171066.fb2 A Carra ring - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 11

A Carra ring - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 11

CHAPTER 9

The voice was shrill, querulous. Seventies at least, Minogue guessed. Rambling probably, was Mrs. Garland.

“Who is it again?” she demanded. “A Guard?”

The piping, haughty tone was sweetened with what he believed must be a Cork, a dignified Cork, accent.

“Minogue, ma’am. I’m an inspector in the Guards.”

“Minogue? Clare, sure where else. You’re a Corofin Minogue now, are you?”

“Further west, ma’am. Where might your son be?”

“You must be some class of a fish then. Or a seal maybe.”

“Above Ballyvaughan, I — ”

“- There’s nothing above Ballyvaughan. Except for stones. Clouds maybe.”

“And well I know it, ma’am, from trying to coax — ”

“You’re not trying to cod me, now, are you?”

“Not a bit of it. Is your son expected home soon?”

“There was a Dan Minogue in Foreign Affairs. Are you one of his maybe?”

A headache had dulled his thinking, gutted most of his patience.

“We’re better known as the Murder Squad. But for now I’m merely — ”

“Murder? What murder? Is Sean all right?”

“Sorry, ma’am. Of course he is. It’s a different matter entirely.”

“Well God in heaven, man, you put the heart crossways in me!”

“I didn’t have the chance — ”

“All you had to do was open your mouth, sure.”

“I really need to talk to Sean, ma’am. Could I trouble you to direct me to him, as promptly now as I can ask, without giving offense.”

“He must be a cousin then,” she said. “Dan. Very direct but always civil. The nicest man you could meet. Oh, charm the birds off the trees. A real favorite with the lassies, so he was. This was during the Emergency of course.”

Minogue let out the deep breath he had been holding. He slouched in the chair and surveyed the squad room. His eyes settled on the newspaper article about Iseult.

“ DeValera, God be too good to him,” she went on, “he put a lot on Dan’s shoulders. Churchill summoned him to Downing Street in ’41. Our neutrality was an act of war to the likes of Churchill. Of course he hated anything Irish — hated it. Dev knew he’d picked the right man in Dan, of course: with the charm came the iron. Oh I can tell you it was not business as usual for Mr. Churchill that morning!”

“When would he be expected home?”

“ ‘Mr. Churchill,’ says Dan, with that lovely soft Clare accent, ‘Mr. Churchill. We feel for the plight of your people and the free peoples of Europe. We know what it is to lose our freedom, so we need ask no lessons in tyranny or freedom from you’ — ”

“Mrs. Garland, I have to ask you again if you would put me in touch with your son as soon as — ”

“‘Understand that we too have beaches, Mr. Prime Minister.’ And as if that wasn’t enough, he looks the old bulldog in the eye, without batting an eyelid: ‘Speaking for my own family, Mr. Prime Minister, I am from the west of Ireland. My uncle was shot dead in 1920 by Black and Tans. He was a farmer with fifteen acres. Now, with all the might and force you could muster to invade my country, you would still have to cross the Shannon to the west of Ireland. And there’ — ”

“Indeed, ma’am. I — ”

“Whist, will you! ‘And there,’ says Dan, ‘there you’d meet me and my family’ Never entered the minutes, needless to say Churchill almost threw a decanter at him, so he did. Oul toper, God forgive him. Hated Ireland, always. You’d be proud to claim relation with the likes of Dan Minogue! A huge funeral… ”

“I must commend you on your memory.”

“Hah,” she scoffed. “Patronizing a woman of fourscore years. I worked for Dev for thirty years. Now, that was long before the corner boys and counter jumpers insinuated themselves, you’ll understand. Long before the sloothering and shuttling off to Brussels and Strasbourg and the like, olagoning for grants and favors and handouts. Begging to be let sit with the fat boys over there, with their shiny suits and their sleek — ”

“Mrs Garland, please I don’t want to waste the resources of the Gardai sending out Guards to find him.”

Mrs. Garland said nothing. Minogue listened harder to the rustling sounds.

“Hello?”

“Don’t be interrupting me! I’m checking his appointments here.”

Minogue looked across at Murtagh. He was on hold on another call. He grinned wearily and shook his head. He heard Mrs. Garland whisper, pages turning.

“Now… Here we are. Yesterday was… Wait… What kind of people are we?”

“Pardon?”

“Set-aside, do you know about that?”

“I do, ma’am.”

“Do you now. We have farmers paid by the paper boys in Brussels not to grow anything. And a lot of them spray the fields to prove they can’t put in a crop there so’s they’ll get the grants. Poison, man — rank poison! Can you credit that? With everything we have, someone in Brussels tells Irish farmers to set aside land, a thing we fought and died for — even to poison it — and we do it? Sure land means nothing anymore. What have we turned into, answer me that. With the year of our lord two thousand bearing down on us… We might as well call ourselves a new name. Euroworms or something. Is that the way to start the next thousand years, is it?”

“Hardly.”

“Here we are now. Sean is at one of his regular things. They go to a restaurant below the back of Merrion Street there. Do you like Gilbert and Sullivan?”

“Which place, ma’am?”

“L’Avenue.”

“He’s at a function there is it?”

“He’s eating his dinner there. They go off to a pub afterward. Tuohy’s. Do you know Tuohy’s’ Do you know what they did to it?”

An ex-football player had lavished a million and something pounds to disassemble a country pub and reassemble it, board by board, in the middle of Dublin. Minogue gave her no chance to start in on it.

“Thank you, Mrs. Garland. I do. Here’s a number for me if I should miss him. If he phones, would you be kind and tell him that I’m leaving this minute to find him, ma’am?”

Minogue threw more water on his face. Still his eyeballs ached. He studied the droplets falling from his nose into the sink. The sneezing hadn’t yet proved a cold was here. Maybe it was working its way express and stealthily to his chest though.

Malone was waiting for him by the door. He had phoned L’Avenue, gotten to speak to Garland. Garland had told him he’d wait for them there. He nodded at Murtagh hunched over his desk.

“John’s gotten ahold of the sister. The Hartnett woman’s, like.”

Minogue took an extension and listened. Fiona Nolan was close to hysterical. Murtagh asked if she could give the key to a Guard and they’d let themselves in. Caught between panic and suspicion, Fiona Nolan said she’d have to discuss it with her hubbie.

Murtagh kicked off against the desk. He rolled no more than a foot.

“She’s freaking out, boss,” he whispered.

“Get her husband to bring the key then.”

“See what she — Yes. Mr. Nolan? Yes Garda John Murtagh, attached to the Technical Bureau.”

Nolan asked if there was an investigation in which his sister-in-law figured. Murtagh rolled his eyes, gave Minogue a look and pointed at the phone. “Can’t,” Minogue mouthed. He put down the extension. He heard Murtagh begin to explain to Nolan as he headed for the door.

Malone took Thomas Street. He drove directly through the Coombe to Kevin Street where they met with the last of rush hour. He said L’Avenue several times, trying out different inflections each time.

“It’s oo, Tommy. Not jew ”

“Lava-noo.”

“You’re close ”

“Doesn’t sound right. Sounds like Lava Noo. Who learned you your French anyhow?”

“Nobody. I picked it up.”

“Garland’s gay, I betcha.”

“Why?”

“He lives with his ma.”

“You were living at home until not too long ago.”

“That’s different. That was on account of the brother.”

Minogue answered Murtagh’s call as Malone drew up in front of the laneway. He eyed the painted sign for L’Avenue high up on the wall.

Nolan, the brother-in-law, was willing to let them into Aoife Hartnett’s place, but only in an hour.

“What,” said Minogue. “After he’s been through it?”

“I suppose,” said Murtagh.

“Tell him to smarten up, John. We’re not across from one another in court.”

“I leveled with him. He’s worried. He’ll come around quick enough.”

Malone turned into the laneway. There was an interior design place, a cake shop with a Russian-sounding name, an architect’s office that looked like some of Daithi’s Legos from twenty years gone by.

“There’s nowhere to park,” said Malone. “I’ll park back out by the bank.” L’Avenue was half full. There were skylights, vines that looked real, wrought iron dividers. Garland was sitting with two men and a woman. One of the men looked familiar. He had the guarded expression of someone who’s well known. Minogue couldn’t place him.

“I’ll come quietly,” Garland said.

Minogue managed a brief smile in return. The size of the head on this fella, he thought. And why did he remind him of a pigeon? The giant’s head, the ruddy face over swelling wattles, and a spotted bow tie stole Minogue’s attention for several moments. On the end of his short arms were fingers like sausages. Minogue made an effort to keep his eyes on Garland’s face.

The others at the table returned the inspector’s nod. The woman smiled. Garland grasped his jacket. He eyed the inspector.

“God, your timing is perfect. Inspector?”

“Matt.”

“A close call entirely. — Colm here was about to extort more wine from us.”

Garland must have told them there’d be a Guard coming to call. Glamorous, no doubt, a whiff of danger, something to tell their cronies about.

“Oh yes,” Garland went on. “He was getting ready to explain the subtexts in A Rebel Hand.”

That’s who the Colm was’ Colm Tierney, newspaper columnist, prognosticator. Minogue’s nose began to tickle. He searched his coat pocket for hankies but he couldn’t find any.

He knew the surge of irritation wasn’t just from having a cold coming on. There was something about these people here that annoyed him. Crank he was, and prejudiced. He knew it, and he felt badly about it, but he knew that wouldn’t alter much of his impressions later.

“Colm’s the man, I don’t know if you’re aware of it now… ”

Garland waited for Minogue to blow his nose.

“Well Colm broke the news that Ireland had disappeared several years ago. ‘The man who lost Ireland,’ we call him ”

Tierney’s lips pursed. The smile, or whatever it was supposed to become, never made it He looked down instead at the glass he was turning on the cloth.

“I keep on finding it,” said Garland. “But he doesn’t believe me! He’s our resident postmodernist — here, did anyone hear the one where some scientist crossed a Mafia boss with a postmodernist?”

Malone had entered the restaurant. He spotted Minogue and made his way over. Minogue finished blowing his nose and glanced at Garland. He’d caught a bit of the punch line, something about an offer you couldn’t understand.

“Can we chat here at one of the empty tables?”

A waitress followed the three. Minogue asked if the coffee was fresh. He gave Garland the once-over again.

“It’s like I was saying to you on the phone, Dr. Garland,” he began.

“Sean. Please.”

“Sean. We’re trying to locate Ms.. Hartnett. We need her help in our inquires.”

Garland looked from Minogue to Malone and back.

“She’s gone to Portugal. That’s what I know at the moment.”

“Did she tell you anything about the hows and wheres of her trip?”

“Well, in a word, no. She has oodles of overtime built up, so — well, she did mention to me that she’d found a seat-sale thing…”

“Did she give a name, a destination?”

Garland’s frown changed his face completely.

“No,” he said after several moments’ thought. “She’d be just notifying me as a courtesy now, not asking me. We’re civil servants and all, but it’s more like a, well, a crowd of academics really. Aoife’d decide on leave and such, like.”

“Traveling on her own?” Minogue tried.

“Well now. I really don’t know.”

“‘I’m going to Portugal’ or ‘We’re going to Portugal’?”

Garland scratched under his chm.

“No, no,” he said slowly. “I’m afraid not. No… Now, is this connected with this American that you were looking for, the man who was found the other day?”

Minogue nodded. The coffee arrived in a small cup. He glanced up at the waitress. Was there something else, she asked. A bigger cup, a lot less jazz on the speakers, windows. A pint; at home with a book. He smiled and shook his head.

“Now I’m worried,” said Garland. “What can I do here, what can we do?”

“Sorry, Mr. Garland. Sean. We’ve been in touch with others about Ms. Hartnett’s whereabouts. She has or had a sometimes boyfriend, and a sister here in Dublin. The sister thought she was going with a gang from work, a girls’ week type of thing. That’s what she told her. So here we are. Do you and she work together on a daily basis, now?”

Garland’s frown deepened.

“No, not every day at all,” he said. “But we’d be bumping into one another pretty well every day. Aoife headed up project teams with the OPW. We have regular meetings and consultations. Now, it’s very informal too, of course.”

“The Office of Public Works, is it?”

“Yes, sorry. We work very closely with their Historic Properties section there. That’s their National Monuments Department.”

“The last time being…?”

“Thursday, I think — yes, Thursday. I thought back after you phoned. I left the office at lunchtime. She was going off to lunch as well. Aoife had been meeting with people to do with an interpretive center.”

He glanced down at Minogue’s notebook.

“After one,” he added. “I remember. ‘How”d it go,’ I asked her ‘Great,’ she said.”

“She left alone?”

“So far as I know yes. I was talking to someone. Des McNally, yes. Out in the hall by the stairs, and she went by.”

Minogue wrote two ls for McNally.

“We do be flexible in this environment,” said Garland. “Everyone works hard. There’d be stress at certain times, of course, like any other…”

He returned Minogue’s skeptical gaze. Then he gave a short laugh.

“Stress you’re thinking — in a museum? Not like your work now, but…”

The missed sleep, the late-night calls, Minogue thought. The hunkering over a corpse, for hours sometimes, the ever new bafflement and disgust, the moment of truth for families and lovers.

“Ms.. Hartnett’s in a high-pressure job, do you mean?”

“Well no, not exactly. She’s an assistant curator. She has responsibilities for several key parts of heritage. There’s an awful lot going on these days.”

Minogue leaned in over his cup. A couple was steered to the adjacent table.

“Tell me what that means in her case, will you?”

Garland put on a puzzled expression

“I’m not sure now that this is where we should be going, now, er, Matt.”

Minogue let the pause linger. He knew Malone would be giving Garland the look. That quiet barrage of indirect scrutiny, the restrained irritation, the aggressive indifference of a seasoned Garda to the fate of anyone who tried to bollock him usually had the desired effect. He lifted his cup and looked around the restaurant. Not bad at all, at all, the coffee. He watched Colm Tierney finish a glass of wine. Ireland’s disappeared, he thought. Had it now.

“What I mean,” Garland said then, “is that of course I’ll be very glad to help out in any way I can.”

“I’m much obliged, Sean,” he managed. Garland sighed.

“I’m not comfortable discussing a colleague’s professional life,” he said.

Minogue watched Malone poke gently at the edge of his eyelid.

“Maybe I’ve given you the wrong impression here now, meeting here with a bit of socializing going on. I forget sometimes, you know. We tend to, well you can tell, try and stay informal. To someone outside looking in, it might look different.”

Minogue nodded. He looked into his cup.

“Sorry now,” Garland went on. He gathered himself in his seat. Fifteen stone, Minogue was thinking. Was that a hundred kilos?

“But I have to step back into my job and be duly cautious.”

“Don’t be sorry at all,” said Minogue. “Enough said now. At this moment there’s a Guard on his way to Ms. Hartnett’s place to see if we can locate her, now.”

Garland sat back.

“My God,” he whispered. “You mean we have reason to be worried, do we?”

“Well now. This much I can tell you, Sean. We can’t find Ms.. Hartnett on any flight out of Dublin. I’d be most obliged if you were to keep this to yourself, Sean. We need to contact others, her family. It may all turn out to be a misunderstanding. A series of misunderstandings.”

“But Aoife is not under investigation by the Guards, is she?”

“Not a bit of it,” Minogue replied. “Now, you were good enough to phone us about a visit from this man who is the current focus of our investigation. Did you know anything about what he and Ms.. Hartnett discussed with this American?”

Garland adjusted his dickey bow again.

“Well I don’t really,” he said. “It was only after me seeing the picture in the papers that I remembered him. I wonder if Aoife herself knows who he is, sorry, who he was. You see, we get a lot of people and groups and requests coming through the department. An awful lot.”

Garland leaned in over the table.

“Culture and history and heritage, they’re all very hot issues now. We’re answerable for a lot more than digging up an oul pot and putting it in a glass case for a busload of schoolchildren to gawk at now. The way histories are handled and researched and presented is all very contentious.”

“There’s more than one history now?”

Garland gave Minogue the eye in return.

“Oh there’s a right can of worms there. There are any number of people and interest groups and the like — stakeholders, they call them — in heritage now. That’s a side of the job that takes a lot of time and training. It takes delicate enough management by times, I can tell you. I have three staff with MBAS, even.”

“So you’re busy, then,” said Minogue. “Inquires, visitors, conferences?”

“All that and more, to be sure.”

“Would Ms.. Hartnett have discussed the visit with anyone else at the office? The American, I mean. Mr. Shaughnessy. She kept notes maybe?”

Garland looked up at a recessed light for several moments.

“To tell you the God’s honest truth, I’ve no idea. Aoife’s very organized. She’d probably have a note if there was something to it. She’d certainly have come to me if there were prospects from this thing, this meeting. But she’s a fierce busy person. She’s project leader on a big site plan that’s moving ahead fast.”

“Which, now?”

“The Carra Fields, out in Mayo.”

Minogue knew that Malone had heard too.

“There was an opening of an exhibition about that recently?”

“There was indeed,” said Garland. “With all the plans and models for the interpretive center laid out. Marvelous. It rewrites a lot of history, so it does.”

Minogue met Malone’s eyes for a moment.

“I’ve a colleague who’d like to persuade me that Mayo people are civilized.”

“Well now he’s got you,” said Garland. “Stone Age people — late enough on in the Stone Age, to be sure. There were thousands of them — a huge cleared enclosure, with grazing and crops. And a big surprise was that there were no fortifications or the like. All of them living a grand existence without the rowing and beating one another we have later. Can you imagine?”

“Very civilized,” said Minogue. “For Mayo. A Garden of Eden.”

“Oh, I could go on and on,” said Garland “It’s excited a lot of interest in Europe. It’s the most important site since, well, we know what happened at Mullaghmore.”

“To be sure,” said Minogue

An interpretive center in the Burren area of his home county had been left half-completed after protests about it had overruled the local peoples’ support for it.

“Aoife can give you the ins and outs of all the things that need to be juggled and managed for this one. God knows! It’s not just money at all, at all. She worked on Mullaghmore too. I remember she saw it coming too, the showdown over that. Anyway, the Fields will be a showpiece entirely. There’ll be no slip-ups with this one. It was heritage funds from Europe that made the big difference.”

“She’s putting the finishing touches to this whole project, you say?”

“Oh yes,” said Garland. “We have the funds, the plans approved. We’re into tenders already and the nitty-gritty. There’s great support all over. Sure the planning and approval process was nearly a love-in. A lot of that was due to Aoife She has that combination: a real expert in her field, and she knows how to manage outside of the fieldwork. Ideal.”

Minogue searched Garland’s face for any irony.

“We’re ahead of the pack here in Ireland,” he went on. “People are coming to Ireland for a lot more than the forty shades of green now. They want to see nature yes, but they want to see a place and a people full of history too, people on the periphery of the continent. I’m not sure that we know what we’re sitting on here.”

Minogue watched a customer looking down the wine menu. These Carra Fields was nearly as far into the west as you could get without falling off into the sea.

“Yes indeed,” Garland added. “Like the economists say, we have good fundamentals, in the line of history. Tremendous historical resources.”

“Our time has come, has it,” Minogue said.

“It has indeed,” said Garland. “And not a moment too soon.”

“How do you mean?”

Garland rubbed at his nose. He looked at Minogue’s writing in his notebook.

“Well, it’s an open secret the way things had been going,” he murmured “So much had been lost.”

“Lost,” Minogue said.

“Yes. Chalices from monastic sites were dug up and melted down hundreds of years ago. Finds that were never reported. Standing stones used to hold up fences. The Beara Chalice, do you remember that?”

“From the field down near Ballyfernter there a few years ago?”

“That’s the one,” Garland said “We had to give thirty thousand pounds to the finder for goodwill. Honest man he was, that turned it in, and him after turning the field one October and there was the chalice lying there with a big dent in it from the harrow… But sure what matter. A bog will push stuff up and you can never tell when or where. The thirty thousand was to tell people they’d be well paid to turn in things rather than be conniving or just breaking things up and selling them. And nowadays any fella in off the street can buy any number of electronic gadgets.”

“Like what?” from Malone.

“Metal detectors — curse of God on them. Well I remember the meetings we used to have back in the early ’70s, when we got the first of the satellite images and we had a bit of money to do the aerial surveys. Oh, you’d laugh — or cry, maybe.”

Garland looked over his shoulder at the group he had left.

“It was Hobson’s choice there,” he said. “We had to decide back then if we should even be making public the digs and the finds until after we had the sites set up and secured.”

Minogue had a second after the tickle before the sneeze erupted. When he finished blowing his nose he looked up to find Garland staring at him.

“Tell you what I can do,” Garland said. The fingers, so short that the inspector couldn’t stop staring at them, were tugging, poking under Garland’s chin. “Come around to the office with me. I’ll see if there’s anything lying around there that’d give us any help.”