The barman reached out over the clutter of bottles and glasses for Moore's money. The pub was full of smoke. The seats were long gone, occupied since early evening. Nearly everyone in the pub appeared to be drunk or at least well on the way to being drunk. Faces glowed with the heat and the beer. Raucous laughter, a shout, more laughter; eyes closed, laughing helplessly with mouth agape, teeth showing to the gums. Everybody was pissed, Moore decided.
He sipped at the beer before swallowing. Too fizzy for bitter, but nice, malty beer. His eyes stung from the smoke. A woman brushed against him as she followed another to the Ladies. No one could hear the television and no one was watching it. Four barmen skipped, reached, smiled and poured pints of Guinness while a constant stream of shouted orders, hand signals and winks kept them busy. Moore looked at the door where he had entered. There was no sign of the man in jeans.
He hadn't noticed until he was crossing the street from the hotel. Then there was the vague speculation, the itch which made him feel vulnerable. As though the street was broader, the traffic faster. Nothing at first. Moore set up his checks. Instead of going into the first pub, he broke into a stride. He headed for the canal bridge, which he had crossed this morning, and launched into a brisk walk down Leeson Street.
He remembered that Leeson Street turned into a one-way street as it neared that park, St Stephen's Green. If there was a back-up in a car, he'd have a long block to lose them, too. The shops were closed. He couldn't take up a surveillance point off the street without attracting attention. The evening was warm. Moore slung his jacket over his shoulder. He had twenty minutes before calling Kenyon. The stream of headlights flowing along Leeson Street surprised him. He hadn't thought of Ireland as busy.
There were two pubs opposite each other at the end of Leeson Street. Moore stopped by the traffic-lights and pressed the pedestrian button. He could not distinguish the man from the groups who were walking down the street toward him. He looked to the four corners of the intersection. Moore had passed no clear alleys or pedestrian ways. If he did have a tail, then the tail would know the streets, that Moore had no place else to go. If there was tandem surveillance on foot, it would be easy to keep him in sight anyway. Five minutes before calling Kenyon and he still needed to get change for the phone.
A group gathered around him, waiting to cross the street. A half-dozen headed for one of the pubs. He fell in with them. All youths; Moore doubted if any of them were legal age. It didn't seem to matter. They were half-pissed already.
Moore was three minutes late with the call. He wondered if Kenyon would hear him over the racket. He pushed further into the booth and plugged one ear with his thumb. There was a smell of sugary perfume off the receiver. He fingered the fifty-penny pieces onto the chute and dialled.
The television news came on. A heavily made-up woman announced headlines. Moore watched an image of the Union Jack and the Irish tricolour spring onto the screen, followed by a clumsy graphic map of Ireland. A line marking the border pulsated in red and the word security appeared across the map. No one paid attention to the news. He pushed the receiver tighter against his ear. He swallowed more beer. The faces around him seemed foreign. He hadn't spotted anyone who set his antennae stirring yet. More people flowed into the pub. A barman nodded at the arrivals. How could they run a country with half the population out boozing every night? It was just his preconceptions about the Irish and the booze. He heard the telephone connections click through, a hissy pause, then the phone ringing in London.
Moore felt calm. He doubted that it was the beer doing its work already. The noise of the mob seemed to rise and engulf him. He strained to hear the phone ring again. It could only be that copper. Minogue. The one with the dry humour and the bit of stage-Irish. Minogue would have put a tail on him. Had he misread Minogue? He looked around at the faces again. Like potatoes, he thought, but flush and moist, talking and laughing. Kenyon picked up the phone at the fourth ring.
"Where are you?"
"In a pub."
"Can you hear me with that racket?"
"Just about," Moore answered. He was amused at the displeasure in Kenyon's voice. When he looked about the crowded pub, he noticed the couple immediately. They were in their late twenties, he guessed, and they came into the pub sober. They looked too earnest about making conversation and looking about. She carried a sweater tied around her shoulders. Her hair was in a pony-tail. She could put the sweater on and shake out the pony-tail if she had to take up pursuit outside the pub, a new face. The man had longish hair, over his ears, no more than ten years out of date. His jeans looked too well tended.
"Any moves from your side?" Kenyon repeated.
"No sign yet. I had a supervised look through the house today."
"We're going to make a pre-emptive approach to the Irish, probably tomorrow. The timing is not up to us. We just explain what's at stake and it's their party. I'd expect a backroom chat at the conference tomorrow. It gets going after lunch. You should wind up before then."
The barman did not know the couple. Nor did any customers greet them. The woman drank a Coke while the man nursed a pint of Guinness. They looked overly absorbed in each other but not flighty enough for it to be the first date.
"Did you hear me?" an irritated Kenyon asked.
"You want me clear of the place by mid-day," Moore said. "And if I have made any progress before then?"
Kenyon took a breath and held.
"Same as the previous protocol. Refer any material you find before then to Mr Murray. He's running things for the moment."
Moore heard the hostility in Kenyon's tone plain over the din of the pub. He wondered if he should bother to tell Kenyon that he was being tailed. Coppers both, the ones here, and amateurish, too. Moore watched as the man took another draught from his Guinness. Tipping it, he let his head back, his eyes almost closed. He glanced at Moore through the slit between his eyelids. Moore pretended not to notice.
He felt sure now. But how many did they have on him?
Moore hung up and looked at the television again. He tried to lip-read over the racket. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted that the couple was staying put. They hadn't looked for a seat or found a wall to lean against, out of the way of the swell thronging up to the bar. That was his own face he was seeing in the mirror behind the bar. He was here in a pub in Dublin with things giving way under his feet and Kenyon's terse voice still in his memory. He was almost certainly under surveillance. Had they found something in Combs' house and were playing it out? Maybe Kenyon was already too late to pull the switch on this… But that Minogue with the eyebrows pushing up, some vague and private amusement, an appetite for mockery perhaps. It was that affable and devious Sergeant Minogue who had pinned the tail on him, Moore guessed. Taking the mickey out of the Brits, the favourite pastime here. Minogue playing a game. Moore's chest burned as he realised that Kenyon's instruction all but removed his chance of what could have been a double coup: if he had been able to recover any Combs' dossier, Moore'd be happier to pull it out from under Minogue's politely mocking nose.
Minogue poured enough Jameson whiskey to colour the tumbler as far as the supporting pylons at the bottom of the Arc de Triomphe. He held the glass to eye level. The orange liquid covered the foreground nicely, easily topping the script " Souvenir de… " He had bought the tawdriest memento he could find at the Gare du Nord, just before Kathleen and he had taken the train back to Le Havre.
He replaced the bottle under the sink and returned to the living-room. Kathleen had fallen asleep in the chair. The whiskey was smoky, sharper than Jameson should be. Maybe he needed to drink more of it, more often, so that it wouldn't have the whack which he was shuddering after now. Good drink for a spring day at the races. Horses, vapour breath snorting in billows, galloping.
It had been more than twenty years since Minogue had run hard on the drink. He sipped at the tumbler and counted the years. Iseult was twenty-two and a half… It must be over a quarter century since he had heard Kathleen's scream and her body hit the floor upstairs. The child, Eamonn, dead above in the cot. Nothing left at all then. Days no different than nights, for months on end. He had been lucky to hold onto his job. It was years before he knew that what had nearly destroyed him was anger, not grief.
Kathleen asleep looked a stranger to Minogue. He looked at the mute, blind television screen. Iseult wasn't home yet. He should wake Kathleen up and send her off to bed, lest Daithi come home half-jarred and cause a commotion. Minogue closed his eyes. Had Combs really missed so much by not having a family? He imagined Combs sitting on a rock drawing the patterns from the stones. Combs and Joyce supping whiskey in his kitchen, a tinker swapping horse yarns with an Englishman. Jimmy Kilmartin's face drifted in behind Minogue's eyelids. Jimmy, the man who was so anxious to be seen doing the right thing. How did a person get like that, so anxious to please? But Jimmy was shrewd, tough as nails by times, no fawning Polonius. Showing how responsible he was… to whom? For what?
The phone rings erupted as pink flares into Minogue's eyelid world. It was his own phone. Kathleen stirred. The room was bright when he opened his eyes. Had he fallen asleep? A man with a genteel Limerick accent was looking for Sergeant Minogue.
"Who would you be yourself?"
"This is Sergeant Dwyer and I'm calling from Shankill Station. Would you be Sergeant Minogue?"
"I would."
"Well, I'm sorry now to be disturbing you. Very sorry, and it ten o'clock at night. I hope I'm doing the right thing now. I have your number from a colleague of yours. Detective Keating."
"Go on."
"I was put through to him after I called the Murder Squad. He thought you wouldn't mind being phoned at home under the circumstances. To make a long story short, I have a man here says he won't stir without seeing you. He knows your name and all. Not a word until he sees you."
"Who is he?"
"Man by the name of Joyce. A tinker."
"Michael Joseph Joyce?"
"The very man."
"What's he doing in Shankill station?"
"He was in a row in a pub here in Shankill and we took him in."
"Is it just drunk and disorderly with him?"
"No, it isn't," Dwyer said as if a conclusion had been reached. "Matter of fact he is up for assault and battery. A client in the pub. Joyce opened his head with a bottle. The man needs stitches all over his face. Joyce'll appear in court in the morning. It's a mighty serious business. The man could have lost an eye."
"Is he sober now, or out-and-out drunk?"
"Well, he can talk up the divil's own story, so he can't be much under the influence. Says that the client passed comments about tinkers in public houses.
Asked him who his wife was shacking up with while he was in the pub."
"So what does he want with me?"
"He says that there's something he forgot to tell you when he was talking to you the other day."
"He didn't mention that he was going to stretch someone in a pub with a bottle in the face," Minogue muttered.
"Ha, ha, I suppose he didn't at that. But he says it's terrible important and that you'd be needing to know right away. And if we didn't tell you, it'd be on our own heads, so it would. If he was really langers, I would've done nothing. But when he says Murder Squad, he got me to thinking, do you follow me?"
Minogue, a Clareman and thus not normally disposed to following any suggestion made to him by any party from the neighbouring county of Limerick, conceded that he did.
"I'll be by in a half hour," Minogue said.
Kathleen was turning out the light in the living room.
It was gone eleven when Minogue, Joyce and the Garda left Shankill station. Flahive, the Garda, chainsmoked as he drove. Joyce and Minogue sat in the back of the squad-car. Once off the Bray Road and its lights, Minogue could see that the night sky was still clear. He found The Plough well into the middle of the sky.
"There's no chance in the world, is there?" Joyce said.
"No. Not something like this. This is a serious charge, Michael Joseph. The man has stitches up and down his face."
"And him after abusing myself and Josie?" Joyce snapped.
"He didn't mean it personally."
"Do you mean to tell me that he tells everyone he meets the same thing, is it?"
This was a changed Joyce, Minogue reflected. Something had given way in him, struck out. Bitterness, a lifetime.
"And I suppose you'll be telling me that I would have been better off if I had have been as drunk as a lord, too drunk to hear him?" Joyce added scornfully.
"Or take a bottle to him."
He heard Joyce snort. Joyce was sober. He sat upright in the seat. Minogue could almost feel a heat of resentment from him. Where was the timid and wheedling Joyce of yesterday?
"What'll me wife and childer do and me locked up in the barracks?" Joyce declared.
Minogue had no pleasing answer. Flahive braked hard for the corkscrew bend at the bottom of Bride's Glen Road. Joyce's caravan was less than a mile up the hill.
"And all the help I'm giving you this evening?" Joyce tried.
"Help you should have given me straightaway yesterday," said Minogue sharply. "You were a foolish man entirely not to tell me about this letter the first time I talked to you. So don't be acting the maggot with me now."
"Didn't I have a few drinks on me and I left the letter in a jacket of mine? I would have tore up that letter and scattered it to the four winds after me finding out what happened to poor Mr Combs. To be mixed up in that class of thing, I says to myself. You can't trust any but your own, we often say, and it's true."
"But you didn't tear it up?" Minogue interrupted.
"Mr Combs might have told someone that a letter was on the way and that t'would be expected. Quick like. I wanted rid of that letter like it was the divil's cloak, let me tell you. So far as I might know it might have been a life-or-death thing, and Mickey Joyce shouldn't have any more truck with a poor man who was after getting himself murdered…"
Life-or-death, Minogue's mind echoed. Talked to Joyce on Monday. Middle of the day. Ball was killed on the Tuesday, near midnight. The letter must have gone to a Dublin address.
"Not even one letter you'd remember off the words on the envelope?" Minogue tried. "An A, a B… any letters?"
Joyce shook his head conclusively.
"I wish I had learned a bit of… " his words trailed off, the head still shaking, slower now.
"When did he give it to you?"
"A week ago, I suppose. We were after having a few drinks and he had the jitters a bit, I was thinking to myself. I didn't like to be asking him what his business was, but I couldn't help noticing he wasn't in the best of fettle."
"Did he talk about anything that was bothering him?"
"No, he didn't. But he had a funny look to him. He took the letter out of his pocket, and he waved it at me with a kind of look on his face. I don't know what you'd call it-"
"Go on."
Joyce took a deep breath and sighed.
"He waved the letter around a bit and he says to me, 'Do you know what's in this?' We had a few drinks on us now, I don't mind telling you. So naturally, I tells him I didn't. 'That,' says he,'that is like setting a pack of dogs on the loose.' Looking at the letter like it was something very strange, not bits of paper at all… I says nothing."
"Michael Joseph. Did Mr Combs know whether you could read and write?"
Joyce frowned his puzzlement and scratched his head.
"I don't know… I suppose. He asked me once what I made of the state of the world, me being a traveller. In a nice way, you understand. I think I told him that I knew nothing about the affairs of people out in the world and that I didn't need to be concerning myself about goings-on like-"
"What did he do or say when you said that?"
"How can I remember that? He was always kind of nice, like, he wouldn't talk down to you. I suppose he didn't take much notice."
"Did he say anything else, then? When he gave you the letter?"
"I can't think of what… and me leaving, with the letter in me pocket… He had the look on him again, like he was sober all of a sudden. To tell you the truth I had the willies a bit and me coming home, thinking about the way Mr Combs looked. He said something about boats, I don't know what… He said his boat had run aground. Then says something about the holy ground to me. Like it might have been funny if he hadn't have been looking so shook. You know the tune, 'The Holy Ground?'"
"Boats?"
"Like a saying, I suppose. Then some other queer expression about a boat on fire…"
"Burning your boats?"
Joyce looked up abruptly. "That's it. The very thing. What does that mean at all?"
Minogue had no answer. Something, his thoughts nagged sluggishly- something- something Combs did, something he had. Gave Joyce a letter to post-but why not post it himself? Something of value; value to whom? No. Combs had given Joyce money, but would he really have trusted him with something valuable, given the temptations of larceny or drink? Minogue's thoughts tugged at a line, bobbed and then went slack again. Nothing. "Burning your boats." Wasn't that Homer? The Greeks stranded before the walls of Troy… a last gamble. His tiredness rumbled into irritation again.
Joyce's wife was standing in the doorway of the caravan. She pushed children in behind her. A crawling infant escaped her, scurrying between her legs. She noticed it an instant before the child made to go down the step. Josie Joyce gathered the child and planted it on her hip without taking her eyes from the squad-car.
"What have you done?" she cried out. "What have you done tonight and you with handcuffs on you, you big ujit?"
She began weeping. It turned to keening, then pleading. It set off a child somewhere out of Minogue's sight, at the far end of the caravan. Joyce told his wife to shut up. Flahive stood against the bonnet of the car with his arms folded. The interior of the caravan was lit by a gas lantern hissing on the kitchen table. Joyce's wife had begun waffling again.
"Don't be carrying on, woman," Joyce hissed.
The glow of the city's lights came faintly over the hedges to the north, obscuring the stars there. Minogue sensed something moving under the caravan. He looked down at the collie, which rested its front paws just inside the shadow.
Joyce jostled by his wife. Minogue followed him in. The inside of the caravan was tidy and crowded. It smelled of smoke and cooking, bed-warmth, child's piss. Joyce blundered to a built-in cupboard beside what passed for a sofa. Children scampered under clothes at the other end of the caravan.
Joyce tore out plastic bags and threw them to the floor. They seemed to be full of clothes. He reached his arms in and drew out a bridle and noseband. He stepped back, kicked the bags at his feet and thrust the straps angrily at Minogue.
Josie Joyce's jaw dropped when she saw Minogue take out his penknife. The children stood silent and gaping like their mother.
"What in the name of God is he doing with that…?" she began.
"This was a present to ye from Mr Combs?" Minogue asked without looking up. The straps had been machine-stitched. The stiff leather was tight and creaking.
"And he said ye could keep it after ye took the horse back, am I right?" Minogue went on.
"I suppose," said Josie, darting glances from her husband to Minogue. "But if it's ours, it's ours. T'was a present. You can't be destroying it."
Minogue could not safely tease his knife under the stitches. He snorted with frustration.
"Damn it to hell. Have you a good sharp knife, Missus, one with a point to it?"
Josie Joyce's eyes bulged wider.
"Go on with you," Joyce muttered.
Minogue worked the point of the knife into the stitches and began slicing them. He levered the two straps open.
"That's a fierce amount of cash money for tackle the likes of that," Josie began.
A small plastic sachet escaped Minogue's palm and fell to the floor.
"What in the name of…" Joyce frowned. Minogue picked up the sachet. He felt his chest expanding, his heart beating in a huge space. When he tried to talk, his words came out in a hoarse whisper.
"This, Michael Joseph, this little thing is what's going to put the bit between our teeth, man."
He held the sealed packet against the propane light. The negatives were stacked perhaps four deep, singly, in two groups.
"Guard, come in here, will you? Be quick, man."
Flahive appeared in the doorway, his nose wrinkled in distaste at having to enter a tinker's caravan.
"Get the station to phone the Technical Bureau. Tell 'em it's me and that I want Photographic and Video. I have black-and-white negatives to be developed and blown up."
"Negatives, sir?" said Flahive warily.
"And I'm going to leave them in their wrapping until they get them."
"And you want these things developed, is it?"
"Yep. And blown up, man. But big." spacebarthing
Minogue did not hear Kathleen coming down the stairs.
"I thought it was Daithi in late," she whispered. "But sure he's in bed hours already."
Her hair was down, an arm holding her dressing-gown together.
Minogue had helped himself to two sizeable glasses of Jameson. He was not tired and he did not feel drunk. He had prints of all the negatives in his lap, along with a plastic magnifying glass.
"It's three o'clock in the morning. What in the name of God are you doing?… What are those? Photos? Are you gone dotty? They're not photos of people at all. What is it, bits of paper?"
"It's something very unusual," Minogue began. "A very, very delicate matter entirely. And I'm not sure what to make of it at all," he began. The drink had had its effects, he realised then. It was too much to explain to Kathleen now.
"Can't you sleep on it?"
"I'm only just home from town this last fifteen minutes. I can't sleep with this stuff in me head. I don't know if I can swallow the thing as real at all. That Combs man that was murdered."
Kathleen shivered.
"Can't it wait until tomorrow?"
Minogue noted the edge to her question.
"It'll have to."
Minogue had checked the streets which Combs mentioned. If this was raving fiction about the Second World War, then Combs had gone to a lot of trouble to get his names and places right. Most were now in East Berlin. Unter den Linden he'd heard of before. Combs called Kufursten Damm the Ku-damm, something Minogue had also heard of before. The Rathausstrasse, where he claimed to have made the broadcasts from, had been levelled by bombing. And that man that was betrayed on purpose, Vogel. Combs thought that Vogel's family had lived in East Berlin. He wrote that he never met Vogel but only heard of his fate after he himself had gotten out. After "Russians" he had written "our allies!!!" and underlined the words several times. But Minogue kept returning to the name Costello. Combs had had his dates right, but he couldn't have known for sure about Costello's killing. All he could do was repeat Ball's hints about Costello and his grisly fate.
Kathleen eyed the bottle of whiskey now dangerously at large, out of the safety of the sink cupboard.
"Once in the blue moon, Kathleen," he murmured.
He laboured to rise from the chair. Kathleen waited by the door. William Grimes, had he heard that name before? No, just the illusion of familiarity brought on by a few drinks.
"Are you still expecting to get up early?" Kathleen whispered at the foot of the stairs. Minogue did not miss the reproach. He scooped up the note he had left for Daithi.
"I'll have to get started on this very early tomorrow, and that's a fact," he replied, following his wife up the stairs. They tiptoed to their bedroom. Hooking his thumb into his socks, sitting on the edge of the bed, Minogue smelled the sugary sourness of his whiskey breath. Maybe he should be hanging off the phone downstairs trying to get ahold of Corrigan or a Superintendent or two. Whatever about three o'clock in the morning, they'd have enough questions for him when he did tell them tomorrow.