The Private Wound by Nicholas Blake Page A

Father’s arrival in the nick of time to rescue me from the car—had it not been suspiciously pat? Perhaps he had organised the whole thing, not to kill me, but as a last warning. It was a bit strange that it should happen on the night he was sitting with the sick widow in her cottage on the hill. Of course, he would have needed an accomplice to stun me and drive me to the strand. But he was a man of absolute authority among his people; and his fanatical zeal against sexual irregularity was well established.
    Hardly had this passed through my mind when I saw its grotesque absurdity. I must be suffering a delayed reaction from the knock on my head.
    â€œSo you’re going back to your cottage?” asked Concannon.
    â€œYes. I’ll bolt the door at night. If I remember to.”It was bravado, of course. Like many timid people, I sometimes had the urge to provoke the crisis which I felt lying in wait for me, to get the thing over with. Concannon gave me an undeserved look of admiration.
    â€œVery well then. We’ll be keeping your cottage under surveillance for a while, till I get to the bottom of that assault on you.” He gazed at me reassuringly. “You’re not a very curious man, Mr. Eyre, are you?”
    â€œHow do you mean?”
    â€œAren’t you interested in the statements I took from your neighbours?”
    â€œI thought that was the sort of thing the police kept under their hat.”
    â€œOh, we have
secretive
policemen over here. As well as secret police. But I’m not the one nor the other.”
    Concannon now told me that, according to their statements, Flurry and Harriet were in bed when the assault took place, Kevin and his wife were going to bed. Seamus O’Donovan had said he was asleep, but he slept alone in a room above one of the Lissawn outbuildings, so there was no one to corroborate his evidence. The man of the cottage a hundred yards down the road from mine said he’d been woken by a car passing along the road about midnight, and before he went to sleep again had heard a car passing in the opposite direction.
    â€œAnd now I want you to make me a list of all the other people you’ve met since you came to Charlottestown. And you’ll write at once for your passport. But there’s another thing; the most important. If you’ll be good enough to help me with this.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI want you to think back over all the conversations you’ve had since you came to Charlottestown—” Concannon was looking at me with a most serious, urgent expression—“and tell me of any occasion when you felt theperson you were talking to seemed specially inquisitive about yourself.”
    â€œThat’d apply to pretty well everyone I’ve met.”
    â€œAh, we’re a nosy lot. Aren’t we, Father? What I have in mind, Mr. Eyre—it’s hard to define—but any man or woman who seemed to think, or maybe you gave the impression unwittingly, that you’re not the man you give yourself out to be—a writer holidaying over here. Someone you felt was pumping you, to draw out your real identity.”
    â€œA nice metaphor,” I replied. “But I really can’t—”
    â€œTake your time, Mr. Eyre. There’s no hurry. It might have been in a shop, in the street, a chance encounter you thought nothing of at the time. In the Colooney bar. Anywhere. You have it now?” he added with a touch of excitement.
    A bell had rung loudly in my mind. Colooney bar. I have an excellent verbal memory: so I was able to tell Concannon, almost word for word, that bit of my conversation with the Colooney manager the first night I was here.
    â€œHaggerty asked if I was in business or government service. I answered, ‘A sort of business. A one-man business.’ I didn’t want it put about just then that I’m a writer: and I was a bit irked by his inquisitiveness. Then he asked if I