The Tinder Box Page 2

  ‘If Patrick is the murderer, then why didn’t you find Lavinia’s diamond rings in Kilkenny Cottage?’ she asked the inspector. ‘Why did you only find pieces of fake jewellery?’

  ‘Who told you that? Bridey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked at her with a kind of compassion. ‘Then I’m afraid she was lying, Mrs Lavenham. The diamond rings were in Kilkenny Cottage along with everything else.’

  Two

  Monday, 8 March 1999, 11.45 p.m.

  Siobhan was aware of the orange glow in the night sky ahead of her for some time before her tired brain began to question what it meant. Arc lights? A party? Fire, she thought in alarm as she approached the outskirts of Sowerbridge and saw sparks shooting into the air like a giant Roman candle. She slowed her Range Rover to a crawl as she approached the bend by the church, knowing it must be the O’Riordans’ house, tempted to put the car into reverse and drive away, as if denial could alter what was happening. But she could see the flames licking up the front of Kilkenny Cottage by that time and knew it was too late for anything so simplistic. A police car was blocking the narrow road ahead, and with a sense of foreboding she obeyed the torch that signalled her to draw up on the grass verge beyond the church gate.

  She lowered her window as the policeman came over, and felt the warmth from the fire fan her face like a Saharan wind. ‘Do you live in Sowerbridge, madam?’ he asked. He was dressed in shirtsleeves, perspiration glistening on his forehead, and Siobhan was amazed that one small house two hundred yards away could generate so much heat on a cool March night.

  ‘Yes.’ She gestured in the direction of the blaze. ‘At Fording Farm. It’s another half-mile beyond the crossroads.’

  He shone his torch into her eyes for a moment – his curiosity whetted by her soft Dublin accent, she guessed – before lowering the beam to a map. ‘You’ll waste a lot less time if you go back the way you came and make a detour,’ he advised her.

  ‘I can’t. Our driveway leads off the crossroads by Kilkenny Cottage and there’s no other access to it.’ She touched a finger to the map. ‘There. Whichever way I go, I still need to come back to the crossroads.’

  Headlights swept across her rearview mirror as another car rounded the bend. ‘Wait there a moment, please.’ He moved away to signal towards the verge, leaving Siobhan to gaze through her windscreen at the scene of chaos ahead.

  There seemed to be a lot of people milling around, but her night sight had been damaged by the brilliance of the flames; and the water glistening on the tarmac made it difficult to distinguish what was real from what was reflection. The rusted hulks of the old cars that littered the O’Riordans’ property stood out in bold silhouettes against the light, and Siobhan thought that Cynthia Haversley had been right when she said they weren’t just an eyesore but a fire hazard as well. Cynthia had talked dramatically about the dangers of petrol, but if there was any petrol left in the corroded tanks, it remained sluggishly inert. The real hazard was the time and effort it must have taken to manoeuvre the two fire engines close enough to weave the hoses through so many obstacles, and Siobhan wondered if the house had ever stood a chance of being saved.

  She began to fret about her two small boys and their nanny, Rosheen, who were alone at the farmhouse, and drummed her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. ‘What should I do?’ she asked the policeman when he returned after persuading the other driver to make a detour. ‘I need to get home.’

  He looked at the map again. ‘There’s a footpath running behind the church and the vicarage. If you’re prepared to walk home, I suggest you park your car in the churchyard and take the footpath. I’ll radio through to ask one of the constables on the other side of the crossroads to escort you into your driveway. Failing that, I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here until the road’s clear, and that could take several hours.’

  ‘I’ll walk.’ She reached for the gear stick, then let her hand drop. ‘No one’s been hurt, have they?’

  ‘No. The occupants are away.’

  Siobhan nodded. Under the watchful eyes of half of Sowerbridge village Liam and Bridey had set off that morning in their ancient Ford estate, to the malignant sound of whistles and hisses. ‘The O’Riordans are staying in Winchester until the trial’s over.’

  ‘So we’ve been told,’ the policeman agreed.

  Siobhan watched him take a notebook from his breast pocket. ‘Then presumably you were expecting something like this? I mean, everyone knew the house would be empty.’

  He flicked to an empty page. ‘I’ll need your name, madam.’

  ‘Siobhan Lavenham.’

  ‘And your registration number, please, Ms Lavenham.’

  She gave it to him. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said unemphatically.

  He raised his eyes to look at her but it was impossible to read their expression. ‘What question’s that?’

  She thought she detected a smile on his face and bridled immediately. ‘You don’t find it at all suspicious that the house burns down the minute Liam’s back is turned?’

  He frowned. ‘You’ve lost me, Ms Lavenham.’

  ‘It’s Mrs Lavenham,’ she said irritably, ‘and you know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Liam’s been receiving arson threats ever since Patrick was arrested, but the police couldn’t have been less interested.’ Her irritation got the better of her. ‘It’s their son who’s on trial, for God’s sake, not them, though you’d never believe it for all the care the English police have shown them.’ She crunched the car into gear and drove the few yards to the churchyard entrance, where she parked in the lee of the wall and closed the window. She was preparing to open the door when it was opened from the outside.

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ demanded the policeman as she climbed out.

  ‘What am I trying to say?’ She let her accent slip into broad brogue. ‘Will you listen to the man? And there was me thinking my English was as good as his.’

  She was as tall as the constable, with striking good looks, and colour rose in his cheeks. ‘I didn’t mean it that way, Mrs Lavenham. I meant, are you saying it was arson?’

  ‘Of course it was arson,’ she countered, securing her mane of brown hair with a band at the back of her neck and raising her coat collar against the wind which two hundred yards away was feeding the inferno. ‘Are you saying it wasn’t?’

  ‘Can you prove it?’

  ‘I thought that was your job.’

  He opened his notebook again, looking more like an earnest student than an officer of the law. ‘Do you know who might have been responsible?’

  She reached inside the car for her handbag. ‘Probably the same people who wrote “IRISH TRASH” across their front wall,’ she said, slamming the door and locking it. ‘Or maybe it’s the ones who broke into the house two weeks ago during the night and smashed Bridey’s Madonna and Child before urinating all over the pieces on the carpet. Who knows?’ She gave him credit for looking disturbed at what she was saying. ‘Look, forget it,’ she said wearily. ‘It’s late and I’m tired, and I want to get home to my children. Can you make that radio call so I don’t get held up at the other end?’

  ‘I’ll do it from the car.’ He started to turn away, then changed his mind. ‘I’ll be reporting what you’ve told me, Mrs Lavenham, including your suggestion that the police have been negligent in their duty.’

  She smiled slightly. ‘Is that a threat or a promise, Officer?’

  ‘It’s a promise.’

  ‘Then I hope you have better luck than I’ve had. I might have been speaking in Gaelic for all the notice your colleagues took of my warnings.’ She set off for the footpath.

  ‘You’re supposed to put complaints in writing,’ he called after her.

  ‘Oh, but I did,’ she assured him over her shoulder. ‘I may be Irish, but I’m not illiterate.’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’

  But the rest of his apology was lost on her as she rounded the corner of the c
hurch and vanished from sight.

  Thursday, 18 February 1999

  It had been several days before Siobhan found the courage to confront Bridey with what the detective inspector had told her. It made her feel like a thief even to think about it. Secrets were such fragile things. Little parts of oneself that couldn’t be exposed without inviting changed perceptions towards the whole. But distrust was corroding her sympathy and she needed reassurance that Bridey at least believed in Patrick’s innocence.

  She followed the old woman’s wheelchair into the sitting room and perched on the edge of the grubby sofa that Liam always lounged upon in his oil-stained boiler suit after spending hours poking around his unsightly wrecks. It was a mystery to Siobhan what he did, as none of them appeared to be driveable, and she wondered sometimes if he simply used them as a canopy under which to sleep his days away. He complained often enough that his withered right hand, which he kept tucked out of sight inside his pocket, had deprived him of any chance of a livelihood, but the truth was he was a lazy man who was only ever seen to rouse himself when his wife transferred from her wheelchair to the passenger seat of their old Ford.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with his left hand,’ Cynthia Haversley would snort indignantly as she watched the regular little pantomime outside Kilkenny Cottage, ‘but you’d think he’d lost the use of both hands the way he carries on about his disabilities.’

  Privately, and with some amusement, Siobhan guessed the demonstrations were put on entirely for the benefit of the Honourable Mrs Haversley, who made no bones about her irritation at the level of state welfare that the O’Riordans enjoyed. It was axiomatic, after all, that any woman who had enough strength in her arms to heave herself upstairs on her bottom, as Bridey did every night, could lift her own legs into a car . . .

  Kilkenny Cottage’s sitting room – Bridey called it her ‘parlour’ – was full of religious artefacts: a shrine to the Madonna and Child on the mantelpiece, a foot-high wooden cross on one wall, a print of William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World on another, a rosary hanging from a hook. In Siobhan, for whom religion was more of a trial than a comfort, the room invariably induced a sort of spiritual claustrophobia which made her long to get out and breathe fresh air again.

  In ordinary circumstances, the paths of the O’Riordans, descendants of a roaming tinker family, and Siobhan Lavenham (née Kerry), daughter of an Irish landowner, would never have crossed. Indeed, when she and her husband, Ian, first visited Fording Farm and fell in love with it, Siobhan had pointed out the eyesore of Kilkenny Cottage with a shudder and had predicted accurately the kind of people who were living there. Irish gypsies, she’d said.

  ‘Will that make life difficult for you?’ Ian had asked.

  ‘Only if people assume we’re related,’ she answered with a laugh, never assuming for one moment that anyone would . . .

  Bridey’s habitually cowed expression reminded Siobhan of an ill-treated dog, and she put the detective inspector’s accusations reluctantly, asking Bridey if she had lied about the car crash and about Patrick never striking his father. The woman wept, washing her hands in her lap as if, like Lady Macbeth, she could cleanse herself of sin.

  ‘If I did, Siobhan, it was only to have you think well of us. You’re a lovely young lady with a kind heart, but you’d not have let Patrick play with your children if you’d known what he did to his father, and you’d not have taken Rosheen into your house if you’d known her uncle Liam was a thief.’

  ‘You should have trusted me, Bridey. If I didn’t ask Rosheen to leave when Patrick was arrested for murder, why would I have refused to employ her just because Liam spent time in prison?’

  ‘Because your husband would have persuaded you against her,’ said Bridey truthfully. ‘He’s never been happy about Rosheen being related to us, never mind she grew up in Ireland and hardly knew us till you said she could come here to work for you.’

  There was no point denying it. Ian tolerated Rosheen O’Riordan for Siobhan’s sake, and because his little boys loved her, but in an ideal world he would have preferred a nanny from a more conventional background. Rosheen’s relaxed attitude to child rearing, based on her own upbringing in a three-bedroomed cottage in the hills of Donegal, where the children had slept four to a bed and play was adventurous, carefree, and fun, was so different from the strict supervision of his own childhood that he constantly worried about it. ‘They’ll grow up wild,’ he would say. ‘She’s not disciplining them enough.’ And Siobhan would look at her happy, lively, affectionate sons and wonder why the English were so fond of repression.

  ‘He worries about his children, Bridey, more so since Patrick’s arrest. We get telephone calls too, you know. Everyone knows Rosheen’s his cousin.’

  She remembered the first such call she had taken. She had answered it in the kitchen while Rosheen was making supper for the children, and she had been shocked by the torrent of anti-Irish abuse that had poured down the line. She raised stricken eyes to Rosheen’s and saw by the girl’s frightened expression that it wasn’t the first such call that had been made. After that, she had had an answerphone installed, and forbade Rosheen to lift the receiver unless she was sure of the caller’s identity.

  Bridey’s sad gaze lifted towards the Madonna on the mantelpiece. ‘I pray for you every day, Siobhan, just as I pray for my Patrick. God knows, I never wished this trouble on a sweet lady such as yourself. And for why? Is it a sin to be Irish?’

  Siobhan sighed to herself, hating Bridey’s dreary insistence on calling her a ‘lady’. She did not doubt Bridey’s faith, nor that she prayed every day, but she doubted God’s ability to undo Lavinia Fanshaw’s murder eight months after the event.

  And if Patrick was guilty of it, and Bridey knew he was guilty . . .

  ‘The issue isn’t about being Irish,’ she said bluntly, ‘it’s about whether or not Patrick’s a murderer. I’d much rather you were honest with me, Bridey. At the moment, I don’t trust any of you, and that includes Rosheen. Does she know about his past? Has she been lying to me too?’ She paused, waiting for an answer, but Bridey just shook her head. ‘I’m not going to blame you for your son’s behaviour,’ she said more gently, ‘but you can’t expect me to go on pleading his cause if he’s guilty.’

  ‘Indeed, and I wouldn’t ask you to,’ said the old woman with dignity. ‘And you can rest your mind about Rosheen. We kept the truth to ourselves fifteen years ago. Liam wouldn’t have his son blamed for something that wasn’t his fault. We’ll call it a car accident, he said, and may God strike me dead if I ever raise my hand in anger again.’ She grasped the rims of her chair wheels and slowly rotated them through half a turn. ‘I’ll tell you honestly, though I’m a cripple and though I’ve been married to Liam for nearly forty years, it’s only in these last fifteen that I’ve been able to sleep peacefully in my bed. Oh yes, Liam was a bad man, and oh yes, my Patrick lost his temper once and struck out at him, but I swear by the Mother of God that this family changed for the better the day my poor son wept for what he’d done and rang the police himself. Will you believe me, Siobhan? Will you trust an old woman when she tells you her Patrick could no more have murdered Mrs Fanshaw than I can get out of this wheelchair and walk? To be sure, he took some jewellery from her – and to be sure, he was wrong to do it – but he was only trying to get back what had been cheated out of him.’

  ‘Except there’s no proof he was cheated out of anything. The police say there’s very little evidence that any odd jobs had been done in the manor. They mentioned that one or two cracks in the plaster had been filled, but not enough to indicate a contract worth three hundred pounds.’

  ‘He was up there for two weeks,’ said Bridey in despair. ‘Twelve hours a day every day.’

  ‘Then why is there nothing to show for it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the old woman with difficulty. ‘All I can tell you is that he came home every night with stories about what he’d been doing. One day it was getting the hea
ting system to work, the next re-laying the floor tiles in the kitchen where they’d come loose. It was Miss Jenkins who was telling him what needed doing, and she was thrilled to have all the little irritations sorted once and for all.’

  Siobhan recalled the detective inspector’s words. ‘There’s no one left to agree or disagree,’ he had said. ‘Mrs Fanshaw’s grandson denies knowing anything about it, although he admits there might have been a private arrangement between Patrick and the nurse. She’s known to have been on friendly terms with him . . .’

  ‘The police are saying Patrick only invented the contract in order to explain why his fingerprints were all over the Manor House.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Are you sure? Wasn’t it the first idea that came into his head when the police produced the search warrant? They questioned him for two days, Bridey, and the only explanation he gave for his fingerprints and his toolbox being in the manor was that Lavinia’s nurse had asked him to sort out the dripping taps in the kitchen and bathroom. Why didn’t he mention a contract earlier? Why did he wait until they found the jewellery under his floorboards before saying he was owed money?’

  Teardrops watered the washing hands. ‘Because he’s been in prison and doesn’t trust the police . . . because he didn’t kill Mrs Fanshaw . . . because he was more worried about being charged with the theft of her jewellery than he was about being charged with murder. Do you think he’d have invented a contract that didn’t exist? My boy isn’t stupid, Siobhan. He doesn’t tell stories that he can’t back up. Not when he’s had two whole days to think about them.’

  Siobhan shook her head. ‘Except he couldn’t back it up. You’re the only person, other than Patrick, who claims to know anything about it, and your word means nothing because you’re his mother.’

  ‘But don’t you see?’ the woman pleaded. ‘That’s why you can be sure Patrick’s telling the truth. If he’d believed for one moment it would all be denied, he’d have given some other reason for why he took the jewellery. Do you hear what I’m saying? He’s a good liar, Siobhan – for his sins, he always has been – and he’d not have invented a poor, weak story like the one he’s been saddled with.’