Look, Shea. It’s half-ten. Kathleen’s downstairs. I’d better go down and let her know what’s happening.”
Hoey gave the Inspector a bleak look. His coat had a dark stain across the lapel.
“Sign yourself out, will you,” Minogue went on. He still felt numbed. “I’ll meet you downstairs. Have you any more tests?”
Hoey shook his head and returned to combing his hair in front of the mirror.
“X-rays or anything? You weren’t concussed, were you?”
“No.”
“Pills you need?”
Hoey shrugged. Minogue watched him appraising his own battered face in the mirror. Hoey worked on a stray lick of hair over his ear. Minogue saw his colleague lose a battle to keep his hand from trembling as it remained poised over his head for several moments.
“Okay then?”
Hoey returned Minogue’s earnest look in the mirror for a moment before he took a step back and jammed his hands in his pockets.
“Jesus Christ,” he spat out. “I look terrible. I feel terrible. I’m not going. I don’t know. Can’t you leave me alone?”
“You missed a button there. Second one down on your shirt. Come on now, let’s go.”
Kathleen kept her shock well-hidden, Minogue thought. They walked to the car-park.
“Well, Shea,” she said as she waited for her husband to unlock the passenger side. “We’re right now, aren’t we?”
Hoey squinted at the cars in the car-park. “Well, Kathleen,” he murmured, “to tell you the truth, if I was right, I wouldn’t be here.”
Kathleen got into the car and gave her husband a look of alarm. Minogue grinned.
“That’s the style, Shea,” he said. Kathleen’s laugh was forced.
Minogue let the Fiat out onto Nutley and aimed it up toward the Bray Road. He began whistling softly between his teeth. Kathleen kept her gaze fixed on the road ahead until they stopped by the lights at Montrose. There she rallied and began working on Hoey’s embarrassment. She spoke in a tone of mock reprimand.
“Sure, what’s wrong with staying out in Kilmacud awhile? Himself here is at a bit of a loose end. Hang around, can’t you, and see that he doesn’t make an iijit of himself.”
Hoey sat back in his seat and began licking his bottom lip. Minogue eyed him in the mirror.
“Yes,” Kathleen went on, “Daithi’s room is going a-begging. You might as well…”
Minogue sensed the hesitation in her voice. She had almost said that Iseult’s room was available too, that Iseult and Pat… But that would be to admit aloud what she had yet to admit to herself.
“There’s the garden, you know,” she went on boldly. “There’s transplanting to be done before the winter proper. I must say now that I only like it for walking around in. But you people from the country, I suppose…?”
Minogue looked at the dashboard clock. It wasn’t too late to phone Kilmartin at home and have a pow-wow about this. Organise some leave for Hoey, park stuff with Murtagh. He resumed his Handel but hummed instead of whistled. He’d phone Herlighy, the psychiatrist, at home tonight too.
As the evening clouds retreated from the sky over Dublin that night, they took with them some of the yellow nimbus of light which had been reflected from the city below. The air grew colder. Although there was no moon, the summit of Two-Rock Mountain became sharp and purple under the stars. Hoey sat wrapped in an eiderdown by the window. He left the window open a crack with the ashtray next to it. He had taken his pills after the bath, but he did not feel tired. He watched two cats walk along the block wall that separated Minogues’ yard from the neighbours‘. A light breeze had the remaining leaves whispering dryly.
Hoey had no handkerchief and, as there were times when he couldn’t stop crying, he used a towel to wipe his face. He worried about waking the Minogues and that, ridiculously, made him cry even more than thinking about Aine. He had grown into the habit of imagining her as his wife in future years. How had he done that? When had he started? For long stretches of time that night he was certain there was no future, but then some indistinct, wishful feeling would crawl into his chest.
He shivered and drew the eiderdown tighter. The sky was full of stars and they held his fascination for a long time. He remembered them as a child just being there, company for wonder and excitements like Hallowe’en and Christmas, familiar and near at hand, like a ceiling. Now they seemed impossibly far. As though the sky were no longer a roof over the world but an opening to confusion and indifferent space. The lid had come off his own world, he thought, the roof torn off the house. He thought of light-years, of stars exploded these millions of years but whose light had only lately reached earth. Seeing them in the night sky when they no longer really existed.
His mind moved wearily through memories. They flared and died and flared again around his heart. He craved a drink of neat whiskey, and he panicked at the thought of a future without a drink. The stitches over his eyebrow began to feel hot and his eyes seemed to swell even more. He tried to picture Africa: huts and black people smiling. Kids singing or clapping for their teacher. Aine. How hot would it be? He lay down then. Did they have lions and stuff in Zimbabwe?
Minogue parked in Dawson Street, and he and Hoey legged it smartly across to Bewleys in Grafton Street. The sky was blue, it was not yet nine o’clock and Dublin was at its best. Hoey’s face drew stares. One child pulled on her mother’s arm and pointed at him.
“A bit of everything,” Minogue urged the waitress. “We’re in from Kilmacud and we’re demented with the hunger.”
The Inspector was obliged to eat most of Hoey’s breakfast. Hoey tried a second cup of coffee, lit another cigarette and waited for Minogue to answer a question he had posed about the psychiatrist, Herlighy.
“Yes, the one I had. Just a chat. He knows Guards. Size him up. Then, if you think he’s okay…”
Hoey blew a thin stream of smoke out under his lip.
“Don’t think that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing,” he murmured.
“And don’t you be worrying about the Killer. I’ll push him around. He’ll be all right. Really.”
Hoey gave a snort. The Inspector concentrated on his saucer.
“You won’t know yourself in a while, I’m telling you, Shea.”
Hoey let smoke stream out his nostrils.
“I thought the whole idea was to know yourself better,” he muttered. “Or stuff like that.”
“No doubt,” Minogue shrugged. He chewed on the tail of a fatty rasher while he searched for a rebuttal which might buoy Hoey.
Hoey cleared his throat again and looked warily around the restaurant.
“He’ll want to know about the love-life and the da and the ma and the rest of it, no doubt.”
“What?”
Hoey’s gaze had settled on a table where five women sat smoking and laughing over coffee.
“Herlighy,” said Hoey. “The shrink.”
“Oh, yes.” Minogue felt his body ease back into the chair. “Yes. Probably, I mean. And he may ask you what you want. How you see yourself after this, you know…”
Hoey pushed a butt to the rim of the ashtray.
“He didn’t push the church at me, you’ll be glad to hear,” said Minogue.
“Huh,” sighed Hoey. “I’m not much on the church and devotions this long time, I can tell you. Even with Aine and the lay missionary thing out beyond in Zimbabwe.”
He paused to take a drag on a fresh cigarette.
“We had rows about it. I asked her what the hell the Church could do for people in Africa. Christ, the damage we’ve done out there already. The white people, I mean. Not to speak of the famines and poverty. Do you want to hear her answer? This’ll give you an idea of how it went sour.”
Minogue said nothing.
“She said I had seen too much of the bad side of people. In the job. All I know is that I’m not about to be running up to hug the altar rails at this stage.”
Minogue was relieved when the talk lapsed. Hoey sat forward in his chair, an elbow on the table, while he stared out at the floor. Minogue recalled people, notably Kilmartin, taking pride in the missionary zeal of the Irish abroad. Television programmes on catastrophes in Africa always seemed to interview Irishmen and women there.
Hoey breathed out heavily.
“Africa,” he said, and turned his one good eye back on Minogue. “I read where we’re all from Africa. The one mother or something like that.”
The Inspector thought of the children’s swollen bellies he had seen on the poster in Galway city.
“Here, Shea. It’ll take you the best part of fifteen minutes to get to his office. I’ll be waiting for you at the gates of the National Gallery at twelve.”
Hoey rose slowly from the table, patted his pockets for his cigarettes and then followed a meandering path around tables toward the exit. Minogue followed him, noting the head and shoulders down on Hoey as he threaded through to the doors.
Kilmartin was cagey. Solicitous and polite, his suspicion masked, he slouched in his chair and waited for a cue from Minogue.
“So there,” Minogue said. “He’s going to stay with us a few days until this gets sorted out.”
“Jesus,” said the Chief Inspector. “He looked a bit shot at the other day, I must say. I don’t mind telling you that I was on the point of taking him aside and…”
Minogue fingered change in his pocket and looked out the window of Kilmartin’s office. Clouds from the west ran low over the city.
“I’m on holidays, remember. All I want is for Shea not to get trampled on.”
“Oi! Don’t get on your high horse, mister. You know, and I know, that we can’t overlook things like this. I only wish he’d so much as, you know, hinted-”
“Maybe he did and we didn’t read it.”
“You sound like you’re blaming the world and his mother for this. That he was bamboozled, like. More excuses.”
Minogue ignored Kilmartin’s provocation.
“You’ll set up a leave of absence for him, will you?” he said.
Kilmartin’s tone turned righteous.
“Course I will,” he replied. “We look after our own.”
The Chief Inspector’s eyes slid around the room before lighting back on Minogue. He loosened his tie. His hand strayed to his collar and began stroking his neck.
“Think he’ll try it again, do you?”
“Try what?”
“He tried to top himself, man. Don’t play me for a gobshite here, I all right?”
Minogue held his breath. A Guard at the scene had probably let his suspicions slip and the remark had found its way to Kilmartin.
“Won’t be the same again, that goes without saying,” Kilmartin added.
“What won’t be?”
Kilmartin flung a glare at his friend.
“He won’t be! Hoey. The fella who is as of this moment hiding behind your bloody skirt!”
Minogue knew he mustn’t goad Kilmartin now.
“It’s a good thing he won’t be the same again,” he began. “Who’d want to be the same again? All hemmed in, at the end of his tether. It’s out in the open now. Between the people who care about him, I mean.”
Kilmartin’s eyes took on a glint.
“God, you’re the cute hoor. Out in the open is right. That’s the trouble! Lamb of Jesus, Matt, I can’t have a head-case on staff!”
Minogue clenched his teeth. The Chief Inspector tapped a cigarette against the packet.
“You took me on, Jimmy. Remember?”
“You never tried to do yourself in, man! You had a lot going for you back then. Never looked back either, if I may be so bold as to remark.”
“Shea has a lot going for him.”
Kilmartin spoke as though he hadn’t heard Minogue.
“Never one to lay his cards on the table, Hoey. I mean, I like him and all the rest of it. He’s done great work. But we can’t have things jumping out of the woodwork at us. Especially these days.”
Kilmartin was still now, his cigarette poised above the box. Minogue cast a glance at his colleague. The Chief Inspector stood up and stretched. Then he stood back on his heels and scratched across his belly. He had tried to keep his stomach in over the years, but his frame-his gait, his manner, his words-all mocked the idea of containment.
“The last cases were ugly, to say the least,” said Minogue. “Maybe Shea couldn’t leave them behind him in the Squad room. The pressure-”
“Oi, oi! What’s this, mister?” Kilmartin waded in. “A fucking sermon? Don’t talk to me about pressure! My insides are like the AA map to pressure! There’s surgeons building holiday homes and buying Jags and retiring early with what stress has done to my insides. Hoey doesn’t have to answer to the public and those fucking jackals in the media-I do. How many people do you know who could take that kind of pressure?”
Minogue nodded his head and pretended to listen. Kilmartin concluded his peroration and tapped him on the shoulder. The Inspector looked through the window at a gap in the clouds. He decided to drive along the seafront by Sandymount on his way home.
Kilmartin grunted and raised a conciliatory arm as if to conjure away the stupidity of those who could never understand him. Minogue knew that his colleague was coming down from his vituperative peak.
“I mean to say, Matt. We’re getting it from both sides, man.”
Minogue decided it was time to light a fuse.
“Absolutely,” he murmured. “Never more important to stick together than now.”
“Definitely,” Kilmartin declared, and tapped his forehead with his cigarette. “As long as we’re 100 per cent upstairs. The lift has to go to the top floor in our line of work, Matt, and don’t forget it.”
Kilmartin lit his cigarette. It was time, Minogue decided.
“By the way. Bumped into Tynan the other day.”
Kilmartin turned around one-eyed through the smoke. He stared at his colleague.
“Told me he’d pay us a visit,” Minogue added. “To, em, throw a few ideas around.”
“You don’t say, now. Tell him, if it’s not too much trouble, to throw his ideas out the shagging window, would you? They’re giving me heartburn.”
“I’ll see what he has in mind, I suppose, later on sometime.”
“Sometime? Jesus Christ, Matty, don’t pretend it was the dog that farted! Ever so sly, you drop this in my lap. What the hell does Tynan want? Come on now!”
Minogue shrugged and looked back into Kilmartin’s stony glare.
“Wait a minute there, you. Whoa right there. What are you trying to tell me? That there’s some connection between Hoey making a gobshite out of himself and Tynan’s blackguarding? Call a spade a spade, man!”
Minogue looked Kilmartin up and down before reaching into the cache of phrases he had built up over the years to deal with the likes of James Kilmartin. He allowed his eyes to open wide and he spoke in a whisper.
“Good God, Jim, what sort of man do you think I am?”
Kilmartin put his hands up.
“Oh, Christ, will you listen to that? Oi! Don’t piss on my shoes and then tell me it’s raining. Why did you wait until now to tell me that Tynan’s on the prowl our way? Is this what loyalty means to you? That you’ll run to Tynan if I don’t cover for Hoey here?”
Fully inflated now, the Chief Inspector disdained further words. He shook his head in disgust as he moved around the office. Minogue wondered if Eilis were recording all this.
“You’ve known me long enough, bucko,” Kilmartin resumed in a low growl. “I’m surprised at you. I eat threats and then I spit them out.”
“I sort of thought it’d be nice to, you know, get an idea of what’s on Tynan’s mind.”
Kilmartin spun on his heel.
“What the hell does that mean? Aren’t you in here to con me into something for Hoey?”
“You know Tynan’s under pressure to disperse us, Jim.”
“Thanks for the tip there, Sherlock. Tell me something I don’t know. Tynan’s top dog, in case you didn’t know. He tells us all when to jump. Frigging Tynan. What’s his thing, Tynan? Jesus, I still can’t get a fix on him. The bastard.”
Kilmartin stopped by the window. The two policemen fell to watching this patch of the world.
“Listen, Matt,” Kilmartin said at last. “I’m not questioning your motives. You’re saying to me keep Hoey aboard or else-”
“-it’s not-”
“Shut up. I know what you’re saying better than you seem to. I’m saying to you that I’ll weigh things in the balance as I decide. Like the quality of the job you do on Tynan.”
“What job exactly?”
“You know what I mean. Get Tynan off my back. The Squad’s back. Maybe he doesn’t believe me when I tell him. You try it. Tell him the Guards down the country would make a pig’s mickey of a murder investigation. Tell him. Show him.”
For an instant, Minogue saw Bourke’s shadowed face in the sun outside the hotel in Ennis. He watched Kilmartin grinding his cigarette into the ashtray.
“I’m going to look around in the files,” he said, and rose from the chair. “Pretend I’m not here.”
Minogue didn’t need to look away from the riot of sunshine to know that Kilmartin’s face was telling him he wished that were indeed so.
Fifteen minutes later, Kilmartin stopped by Minogue. The Inspector stayed on his hunkers by the filing cabinet, ignoring Kilmartin for the most part.
“What are you looking for? I probably know it already.”
“Negative, Jimmy. Remember, I’m not here.”
Minogue’s eyes darted to the thumbed-back folder as his fingers dawdled through the files. He held the folder with his left hand and reached in with his right to turn back the tag.
“Bingo,” he whispered.
Kilmartin was lighting a tigarillo. Minogue reached down, loosened the folder from the press of its neighbours and stood up. He kicked the drawer shut while Kilmartin blew gusts of smoke toward the ceiling. Minogue cleared a path through the smoke with his free hand.
“Well, seeing as there’s nobody here,” said Kilmartin.
Minogue guessed from the forced tone that Kilmartin had probably squeezed out a sneaky fart.
“That’s an old file copy, that. Wasn’t our work. Divisional HQ file. What are you looking for?”
Minogue leaned against a cabinet and scanned the summary of the judgement. As he did, Kilmartin’s bygone fart insinuated itself into his awareness. The Inspector swore under his breath, held his breath and stood.
“Well?” said Kilmartin, and followed Minogue.
The Inspector turned on him.
“Honour of God, Jim, don’t fart in here at least. Show a bit of mercy, man.”
Kilmartin leered around his cigar.
“Tell me what you’re up to, so.”
“This case here. I just wanted to look over the summary.”
“To what end, Mr Trick-of-the-Loop?”
“Maybe the Tynan one,” Minogue murmured. “Eventually. A long shot.”
He sat down and flicked slowly through the photocopies. He jotted the names down as he came across them. Dan Howard, Sheila Hanratty, Garda Tom Naughton. Sergeant Raymond Doyle, sergeant in the station in Portaree. The Coroner’s certificate presented at trial, autopsy performed by Dr J. Marum of Galway city, author not called.
Kilmartin blew a smoke-ring across the desk at Minogue.
“Jimmy, here’s a case that we never had a hand in. Not even consultancy that I can see.”
Kilmartin blew another ring. “Maybe there wasn’t an unlawful killing involved.”
Minogue ignored the sarcasm.
“Didn’t you hear me telling you that it’s an old file copy?” Kilmartin went on. “Wherever it came from was all Divisional work. That’s before your time here. Ancient history.”
“A girl killed in a house fire near Portaree, County Clare. Convicted for manslaughter, received a life sentence-”
“A life sentence? Sounds tough. Are you sure?”
“-James Bourke. No participation by the Squad.”
“You said that already. That’s back in the time of the Rood, man. A lot of stuff wasn’t in place and coordinated back then, as I recall.” Another well-formed ring emanated from Kilmartin.
“Common enough then,” Minogue went on, “to let the local Guards dispose of a murder case?”
“Christ on Calvary hill, man, don’t you be listening to me at all around here? That’s what I keep on banging me head against the wall about trying to convince the powers that be, every time the bloody topic of ‘decentralisation’ comes up the shagging pipe from some crank Super in frigging Ballygobackwards. Things have improved since then, we all know that, but the same thing could conceivably happen in the morning.” Kilmartin paused and puffed on his cigar.
“ ‘Conceivably,’” said Minogue.
“Shut up a minute,” suggested the Chief Inspector. “Such was done, that I can say. And several times there was an almighty pig’s mickey made of things, let me tell you. Do you remember the case of that young fella killing the married woman, the Shaughnessy thing in Cork? He nearly walked the first day of the trial on account of know-it-alls in Mallow that decided they could handle everything. They made a bollocks of it. Lost half their evidence when some bloody barrister fresh out of school in his robes drove a coach and horses through the exhibits.”
Kilmartin perched on the edge of his desk and leaned in over Minogue. “Christ, tell that one to Tynan if he gives you the chance. Don’t you remember that one? Jesus wept, man. Some of the exhibits were kept in a drawer along with first-aid stuff and leftover egg sandwiches. Stuff wasn’t even catalogued! And then the fella who attended the PM got sick and left the room for a half an hour, bejases, so the defence nearly put it over that the Guards didn’t even have consistent control over the bloody corpse to be sure of cause of death! Such a mess! Comical.”
“I had a conversation with a barrister below in Ennis-”
“Your time is your own to waste, man. It’s a free country.”
“-and what he recalled of the thing is true so far. According to him, the whole thing deserves a good scrutiny at the very least.”
“A good scrutiny indeed,” Kilmartin whinnied. “Sue us, then. The bollocks.”
“Sue the Guards in Portaree and in Ennis, you mean.”
“But maybe they had an open-and-shut case then. Christ, maybe the local Guards actually got it right for once and someone’s taking you for a gom, pal.”
“Count in the last ten years the number of murder cases which didn’t have our involvement.”
“It’s not statutory procedure that we invade every town and village in Ireland when there’s a murder,” said Kilmartin. “I’ve seen murder cases put to rest with a coroner’s inquest. But if you think any case was made a bollocks of, or hushed up… Far be it from me, etcetera.”
Minogue flipped the folder shut. The pungent staleness of the papers lodged in his nose.
“The fella who was convicted, he’s back on the streets. I saw him.”
Kilmartin put on a biddable expression.
“Look, now. If you’re fishing for prime examples of Guards down the country making iijits of themselves when the Squad is not called in, you should find something more recent to feed Monsignor Tynan with. I’m all for that.”
Minogue looked at his watch. Hoey’d be finished by now. He stood up.
“Here, lookit,” Kilmartin said brightly. “Are you planning to kill someone below in Clare, yourself? And then close the case in record time to make headlines? Public relations, like? What about the potshots they’re taking at the tourist cottages down there?”
“You’re a laugh a minute, James,” said Minogue, barely listening.
Something remained just outside his grasp as he sat there. Kilmartin issued smoke-rings indolently into the squad room. Minogue’s eyes began to smart from the smoke that now hovered in layers around him. He looked up at his tormentor and friend. Up, he decided. Out of here to get Shea Hoey. He rose and picked up the file.
“Tell me something. Are the records for sittings of the Central Criminal Court from, say, more than ten years back or so still kept in paper?”
“The books of evidence, yes,” Kilmartin declared. “The summaries of judgements, yes. You know yourself that transcripts are typed up in full only if there’s an appeal launched-and only then if it’s not ab initio.”
“ Ab inito?”
“Will I turn that into normal conversation for you? It means you throw the old trial out completely and start from scratch again. That’s what it means.”
“I didn’t know you spoke Latin.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, jack. I could nearly say the whole Mass in Latin. Yes I could, by God. Memory is a very odd thing, the way it all comes back to you after I don’t know how many years. I remember the whole thing nearabouts. The whole mass.”
“I should ask you to say it, so.”
“Huh. A lot you’d know about going to Mass. I’ll tell you this: you could find out a lot more that’d surprise you, if you try to give me the shitty end of the stick with this, this…whatever bollicking around you’re going to do between Hoey and Tynan.”
“I’ll bear that in mind now, James.” He waved the file at Kilmartin.
“Watch your back, that’s my advice,” Kilmartin called out. “And keep your eye on the ball.”
Did he mean Tynan? Hoey? Crossan? Minogue rolled his eyes at Eilis as he hurried out into the sunlit morning outside.
Minogue caught sight of Hoey immediately he turned the corner by the National Gallery. He stopped behind a lamp post to observe him. Hoey was leaning against the lip of a water trough set into a monument opposite the Gallery. Sunlight filtered through the branches hanging over the railings of Merrion Square. Very occasionally, a leaf fell to the footpath, unhurried by the passage of the constant traffic on Merrion Row.
Framing Hoey with its tired splendour was a memorial fountain erected two centuries ago to the Duke of Rutland. Dublin’s coal-smoke winters had rendered most of the cornice moulding and the edges of the pilasters above Hoey indistinct. It had been over a century since either lion’s head had spewed water into the troughs. Minogue had been used to seeing down-and-outs lying on the stone benches at the foot of the monument. He watched Hoey watching a couple as they marched by arm in arm and kicking at the leaves. His features were tight and drawn as though a wind unknown to others on the same street was blowing dust into his face. The Inspector took a deep breath, put on a smile and skipped across the street. Hoey watched him approach.
Minogue gained the broad footpath, and the stone mass loomed over him. Hoey stood on his cigarette and shoved his hands into his pockets. Minogue glanced up at the monument. Sculpted stone panels that had contained figures in mourning were incomplete. Other sorrowing figures in Roman dress were missing heads; supplicating arms had broken off at the forearms. Noble death in classical relief, Minogue thought. And here’s Hoey, a round-shouldered and pasty-faced survivor in a creased coat, looking small and defeated. Minogue’s stomach went wormy and the fake smile began to lock his jaws.
Hoey nodded and looked to a passing bus. Minogue nodded back but could think of nothing to say.
“Well,” he tried at last. “Let’s pick up some stuff from your place and put it in the car. Then we don’t have to be chasing wardrobes around the town.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Stay at our place awhile, Shea.”
“Well…”
He smiled witlessly at Hoey and shrugged. Hoey’s suspicious squint lasted several seconds. Minogue looked around at the trees and waited. He thought of Hoey at his desk, tired, smoking while he did the work he was best at, organising evidence. Tagging, notating, receipting, filing-preserving impeccable chains of evidence for the State case. Minogue worked well with him, believing that, like himself, Hoey could let his thoughts become still when he needed to. Methodical and routine but acutely sensitive to nuances at a scene, Hoey instinctively absorbed details. Minogue knew that his colleague left those details in suspension while he waited and then coaxed the impressions and facts into some trajectory as he felt their gravitational pull stronger. Hoey was sizing him up.
“Come on, Shea. I have the car parked down in Nassau Street.”
Hoey began to say something but Minogue was gone. Hoey caught up with him.
“Your man says hello, by the way,” Hoey said.
“Herlighy? Great.”
Minogue kept striding down Nassau Street. Part of him observed the passing faces, the doors, the signs and traffic, the commonplace mysteries of his city. Its every detail seemed too sharply present in the November sunlight. His mind went to Ennis, Bourke’s eyes in shadow outside the Old Ground Hotel. Maybe today Bourke was standing across from Howard’s constituency office. Crossan’s wryly chiding words about forgetting to do his devotions for All Souls, to hang his cloth by the holy wells for a cure, came to him then: there are no ghosts in Dublin?
“Are you going to see Herlighy again?” he heard himself ask Hoey.
Hoey stopped and lit a cigarette. Minogue watched him exhale and look away down the street.
“I will, I suppose.”
“Good. After we get set up in the clothing and toothbrush line, what do you say to going wall-eyed looking at a microfiche?”
Hoey kept his stare on the railings of Trinity College ahead. Minogue recalled that a car bomb had gone off by this part of Trinity’s wall, killing seven or eight people. Wasn’t one of them a child? The wall and the railings had withstood the blast, but scars remained gouged into the limestone.
“A microfiche of what?”
“Has to do with a thing down in Clare years ago. Newspaper reports. Sort of dabble in the archaeology business a bit. What do you think?”
Hoey’s one-eyed gaze wandered past Minogue’s. It settled on the far end of the street where sunlight cannonaded out of the mouth of Grafton Street, a golden vision that seemed unattached to the rest of Dublin city.
“Ow!”
“What?”
The one with the ear-ring took his thumb out of his mouth.
“That big stone I dropped on me thumb the other day. I don’t know if it needs looking at. Ow!”
The driver was about to look over when he saw the figure step out from the hedge.
“Jesus.”
In the gloom ahead he saw the cars parked tight in to the hedge. A Guard wearing a reflective waistcoat stepped out into the middle of the road.
“Don’t get all panicky,” hissed the passenger. “There’s nothing we have to worry about.”
The driver rolled down the window. To his right he saw movement in a gap in the hedge. There were two men in the ditch. They held submachine pistols close to their sides.
“Howiya,” the driver called out. The Guard was young, and he wore a flak jacket under the fluorescent green waistcoat. The driver remembered him from a checkpoint by Rannagh a few days ago. He looked cold.
“Lads,” the Guard called out. He stood on tiptoe looking through the open window. “Are ye done for the day?”
“We jacked it in for the day, all right,” said the driver. “Had enough battering stones and pouring cement.”
“Open up the back and I’ll take a look,” said the Guard.
“Fire away,” said the driver.
Driver and passenger turned in their seats to watch the door swinging up. A plainclothes Guard joined the one in uniform. A flashlight was snapped on.
“Are ye nearly done with it?” the Guard said.
“Another couple of weeks and we’ll be out,” the driver replied. “A palace entirely.”
“Good work being done, is there?”
“Only the best.”
The plainclothes Guard seemed to deliberate about going around to the other door. He shrugged and looked in at the two.
“All right, lads.”
He drove away from the checkpoint slowly and nodded at the two in the ditch. The evening had already taken over the ditches and hedges. The headlights swept over their faces. They didn’t move, but their eyes followed the van until it was past them.
“Whoa, Jases!” said the passenger and whistled. “They’re getting very fucking serious! Did you see the pair in the ditch? Wearing their guns out in the open?”
“Good.”
“Good? Oh, right. Yeah. There’s that to it. Ow.” He put his thumb in his mouth. “Bloody planning permission and all the shagging stones and cement they want in, just to make it look like it belongs here,” he mumbled around his thumb.
“The vernacular, they call it,” said the driver. “Native materials.”
The passenger sniffed.
The driver concentrated on the road ahead. He wondered if there was another checkpoint ahead. They had spent most of the day carrying and sorting the stones they needed for the walls of the addition. The stone is local, he thought, the tradesmen are local and we’re being paid by a man from Dusseldorf. And this guy wants his holiday cottage in fucking Ireland to look really Irish.
“He’s gone back to Dublin,” said the driver.
“Who is?”
“Your man. The uncle.”
“So there never was anything to him,” said the passenger.
“The undercover thing? Doesn’t look like it now, does it? Coincidence.”
The passenger began to laugh. The driver looked over.
“What?”
“I was just thinking. The other night. What your man must have done when the bullets started flying. In the window. It’s lucky he was in the jacks!”
The passenger slapped his knee.
“Ow. Mw thumb!”
Hoey had fallen asleep without Minogue noticing. The Inspector drew into the shopping centre and began scouting for a parking spot near to the supermarket. The setting sun crested Two Rock Mountain and flooded the car. Hoey’s breathing turned to snores. Minogue looked at the sleeping policeman and wondered if he should wake him. Hoey looked somehow smaller to him. Deltas of blood vessels stood out on Hoey’s purple eyelids. The face was waxen and his lips were again dry and cracked. He recalled that Hoey had swallowed a pill as they had got into the car. Antidepressant? He levered himself slowly onto the pavement and let his door rest against the latch.
The Inspector rubbed his eyes as he trudged toward the entrance to the supermarket. His eyes still stung and ached from the two hours at the microfiche reader. He might have to concede on a matter of vanity, he reflected, and finally go to an ophthalmologist. No more of his errant bragging to Kathleen about having hunter’s eyes, that he could see what he wanted to see, when he wanted to see it. Hoey had tried to show an interest during the afternoon, but had gone out for a smoke several times. Twice Minogue had sneaked out to make sure Hoey hadn’t fled. From the microfiche he had copied two newspaper reports that hadn’t been in Crossan’s envelope. He had studied them on the reader and again from the photostats, but he’d still found nothing that went beyond what Crossan had already dug up and copied. He’d had to struggle several times to remind himself of the point: it was what hadn’t surfaced that had kept Crossan’s interest.
As he entered the supermarket, Minogue felt the task of shopping to be suddenly exhausting. His mind buckled under the weight of relentless details, of shelves full of foods and household cleaners and spices and a frightening number of things you could fill your home with. He reached for a basket and tried gamely to start his task. Some holiday. Milk, he remembered. Bread? Should he have woken Hoey up and at least asked him what foods he liked?
He balanced two bags of groceries in either arm as he headed back to the car. In the ten minutes he had spent in the shop, half the daylight had drained away into a crucible of cooling yellow which glowed above the shopping centre. He looked ahead for Hoey’s form but couldn’t see him against the sunset glare on the windscreen. Minogue laid his bags down by the boot and poked with the key before looking in the back window. Hoey was gone. He clutched the keys and stepped around the passenger side. Dazed, he stared at the empty seat. His thoughts couldn’t form. He looked over the rows of cars and squeezed the keys in his palm. He was alert now, with an ache low in his stomach.
The Inspector skipped down to the bus-stop and searched the faces of a dozen people there. Had a bus come and gone in the last few minutes? No, said a wary teenager. Minogue wanted to run but he didn’t know where. Had Hoey gone to a pub? Just run away? If Hoey was on the run from him, he meant business. He stood still and felt the panic take hold of him. Hoey the quiet one, the one who had left no hint of what he was going through, had scarpered. Had he woken up suddenly, stricken by the uselessness of things, his defences robbed in sleep?
Minogue ran back to the car-park and headed for the walkway that led to the centre of the shopping centre. Maybe Hoey had gone looking for him in the supermarket. Minogue ran by his car and then stopped short. The two bags of groceries were gone. He leaned down and looked in to find Hoey smoking a cigarette, the glow stronger in the gloom as he drew on it. Minogue held his breath, let it out slowly and sat in behind the wheel. He could not resist a glance at his colleague.
Hoey rolled down the window to let out more smoke.
“Did you forget something?” he asked.
Minogue was still trying to hold his breath. “I did.”
“I woke up and I had no fags,” Hoey murmured. “I thought I might bump into you beyond.” He pointed his cigarette toward the supermarket. “I put the stuff in the back seat.”
Minogue tried to breathe normally as he steered out onto the Lower Kilmacud Road.
“Hard to see anything now, but.” He heard his inane words again. “One minute it’s all right and the next thing you know is that it’s night.”
Hoey nodded and crooked his arm to squint at his watch. Minogue’s heartbeat was slowing now but he could not stop words rushing out of himself.
“The days are getting very short now, yes, they are.”
By nine o’clock, Minogue was both exhausted and uneasy. He was trying not to notice Hoey’s fidgeting. Trying so hard, he noticed it all the more. He looked up from the guidebook to Greece. After a long bath, Hoey was half-heartedly watching a documentary on grizzly bears in Canada. Minogue felt trapped in his own house. Kathleen had discovered that the Costigans up the road needed a visit, and she had left Minogue with a furtive glance of commiseration. Hoey had flicked through some of the books Minogue had left near the fireplace, but the one he had settled on lay open on the same page in his lap this last hour. The ads came on. A well-known comedian began singing about shampoo.
“So this Crossan thinks poorly of the whole thing,” Hoey murmured.
“Yes. More to the point, how it was gathered.”
Minogue ached for a glass of Jamesons. Hoey’s constant shifting in his chair-the leg-crossing, the foot tapping air, the hand straying to his nose and mouth, the incessant flicking of ash into the fireplace, the throat-clearing and the swallowing of phlegm-had all accumulated somewhere in Minogue’s mind until he himself was jittery. He had read exactly four pages of his book in the last hour, and he was beginning to have trouble hiding his irritation.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Hoey and yawned. “Kind of hard to get excited about it.”
He lit up another cigarette. Minogue counted the butts in the ashtray and divided the number into one hundred, the number of minutes he estimated that they had been sitting here. Still layers of smoke shaped by the light overhead reminded Minogue of the holy pictures of his youth. He slid out of his chair and opened the window a crack.
“Sorry,” said Hoey, and began coughing. “I forgot.”
“Smoke away, man. It’s not as bad as what Jim Kilmartin puts out. Between the cigars and the farts-and then those damned Gitanes of Eilis’s.”
Hoey gave a wan smile and rubbed the side of his cigarette around the saucer. He looked around the living room as though assessing the knickknacks and pictures, those weights and anchors of home.
“Did Crossan put any of this down in writing?” Hoey asked. “Any documentation, like?”
“Just Bourke’s ramblings on paper. A few copies of newspaper reports.”
“You didn’t talk to Bourke?”
Minogue shook his head. He joined Hoey in watching a tranquillised grizzly being lifted into a wooden crate and then airlifted, dangling in a net under a helicopter. The nasal tone of the commentator against the bat-bat of the rotors detailed the hopes of the biologists for the grizzly.
Minogue wondered what effects Hoey’s pills had. He watched as the grizzly’s crate came to rest on a small plateau somewhere in the Rockies. Two men entered the picture and began setting up the door of the crate for the bear’s release. Minogue’s exasperation crested. He thought of a walk of the neighbourhood.
“What would you be doing of an evening at home, now, Shea?”
Hoey kept his eyes on the screen. The biologists retreated to safety, ready for the release.
Hoey replied with a cheer which Minogue found disquieting,
“Tell you the truth, I’d probably be in a pub.”
The Inspector struggled to recover from his own folly. He studied Hoey’s profile as the door of the grizzly’s crate was opened. Was it the glare from the screen or was there really a dull sheen of sweat on Hoey’s forehead? Hoey didn’t look keen on a walk. Minogue wanted a bloody drink and couldn’t for fear of tempting Hoey: a prisoner in his own home. He picked up his book and tried to read again. The phone trilled twice before he recognised it as a phone at all.
Crossan screwed the top on the bottle and waited for Minogue to answer. He took a belt of the whiskey and rubbed the glass in a slow semicircle on his desk. An hour ago he had felt that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from puking, but the anger had taken over and had saved him this humiliation and a greater one-being sick in front of two Guards. They’d have it all over the town by tea-time that the great Aloysious Crossan had made a gobshite of himself when the going had got tough. He still felt the outrage and shock like acid in every part of his belly. Ahearne and another Guard, along with Tom Igo, the county coroner, had been waiting for him in the morgue of the County Hospital. The body had been brought there just after nine o’clock last night. It was only this morning, after several hours of Gardai trying to find next of kin, that Ahearne had thought of contacting Crossan.
Jamesy Bourke’s chest had taken most of the charge, but a scatter of pellets from the blast had lodged in his neck. Like those black spots, Crossan thought numbly, recalling from his youth the warts treated with burning lotion. Bourke’s jacket was shredded and soaked in blood. His eyes were still open in shock. One minute Crossan’s throat was tight with outrage, and then, with the sheet pulled back, his stomach had fallen, almost taking his control with it. Only anger and will had prevented him from vomiting. He remembered turning to meet the eyes of the Guards, Ahearne and Murphy, defying their expectations. Yes, I attest that this is the body of James Bourke, known to me personally. The bitter formality had registered on the faces of the two Guards, and Crossan had walked steadily out of the morgue, knowing that he had seen a hint of shame on both faces. Through the rushing noise and the nausea, Crossan had heard Tom Igo whispering wheezily next to his ear that Bourke had “gone instantly.”
Two rings. Where was Minogue? Maybe half-ten was a bit late to be phoning him. What the hell took him back up to Dublin anyway? So he could avoid being bloody-well asked to do something for Bourke. He thought again of Jamesy Bourke’s body being lifted from the compost heap as though he, like his dog, had merely to be disposed of. “Gone instantly”-no: Jamesy Bourke had died slowly over the last twelve years.
The phone was picked up at the other end.
“Minogue?”
Minogue packed two changes of clothes, extra socks and a few books in a soft-sided overnight bag and went downstairs to wait for Kathleen. He tried to imagine her reaction. Would she laugh? She’d want him to take up the job of talking to Mick and Eoin again. Hoey had stretched out his legs and was pouring more tea while the ads rolled. Minogue sat across from him and watched an aging rock star peddle soft drinks.
“Last night,” Hoey said.
“Around eight o’clock, he said,” replied Minogue. “According to what the Guards told Crossan, this Spillner fella thought that it was the same thing that had happened the night before at another place.”
“Was Bourke…?”
“Not at all. He was mooching around the man’s car, looking for something.”
Hoey drew on a fresh cigarette, blew out smoke and scratched at the back of his neck. The pop star of forty-five landed improbably on his feet and was surrounded by teenagers who made skilled, jerky motions in a wave around him. He grabbed one of them-a delighted girl-and she hung on to his arm while stars burst behind them.
“Well, I don’t want to be…”
Hoey left the sentence unfinished and fell to staring at the fireplace. Minogue squirmed and thought of phoning Kilmartin tonight. He looked down at his watch and decided against it. Half-ten. God
Almighty wife of mine hiding out at Costigans’ while we sat here like iijits watching rubbish on the box.
“I don’t want anything backfiring, Shea,” Minogue stated. “I feel bad enough about not having talked to Bourke. I have to go down and find out what happened, at least. But I can’t be looking over me shoulder. You know what I’m saying now.”
Hoey’s puffed eyes remained fixed on the fireplace.
“I might be shaky, but I’m game,” he muttered.
“Look, Shea. It mightn’t be smart to be getting involved in something like this. At this stage.”
Hoey drew hard on his cigarette.
“Did the Squad get a call on it at all yet?”
“Don’t know. I’ll ask Eilis in the morning. This Spillner fella who shot him was brought to the station. He’s been moved to HQ in Ennis since. Crossan told me that he heard that there’s someone coming down from the German Embassy to sort it out too.”
“Where did he get the shotgun?”
“Well, I’m only going on what Crossan was told. Apparently Spillner brought it with him in the boot of his car on a trip here last summer. Since the trouble below in Clare and Limerick and so forth. The arms finds and the shooting and the foofaroo starting up about the tourists buying up places. Last I saw of him he was sitting next to a musician, clapping his hands.”
Kathleen opened the hall door. He intercepted her in the hall as she was taking off her coat.
“Guess where I’m going?” He paused and decided. “Where we’re going, tomorrow. Shea and myself.”