Extracts
The White Tower - a sequel to The Trojan Dog
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This extract is from Chapter One of The White Tower

Grey castle walls rose straight from sheer cliffs. I felt as though spires of saltwater were constantly washing over me, as they washed and worried the sharp rocks at the cliff's base. Intense cold entered my body through my fingernails and ankle joints, and I forgot I was standing in a room in Canberra, staring at a computer screen. Whoever had created the scene in front of me had drawn the walls and rocks as though they were almost one - straight grey smoothness of the walls, more variation of colour in the cliff face - inseparable and yet not quite. I felt that he - for I knew the artist's name - had intended both to rise from the ocean as though the whole of Irish history could be made contingent in the blinking of an eye.
Yet I stared for a long time at the dividing line, as though it was the picture's most important feature. Directly below it was the body of a young man, his blond hair a single spot of brightness on the screen, long enough to cover his face, and flowing over one dark shoulder. He lay on the spray-wet rocks with his left arm bent underneath his head. A single, hurried glance might have left the viewer with the impression that he was asleep, except for the impossible angle of his legs, spired rocks that gave no quarter.
He wore a black shirt that might have been a uniform. I imagined him standing on the castle wall, looking down, or up, in that last moment before he jumped, a person whose decision, or blank despair without decision, had got him that far, to stand above the ocean on the thick waist of an ancient building.
I turned to the woman standing next to me, realising that the grip of cold came from her as well.
I was aware that Moira Howley, the mother of the young man whose computer we were looking at, in fact wasn't looking at it, hadn't looked at it since she'd led me to her son's room and switched it on. While I'd been staring at the screen, she'd been standing with her head down, one hand resting on a black table.
‘Is this all Niall left? No note? No other message?’
‘No,’ Moira said. ‘Just this.’
‘What about a will?’
Moira did not so much shake her head as her whole body. She turned from the computer to stare out a window at a square of grass. A magpie hopped across it, dragging a tangled piece of string.
‘It's a nightmare,’ she said softly. Her eyes were swollen, yet suddenly full of pride.
‘But you kept it?’
‘I've stared at it till I was sure I was going mad. That's why I phoned you.’
‘What did the police say?’
‘Oh, the police,’ Moira said dismissively. ‘Niall wanted us to make the connection between this and the tower.’
‘But what did the police make of it?’
‘A suicide note,’ Moira said, finally looking at me. ‘That was their conclusion.’
‘Did you attend the hearing?’
‘I couldn’t. Bernard did.’
‘But you – ‘
‘The coroner said he was satisfied that Niall had taken his own life.’
I didn’t know why my questions were making Moira impatient. She looked top-heavy and yet frail, a house of cards that was about to topple over, a house a child had made and then forgotten, that the first breeze from an open door might send scattering. Part of it was winter clothes too thick for a September morning, a morning people were celebrating all over Canberra, throwing off jumpers, getting out of doors.
Her only son had killed himself on the night of the winter solstice, and she shivered in remembrance. Her brown woollen cardigan had wide lapels and sagging hip-length pockets. A long skirt, colour of mustard that had been in the fridge too long, was designed to be worn with boots, yet Moira had on thick white socks and a pair of dark blue clogs. When she'd brushed her hand against mine, it had felt like putting my hand in a freezer.
After my mother died, I'd wrapped myself in layer after layer, and trembled underneath them.
‘I want someone who can find out what my son was doing.’ Moira's breath strained as though she, and her words, moved forward in spasms. ‘Who were these people he sat up half the night playing that game with? What did they do to him?’
‘Didn’t the police do that?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Moira said, then smiled. ‘It's all right. Sandra. God knows, I've spent enough time working myself up to this. I have cousins called Mahoney. Did you - ’ She bit her lip without finishing her question, but I realised that my Irish surname was the reason she’d picked it from the phone book. ‘How about I make some tea and we'll drink it in the living room?’
I smiled back encouragingly. ‘While you're making it, I'll copy this.’
Moira left me alone in her son's room and I copied the castle scene, not quite sure why I was being so careful, since I intended asking her if I could take the computer home, so that my partner Ivan Semyonov, could go through the hard drive.
I closed the image file. All that remained was the single icon Niall had chosen to leave on the screen. He’d called it ‘the white tower’.

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