rough sedge. The sense of nausea he experienced on first reading it had gone and in its place was a dull ache of indefinable anxiety, a kind of tugging that distorted his thoughts, making all he laid eyes on as unreal as the false sense of security he had felt talking to McGing about ragwort that morning. His pattern of thought had shattered into a thousand fragments. To survive he must pull himself together and decide before tomorrow on a sensible course of action.

  First, he must discover who wrote the note. It wasn’t strictly necessary, of course, but he felt in his bones that decision would come easier once he knew the temper of the enemy. For a moment he studied the handwriting but the anonymous block capitals told him nothing. Any clues they contained must lie in the language, in the telltale turn or twist of a phrase. The writer was obviously intelligent, capable of expressing himself succinctly and with dry humour, capable of writing over fifty words with only one error. But perhaps he had written ‘in three day’s time’ rather than ‘in three days’ time’ to put him off the scent. The word ‘transplanted’ was another clue; it would come naturally to a countryman but it could also come naturally to a city slicker who had met farmers. And what of the word ‘bogmail’? Surely, in this rather self-conscious attempt at humour lay the clue that would lead him to the enemy. Judging by the postscript, the writer was a regular customer, someone who had got his hands on an old business envelope with his name and address, someone who lived in Glenkeel and had a bank account in Dublin. In theory such men were few but they were not at all easy to identify. Cor Mogaill had the right sense of humour. Gimp Gillespie was good with the pen. Rory Rua went to Dublin regularly to see his sister. Kenneth Potter, being English, was a dark horse but he couldn’t be ruled out. Of the men who drank in his pub, Crubog was the only one he trusted.

  Again he went over the suspects one by one. On the internal evidence Cor Mogaill, Gimp Gillespie and Potter were the likeliest suspects. All three of them had the kind of humour that would have enabled them to write the note, whereas Rory Rua, though a great newspaper reader, was stolid and unimaginative, not the kind of man who would think of the word ‘bogmailer’. On the other hand he could well have seen him burying the body on the bog. His bog was on the Abar Rua and he was known to get up early from time to time in the hope of catching the thief who kept stealing his turf. Come to think of it, even Potter was a possibility. He was a keen bird watcher, often on the mountain with his field glasses, but was he likely to be bird watching at three o’clock in the morning?

  He gazed round him at the bare landscape. He was lost in a labyrinth from which there was no exit. He could spend the day on ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ to no purpose; the only real evidence he had was the letter. He read it again and heard Potter’s cynical laugh on the other side of the counter. It was Potter, by God; he was just the kind of man who’d take pleasure in coining a word like ‘bogmail’. He would keep an eye on him and listen for the telltale phrase that would transform a hunch into deadly certainty.

  Observing the regal progress of the water bird, he pondered the best course of action. He could pay the £30 a week and hope that the bogmailer would not ask for more; he could go to McGing with the letter in a display of outraged innocence; or he could call the bogmailer’s bluff by ignoring him. As he considered the three options, he knew in his heart that the choice lay between the first and the last. He removed his hat and took a Connemara Black from the band. It was a good fly for a cloudy day with the wind blowing against the flow of the water where the stream left the lough in the southwest corner.

  His eye travelled over the popply surface, which glinted intermittently in the changing light. Imagining brown trout lurking in the shadows of the peaty bottom, dark and mysterious as their unplumbed home, he attached the fly to the trace and picked up his canvas bag, about to make his way round the edge to the far side of the lough. As he turned, the water bird raised its head and looked him in the eye for a long moment before settling down once more to its unobtrusive whiffing. The long moment changed his mind. His head swam as he recalled the malocchio and the article on the Evil Eye. He knew better than to compete with such a seldom-seen visitor, whose origin and purpose was a matter for speculation. He would cross the hill to the more sheltered Lough of Gold and thus avoid needless confrontation.

  The wind blew stiffly through the heather and against the back of his legs. Suddenly he was on the other side of the hill without a breath of air stirring. Below him the sheltered lough was a sheet of glass with stooping weeds on one side and a patch of water weed, red and green, near the edge, flat floating circles with missing segments. Just then his eye caught a familiar form: a grey, high-shouldered heron stooping on a stone near the shore. He dropped to his knees in the heather, his eye still on the skeleton-thin sentinel. He couldn’t be sure if the heron had seen him. If it had, it refused to give the slightest indication, not even a tilt of its crested head. He gazed at the long beak on the rough breast, gradually becoming aware of the true meaning of immobility. In an instant he knew what he must do. Like the heron he would move neither head nor foot; while presenting a picture of intelligent vigilance, he would affect a masterly inactivity and possibly make Potter think again.

  A devilish thought entered his head; he would test the heron’s nerve as Potter would undoubtedly try to test his. He got to his feet and began walking straight towards the bird, determined to see how close he would get before she took flight. Would she turn on the stone and fly into the east or would she fly into the wind and turn on the wing? Picking his steps over the rough ground, he made a slow approach with both eyes on the stooped head. A sudden flap made him jump. Another heron he hadn’t spotted rose from the reeds, and when his eye returned to the stone, its companion had also risen. It would not have happened to him yesterday. His nerves were on edge; he was too easily distracted. He watched as they flew off in different directions with powerful wing beats and long legs trailing. Somehow he felt pleased when they converged on a hillock to the east of him.

  ‘By your gimp I’d say your bag is light.’ The voice came from the hillside behind him. With a tremor of
apprehension, he recognised McGing’s nasal drone.

  ‘Not a stir on this water,’ Roarty said, turning to face the bulkier man.

  ‘Have you tried the Lough of Silver?’

  ‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘They’re rising short, the buggers.’

  ‘Never. Not with the wind in this airt. It’s the best airt there is.’

  He watched as McGing came down the side of the hill, the deep heather brushing his wellingtons. He was wearing green corduroys tucked into his gumboots and a grey thorn-proof jacket with bulging pockets that made him look even broader and more awkward than he appeared in uniform. His face was flushed, and as he drew level Roarty noticed a tear in his left eye from having been facing into the wind. He was noticeably overweight; he had the look of a man who was heading for an early heart attack.

  They stood on the shore facing the quiet water, two once powerful men now past their prime. Roarty felt that if they were to wrestle, there was no telling which of them would win. They would not wrestle, however. Any conflict between them would be one of irreconcilable intellects.

  ‘And what fly did you have on?’ McGing asked.

  ‘A Connemara Black.’

  ‘I’ll try a Zulu then. Either should be killing on the Lough of Silver with the wind and the sky as they are.’

  ‘You can try any fly you like. It won’t make a hap’orth of difference. I did my best but a big black water bird put the evil eye on me.’

  ‘A big black water bird? You mean a duibhéan?’

  ‘It wasn’t a duibhéan. No cormorant ever kept her head so still.’

  ‘It’s nothing else,’ said McGing. ‘Didn’t I see her myself last week, a big duibhéan, as big as a swan!’

  ‘But you don’t find duibhéans as big as swans.’