by John Brady
Mrs. Tovey, the headmistress, had given perfect directions. He was ten minutes early. Plenty of time to gawk at the framed photos in the hall lined by doors to one side and windows to the other. A staff room, he noted; a supply room; a room with two photocopiers; a huge cleaner’s cupboard it looked; the headmistress’s office.
Before the eighties, there were no Murphys, O’Connors, or Doyles inscribed on the nameplates of former staff and headmistresses going back over the years in Honora School.
“Everything’s changed, of course,” he heard himself muttering. And then a door flew open behind him.
Mrs. Tovey—an early middle-aged woman with the gait of an athlete and flat shoes which told a confused Minogue he was definitely right about something—did wear the glasses he half-expected, along with an intense expression he put to the cause of his visit. She also had a fierce country accent. She held her hand out.
“Thanks for arranging this,” he said. “Oh I hardly need to be checking an identity thing now, do I? A Chief Inspector . . .?”
Minogue offered a smile and put away his card. Since when were teachers—a headmistress of a private school—allowed to wear jeans?
“I’m in here all July,” she said. “It’s nothing, I mean, to meet with you. Whatever I can—we can—do.”
“Paperwork is a divil, to be sure.”
“Don’t talk to me,” she said. “It doubles every year.”
She pushed open the door to her office. Awkwardly he got by her, waited for her to park her briefcase.
“Sit down, sit down,” she said. “I just have to forage around here a minute.”
She covered up what looked like some printout of a timetable and closed a drawer.
“You work with the other Guards then, I imagine?”
“I was asked in just yesterday to help.”
She pulled two bulging folders from the briefcase, then a laptop, and she stacked the folders at the outer edge of a table behind her. She swivelled back.
“We’re all very upset here. Very. It’s been very difficult.”
He nodded.
“I have to tell you,” she went on, “that when you first suggested this, I wasn’t keen. It took me a while.”
He thought about Kathleen slagging him while he put on the good suit, wondered if that too had set up some primeval reflex that had him here, a countryman in front of the headmistress of probably the most exclusive girls’ school in the country.
“Like I said, it’ll help us all.”
The gently raised eyebrows were a signal to make his case again, maybe.
“The way it is, it’d be hard enough if I were to be visiting them at home. Not to speak of the time I’d need to be going around.”
“Well, it took some persuading the parents, er . . .”
“Matt.”
“But they surprised me. They’ll all come. They didn’t utter one word of protest.”
“That’s great.”
“They’re worried sick,” she said.
“I suppose they would be, yes.”
The phone went off.
He listened to her, let his eyes wander the room. “Yes,” she said. There was a younger smiling Mrs. Tovey on a horse somewhere. He began to invent a past for her: country house, West Cork, Anglo Irish, huntin' and shootin', dogs in the kitchen, long windows, cashmere jumpers. “They’re here,” she said. “I mean he is here, an Inspector, ready.” She listened, nodded. “And thank you for doing this, it means so much. Yes.”
She replaced the receiver and looked over at him.
“They’re here, the O’Neills. Bronagh.”
“Mrs. Tovey, before I have a chat with any of them might I ask you a few questions?”
“Go ahead.”
“It’s about Niamh. What you might know or not know of her and her friends.”
She sat back and gathered herself. Then she spoke. She had expected him to ask, Minogue realized, had prepared in detail for this. Formidable: he couldn’t shake the word from his mind. She told him the limits several times; how protecting those in her charge was a sacred trust; how she would hand onto the school counsel any questions or points she didn’t believe were hers to answer.
Then she looked down at her watch.
“I have a question for you now,” she said. “Before I show you the room where you can talk to them.”
“If you find out that this tragedy was a result of something going on in our school . . .?”
For a few moments he wondered if he had misread her: the firm handshake, the accent he guessed as Cork. Would it be the honour of the school or some guff like that, he thought, or maybe even some effort at coming the heavy with confidentiality stuff.
“Well,” he said, “you can imagine that we have to go at every angle.”
She blinked, kept up her earnest stare.
“Do you mean, say, if we found out there had been some illegal activity here in the school?”
“Something like that, yes. I’ll be honest with you. Talk of drugs would do a lot of damage to our community.”
The fact that she had uttered one of the words that had been driving him around the twist for a good number of years shouldn’t be counted.
“I’m not here to cause damage,” he managed. “I just need to find out what happened to this girl.”
She had glanced down at her desktop, he thought as he followed her down the hall, stared at it for several moments in the way that told him she had made a decision that was hard for her. Sized him up probably, knew that it was better not to keep on that line. The brisk manner when she stood, the all-business smile, had registered with him.
The room she guided him to had décor strikingly mod enough for him to start at the sight of it. A pot of coffee, biscuits, even pens and paper. The oval table was high German boardroom style, the chairs themselves works of art.
“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble,” he said. “Thank you.”
Mrs. Tovey glanced at him before she moved an overhead projector off a chair.
“It’s still Ireland,” she said, tucking two chairs in and turning back. Minogue had been studying the halogen lighting, the plasterwork.
“Rachel Tynan was a neighbour of mine growing up,” she said. “She’s like me. She digs with the other foot.”
Protestants, Minogue thought. He had almost forgotten.
“’Jesuit John,’ yes.”
Minogue didn’t want to mistake the raised eyebrow. He wondered if Mrs. Tovey had phoned Tynan or vice versa. He managed an official smile.
“She says hello by the way,” Mrs Tovey went on. “Says she looks forward to seeing more of The Holy Family.”
Iseult and her in-your-face artwork, Minogue thought. So Rachel Tynan was still able to get out and about. Those treatments that left you shagged ween’t gig to stop her.
The mischief left Mrs. Tovey’s face before the smile.
“Do what you have to do,” she said to him then, as though answering a demand he had never made. “Whatever comes of it. We’ll manage.”
A Fella
Bronagh O’Neill was in a terrible state. A lot of times, between bouts of crying and being hugged by her mother, she was unable to say a word. Her father, a man considerably younger than Minogue and whom Minogue suspected of being that John O’Neill stockbroker he’d seen plastered all over the financial section not long back, did a not bad job of hiding his impatience and anger.
“Come on now, love,” he’d say every now and then, to little effect.
Mrs. O’Neill looked French, elegant, tired, worried. She had that accent, the one they called the DART accent, that he had stopped trying to figure out long ago.
Bronagh gave a shudder like a hiccup every now and then. She spoke in a raspy whisper, sometimes squeezing out the words. He heard her pulling at her nails under the table. Her freckles went right to her hairline.
He took Niamh’s bits of paper and placed them on the table next to her. She stared at them for several moments and t
hen burst into tears again.
“Quite the artist,” he said to her when she was able to sit up again. “A great eye there. The same with clothes and that?”
“Yes. She could pick something exactly right.”
“Did you sometimes do shopping expeditions together?”
Bronagh nodded. Her face began to go again. This time she was able to fight it off. Minogue pointed at the stylized letters and words.
“I’m embarrassed to tell you something now, Bronagh.”
She returned his gaze, and her face eased a little.
“Ninety-nine percent of this means nothing to me. Except maybe Ireland’s Greatest Band there. But the rest . . . I’m prehistoric.”
She half smiled and wiped her face. Her mother held out another tissue.
“Those are bands, too,” she whispered. “And that one there. Words to songs.”
“The logos there?”
“I think that one’s for PINK. There’s a designer called that. And that’s OAM. One a.m. A band.”
Minogue sighed.
“I’m truly lost,” he said. “Bad enough that I’m a culchie, but I think I must have been living on another planet this last while.”
He waited for another smile from her. Then he decided it was time.
“Did you take Ecstasy pills yourself, Bronagh?”
Completely still, her eyes locked onto the edge of the table. Minogue thought of Jennifer Halloran again, the blunders.
Mr. O’Neill crossed and uncrossed his legs.
Mrs. O’Neill’s darting eyes, and she put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder, flickered from her daughter to Minogue and back.
“We talked,” she said, hoarsely, and swallowed. “Bronagh will tell you. Won’t you, love?”
Minogue hardly heard her.
“It’s not a crime,” he said. “You’ll be getting no lectures from me.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
She was moving her jaw from side to side but wouldn’t look up.
“I didn’t see her go,” she said, “and began to shudder. I didn’t see her. I would have gone with her.”
She fell sideways toward her mother, and put her arms around her.
“Bronagh has a summer job now,” Mr. O’Neill said. “She’ll be busy. And then we’re all going over to my sister. She’s outside Washington. It’s going to be all right.”
He leaned in, patted her shoulder. Minogue heard her wail smothered in her mother’s shoulders.
He let his thoughts run to the clearing in the woods over Shankill, that patch between the gorse that opened out over the sea. It’d be soggy enough there now. He didn’t care. He’d give it until eight or even half eight, when the light would begin to change in earnest, and he’d head up.
“Bronagh,” he said in a gap between her sobs, and he waited.
“Bronagh, is it going on with others here in school?”
She nodded.
“It was Niamh had them,” she whispered. “She showed them to us back before exams. But I wouldn’t.”
“Did you take one that night?”
She nodded. Minogue thought it was the mother’s breath going in that he’d heard now. Mr. O’Neill was staring at the wall.
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
The girl became very still. Minogue saw that her eyes had lost their focus. Was she going to keel over, he wondered. The mother broke the spell, slowly rubbing the girl’s forearm.
“You say she had several. How many?”
“Maybe seven or eight. They had different marks on them,” she said then. “And she said, Niamh said, that she had her own one. A special one, a present.”
“A present from whom?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know any name.”
“Another girl maybe?”
“No. But she slagged him.”
“Not a boyfriend?”
The quick twist, the nose wrinkling might be a sign she was coming around, Minogue thought.
“God no. ‘A lad’ she called him. That’s sarcastic, like.”
“Not a term of respect, is it?”
She shook her head.
“A scruff, is another word. I didn’t hear her say that, but it means the same.”
“Was there anything about where or when she met this fella then?”
“No—wait. No. But she just said she’d been bored out of her skull some days, down at her parents’ place, somewhere in Wicklow. They have this place, I don’t know what you’d call it. Mom?”
“The Links, it’s called,” said Mrs. O’Neill. “It’s a resort down in Kilcoole.”
Minogue remembered coming across the place a few years ago on a jaunt with Kathleen down the back roads from Wicklow town. A hotel and spa thing; chalets, with lots of landscaping; golfey things. Pricey, he recalled Kathleen telling him, a country club type of a thing that had sold quickly. A weekend place you could turn the key on, a view of the sea, all organized and only thirty miles or so from Dublin.
“Kilcoole,” he said.
“She used to go into town, but there was nothing to do, Bronagh said. I think that’s what she said. She didn’t want to go there on those weekends, but her parents used to go. It’s golf, I think.”
“Into town, do you mean back into Dublin?”
“No. Sometimes her parents, well her mother, might go back in as far as Bray with her. Some shopping, I think, you know.”
Exhausted, she looked, already. Minogue let the quiet work on the parents too.
“Some fella then, we think,” he said finally.
Bronagh nodded.
“Maybe someone she met in, where is it again, Kilcoole? Bray maybe?”
“That’s all I know, honestly.”
Minogue felt the father’s eyes on him now. Testy. Well fine, he thought, let them wait. There had to be something better than “a fella.”
He began to rearrange Niamh Kenny’s copybooks and scraps around the table. His mobile sounded.
Tunney said it was about the girl.
“Wait a minute, will you,” Minogue said. He looked at Mrs. O’Neill.
“I’m just going out to take this call outside. I’ll only be a minute.”
He saw the can’t-we-go-glance the girl threw at her mother.
“Bronagh,” he said getting up. “I want you to do something now, if you please, while I’m taking this call.”
There was wariness as much as the shock on her face now. Friends were everything at this age, weren’t they. It wouldn’t be at this session she’d be willing to tell him everything. And the parents know, he thought, they do.
“I want you to look over these,” he said to her. “See if you can spot anything on these—doodling, drawing, letters, words, anything that strikes a chord with you. Anything that might tell us about this fella.”
He closed the door and rested his elbows on the windowsill at the end of the hall. The clouds had shapes to them now, he saw, not the blanket of grey that had dumped tons of rain on them. This was promising?
“Okay,” he said. “Sorry about that. I was interviewing her friend there, the O’Neill girl.”
“Well, what’s the story with her?”
“I don’t know. I can’t really push it today. Tell me yours, why don’t you.”
“Okay,” said Tunney. “There’s a woman just come in to the station here, with a phone her young fella found the other day. A mobile phone.”
“Niamh Kenny’s?”
“Looks like it,” Tunney said, on account of where he found it. Up in the park is where. Him and his mate. It was the mate told his ma, and that ma went over to the other ma. She found it in the boy’s room.
“I’m going back to the house with this woman and have a chat with the young fella. He’s ten, only.”
Minogue ended the call. He let his gaze rest on the yard and the fields beyond. Was there ever a lonelier place than a school during the summer.
Bronagh had to know more than this. He thought about putting t
he heavy word on the O’Neills. He didn’t doubt but that they could bite back: a Garda intimidating a minor, a distraught minor—he sensed the presence in the hall behind. Mrs. Tovey had materialized in a doorway.
“I heard a voice,” she said. “Almost forgot you were here.”
He held up his mobile. He made sure he had locked the keypad before sliding it into his pocket.
“How’s it going inside?”
“We’re working through things.”
It was all he could think to say.
“It’ll take a long, long time for them to process this at all,” she said. “To really get back on an even keel.”
He nodded.
“They’re still kids,” she said. “Even with the mobiles and the skiing and the travels. They’re not half as worldly wise as they might try to have us believe.”
He looked at the door. Bronagh O’Neill and her parents were waiting not ten feet away.
“Do you ever wonder,” he began, “if there are things going on in these girls’ lives now - some of them anyway - that are kind of invisible to other people?”
She looked out the window onto the playing fields.
“I do actually,” she said. “Beyond the secrets and the schemes and the romance and rivalries. The sheer, cruel bitchiness even.”
Turning away from the window, her gaze sharpened and fastened on him.
“And it worries me.”
Her awkward half-smile had anger in it. It reminded him of the reactions he seen in court when a verdict or a stay had gone against the State.
“It’s very different nowadays,” she said, “isn’t it.”
A Rat, Surely
Grogan actually didn’t appreciate the door of the restaurant being held open for him. Still he nodded. How could he growl at the young man who was decent enough to know that doors should be held open for the likes of him? It wasn’t just to impress the girl with him. There was a strong whiff of cologne as he got by him. So this was it then, he thought. When Catholic kids can go out and buy perfume or leather jackets or cars for themselves, that’s when we know when we’ve won. Or maybe not.
