Watchman

Prologue

It was said that his ancestors had come from Donegal, and for that reason if no other he had decided to spend a holiday in Ireland. The lush countryside, so quiet after London, and the little villages around the coast delighted him, and the people were polite and, he supposed, as friendly as they would ever be to an Englishman. Ah, but he was quick to point out to them that his roots were in Donegal; that in spirit if not in body he was as they were, a blood-hot Celt.

Having spent long enough in the west, he traveled east, driving through Fermanagh and Monaghan until he reached the coast, just south of Dundalk. The days were balmy and clear, and he breathed it all in, resisting the occasional temptation to telephone back to London with news of his trip. He could wait for all that.

A few of the men along the coast were fishermen, but not many, not now that the economy was dragging itself, along with the country’s social problems, into the twentieth century. The north was a ferment of naive idealism and brutish anger, the whole concoction spiked by foreign meddling of the most malign nature.

In particular there was one young man, his hair wild and with a beard to match, whom he met in Drogheda, and who had spoken to him of the fishing industry and the village pubs and of politics. Politics seemed to pervade life in Ireland as though the very air carried whispered reminders of bloodshed and injustice. He had listened with an unjaundiced ear, explaining in his turn that he was on holiday, but that really he was recovering from a broken heart. The young man nodded, seeming to understand, his eyes keen like a gull’s.

In one of the pubs they sat for night after night, though he could feel, through his happiness, the end of the holiday approaching. They drove into the countryside one day, so that the young man, Will, could spend some time away from the gutting of fish and the rank posturing of the boats. They ate and drank, and, with Will’s directions, approached a quayside as dusk was falling. He pointed over to a small boat. The air was rich with the smells of fish and the endless screeching of the herring gulls. The boat, Will told his companion, was his own.

‘Shall we take her out?’

As they did, out past the green-stained walls of the quay, out past the bristling rocks and the wrack, into the choppy Irish Sea, the older man trailed his hand in the bitter-cold water, feeling the salt cling to his wrist. Will explained why the wind was slightly warm, and spoke of the hunt for some legendary giant fish, a shadowy monster that had never been caught. People still caught sight of it, he said, on moonlit nights with a tot of rum inside them, but if it was still alive, then it would be hundreds of years old, since the first such tales had been told centuries before. The sky gaped above them, the soft spray like an anointing. Perhaps, thought the Englishman, he was the outdoor type after all. He would return to London, give up his job (which was, in any case, about to dump him), and drift, seeing the world through rechristened eyes.

The engine stopped, and the lapping of the water became the only sound around him. It seemed a pure and a miraculous peace. He looked back in the direction of the shore, but it was out of sight.

‘We’re a long way out,’ he said, one hand still paddling the water, though it was growing numb with cold.

‘No,’ said the younger man, ‘it’s only you that’s a long way out. You’re way too far out of your territory.’

And when he turned, the gun was already aimed, and his mouth had opened in the merest fraction of a cry when it went off, sending him flying backward out of the boat, so that his body rested in the water, his legs hanging over the edge, caught on a rusty nail.

The younger man’s hand shook only slightly as he placed the gun on the floor of the boat. From a bag concealed beneath one seat he brought out a load of stones, which he hoped would be sufficient for his purpose. He tried to pull the corpse back into the boat, but it had become sodden and as heavy as the deadweight it was. The sweat dripped from him as he heaved at his catch, growing tired quickly as though after a full day on the boats.

Then he caught sight of the face and he retched, bringing up a little of the dead man’s gifts of food and wine. But the job had to be done, and so he gathered up new strength. He had done it, after all, he had killed his first man. They would be pleased with him.