Chapter 14: A Detective in a Pack

I spent the rest of the morning being a grieving sister, because a grieving sister can knock on any door in a village and be asked in.

Padraig went down to the shop to buy a paper and to be seen buying a paper, and I put on my good black coat and pinned my hair back and went up the hill to the cottages behind the church. My mother's old house was up there, the one with the hens, and it was empty now with a padlock on the gate and a sheet of tarpaulin over the roof. I stood in front of it for a minute so that anyone watching from a window would see me doing it.

The first house I went into was the post office woman's. Her name was Eileen, which is a common name on this coast, and she had a fire on and a pot of tea and she sat me down in the good chair and said, "You poor thing, you have been walking the roads all week."

"I have been walking the roads," I said. "I cannot sit in that cottage. Every time I sit down I hear the clock and I think about her."

"That is the way of it," Eileen said. "When my mother went I could not be in the house for a month. I slept in my sister's and I cried every night into a pillow that was not mine."

I let her talk. I let her talk about her mother and her sister and the price of stamps and the state of the post office roof, and then I said, "Eileen, you knew my sister better than I did. She was in this village fifteen years and I was in Dublin, and I have been sitting in that cottage wondering what her life was."

Eileen's face did the thing that faces do when they are deciding how much of a thing to say.

"Your sister kept to herself," she said. "She was friendly, mind. She had a word for everyone. But she kept her business to her own house, and when she started going up to the high ground in the evenings people began to talk."

"When did she start going up to the high ground?"

"Last summer. After the meeting in July." Eileen poured more tea. "She would go up after her tea and not come back until dark. Tom's wife said she was looking for something. I said to her, Siobhan, there is nothing up there but stones and sheep, and she said, there is more up there than you think, Eileen, and then she laughed and went out." Eileen put the pot down. "The week before she died she came in here to buy a stamp and she was not herself. Her hands were shaking. She said, Eileen, if a letter comes here for me from Galway, do not put it in my box, keep it behind the counter and give it to me in my hand. And I said, why would I do that, and she said, because there are people in this village who open other people's letters."

"Did the letter come?"

"It came. On the Monday. And I put it behind the counter like she asked and she came in for it on the Wednesday." Eileen looked at the fire. "She read it standing right there where you are sitting and her face went the colour of that wall and she said, oh God, and she put it in her pocket and went out. Two days later she was gone."

"Do you remember what was on the envelope? The Galway address?"

"No. But I remember the postmark was not Galway. It was Athlone." Eileen frowned. "I thought it strange at the time. She said Galway and the postmark said Athlone."

I thanked her and went out. I walked down the hill and I put Athlone in the notebook in my head, under the word Galway, with a question mark after it.

The second house was Tom's, the man with the moustache from the boathouse. His wife was called Hannah and she was a small woman with a sharp face and she had a baby on her hip and a three year old hanging on her skirt, and she did not ask me in. She stood in the doorway with the baby and said, "If it is about the boathouse you want Declan, he is the harbormaster."

"It is not about the boathouse. It is about my sister. You were friends with her."

"We were not friends. We were neighbors." Hannah shifted the baby. "I will say this for her, she was good with the children. She taught my eldest his letters when the school was shut and she never took a penny for it." She looked down the road and then back at me. "She was in the shop in February and she was buying a map. I said, what do you want a map for, and she said, I am going up to the old stones and I want to be sure of the way. And I said, you have lived here fifteen years, you know the way, and she said, I know the way but I want to know what is marked on it." Hannah's sharp face got sharper. "She had a mark on her arm, here." She touched her own forearm. "A bruise the shape of a hand. I said, who did that to you, and she said, nobody did it, I fell."

The baby began to cry. Hannah jiggled it and did not look at me.

"When was this?"

"End of February. Two weeks before she died." She stepped back into the doorway. "I will say one thing more and then I have to see to this one. The night she died, the Thursday, I was up with the baby at two in the morning, and I looked out of the window and there was a light on in the hall. The hall has no light on at two in the morning. I told Tom and Tom said it was the Alpha doing the accounts."

"And was it?"

"The Alpha does not do accounts at two in the morning." Hannah closed the door.

I stood on the step a moment. Two in the morning. Thursday. The night of the claim, or the night after. The hall with a light on.

The third house was down by the water, the last cottage before the boathouse, and it belonged to a man called Leo who was seventy odd and who had been a fisherman all his life and who now sat in a chair by the window with a rug over his knees and watched the harbor. He waved me in before I knocked.

"You are the sister," he said. "Sit down. Do not mind the dog."

There was a dog, an old black thing asleep by the fire, and it lifted its head when I came in and then put it down again. Leo poured me a glass of water and told me about the old days, the big boats and the big catches and the winter the harbor froze, and I let him talk and watched the harbor with him and waited.

"I will tell you a thing," he said at last. "I have been wanting to tell it to someone for a month and there is no one in this village I can tell it to. The night your sister went into the water I was sitting where I am sitting now. I do not sleep. The old do not sleep. And at about eleven I saw a car on the shore road."

"A car."

"A car. A dark one. It came along the shore road slow with no lights on and it stopped at the boathouse and a man got out and went in, and he was in there twenty minutes and then he came out and drove away." Leo looked at me. "There are no cars on this shore road at eleven at night. There is no one in this village who drives a dark car."

"Did you see the man's face?"

"I saw his coat. It was a good coat. Not a fisherman's coat. A town coat." Leo rubbed the rug over his knees. "And I will tell you the other thing I saw and then I will say no more about it, because I have lived in this village seventy years and I know when a thing is not my business. The next morning the Alpha came down to the pier in her boots and she had been up all night, you could see it in her, and she said to the men, the Mary Rose is not to go out today, the boat is not to be touched until the coroner is done. And the men said aye and they did not touch the boat. And that afternoon the car came back and parked by the boathouse and the man in the town coat went in and out again, and the Alpha stood on the pier with her hands in her pockets and watched him do it."

I sat with Leo in the little cottage by the water and listened to the fire and the dog breathing and the gulls outside.

"Leo," I said. "Was there a woman in the car?"

He looked at me. His old eyes were clouded and very shrewd.

"There was a woman in the car," he said. "She did not get out. She sat in the front seat with her hands in her lap. She had a light on in the car and I saw her for a moment and she had hair the colour of a fox and a face like she was going to be sick."

I got up. I thanked him. I walked out to the shore road and stood with the wind coming in off the water and the burned boathouse behind me.

A dark car with no lights. A man in a town coat. A woman with red hair who sat in the car and looked sick. And a letter with an Athlone postmark that made my sister say oh God.

I went back to the cottage and found Padraig at the table with the newspaper and a pencil and a list of the names of the whole village in his notebook.

"Padraig," I said. "I need you to go to Athlone."

He looked up.

"There is a woman with red hair who was in this village the night my sister died, and there is a letter with an Athlone postmark, and there is a man in a town coat who is not from this village. You are not a wolf and you are not known here and the Alpha cannot hear what is in your head." I sat down across from him. "Go to Athlone and find out who sends letters from that postmark to Dún Aonghasa. And when you have found it, do not write it down and do not telephone me. Come back and tell me with your mouth in a room with no windows."

Padraig put down the pencil. "And what will you be doing while I am in Athlone?"

"Tonight I am going to the harbor office and I am going to put a question to Declan, and I am going to watch his face." I looked at the clock. It was half past six. "And tomorrow night is the full moon, and my sister's letter says the pack runs, and I am going to be on the high ground when they do."

Padraig looked at me for a long moment. Then he folded the newspaper and stood up and put on his coat.

"One thing," he said. "You said the Alpha can hear what the pack is thinking when she calls them. Can she hear you?"

"Declan says she will be able to, once I am properly shifted."

"Then do not think about the ring." Padraig pulled his collar up. "Think about something else. Think about a wall. Think about a blank wall and nothing behind it. Because if she hears you thinking about a silver ring with a crescent moon on it, we are both dead before Saturday." He opened the door. "I will be back from Athlone by Friday night. Do not do anything clever until I get back."

He went out. The door closed. I stood in the kitchen with the clock ticking and my sister's letter under a flagstone and a silver ring in a hole in the floor, and out on the road I heard a step coming up the path and a knock at the door, and I knew who it was before I opened it, because I could smell the pine and the wet wool and the rain through the wood.