“Not very good,” I told him. “My best friend got kidnapped by the IRA a few hours ago and bundled away to God knows where. I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”
“That’s desperate,” he said, shaking his head. “And did you hear that Seán Lemass is the new Taoiseach? What do you make of him anyway? I don’t like the amount of oil he puts in his hair. It gives him an air of malevolence.” He turned around as the door opened and an older Garda stepped inside, carrying a folder and a cup of tea, and introduced himself as Sergeant Cunnane.
“You’re the boy’s father?” he asked Charles as we all sat down.
“His adoptive father,” he replied. “Cyril isn’t a real Avery, as you can probably tell just by looking at him. My wife and I took him into our home when he was just a baby in an act of Christian charity.”
“And is your wife on her way in to us too?”
“I’d be shocked if she was,” he said. “Maude died a few years ago. Cancer. She beat it when it was in the ear canal but once it spread to her throat and tongue that was it. Curtains.”
“I’m very sorry,” said the sergeant, but Charles waved his sympathy away.
“Don’t be, don’t be,” he said. “Time has been a great healer. And it’s not as if I didn’t have other options. Now, tell me, Sergeant, what’s going on here exactly? I heard a little bit on the radio on the way in but I’m mostly in the dark.”
“It seems that your son—”
“Adoptive son.”
“It seems that Cyril here and his friend Julian left the grounds of Belvedere College earlier today in contravention of school rules for a rendezvous with two older girls in the Palace Bar, Westmoreland Street.”
“Are those the two girls I saw sitting out there in the corridor? One of them was in floods of tears and the other looked bored out of her tits.”
“Yes, that was them,” said Sergeant Cunnane as I looked away in embarrassment.
“Which one was yours, Cyril?” he asked, turning to me. “Tears or tits?”
I bit my lip, unsure how to answer. Strictly speaking, neither of them was mine but if we had to be paired in any specific way, there could only be one accurate answer.
“Tears,” I said.
He made a tsk sound and his face registered his disappointment. “Do you know,” he said, turning to the sergeant again, “if I’d had to put money on it, I would have guessed that he’d say tears, but I really hoped for his own sake that he would say tits. Sometimes I wonder where I went wrong. It’s not as if I brought him up to respect women.”
“Mr. Avery,” said the sergeant, doing well to keep his composure. “We have to ask your son…your Cyril…Cyril, a few questions. Can you just remain quiet while we get through this?”
“Of course, of course,” he said. “Terrible business all the same. Who’s this Julian fellow anyway? The one who got kidnapped?”
“My roommate,” I told him. “Julian Woodbead.”
He shot forward in his seat like a bullet. “Not Max Woodbead’s young lad?”
“That’s right, sir,” said the sergeant.
“Ha!” he cried, bursting into an unexpected round of applause. “Funny story, Sergeant. So this fellow, Max Woodbead, was my solicitor a few years back. He wasn’t as well known then as he is now, of course. He made his name off me, you might say. There was a time when we were the best of friends but I hold my hands up and admit that I made a few wrong decisions on the marital front and let’s just say that I laid the old garden hose down on someone else’s front lawn, Max’s front lawn to be precise, and when he found out he gave me a right seeing-to.” Charles slammed his fist down on the table, making us both jump and causing the sergeant’s tea to spill over the side of his cup. “And do you know something, I never held it against him. Not for a moment. He was quite within his rights. But then after I went to prison, he bought my house at a knock-down price and threw my wife and adoptive son out on the street, and Maude was not a well woman. That was a terrible thing to do and I’ll never forgive him for it. But having said that, it’s an awful thing to lose a son. A parent should never have to bury a child. I had a daughter once but she only lived a few days and—”
“Mr. Avery, please,” insisted the sergeant, rubbing his temples as if he had a headache coming on. “No one has lost anyone yet.”
“Well, misplaced a son then, if you prefer. There’s a quote coming back to me. Oscar Wilde, I think. Do you know it?”
“If you could just remain silent, sir, while I talk to Cyril?”
Charles looked baffled, as if he couldn’t quite understand what the problem was. “But sure he’s sitting right there,” he said, pointing at me. “Ask him anything you like; I’m not stopping you.”
“Thank you,” said Sergeant Cunnane. “Now, Cyril, you’re not in any trouble. But I need you to be honest with me, all right?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, anxious to please. “But can I just ask you, do you think Julian is dead?”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “It’s early days and we haven’t even received details of where the kidnappers want the money to be sent. They’ll hold on to him for a bit yet. He’s their collateral, you see. There’s no reason for them to harm him.”
I exhaled in relief. The idea of Julian being murdered made me dizzy with terror; I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to survive such an outcome.
“Now, Cyril, tell me why you went into town this afternoon?”
“It was Julian’s idea,” I said. “I thought we were going in to look at the shops or maybe go to the pictures but really he’d arranged to meet Bridget and wanted me with him because she was bringing another girl to make up a foursome. I would have been happy to have gone to Stephen’s Green to feed the ducks.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” said Charles, rolling his eyes.
The sergeant ignored him as he wrote all this down. “And how did he know Miss Simpson?” he asked me.
“Who’s Miss Simpson?”
“Bridget.”
“Oh.”
“Where did they meet?”
“In the tearoom at Leinster House,” I said. “We went there on a school trip a couple of weeks ago.”
“And they hit it off, did they?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure how to answer this.
“Did this Bridget creature ever come to your school?” he asked. “Did she stay with Julian in your room at all?”
“She did not,” I said, blushing. “I didn’t even know that Julian had stayed in touch with her. They must have been writing to each other but he never said a word about it to me.”
“We’ll know about that soon enough,” said Sergeant Cunnane. “We have an officer over there now doing a search. He should be back any time now.”
I opened my eyes wide in panic and felt my stomach drop. “A search of what?” I asked.
“Of your room. In case there’s anything there that might help us find Julian.”
“Will you just be searching his side of the room?” I asked.
“No,” he said, frowning. “Sure we don’t know which side is his, do we? And things can get mixed up anyway. Sorry, Cyril, but we’ll be looking through your things too. You’ve nothing to hide, have you?”
I glanced around for a bin; there was a possibility that I might be sick.