Wot happened wiv yeou enyway?” Melanie McInerny asked Hoey. Hoey’s arm froze, the cigarette within inches of his lips, and he gave her a startled look. She sucked on the straw again and rolled ice at the bottom of her glass.
“How do you mean?” he asked. He cleared his throat while completing his arm’s trip with the cigarette but rested his knuckles against his lips as he coughed.
“Theowse black ooiyes iv yose. Who ’it chew?”
Minogue looked over. Eilo McInerny drank from her vodka. They were sitting in the otherwise deserted lounge of Spring’s Kingdom Bar.
“A car accident,” Hoey murmured with a hint of affronted pride.
“Yeou shuddn’t smoake, should yeou? Dzo yeou jog or anything?”
The surprise was twisted off Hoey’s face by another cough.
“Stop giving him the treatment, Mel,” said Eilo McInerny. “He’s the cop, not you.”
“Yeou smoake too, Mum. It’s desgasting.”
Minogue could only smile. He tried again to reboard the derailed conversation.
“I don’t expect you to have a perfect recall of what happened back then.”
Eilo McInerny took another drink but she would not get back on track.
“Imagine that,” she murmured, the glass poised under her nose. “Shot dead, just like that. By the fella who ran over his dog. The bad luck folleyed him and caught up to him in the end.”
“It’s a tragedy, to be sure, but can we-”
“Tragedy, is it? What the hell would you or the likes of you know about tragedy?”
Melanie looked over at her mother. “Yeou shuddn’t drink nao moahr, Mum.”
That was the bottom half of her second drink, Minogue realised. He was already drifting nicely offshore in the lee of one Jamesons. He hoped he wouldn’t have to keep pace with her. Hoey looked steadfast enough with his 7-Up.
“She gits loike that,” said Melanie with a superior air.
“What?” barked Eilo McInerny, as though returning from a distant place. “What?”
“Shea, you have to get some cigarettes, I daresay,” said Minogue. “Melanie, would you be kind enough to direct my friend here to a shop? Maybe you could help him pick a box of chocolates too, a gift I should maybe bring back to relatives. He’s not really with it as regards that sort of thing.”
Both Hoey and Melanie frowned and stared at Minogue.
“Mum?”
“Go on with you,” said Eilo McInerny. “He won’t bite you.”
Melanie McInerny plodded to the door as though to a firing squad. Her mother watched her go.
“I don’t know from one day to the next if I’m doing the right thing with that one,” she muttered. Minogue heard less of the English accent now. “I couldn’t leave her with Ralph. Ralphie’s an iijit. Nice, but he’s a slob. It’d be neglect with him. He wouldn’t notice her going to the bad. No, I couldn’t leave her there with him.”
“So you came here to try and make a go of things.”
She took out a cigarette and toyed with it. “Yes. Mel is a bit of a curiosity about town. It’s not a holiday for her anymore, though. She gets fed up. She finds school hard here and the kids here are innocent really. But the nuns are very good to her. Whatever else you can say about the nuns…” She lit the cigarette.
“Why did you run today, so?”
She nodded once at the ashtray and pointed her cigarette at Minogue as though locating his head along a gunsight.
“Don’t ask me that again or I’ll fucking throw that at you.”
“Point taken.”
“I don’t plan on getting burnt like what I had done to me before. Now, can you get that through your thick skull? I have responsibilities. I have enough on me plate with a daughter full of hormones, and me with no man here in Tralee. I do me work and I pay me rent. Why would I be volunteering to be put through the mill again?”
“You had a tough time on the stand back then, I believe,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed.
“What do you know about what I went through? You and your ‘tragedy’ and a big long face on you like a dog fishing for his dinner.”
She flicked ash at arm’s length toward the ashtray. It fell a foot short.
“You. Ralphie. Howard. Jamesy Bourke. Your brains in your trousers. Full of chat and buying drinks and joking. All ye want is a poke. Then ye’re gone on to the next one. Do you think for one minute that Jamesy Bourke was different, do you?”
“I didn’t say he was a saint.”
“A saint,” she mimicked. Minogue asked for the same again from the barman.
“When you’re a man, you have the power,” she went on. “Rich or poor, black or white. And when you’re a man that has money in his pocket, or when you have a uniform, the world is your oyster.”
“As a matter of fact, my uniform doesn’t fit me anymore.”
She gave him a scornful grin and waved the cigarette at the ashtray again.
“What about Dan Howard?”
She spoke with little feeling. “Dan Howard is a fucking bastard. And his wife is a jumped-up, money-grubbing bitch. And Tidy Howard, as for that old bags…”
She seemed to catch herself then as if she had spotted herself in a mirror.
“You were dragooned into taking the stand.”
“I was,” she murmured. “I was called as a witness, and I was picked up by the Guards. That prick-Doyle. He was the Sergeant in Portaree at the time. Little did I know that I’d be in court to dirty someone else’s name.”
The barman, a rheumy-eyed man not ten years from retirement, laid down the drinks.
“I had no dinner,” she said. “If I have another one of these, I’ll be plastered. Have to watch the figure and that too.” Minogue watched her poke at the ice and then lick her finger. “There might be a bachelor farmer on the look-out, you never know.”
Her smile was brief and it fell away quickly. She took a gulp of the new drink. Minogue looked at his own Jamesons sitting implacably next to him. How could he preach to Shea Hoey about drink? It’d be like Kilmartin delivering advice about etiquette.
“I was told back then that I could help Jamesy Bourke get off lighter,” she said. “Fool that I was, I didn’t think about how it was going to be done. I half felt sorry for him. My mistake. We both know where that got him, don’t we?”
“You thought he didn’t deserve-?”
“Look,” she broke in. “Jamesy and the rest of them were gobshites. But it wasn’t entirely his fault. Even I could see that, and me knowing Jane. What was the use of throwing one life away for another? The world is full enough of revenge and killing. What use would locking him up for his life be to anyone? I’ve been roughly used in my time. I’ve seen the bad side of people but I’ve survived and still come out human. When you’ve been through what I’ve been through over the years, you don’t be so certain, cocked up in your armchair and looking down your nose while you’re discussing how people go to the bad. He was too simple for the real world. Too stupid, maybe. The way we all are sometimes, maybe. But you can’t live your life like that. You have to wake up sometime.”
“You were given the boot,” said Minogue.
“You said it,” she snapped. “Treated like dirt. Like an iijit. I didn’t see it coming.”
“What for? Liking Jane Clark?”
“I did, you know.” She cast a bitter look at Minogue which caused him to sit still. “Not in the way you people’d like to be thinking it either. Not the way they threw it around in court. Ask yourself how the whole matter came up in that damned courtroom. Go on. You’re the cop. Go on, ask me, then.”
Minogue took a deliberately slow drink of Jamesons.
“You mean that you and Jane Clark had a relationship?”
“Relationship,” she cackled, and coughed. “Where did you get that word? In one of your courses, or off the telly or something?” The coughing took control of her again.
“Go on, say it,” she wheezed. “Say the word!”
She sat upright at the front of her chair, trying by her posture to stave off more coughing. Minogue knew he had to meet her gaze, but the effort of looking over to her was almost too much for him.
“Say it,” she growled. “I bet you like to think about it. Two women. You’re like the rest of them. Come on now, don’t let your side down!”
“Jane Clark and you had a love affair of sorts,” he said.
There was triumph in her eyes.
“Say it like they kept on saying it that day. Lesbian. Homosexual. Perverse.”
The barman looked up from the paper.
“Not all of us are cavemen, you know-”
“‘I’m not like the other ones.’ Like hell you’re not, mister.” She drew fiercely on her cigarette.
“There I was, an ignorant skivvy up on the stand, being made to paint a picture of a lesbian for all the learned gentlemen. Guards and reporters and the judge, and the women-they were worse than the men. They looked at me like I was a piece of shite. There are plenty more words for it and I’ve heard them all, so I have. There I was, in tears, being made to tell people that Jamesy Bourke was provoked by the fact that she was a lesbian as well as a whore. And that she had laughed at him when she was with me, for his efforts at playing the Casanova. Sure with the drink he had every day he wouldn’t have been able to get it up with a crane.”
“I’m just trying to find out what happened. If she was lesbian, well…”
“Hah,” she scoffed, and returned the barman’s stare. The barman let his eyelids down slightly and returned to pencilling in something in the paper.
“Sure, how could she, and she taking up with Dan Howard and Bourke?” she asked. Minogue considered the Jamesons lolling in his glass.
“You’re the cop. You tell me how Bourke’s lawyer, that weaselly looking…what was his name?”
“Tighe.”
“Yeah, him. How the hell did he get wind of me and her, to get me on the stand and take the oath so that the wide world would know that Jane Clark and myself had put our arms around one another?”
“Dan Howard must have told him.”
She squinted through a ribbon of smoke. “You’re not as thick as you look.”
“Because Dan Howard would have heard it from her,” he added. “And in the heat of the row with Bourke, he’d have been doing his best to put Jane Clark down. To persuade Bourke that she wasn’t worth fighting over.”
“Nice work there, Guard. I’ll tell you something, now”-she leaned forward to better deliver the sarcasm-“and it’s this. Dan Howard told him-Jamesy Bourke-sure enough. That must have driven Bourke wild. Does Dan Howard end up on the stand for inciting Bourke to go out there and set her house on fire? Does he? He might as well have handed Jamesy Bourke the order and the bloody matches.
“Yes,” she continued after a scrutiny of her cigarette and some part of her palm, “she was like that. She’d tell him straight out. I know that he knew because he’d come by the hotel with his wandering hands, pushing himself against me. Asking me if I’d try out a man for a change. Jamesy Bourke was the same way. Chasing skirts and slobbering over women and pints. God’s gifts to women.”
“Do you recall Crossan at all?”
“Ah, he was kind of gawky. Tall and skinny, with eyes like Hallowe’en. Nice enough, I suppose, but he wasn’t around much. A Protestant, I believe. Sort of aloof, like you’d be careful talking to him. But I remember thinking he sort of followed Howard around a bit. He was never up to the high jinks that Howard’d get up to. Quiet type.”
Minogue watched her put out the cigarette. Resignation had crept into her face, her tone. He thought of Crossan for a moment, the glaze on the barrister’s eyes when he’d spotted the Howards.
“I wanted a bit of comfort,” she muttered. “That was my big sin. I had no mother, you see. She died when I was three, she was hit by a car. My da was useless. I couldn’t wait to get away. Never keen on the schooling. Fool that I was, I took up as a chambermaid and general skivvy in the hotel in Portaree. It was all right during the summers. You’d be busy and you’d meet people that’d keep your interest. The winters were the pits. Damn the bit of difference I made at the end of the trial anyway. I got me walking papers. He said he couldn’t employ a person of my character. Fucking bastard.”
Minogue sat up again.
“Tidy Howard,” she muttered. ‘“Old Dan’ some of them called him. I hear he’s alive still, in some nursing home after a stroke or something. Another bastard. I hope he rots before he dies.”
The barman folded his newspaper noisily. Minogue looked over at him.
“Is that everything you need to know now, Guard?” she asked. “Cause I don’t want to talk to you again.”
Minogue could think of nothing to say.
The door squeaked open as Hoey and Melanie McInerny returned.
“He solves muhdahs, Mum. Is nit cryeepy?”
Eilo McInerny looked from Minogue to Hoey.
“We’ll hang around here a few minutes,” Minogue said to Hoey.
Eilo McInerny laboured upright.
“Do what ye like,” she said. She pushed her daughter who tottered with the suitcase ahead of her. “But don’t be bothering us again.”
The door swung closed. Minogue sat down heavily on the vinyl seat. The scent of tired-out perfume hung in the air.
“That girl is wild out,” said Hoey. “A maniac. I can’t believe she’s thirteen.”
Minogue looked down at the remains of his whiskey. A young couple, the beginnings of an after-work crowd, entered the pub.
“Another round, men?” the barman called out.
Minogue gave him a look of manic intensity. “What would we want more drink for? Do you want us to be dragging ourselves out of Tralee with no shoes on our feet? Our pockets hanging out? What kind of a man are you at all? We’ve been very ably fleeced here already. Where’s your telephone?”
The barman maintained his expression of solemn detachment.
“You’ll be passing it on yer way out.”
Minogue yawned and stretched all the way to the ferry dock in Tarbert. They arrived just in time to see the ferry twenty yards offshore, heading away from them. The estuary was at full tide and the Clare shore was softened by a veil of drizzle. Muddy, grey-green swells were beginning to splash against the rocks with more insistence by the minute. He was only now beginning to get the better of the whiskey. He turned the key and tapped at the wiper lever. Hoey was smirking.
“I’m glad to see that one of us is in fine form at least. What has you so chipper?”
“The pair in Tralee,” said Hoey. “Ever see anything like them? They’re a team, there’s no doubt.”
“You missed her speaking her mind about the Howards etcetera.”
“I’d say she laid it out straight as a die,” Hoey said. Minogue looked away to the water. Hoey’s voice dropped to a monotone now. “You badly want to show them up here in Clare, don’t you? Russell and company.”
“I suppose I do, at that,” murmured Minogue. “But more than that, I’m going to find out what happened that night. To answer your question, though, it would please me to find out that they had made a mess of the Bourke case, yes.”
The smirk returned to Hoey.
“It’d please the Killer more,” he murmured. “Here. I have to take a leak after all that 7-Up.”
Minogue watched his colleague slouch out into the rain. He gave up trying to see clearly through the windscreen and thought about Jane Clark. She had been a woman with the nerve and the will to set herself up in a foreign country, in rural Clare. She had had experience of the world well beyond whatever Jamesy Bourke or Dan Howard might pretend to. Here was a woman who had slept with the both of them and made iijits of them into the bargain. Her mocking had probably excited Bourke and Howard even more. Howard could have laughed in return, and even encouraged more, but Bourke would have been more touchy. He thought of Kathleen and himself, in the sand-dunes in Brittas Bay, frantic, whispering, wrestling. He squirmed in his seat as the desire pulsed though him and ground in his stomach.
She had slept with Eilo McInerny: low score on the inhibition scale. Back with Howard: yes, he might even have enjoyed her mockery. Not Bourke: rooted locally by land, by habit, but fired with the ambition of being a poet, what Kilmartin would describe as a few sandwiches short of a proper picnic. How would Bourke have reacted to her reciting the names of a score of lovers? Was Howard more free and easy or just less involved? Howard might have been the duller man, unimaginative. Son and heir, he could grin and move on to the next. Bourke would have idealised her. Her scorn would have flayed him.
The warmth surged in his belly, stirring his loins. What a land for Bourke to find a woman with a sex drive she wasn’t ashamed of. He shifted again. His mouth was dry. He thought of Sheila Howard, and his forehead became suddenly itchy. Did she contain this boyo of a husband? Was she charged with an eroticism in private? A wave of prickly heat settled around the top of his forehead. Damnation, he thought, getting flustered, sitting here swelling up like a teenager. He opened the window and received for his trouble a spray of fine, cold rain. Eilo McInerny’s words came back to him. Crossan, aloof: jealous of Howard? Hoey got into the car in a hurry and slammed the door hard against the weather.
“God, it’s hot in here,” he muttered.
Minogue’s mind flared with embarrassment. Had Hoey sensed what feelings had bullied him these last few minutes?
“We need to talk to Dan Howard,” said Minogue.
“If he’s in town,” said Hoey.
Minogue switched on the ignition and batted the stick for the wipers. Was it getting darker, or had the clouds settled lower over the water? A finger’s width from the blurred Clare shore, the ferry had embarked on its return trip. The Inspector blinked back to the present. The air in the car was stale and damp, full of the smell of Hoey’s wet coat, itself redolent of cigarette smoke. Minogue flicked on the wipers again. The ferry was clearer now, half-way, he calculated. He watched it breast the estuary waves, bucking slightly. In the mirror he studied the faces in a car nosing in behind. Two subdued-looking children to either side of an infant asleep in the back seat looked out opposite windows. The infant’s face was turned awkwardly, mouth agape, and the expression suggested he or she was about to cry. The driver, a farmer with heavy sideburns, wore a dark suit and a look of resignation. From the passenger seat, a woman stared at the water. A funeral?
He looked again to the ferry and saw smaller creases in the waves alongside it. He held his hand on the wiper-switch and concentrated on that part of the water.
“Well, I declare,” he began to say, “if those aren’t porpoises or seals or something. They’re following the boat, man!” Hoey turned to stare at the ferry too.
The weight of the afternoon, all its irritations and disappointments, dropped off the Inspector’s shoulders. Across time and place, beyond time and place, he relived the days he had fished with his uncle off Doonbeg. His uncle had pointed them out as they approached the rowboat. Minogue, eight or nine and afraid, had dropped his rod. Not to worry, his uncle had said. He recalled his uncle’s face going blank as he’d looked toward the glistening bodies arcing and slicing the water nearby. Not to worry, they had come to inspect us, that’s all. Now the same wonder stirred Minogue, but, he realised, in his own rising exhilaration was envy.
“They’re seldom here. Maybe the water is warmer this year, and we don’t know it.”
The ferry in, the porpoises headed back toward the mouth of the estuary. Minogue waited for three cars to disembark and then drove on. The car with the yawning, sombre family followed. The wind drove rain and sea against the boat and the sprays of rain hissed against the windscreen. The Inspector stepped out into the water-world and felt the muffled throbbing of the engine rising up through his bones. Waiting on the deck for even a minute meant a thorough drenching. He entered the small waiting-cabin under the bridge and had to pull the door hard against the wind. Despite the rain on the windows here, he’d still get a fair view of the porpoises.
Rain lashed the windows harder as the ferry moved away from the dock. Minogue scanned the waters. Five minutes passed but he couldn’t find the porpoises again. They were out there somewhere, gleeful and rapturous, he knew. Shudders of waves slapping against the hull passed up through his legs as he stared at the water. Disappointment came to him as a tired ache in his shoulders, with gravity and age winning easily at the end of the gloomy afternoon. He made one last sweep of the waters before stepping out onto the car-deck.
Hoey was smoking and listening to traffic news from Dublin. Minogue took a notepad from the glove compartment.
“They’re gone,” he said. He began writing names on the pad. Hoey watched him but said nothing. Minogue took out photocopied pages from the envelope and glanced down at his own notes in the margins.
“Tom Naughton, the Guard who worked with Doyle, was first on the scene. Maybe we’re a bit late for doing anything more today.”
Hoey glanced at the clock. Minogue’s stomach registered the ferry’s yaw.
“Where will we put up, so?” Hoey asked.
“One of the B amp; Bs out the Clarecastle Road. I thought of my brother’s place but…”
Another wave thudded against the hull and the air in the car vibrated with the relayed shock. The wind smeared raindrops across the windscreen. The ferry was eased expertly into the Killimer dock, its engine rallying and slowing to negotiate the waves. Minogue felt the faint lateral sway of the boat, drawn by the waves, before it came to rest with a bump. He waved at the man lifting the gates and called out through the slit in the window as he inched the Fiat forward onto the ramp, “Damp.”
The man was young, and his face shadowed in the hood of his rain-suit reminded Minogue of a monk. The Fiat hesitated at the bottom of the ramp before beginning the incline up to the Kilrush Road.
“Well, now,” said Hoey. “Look ahead there. We’re back to civilisation here now.”
A Garda checkpoint was in place where the short road to the dock met up with the Kilrush Road. Minogue found first gear and approached the two Guards slowly. Rain poured thinly from their hats as they leaned to look in the window.
“Hello now,” said one. “Where are ye coming from?”
Minogue had his card out. In his side vision he saw a figure stirring across the back window. He reached up with the card while Hoey tendered his own to the Guard on his side of the car. The Inspector looked back and through the streaming window he saw a hooded figure standing to the driver’s side, just out of sight of his wing mirror.
The Guard tried not to look surprised as he returned the card.
“Thanks, now,” he said.
Minogue guessed that the two Ford Granadas were Emergency Response Units.
“We didn’t see ye on the way down,” said Minogue. “Around the two o’clock mark.”
The Guard shrugged.
“Ah, we do the spot checks for a couple of hours. Move around a lot,” he murmured. “Catch them on the move is the idea.”
“‘The West’s Awake, The West’s Awake,’” Minogue half-sang, half-growled.
“You said it,” the Guard grinned. “Pass on, now.”
“By the way, is head-the-ball behind us from Dublin?” Minogue asked.
The Guard took quick control of his smile but it lived on as a wry cast to his face.
“How well you spotted him now. Was it the cars beyond?”
“As well as where he’s standing, with the hardware hanging under his coat. Never thought we’d see Clare so lively, I can tell you.”
“Ah, it might blow over…sooner or later,” said the Guard. The expression on his face reminded Minogue of a farmer guessing on the weather.
“If only they’d stick to painting slogans on the walls.”
Minogue wished the sodden Guard good luck and headed for the Ennis road. No shilly-shallying around the bog-roads by Carabane trying to save a few miles either, he determined. Cars the age of his sclerotic Fiat that had started out on such boreens had never reached their destinations.
Save for streetlights smeared on the black, shiny streets, Ennis was grey and unfamiliar. Minogue parked under Crossan’s office window.
“See the score with him,” he muttered. “It’ll only take a minute. Then we’ll go and get a bit of tea or something. Have you an appetite in that line?”
“As a matter of fact,” Hoey whispered, “I have a fierce thirst on me.”
The despondent urgency in his voice startled Minogue. He looked to Hoey’s face and remembered his own whiskeys in Tralee while Hoey had nursed 7-Up. He knocked and made room for Hoey in the meagre shelter of the doorway. Crossan flung the door open energetically.
“Yiz are back,” he announced. “Come on up.”
Minogue felt his mood flattening out with each step as they trudged up the stairs after Crossan.
“Ye’ll have a drink,” Crossan said.
Minogue struggled with his reply. “None at all thanks. A bit of tea and the prospect of a bed would do wonders to, er, build morale.”
“Had a call from Dan Howard,” Crossan called out. “Wants to help out with funeral expenses and what have you. Himself and the missus want to help in any way they can.”
“Is Howard in Ennis right now?” Minogue asked.
Crossan nodded. “I told him that I’d call by his house tonight if I could find the time,” the lawyer said. He looked toward Hoey. “That eye of yours is going green. Is that a good sign?”
“I don’t know,” said Hoey.
“I’ll go with you,” said Minogue.
Crossan hesitated. Rain blew across the window with a sigh.
“Let’s eat something for the love of God,” said Minogue. “Oh. I need to use the phone here first.”
Crossan waved his arm over the phone and Minogue sat forward to reach it. He dialled his home number and watched Crossan shrug into his coat. Why had Crossan hesitated, he wondered? The phone was picked up.
“It’s me, Kathleen,” he said. “Your present husband. I’m in Ennis. It’s raining.”
“That’s not news to me,” she declared. “Tell me what else.”
He detailed the sighting of the porpoises from earlier in the day, the trip to Tralee.
“Is Shea Hoey holding up yet?”
Minogue glanced over. Hoey was studying the ceiling, his head resting on the chair-back.
“Yes, or so it looks.”
“He’s there beside you?”
“That’s true.”
“I only hope he doesn’t do something wild, you know,” she went on in a whisper. “Because you might get caught up in it. I got to thinking that, you know, he should be staying up here in Dublin to get his, you know, treatment. I worry about him being next to you. What could happen, I mean.”
“You should have seen them. I remember wanting to ride on their backs. Off they went, happy as Larry, I don’t doubt, off out to sea. Live with them and never come back home to the farm.”
“What? What are you going on about? Those creatures? Be serious now.”
Minogue took her advice. Yes, he had enough changes of clothes and was installed in a good B amp; B. He concluded the chat with a request to his wife to check yesterday’s temperature in Athens. When he put down the phone, both Crossan and Hoey were looking at him.
Minogue thanked the waitress and started immediately in on the black pudding, a blood sausage favoured in rural areas yet. A generous portion, along with the waitress’s commiserations about the unsettled weather, accompanied the mixed grill.
“Kathleen asked how we were doing on our, em, hobby.”
Hoey grasped a chip with his fingers.
“What did you tell her?”
Much to Minogue’s distaste, Hoey kept a cigarette going in the ashtray, taking pulls at it between chips. The long plate-glass windows of the Beehive Restaurant were densely freckled with rain. Hardly a car passed on the puddled street.
“I informed her that we had the personnel to do a right good job of it. That’s probably a way of saying that we’ve gotten nowhere yet. But that we might know better tomorrow.”
Hoey munched reflectively on a chip.
“That wasn’t so big of a whopper,” he murmured.
Minogue watched two cars moving slowly down the street. A customer opened the door and Minogue heard the hiss of tyres from the Fords. Each car had three men in it, he noted. Light from the restaurant caught the antennae waving by the back windows of the cars. The faces were in shadow until the car drew level with the restaurant. A young man stared in the window and his eyes met Minogue’s for several moments. A hard-case from Dublin, the Inspector registered: prowling. The face fell back into shadow as the car passed. Hoey’s eyes were still fixed on the empty street.
“The cavalry,” said Hoey. “It’s getting to be like a garrison town.”
Minogue worked on his grill but had to leave most of the chips. He dared more coffee but wished he could smoke to blunt its taste.
“Kathleen asked how you were doing.”
Hoey rubbed his nose with a knuckle and concentrated on moving the ashtray in a pavane around the Formica. Minogue suspected that his colleague was putting his fingers to work so that his hands would not shake.
“Looked better by the hour, I told her. More or less, like. What I didn’t tell her, of course, is that I’m worried about leaving you on your own tonight while I go over to Howard’s place with Crossan.”
“Well, let me go along with frog-eyes and yourself, so.”
“Two Guards off the Murder Squad, Shea? I don’t think that’d be a sound move. I want it to be as social as it can be. More will come of it.”
“The Clare connection?”
“I suppose. Sorry.”
Hoey’s fingers slowed, and he rubbed his forehead with his thumb. He and Minogue had booked into a bed and breakfast run by a Mrs McNamara. She had kept her curiosity in check for the moment, issuing a great welcome for her two guests. She explained the weather to them, told them that there was plenty of hot water, the prospect of a session with melodeons in Davitt’s pub, told them there was another bathroom at the back of the house, asked them if they liked a big breakfast, invited them down to the parlour to watch the Miss Ireland beauty contest on the television tonight, recommended visits to the Ailwee Caves and the Folk Village by Bunratty.
The ashtray had begun its segue again. Hoey didn’t look up when he spoke.
“Tell Kathleen I’m all right. Considering.”
Minogue’s mind was drawn to the movement of the ashtray.
“I’ll head back to Mrs McNamara,” Hoey added. “Have a wash-up. I’ll take a gander at what Miss Ireland’s like this year.”
Minogue wrenched his eyes away from the mesmerising movements of the ashtray. He tried to lighten the atmosphere. He remembered the holy water font by Mrs McNamara’s door and the picture of the Sacred Heart reddened by the glowing bulb. Their widespread use and illumination on the island surely landmarked Ireland for sightseeing aliens, he believed.
“If you’re watching with Mrs Mac, I’d stick to the details about charm, personality and poise, Shea. Rather than dwell on the merely physical, I mean.”
Hoey feigned mild amusement.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “You can even take a drink or two with Crossan and not feel bad.”
“If I’m treating you like an iijit, Shea…”
“You’re not, it’s all right. I just have to decide for myself with this drink thing.” Hoey sniffed and slowed the ashtray’s dance,
“Us driving around today,” he murmured, “it’s hard to say. A few times I had the strangest ideas come into my head. It’s like I’ve lost something. Something is over. And I know that I can’t go back and get it, whatever ‘it’ is. Never. But I’m kind of glad of it.”
Hoey let go of the ashtray abruptly and pushed it into the middle of the table. Immobile, it seemed to draw his attention even more. He snapped open his packet of cigarettes, lit one and stared at the spotted, violet window.
“Do ye want anything else?” asked the waitress.
“No, thanks,” said Minogue.
He watched her load up with plates and head back for the counter. Hoey’s face eased, as though he had just understood a subtle joke. He nodded toward the window.
“I was looking at that window when we came in. For a few minutes I didn’t realise that the fella in the window was me. Did that ever happen to you?”
Minogue nodded.
“You are who you are,” Hoey said. “Hardly news now, is it? I’m not proud of what I did. I’m not ashamed of it either. But it’s me, and I’m here. That’s it. That’s all of it.”
Hoey’s face had cleared of lines. He returned to gazing at the window as though it were a lush landscape where he could see forever.
“If Herlighy heard that, he’d sign me in somewhere, I’ll bet you.”
Minogue held fast to his wish not to interrupt.
“Look at you, though,” Hoey went on. “Nothing seems to knock you down.”
“I have Kathleen and the children, Shea. And I do enjoy being around Jimmy and the others-”
Hoey waved away Minogue’s words with a tired, knowing grin.
“Yeah, yeah. The Killer looks out every day of his life to see how he can look good and have people think he’s the bees’ knees.”
“He’s a good leader, Shea. Has to crack the whip sometimes. But he leaves us plenty of room.”
“He’ll turf me out. That’s the kind of room he’ll give me.”
“He will not,” Minogue retorted. He met Hoey’s eyes. “I won’t let him. And that’s that.”
Hoey’s eyes lost their piercing intent after several moments and slipped back to the window.