Minogue awoke early to the sounds from the yard. It was seven. He must have fallen asleep immediately last night. He did not try to get back to sleep but lay still for ten minutes, the eiderdown up to his nose. Faint dawn light brought depth to the forms in the room, sharpening the corners and picture frames. He listened to the rhythmic humming suction of the milking machine before he tiptoed into the hall. Maura was setting the table. She smiled at him and went to crack eggs into a bowl. He wondered if she had slept at all. “Howaryou, Matt?” she whispered. “Are you good?”
“Powerful,” he said. He put on his coat. “The air here is mighty.”
“There’s spare wellies there,” said Maura. “They’d be a fit.” He slid into them and stepped out into the yard. A bright dawn was soaking in between the hedges on Drumore Hill. The sky was clear and sharp, and Minogue rubbed his hands against the chill. His eye caught the silver edges in the yard, the ruts and holes where water had frozen. Mick was watching his son moving cattle through the milking parlour. He nodded to his brother.
“The happy lot of the farmer,” Minogue tried. “At one with nature and her bounty.”
“My eye,” grunted Mick.
The brothers watched Eoin washing teats. Minogue helped Eoin move cattle out until he received a tail flicked across his face for his troubles.
“God, these are very boisterous creatures,” said Minogue. “Are you sure they’re not goats?”
Mick shook his head but did not reply. Eoin wore a frown of concentration as he moved about between the cows. Minogue blew into his hands and watched his breath vapour and trail off in the morning air. A sudden shaft of light struck at the side of his head, the sun cresting over the shed across from the milking parlour.
“Fresh,” said Minogue. He turned to his brother. “Aren’t you cold?”
“If and I am, I can’t feel it,” replied Mick. His hands came out of his pockets. “I might as well have bits of stick on the ends of these arms this morning.”
Minogue held back from words of encouragement, knowing that his brother would hear them as pity. The sun blazed in the doorway now. The glare caught the nap on a cow’s rump and outlined every hair. He looked around the parlour again and smelled the milk and the dung and the straw and the sweetness in the cows’ breath. What the hell more can I do that I’m not already doing, he thought. He walked to the doorway to get some sun.
Two cars were entering the yard. One stopped within feet of the milking parlour, the other by the back door of the house. Minogue tried to shield his eyes but the low sun blinded him. He knew the cars for what they were when he saw the antennae still quivering after the engines were shut off. A young Guard with a crew cut and a long bony nose with a kink in it was out of the car quickly. Another in a soft leather jacket followed him from the passenger side. Minogue stepped out of the sunlight to see the farmhouse better. Two other men were gone in the door of the house.
“Lookit,” Minogue began. “There’s only the woman of the house and my-”
The Guard with the long nose brushed by him. The other stared at Minogue and stood to the other side of the doorway. The Inspector made for the doorway but Leather Jacket stepped in front of him. He heard running footsteps in the yard. Another Guard, a curly-headed older man with a pepper-and-salt moustache and a bomber-jacket, entered.
“He’s out here, all right,” he said, with barely a glance at Minogue. “Who are these fellas?”
“Who are you?” Minogue asked.
The one with the moustache looked at Minogue and then beyond him.
“Down here,” said Crew Cut. “Him and the da.”
“What the hell are ye doing?” Mick Minogue began.
“Take the da and this fella out to the house,” said Moustache. “Or sit one of them in the car.”
Minogue started to follow Moustache down to where Eoin was standing. He had gotten two steps before his arm was pinned. He was down on his knees with his head twisted in a lock when the shouting began. He too tried to shout but the Guard’s arm covered his mouth. Minogue inhaled the leathery scent from the arm over his face.
“This one’s trouble,” the Guard called out.
Minogue’s mind flared with the sharp pain as his arm was pushed farther back.
“What the hell are ye about?” Mick was bellowing.
“Keep off now,” said Moustache. He and the other detective closed on Eoin. Minogue heard more footsteps behind him.
“Lace him up,” said the Guard holding him. “The oul’ lad might be throwing shapes here in a minute.”
With the headlock released, Minogue bent forward to ease the armhold. His other arm was grabbed and he heard the soft clicks as the plastic restrainers were cinched home.
“Bloody gangsters, the lot of ye!” Mick shouted. Eoin’s eyes darted from one Guard to the other.
“Shut up,” said Moustache. The Guard who had been holding Minogue stepped by him and faced Mick. Eoin had a pitchfork in his hand. The Guard in the leather jacket drew a pistol from under his jacket and held it at arm’s length, pointing it at Eoin.
“Eoin!” Minogue shouted. The cattle began lowing and stamping their feet as they jerked at the chains. “Leave it down, Eoin!”
One of the cattle began kicking at the bars. The milking machine droned on: sum-sum, sum-sum. Eoin dropped the fork and the Guards were on him.
“Jases,” Minogue heard the Guard with the gun mutter. He realised that he was still on his knees.
“Get up and let’s have a look at you,” said the Guard. He slid the pistol under his arm and pulled Minogue by the armpit. “You’re not here to help your man here pike hay, are you?”
Minogue turned to face him. He was a stocky, tired-looking man in his late thirties. His hair had receded to a point directly over his ears. His breath smelled of cigarettes. He narrowed his eyes as he searched Minogue’s face. Minogue watched the surprise roll down his face until his mouth opened.
“Divine Jases,” said the Guard and he looked over Minogue’s shoulder at his colleagues. “This is what’s-his-name. Up in Dublin. I done a stint, a training thing with the fingerprint section in the Bureau up in Dublin.” His eyes returned to Minogue’s. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? One of us, I mean.”
Cuddy shook his head again and scratched at his scalp. Minogue sipped at his mug of tea. Cuddy lit another cigarette. He breathed out the smoke and used the spent match to poke at the other butts in the ashtray. Cuddy was a sergeant in the Special Branch. He had driven in from Limerick just after midnight.
“All right,” he said in the middle of another yawn. “Point taken. But this isn’t Dublin where help is thirty seconds away.”
Minogue pinned him with a glare.
“No offence now,” said Cuddy. “Oh no.” He placed the cigarette between his lips to free his hands. “But look at it from our point of view.”
He began counting on his fingers, pausing to grasp each finger for several moments. “Three ton of stuff from Libya dug up out of the dunes there in near Bracagh over the summer. Semtex. Thirty-odd assault rifles.”
He drew on his cigarette to give Minogue pause to look impressed. He feigned an earnestness which Minogue knew was not native to the man.
“And that siege with your man last year. Jesus,” he whispered. “Lawlor, the madman on the run for six years. Three solid days and three nights of shooting.”
Minogue nodded. Cuddy dug his elbows into the armrests and sloped forward in the chair, one eye half-closed as a shield against the ribbon of smoke rising from his lap.
“None of them come quiet anymore. Can you blame Reilly for using the hardware there?”
Minogue remained unconvinced. Cuddy rallied for more.
“While ago, in Feakle, we got a call there was shots up in a quarry near the town. There was a vanload of us left Limerick and a squad combing the place inside of ninety minutes that night. Nothing, of course. You can’t be taking chances.”
“But these arms dumps are for the North,” Minogue said. “And you know that. You read the same circulars as I do.”
Cuddy cocked a bloodshot eye at this Inspector down from Dublin.
“Fair enough,” he conceded. “Then how come we have a gun in the back of your nephew’s car?”
“He had no knowledge of what his pal had in that bag. And you know that.”
“With all due respect to you and yours now, your nephew has a mouth on him. It’s bad manners to be giving speeches about politics and constitutional rights to Guards who have been shot at.”
Minogue weighed a retort but decided to hold back.
“Anyway,” Cuddy continued, “the IRA has handed out guns locally, that’s plain to see. That’s what has us going in hard first time out. Can you blame us, I mean to say?”
Minogue couldn’t. He had watched the detectives shambling back to their cars where they now sat while Cuddy held this pow-wow. Maura had vacated the kitchen, her departure punctuated by the sharp thud of a pot of tea on the table between the two policemen. Minogue had liked what he had heard as Maura went back down the hall. She had stood up to her husband and didn’t care who heard her tell him to whisht and let the Gardai settle it.
“When did all this happen again?”
“Just around the eleven o’clock mark,” replied Cuddy. “One burst of shots-faster than an automatic, awful like what we took away from your nephew’s car, the way it was described-”
“Give over with that now,” Minogue waded in. “That’s Make-My-Day Delahunty’s style of management. This national sport of jumping to conclusions’s turning into a blood sport.”
“The shots came in the windows high up, as if to say they were warning shots. Phone line cut, nice and neat. This fella is kicking up murder. Spillner. He’s a big shot. It’s a damn sight different than knifing tyres and painting slogans on the walls.”
“It is that,” Minogue allowed.
Cuddy killed the butt conclusively, looking down his nose as though he were putting a fallen housefly out of its misery. He spoke in a monotone now.
“If the IRA is into this kind of a stunt so as to scare off tourist money here, it’s news to me. That’s all I can say at this stage. It’d get the headlines, let me tell you, and easy enough done too: a few forays at night, a bit of shooting. Millions of pounds frightened out of the country. The likes of yourself or myself might not like some German buying up houses here, but the law is the law and the EC is the religion of the day. We have to chase fellas and kick them around for the sake of some continental you or I wouldn’t give the time of day to ordinarily.”
Cuddy’s face had lapsed into an openly cynical expression. He issued a rueful smile then and scratched the back of his neck. Minogue recalled Spillner smiling, clapping to the music in the pub.
“We wouldn’t want to have to consult you in your official capacity if things get out of hand here and some bloody holiday-maker gets himself plugged one night in his cottage. Cottage?” He snorted and threw his head back momentarily. “What am I saying, cottage? Bloody palace he has. You should see it, I’m telling you. ‘Vy vould zey doo zis to me?’ I heard Spillner saying. Hah. I heard he even speaks a bit of Irish. Sits in the pub soaking up culture. Gas. Him trying to learn Irish, me busy trying to forget mine. They have more respect than we do ourselves, I’ll tell you that. Culture and stuff, I mean.”
“They’re welcome to soak up what they can,” said Minogue. “I keep on hearing how we have so much of it to spare.”
“Ah, there’s a Clareman talking,” said Cuddy. “You Clare crowd have all your high kings and fairies, but it’s far from palaces the likes of us in Leitrim were reared. I’ll be seeing you.”
Minogue congratulated himself on being but one county away in his guess. He had pegged Cuddy for County Longford. Palaces, he thought, and looked around the kitchen again. The old fireplace had been filled in even before he had left the farm for Dublin. As a baby he had been bathed here. Here he had argued with his father, played cards, poured and drunk whiskey over thirty years ago. He recalled the apartment brochures on the kitchen table in his Dublin home. Far from this indeed, he thought.
“Do you want a statement?” he said to Cuddy’s back. Cuddy turned with a wry look.
“Ah, no. Thanks. Ye were below in the pub, the three of you, so say no more. We found no one after a night’s work, you see. Truth is that Eoin wasn’t high up enough on our list. Otherwise we’d have been here in the door on ye at one o’clock this morning.”
Minogue followed Cuddy outside. The yard was full of sunlight now. The cold air caught in Minogue’s nose and made his eyes water. Mick and Eoin stood by the door to the byre. Cuddy didn’t spare them so much as a nod as the two cars left the farmyard, their tyres rasping over the patchy cement.
“Black and Tans,” Mick hissed.
Minogue’s anger propelled him across the yard in long strides.
“Am I one as well, Mick? Am I?”
Mick returned the stare. Eoin shuffled his feet and looked down at his wellies.
“You and your bloody notions,” Minogue went on. “Declare to God, you had me driven up the walls years ago. Inside your head must be like, I don’t know, the ruin of some old house or something.”
“And what have you?” Mick retorted. “Only the company of the likes of those fellas. Up in Dublin, you are-you have no home except up in Dublin. Dublin! Them that turned their chamber-pots on the men of 1916 and they marching away to be shot.”
Minogue looked away in exasperation. The hedges were dark with the sun low behind them.
“I did as much and more work in this very spot as you did, let me remind you,” he muttered then. “I know plenty about knocking a living out of stones and bogs. Them fellas just gone are none to my liking either, but they have this character weakness. We all do, if we’re human at all, man.”
He stared at his nephew in an effort to get Eoin to look at him. He realised that he had been preaching. He stopped then and his breath tumbling aloft was lit from the sun behind. The endlessly bright morning arching over the farmyard had swiped all his words. He tried to follow that small cloud which was his own spent breath dissipating. Mick was walking stiffly away toward the house.
“They don’t want to be blown out of their shoes,” Minogue called after his brother, not caring if he was heard. “That’s all that’s bothering them.”
Minogue drove into Ennis daydreaming about Santorini. The traffic slowed as he rounded the monument at the Mill Road. He turned by Harmony Row, coasted over the bridge on the River Fergus and drove down Abbey Street to the Old Ground hotel. Ennis sparkled under the sun, black shadow and glare of shop windows together in the twisting, narrow streets he liked. Pedestrians keen to see a familiar face looked to the passing cars. Knowing none himself, Minogue still lifted his fingers in salute.
With the traffic completely at a standstill now, Minogue rolled down the window. He leaned over and saw a Garda leaning on a car roof ahead, talking in the window. Bareheaded and domestic-looking, the guard had ash-grey hair and a beard that needed attention twice a day. He studied Minogue’s card.
“I’m going for a dinner at the Old Ground,” said Minogue. “Am I safe in Ennis this morning?”
“Oh, fire away, now,” said the Guard and squinted through the glare off Minogue’s windscreen. “It’s a court case going on to do with the shoot-out there back in July. They’re probably breaking for their dinner now anyway. But there’s no parking around the courthouse on account of the business.”
“Fair enough,” said Minogue.
The guard sighed.
“Is it like this in Dublin?”
“Worse. There’s no place to park at all.”
The guard smiled dryly and tapped on the roof with his fingertips.
“Go ahead now, Inspector.”
Minogue counted a half-dozen Garda cars parked in the side-streets. He spotted a tactical van immediately with its triplet of antennae and its stubby wire for the telephone link quivering slightly as someone moved around inside the vehicle. The Inspector parked and checked his watch. He was twenty minutes early for Crossan. He decided to stroll a roundabout way to the Old Ground.
Alerted by a reflection in a shop window, the Inspector turned to find a wigged and gowned lawyer flying, it seemed to him as he studied the billowing robe, across the street toward him. Behind the sharp nose, which made Minogue think of Pinocchio, were bulging thyroid eyes. They made for an expression of intense fright.
“Are you the Inspector Minogue I’m supposed to be meeting?” Crossan called out.
“I am that. How did you know?”
“Ha, ha!” Crossan guffawed. “And you the detective! I saw you walking away from a car with a Dublin registration. But sure, you’re the spit of your brother!”
Spit, thought Minogue.
“Cut out of him,” said Crossan. “Will we mosey on to the Old Ground now?”
Minogue fell into step alongside the barrister. A half-dozen steps from the door of the hotel, Crossan stopped suddenly and wheeled around. He looked up and down the busy street. Minogue imagined the swelling eyes popping out onto the steps, rolling and bouncing down through a Dali Ennis. He dared a quick survey of Crossan’s face and noted the blue bristles, each clear in the skin that looked like paper. Definitely an indoor plant. Was he looking for someone or something?
“And you belong to Rossaboe and places west?” Crossan murmured.
Belong? Perhaps he did, the Inspector supposed. Thirty years in Dublin had but rubbed him down to bedrock. As weather is to climate.
“Born, bred and starved there,” Minogue admitted. The lawyer smiled briefly, walked to the door of the hotel and held it open.
A waitress whom Crossan called Maureen led them through the dining room. Yes, she told Minogue, the coffee was freshly brewed.
“You got the envelope then,” said Crossan. “The photocopies, like.”
Minogue nodded and inspected the cutlery. As regards trappings, the hotel had improved no end, he had to conclude. His last dining adventure here had been nearly six years ago when he had come down to Ennis to bury an uncle on his mother’s side. He pondered the possibility of soaking Crossan for a salmon and seafood dish listed for fifteen quid.
“And the, er, thing that Jamesy penned. That epistle…?”
“As best I could,” said Minogue. “Tended to be repetitive, really.”
“Did it make any sense to you?”
“Not a whole lot. Have you had many dealings with mental illness in your job, Counsellor?”
Crossan flashed a rueful smile which ended in a frown. The waitress appeared with the wine. Minogue looked around the room as she poured. The dining room was almost full. Businessmen, farmers and travelling men down for the mart, a few late-in-the-season tourists. A table across from theirs had a reserved sign on it. As he reached for his glass the couple appeared in the doorway.
She looked tall here, he thought. Her hair was actually blonde, her eyes clear and still. She seemed to be brighter and clearer than others in the room, as if she had captured some sharp light all for herself. For an instant, Minogue believed he could smell a faint perfume. Dan Howard stood next to her now. A waitress fussed around them. More faces turned toward the couple.
“Well, now,” he heard Crossan say. The ice was tugging at Minogue’s guts now. She had seen them, noted them, he believed.
The tone, a mix of sarcasm and stern humour, brought Minogue to.
“And good day to you, Mr and Mrs Howard,” Crossan called out.
Dan Howard winked at Crossan. His smile broadened as he walked to Minogue’s table. Sheila Howard strolled after him.
“Well, Alo, you’re always busy,” said Howard. He leaned in and offered his hand to Minogue.
“Parlous times as ever,” said Crossan. “Where there’s trouble, there’s money.”
“Hello, Aloysious,” said Sheila Howard. She nodded at Minogue.
Minogue’s chest was tight but his heart’s thump seemed to visibly rock it. Sheila Howard blinked, smiled and looked from Minogue to Crossan. Minogue tried not to look at her face. He wondered if anyone could see his chest pounding.
“And Mick Minogue’s brother, how are you?” he heard Dan Howard asking.
“I’m very well,” he managed to say.
“A small world, now, isn’t it?” Howard went on. “Are you enjoying your holiday?”
“To be sure,” said Minogue.
“Great. I hope you’re considering coming back home sometime, are you? We’ve a lot going on in Clare nowadays.”
“In more ways than one,” said Crossan.
Howard grinned.
“Time enough,” said Minogue.
Howard laughed. An easy, cheery laugh. Disarming, Minogue thought. A favoured son, the boy, this Dan Howard seemed.
“Great,” said Howard, and rubbed his hands together. He turned to Minogue with a sardonic squint.
“You’re sitting next to the best barrister in County Clare, I’ll have you know. You know where to find me if you want me, I hope. Drop into the office anytime. Don’t mind that crowd up in Dublin.”
The Howards returned to their table. Sheila Howard sat down and her husband followed, flapping loose his napkin from the glass. She folded her arms over the mauve cashmere polo-neck which hung loosely from her shoulders. Howard moved his glass to the side of his place-setting and smiled at his wife.
Us and them again, thought Minogue: the crowd in Dublin and the country people. Like many another rural TD, Howard championed “his own” against the distant uncomprehending bureaucrats and voters in Dublin. But didn’t Howard spend his time in Dublin?
“How do you know Dan?” Crossan repeated.
“Oh. We were in the pub in Portaree. Himself and missus arrived in for some kind of a meeting.”
“Indeed,” said Crossan with delicate scorn. “The PDDA.”
“They live in Ennis, the Howards, do they?” asked Minogue.
“They maintain the residence here,” Crossan replied in a nasal drone of nonchalance which Minogue read as his send-up of snobbery. “As well as a pied-a-terre in the capital. They dine occasionally here among the patrons of the Old Ground.”
“Well, Dan Howard seems to count as a fan of yours,” Minogue prodded.
Crossan snorted and sipped at his wine.
“Hah. Do you have fans yourself now, Inspector Minogue? In your line of work, I mean.”
Images came to Minogue: a pile of rags in the ditch, what was left after a hit-and-run. And how could you kick a man in the face enough to kill him? Were parts of humanity exempt from evolution?
“Hard to tell, really. But people are relieved when a murderer is caught, if that’s what you mean.”
Crossan’s eyes glistened but remained blank and unblinking. The Inspector watched as Crossan’s thoughts seemed to return to him. He nodded as though conceding something.
“Oho,” said Crossan then, a glint of happy malice in his stare.
The Howards were getting up from their table. Although her face betrayed no signs, Minogue sensed in Sheila Howard an anger held in check. Dan Howard’s dimples seemed to have disappeared. The waitress was already darting over to them. Crossan leaned back in his chair and looked out the window onto the street.
“By gor,” said Crossan. “Speak of the devil. There’s timing for you. The man himself.”
Minogue looked out through the curtain onto the street. A bread lorry drove by slowly, revealing in its wake the dog, then the bearded figure and the bag on the footpath beside him. The sun was full on Jamesy Bourke. Minogue watched the waitress persuade the Howards to stay at another table. Dan Howard’s practised, public face regained its affability. He made a joke to the waitress and then looked toward Crossan and Minogue, eyebrows arched, as though to convey a magnanimous patience which Minogue did not understand. Sheila Howard busied herself moving the condiments and flowers around on the table. Dan Howard ran his fingers through his curls once and pointed to something on the menu. Two middle-aged men in suits stopped by the Howards’ table and shook hands with Dan Howard. A quip was issued, a joke returned.
Crossan nodded his head in the direction of the window.
“Sometimes Jamesy takes up station outside yours truly’s constituency office up the street here. ‘The clinic,’ as if to say he was looking for a cure, you might say. Our modern version of pagan idolatry.”
When Minogue looked out the window again, Jamesy Bourke and his dog were gone. For a reason his mind could not fasten on, the Inspector saw the wall where Jamesy Bourke had stood as strangely vacant now, filled with the sun’s glare but somehow marked by the absence of the figures, as though a shadow had been left. The waitress snapped open a folding table and laid the tray on it.
Crossan’s eyes snapped open and they bored into the Inspector’s. “Well,” he said. “Have you left your bits of rags and your rosaries out by the holy well and done your indulgences?”
Minogue’s puzzlement showed.
“Aha. You’ve lost your religion up in the metropolis. All Souls.”
“Ah, I’d forgotten.”
“There are no ghosts above in Dublin, I suppose.”
Minogue recalled his mother hanging bits of cloth by St. Gobnet’s Well amidst the statues, the holy pictures and the flowers. Did Maura now tie pieces of Mick’s clothes there to implore a saint no longer a saint in Rome to banish the arthritis seizing more of her husband by the year? Crossan laid his napkin on his knees and leaned in toward the Inspector.
“There’s stuff I meant to bring but you hijacked me before I could go to the office and get it. Will you, em, stop by the office with me after? A little postprandial too, maybe?”
Minogue paused in his work of separating his salmon fillet. Did Bourke know that he’d be…?
“I will, I suppose,” he answered.
Crossan’s office was in Bank Place, a terrace of early Victorian houses. His rooms were high-ceilinged, stately, cluttered. Minogue followed him past the secretary’s desk, the only business-like aspect to the place. The long windows, one of the terrace details which more openly aped Georgian, looked down on the street through wrought-iron railings. Some modern devices intruded, Minogue noted, but the fax and photocopier seemed devalued by being half-hidden under papers. A faded rug, its intricate designs formerly blue and probably yellow, took up the floor in the middle of the room. Numbered prints of landscapes covered up one wall.
“I’ve a secretary,” Crossan was saying. As though landing a fish, he lifted a bottle of whiskey out from behind a stack of folders. “But she’s only part-time.”
Which part of the time, Minogue was tempted to ask: the time she was asleep?
“She’s on her honeymoon. In Greece, if you don’t mind.”
Alerted by the weight of the filling tumbler, Minogue looked up at Crossan. “Whoa, man! Are you trying to do me in?”
Crossan tipped the bottle back up and sat down himself. “Tell me something now. What keeps a man like you going? In your line of work, like.”
Minogue couldn’t decide whether Crossan was pulling his leg or testing his temper. He looked to the rows of leather-bound books on Crossan’s shelves.
“Are you trying to interview me for a job here, is it?”
“Pretend that I was.”
“We try to give an accounting for someone murdered.” He felt Crossan’s eyes drill into him.
“I meant how or why do you stick at it. What drives you?”
“God, what a question. Fairness, I suppose. Especially for the people who are left…”
“There’s more?”
The Inspector looked hard at the lawyer for any hint of a sceptical reception.
“You give something back to the victim too, even though they’re dead. Their dignity, maybe. Now, are these conversational tidbits leading anywhere?”
Crossan sniffed at the remains of his whiskey as though contemptuous of the comfort it offered.
“All right. Jamesy Bourke-”
“Let me ask you something straight out first,” said Minogue. “Did you tell Jamesy Bourke that you were getting in touch with me?”
Crossan grinned shyly and nodded his head. It changed his face entirely.
“I must confess that I did. I told him that you were related to a client of mine.”
“And the meeting at the hotel?”
“No, no. But I’d lay money that he happened to see the Howards there. It’s happened before. Can I get away with that without suggesting that Jamesy is in fact trailing the Howards?”
Minogue studied Crossan’s lopsided smile.
“Another preliminary matter there now, counsellor. You wangled the participation of various members of my family in setting up this exchange of pleasantries we have current here.”
“I believe I did at that. Are you offended?”
Minogue thought of Maura Minogue’s laughter, her infectious cheer.
“I’m not now.”
“Well, I can go on, so. Jamesy Bourke came to my office here a few months back. Frightened the wits out of me, I can tell you. Walked right in that door, so he did, and just stood there. Now remember, this is twelve years or so after he was put away. He’s a recovered alcoholic, but he seems to have managed to come out from under that, too. He’s on medication for manic-depression. He has episodes where he, er, ‘sees things.’”
“You’re giving me all the good news first?”
“I want you to know that my eyes are wide open as regards Jamesy Bourke. At any rate, he wanted me to listen to the ideas he had concocted over the years.”
“And?”
“Well, I took a look at what there was. There was the summary, the book of evidence. Phoned his counsel at the time, Tighe. Newspaper reports about the trial printed some of the court testimony. Those I copied and stuffed in the envelope for you. I ended up telling Jamesy that I could find nothing which could be construed as legally or procedurally improper in the proceedings of the trial.”
Minogue let several seconds pass.
“Well,” he said. “That was it, then?”
Crossan snorted but did not smile. He began rubbing his glass around his palm with sudden hasty movements.
“Maybe I should have prefaced that by starting with ‘in spite of everything.’ You see, Tighe had entered a plea of not guilty because he knew the State’s case was circumstantial. But at some point in the second day of the trial, Tighe told me, Jamesy just seemed to give up. Fell apart, Tighe said. Lost his temper on the stand, ranting and raving about witnesses and the Guards. Didn’t impress anyone, I can tell you.”
“What did Bourke say when you told him that?”
“I think he didn’t hear me. I told him he’d have to persuade me or help me by bringing forth new evidence. That was the only way. Shouldn’t have opened my mouth there, I thought afterwards, because next thing is he produces that twenty-page thing, that epistle that I gave you.”
“Has it made a difference to you, then?”
“No. I’d have to agree with your reading. Rambling, unreliable. Downright weird. There wasn’t one thing I could take from it and seek verification with. It could be used to have him admitted to a psychiatric ward.”
“So how come we’re…?”
Crossan looked at the Inspector as though he were deciding whether he would buy something frivolous.
“All I can say is this: I decided that one day-fee or no fee-I’d dig up the whole Bourke thing. The trial, the police investigation. The whole thing. Of course you know about ‘one day’-it never comes. But I began to hear more about Jamesy and what he was up to. People see him hanging around the ruin of the house where the fire happened. Talking and shouting to himself as he rambles the roads. I don’t want to say that he’s following the Howards exactly, but… Jamesy seems to be on the high road to a lot of trouble. I think he might go off the deep end.”
“So you thought you’d calm him down by telling him you’d do something. I see.”
“I wonder if you do,” said Crossan quickly. “There’s more to it than just feeling sorry for him. I have this feeling that Jamesy didn’t get himself a fair trial at all.”
“Didn’t you just tell me that you had nothing to go on?”
Crossan shifted in his chair and gave the Inspector a doleful look.
“There’s a strange feel off the material, the records. Sounds terribly professional, I know. But the stuff I saw from the Book of Evidence putting Jamesy at the fire with the proverbial match in his hand and the proverbial motive pinned to his chest-well, it didn’t look that strong to me.”
“Maybe Tighe was not as good a barrister as you would have been in his place.”
Anger flared in Crossan’s eyes but it dissolved and he almost smiled.
“You don’t believe that Bourke was guilty, then,” said Minogue.
“That’s not what I said.” Crossan’s hand rose from the table and stayed poised in mid-air.
“The investigation, the evidence looked shoddy and put-together. At least from what I saw in summary form, I’d have to admit.”
“Come on now, Mr Crossan. You need to bait your hook, man. The whiskey isn’t that good.”
Crossan’s smile was forced.
“Well, all the work was done by local Guards, for one thing.”
Minogue thought of Kilmartin’s grim amusement when he recounted the sloppiness of Guards in securing evidence, those arrows in the Chief Inspector’s quiver he used when defending his Squad. “Mullocking and bollicking about,” Kilmartin called those blunders.
“Maybe the local Gardai had the resources and the competence to do it,” said Minogue.
Minogue wondered if Crossan would detect the tongue-in-cheek. The lawyer leaned to one side and took an envelope from under a notepad.
“Interesting you should say that, now,” he murmured. “That’s the same tune they played at the time too. Here, open this up.”
Minogue wanted to ask about it but Crossan kept talking.
“Back then I was articling in Limerick. Learning the ropes. Used to come home weekends.”
Minogue slid out a photograph and a folded newspaper clipping. Crossan swished more whiskey into their glasses.
“Dan Howard,” said Minogue.
“Good for you. You wouldn’t know the others, I’ll bet.”
Minogue squinted at the faces. The snapshot had been taken with a cheap camera and the cyanotic hue of the emulsions reminded Minogue of murder victims. Glare from the flash had whitened a face too close to the lens. Bottles around the room reflected the flash. Red pupils like vampires, a sweaty sheen on the faces. One of the men was playing a guitar backwards. Another was holding a bottle out to toast, but the flash had caught him with his eyelids almost completely closed. Crossan pushed the glass of whiskey at Minogue and poked his finger at one of the faces.
“Come on, try.”
Minogue looked again at the long, blonde hair parted in the middle. The girl was smiling, but not in earnest. Her eyes with the eerie pink pupils were looking directly toward the lens.
“Sheila Howard,” said Minogue.
“Sheila Hanratty, she was then,” Crossan corrected. “Now. See the fella standing up, waving the bottle. The fella with his eyes half closed, looks like he just got hit by lightning.”
Minogue looked at the sweaty faces again and shook his head. “Whoever he is, he looks like he’s well-on there.”
“But can you tell me who he is?”
“Mo, I can’t. I’m from Clare, fair enough, but I don’t keep census details in me head.”
“He’s from your end of the parish.”
“So’s half the country.”
“That’s Jamesy Bourke.”
Minogue’s brain flashed a picture of the bearded man: the dog, the bags of newspapers, the slinging off into the night outside the pub last night. The ghost standing across from the hotel dining room at dinner. Crossan had hinted that Bourke was obsessed with the Howards. The barrister fingered open the clipping, held it out and put on a haughty air as he read it aloud. Minogue sipped at his whiskey.
“This is the original of one of the pieces I sent you. Christ, the flow of language. My God, man, you can’t beat the prose of a reporter on a provincial Irish newspaper. ‘While in a state of drunkenness, aggravated by the same narcotic substances bringing ruin to so many young lives, James Bourke killed Jane Clark of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in an act of manslaughter… In delivering his decision, Justice Sweeney called the case a tragedy but one that has clear lessons for society. The behaviour and lifestyle which drink and drugs bring in their wake promote the abandonment of the very values that bind a society together and give it strength. Despite the convicted man’s involvement with narcotic substances and a self-admitted drinking problem, and notwithstanding his confession and remorse over what he had done, Justice Sweeney noted, these factors do not diminish decent people’s dismay and horror at the death of this young woman, a visitor to our shores…’ Will I go on?”
Minogue shook his head. Crossan let go of the clipping. It fell to his lap folded in upon itself. Minogue peered at the snapshot again.
“Typical Sweeney. A spoiled priest, they used to say. Always thought the Bench was a bloody pulpit. Was it merely bad luck that Jamesy Bourke drew the same Sweeney for trial?”
“That’s the girl there, the one with the tan?”
Crossan nodded. “Tell me who took the picture, if you can.”
“You did,” said Minogue.
Crossan smiled briefly.
“So,” Minogue resumed with clear exasperation. “Ye were friends.”
Crossan puckered his lips and exhaled. He spoke in a subdued tone now.
“We were all friends then. Jane Clark was a breath of fresh air here. She was wild out, but so what? She came to stay a few days and ended up staying the whole summer.”
“Longer than that,” said Minogue.
“That’s right, yes. She had rented that cottage out on the Leckaun Road and she was setting it up to do a bit of pottery. She was here to stay, she said. We used to be slagging her for being a tourist, you know, a blow-in that’d be gone by the autumn. Jamesy was head over heels from the minute he set eyes on her. He wrote her poems. But Jamesy was a tearaway lad, with his music and his poetry, flying around in every pub between here and Ennis. Not cut out for the farming, Jamesy.”
Minogue glanced up at Crossan. The lawyer was nodding his head slowly while he bit his lip.
“She’s buried out in Canada,” Crossan said. “What was left of her after the fire.”
The Inspector placed his hands on the armrests. Crossan didn’t seem to notice the hint.
“The story is that Jamesy set fire to the cottage in the early hours, about one o’clock. After he put a match to it, he sat out by the front door with the remains of a bottle of whiskey in his fist and waited for Jane Clark to run out the door and into his arms. Like a film he had running in his head. Mad drunk.”
“Out of his mind,” said Minogue. “We’re getting to the point here now, I think.”
“When she didn’t come out, he lost it,” Crossan went on. “Started screaming. He had had a big row with her earlier on that evening, on account of her sharing her favours with someone else.”
“Yourself?” Minogue tried.
Crossan snorted. “Spare me. No, it was Dan Howard.”
Minogue sat back in his chair. He thought of Dan Howard’s ready smile.
“Ray Doyle was the Sergeant the time,” Crossan continued. “Not the worst, I’d have to say. A bit thick, really. Naughton was the Guard most involved. Tom Naughton. He was the old hand around Rossaboe, a Limerickman. He was also a bollocks of the first order. Naughton was the one who got things done around Rossaboe, really. He was first on the scene that night. Well, Tom Naughton went out of his way to nail Jamesy and get him locked up as quick as he could for as long as he could.”
“Personal thing with him, was it?”
“Yes. He had it in for Jamesy. Jamesy was always one step ahead of the Guards here as regards any general mischief. Naughton himself was partial to the drink and that was well known. Jamesy was a terrible mimic-to beat the band, really. He’d have us all in stitches in the pub. Naughton hated him. Vindictive type of a man, Naughton. A real bastard.”
“We number some in our ranks,” Minogue offered after several seconds. “Did Doyle go after any other, em, Bohemians in the area? Such as yourself and Master Howard, like.”
“Hah,” Crossan sneered. “He’d never go after Dan Howard or myself, for all the mischief we might have been up to. We were gentry after a fashion, safe enough with our wild oats. But Naughton was in a lather over Jamesy Bourke and the carry-on out at the cottage. The attitude with Naughton was that Jane Clark was a one-woman crime wave with a mission to subvert the morals of the whole bloody country. He’d called on the cottage a few times, poking around, but she knew her onions as regards the law, as I recall. Search warrants and what have you. She wasn’t afraid of him.”
Minogue placed his glass down heavily on the desk at his elbow.
“All right,” he said. “Now. One question.”
Crossan stared at the Inspector.
“Why now?”
Crossan paused before answering. Minogue realised that Crossan had thought about this, had expected it.
“Well. I could start with circumstances. It was when I was talking to Eoin that you came up. He didn’t tell me much about you, except that you were up in Dublin these years. Your job, of course. Then there was Jamesy hanging around, haunting the bloody place, standing out there on the footpath looking up at the bloody window. Even when I’m not there he stands around, sometimes for an hour. It’s as much as I can do to stop the secretary from calling the Guards when she sees him. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Howards, one or the other of them, finally has too much of Jamesy gawking at them.”
“Even after you told him the whole thing was a non-starter from a legal point of view?”
“Yep. One day there, a couple of weeks ago, I came back from court and there’s Mary in tears. She says he was around. ‘Looking at me,’ she says. Wants to quit. Thinks Jamesy is out to do what he did to Jane Clark. Very upset. The next time I see Jamesy, by God, I’m annoyed, so I go pelting down the stairs and look him in the eye. What does he tell me? He tells me that his memory is coming back to him better than ever. ‘It’s all coming back to me,’ says he, with his eyes like bloody saucers, sitting there where you’re sitting now.”
Crossan sat back and let his legs straighten out in front of him.
“He had electroshock after his breakdown and he’s been on medication for years.”
Minogue felt his own irritation rising again. A dinner of salmon, a glass of whiskey and Crossan’s humour over dinner had seemed bargains at the time.
“His memory, you say.”
Crossan waved away Minogue’s sarcasm.
“I know, I know. And there’s everyone else running around here trying to forget things, building bloody folk-village museums to bury the past by putting it behind glass or something.”
Minogue feigned shock.
“Dear God, counsellor. A radical?”
“Objection sustained. Anyway. I told him maybe I’d look into it again. And so, between the jigs and the reels, your name came up.”
“Thanks very much.”
Crossan abashed looked surprisingly vulnerable to Minogue. He looked at his watch. The barrister leaned forward in his chair.
“He told me that he thinks he might have been-get this: thinks he might have been-in a car sometime that night. He remembers drinking from a bottle and spilling a bit down his shirt because the car was moving. That never came up at the trial as far as I could ascertain. But how am I to ever know Jamesy hasn’t imagined all this?”
“Tell me about it,” said Minogue dryly. “What about setting fire to the house? Is he getting his memory back on that too?”
Crossan glared at the Inspector. Threads of remorse brushed against Minogue’s whiskey-dulled mind.
“Even if you had the full steno transcript of the trial, it wouldn’t necessarily help,” he said.
Crossan nodded, and ran his fingertips along his neck.
“So, presuming any material evidence is long gone, the only avenues open to you are to go to the people who testified?”
Crossan nodded again. His nails scraping against the bristles filled Minogue’s attention with their rasping. He sensed that Crossan was expecting him to say aloud the words that were foremost now, that he had next to nothing-a lost cause. A motorcycle howled by on the street outside.
‘“Why now?’” Crossan asked as the noise receded. To Minogue it seemed that the barrister had lost interest. “Christ, I don’t know. The time of year, the day that’s in it, I don’t know. We were friends once, all of us. But now there’s none of Jamesy left the way he was. He was destroyed.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Minogue asked.
Crossan’s face was slack.
“You’ve already done it; you sat and listened. I can ask no more. You could put it in your file of yarns to tell your pals in the pub after work, I suppose.”
The tailflick of sarcasm stung Minogue. He gave Crossan a cool appraisal. What made this barrister tick? He had refused payment from Mick and Maura for Eoin in lieu of something he valued more? For a moment, Minogue saw again the sour glee on Crossan’s face at the Howards’ embarrassment. Maybe Crossan was trying to make some Guards look stupid too. But what if this marble-eyed lawyer was nothing more than kind-hearted, a man however contrary but decent?
“Well, now, Mr Crossan,” Minogue began, puzzled still. “Smart-alecking with me is hardly the best way to…”
He let the rest of the sentence die. Crossan set his jaw and jerked up from his chair. Had he just given up?
“Have to go,” said Crossan.
Minogue was slow to stand. He felt the exasperation stronger now. It had taken Crossan, a man whose job routinely involved him in flaying Garda witnesses in court, a lot to come to a Guard for help. Was it fair of him to sit here and sell Crossan a line about the local Guards being expert murder investigators?
“Well,” he began.
Crossan turned. His eyes were straining now. Minogue looked at a print on the wall.
“I don’t know now,” he muttered, “and I can’t make a promise.”
“Okay,” said Crossan. “That’s a start.”