“Fucksake!” Tony said. “I should never have left the bloody crime scene. The fuck was I thinking?”

“Tony mate, go back in the BMW, tell them you were following a lead and send some reservist back here with the car. I’ll wait until the widow McAlpine shows up.”

“I can take your wheels?” Tony asked.

“Sure.”

“I wouldn’t normally, but I am lead and maybe we shouldn’t be buggering off round the countryside like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.”

“Hope and Crosby? Christ, Tony, you need new material, mate. Have you heard about this rock and roll phenomenon that’s sweeping the land?”

“You’re sure I can take the car?”

“Aye!”

“You’re a star. And you’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

The deal was done. Tony pumped my hand and got in the Beemer.

He wound the window down. “Stay away from trouble,” he said.

“You should warn trouble to stay away from me.”

“Young widows in lonely farmhouses …” he said with a sigh, revved the Beemer and forced the clutch into an ugly second gear start.

16: SALT

I was glad that he was gone. I wanted to talk to Mrs McAlpine alone and to follow up with Sir Harry alone. Tony was too much of an equal. It required weight to deal with him and I needed the emotional space to think.

I walked to the farmhouse again and tried the door.

She’d locked it.

What country person locks their door?

“Maybe one who’s just had her husband gunned down by strangers,” I said to myself.

Cora barked at me.

The rooster gave me the eye.

I looked at the horse tied up across the fields and I looked at the track up to the manor.

The latter was less muddy than the former.

“The big house first, I think,” I said.

The slope was on a one in seven gradient that was a little taxing and I had to catch my breath at the top of it when I reached the stone wall around the house and the estate. There was an old lodge that had been boarded up but no actual gate itself.

There were assorted farm buildings along the wall and a short drive to the house lined with palm trees. Coconut palms, by the look of them, always an odd sight in Ireland but not uncommon: sailors had been bringing them back in pots for centuries.

A brisk walk underneath them brought me to the house. There were two cars parked outside: an Irish racing green Bentley S2 Continental and a black Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Both vehicles were about twenty years old and had certainly not been designed for country living. They were the worse for wear, particularly the Bentley, which was rusted almost to scrap. I wondered if the engine still turned over, but if it did the best you could have done with it was drive it to the junk yard. The Roller was in better nick but not much: the rear suspension was gone, the fenders were dinged and the original paint job had been touched up with what looked like house paint. Both vehicles were caked with mud and bird shit. I loved cars and this was a crying shame.

I gave the house a butcher’s: mid-century Georgian, red sandstone, three floors, a steep slate roof and a large wooden door that once had been painted a garish bright blue but which now had faded into a pleasing mottled indigo. The original, elegantly high, curved windows had been replaced by squat square jobs in brown frames. A black, sinister ivy was growing over two thirds of the house and all the third-floor windows were a suffocated tenebrous jungle. At least the ivy helped conceal the house’s shambolic condition, but if you looked closely you could see the unrepaired cracks in the walls, the missing tiles in the roof and the strange lean of the entire structure a good ten degrees off the verticle.

I was vibing a classic case of the aristo fallen on hard times: big empty rooms, mad woman in the attic, eldest daughter marrying some garish Yank with money.

I crunched on the gravel and walked up moss-covered granite steps to the porch.

I rang an ancient-looking push bell and contemplated a sour-looking cat who was sleeping on a heap of old newspapers. At least, I assumed he was sleeping, as he didn’t seem to breathe once.

A middle-aged woman came to the door. She was wearing an apron and looked annoyed. “He’s not in, so he’s not,” she said in a pissed-off West Belfast accent.

“Where is he?”

“Out with the dogs, so he is.”

I showed her my warrant card.

“Poliss, is it? Is there anything wrong? Will I get Betty?”

“Who’s Betty?”

“The housekeeper, Mrs Patton.”

“And who are you?”

“Cook. Aileen.”

“Who is else is in the house?”

“No one else. Ned will be with the horses.”

“Is that everyone?”

“Yes.”

I wrote the names in my notebook.

“Is there a wife, girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Can I come in?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” Aileen said.

I followed into her a rather gloomy looking hall with dark wood panelling and a staircase curving to the upper floors. There were hunting trophies on the wall, something I had not seen before anywhere in Ireland. Huge stags but also lions, leopards, a cheetah – all from another age.

The place was dusty and it smelled of mildew. The smell was so bad, in fact, that I gagged, and to cover my embarrassment I pointed at the beheaded animals.

“Do they not give you the willies, love? All them eyes looking down at you,” I said in the demotic.

She laughed. “Aye, they’re desperate so they are.”

“Is it from himself?” I asked.

I could tell now that Aileen was a Catholic. It was hard to say how I could tell but I could. Accent, body language, who knew? Sir Harry wasn’t a raging bigot then.

“No, no. From his da or his grand da more than likely,” she said.

“What does he do for fun?”

“When he’s not in his office in Belfast he just likes the quiet time. Potters around the garden, reads in his library.”

“Terrible about his brother, the captain in the army.”

“Shocking, so it was. Shocking.”

“I suppose you didn’t hear the killing from here?”

“Oh, no. It’s too far away. We didn’t hear anything.”

“And there were no witnesses?”

“From up here? No.”

“Was Sir Harry at home that day?”

“He was out in the garden, I think. He went over straight away. Of course there was nothing he could do.”

“No. Martin was his younger brother?”

“Yes. Eight or nine years between them, I think.”

I shook my head. “Must have been awful that morning.”

“Oh yes, I’ll never forget that day. Shocking, so it was. Such a cowardly act. They’re vermin. Vermin shooting a man in the back.”

“He was shot in chest,”

Her eyes scolded me. “What does it matter! What does that matter? What are you here for, anyway? I told you Sir Harry was out. Wait here.”

Before I could call her back she vanished through a door and a rather different woman appeared in blue suit, white pearls and a black bouffant. She was about forty, thin, thin-lipped, and there was a touch of old Hollywood in her heavy lidded eyes and defiant unfeminine chin.

She walked towards me, all systems bristling. “May I see your identification?” she asked.

I showed her the warrant card.

“I take it that you’re Mrs Patton?” I asked.

She nodded. She was from Derry, by the sound of it. Brisk and business-like. I dug the whole Rebecca scene, but if she was Mrs Danvers and Sir Harry was Max de Winter, what did that make me – Joan fucking Fontaine?

I took out my fags.

“Oh, there’s no smoking in here,” Mrs Patton said.

I put the cigarettes back in my pocket with a mumbled “Excuse me”.

A little victory for the home team, there.

“And how can we be of service today?” she asked.

“I need to see Sir Harry. I was wondering if I could, uh, if I could wait for him in your lovely garden,” I said, putting on a bit of my Glens accent.

“The garden? Why?” she said, both disarmed and suspicious.