The Tinder Box (3 page)

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

18

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?'

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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?'

Till do it from the car.' He started to turn away,

then changed his mind. Till 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 church and vanished from

sight.

20

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.

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'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 (nee 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

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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

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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

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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

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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?'

The 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 heating 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.

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