we got no plates now?’
‘Sorry, I haven’t got time.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve to be in Dublin. I’ll only just get the train.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. They want to see me at Garda HQ. They didn’t tell Gerry Riordan what it was about. I could see the expression on his face coming down the phone line at me!’ He laughed again, grabbing an apple from the bowl on the sideboard. He looked down at the lamb, sleeping in a cardboard box by the stove. ‘And don’t forget her, will you Tom?’
‘I won’t,’ his son nodded, still reading, not looking up.
He ran upstairs a lot faster than he’d come down. He wasn’t tired now. In a place where not much happened, anything happening was an event.
In the farmyard David Gillespie was driving a cow and a calf into the loose box next to the barn. Stefan took the bicycle that was leaning against the wall by the front door and cycled out round his father and the cow and calf; the cow stopped, bellowing darkly, and nudging her wobbling calf away.
‘I don’t know what time I’ll be back, Pa. I’ve to go to Dublin.’
His father nodded and tapped the cow’s backside.
‘Your Ma said.’
‘Ned Broy wants to see me. And pronto, apparently!’
‘What have you done?’ said David with a wry smile.
‘He’ll be worried about the sheep stealing again, I’d say, Pa.’ He rode out of the farmyard, down to the road.
His father watched him for a while, remembering the years that had passed since his son was last called to Garda Headquarters. At the end of all that Stefan had left his job as a detective in Dublin, and had come back to Baltinglass to work as a uniformed sergeant in the small West Wicklow town. It had been his own choice, driven as much as anything else by the responsibility he felt to his own son. Tom was only five then, living with his grandparents on the farm, seeing his father once a week, sometimes less. The four years that had passed since then had been happy ones for the most part, but in a family where emotions were sometimes as deeply hidden as they were deeply felt, David Gillespie knew that what his son gave to that happiness came at a price.
It wasn’t a price Stefan begrudged, but it was still a price. His life had been on hold. There were things that weren’t easy; there were corners where the comfortable contentment the Garda sergeant showed his Wicklow neighbours was less than comfortable. He lived in a place he loved, with the people he loved. It was what he had felt he had to do; it was not all he was.
For Stefan’s mother it was simple enough; all that was missing was a woman, not to take the place of her son’s now six-years-dead wife, Maeve, but to fill the empty places.
David Gillespie knew it went further than that. A long time ago he had put his own life on hold, for very different reasons, and he had come back to the farm above Baltinglass to give himself the space to breathe. He had breathed the air that came down from the mountains very deeply, and like his son he loved it, but it was a narrower life than he had wanted, with all its gifts. David had found a way to calm what was restless and dissatisfied in himself; perhaps he had nowhere else to go. But he recognised the same restlessness in his son; he recognised that it went deeper too.
He looked round the farmyard for a moment, then up at the hills that surrounded it, Keadeen, Kilranelagh, Baltinglass Hill. It was a great deal, but it would not be enough, not the way it had been for him, even if Stefan had persuaded himself it could be. David Gillespie shrugged, and turned back to the suspicious cow and her calf, driving them into the loose box.
Inevitably some of the same thoughts came into Stefan’s head as he cycled through Baltinglass’s Main Street and along Mill Street to the station, but it was easier to think about the present than the past. As he sat on the train following the River Slaney north towards Naas and Dublin, he looked out of the window and thought how little what he’d been doing in recent weeks could interest the brass in the Phoenix Park. He smiled. Sheep stealing really was about as serious as it got.
There was the new Dance Hall Act, of course, which required all dances to be licensed in light of the moral dangers the Church felt were inherent in dancing. A spate of unpopular raids was taking Stefan into the courthouse in Baltinglass on a weekly basis now. Yesterday he’d been giving evidence against the Secretary of the Dunlavin Bicycling Association and the Rathvilly Association Football Club. Admittedly the Dance Hall Act was causing considerable anger among the unmarried guards in Baltinglass who, when they weren’t raiding the dances, were dancing at them.
Then there was the pen of in-lamb ewes he was pursuing, that had disappeared from Paddy Kelly’s farm on Spynans Hill in February. Christy Hannity had bought them from Paddy at a farm sale and swore blind the old man had put them back on to the mountain while he was in the pub. It wasn’t the first time Paddy Kelly had played this trick and got away with it. All he had to say now was that mountain sheep had their own ways and Christy was too drunk to remember what he’d done with them.
And there were two days wasted on James MacDonald who had assaulted the Water Bailiff, Cathal Patterson, after refusing to give up a salmon found in his possession by the Slaney. He claimed the salmon was a trout, which he had since eaten. As for the Water Bailiff’s nose, didn’t he break it himself, tripping over a dead cat as he was walking out of Sheridan’s Bar?
It was hard to push the past out of the way altogether as Stefan walked from Kingsbridge Station through the Phoenix Park to the long, low stone building that was part eighteenth-century army barracks and part Irish country house. Nothing very much had happened in the last four years; most of what had, had happened to his son. He had no problem with that; it was why he had left CID, why he had left Dublin, why he went home. But the thought of how easily and how completely he had left behind the job he had always wanted, since the day he joined the Gardaí, had never struck him as starkly before as it did in the few moments he spent waiting outside Ned Broy’s office.
It hadn’t only been about Tom of course. He had also left because it suited everybody, the Garda Commissioner included. He had been involved in investigating two murders that in the end nobody wanted investigated too publicly. There had been justice of a kind, finally, but it had been a rough justice that the Irish state didn’t want to know about.
For a time it had been easiest for Detective Sergeant Gillespie to become plain Sergeant Gillespie in a country police station. No one had really meant him to stay there so long. He hadn’t intended that himself. It just happened, because that was what was best for Tom. Now, as Stefan sat in Ned Broy’s office again, he could feel an awkwardness in the Garda Commissioner. Sergeant Gillespie’s submerging in a backwater had not been what he had intended either.
Whatever was urgent, the Commissioner’s opening words weren’t.
‘So, how’s West Wicklow?’
‘Quiet enough, sir.’
‘You’re keeping Gerry Riordan in check, I hope.’
‘Well, mostly he does what he’s told.’
The Commissioner smiled. There was a moment’s silence.
‘You’ve been there a long time.’
‘Four
