The White Tower (12 page)

‘You don't have that problem?'

‘My folks are cool, and in any case I live a long way from them. You know,' she said, looking me up and down, then nodding as though she'd come to a decision, ‘Niall wrote to me just before he died.'

‘What about?

‘The hospital where he worked. He was in some sort of trouble. He didn't spell it out. Something to do with the guy he worked for.'

‘Dr Fenshaw?'

‘Yeah. Niall obviously thought the world of this guy, but he'd done something that upset him.'

‘What?'

‘Niall never said. He never went into any of the details. I told him to go and talk to someone over there, someone he could trust. And to forget about all this shit with the Castle. He needed that like a hole in the head. Just quit, like I was doing.'

‘Did he take your advice about talking to someone?'

‘I don't know. If he did, it couldn't have done him much good, could it?'

‘So Niall really admired Dr Fenshaw.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Like he admired Fallon?'

‘I got the feeling even more so, but by the time Niall was telling me this stuff he was totally pissed off with Fallon.'

‘Did Niall describe Fenshaw to you? Tell you why he thought so much of him?'

‘You mean physically?'

‘As a person.'

‘He did say that he made you feel special, and that he was a perfectionist, that he drove himself as hard as he drove everyone who worked for him.'

‘You really never met Niall face to face?'

‘Never.'

‘Do you feel you should have helped him more?'

‘Of course,' Bridget said, with another wry face in which sadness fought with something tough and resilient. ‘Don't you?'

Twelve

I drove north from Belfast airport in a hire car, arriving at Fallon's village just on dusk. I was tired when I got there, but proud of the way I'd managed.

The village had two hotels and a few more bed and breakfast places. I'd booked to stay in the only B&B that was open in October. My guidebook mentioned Sorley Fallon's silverware and jewellery shop as one of a handful of businesses catering to summer tourists.

The light was fading as I pulled up. The countryside around was bare, practically treeless, the few trees already stripped of leaves. Small, stone-fenced fields neatly contained black-faced sheep, and stretched all the way to cliff edges, the ocean below them a grey shimmer in the evening light.

A woman wearing a tweed skirt and twinset showed me to a tiny upstairs room where I dumped my bags, then hurried out for a walk while there was still some light to see by.

People were about, two couples walking dogs, a woman pushing a stroller and holding a child of three or four tightly by the hand, others making their way towards the closest pub which, I was glad to see, served dinner from seven o'clock on.

I found the jewellery shop without any trouble. It was small and narrow-fronted, as was the shop advertising Aran wool jumpers next to it. Both were closed, but there was a light on at the back of Fallon's. I studied the finely-carved pieces in the window to see if I could spot any of the ones he'd photographed for his website. There were trays of bracelets, earrings, brooches, attractive but nothing out of the ordinary. I heard a noise and stepped back onto the street.

It was too dark to take the cliff path to the sea. I'd save that for tomorrow. I didn't have a plan for tackling Fallon, but I believed I had one card up my sleeve. Everything would depend on what happened when I played it, how Fallon responded, what move he chose next.

. . .

Fallon's homepage photograph didn't do him justice. He shook my hand, studying me with a smile of amusement, blue eyes of the Pacific seabed, not that other sea at the bottom of a cliff. If my flesh was a disappointment, then he was not about to say. His long black hair was tied back with a leather thong. He was tall, well-built, with the expectant confidence of someone who has turned strangers' eyes since he was a boy.

His shop was furnished with a couple of long, low display cases, two tables—one with a cash register and the other a computer, printer and modem—and a couple of chairs that looked as though no one ever sat on them. The windows facing the street were small, but an impression of light and space had been created by a large, sloping skylight towards the back. Under it was a workbench, covered with silversmithing tools and pieces of jewellery in various stages of completion.

Fallon was still smiling, waiting for me to explain myself.

‘It's a quiet place you have here,' I said.

‘The winters are quiet, that's true.'

His voice had an Irish way of holding together softness and its ­opposite.

‘You prefer the winter?' I was afraid that my flat Australian vowels had already let me down.

‘Very much so. And yourself?'

‘It's cold, Canberra. Not like here though. Dry. The autumns are beautiful. Have you ever been to Australia?'

‘I've not had that pleasure.'

He asked me if I'd like something to drink, and disappeared through a door set in the shop's back wall. There was another small building, a kind of annexe, behind the shop and a little to one side. It looked too small to live in, though large enough for a narrow kitchen. I guessed it was where I'd seen the light the night before.

His computer was running Windows NT, which took forever to load. My host would be back before it did. I heard water running and prayed for some small kitchen calamity while I scanned icons for Fallon's internet service provider.

The second it came on the screen, I heard footsteps and flicked the power switch.

Fallon set down a tray with a coffee pot and two mugs that looked as though they'd been fired at a local pottery. He poured coffee, keeping his head lowered over the pot.

‘Where did you work before you came here?'

‘I studied computer science at Queens,' Fallon said slowly, as though he all day to fill in his biography. ‘Then I worked in Belfast for a while. For IBM. Belfast drove me crazy. I'd started making jewellery when I was a student. I found I could sell quite a bit, you know, without really trying. I went to evening classes in silversmithing. One night a bomb went off so close it blew the electricity. We were sitting there, twenty of us, boys like me mostly, looking for an hour or two's escape, with our welding torches in our hands.'

‘What happened?'

‘Oh, the tech had its own generator, but by the time they got it going, the hour was up. Class dismissed.' He laughed. ‘One Christmas I came up here and that was it. Love at first sight.'

I took a sip of coffee. It was good, hot and fully flavoured.

I looked at him over the top of my mug. ‘Antrim's the most thoroughly Protestant county in the north. So I heard.'

‘You heard correctly.'

‘Why did you call your MUD
Castle of Heroes
?'

‘It's from Yeats. Yeats liked castles. He bought one and lived in it during the civil war. Thoor Ballylee, it's called. And years before that, he'd found this castle in the middle of Lough Key. He had the idea of making it into a castle of heroes, the centre of a new cult.'

‘You were following in the poet's footsteps?'

Fallon shook his head slightly, perhaps to clear away an unwelcome vision.

‘Others might see it like that. I don't.'

He leant over to refill my mug. I've always liked being waited on by men. It calms me and makes me feel satisfied, as though I've just eaten a very good, but light and nutritious meal. It's a feeling of how life could be if the world were tilted just a little more.

Whether Fallon sensed this or not, he made a small ceremony out of pouring the coffee and watching me drink it appreciatively.

‘Yeats is remarkable you know,' now there was something shy in his expression, as if he didn't know how his opinion would be met, ‘for his interest in both nationalism and the occult. The two great passions, or forces in his life. And poetry, of course, though poetry wasn't so much a separate interest as an attempt to bring those other two together.'

‘Yeats was a Protestant.'

‘So was Wolfe Tone.'

‘Did Yeats succeed, in your view?'

‘Read the poems.'

‘I studied them at university.'

Fallon inclined his head in deference to the superior knowledge conferred by universities. ‘You know all about it then.' A strand of his hair came loose from the leather thong.

‘What about the magic? Did you get that from him too?'

‘He compiled books of fairytales, that's true. But the primary magic in my Castle is—I mean used to be—a staple of Irish folk tales.'

‘Was Niall Howley a Republican?'

Fallon smiled and said, ‘I suspect there's a type of Irish–Australian for whom we, the
Irish
Irish, are never good enough. You should visit Yeats's birthplace while you're here.'

‘There's nothing I'd rather do.' I nodded to emphasise the point. ‘But in the meantime—'

‘Yeats was a game player, as all great poets are. And all great game players have a little of the poet in them.'

‘Tell me why you decided to execute your favourite. And remember, I'm an Aussie blockhead, so you need to keep it simple.'

Fallon's stone blue eyes were cold. ‘You should understand that Ferdia became erratic, irresponsible. I reprimanded him, then I threatened him with demotion. It made no difference. Then I caught him, or rather Niall, attempting to steal my source code. If he'd succeeded, he could have crashed the Castle any time he wanted.'

‘How did you catch Niall?'

‘My system recorded attempted break ins. He was logged on every time. It still amazes me that he thought he could get away with it.'

‘Why would Niall want to crash your MUD?'

‘I wish I knew.'

‘Did you talk to the other Heroes about him?'

‘Enough to convince them that the problem was serious.'

‘So the execution was—?'

‘I had to put a stop to it. He could have started his own MUD, but if he wanted to be part of mine, then he had to play according to my rules.'

At times it seemed that both of us were making a scrupulous ­distinction between Ferdia and Niall, at others that Fallon ran them together to suit himself.

‘Who told you Niall was dead?'

‘A friend of his from the hospital.'

Fallon roused himself, as though this was the point he really wanted to make. ‘Do I grieve for him? Yes. I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you if I didn't. Do I blame myself? No, I do not.'

‘Did Niall always log on from the same computer?'

‘From memory, there was more than one.'

‘Did you keep a record?'

I waited while he looked up the addresses, copied them, and handed them to me. One was Niall's. The other looked as though it could belong to Monaro Hospital.

‘This could mean two players, couldn't it? Both claiming to be Ferdia.'

Fallon hesitated for a moment, then replied that, though he'd kept all his login records for a time, he'd recently got rid of them.

‘What about the buildings, all the graphic stuff?'

‘I got rid of that too.'

I reached into my bag, took out an envelope containing a copy of the castle scene and handed it across.

‘It was left on Niall's computer when he died.'

Fallon glanced at it without apparent recognition.

‘Niall sent it to you, didn't he? When?'

‘It would have been the night he died.'

‘June the twenty-second?'

‘That's right.'

‘Did he send it to any of the other players?'

‘I have no idea.'

‘Did you create it and send it to him?'

‘Of course not.'

Fallon's voice was so mild, so soft. I listened for the edges, the cut under the sibilance and repeated, ‘When?'

He thought for a few seconds, then said, ‘It would have been after midnight. Your time.'

‘Niall was dead by then.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Absolutely. Someone sent you the picture after he'd pushed Niall off the tower.'

Out of Canberra, out of Australia, I felt free to say it. And having said it, it felt right.

‘Do you know who it was?' asked Fallon.

‘Do you?'

When Fallon didn't answer, I said, ‘Niall was very different from Ferdia, wasn't he? From the character he played. You could say they were opposites.'

‘What makes you think that?'

‘I'm asking you.'

‘Niall could be free in the Castle. He wasn't alone in that, but there were aspects of his life in Australia that seemed, from what he told me, to be very constricting.'

‘He talked to you about some trouble he was in? He phoned you?'

Fallon said sarcastically, ‘Before his
character
began behaving so destructively. Before our disagreement.'

‘What
was
Niall like then? Why did he need this freedom that you say you gave him?'

‘To express himself, aspects of himself that there was no place for in ordinary life, or that he couldn't find a place for. He'd been brought up very strictly. He was frightened of his father. There was a lot of anger there, but he'd learnt to hide it well.'

‘Are you saying that you and the Heroes understood him better than his family or friends?'

‘I'm saying that we came to, yes.'

‘Understood what, exactly?'

‘His determination. His devotion.'

‘His devotion to Dr Alex Fenshaw?'

‘Who?' Fallon's eyelids didn't flutter. His eyes became harder if ­anything, but I was sure he knew the name.

‘Did Niall tell you he and Dr Fenshaw quarrelled?'

‘I understood,' Fallon said, choosing his words with evident care, ‘that they were a loyal and close-knit group.'

‘Niall said that did he?'

‘He implied it.'

‘Did he expect too much of other people?'

‘Possibly.'

‘Did that make you angry?'

‘Not until it became clear that I was losing him.'

Fallon picked up the tray and stood up. This time I followed him.

Autumn sun through a second skylight turned the back room into a cask of amber light. Fallon moved through it casually, yet with the strength of ownership. He set down his tray on a stainless steel sink and bent to open a small fridge. It struck me that he showed no concern about leaving his shop unattended.

‘It's a lovely room,' I said. ‘Rooms.' Not wanting to disparage the shop by my comparison. Behind this sloping globe of kitchen was there an even smaller, light-centred bedroom?

I waited till he stood up and I could see his face. ‘Bridget Connell told me Niall wrote to her about trouble he was having at work.'

‘If you've met Bridget, which it appears you have?' Fallon didn't bother to hide his distaste. ‘Then I'm surprised you haven't worked out that she's a compulsive liar. Bridget tailors her story to her audience, whatever she feels will titillate them. Let me guess—she told you she used to work in aeronautics. She showed you around her factory. She likes doing that. She's the financial manager's daughter. He indulges her, to my mind, excessively. I expect she also spoke about her family, the poor brother stuck in Ireland recovering from a nervous breakdown, the sister she would like to help. Bridget is an only child.'

Each of Fallon's words tapped out into a silence that had not been broken by a single workaday noise such as the phone ringing, the fax machine whirring, not even an old-fashioned bell over the door announcing the presence of a customer.