Cry of the Hunter - Jack Higgins [54]
‘There was another, wasn’t there?’ Fallon said. ‘A younger one?’
She nodded. ‘You mean Charlie – he’s still here. He’s eighteen now.’
Fallon frowned in puzzlement. ‘Where is he? He must have been out early.’
She finished milking the cow and sat back on the stool. ‘He didn’t come home last night,’ she said. ‘He does that often. Spends the night on the hillside watching the stars or some such foolishness.’ She stood up and said briskly, ‘He took bad with the meningitis when he was thirteen. His wits are clean gone.’ Fallon couldn’t think of anything to say. She gazed at him quizzically. ‘You aren’t by any chance feeling sorry for me are you?’
He smiled and reached for the milk pail. ‘Well almost,’ he said.
She slapped his hand. ‘Put that damned pail down. I’m not decrepit yet.’ She leaned against the stall. ‘Now give me a cigarette and tell me what you’ve been up to. I haven’t seen a paper in a week.’
He told her everything from the very beginning – from the night O’Hara and Doolan had arrived at his cottage. When he had finished there was a long silence. After a while he shifted uncomfortably and said, ‘What do you think?’
She grunted scornfully. ‘I think you’re the biggest bloody fool in the world,’ she said. ‘That’s what I think.’ She shook her head. ‘The one thing I can’t forgive is the way you’ve involved that poor girl. You’ve ruined her.’
He nodded his head several times and kicked viciously at the side of the stall. ‘I know. I know. But there was a sort of inevitability about that. And anyway,’ he added defensively, ‘she’s absolutely in the clear as long as Rogan keeps his mouth shut. The trouble is, I think he’ll spill his guts if the police get their hands on him.’
She picked up the pail and he followed her from the byre. ‘I know Rogan,’ she said. ‘He stayed here last year. He’s a bad one. The worst I’ve ever come across.’
Fallon sighed. ‘I don’t know where they found him. He’s a fine example of the Irish patriot, I must say.’
She laughed coldly. ‘The Organization has to take what it can get these days and that’s the truth of it. They aren’t getting the educated idealists like they used to. They have to recruit from the scum who’d have ended up on the wrong side of the law anyway.’
‘It was different in the old days,’ he said wistfully.
She turned on him, suddenly stormy. ‘Of course it was,’ she said. ‘But times have changed. You’re an anachronism. You’re out of date – old fashioned.’ She shook her head sorrowfully. ‘You should never have come back.’
He took a deep breath and managed a smile. ‘I’m beginning to realize that.’ For a moment he stood silently, kicking at the ground with the toe of his shoe and then he said, ‘I think I’ll go for a walk. If young Murphy tries to follow me head him off will you? I’d like to be on my own.’ She nodded sombrely and he turned on heel and cut across the yard and out of the gate.
At the back of the farmhouse there was a small glen slanting back into the hills and he plunged into it, scrambling over a jumbled mass of great boulders and stones.
The glen lifted a little and the boulders gave way to thick heather and springy moss. A small stream rattled over white stones and he stood listening to it for a while and then a cloud drifted across the face of the sun and a shadow fell across that place. The sound of the stream faded into the background and there was only the silence. Fallon turned deadly cold and a thrill of elemental fear moved inside him. Here in this quiet glen he was face to face with the silence of eternity and he suddenly realized his own insignificance in the general scheme of things.
He stood as if turned to stone, hardly daring to breathe, and then the sound of the stream gradually came back to him and a small breeze rustled through the heather. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the beads of perspiration from his brow. When he sat down on the springy turf and put a cigarette in his mouth, his hands trembled slightly. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and