Which of you, er, puked, lads?”
The Sergeant was a slight man named Ward who wore an expensive English raincoat and a paisley tie. Minogue had been thinking of those few seconds after Naughton had dropped to the floor. The shock waves of the report in the air, the sound itself reverberating in the room and then, long after that, echoing in Minogue’s thoughts. The puff of smoke dissipated slowly. It reached Minogue’s nostrils and stung while the shouts and the gunshot continued to roar in his ears. Hoey groaned softly and held his face before drawing his hands down his cheeks. Spots of blood had been slapped on the ceiling and upper part of the wall. Several of the spots had begun to drip but then stopped, several inches down the wall. Minogue looked up again at the black spot, darker than the others, where the bullet had gone after it had exited Naughton’s head.
“Was it yourself, em, Matt?”
Minogue shook his head and looked around the parlour. He didn’t give much thought as to why Ward asked. Was it to appear exacting and professional or to taunt him while he had the chance? An ambulance blocked the window onto the street. Occasionally a head peeped around the window frame, its owner squeezing into the space left by the ambulance on the footpath. Several times Minogue heard a man’s voice telling someone to keep moving.
When the echo of the gunshot had died away, Minogue thought he had heard a sigh escape Naughton, but it was not so. For several moments the blood seemed to be the only thing that had any life there. Minogue remembered standing up weakly, dizzy even, looking for a path to the phone which would keep him out of the growing pool that spread out on the floor beneath Naughton, advancing in its own time out and down, beyond his twisted legs toward the table. Hoey said something and then began vomiting, the stream hitting the floor with force, but he stayed on his feet as he backed away. Minogue, still too bewildered to be shocked, had the sense that something had come into the room and that it was still there, a force or presence that suggested to him that it was perusing the situation, lingering even, to see if there was more it should do or effect. How the hell had Naughton come by a gun?
Hoey had trouble with his matches. His lips clenched around the cigarette were a pastel purple slash on a parchment-coloured face. Ward turned his attention to Minogue again.
“Are you sure you can… Now, I’m not suggesting that you’re not up to it, or that you can’t, no, no…”
Ward continued this unsolicited argument with himself, and he touched the bridge of his nose as if to demur.
“After all, ye’re the ones with the expertise and all-”
“I can do it,” Minogue said. “Shea can too, I imagine. Right?”
“What?” said Hoey blankly, his attention suddenly stolen by the match he had at last managed to light.
“Manage,” said Minogue. “Carry on, like.”
“Off to see her nibs?” Hoey asked. “Eilo…?”
“Well,” said Ward, “I have to tell ye now-and don’t get me wrong- but my advice is, well, leave things alone for the time being. Can’t ye get back to your business soon enough?”
Minogue looked at Hoey. “It might be better if we were to get to her before she gets news of this here, em…”
“Incident,” said Ward.
“If we stop to think about things at all, we might never get going again,” he said. “That’s about the size of it.”
“I know what you’re saying, but ye’re here as, well, not as investigating officers, more like…well…”
Minogue saw Hoey shiver once and lick his lower lip with a raspy, dry tongue.
“We’ll stay with it, I’m thinking.”
Ward shrugged and left.
“All right, Shea?” Minogue whispered.
Hoey looked up bleakly, ready to refuse. Exasperation and weariness took over his face and he closed his eyes. He pursed his lips and looked out the parlour window as the ambulance drove off the curb. Minogue could almost hear his fretting thoughts. Hoey stood and walked out the door, banging his shoulder as he crossed the threshold. Ward stood by the hall door writing in his notebook. Minogue gave him a card.
“I gave one to the first Guard. Long nose, tall…”
“Dempsey.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you later.” Ward started to say something and Minogue stopped, ready for the warning or anger he had been expecting. Did you drive an old man to this?
“There’s no way in the world we thought he was going to do it,” Minogue declared.
“And you don’t know why he…? You really don’t know?”
Minogue shook his head.
“Maybe I should have picked up on the way he was talking after the row.”
Ward frowned.
“I was too busy trying to figure out what he was saying. He had drink on him. I hadn’t a clue in the wide world he’d come up with a gun, I can tell you.”
Ward’s deep breath suggested to Minogue a conscious effort to keep his temper in check.
“Okay, okay. Just…”
“I will,” said Minogue.
Hoey was already sitting in the passenger seat. A faint smell of vomit clung to his clothes. He didn’t look Minogue in the eye.
“We didn’t do it, Shea,” Minogue repeated. “Do you hear me? He did it. He wasn’t in control of himself, for that matter.”
Hoey said nothing.
“Like it or not, it means something to us. You know what he said. We need to follow up on it. What he told us, like.”
“So what’s the plan now?” Hoey’s voice was sharp. “Where can we go to do more damage?”
“ ‘She did better out of it than she deserved.’ Do you remember him saying that?”
Hoey looked at his watch and rolled down the window. He blew smoke out and let his arm dangle over the door.
“She kept something to herself that she could have-should have- told us-”
“Why the hell should Eilo McInerny tell us anything?” Hoey snapped. “What good would it do her? Screw up her life again?”
Minogue knew enough to say nothing.
“I mean to say,” Hoey’s voice rose and he flicked the cigarette long after any ash had fallen. “Who in their right mind would talk to us? All we bring is-”
“We didn’t kill him, Shea. You’ve got to understand that-”
“All for what? Christ Almighty, we’re the kiss of death around here.”
“What Naughton said tells me that we really don’t know what happened that night. Naughton did. Or at least he knew something, and what he knew was important enough-to him at least-that he wasn’t going to tell us.”
Hoey drew on his cigarette.
“How can we walk away from it?” Minogue asked.
Hoey’s eye was smarting from the smoke when he looked at his tormentor. Again he looked at his watch, but Minogue knew it was a gesture. Tralee would take an hour and a half.
“Take the back, then,” Minogue said.
Hoey slammed the passenger door hard. Minogue strode in the door of the Central Hotel. His heart began to beat faster. He dodged a somnolent lounge-boy who tacked across his path.
The receptionist’s perfume met Minogue ten feet ahead of her desk.
“Oh, hello,” she smiled, and put down the telephone. “You’re back. Would you be-”
Minogue flattened his hands on the counter and leaned in over it.
“Eilo McInerny. Where is she?”
The receptionist’s smile faded, rallied and faded even faster when she met Minogue’s eyes. She screwed on the lid of the nail polish.
“Well, now, let me think.”
“Is she working now?”
“Well, if she’s in…this is the afternoon…she’d be somewhere near the dining-room, probably, helping set it up for-”
Minogue strode to the french doors and opened them. A teenaged girl with short dyed hair stopped setting a table and looked over at him. He didn’t stop to close the door but said Eilo McInerny’s name to the waitress. The girl stepped back and nodded toward a swing door behind a counter at the back of the dining-room. He kept moving and pushed open the door. In the kitchen now, he saw a white tunic move between a counter-top and hanging pots that obscured the face.
“Is Eilo McInerny here?” he said, rounding the counter.
Under the lopsided chef’s hat, which reminded Minogue of a wayward cartoon rabbit, was a watery-eyed man in his forties. The chef’s eyes darted toward a stained, stainless-steel cabinet next to a collection of buckets. He stepped out into Minogue’s path.
“Who’s asking?”
“A Guard, that’s who. Step aside, mister.”
He heard a movement next to the buckets, and he skipped around the cabinet. Eilo McInerny was on her feet, her magazine on the floor. She stepped on her cigarette and brushed at her skirt. For a few seconds her eyes continued to betray her fright. Minogue spotted the tumbler, half-hidden by the door of the cabinet which had been held open to hide a chair.
“You again. I never expected to see you back.”
Minogue came to a sharp stop and stared hard at her.
“Matter of fact, I told you and what’s the other one, the pasty-faced silent type with the black eyes, get lost and leave me alone.”
Minogue looked over his shoulder at the chef and then back at Eilo McInerny.
“I was talking to someone that used to know you. Back in Portaree. In the old days.”
“Fuck off with yourself,” she said.
“I want to pass on to you what he told us,” Minogue continued.
She threw her head back but she couldn’t shake free of what her darting eyes told the Inspector.
“Go to hell. I don’t have to do anything.” Drinking, Minogue decided, but that wouldn’t stop him.
“We can have this out in front of your fella here, Mr Cordon Bleu, or-”
“He’s not my fella.”
“Or we can call for a squad car and do the job right.”
“You’re talking shite,” she scoffed. “Take it away with you.”
“Naughton. Garda Tom Naughton. You remember him, don’t you?”
Eilo McInerny shifted on her feet and folded her arms. Her eyes narrowed.
“Let’s talk somewhere,” said Minogue.
“There’s a crowd coming in from an office for a retirement do.”
Minogue returned the chef’s gaze.
“Come on, Eilo, before I have to have you hauled out of here.”
She shook her head once and made for a door by a set of sinks.
“I’ll be back in good time, Tom,” she said.
“No hurry,” said the chef. His limp, glistening eyes followed Minogue. Hoey opened the door as she put out her hand.
“Jesus,” she started, and stepped back on Minogue’s toe. “Where the hell did you come out of? You look wicked.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hoey muttered. They followed him to a door that led into an alley.
“Any fags?” she asked. “I left mine back in the kitchen.”
Minogue opened the passenger door of the Fiat first, turned the ignition. Hoey extended his packet and she plucked one before she sat in the car. She coughed with the first drag of the Major and her shudders and gasps shook the car. Minogue adjusted the heater.
“Christ,” she wheezed. “No wonder you’re so skinny. Coffin nails.”
She looked contemptuously at her cigarette and took another drag on it. Minogue leaned against his door and turned to her.
“You sold us a pup the last time, Eilo. Now I want to hear the bits you left out. No messing either.”
“What the hell can I tell you except what I done already?”
“Smarten yourself up, Eilo. I’m not codding.” Minogue waved away the smoke billowing from her cigarette. He saw the look of worry pass across her face before she recovered the pout. She looked out the window.
“You’re not codding,” she murmured.
“Tom Naughton said you did better out of Portaree than you deserved. What did he mean?”
“Ask him, why don’t you?” she muttered.
Hoey cleared his throat before he spoke. “Tom Naughton blew his own brains out not four hours ago. Right in the middle of talking to us.”
She looked away from the window to Hoey and blinked.
“So we’re not in the humour of playing games here now,” said Minogue. “You’ll appreciate.”
His words seemed to have no effect on her. She stared right through Hoey.
“Look, Eilo, this is what he told me. I’m not going to hold anything back. You have to know we’re not trying to trap you into anything or play off what you say against anything else.”
She let the smoke out of the corners of her lips, like white paint poured into a slow eddy of water.
“You knew Naughton, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I knew him, all right.”
She had spoken in a voice so soft that, for a moment, Minogue wondered if she were the same woman he had confronted not five minutes ago. He knew that she believed them now because her eyes shone with hatred and joy.
“Everything comes to them that wait,” she murmured.
“What do you mean?”
She ignored Hoey’s question. “I always heard that and I believed it, too. I prayed for that to happen a thousand times. Everything comes around again.”
She let out a mouthful of smoke but, like a waterfall reversed, she snorted it back into her nose. Then she blew out the smoke. The ferocity slid away off her eyes and her gaze dropped to the dashboard.
“So Naughton did for himself, did he,” she muttered. “Well, by Jesus, there’s a cure for everything.”
“You got something out of your time in Portaree,” said Minogue.
“You fucking iijit!” she lashed out suddenly. “I got heartache and misery!”
“And what did Naughton have to do with that?”
“He was like the rest of them, only worse. He was the Guard. He should have been on my side.”
“In what?” Hoey asked.
“He knew I was telling the truth. With that dirty smirk on his face.”
“He knew what?”
“He knew what they were like, Tidy Howard and the rest of them. Oul’ goats like him. Hah. Tidy towns and clean streets. There’s a joke like you never heard before, mister. They all sat and talked with one another too, I can tell you. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Tidy and Doyle and Naughton, sitting in the parlour after they had cleared the shop. ‘Eilo! Make up a bit of something! Eilo! Run up a sandwich for the Guards here now!’ One o’clock in the morning sometimes, can you credit that? Sure Howard had them in his pocket-”
“Wait a minute,” said Minogue. “What do-”
“Ah, you’re not that much of a thick, are you? The Guards’d come by the odd night to make sure we weren’t serving drink after hours. They’d make a big fuss about clearing the pub and the rest of it. Then they’d go behind the counter and start up gargling themselves. Tidy knew what nights they’d be in, so for every one night they’d show up, there’d be weeks and weeks of him pouring drinks up to twelve o’clock.”
“That’s the size of it then?”
“Do you think he’d tell me what games he was playing, is it?” she shot back at Minogue. She looked away and her glare softened.
“‘Eilo! Run up a bit of something!’ Hah. And Naughton laughing all the while. He had dirty eyes.” She darted a look back at Minogue then.
“I asked a nurse I met in London once about strokes, after I heard about Tidy collapsing. She told me that the mind can be working fine and well, but that the body could be paralysed. Just think, that oul’ bollicks trapped inside his own body. The price of him, I say.”
As though ashamed of her feelings, she looked down at her hands. Hoey was about to say something, but Minogue flicked his head at him. They waited.
“When I got to the hotel first, there’s Tidy telling me he’d look after me like a father. What kind of a father would do that though? But what did I know? All I knew was that I could lose me job and he could make up stories about me. I’d never get a reference off him. That’s what Naughton said. The bastard.”
“What happened?” Hoey asked.
She looked up under her eyebrows and Minogue believed she was about to launch herself at one or both of them. Her words issued out in a purr.
“None a your fucking business, you whey-faced iijit.”
“You have your own life now, Eilo,” Minogue argued. “You won. So help us out and don’t be throwing things at us.”
“I won?” she almost laughed. The contempt froze on her face but her eyes ran up and down Minogue, the disbelief plain. He noticed for the first time that she had bags under her eyes-how had he missed that before?
A teenager with the back of his head shaved and a long piece flowing down from the crown freewheeled by, no hands, on a bike painted fluorescent pink. Minogue looked at Hoey. The silvery film of fatigue and suspicion was clear on his colleague’s eyes. Blotches of colour by Hoey’s nostrils gave him the look of a child in from cold weather.
“Tidy Howard took me… had me,” she said.
“He…?”
“Yes, he did,” she whispered. “He took me and he dragged me and he pulled at me-and he choked me. Then he was on top of me. I couldn’t move. I wasn’t always this, what’ll I say…”
“Comfortable?” Minogue tried.
“Jesus,” she almost smiled. “You’re the sweet-tongued bastard. Anyway. A big heavy pig of a man and his false teeth coming loose-I could feel them pressed onto my teeth, I remember. My lips were bleeding. Pushing on me. I thought I’d faint. I couldn’t breathe. I stopped fighting ’cause I thought I wouldn’t make it out from under him. That’s the truth.” She puffed out a ball of smoke and blinked.
“And when you tried to…?”
“They were in cahoots. Drinking ’til all hours. The next day there’s the oul’ bastard on the front page of The Clare Champion, shaking hands with some German that was opening a knitwear factory.”
“You told Naughton what had happened?”
“I did. And what an iijit I was to go and do a thing like that.” She paused. “When I think of it…” She took a long drag from the cigarette, grimaced and cast about for an ashtray.
“Fire it out the window, can’t you?” said Minogue. She looked down over her shoulder at the Inspector.
She rolled down the window and flicked the butt expertly across the street. Minogue was surprised at the distance she achieved with such economical effort. She turned to him with a piercing look.
“So what are you going to do now? What can you do? Naughton’s dead, so you tell me. Tidy Howard is up in the nursing home with his plot bought and his box picked out and ready. There’s nothing left. So what are you two after?”
“What did Naughton mean about you doing well out of it?”
“Fuck Naughton,” she hissed. “I’ll tell you what Naughton said to me. I’m sure ye’d like to hear. You want to hear the dirt, don’t ye? So you can tell your pals back up in Dublin one night and ye having a few jars. I’m only sorry I don’t have a few pictures to show ye.”
“It’s not like-”
“Don’t give me lectures about what it is and isn’t like! This is all the help Naughton was to me: ‘Did someone ride you right?’ was what he said to me. ‘Did he ride you straight and did you get cured?’ says he. Fucking worm. And him a Guard.”
Minogue kept his eyes on the Fiat insignia on the horn. An urge to lean on the horn and hold it came to his hands.
“Only sorry he didn’t have a go himself,” she whispered. “He knew everything. I’m sure Tidy Howard told him, and them sniggering and drinking.”
“Knew what?” Hoey asked.
“About me. About Jane Clark. Her and me. That’s what he meant about ‘straight,’ you thick. With a man, like. Here. Give us one of those Majors.”
Hoey held out the packet opened already. She didn’t light it but studied it instead, as though it were a weapon.
“So what did you get out of this, then?” asked Hoey. “It doesn’t make much sense.”
“I knew things,” she murmured. “I knew about Jane and what she was doing. But she told too. She was like that. She wasn’t afraid of anything. She laughed in their faces. ‘What century do you think you’re in?’ she’d say. That’s what she was like. And I liked that about her. She could say things that I’d…”
She shook her head as though trying to dislodge a bee caught in her hair and reached across to thump in the cigarette lighter.
“Does this part of your limo work?” she asked.
“Wait and see,” said Minogue. “But listen, you lost me there.”
“Ah! Dan Howard and Jane. Jamesy Bourke and Jane. She told me. She kind of saw it like a big adventure and a bit of a comedy too. Oh, Christ, but she’d have me in stitches. ‘You can learn all you want about Irish history and civilisation when you have one of them burrowing away at you’ she told me. The things they said to her when they were, you know…close.” The lighter popped out.
“She really had one over on them. And I don’t know if they ever knew it, Jamesy or Dan. Dan”-she blew out a vast quantity of smoke, the first work on a fresh cigarette-“what a gobshite. Dan, only Dan. Curly wee Dan. Hah. He’d get up on a table if the tablecloth looked enough like a skirt, so he would.”
“But what did you get out of this?” Minogue tried again. “What did Naughton mean?”
“Did you get in the wrong queue when God was handing out the brains or what? Do you honestly think that Naughton would do away with himself over some revelation like this, a parlourmaid like yours truly here, that no one cared enough to believe?”
She taunted Minogue with a wide-eyed stare. The Inspector didn’t try to hide his exasperation now.
“Look, Eilo. Stop mullocking about here, like a good woman. We’re trying to do the right thing. What did she have over these people, Jane Clark?”
“The right thing? Huh. What the hell use is it for me to tell you? It’s all done with.”
The Inspector rubbed at his stinging eyes. His battered Fiat was full of smoke, and he had a pain over his eyes that wasn’t going away and would probably get worse. He was homesick for the ordinariness of his home, his wife, his adopted city. He wanted to be sitting in front of the fire with a glass of whiskey and errant thoughts. He had travelled the roads of west Clare more in this last week-and for what? It came to him with the sudden force of a truth he had hidden from wilfully, that the Hoey he had dragged along, that the faded, greenish-coloured snapshots of Jane Clark, that the dreams of that familiar stranger and his own claustrophobic premonitions about Kathleen’s apartment plans were part of one story, a story he couldn’t make sense of. It didn’t matter how, he knew. What mattered was his own obstinate will to see this through. Still, he was angry.
He was out of the car quickly, the Tralee air rushing into his lungs. The force of the door slamming rocked the Fiat and it squeaked on its shocks. The sea, he thought while he waited for his anger to ebb, and the porpoises. Their domain the water, their senses beyond what we could imagine-the very core of the earth itself guiding them, or the stars, perhaps, the squeals of their kind as they surfaced and dived, surfaced and dived.
“Shit,” he said.
The roof of the car was cold under his palms. He spread his hands wider. Cigarette smoke issued out thinly from Eilo McInerny’s window.
“What the hell got into him?” he heard her say. “He should get a grip on himself or something.”
People, he almost shouted-humans. Images flew through his mind. Fire in the night and the stone walls reaching for the sea in darkness.
“He’s fed up with being taken for an iijit,” he heard Hoey reply. “He doesn’t get like this very often, I can tell you.”
Hoey said something else to her but in a tone too low for the Inspector to make out the words. Minogue turned and leaned back against the window, folding his arms. Overhead a dozen seagulls hovered white against the sky. The sunlight was brass on the side of the street. Naughton was in the morgue and his house was sealed. The bang reverberated in Minogue’s mind again and he shuddered. The gun Naughton had used was on its way to the laboratory in Dublin, thence to Moran, the Gardai’s resident ballistics expert. Would Moran be able to put parentage on the gun, link it to others? Ward, the detective who had interviewed him for a half-hour, had asked him twice if he had suspected that Naughton had had a gun. Stupid question. If Matt Minogue had so much as wondered whether Naughton had a gun somewhere, he’d never have gone near the damned house. Where did he get the gun?
“Oi,” he heard. He sat back into the Fiat.
“I have me job to go to,” Eilo McInerny said. “Mel’ll be home from school. I have to phone her and give out to her about her homework.” She paused to take a last pull on the cigarette.
“Then I’ll go back to Tom and Bridie and Maureen above in the hotel, and I’ll serve up a dinner to a crowd of people. Me feet will be hanging off me when I get home. But I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and put a bit of money aside for a trip to London. It’s for Mel. I promised her we’d go sometime.” She turned up the cigarette and studied the smoke rising from the tip.
“And I might just stay up late and have a few jars with Tom.” She looked up at Minogue. “And I might have a bit of fun. The Russian hands and the Roman fingers, you know?”
Minogue stared back into her eyes. People, he thought. It’s a fallen world, there’s no doubt.
“And then I’ll go home. And that’ll be that. Naughton’s dead, and Jamesy Bourke’s dead, and if I wait long enough, by Jesus, the rest of ‘em will fall into their graves too. Or get shoved into them. But I’ll sleep and eat and have rows with Mel and Tom. I’ll see all of them down, that crowd. Do you hear me?”
Minogue was caught between respect for her tenacity and dismay at her bitterness.
“All too well,” he said.
“Well, because you’re not a gobshite Guard-at least not according to your pal here-”
Both Minogue and Eilo McInerny looked over at Hoey. The detective examined his nails. His hands were trembling again, Minogue saw. He stared at Hoey’s forehead, willing him to look up.
“-who tells me you’re different, to the extent that you’re having rows with even the Guards in Ennis about Jamesy Bourke. Now that is something. And now I hear from him here that you’re ready to move heaven and hell to get at what happened to Jane.” Her eyes stayed on Hoey. He glanced at Minogue and looked out the window. “The oddest pair I’ve ever come across,” she murmured. “Ye remind me of some story I heard and I was in school-I forget it now. Some fool and his pal going around the country looking to fix things. Making iijits of themselves, it turned out. And me the iijit here too now, about to be taken in by ye. It’s the right fool I am, God help me, and I’ll never be cured of it.”
“Look here,” said Minogue. “We’re not out to cod anyone.”
She seemed not to have heard him. A smile began to form at the sides of her mouth. “After all I’ve been through… It must be the look of your man’s face here.” She turned to Minogue and her eyes narrowed. “Well, I’ll tell you a few things now. So listen. Gimme another one of those Majors. You. Shea. What’s-your-name.”
Eilo McInerny hammered in the cigarette lighter and settled back into the seat with a sigh. She concentrated on the lighter knob, her hand poised for it to pop out.
“You know how I was treated on the stand when I was called,” she began. “I was working that night. Saw Howard and Bourke getting plastered and the rest of it. But there’s one thing that never came up at the trial and I kept it to myself until after.” The lighter popped and she grasped it.
“I remember”-she paused, speaking through the smoke-“I remember thinking to myself that I could keep it up my sleeve. I thought of it as my ticket out of there.” Her eye watered from the smoke and she rubbed at it with a soft clicking sound.
“I went up to the bitch and I told her what I’d heard and what I’d seen, with her and Tidy Howard having the row that night. I let her think what she liked, that I had heard what they had been rowing about. She said nothing, just looked at me like I was some class of a lower form of life. That was her way, of course.” Into Minogue’s mind shot the image of Sheila Howard’s face.
“Yeah,” she murmured between her teeth. “Looked down her nose at me. Said nothing. But I knew there was something fishy going on. The next day, ould Tidy takes me aside and asks me if I had ever thought of bettering myself. Whatever the hell that meant. Would I try London, says he. He’d pay my way and give me the address of a landlady, as well as some money to get me started in digs there and so on. I’d think about it, says I.” She coughed and shifted around in the seat.
“Next day, a Guard-Doyle-came by and told me that I’d be asked to be a witness at the trial because Jamesy Bourke was after being charged. I was to stay around because the trial’d come up within a few months. Sure enough, it did. Like an iijit, I thought I’d just be asked about what I saw in the pub that night. But I walked into an ambush. And you know the rest. I came back to the hotel in a flood of tears-raging mad, I was too, and frightened. Then in came this fella, you probably don’t know him-a kind of a do-for, a crony of Howard-and he says the dirtiest things. About me, about Jane Clark. Says he doesn’t want to walk the same streets of the same village where I live.”
“Who was he?” Hoey asked.
“A lug. He came into the bar a fair bit. Duignan…Day-God, it goes to show you that I can’t remember-”
“Deegan?” said Minogue. “Big, running to fat?”
“Deegan, yes. I hardly knew him. He did odd jobs and he rented farmland from the Howards, I heard. So there it was: Get out of town. After your man Deegan had gone, in comes Tidy himself, with an envelope of money and an address. ‘Twould be better for all concerned,’ says he. Liar. Bastard. Pig. There was a thousand quid in the envelope. I couldn’t believe it. I was always sure that it was me saying what I said to her ladyship got me the ticket out.”
His headache was gone. He kept his eyes on Eilo McInerny’s broad back as she trudged up the steps into the hotel. Minogue imagined her body in a rococo painting of a goddess reclining in a glade. With her hand on the door, she looked back at the two policemen before flicking the cigarette over the roof of the Fiat. Hoey waved tentatively and let his hand drop into his lap.
“You told her what had happened to you?”
Hoey nodded.
“Why?”
Hoey rubbed at the side of his nose. “She’s been through a lot. I sort of thought that she needed to know that we’re not per-well, I mean, that we were all looking for a cure for something. That I was, I mean.”
“We,” said Minogue. “You were right the first time.”
Hoey raised a hand as if to make a point but let it drop again.
“If only Tidy Howard could-” he began.
Minogue shook his head.
“What I want to know is whether Dan Howard knew anything about all this.”
“He must,” said Hoey. “He’s married to the woman, for God’s sake. Married people don’t keep secrets, like.”
Minogue laughed aloud.
“What’s so funny?”
“The bit about married people.”
Hoey’s tone suggested irritation as well as embarrassment. “Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?”
Minogue started up the Fiat to distract himself from laughing again. Hoey lit another cigarette, coughed and rolled down the window. A lorry towing a trailer full of pigs stopped next to the car. Their trotters scrambling on the wood, their squeals and the smell of pig shit made Hoey roll up the window again. The lorry moved off slowly. Minogue drove around the corner and switched off the engine.
“What’s the matter?” said Hoey.
“Have to think out loud for a minute. That night: Eilo’s working and she sees Dan Howard and Jamesy Bourke drunk in the bar. She remarks to herself that there’s a lot of drink in front of Bourke. Later on she remembers seeing Sheila Hanratty and her friends. Then Eilo’s off about the place, ‘working’-which means she went out to a storehouse for a smoke and a drink from a bottle of vodka she kept out there. She sees Sheila Hanratty come across the yard after Tidy Howard and they’re arguing. Naturally she hides. She doesn’t hear what they’re squabbling about but she’s surprised that Sheila Hanratty should be shouting at Dan Howard’s father.”
“But she does hear one thing that Tidy shouts at her: ‘You live your life, I’ll live mine.’”
“And some bad language from the both of them. Surprised her to hear Sheila Hanratty like that. Had the name of being well-reared.”
“Right. Sheila Hanratty walks off in a huff. Eilo is able to get out of her hidey-hole, and she goes back in to help clear the bar. She follows Sheila Hanratty.”
Hoey nodded.
“And the same Sheila Hanratty goes through the bar and straight out the door onto the street.” Minogue looked to Hoey for comment but his colleague merely considered the tip of his cigarette.
“This is half-ten, now,” Minogue went on. “There’s another hour before the pub closes. Come closing-time, Eilo sees that she’s back, and she’s in a buzz around the boyos up at the bar. The same boyos are well and truly pissed by this time. Pretty soon afterwards they’re out on the street and Sheila Hanratty drives Dan home.”
“Right,” murmured Hoey. “The Howards didn’t live above the place.”
“Here’s my question: If Dan Howard can’t leg it the half-mile or so back to his house, how can Jamesy Bourke walk as far as Jane Clark’s cottage? If Bourke is as far gone as Dan Howard, don’t you know.”
“I don’t know,” Hoey offered. “Nobody knows. Bourke himself didn’t know.”
“Back away from that for a minute. How do we know that Sheila Hanratty actually went anywhere after her kerfuffle with Tidy Howard? Eilo says she saw her go out the door. Just assumed she got into the car. But she might have driven around the corner and come back to the bar directly. She might have gone to get something in the car. Her handbag or something. Then again, she might have been upset or the like, and needed…”
The thought of Sheila Howard distraught over something, using bad language, gave Minogue a feeling of faint but not unpleasant aversion.
“She might have come back in a matter of minutes. Eilo mightn’t have seen her until later,” Hoey was saying.
“Yes.” Minogue was still mired in his sliding thoughts.
“Then again,” Hoey added with unmistakable irony, “it’d be nice to know where she actually did go, and for how long.”
Minogue awakened to Hoey’s mood and glanced across at him.
“Yes and no, Shea. There’s Crossan taking digs at the Howards. I’m far from satisfied that Crossan is as pure as the driven snow here. He may be the happier man to see Dan Howard and Sheila Howard with plenty of mud on them.”
“You’re lumping Eilo McInerny in there too?”
“It struck me that there’d be a certain, what can I call it, a certain relish that Eilo’d enjoy if the Howards, Sheila Howard included, got in the way of scandal.”
“You think she’s a muck-raker.”
“That’s not what I said. I’m saying that she could put a cast on her recollections. I’m wondering…I’m wondering exactly what Crossan told her the times he was talking to her recently. Maybe Crossan sort of enlisted her-not outright hired her, I mean, but-”
“Crossan? You don’t believe her, then.”
“I’m saying that she might be embellishing. She didn’t actually hear the conversation between Tidy Howard and Sheila Hanratty. And she didn’t actually see her drive off, much less where.”
“All right,” said Hoey. He blew out under his upper lip. “All right. But she didn’t claim to have seen or heard everything.”
The afternoon sun was just above the rooftops now, and the copper hint of evening was already on the streets. The sun had warmed the car’s interior and brought up the smell of cigarette ash even stronger. Hoey had become more fidgety.
“Crossan,” said Hoey. “You’ve got him in your sights, haven’t you?”
Minogue nodded.
“Back to the money thing, then,” Hoey tried. “She says that Tidy Howard gave her money for the train and then for digs over in London. A lot of money. Maybe because he had her on his conscience?”
“Take-it-or-leave-it type of deal?” said Minogue.
“Right. He rapes her and then later he kicks her out after throwing a bit of money at her. But the way she talks about him, it wasn’t in character for him to give a damn about that sort of thing. Why did he wait until after that night to talk her into going away?”
“Bears out her version of why she got the money, all right.”
“Yeah. The main reason was that she knew that something was going on that night,” said Hoey. He sat forward and began counting on his fingers.
“Look. She sees Tidy Howard and Sheila Hanratty having some kind of row. Sheila storms out, obviously not getting the answer she wants. She goes somewhere. When Eilo sees her again, she’s back in the bar looking a lot less glamorous than the first time she appeared. We have to go after her. Sheila Howard.”
Minogue took a deep breath and looked at his watch. “With what?”
“Naughton got paid off-”
“Can’t prove a damn thing now, and you know it.”
Minogue’s shirt-collar began to irritate his neck. The sun came around the door-pillar. There was a glint in Hoey’s eyes and his fingers moved the cigarette around quickly.
“Ask Mr and Mrs Howard,” he growled. “Round two. This time put the squeeze on ’em.”
Minogue longed for a cup of coffee, to be alone for a while. A vague apprehension had taken the place of the emptiness, itself part of the leftovers of shock. Hoey scratched his bottom lip with his thumbnail. The Inspector slid deeper into his seat and looked down the street.
The afternoon light had stretched the shadows across the street. They had begun their relentless ascent on the buildings to the western side. Soon the roofs, the aerials and the chimneys would take the glare all to themselves and the street below would fall into darker shadow. Gold and bronze had already taken fire in several windows. Minogue watched a mother pushing her pram toward the car. Her face was set firm as if she had just had news that disappointed her. She stopped the pram and called out to a boy crying on the footpath behind her. The boy stood staunchly with his face contorted.
“All right so, bye-bye,” the woman called out.
She was too tired to be really angry, Minogue believed. The child continued crying and pivoted toward a parked car. He began fingering a door handle, tracing patterns in the dust on the door panels. His Hallowe’en costume had held together well, the Inspector noted. The cloak’s high collar suggested Dracula but perhaps he was mistaking it for Superman or Batman. Would this stubborn child insist on wearing his hero’s clothes night and day until they fell off in flitters?
“I’ll layve you here in the street, so I will, if and you don’t come on!” the mother shouted. She had rested one hand on her hip, the other laying the handle of the pram.
“All right, then! Bye-bye.” The child wailed and sat down heavily.
“I’m going!” said the mother. She turned and pushed the pram.
Minogue watched her staged resolution and he wondered how far she’d walk before she turned for another ultimatum. Some vague feeling rustled in his chest. The child howled wait, mommy, wait. The mother walked by the Fiat and glanced in at the two detectives. Reflected sun from a window was on her face as she turned. The glare caught every line, the cast of her mouth, her eyelashes. Wait, mommy, wait, cried the child, but he stayed on the footpath.
“I’ll do no waiting! Get up off the ground this instant and hurry on with you, you bold boy!”
The threat of abandonment worked. The child tried to swallow his cries and rose to his feet. Boys, thought Minogue, and remembered Daithi’s infant temper-a lot more work than girls. Little pleased with her victory, the mother had more conditions.
“And no more whinging out of you!” she warned.
“I’d say she’s something, that one,” murmured Hoey.
“With the pram?”
“No. Sheila Howard.”
The surprise worked its way down to his stomach. Hoey’s mind was off on its own course. He was giving his colleague and nominal boss a cool survey. Minogue started the car hastily enough to grind the starter motor. He gritted his teeth, tightened his seatbelt and busied himself lickering with the controls for the choke and then the heater. Up the Listowel Road and on to Tarbert and the ferry to Clare; meet with Crossan, see if he had anything new; try not to take a swipe at him. Try not to have a row with Hoey en route either. He took a deep breath and released it. Hoey was still eyeing him when he turned to check for traffic. The Inspector trod heavily on the brake pedal.
“What the hell are you looking at?” he growled at Hoey.
Hoey said nothing, but he kept looking at him. Minogue searched his colleague’s face. Hoey’s expression reminded him of one of those bench-marks of marriage, a high-water mark, when one partner looks at the other in the wake of a thoughtless hurt. He disengaged the clutch.
“What’s up with you, Shea? Quit giving me the treatment.”
“What’s up with you, you mean.”
“This is not a good time to be playing games with me. You’ve got something on your mind? Do you resent being dragged up and down the country, is that it? Well, if that’s the case, all you need do is-”
“What the hell use is it to me to say something to a man with his fingers stuck in his ears?”
Minogue understood that something had lurched out into his path like an inescapable drunkard weaving toward him on the footpath, mirroring his efforts to sidestep him. He had defended the Howards to Crossan, a man who knew them far better than he, Minogue, did. Now he was annoyed that he had to defend them again to Hoey. He, Minogue, had turned away from something, but part of him-that part of him which over the years had become his real intelligence-had been trying to make itself known to him.
“It was just you and Crossan the other night. Going to see her,” Hoey said. “I wondered why you didn’t ask me along.”
“I didn’t want two Guards, Shea. It’d change the atmos-”
He saw her in jeans then and the Fiat seemed to get unbearably warm. Sudden heat prickled under his armpits and by his ears. Her blonde hair, her head turning in the lamplight, the swell of her breasts under the sweater. His heart kept up its tattoo and he knew that it was futile to try and disguise the colour rising in his face. He looked away down the street and switched off the engine. The car rolled back half a foot and the tyres bounced dully on the curb. The street ahead was a striped and jumbled shadow play, glare adjoining gloom under a sky already lightening at the edges. He didn’t bother to look at his watch. An hour and they’d need headlights. It’d be dark and them getting into Ennis. What the hell would he say to Sheila Howard?
Hoey looked away down the street before taking out a cigarette. The mother with the pram and the laggard infant were crossing the street in the middle distance. She yanked on the child’s arm as Hoey tapped a fresh cigarette on his knee and led it to his lips. There it rested for several seconds. Then he gently plucked the cigarette out again. His dry lips stuck to the filter. He replaced the cigarette carefully in the packet and then nudged his colleague. It was a gesture of intimacy that startled Minogue.
“What’s the big hurry back up to Ennis anyway?” said Hoey. “I’ll stand you a mug of something.”
Minogue nodded and kept his eyes on the opening of the street where the mother, pram and child had disappeared. Swallowed up, he thought, as they turned the corner. He wanted them to return but he didn’t know why. The anticipation he felt while staring at the corner made him alert again. His body felt flabby and loose in the seat. His eyes ached and he rubbed at them. The more he rubbed, the more colours appeared. He thought of his brother’s family sequestered on the farm with the night about to come down over their fields, the bleak heights of the Burren which rose around the farm given over to winter again. He stopped rubbing his eyes but held his eyelids closed and watched the wash of red and yellow, the dark blotches spreading. Still as the land might look, there were squad cars parked on sidestreets, Guards sitting by phones waiting: a shooting, a suspect on the move again, a vehicle approaching… For a moment, Minogue was hovering over it all again, as in that dream. Fire blazed up from the thatch, the screaming Bourke, the firelight dancing on the stone walls.
“Well, what do you say?”
Like the yarns he had heard as a child about travellers falling into the underworld, he had fallen through a hole somewhere, he saw then. There the pookas and fairies still held sway, marshalling spells and riddles to entrap the arrogant who had inherited the upper world. Great God, what an iijit I am still. Decades in Dublin, cute from years of dodging traffic and chancers, criminals and superiors, later content in interior victories. Almost educated, he liked to think. Now he saw that his judgement had gone out the window. Sheila Howard, thinking about her half the day. Hoey had been sitting next to him to witness his blunders. Upside down, reversed: measures confounded, rules obscured. Humiliation grasped at his guts and held. God, what an iijit. Hoey opened his door gently and waited. Minogue looked over at the open door but didn’t see anything. He felt he was nearing the surface now, but he was still pursued by images and words. Iseult’s hunger for life, her scorn keeping her keen; Daithi working toward an immigrant life in the States; Kathleen’s steadfast love, her patience and indulgence. Kilmartin pausing in mid-oratory, face framed by anxious cynicism. The porpoises alongside the boat, carefree taunts from their world.
“She’s probably up in Dublin by now,” he heard himself mutter.
“What?” asked Hoey, and bent down to look in the car.
“She’s up in Dublin with Dan Howard, I imagine.”
He rubbed his eyes again. His eyelashes clung together when he stopped. When he tugged his eyelids open, there was still no sign of the Superman who had been dragged into oblivion by his mother. The shadows seemed deeper now.
“I’ll phone the Killer,” he said.
Hoey nodded.
“But Shea.” Hoey bent down again. “When we get back to Ennis, when we walk in the door of Crossan’s office…” Again the words disappeared, despite his wish to sound resolute.
“We’ll tell him what we know,” Hoey said quietly.
“Yes, I know. But as for speculating, that’s not really on, okay?”
“Look,” said Hoey, and he looked down the street. “There’s an eating-house down there. Maybe they’ll have something there.”
Minogue tumbled wearily out onto the path.