Selected Stories

Alicia laid down the cloth with which she had been applying Goddard’s Silver Polish to the cutlery and Catherine watched her sister’s slow, deliberate movements as she shined the last of the forks and then drew off her pink rubber gloves and placed them one on top of the other beside her. Alicia could sense something; she often had a way of knowing what was coming next.

‘I don’t know are you aware,’ Leary enquired, addressing only Catherine, ‘it wasn’t paid for?’

‘What wasn’t?’

‘The job I done for you.’

‘You don’t mean painting the front?’

‘I do, ma’am.’

‘But of course it was paid for.’

He sighed softly. An outstanding bill was an embarrassment, he said. Because of the death it was an embarrassment.

‘My husband paid for the work that was done.’

‘Ah no, no.’

The frown Catherine had checked a few moments ago wrinkled her forehead. She knew the bill had been paid. She knew because Matthew had said Leary would want cash, and she had taken the money out of her own Irish Nationwide account since she had easy access to it. ‘I’ll see you right at the end of the month,’ Matthew had promised. It was an arrangement they often had; the building-society account in her name existed for this kind of thing.

‘Two hundred and twenty-six pounds is the extent of the damage.’ Leary smiled shiftily. ‘With the discount for cash.’

She didn’t tell him she’d withdrawn the money herself. That wasn’t his business. She watched the extreme tip of his tongue licking his upper lip. He wiped his mouth with the back of a paint-stained hand. Softly, Alicia was replacing forks and spoons in the cutlery container.

‘It was September the account was sent out. The wife does all that type of thing.’

‘The bill was paid promptly. My husband always paid bills promptly.’

She remembered the occasion perfectly. ‘I’ll bring it down to him now,’ Matthew had said, glancing across the kitchen at the clock. Every evening he walked to McKenny’s bar and remained there for three-quarters of an hour or so, depending on the company. That evening he’d have gone the long way round, by French Street, in order to call in at the Learys’ house in Brady’s Lane. Before he left he had taken the notes from the brown Nationwide envelope and counted them, slowly, just as she’d done herself earlier. She’d seen the bill in his hand. ‘Chancing his arm with the taxman,’ she remembered his remarking lightly, a reference to Leary’s preference for cash.

On his return he would have hung his cap on its hook in the scullery passage and settled down at the kitchen table with the Evening Press, which he bought in Healy’s sweetshop on his way back from McKenny’s. He went to the public house for conversation as much as anything, and afterwards passed on to Alicia and herself any news he had gleaned. Bottled Smithwick’s was his drink.

‘D’you remember it?’ Catherine appealed to her sister because although she could herself so clearly recall Matthew’s departure from the house on that particular September evening, his return eluded her. It lay smothered somewhere beneath the evening routine, nothing making it special, as the banknotes in the envelope had marked the other.

‘I remember talk about money,’ Alicia recalled, ‘earlier that day. If I’ve got it right, I was out at the Legion of Mary in the evening.’

‘A while back the wife noticed the way the bill was unpaid,’ Leary went on, having paused politely to hear these recollections. ‘“It’s the death that’s in it,” the wife said. She’d have eaten the face off me if I’d bothered you in your trouble.’

‘Excuse me,’ Catherine said.

She left the kitchen and went to look on the spike in the side-cupboard in the passage, where all receipts were kept. This one should have been close to the top, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t further down either. It wasn’t in the cupboard drawers. She went through the contents of three box-files in case it had been bundled into one in error. Again she didn’t find it.

She returned to the kitchen with the next best thing: the Nationwide Building Society account book. She opened it and placed it in front of Leary. She pointed at the entry that recorded the withdrawal of two hundred and twenty-six pounds. She could tell that there had been no conversation in her absence. Leary would have tried to get some kind of talk going, but Alicia wouldn’t have responded.

‘September the eighth,’ Catherine said, emphasizing the printed date with a forefinger. ‘A Wednesday it was.’

In silence Leary perused the entry. He shook his head. The tight features of his face tightened even more, bunching together into a knot of bewilderment. Catherine glanced at her sister. He was putting it on, Alicia’s expression indicated.

‘The money was taken out all right,’ Leary said eventually. ‘Did he put it to another use in that case?’

‘Another use?’

‘Did you locate a receipt, missus?’