Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [198]
Edward was frightened, the Major realized abruptly. The man was terrified! That bullet-proof waistcoat had not been an idle whim, it had been a desperate measure to shore up his crumbling nerve. Suddenly this was so clear to the Major that he wondered why he had not realized it before.
“You’d better go upstairs and go to bed,” the Major said, not unsympathetically. “You’re exhausted. I’ll see to the doctor and the D.I. when they get here.”
But when Edward had left him alone with the presence bulging under the tablecloth all the horror returned. He saw Edward triumphantly dragging the dead Sinn Feiner across the gravel. He closed his eyes...Edward comes nearer and nearer, one of the dead man’s ankles gripped under each armpit like the shafts of a hand-cart. Behind him the heavily muscled shoulders and lolling head leave a long trail on the dew-laden gravel and the friction causes the arms to spread out wide into the attitude of crucifixion. Released from somewhere inside the house, the Afghan hound comes bounding up and whisks cheerfully around the body which Edward is dragging towards the potting-shed.
“Thank heaven I sent the twins away. Edward will go too now. Today or tomorrow. As soon as possible.”
The Major underwent a craving to light his pipe, but respect for the dead young man across the room prevented him. Thwarted, the craving for tobacco transformed itself into a craving for something else that was normal—anything: to go fishing, to watch a cricket match, to take tea with his aunt in Bayswater. He couldn’t, of course. Everything had to be settled in Kilnalough. Besides, his aunt was dead also—for a moment he found himself thinking of her with great sadness and love. But then the bulging tablecloth restored him to that morning’s tragedy.
He looked at his watch and was astonished to see that it was not yet eight o’clock, scarcely breakfast-time. Had his watch stopped? No. Which meant that little over an hour had elapsed since he had been woken by the explosion which had preceded the firing of a single shot.
At first, examining the body in the potting-shed, he had been unable to find any trace of a wound and had wildly hoped that he had been deceived, that there had been no shot from the roof, that the lad had been killed in some other way—by the blast from the explosion, perhaps. But then, looking more carefully at the lolling head he had seen the widened, blood-rimmed hole in the ear, which the bullet had exactly entered. Suddenly the head moved. Balanced on folded potato sacks, it had rolled a little to one side. Now, from that neatly circular but too large hole in the young man’s ear, liquid began to well up—slow and thick, like dark oil from the neck of a bottle. The Major had watched it drip from the ear to the work-bench and from the work-bench to the putrid mown grass. Presently, however, it diminished and stopped.
“Who is it?”
A maid was standing timidly at the gun room door saying that the doctor and the man from the police...But they had already edged past her and entered the room, the doctor struggling forward with his frail, white head on a level with his shoulders. It was intolerable, thought the Major, that an old man should be got out of bed at such an hour of the morning. His shoelaces were undone and a sparse frost of white beard showed on his cheeks. As he came forward he glanced once, briefly, at the Major with eyes that were alert and curiously full of sympathy, as if this body under the tablecloth were in some way related to the Major instead of a complete stranger.
“When you’ve finished here I shall go back with you into Kilnalough. I must speak to the boy’s father...”
“That would be absurd, Major.”
The Major passed a hand over his brow, which was damp with perspiration. “Of course he must have been told by now. There