‘The body is in the library,’ Colonel Osborne said. ‘Come this way.’

Detective Inspector Strafford was accustomed to cold houses. He had spent his earliest years in a great gaunt mansion much like this one, then he had been sent away to school to a place that was even bigger and greyer and colder. He often marvelled at the extremes of discomfort and misery that children were expected to endure without the slightest squeak of protest or complaint. Now, as he followed Osborne across the broad hallway – time-polished flagstones, a set of antlers on a plaque, dim portraits of Osborne ancestors lining the walls on either side – it seemed to him the air was even icier here than it was outside. In a cavernous stone grate three sods of damp turf arranged in a tripod smouldered sullenly, giving out no detectable warmth.

It had snowed continuously for two days, and this morning everything appeared to stand in hushed amazement before the spectacle of such expanses of unbroken whiteness on all sides. People said it was unheard of, that they had never known weather like it, that it was the worst winter in living memory. But they said that every year when it snowed, and also in years when it didn’t snow.

The library had the look of a place that no one had been in for a very long time, and today it wore a put-upon aspect, as though indignant that its solitude should be so suddenly and so rudely violated. The glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls stared before them coldly, and the books stood shoulder to shoulder in an attitude of mute resentment. The mullioned windows were set into deep granite embrasures, and snow-light glared through their numerous tiny leaded panes. Strafford had already cast a sceptical eye on the architecture of the place. Arts-and-Crafts fakery, he had thought straight off, with a mental sniff. He wasn’t a snob, not exactly, only he liked things to be left as they were, and not got up as what they could never hope to be.

But then, what about himself? – was he entirely authentic? He hadn’t missed the surprised glance with which Colonel Osborne, opening the front door, had scanned him from head to toe and back again. It was only a matter of time before he would be told, by Colonel Osborne or someone else in the house, that he didn’t look much like a policeman. He was used to it. Most people meant it as a compliment, and he tried to take it in that spirit, though it always made him feel like a confidence trickster whose trick has been exposed.

What people meant was that he didn’t look like an Irish policeman.

Detective Inspector Strafford, first name St John – ‘It’s pronounced Sinjun,’ he would wearily explain – was thirty-five and looked ten years younger. He was tall and thin – ‘gangly’ was the word – with a sharp, narrow face, eyes that in certain lights showed as green, and hair of no particular colour, a lock of which had a tendency to fall across his forehead like a limp, gleaming wing, and which he would push back with a characteristic stiff gesture involving all four fingers of his left hand. He wore a grey three-piece suit that, like all his clothes, appeared to be a size or more too big for him, a narrowly knotted wool tie, a fob watch on a chain – it had been his grandfather’s – a grey gabardine trench coat and a grey wool scarf. He had taken off a soft black fedora and now held it by the brim at his side. His shoes were soaked from melted snow – he didn’t seem to notice the puddles forming under him on the carpet.

There was not as much blood as there should have been, given the wounds that had been inflicted. When he looked more closely he saw that someone had mopped up most of it. The priest’s body had been tampered with too. He lay on his back, hands joined on his breast. His legs were aligned neatly side by side. All that was lacking was a set of rosary beads twined around his knuckles.

Say nothing for now, Strafford told himself. There would be time enough for the awkward questions later on.

On the floor above the priest’s head stood a tall brass candlestick. The candle in it had burned out completely and the wax had flowed all down the sides. It looked, bizarrely, like a frozen cascade of champagne.

‘Damnedest thing, eh?’ the Colonel said, touching it with the toe of his shoe. ‘Gave me the shivers, I can tell you. As if there’d been a Black Mass, or something.’

‘Umm.’

Strafford had never heard of the murder of a priest before, not in this country, or at least not since the days of the Civil War, which had ended while he was still a toddler. It would be a huge scandal, when the details got out, if they got out. He didn’t want to think about that just yet. 

‘Lawless, that was his name, you say?’

Colonel Osborne, frowning down at the dead man, nodded. ‘Father Tom Lawless, yes – or just Father Tom, which is what everyone called him. Very popular, in these parts. Quite the character.’

‘A friend of the family, then?’

‘Yes, a friend of the house. He often comes over – came over, I suppose I should say now – from his place up at Scallanstown. His horse is stabled here – I’m master of the Keelmore hounds, Father Tom never missed an outing. We were supposed to ride yesterday, but there was the snow. He called in anyway and stayed for dinner, and we gave him a bed for the night. I couldn’t have let him go out again in that weather.’ His eyes went back to the corpse. ‘Though looking at him now, and what’s become of the poor chap, I bitterly regret that I didn’t send him home, snow or no snow. Who would do such a terrible thing to him I can’t think.’ He gave a slight cough, and waggled a finger embarrassedly in the direction of the dead man’s crotch. ‘I fastened up his trousers as best I could, for decency’s sake.’ So much for the integrity of the crime scene, Strafford thought, with a silent sigh. ‘When you look you’ll see that they – well, they gelded the poor chap. Barbarians.’

‘“They”?’ Strafford enquired, raising his eyebrows.

‘They. He. I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing we used to see a lot of in the old days, when they were fighting for their so-called freedom and the countryside was thick with murdering ruffians of all sorts and hues. There must be a few of them still about, if this is anything to go by.’

‘So you think the killer, or killers, got in from outside?’ 

‘Well, for God’s sake, man, you don’t imagine anyone in the house would do a thing like this, do you?’

‘A burglar, then? Any signs of forced entry – smashed window, broken door lock?’

‘Can’t say, haven’t checked. Isn’t that your job, searching for clues and so on?’

Colonel Osborne looked to be in his early fifties, lean and leathery, with a nail-brush moustache and sharp, ice-blue eyes. He was of middle height, and would have been taller if he hadn’t been markedly bow-legged – the result, perhaps, Strafford thought sardonically, of all that riding to hounds – and he walked with a curious gait, at once rolling and rickety, like an orangutan that had something wrong with its knees. He wore highly polished brown brogues, cavalry twill trousers with a sharp crease, a tweed shooting jacket, checked shirt and a spotted bow tie in a subdued shade of blue. He smelled of soap and tobacco smoke and horses. He was balding on top, with a few strands of sandy hair heavily oiled and brushed fiercely away from the temples and meeting at the back of his skull in a sort of spiked ruffle, like the tip of the tail of an exotic bird.

He had seen action in the war as an officer with the Inniskilling Dragoons, did something noteworthy at Dunkirk and was awarded a medal for it.

Very much a type, was Colonel Osborne. A type that Strafford was thoroughly familiar with.

Odd, he thought, that a man should take the time to dress and groom himself so punctiliously while the body of a stabbed and castrated priest lay on the floor in his library. But of course the forms must be observed, whatever the circumstances – afternoon tea had been taken every day, often outdoors, during the siege of Khartoum. That was the code of the Colonel’s class, which was Strafford’s class, too.

‘Who found him?’

‘My wife.’

‘I see. Did she say if this is the way he was, lying like this, with his hands joined?’

‘No. In fact, I tidied him up a bit.’

‘I see.’

Bloody hell, he thought. Bloody hell.

‘But I didn’t join his hands – that must have been Mrs Duffy.’ He shrugged. ‘You know what they’re like,’ he added quietly, with a meaning look.

By ‘they’, Strafford knew, he meant Catholics, of course.

Now the Colonel produced a monogrammed silver cigarette case from...