Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

‘Right.’

The smile guttered at my tone but it quickly lit up again. ‘I have a riddle for you, Master Tristram. What begins and has no end, and what is the ending of all that begins?’

‘I don’t know, Larney. What begins and has no end, and what is the ending of all that begins?’

‘Death.’

‘Death,’ I repeated.

His smile hovered in the seething darkness, just his smile, as if his skin were black around it. ‘Yes, death,’ he said. ‘Everyone thinks you are dead.’

‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence,’ I informed him, and hurried away with a curt goodnight.

The avenue was longer than I recalled, and steeper too. Graveyard ivy clotted the orchard walls in grotesque guises — cut-throats, hanged corpses, ghouls. I am a troubled man. I have a troubled mind. I see things in the dark. For a panicked moment I thought I had lost my phone and clapped a hand to my heart, but no, there it was in my pocket. Finally, the avenue opened out onto a familiar expanse of gravel. The pebbles formed a pale moonlit square at the foot of the castle steps. It was a long stretch to cross, a long and exposed stretch past all those looming windows.

I doubled back down the avenue and ducked around the old tower to Mrs Reid’s apartments. Through the gap in her curtains I saw her sitting at her kitchen table with a magazine, feeding chocolate digestives into the slot of her mouth like documents into a shredder. Larney had claimed her as a distant cousin, an allegation she denied, although everyone from the village was related to everyone else. You weren’t a real local unless your mother was from your father’s side of the family.

I tapped on the windowpane. Mrs Reid spilled her tea in fright. ‘It’s only me, Mrs Reid,’ I called to reassure her. A pause as she processed my voice.

The porch light came on and she opened the door a fraction, the safety chain tautened above her top lip like a brass moustache.

‘Hello, Mrs Reid.’

She blinked in astonishment then shut the door in my face. I took an affronted step back. Then I heard the chain sliding across. Mrs Reid flung open the door and gathered me to her, just like in the old days. She was a good woman, a kind one, and most certainly a forgiving one. I am sorry to have dragged her name into this.

‘My poor pet,’ she crooned, ‘your hands are freezing.’

‘You didn’t think I was dead, did you?’

‘Tristram! What a question.’

‘But you didn’t, Mrs Reid, did you?’

‘No, of course not. Your mother told us before she passed away that it was another Tristram St Lawrence.’

‘Nobody told me she was dying.’

Mrs Reid wasn’t willing to drag that whole ugly business up again, so she ushered me in to the warmth of her kitchen and set about producing dishes of food, trying as she had always tried to fill some hole she perceived in me, but I wasn’t hungry. The red door loured beside us, connecting her quarters to the castle proper. She glanced at it from time to time, wary of rousing the big bad ogre who lived on the other side. Surely the old bastard was deaf by now? What was he, after all — ninety?

When the teapot was empty and our cups drained, Mrs Reid nodded at the clock over the stove. ‘You really should go in before he retires for the night,’ she advised me, standing up to clear away the plates. ‘He heads upstairs around midnight. I’d show my face before then if I were you. If he hears you stealing around in the night, he’ll take you for an intruder and shoot you on sight. You know what he’s like.’

I did. I knew what he was like. Both of us knew what Father was like.

*

The connecting stone passage was littered with cigarette butts. He was still rolling his own. Mrs Reid was no longer able to bend down to pick them up, or perhaps she was no longer willing to bend down to pick them up, in the hope that Father might get the message and stop generating extra work, for he was a man who had never had to clean up after himself, being the last in a long line of patriarchs. He had sired me, his only child, at an advanced age with a considerably younger wife. His initial joy at fathering a son was short-lived. His disappointment in me, on the other hand, knew no limits.

I knocked before entering the dining hall, and pushed open the door when I received no reply. The hall was dark and empty. I crossed over to warm myself by the fire. Even with it burning, even in May, that room was cold. I ran my fingers over the engraving on the architrave of the mantelpiece. Qui Panse ; ‘Which Heals’. The family motto.

A commotion broke out as two setters exploded through the far door. They skidded to an aghast halt at the sight of me, then crouched and growled.

‘Get out of that!’ I commanded them, and although they were young dogs and had never laid eyes on me before, instinctively they understood that they should submit, and they flattened their long bellies against the floor. They recognised me as their breed, just as I recognised them as my breed, since there have always been Irish setters in the castle. Several were depicted at their masters’ feet in the family portraits lining the hall. But I’m not here to give a history lesson.

I got down on my hunkers to caress their long ears. These two were beauties, the breed at its best — alert and agile, muscular and sleek, a map of liver-brown continents on the white sea of their backs. They kept their handsome heads on the floor and swallowed contritely. ‘That’s better,’ I told them.

They heard him first. Their bodies tensed. I looked up.

A tall lean figure of military bearing was watching us from the doorway. Arnhem 1944, rank of colonel. I got to my feet. Father lowered the rifle.

‘Heel,’ he said coolly in his own good time, and the two dogs scrambled over and prostrated themselves at his feet. He propped the rifle against the frame of the door and clasped his hands behind his back. I raised my chin and aimed a thousand-yard stare at the wall.

‘Why have you returned here?’

‘This is my home.’

‘This most certainly is not your home.’

‘I am your son.’

‘Only when it suits you.’

This was how we spoke, Father and I. If we spoke at all. I rested my eyes briefly on his face. Ninety-odd years of age and still possessed of his silver helmet of hair. He was already grey by the time I was born although old photographs reveal him to have been blond. It was about the only feature I had inherited from him. The fair hair and the height.

He circled me slowly, examining my person. The inspection had commenced. I directed my gaze at the wall again, or at a point just beyond it.

‘Have you come to apologise?’

‘I have not.’

‘Then this conversation is over.’

With that he left, collecting the rifle upon his exit. ‘Heel,’ he instructed the setters once more and they fell in line behind him. I remained standing to attention for some time in the wake of his departure, listening to the embers settle in the grate as the fire faded beside me, as I faded beside the fire. I don’t know why I’m talking about all of this in the past tense. Nothing is past. Everything is tense. You’ll forgive me, Fergus, if I leave it there for the moment.

‘Mr St Lawrence, returning to the brief conversation you conducted with Mr Hickey on the steps of the Summit Inn on 26 May 2006 in which he mentioned that he had a business proposition for you: at what point did you enter into a partnership with him?’

Not for a number of weeks, and when I did enter into a formal business arrangement with Mr Hickey, I did so at M. Deauville’s instigation. He called me the following morning wanting to know how I had come to find myself in one of my old haunts. ‘It was late,’ I said, ‘where else was I supposed to go?’ presuming he meant the castle, but no, he meant the Summit Inn. How had I come to find myself in the Summit Inn? I had no answer to that.