Selected Stories

He spoke softly, not in the cagey, underhand tone of someone attempting to get something for nothing. Catherine was still standing. He turned his head to one side in order to squint up at her. He sounded apologetic, but all that could be put on also.

‘I brought the receipt book over with me,’ he said.

He handed it to her, a fat greasy notebook with a grey marbled cover that had The Challenge Receipt Book printed on it. Blue carbon paper protruded from the dog-eared pages.

‘Any receipt that’s issued would have a copy left behind here,’ he said, speaking now to Alicia, across the table. ‘The top copy for the customer, the carbon for ourselves. You couldn’t do business without you keep a record of receipts.’

He stood up then. He opened the book and displayed its unused pages, each with the same printed heading: In account with T. P. Leary. He showed Catherine how the details of a bill were recorded on the flimsy page beneath the carbon sheet and how, when a bill was paid, acknowledgement was recorded also:

Paid with thanks, with the date and the careful scrawl of Mrs Leary’s signature. He passed the receipt book to Alicia, pointing out these details to her also.

‘Anything could have happened to that receipt,’ Alicia said. ‘In the circumstances. ’

‘If a receipt was issued, missus, there’d be a record of it here.’

Alicia placed the receipt book beside the much slimmer building-society book on the pale surface of the table. Leary’s attention remained with the former, his scrutiny an emphasis of the facts it contained. The evidence offered otherwise was not for him to comment upon: so the steadiness of his gaze insisted.

‘My husband counted those notes at this very table,’ Catherine said. ‘He took them out of the brown envelope that they were put into at the Nationwide.’

‘It’s a mystery so.’

It wasn’t any such thing; there was no mystery whatsoever. The bill had been paid. Both sisters knew that; in their different ways they guessed that Leary – and presumably his wife as well – had planned this dishonesty as soon as they realized death gave them the opportunity. Matthew had obliged them by paying cash so that they could defraud the taxation authorities. He had further obliged them by dying. Catherine said:

‘My husband walked out of this house with that envelope in his pocket. Are you telling me he didn’t reach you?’

‘Was he robbed? Would it be that? You hear terrible things these days.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’

Leary wagged his head in his meditative way. It was unlikely certainly, he agreed. Anyone robbed would have gone to the Guards. Anyone robbed would have mentioned it when he came back to the house again.

‘The bill was paid, Mr Leary.’

‘All the same, we have to go by the receipt. At the heel of the hunt there’s the matter of a receipt.’

Alicia shook her head. Either a receipt wasn’t issued in the first place, she said, or else it had been mislaid. ‘There’s a confusion when a person dies,’ she said.

If Catherine had been able to produce the receipt Leary would have blamed his wife. He’d have blandly stated that she’d got her wires crossed. He’d have said the first thing that came into his head and then have gone away.

‘The only thing is,’ he said instead, ‘a sum like that is sizeable. I couldn’t afford let it go.’

Both Catherine and Alicia had seen Mrs Leary in the shops, red-haired, like a tinker, a bigger woman than her husband, probably the brains of the two. The Learys were liars and worse than liars; the chance had come and the temptation had been too much for them. ‘Ah sure, those two have plenty,’ the woman would have said. The sisters wondered if the Learys had tricked the bereaved before, and imagined they had. Leary said:

‘It’s hard on a man that’s done work for you.’

Catherine moved towards the kitchen door. Leary ambled after her down the hall. She remembered the evening more clearly even than a while ago: a Wednesday it definitely had been, the day of the Sweetman girl’s wedding; and it came back to her, also, Alicia hurrying out on her Legion of Mary business. There’d been talk in McKenny’s about the wedding, the unusual choice of mid-week, which apparently had something to do with visitors coming from America. She opened the hall-door in silence. Across the street, beyond the silver-coloured railings, the children were still running about in the convent yard. Watery sunlight lightened the unadorned concrete of the classrooms and the nuns’ house.

‘What’ll I do?’ Leary asked, wide-eyed, bloodshot, squinting at her.

Catherine said nothing.