TEARS—IDLE TEARS

The disappearance of old Forester, the land agent, brought me to
Ballyaindreesh in a hurry.  On the previous night he had apparently
walked in his own door and never been seen or heard of again. If it
had been the other way round, I should have felt easier in my mind,
but from a policeman’s point of view, this was an eminently
unsatisfactory exit.

‘The servants whom I questioned all had an air of stolid
mystification.

‘I suppose,’ I asked sarcastically, ‘that you people think he was
carried off by the fairies?’

‘It could be,’ they replied with folded hands and blank faces.

‘It could not,’ I snapped, losing my patience.

On the other hand, there were no good grounds for believing that
anything more serious had occurred. He had had a dispute, warm enough,
it is true, but not dangerous, with the tenants; the local Tenants’
League had addressed representations to him, but in these documents
they had assured him, without irony, of their deepest respect and
gratitude. Someone or other had sent him a threatening letter, but who
in Ireland minds threatening letters? For safety’s sake a guard had
been put on his house, though not, unfortunately, upon his person. Nor
was there any sign of a struggle. The rain had washed away what traces
there might have been outside the house, but the two policemen on duty
swore they had seen and heard nothing.

After a sleepless night I came to the only possible conclusion, though
I confess it seemed to me a crazy one, that Forester had been
kidnapped if not actually murdered, and that the servants and the two
policemen had been accomplices. I questioned this unhappy pair
again. They showed signs of great mental distress, but obstinately
adhered to their story.

‘You mean,’ I asked, ‘that a large party of men forced their way into
the house you were supposed to be guarding, kidnapped or killed the
owner, took him away, alive or dead, and that you two didn’t hear a
sound?”

They bowed their heads, and I noticed that their ears were crimson.

Later, the Divisional Superintendent came.  He in turn interviewed the
maids and the guards and reluctantly agreed with me. We had a large
body of reinforcements from neighbouring towns, and organised
extensive searches.

For forty-eight hours I drove with him from hamlet to hamlet; by night
I knocked up unoffending country folk and examined barns, outhouses
and haystacks. We even dragged the river. In the intervals I put the
local men through it.

At last one or two facts began to emerge.  The first was that the
local guards countenanced fairly generally certain breaches of the
licensing laws. I did not mind that. I do the same myself.  But on
interviewing the two publicans whose premises were nearest to
Forester’s house | found that on the night of his disappearance each
of them had closed his shop at the legal hour, and had neither
entertained nor seen anyone for the rest of the night.

Next I questioned the habitués. These fell into two classes. One
public-house was frequented by shopkeepers, passing commercial
travellers, a gardener, a decayed gentleman with a taste for whiskey
and the local schoolmaster.  The other, the popular one, had clients
who interested me more. They were the young bloods, the tenants, the
labourers. But the two classes evinced the same astonishing eagerness
to plead guilty to breaches of the licensing laws on any and every
occasion except the one I was concerned with.

Two who had no alibis and seemed incapable of producing any, I
dismissed from my mind.  That left seven, who, except at odd moments,
had witnesses to account for their every movement in the course of the
evening. I knew that those seven, if not the actual culprits, were
familiar with every detail of the crime. During the civil war there
was in my column a facetious youth who declared that ‘everyone of
military age should be in bed by ten—and have proof of it.’

But what the schoolmaster and the others were doing in this very
doubtful affair I did not know. The master? He was a nervous little
man with the snub nose and long upper lip that seems to make contact
with the high cheekbones, and gives a man the appearance of a figure
in one of Cruikshank’s caricatures.  When the village idiot left
school for the last time he took his schoolbooks as far as the bridge
and dropped them one by one into the river, intoning ‘Insofar,’
‘Nevertheless,’ ‘Notwithstanding.’ That was what the master was
like. And beyond the fact that he was writing a local history (he
would have been!) the only suspicious circumstance which the local
sergeant could recollect was that on summer days he took his drill
class to the river to bathe, and you saw him, swimming on his back,
his head and toes raised, tuning the strokes of the boys behind him to
the notes of ‘The Harp that Once’ which he managed to play (quite
well, the sergeant informed me) on a concertina.

The sergeant looked at me stolidly as he told
me this, but after a moment the faintest flicker raised the corner of
his mouth. It was as though his lips had opened and winked at me.

‘I see,’ said I, in an official tone, ‘a man of an orderly
disposition.’

‘A bloody ordherly disposition,’ agreed the sergeant feelingly.

One consolation remained, though it was no more than an impression
conveyed to me when I went into the street to buy cigarettes. It was a
feeling of uneasiness that came from the interior of the public-houses
and over the half-doors of the little cottages in which I could see
women, seated over the fire, talking in low voices. This could mean
only one thing, that Forester, alive or dead (dead, I felt), was
somewhere under our hands. ‘The next move was with our suspects.

‘They moved before I was prepared for them.  One day in my hotel at
Wilford I received an urgent call. When I reached Ballyaindreesh, it
was to hear that one of the school children had been seen taking a
spade from the school to the master’s house. This, I realised, might
be perfectly innocent, but at the same time I was taking no
chances. About seven o’clock a guard summoned me to the window to see
Clinch, the secretary of the Tenants’ League, go up the road in the
direction of the master’s house. Clinch was a young man with whom,
unofficially, I was on excellent terms. He had a red face with pale
bushy eyebrows, and an excitable manner which concealed a good deal of
cunning. I felt that things were beginning to stir. After dark, myself
and the sergeant, in plain clothes, slipped across the fields to keep
an eye on the master’s house.

It was a starry April night. We crept along the hedge till we were so
close to the back of the house that I could actually hear the voices
inside.  More than an hour passed before the back-door opened and a
light broke through the leaves of a white-thorn above our heads.

‘Is everything clear?’ asked a man’s voice.

‘Quiet enough,’ replied another in a whisper.

‘Will we chance it?’ asked the first.

There was no reply, but four or five men began to move up and down the
yard. One passed so close to me that I was able to recognise him. It
was Clinch.

‘I’ll get the things, Dan,’ he said in a low voice, and shortly after
I heard him fall over something in an out-house and swear. ‘The
things’ collected, the men made off along the back of the house. We
waited for a few minutes before following. We lifted aside a gate of
rustic work, and crept along the edge of the house garden till we came
to a low wall. The voices, now much quieter, were coming from a dense
blackness below. The ground sloped sharply through bushes and low
trees. I heard a stream, and one of the men smothered a curse as he
slipped and splashed into it. The slope was
harder for us than for them as neither the sergeant nor I was familiar
with it. I did not know where the stepping-stones were likely to be
and did not dare to use my torch. Accordingly, I lowered myself over
the bank, and found to my relief that the water was only
shin-deep. But it was cold.  It drew a moan from the sergeant. We had
lost the trail, but I felt sure the men had continued straight on, up
the hill.

We hurried after them, making as little noise as possible, and in
doing so, almost walked into them. We were just mounting a fence when
they passed at the other side, and I heard the voice of Clinch.

“What star would you say that was, master?’

‘I would be inclined to imagine it was Cassiomeda,’ came the reply,
given in a very nervous voice.

Our cross-country chase lasted for a long time. I noticed that our
suspects were carefully avoiding the roads patrolled by
police. Finally we struck a steep laneway covered with loose rubble
and stones, so that the sergeant and I were compelled to walk in the
drain to avoid giving ourselves away. Suddenly, the footsteps
stopped. For five full minutes I thought they must have heard us. Then
it dawned on me, a minute too late. The headlights of a car picked out
the hawthorn fences at one side of the lane and at its foot a
by-road. Next minute the engine roared and the car was gone.


II

I sent the sergeant back to the nearest patrol for help. He was to
bring out three or four cars of armed detectives and call all
stations. For twenty minutes more there was nothing I could do but sit
on the fence, smoke and study a map.  When the first car arrived, I
joined it.

The road we were travelling led right into the heart of the mountains;
some miles out it was crossed by another by-road, going north and
south. I arranged that a car should explore each of these roads, while
I, with the remaining two cars, went on.

Gradually, the country began to rise, the road became
bumpier. Mountain sheep with black snouts emerged for a moment into
the headlights and then scampered off for dear life through the
heather. Even above the noise of the engine and the voices of the men,
I could hear the roar of streams flooded with spring rains.  A
countryman whom we met heartened me with the information that another
car had immediately preceded ours. We switched off the headlights,
continuing as best we were able over a ridge of mountain, and with
engines shut off, slithered down the hillside till we came to a
bridge-head where our road turned sharply to the right.

We had driven about two miles beyond it when the driver suddenly
pulled up with an oath. We had almost failed to notice, drawn in
under a high wall, a battered car without lights.  Near where we
stopped was a broken-down iron gate, and through it, to my
astonishment, I saw headstones and crosses.

‘Hurry!’ snapped the sergeant. “They'll be gone.’

The gate was held only by a loose chain. We opened it and plunged in
with drawn revolvers.  It was very dark and rough. I crashed my feet
through a glass-covered wreath before I found the path again. Suddenly
my torch located a man’s figure. He seemed to be standing on raised
ground and carried something long in his hands. For a moment I feared
we had walked into an ambush.

‘Hi, you!’ I shouted. ‘Put your hands up!’

‘All right, Dan,’ said Clinch’s voice. ‘Let her rip!’

At the same instant a blinding flash caused me to lower my eyes. But
not before I had glimpsed all that was going on about me. Above me on
the height towered a tall, time-worn Celtic cross with fresh earth at
its feet. The schoolmaster’s little figure bent over a camera tripod
looked very dark against the fierce light thrown up on it, and all
round, their elbows resting confidentially on a low wall of loose
stone, were scores, literally scores of mild and interested country
faces. And then everything was blacker than before. I could no longer
see the man on the hillock. My torch went out. I
took a step, stumbled and closed my eyes. And from the darkness came
Clinch’s coarse and mocking voice.

‘Well, superintendent,’ he asked, ‘what the devil do you want?’


III

I should have had the sense not to indulge in a barging match with
Clinch for the benefit of the invisible audience of mountaineers. I
might have known he would be prepared for it. But the coarse humour of
the trick maddened me. I must have terrified the schoolmaster with his
‘orderly mind,’ because he overwhelmed me with apologies and
excuses. He wanted a picture of the cross for his history but he
couldn’t get a proper light on it by day, the reliefs were so rubbed
down. I had the base satisfaction of lashing him with my tongue as he
had probably never been lashed before.

I withdrew only when I realised that my escort was as enraged as I,
and for two pins would have made smithereens of Clinch and the
master. Clinch’s howls and jeers followed us to the car, growing
louder and more scurrilous as we retreated.

In the car I cursed myself again for a fool.  The cemetery had given
me an idea. I drove straight to a little cemetery about three miles
outside Ballyaindreesh. I didn’t need to search for long. While I and
my braves had been
following Clinch’s will-o’-the-wisp, Forester’s body had been removed
from its real hiding place in the family vault. And this time I
guessed I shouldn’t find its whereabouts in a hurry.  Twelve or
thirteen miles to the north were boglands, where you could safely have
buried an army corps.

Next morning when I walked down the village street there was an
astonishing change in the atmosphere. No longer was there the same
constraint; no longer were the people shy of saluting me. And the
greetings were not malicious or ironical, merely good-natured; and
this despite the fact that an army of press men had descended on
Ballyaindreesh. We had become first-class news.

I called at the parish priest’s house. He was an old man with the
reputation of being a bit of a terror, though for my part I found him
an eminently lovable person. He was almost crippled with rheumatics
and roared as he stumped about the house.

I explained to him what I thought had really happened on the night of
Forester’s disappearance. While his guard was in one pub (the
respectable one) having a drink, Clinch and the rest had met in the
other, and in the heat of liquor some new proposals had occurred to
them as an inspiration from heaven. They had decided to call on
Forester to explain these——nothing more, I was certain. But some row
had blown up and I could guess what it had been about. Among Clinch’s
supporters was one whose case was notoriously bad, because he was
demanding a reduction on property which he had already sub-let at
twice the original rent. That, I felt, would have cut old Forester to
the heart, and if Dorgan had been there and opened his mouth—as he
certainly would have done, for he was a garrulous, whining fellow with
an immense capacity for deceiving himself—the land agent might well
have proved nasty. Someone had hit him, or perhaps given him a push,
and he had knocked his head in falling. Then the door had opened and
in had come the two unfortunate guards. Between them they had shifted
the body, not to the cemetery, but back to the public-house from which
the guards had come, and it had been only in the early morning that
they had dared to remove it.

The parish priest heard me out with grunts and roars of approval. On
the following Sunday he preached an extraordinarily impressive sermon.
The curious thing was the way in which he took my suggestions and,
without mentioning names, cleverly wove them into an imaginary
reconstruction of the event. I watched Clinch, who was sitting a few
seats above me. He was gazing up at the priest with a mild expression
of interest. I should have given everything I had for the privilege of
watching the master’s
face, but he was sitting too far behind. The priest concluded with a
moving appeal for information and assistance, and when he had done the
congregation sat on as if transfixed.  That day I got no greetings in
the street.  Self-confidence was somewhat shaken.

After dark that evening a half-dozen guards in plain clothes left the
barrack in ones and twos as if going for a walk. Their duty was at any
cost to overhear the conversation of three of our suspects: the
schoolmaster; Dorgan, the man whom I suspected of having struck the
blow; and one other man who, I had thought, was uneasy in his mind. As
this particular task meant that the guards would probably spend the
night clinging on to the thatched roof of a cottage, I did not bother
to await their return, but retired to my hotel in Wilford. The moment
the reports were ready my friend the sergeant would drive over with
them.

When I woke next day it was already midday, and the maid was knocking
me up to say that the sergeant was below. He entered, looking dirty
and sleepy.

‘What’s the meaning of the delay, Donoghue?’  I asked sharply.

‘I didn’t think ’twas worth while to disturb you,’ he replied in
melancholy tones.

‘Why? Didn’t they hear anything?’

‘Hear anything?’ he echoed in an injured voice, and produced pages
upon pages of
official foolscap, covered with the laborious long-hand of my champion
note-takers. I had read two pages before I realised the significance
of the sergeant’s tone. The first sheet was headed ‘Conversation
Recorded between Mr and Mrs James Buttimer in the bedroom of their
residence, Aghabooley, by Guard Joseph Fenton on the night of April
12th, 19——.’ It ran somewhat like this:

Mrs B. Well, James, wasn’t that the queer sermon this morning?

Mr B. It was so, Mary.

Mrs B. I do not think I have ever heard the like of that sermon in my
life.

Mr B. Nor I.

Mrs B. Would you not swear it was the way he suspected someone in the
parish done it?

Mr B. You would surely.

Mrs B. But the Canon ought to know well it was no one but strangers
ever done the like.

I glanced hastily at the second document.  Like the first it obeyed
the major canon of dramatic writing by plunging without delay into the
heart of the situation. It contained some original suggestions as to
the possible presence of secret rooms and passages in Forester’s
house.  It mentioned that since ‘the bad times’ there had been a curse
on the Foresters and that all of them had come by mysterious
ends. There was in it a genuine desire to be helpful without being
compromising. The third returned to
the original plea that the crime must have been committed by
strangers.

‘Is there anything at all in the damned things?”  I asked in
exasperation.

The sergeant laid his finger upon the concluding lines of the second
report, which dealt with the Dorgans. ‘At 2.45 a.m.,’ commented the
note-taker laconically, ‘the conversation was resumed as follows’:

Mrs D. Phil!

Mr D. Well?

Mrs D. Phil, is he gone yet?

Mr D. Shut up, you fool of hell!


IV

I was stumped once more when the school inspector came. He was a small
fat man with a shaggy head of white hair, a heavy drooping moustache
stained with nicotine, and a demeanour of great benevolence and
dignity. He wore a cloak, and looked like an actor. He behaved like
one as well. He could not refrain from broad and eloquent gestures and
talked without strain in beautifully rounded periods.  He was the only
man of real culture in our provincial society, and I always enjoyed
his visits.

‘Ye don’t go about it right,’ he said, stroking his moustache. ‘Any of
ye.’

‘How would you go about it?’ I asked jestingly.

‘Make ’em confess. There’s only one way to deal with an Irishman, and
that’s to make him confess.’

Yes?’

‘Now, don’t laugh, young man!’ he went on with imperturbable
gravity. ‘I’m twice as long in the world as you, and I have twice as
much acquired sense, without referring to any natural gifts I may have
received from a bountiful but discriminating Providence. And I tell
you again, all you can do is to make them confess.  An Irishman is a
man of great sensibility. The moment you begin to cry he’ll cry too.’

I laughed outright. The inspector followed me with his small shrewd
eyes.

‘What’ll you bet I don’t get the whole thing out of the master
to-morrow?’ he asked. ‘Will you bet me a pound?’

‘I’ll bet you five.’

‘Done. I had tougher propositions than little James Buttimer to
handle.’

‘And how did you do it?’

‘How did I do it? I acted, sir, I acted. Ah, young man, there was a
Garrick lost in me!  “Peter,” I said, “how long do you know me?” And
Peter, or whatever his name was, would look at me with his eyes
protruding with mystification, and say, Ten, fifteen or twenty years,
as the case might be. “And now, Peter,” I said, “did you
ever know me to do you or yours a bad turn?”  And, of course, he
replied that he didn’t. “You know what I am, Peter,” I said, “an old
man with eternity before him that wants to die as he lived, in peace
with his neighbours.” “I do, Michael, I do,” replied me bucko. “And
you know how long I have to go for my pension?”  “Yes,” says he, “five
years.” “And Peter,” I said, “would you like to cloud the serenity of
an old man’s declining years with the thought that ’twas through him
that you and your charming wife and your four helpless little children
were put begging their bread on the roads of Ireland?”

He paused.

‘At those words, young man, I usually saw the tears dilating the poor
idiot’s eyes. ... Now, that is a very coarse and inelegant
illustration of a method which has an infinite number of refinements,
but it will show you what I mean when I say that if you want to get
the truth out of an Irishman you must first of all make him cry. As
long as an Irishman can keep a straight face he’ll tell you nothing
but lies.’ The inspector thumped the table. ‘Lies, and damned lies and
bloody lies! But when you appeal to his natural tendency to hysteria,
when he cries, you can do what you like with him. An Irishman in a
state of emotional upheaval hasn’t the intelligence of a frog.’

‘You have a very low opinion of your fellow countrymen,’ I said with a
laugh.

‘I have a very great love and admiration for my fellow-countrymen,’
said the inspector gravely. ‘And ’tis just because I have that I know
how to handle them.’

I am afraid I paid very little attention to the old man’s words. In
fact, I recollected them only the following evening when we met again
for supper. We found ourselves alone in the long room.

‘Well?’ I asked, pretending to fumble for my pocket-book.

‘Young man,’ he replied solemnly, stroking his heavy moustache, ‘I’m
going to leave you your five pounds.’

I laughed. The inspector’s countenance never changed, and his shrewd
eyes remained fixed on mine.

‘Young man,’ he said. ‘I think I remarked to you last night how long I
have to go for my pension.’

‘You did.’

‘Well, I’m looking forward to that pension.  I propose when the
occasion comes to spend the rest of my life reading Shakespeare—an
author, young man, I seriously recommend to your attention—and writing
my reminiscences. Now I have a great regard for you, young man, and I
appreciate the pleasure of your society, but at the same time, at my
age, as you will some day discover, hopes become fewer and more
pertinacious. I wouldn’t like to do anything that might disturb my
prospects.’

‘Come! Come!’ I exclaimed. ‘Admit you failed!’

‘Failed!’ repeated the inspector in an injured tone. ‘Failed!’ His
nose puckered up till it sent a network of wrinkles to the corners of
his eyes.  ‘Failed!’

“Well, put it in another way. He didn’t blab.’

‘Didn’t he? Didn’t he now?’ The inspector snorted briefly. ‘Let me
tell you, young man, for your personal information, that Mr James
Buttimer blabbed—to use your own undignified but eloquent
expression—till he made me sick.  ... And, what’s more, he cried!’
Again the wide nose puckered in disgust. ‘And his wife cried!  And his
two daughters cried! And his son cried!  And they did nothing else but
cry for one hour solid till they took away what little appetite I had,
which, as you know, owing to the deplorable condition of my digestive
organs, is on all occasions of the very slightest.’

The inspector pushed a full plate of rashers and eggs from him, and
rose with great dignity.  But all the same he would tell me nothing
more.


v

And that is why there are no Irish detective stories. The sequel is
apparently irrelevant, but I record it since it has been my only
recompense
for much waste of time and energy—not to mention a trousers which I
have never worn since.  Ballyaindreesh from a well-conducted village
where, as they used to say, ‘wan fly wouldn’t get in another fly’s way
without an apology’ has become very prominent in the District Courts
for feuds, brawls and vendettas.

Recently, on the occasion of a hurling match, there was a riot that
resulted in a score of split heads and as many
prosecutions. Apparently it all arose out of a shout raised by some
drunken supporter of the visiting team: ‘Ballyaindreesh, where the
fairies took the man!’ The Justice in a strong speech said it appeared
as if the people of Ballyaindreesh not only could not agree with one
another but could not agree with anyone else.

However, it headed the list of subscriptions for the handsome
presentation made to me on my marriage, and I was interested to hear
that Clinch was prominent among the collectors.