The New Policeman (20 page)

“I feel sorry for him,” said J.J.

“He’d be delighted to hear you say that,” said Aengus. “Tell him when you next meet him.”

“But it’s awful, what happened to your people.”

“Truly terrible,” said Aengus. “But it’s happened. Nothing can change it. It’s too late for the Dagda to decide it wasn’t a great idea.”

“What do you think he should do, then?”

Aengus smiled. “You should see my father dance, J.J. He should come down off the mountain and live with his people.” He reflected for a moment, then added, “Or die with them.”

J.J. was irritated with Aengus. It was all very well to be scornful of the Dagda and to criticize the ploddies and accuse them of being greedy. What entitled him and the others to drift around in perpetual bliss while on the other side of the time skin people slaved and died and suffered all the troubles associated with mortality?

But the leak wasn’t only affecting Tír na n’Óg. He had almost forgotten why he had come. If time was
gaining such momentum here, what might be happening back there?

He looked at his watch. Quarter to seven. In a while longer, time in this world would be matching that in his own world for speed.

“We’d better do something,” he said.

“The leak,” said Aengus.

They looked at the rock-strewn hillside below them. There was no obvious choice of direction.

“Do you mind if we go down that way?” said J.J. “That’s my house down there in the trees. I’d like to see what it looks like over here.”

“I suppose we may as well,” said Aengus. “I’ve no better idea, anyway.”

They walked down the steep hill toward the farmhouse. The same hill was their winterage at home, but here there were no walls, and although J.J. recognized individual rocks and some of the shapes that were in the land, he was slightly disoriented and couldn’t quite get his bearings.

About halfway down to the house he stopped and looked back, trying to place his position in the landscape. That was it. There had been no clearance here, no bulldozing. They had already come past the top meadow with its ring fort, but here, along with a lot
of the other fields, it was still covered with rock.

He had his bearings now, but something else was missing.

“Where’s Bran?”

Aengus stopped and looked around. “I don’t know.” He called her.

J.J. called as well. “Bran? Here, girl.”

They waited, but the dog didn’t appear.

“Oh, no,” said J.J. “I hope she hasn’t given up.”

“She could be stuck somewhere,” said Aengus. “Did we climb over any big rocks?”

“I don’t think so,” said J.J. “I’d better go back and look for her.”

“I’ll wait for you,” said Aengus.

KING OF THE FAIRIES

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Ciaran had tried to talk Helen out of holding the céilí, but she wouldn’t be dissuaded. What was more, she had their daughter’s full backing. Marian was not going to dance, though, this time. She was ready to take J.J.’s place, playing at her mother’s side.

Time was still racing away from them all. They made no efforts to compensate themselves for J.J.’s absence with any kind of distraction, but even so their days flew by with impossible speed. It was almost as though the hours were being leeched away by some vast, unseen vacuum. And with every one that passed, the prospect of J.J. returning grew dimmer.

Sergeant Early had written off the new policeman. He hadn’t turned up for days. It vaguely crossed his mind
that there might be another case of a disappearance, but he was not inclined to investigate. If O’Dwyer had disappeared, it was, at least, one less headache for him to deal with.

They were getting nowhere with the missing persons. Reluctantly, they had accepted that Anne Korff would have to be included in the tally. It was more than a fortnight now since she had locked up her house and gone, and she hadn’t made contact with anyone yet. Special detectives had been drafted in from Dublin, and the whole round of house-to-house inquiries had been repeated. Nothing, absolutely nothing was emerging.

When Garda O’Dwyer did turn up for work, just in time to go out on night duty, Sergeant Early roasted him. O’Dwyer weathered the storm of abuse by gazing fixedly at the wall and counting backward from a hundred. It was well for the sergeant that he did. He had no inkling of what the new policeman might have done to him had he lost his temper. When the tirade was finally over, Larry refocused himself and accepted the orders he was given for the night. As he left the office he said to Sergeant Early, “I hear you play the banjo. A gorgeous instrument. We must get a tune together some time.”

He was posted in Gort, for the happy hours after the pubs closed. There were some rough elements in the town, and there was plenty to keep him busy that particular night. Larry was not averse to making difficult arrests, or even to jumping on a few heads, though he could think of several better ways of dealing with miscreants. All the same it was not, as far as he could remember, the reason that he had become a policeman.

Helen was taken by surprise on her birthday. She was working so hard at just carrying on that she had forgotten all about it. Ciaran and Marian woke her with breakfast in bed and a pile of presents so big that it took her half an hour to open them all. They made her stay in bed while they did the morning jobs, but she had to get up when friends started calling with more presents.

Ciaran cooked lunch. Afterward he announced that they were all going to the pictures in Ennis, and from there to a meal in Helen’s favorite Chinese restaurant. The day flew by and Helen entered into the spirit of it as well as she could, but they all knew that her pleasures were hollow without J.J. there to share them. As they were about to set out for the cinema, she said,
“What if he comes back and there’s nobody here?”

“He’ll wait,” said Ciaran. “What else would he do?”

But Helen wasn’t happy with that. Before they left, she wrote a note for him and left it out on the kitchen table.

THE ANGRY PEELER

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J.J. retraced his steps across the hillside. He called out to Bran again and again, but she didn’t come, and locating a gray dog in terrain that was predominantly gray was beginning to look like an impossible task.

She couldn’t be that far away. She had been with them at the bottom of the stony steps, and he was fairly sure that she had started out with them as they came down the hill. Dead or alive, he was sure to come across her if he kept looking for long enough.

Still calling, he climbed up to the edge of the hazel and looked in. The shadows were deep in there, and although J.J. couldn’t see anything that looked like a goat, he had no intention of going in without Aengus.

“Bran? Bran!”

But if Bran was in the hazel woods, she wasn’t coming out.

From his vantage point J.J. looked back down the hillside. Despite the overall grayness, he was fairly sure that she wasn’t anywhere within sight. Aengus Óg wasn’t visible either, and J.J. assumed he must have gone on to the house. As far as J.J. could see, there was only one place where Bran could be concealed from view, and that was in the ring fort. Its outline was quite clear, but he could see little within its circumference because of the holly and whitethorn growing there. He walked back down to it and stepped over the low wall of standing stones.

There was still no sign of the dog. J.J. walked between the trees, calling as he went. The inside of the rath was exactly as his own one was at home, tree for tree and stone for stone. But as he came to the middle, J.J. saw that there was one major difference. Where in his world there was just another pile of stones breaking the surface, here there was a place where a flat stone seemed to have slipped sideways and was hanging on its edge, almost as though it was hinged. Beneath it was a deep hole. J.J. kneeled down and peered into it. Underneath the flat stone, the hole broadened out.
It was, without doubt, the entrance to a souterrain.

As he looked down into it, J.J. heard sounds, muffled by their passage from the depths of the earth. He slithered down into the hole, noticing as he did so the fresh scratches of a dog’s claws and a damp smear of blood.

“Bran?”

He listened, and heard more distinctly now the low, menacing snarling of a dog and a man’s voice, raised in anger. A swift chill ran through J.J.’s veins. Down there in the darkness was something he was in no hurry to investigate. He scrambled back to the surface and ran to the edge of the fort.

He couldn’t see Aengus. He shouted his name. It bounced around among the rocks for a while, but wherever Aengus was, it didn’t reach him. J.J. yelled again, louder. There was no reply.

J.J. was frightened. He was out of his depth, and Aengus Óg had done a bunk. With no clear idea about what he was going to do, he went back to the mouth of the souterrain. Down there in the darkness, Bran was still growling. There was a shout and a bark, a moment of silence, then he heard her growling again.

“Bran!” He waited. She wasn’t going to come. Why had she gone down there and who had she found?

She had followed him so determinedly wherever he had gone in Tír na n’Óg. Him, not Aengus. He didn’t know why, but he was certain that she had purposefully attached herself to him as soon as she’d seen him walking down the main street of the village. It made no sense that she didn’t respond to his call.

Unless she couldn’t. It was that thought, the sudden realization that Bran might be in danger, that galvanized J.J. into overcoming his fear. With unsteady hands, he unzipped his inside pocket and took out the candle and matches.

The bright flame in front of his face blinded him as he wriggled through the crawl hole. Anything might have hit him as he lifted his head on the other side, but nothing did. The first hall was empty; the only movement came from the flickering shadows created by his candle. The sounds were clearer, though, and as he walked through the long, narrow room, he began to hear words.

“Go on! Go back! Get out of here!”

Bran, then, was the aggressor. But why? Who was she threatening? J.J. became a little more curious and a little less afraid. The dog was in a bad way, but as Aengus had pointed out, there was nothing wrong with her teeth. Weak as she was, she wouldn’t let anyone
harm him as long as she had the use of them.

He kneeled down and squeezed through into the second chamber. The light from his candle revealed the burly shape of the wolfhound just beyond the entrance. She swayed and wobbled, barely able to stay on her feet, but her snarls were savage enough to be taken seriously by anyone who heard them. She had not registered his arrival, and even though he knew her, he was reluctant to reach out a hand. Her attention was fixed on the opposite corner of the chamber, where the man was standing.

“Call off your hellhound!” he shouted.

J.J. held up his candle and nearly dropped it in surprise. The man was wearing black clothes and a dog collar. For reasons known only to herself, Bran was engaged in a standoff with a priest.

THE PRIEST WITH THE COLLAR

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