William Trevor - After Rain

‘Excuse me,’ Catherine said.

She left the kitchen and went to look on the spike in the side-cupboard in the passage, where all receipts were kept. This one should have been close to the top, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t further down either. It wasn’t in the cupboard drawers. She went through the contents of three box-files in case it had been bundled into one in error. Again she didn’t find it.

She returned to the kitchen with the next best thing: the Nationwide Building Society account book. She opened it and placed it in front of Leary. She pointed at the entry that recorded the withdrawal of two hundred and twenty-six pounds. She could tell that there had been no conversation in her absence. Leary would have tried to get some kind of talk going, but Alicia wouldn’t have responded.

‘September the eighth,’ Catherine said, emphasizing the printed date with a forefinger. ‘A Wednesday it was.’

In silence Leary perused the entry. He shook his head. The tight features of his face tightened even more, bunching together into a knot of bewilderment. Catherine glanced at her sister. He was putting it on, Alicia’s expression indicated.

‘The money was taken out all right,’ Leary said eventually. ‘Did he put it to another use in that case?’

‘Another use?’

‘Did you locate a receipt, missus?’

He spoke softly, not in the cagey, underhand tone of someone attempting to get something for nothing. Catherine was still standing. He turned his head to one side in order to squint up at her. He sounded apologetic, but all that could be put on also.

‘I brought the receipt book over with me,’ he said.

He handed it to her, a fat greasy notebook with a grey marbled cover that had The Challenge Receipt Book printed on it. Blue carbon paper protruded from the dog-eared pages.

‘Any receipt that’s issued would have a copy left behind here,’ he said, speaking now to Alicia, across the table. ‘The top copy for the customer, the carbon for ourselves. You couldn’t do business without you keep a record of receipts.’

He stood up then. He opened the book and displayed its unused pages, each with the same printed heading: In account with T . P. Leary . He showed Catherine how the details of a bill were recorded on the flimsy page beneath the carbon sheet and how, when a bill was paid, acknowledgement was recorded also: Paid with thanks, with the date and the careful scrawl of Mrs. Leary’s signature. He passed the receipt book to Alicia, pointing out these details to her also.

‘Anything could have happened to that receipt,’ Alicia said. ‘In the circumstances.’

‘If a receipt was issued, missus, there’d be a record of it here.’

Alicia placed the receipt book beside the much slimmer building-society book on the pale surface of the table. Leary’s attention remained with the former, his scrutiny an emphasis of the facts it contained. The evidence offered otherwise was not for him to comment upon: so the steadiness of his gaze insisted.

‘My husband counted those notes at this very table,’ Catherine said. ‘He took them out of the brown envelope that they were put into at the Nationwide.’

‘It’s a mystery so.’

It wasn’t any such thing; there was no mystery whatsoever. The bill had been paid. Both sisters knew that; in their different ways they guessed that Leary — and presumably his wife as well — had planned this dishonesty as soon as they realized death gave them the opportunity. Matthew had obliged them by paying cash so that they could defraud the taxation authorities. He had further obliged them by dying. Catherine said:

‘My husband walked out of this house with that envelope in his pocket. Are you telling me he didn’t reach you?’

‘Was he robbed? Would it be that? You hear terrible things these days.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’

Leary wagged his head in his meditative way. It was unlikely certainly, he agreed. Anyone robbed would have gone to the Guards. Anyone robbed would have mentioned it when he came back to the house again.

‘The bill was paid, Mr. Leary.’

‘All the same, we have to go by the receipt. At the heel of the hunt there’s the matter of a receipt.’

Alicia shook her head. Either a receipt wasn’t issued in the first place, she said, or else it had been mislaid. ‘There’s a confusion when a person dies,’ she said.

If Catherine had been able to produce the receipt Leary would have blamed his wife. He’d have blandly stated that she’d got her wires crossed. He’d have said the first thing that came into his head and then have gone away.

‘The only thing is,’ he said instead, ‘a sum like that is sizeable. I couldn’t afford let it go.’

Both Catherine and Alicia had seen Mrs. Leary in the shops, red-haired, like a tinker, a bigger woman than her husband, probably the brains of the two. The Learys were liars and worse than liars; the chance had come and the temptation had been too much for them. ‘Ah sure, those two have plenty,’ the woman would have said. The sisters wondered if the Learys had tricked the bereaved before, and imagined they had. Leary said:

‘It’s hard on a man that’s done work for you.’

Catherine moved towards the kitchen door. Leary ambled after her down the hall. She remembered the evening more clearly even than a while ago: a Wednesday it definitely had been, the day of the Sweetman girl’s wedding; and it came back to her, also, Alicia hurrying out on her Legion of Mary business. There’d been talk in McKenny’s about the wedding, the unusual choice of midweek, which apparently had something to do with visitors coming from America. She opened the hall-door in silence. Across the street, beyond the silver-coloured railings, the children were still running about in the convent yard. Watery sunlight lightened the unadorned concrete of the classrooms and the nuns’ house.

‘What’ll I do?’ Leary asked, wide-eyed, bloodshot, squinting at her.

Catherine said nothing.

They talked about it. It could be, Alicia said, that the receipt had remained in one of Matthew’s pockets, that a jacket she had disposed of to one of her charities had later found itself in the Learys’ hands, having passed through a jumble sale. She could imagine Mrs. Leary coming across it, and the temptation being too much. Leary was as weak as water, she said, adding that the tinker wife was a woman who never looked you in the eye. Foxy-faced and furtive, Mrs. Leary pushed a ramshackle pram about the streets, her ragged children cowering in her presence. It was she who would have removed the flimsy carbon copy from the soiled receipt book. Leary would have been putty in her hands.

In the kitchen they sat down at the table from which Alicia had cleared away the polished cutlery. Matthew had died as tidily as he’d lived, Alicia said: all his life he’d been meticulous. The Learys had failed to take that into account in any way whatsoever. If it came to a court of law the Learys wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, with the written evidence that the precise amount taken out of the building society matched the amount of the bill, and further evidence in Matthew’s reputation for promptness about settling debts.

‘What I’m wondering is,’ Alicia said, ‘should we go to the Guards?’

‘The Guards?’

‘He shouldn’t have come here like that.’

That evening there arrived a bill for the amount quoted by Leary, marked Account rendered. It was dropped through the letter-box and was discovered the next morning beneath the Irish Independent on the hall doormat.

‘The little twister!’ Alicia furiously exclaimed.

From the road outside the house came the morning commands of the convent girl in charge of the crossing to the school. ‘Get ready!’ ‘Prepare to cross!’ ‘Cross now!’ Impertinence had been added to dishonesty, Alicia declared in outraged tones. It was as though it had never been pointed out to Leary that Matthew had left the house on the evening in question with two hundred and twenty-six pounds in an envelope, that Leary’s attention had never been drawn to the clear evidence of the building-society entry.