Minogue knocked and inclined his head to the door. Naughton’s house was at the end of a terrace. Heavy curtains hung from the one window next to the door. The window wells were freshly painted with a thick cream gloss and the two upper windows had double-glazed aluminium frames. Minogue stepped back and looked at the upstairs window. Hoey was standing in the sunshine at the end of the terrace. The door opened abruptly and Minogue turned to face a tall man with a full head of white hair brushed back over a pink face. Two clear and piercing blue eyes stared into Minogue’s. A light scent of shaving soap and brilliantine came to the Inspector, followed by house smells of tea and a fry. Naughton had said something but Minogue hadn’t heard. He had been watching the harelip scar as Naughton had uttered the words.
“Hello there, now,” said Naughton again.
He was wide and big and his hands hung low alongside his thighs. There was something of the giant about him, Minogue thought, like those ex-RIC men he had known. The physical size of those precursors of the Gardai had been adduced to be one of the prime drivers of law enforcement until the guerilla warfare of the War of Independence had swept away any grudging respect accorded them.
“Good day to you now, Mr Naughton,” he began. “I’m Matt Minogue, a Guard…”
Naughton’s eyes were on Hoey now, who had sidled down to stand beside Minogue.
“…and this is my colleague, Seamus Hoey.”
Naughton folded his arms. Minogue looked at the bulk straining the jumper. A bit of a pot on him but by no means gone to seed. A bachelor, a retired Guard, who still wore a collar and tie under his jumper.
“Well, I haven’t met ye before,” said Naughton. He looked up and down the terrace. “Are yiz here on some kind of business?”
“We’re down from Ennis-”
“Are ye attached to Ennis station?”
“No, we’re not actually-”
“So where are yiz from then?”
Minogue paused and glanced at an old woman passing on the footpath behind them.
“Good morning, now, Mr Naughton,” she crowed.
“Isn’t it now,” said Naughton.
Minogue looked beyond Naughton into the house.
“Come in, I suppose,” said Naughton. “Come in.”
The front room was a musty parlour, spotlessly clean and unused. The Inspector sat on a hard-sprung sofa and looked around the room. There were photographs of men in Guard’s uniforms of thirty years ago, one of an old woman with the face of a mischievous child, bunched in a smile. The fireplace had been fitted with a gas burning unit complete with bogus glowing coals. A nest of tables squatted under the window. Between two cumbersome chairs stood a buffet with glass doors over a series of drawers.
“Ye’ll have something?” said Naughton.
He rubbed the back of his huge right hand with the thumb of his left. Minogue associated the gesture with big men who could never lose a teenage awkwardness about their size.
“Ah, no, you’re all right there, thanks,” said Minogue.
“Are yiz sure now? A smathan, even.”
The Inspector shook his head and stole a glance at Naughton’s face again as he made to sit down. If this was what recourse to alcohol in a big way did, Minogue wondered, then maybe there was something to be said for it. But no. Something about Naughton put the Inspector in mind of a bull elephant, a creature who might go suddenly, felled by a massive stroke, crashing to the ground.
“From Ennis, you say now,” said Naughton. He sat forward, elbows on his knees, a massive hand clasped around the knuckles of the other.
“Yes.”
Minogue tried to put on a friendly face, but he continued to be distracted by details. The soapy smell from a face meticulously shaved, the faint smell of shoe polish, the razor nick by Naughton’s ear, the outline of the braces that the retired Guard still attached to his trousers. A life of habit, a man who liked and needed routines.
“But yiz are not Ennis.”
“We work in Dublin.”
“God help yiz, so.”
Minogue tried again to smile.
“It’s gone desperate in Dublin, I believe,” said Naughton. “Not safe to walk the streets, they say.”
“I suppose,” said Minogue. “But sure troubles can come anywhere. The divil has his own guide, as they say.”
“Tis true for you. Tell me, are you a Sergeant?”
“I’m an Inspector, in actual fact. They kicked me upstairs to be rid of me.”
Naughton issued a sceptical, knowing wink.
“I came down on a visit to my relations this little while back,” Minogue said. “And I, er, ran into a man above in Ennis. He told me a few things about events back, now, a good number of years back…”
“Who?”
“Aloysious Crossan.”
Naughton scratched the back of his head.
“I knew him,” he muttered. “He’s a big name in the law. Is he still at it?”
Minogue nodded. “To great effect too, I believe.”
“Hah,” scoffed Naughton. “He was mighty sharp with his mouth as I recall. But he had the name of being good for them that needed it.”
He sniffed and gave Minogue a grin with no warmth in it.
“You know yourself,” he said.
Minogue raised his eyebrows.
“His clients,” said Naughton, his hands working over one another. “He hires himself out to scuts.”
“I’ve heard that said,” said Minogue.
“If and he was a woman, he’d be a prostitute,” Naughton added. He glanced down at his own hands. Like a boxer listening to a pep talk, Minogue thought, a horse of a man. “But sure you wouldn’t know these days, with the homos and what have you, would you? Anything goes, nowadays.”
The blue eyes which came up from the stilled hands had a glaze of satisfied amusement. Minogue’s eyes were drawn to the wiry white hairs, like pigs’ bristles standing out by Naughton’s collar.
“He is a Protestant, all right,” said Minogue. “But you probably knew that.”
“Prostitute, I said.”
Minogue feigned relief. “Oh. That’s not so bad. I thought you said Protestant.”
With no movement that Minogue could detect, the face had become blank and hard.
“What do yiz want?” he said.
Minogue thought about the house afire in his dream, himself weirdly aerial over the blaze, with the sea black under the stars and the porpoises racing out to the sea.
“How much did you have to drink the night of the fire?”
“What fire? What are you talking about?”
“Jane Clark. Jamesy Bourke. Dan Howard. You.”
“Fuck off. Inspector or no inspector, you’re nothing to me. Get out of here.”
“Or you’ll call the police?”
“Fuck off outa my house.”
“Where was she when you got to the house?”
Naughton’s hands reached for the armrests.
“Where was she?”
Naughton propelled himself up. Hoey also stood. The Inspector raised a hand toward Hoey.
“Take yourself up and outa my house this minute.”
“Phone. Go ahead,” said Minogue, and concentrated on the sunlit window.
He wondered if Naughton would take a swipe at him. He leaned slightly to his left, away from the giant. Naughton clumped by him and walked down the hall. Hoey cleared his throat and rattled his cigarette box in his pocket.
“Are you sure you want to go at him like this?”
“Head first, Shea,” Minogue whispered. “No other way at this stage. If he’s a drinker, got to shake him. And Eilo McInerny got it hard from Naughton too. Man’s a bully, Shea. We’re going after him.”
“We could get run out of the place and get nothing,” said Hoey. “Except maybe a thick ear.”
Minogue reconsidered his strategy for a moment. Shock treatment for a drinker might backfire. Who would Naughton phone? A minute passed. Hoey shrugged, took out his cigarettes and lit one. He made a half-hearted survey of the room for an ashtray. Minogue watched him all the while, listening for Naughton’s voice.
“You’re in the pink, anyway,” Minogue murmured. “Excepting for those lungs of yours.”
Hoey took the cigarette out of his mouth and eyed Minogue, the fag poised in his hand.
“It’s the excitement. Never a dull-”
Minogue knew immediately that it was glass, and he was first out the parlour door. The door to the back room was closed. He opened it and looked down to the tiny kitchen where Naughton was stooping. The rest of the room was taken up with a table, television and dresser. A red-faced Naughton stood up. The smell of whiskey reached Minogue and he looked down at the shattered bottle, the pool by Naughton’s feet.
“Get to hell out of this house,” said Naughton in a growl, “or I won’t be responsible for what happens to you.”
“Who will you be responsible to?”
“Fucking smart-arse. Get out to hell!”
“You can’t hide in a bottle, Guard,” said Minogue.
“Who the hell are you to be coming around here, without a by-your-leave? You come marching in here, without any notice-”
“What do you need notice of?”
“If you had’ve phoned or let a man know there was an inquiry…”
Hoey’s smoke stung Minogue’s eyes.
“You march in here with accusations… By God, I’m going to have you drummed out. You’ll be in court over this, so help me.” Naughton’s hands turned into fists.
“Easy does it, now,” murmured Hoey.
“Who are you, you pasty-faced iijit? No wonder you have two black eyes. I’ll have you thrown out of your job too, so I will.”
Minogue looked at the chairs tucked in under the table.
“Why don’t we just sit down like civilised human beings for a few minutes? And discuss the matter in a calm, gentlemanly manner.”
“Ye’re not in that category,” Naughton called out. “By Christ, I’m glad I never had to meet the likes of yiz on the force. We were above board and dacent in my time.”
He reached out suddenly and pointed at Minogue. Hoey stepped back.
“We didn’t take our orders from maggots like Alo Crossan. The shitehawk. Hah, look at ye! Hook, line and sinker, bejases! He’s got you codded. It’s sorry for you I should be.”
“You said in testimony that Jamesy Bourke was falling-down drunk when you got to the cottage. That the whole place was an inferno.”
“Do you know what a thatched roof is?” Naughton sneered.
“But you were there when the fire was put out. And you were the first policeman in the door.”
“What if I was?”
“Where did you find her?”
“What difference does it make to you where she was?” Naughton’s voice rose. “She was gone to glory by then.”
“You were drinking that night, weren’t you, like the way you did and the way you still do,” said Minogue.
Naughton pushed away from the sink with his backside and came at Minogue. Hoey had anticipated it, but Naughton took him in his rush toward the Inspector. The three fell across the table and Minogue felt Naughton’s boozy breath rush out over his face. Hoey wriggled to the side, extricated himself and rolled off the edge of the table. Naughton was trying to clamber up on the table fully. His hand found Minogue’s throat and squeezed. Minogue yelped and tried to raise his arm but Naughton pinned it with his own. Hoey shouted at Naughton and grabbed him by the shoulders. Naughton kicked at Hoey who groaned as he tottered away, falling over a chair. Minogue’s eyes began to bulge and the grip on his throat turned to a stabbing pain. Naughton was wheezing and muttering under his breath. Minogue tried with his arm again but all he could do was thump Naughton on the head. Dimly he heard Hoey scrambling to get up. Naughton’s feral eyes darted over to Hoey and Minogue took his chance. He chopped with his free hand down inside Naughton’s elbow. Before the giant could straighten his arm again, Minogue’s head shot up and butted him. Naughton reared back with a grunt and fell groaning from the table. Minogue elbowed up slowly, the crack still resonating in his head.
“Jesus,” he heard Hoey say. He watched his colleague pull himself up crookedly, holding his crotch. Minogue gulped in air and rubbed his throat.
“Are you all right?” he said to Hoey.
“He kicked me in the nuts!” Hoey wheezed. “Me. A Guard did that to me!”
“Retired Guard,” said Minogue, still trying to catch his breath. He looked down at Naughton who was holding his head and muttering. Hoey suddenly kicked at Naughton.
“Shea!”
Hoey glared back at the Inspector. “If and he gets up and tries that on me again, I’ll give him what-ho!” said Hoey. “A fuckin’ oul’ hooligan.”
“Get outa my house,” Naughton whispered hoarsely from below. The stench of whiskey nauseated Minogue now. He beckoned to Hoey.
“Come on,” he said.
“This is only the start, whatever your name is,” said Naughton sitting up. “Yiz don’t know the trouble yiz are in.”
Minogue inclined an arm and Naughton took it.
“Sit yourself down now, Guard,” said Minogue. “We’ve had our spat and handed out our clouts.”
“You’ve more coming to you,” snapped Naughton. “The fat’s in the fire on you now. And you the big knob down from Dublin with your gutty moves like that!”
“What do you call kicking a Guard in the balls?”
“I was attacked!” shouted Naughton, but then grimaced and held his head. “And then your man here pulls that low stunt like that. The Ringsend kiss, by Christ!”
“Trying to choke the life out of me isn’t a great way to tell me what happened to Jane Clark,” said Minogue. Naughton groaned again and closed his eyes with a pain.
“There’s nothing to tell, you gobshite. Ask the man who killed her.”
Hoey still looked angry. Minogue nodded to a chair. Hoey sat with a delicate motion.
“I’m only sorry I didn’t get the chance to do exactly that,” said Minogue.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Jamesy Bourke got killed the other night. That’s what it means.”
Naughton looked up in pained disbelief. Hoey was almost hovering over the seat. Wheezing, Naughton clawed his way up off his knees, righted a chair and sat into it. Minogue plugged in the kettle and stepped back over the glass on the floor.
“Go ’way. You’re trying to cod me. Jamesy Bourke?”
“He was shot dead the other night. Yes, he was,” Minogue replied. “A German who thought he was shooting an IRA man with a gun in his fist. We haven’t been driving all over the west of Ireland here for the sole purpose of trying to cod you. What about some tea or something and a proper civilised conversation?”
“Fuck the tea so and give me something proper,” said Naughton.
“So. Who called the station that night?”
The hulking man’s tone turned suddenly gentle. He rubbed slowly at his head and his expression changed into something Minogue would later recall as a smile.
“Have you been digging into this a long time?”
“Awhile.”
“And what did yiz find?”
That faint smile held fast at the corners of Naughton’s mouth. His hand came away from the red swelling over his eye and, as though it were independent of him, began to massage his neck. He looked out the small window to the roof of what might have been an outdoor privy. A battered-looking ginger cat walked languorously across the corrugated surface, its shadow black on the sunlit grey. Minogue looked at Naughton’s hand stroking the bristling neck. People paid a lot of money for haircuts like Naughton’s these days, he thought.
“Did yiz meet up with Dan Howard at all?” murmured Naughton. The cat stretched and turned its eyes away from the sun.
“Yes, I did,” replied Minogue.
“Our home-grown statesman,” said Naughton to the window.
“He doesn’t claim to be,” said the Inspector.
Naughton wheeled on his heels from the window.
“ ‘He doesn’t claim to be.’ What do you know? Dan Howard’s a fucking child!”
Minogue felt an instinctive anger. To be young and unstamped with adult knowing was for Naughton contemptible.
“Nothing to his da, by Jesus,” Naughton went on. “But sure look at the da now. He’s like a cabbage or something, lying in the bed. Fed with a tube, like he’s being watered. Hah. I hear that Sheila Howard visits him more than does Dan himself. What does that tell you?”
“Have you seen Tidy Howard since he had the stroke?”
Naughton fixed a look on Minogue. There was condescension in it, hostility too. The kettle began to sigh and give low cracking sounds as the element began to disperse and move the water within.
“Mind your own fucking business.”
“Who phoned the station that night?”
Naughton made a pitying smile.
“Dan Howard’s not a man at all. Oh, he can talk the best you ever heard, along with the rest of them. But, sure, what’s talk? He can smile and play the game, and I don’t doubt that he’ll get elected again.”
Naughton returned to rubbing his swollen eyebrow. Thwarted yet in his efforts to come to grips with this man, Minogue still sensed something to the side of Naughton’s contempt.
“Dan Howard doesn’t know what made him,” Naughton murmured. “That’s why he’ll never be the man his father was.” He looked sideways at Hoey before glaring at Minogue.
“I don’t know about you but this pal of yours here, I can tell. Soft, like the rest of ’em his age. Complaining about getting a tap in the bollocks. But you”-Naughton closed one eye and squinted at the Inspector-“one minute you’re all business and the next minute you’re asking for tea! Maybe you’re a fuckin’ head-case or a good one gone soft yourself. No balls, hah?”
To Minogue, Naughton seemed to be both deflated and made even more monstrous at the same time. Maybe he had had his morning gargle and by now the drink had set free the impulses and thoughts of a bachelor too long unshackled from the daily routines of being a Guard.
“You didn’t know Bridie Howard. How could you?” Naughton went on in a monotone. “She should have gone to the nuns the way she wanted to before she up and married a man like Tidy Howard. A dried-up bitch and I don’t care if she’s gone these twenty years. If she’d a been a woman and a wife proper, sure who knows how things would have turned out? She made a baby out of little Dan, so she did. I sometimes thought it was revenge she was after for having had to dirty herself, by God, to get up the pole in the first place. God help her, she’s dead.”
Naughton licked his lips and snorted.
“It’s not natural for a man to marry someone who spent every night with her skinny legs turned around one another like a hawthorn bush inside a night-dress made of feckin’ chain-mail. With her back to the wall and her rosary beads in her hands…”
It was Hoey who asked the question Minogue had framed in his own mind.
“How do you know all this?”
Naughton made no reply, but his eyes slipped out of focus.
Minogue recalled Eilo McInerny’s account of Tidy and his cronies gathering in the pub after closing-time for a few jars while she had to make sandwiches for them.
“You never married yourself,” he said to Naughton. Naughton’s eyelids almost closed.
“Keep your fucking nose out of my private life. What would you know about anything? I looked after me mother and five brothers and sisters, so I did. Living in this very house. I put a sister through nursing in London. And I liked my job, by God.”
“You’d have known everyone in town, then.”
“Damn right, I did. I knew the Bourkes better than they knew themselves, some a them.” Naughton paused and pointed a finger at his head.
“Wild out, the lot of them. Wasters and madmen. Only the mother was there, they’d be all in jail or in some mental hospital. You say Bourke’s after getting himself killed? Well, I could have told you something like that’d happen to him. I could have told you that twenty years ago.”
“So Bourke was completely to blame for the death of Jane Clark.”
Naughton flicked away Minogue’s words with a snap of his fingers. Hoey stood up.
“What the hell would you like to tell me next?” Naughton was almost shouting now. “ ‘Death by misadventure’? You fucking iijit! Or that Bourke should have been given five years for manslaughter? That it was an accident? Don’t you be starting with this mollycoddle stuff the social workers are full of, that Arthur Guinness did it, or the Pope of Rome.” He pointed at Minogue.
“Let me tell you something, Mr Know-It-All.” Tiny gobs of spittle flew out from Naughton’s lips into the sunlight.
“I’ll tell you what really killed that one. She did it herself! Yes, she did. She was a whore. That bitch. She had more rides than a bike. There was nothing she wouldn’t do, no poor iijit she wouldn’t drag into her web. The more I heard about her, the worse it got.”
“What sort of things do you mean?”
The kettle was almost boiled now. Naughton’s reply came in a savage whisper.
“She fucked half the parish.” His eyebrows went up and he gave a bark of laughter. “For free too.”
Naughton sank into the chair and shook his head at his own humour. He enjoyed it the more because neither Minogue nor Hoey was smiling. The Inspector studied Naughton’s changed face and guessed that he’d go for the drink again any minute now. He glanced down at the mess on the floor and then returned Hoey’s anxious stare for a moment.
“You seem to remember that night well, then,” said Minogue.
The amusement stayed in Naughton’s eyes but he said nothing. He looked out the window and let his face slide into a slack mask of indifference.
“You think you’re going to find out something worth finding out if you poke away at this long enough, don’t you?”
Minogue shrugged. “I’m trying to fill in gaps in what we know about that night.”
“I thought you knew everything, smart-arse. I was out in the car that night. I saw the fire a long ways off.”
“No one phoned you?”
Naughton looked away and rubbed at his forehead. Then he looked back at the Inspector, frowning as if he were looking at a child who had been warned off mischief but had promptly done it again.
“Did Crossan put you up to this? Christ, Crossan’s pot-boy, you are. Hah. Send a Guard to bait a Guard, is that it? How much is he paying you? You turn against your own, is it, and run with the likes of Crossan?”
Minogue didn’t answer. Hoey was still standing next to the window. Naughton laid his palms on his knees and slowly stood upright. Halfway up he grasped his forehead, making Hoey recoil in anticipation. The contempt slid off Naughton’s face.
“Jesus, it’s like the kick of a donkey I got,” he whispered. “You can have your tea. I’m due a smathan.”
He walked carefully to the dresser and opened it. From behind a dinner-plate he took out a half-bottle of clear liquid and unscrewed the top. He drank from the bottle, paused and took another mouthful.
“There, we’re right,” he whispered hoarsely. “A fella should always start the day with holy water.”
He probably had caches of drink all over his house, Minogue guessed. Poteen gave off little smell. He probably had a cheap and ready supply of it, and his breath wouldn’t reek of shop whiskey.
“Tell me about Dalcais,” said Minogue.
Naughton stood still and blinked once, slowly.
“You have shares in it. The Howards’ company. Have you forgotten, maybe?”
“Oh, I’m only now beginning to see what kind of a man you are.” Naughton spoke in a gentle voice. “You won’t be happy until…”
He closed his eyes and gave himself over to swallowing the poteen until he had drained the bottle. When he opened his eyes again, they were watery. His bellows of laughter rolled about the house. Suddenly they stopped and Naughton rubbed his wet eyes slowly before looking down into the empty bottle. He looked at the policemen with a melancholy amusement.
“So there, Lord Muck down from Dublin.”
The steady, watery eyes rested on some point on the wall behind Minogue and he sensed the words waiting to be said, the doubts warring in Naughton’s mind. Naughton rubbed at his chin and a faint smile flickered around his lips. A bashful expression crossed his face and lifted his eyebrows, taking years off the crusty face.
“There, what?” Minogue asked.
Naughton’s face darkened suddenly with anger.
“I know what you’re looking for,” he hissed. “You want to know if I did me job that night. Me sworn job as a Guard. I’ll tell you how I handled that night’s work, mister-like I always did me job, that’s how,” he snarled. “I did it well. I did right by God and man. And that’s more than many are doing these days.”
Naughton sniffed, covered one nostril with his thumb and then looked at the floor by his feet as though surveying a place to spit. Minogue made another foray.
“You saw a fire and you drove over?” said Minogue.
Naughton spoke vaguely as though he had moved on to other thoughts. “That’s it.”
“Where was Doyle, the Sergeant? When did he get to the house?”
Naughton leaned back against the edge of the countertop. A plume of steam came from the boiling kettle behind his shoulders.
“You saw Bourke at the house,” Minogue went on. Naughton’s eyes slipped out of focus.
“Like a monkey with fleas,” he murmured. “Leaping about, he was.”
“There was no one in the car with you? Out from town, I mean?”
Naughton didn’t answer but stared at the empty bottle.
“Did you know Eilo McInerny-she worked at Howard’s hotel?”
“A fat kind of a girl with big agricultural ankles,” Naughton muttered. “She’s another one.”
“Another what?”
Naughton ignored the question.
“She’s another what?” Minogue asked louder.
“Another fly in that one’s trap,” Naughton said. “Sleeping with her. Whatever they do with one another. Fucking animals. What am I saying, animals? Animals don’t do that.”
“Eilo McInerny doesn’t have fond memories of Portaree, the way she was treated,” said Minogue.
Naughton looked up at the Inspector. “How was she treated, so, if you know so much?”
“Drummed out,” replied Minogue. He heard the indignation rising in his own voice. “Kicked out of her job. No family to go home to. Turfed out.”
Naughton rose to his full height and let his arms down by his side. He left Minogue a look of easy contempt and turned to the kettle.
“She did better out of it than she deserved, let me tell you,” he said into the steam.
He flicked off the socket switch and reached for a teapot sitting next to a plastic bowl in which a head of cabbage was soaking. Minogue waited for Naughton to turn around. He considered this hulk’s life here amidst the stale world of boiled cabbage and whiskey, porridge and ironing, the stacks of newspapers in a home that reminded Minogue of a guard room. Naughton made the tea slowly, moving with deliberate care.
“Here, I’ll get the cups.”
Naughton spoke in a tone so soft that Minogue was startled. The Inspector had been meeting men like Naughton all his life: Kilmartin himself, the Mayo colossus minor to Naughton but filled with a like mix-the cynical exuberance at another’s folly, then the disarming, implacable loyalty to those he had become close to. Policemen trusted policemen and few others. That was part and parcel of the job, Minogue understood. But many Guards were immured in their distrust of people, and Minogue had moved beyond feeling sorry for them.
He watched Naughton, so light on his feet now, his movements dexterous and measured as he took down good china cups and saucers. Naughton balanced them expertly while he drew out milk from the fridge and then stepped daintily around the pieces of the broken bottle. For a moment Minogue believed that he caught a glimpse of what could have been a fussy parent, a man who would like to cook for his wife or children. Did Naughton drink to escape these things or to indulge them, he wondered.
“There, now,” said Naughton, “we’re right. Oh, spoons,” and he turned on his heel.
“Most of us are retired out by now, I daresay,” he went on. “It’s a lot different since I walked out the door here one fine morning, with my letter in my fist and my new suit in my case and the ma waving. Then in the train to Templemore.”
He paused, his hand in the drawer, and turned toward the two wary policemen with a boyish smile.
“God, but they were great days.” His eyes lost their sharp contact with Minogue’s then. “The most of ’em. But the people now, they hardly have a pick of respect for the law. It’s the sex thing and”-he looked sheepishly down at the shattered bottle-“of course, the human frailties, as my mother would say.”
He nodded his head conclusively and bit his lower lip. How much of a burden had that harelip been to him, Minogue wondered. Branded for life, made him hostile to any softness in himself? Shamed him with girls? Left him angry at a world whose imagined recoil from his features had closed him off from others?
“My father, and him dying above in St. Lukes in Dublin-God, I hate that bloody town, I wish we had’ve sold it to the British-my father told me that God always sends the devil to test everyone that’s born into the world. The devil can take any shape at all. It might even be somebody who sits next to you in school. Or a woman. Or something that happens in your work. To test you and remind you to be vigilant, be on your guard, like. Do you believe that?”
Lessened by long exposure now, the whiskey smell had given way to the smell of drawing tea. The sweet, strong aroma took Minogue’s thoughts for several seconds. Home. Morning, breakfast in bed. Talk, night. The blue sky framed in the window seemed to beckon him to hope. To test you, he heard Naughton’s words again. He saw Sheila Howard’s face but he felt no shame now. Hoey sat very still. Naughton let the small bundle of spoons free from his fingers onto the table.
“I do,” said Minogue. “I know what you mean.”
The spell of immobility in the room was broken now. Naughton’s words yet unreleased began to exert a stronger force on the Inspector. Hope came as a dull excitement in his stomach. Naughton knows something, he tried to tell Hoey with his eyes. Wait. Naughton grinned again at some recollection.
“It’s up to God in the end,” he whispered, and spread the spoons on the table. “But do you know what the hard thing is? I bet you don’t. I can nearly tell in a man’s face if he knows this…”
“What is it?”
“God doesn’t care. He doesn’t, you know. I found that out too late. If there is a God, well, He doesn’t care. And what sort of a God is that, then?”
He turned back to the open drawer and took out folded dishcloths. Minogue looked to the sky again. A diesel lorry droned by on the street, its exhaust echo resonating in the window. Naughton flipped open the bundle of cloths, sighed and lifted the revolver up, clasping and unclasping it as if to test its weight.
Minogue saw the object imperfectly in his side vision. He turned his head, already startled. Hoey pushed back in his chair and grasped the table-top. Naughton swallowed and cocked the hammer. The scratch and click of the metal banished any doubt from the policemen’s minds. Naughton tried to smile but Minogue saw that he couldn’t. The Inspector felt nothing. The world had stopped. Waiting. Somewhere Minogue heard a voice telling him that there was nothing he could do. Something in him struggled against this and tried to resurrect his reflexes, but his body didn’t move. Naughton’s whole attention was on the gun. His eyes were fixed on it as though it had appeared by sleight of hand, a conjuror practising, proud of his skill.
“Jesus Christ,” Minogue heard from far off. It was Hoey. Seamus Hoey’s arm came up, his fingers splayed open, a look of terror twisting his face.
“So do your duty, boys,” Naughton whispered. “And I’ll do mine.” He lifted the gun up and shoved the muzzle under his chin. His hand wavered but he redirected the gun back, shoved it under his jawbone tighter and worked his finger inside the guard. Then he yanked the trigger.