by John Brady
“Ask him where they’re taking it,” he said. “If you please.”
Chief Inspector Noonan was well over six feet. He had an odd bump at the bridge of his nose and fine, dark-red hair that reminded Minogue of a horse. Dyed, he wondered, but decided it couldn’t be. The chief inspector had sandwiches and a pot of tea waiting for his visitors. Minogue wondered if he’d already struck up a liking for Noonan before he’d been offered the sandwiches. The expression maybe, the one eye open slightly more than the other, the quiet tones
“Floats,” said Minogue again. He glanced at the edge of the tomato slice peeping out from between the slices. Yellow more than green.
“Quite something, I tell you,” said Noonan. “One fella went down from the boat, made two or three paddles back to the boat, gets enough for four points, and that’s that.”
“As easy as that.”
“Child’s play,” Noonan said “They inflated them open when they were ready. Up comes the car. The boat took it out from near the rocks and it’s up on a winch and the boat’s back in the harbor. You sort of forget how strong air is.”
“Isn’t that something.”
“Tell you the truth, we were lucky,” said Noonan He pushed the second plate of sandwiches toward Minogue. “The fisheries crowd and the recovery gear were handy in Belmullet.”
Minogue took a long sip of tea. The female removed from the car was in the morgue of the county hospital. The female, well who else could it be. The Micra was wrapped and headed to Castlebar in a lorry. “Juris-dictional,” Noonan said flat-out. In the spirit of decentralization. It was Divisional HQ, and the forensic work was usually done there. Minogue glanced at the photos on Noonan’s wall. There were two former commissioners among a group of smiling officers.
“Isn’t it though?” Noonan asked again.
“Which now?”
“The means. Give us the tools. Sure, isn’t that what’s going on in Dublin?”
He had missed whatever preamble Noonan had given.
“I, er, well, there’s always some new initiative, isn’t there?” he managed.
“Law reform is the tool,” said Noonan. He looked from Malone to Minogue.
“The whole Smith thing, sure, how come he was ever out on the streets at all? He should have been behind bars for life.”
Minogue returned Noonan’s quizzical smile. So the chief inspector wanted to chew the fat about Larry Smith, did he? He declined Noonan’s offer of more tea.
“Sure it’s the wild west above there isn’t it? Gangs, the whole shooting gallery? Something has to be done.”
The gentle smile lingered. Noonan inviting a confidence, assent: Ah, you’re right, the law’s an ass. We should take the likes of Smith out ourselves if the law won’t. Noonan tilted his cup and rubbed it around the saucer. The Old Guard, Minogue thought. Noonan, with the countryman’s innate hospitality, but the two former commissioners he was proud to display himself standing beside had been renowned as wallopers.
“How best can we get to the site?” he asked. “The cliffs…?”
CHAPTER 16
Noonan drove. he waved at people. He rolled down the window and slowed to greet an old man laboring with a walking stick and a shopping bag.
He pulled in beside a railing that Minogue took to be a sign of a national school.
“Now,” Noonan said. “I’ll bring out our guest. She’ll give us a bit of a background.”
“Who, now?”
“Mairead O’Reilly. Her father was the teacher out by Cahercarraig these years. It was Peadar, the father, who got the whole thing started — but sure let Mairead tell you all about it.”
Minogue studied the bars on the railing, imagined the headlong dash of the schoolchildren at the bell, charging through the gap in the wall and pushing off from the railing, scattering down the footpath.
Noonan returned smiling and talking to a thickset woman with large glasses and a three-quarter length suede coat. She carried a bag in one hand and a set of Wellington boots in the other.
“Maybe they’re for you, Tommy,” Minogue murmured.
Malone tugged at the door release. Minogue caught the tail end of Mairead O’Reilly’s quip about the Guards taking the principal away in a squad car. Noonan took her wellies and dropped them in the boot.
A brisk, keen handshake as she sat in beside Minogue. She smiled and made no rebuttal to Noonan’s joke about the pupils having the rest of the day off. Minogue introduced Malone.
“Mairead’s father was a legend,” said Noonan. “Peadar O’Reilly. He died last June twelve-month. A great loss If it wasn’t for him now, well, Mairead’d tell you all about it if she wasn’t so modest. She and I go back a long ways.”
“Not that far back now, Tom.”
Minogue obliged with a grin. A schoolmistress not averse to being coy? She turned to Minogue.
“I’ve a brother a Guard in Roscommon,” she said.
The squad car passed a dilapadated garage at the junction of the Ca-hercarraig Road. What was it about teachers, Minogue wondered. Self-assured from years of being up in front of others, he supposed: authoritative, complete, custodial. Always wanted the last word.
“He started before the war, didn’t he, Mairead,” said Noonan. “The Fields?”
“In the thirties,” she said. “Well, ever since he heard about it in school, I suppose, so earlier yet. He was always interested in the folklore and the history. He’d be walking the roads and talking to people. Of course sure he knew everybody. With the sports and the music and everything.”
“A Renaissance man,” Noonan said.
“Well now, he amassed a lot of information that would have been lost otherwise, I suppose.”
“So your father discovered the Fields basically,” said Minogue.
“He did that. He’d been out in the bogs one summer cutting turf. Some of it was for home and some of it for the school. Can you imagine? You’re not Dublin, now are you?”
“I’m not. Clare, but bygone days.”
She smiled.
“You had the one-room school, did you?”
“Indeed we did. A crowd of us, all shapes and sizes. I don’t know how the teacher did it.”
“Well how far we’ve come. I wonder what Da would say if he took a look at the Internet we’re getting into the school next week. My God, I stare at the screen there when John Doyle’s banging away on it and my mind, it goes, well I don’t know. Connected to the whole world. I can’t believe it. Satellites, signals flying through the air. From Mayo. Isn’t it wonderful?”
The sun broke through as they slowed for a blind bend. Noonan drove in a puddle to leave room for an oncoming Harp lorry. Sunlight flooded in Minogue’s side, caressed his neck and shoulders. Noonan steered over a narrow bridge.
“He was in Cahercarraig until they closed it,” she said. “In 1962. The same year Kennedy came. The end of an era, I suppose you’d say. But we were reared out by Bruach. Seven of us. Oh, many’s the Saturday we were out on Carra. I always think of those times as sunny days. Up on the bog — sure Ma must have been martyred with us, so she must. While Da was doing his digging.”
She looked back at a boarded-up house.
“I remember once he dug a trench,” she went on then. “It must have been nearly ten feet deep. Ma was petrified it’d fall in on him. The bog, you see. And she persuaded my uncle Ger to go up with him so’s he’d not fall down a bog hole. Comical it was, the way Ger told it. ‘I’ll go up there no more,’ Ger would say, ‘for fear of meeting all the crowd he was telling me about.’ Da couldn’t work with Ger of course. Ger was always pulling his leg, d’you see. Da was very serious.”
“Crowds of people, is it?” Minogue asked.
“Ah, God, no,” Mairead O’Reilly said. “There was no one there ever. Da would be lecturing Ger, getting carried away with himself. ‘That layer there now, Ger, that’s Rome being founded.’ An amateur archaeologist.”
“But sure he wasn’t far off the mark now wh
en it was finally excavated,” said Noonan. “Was he?”
Minogue watched her eyes roam the hillsides. Her smile faded a little.
“Tis true for you,” she said. “But Da would have had you believe that this was where civilization started.”
“Paradise lost,” said Noonan, and he threw his head back once.
The few trees and hedges were behind them now. The views to both sides were across roadside ditches to bog. Minogue tried to figure north from west but the twisting road drove the sun across the roof of the car too often for him.
The road rose to a plateau. Minogue caught glimpses of the turns and dips as the road wound its way toward the coast ahead. They passed rusting forty gallon barrels, mounds of crushed rock.
“This road’s going to be widened now to go along with the site,” said Noonan.
“Hard to imagine fifteen or twenty thousand people living up here, isn’t it?”
“That many,” was all Minogue could manage.
“There’s Carra Hill beyond,” said Mairead O’Reilly.
Minogue followed her pointed finger. Rising ground culminated in a gently rounded hill.
“There’d be the crowning there,” she said, “with all the goings-on over by the road. That all died out of course. But it started up again after the Famine for a few years. It never caught on again after that. The people emigrating…? I don’t know.”
“Your father had all this researched?” Minogue tried. She shifted in her seat.
“He did, he did,” she replied. “But some of it turned out what you might call fanciful. Or at least that’s what the ex — well, the history people thought. Da was an amateur, you see. And proud of it too: the Latin root, he’d always say — amo, amas, amat — to love something is not necessarily to carry a degree from some university around with you as authority. Those were his ways.”
Was it the warmth of the sun, he wondered, or the pleasure of being away from Dublin that made him dreamy. Maybe it was the idea of this country schoolteacher for decades doggedly unearthing a forgotten history. He imagined O’Reilly in the classroom, singing, conjugating obscure Irish verbs, dependably clattering the odd dunce, roaring at one of his charges errant or lackadaisical with a hurley stick. Quite a breed, the country schoolteachers then, and some lost genius in many. He remembered the books given to him by his own teacher, McMahon, as a parting gift. Chekov and Gogol, Maupassant. McMahon, run over by a car at midnight on a road ten years later. Asleep in the middle of the road, drunk.
“People thought he was mad, of course,” she was saying. “But sure everyone loved him. The kids adored him. Oh but he was strict! I get people writing me and telling me about Da. Universities, heads of companies, even people who ended up in Australia. A man sent us a thousand pounds from Sydney. He’d had Da as a teacher back before the war, but he hadn’t forgotten. ‘A habit of mind for learning,’ Da would say, ‘A cast of mind for truth.’ The old school, I suppose some would say.”
Minogue suppressed a yawn and tried to smile at her.
“Well of course the world caught up to Da,” she went on. “But do you know, it didn’t interest him much. He went on about his business after retiring, gathering the stories and the poems and the songs. He was going to buy a computer, he told me a week before he died. So as he could do the things he’d collected. He had eyewitness stories of the Famine, sure. People who were children when it happened. All that way back. He’d taken them down when he started teaching. His first notebook is 1928, when he was in school himself. A born historian. So there.”
“Here we are,” said Noonan, “up ahead.”
Minogue saw the roof lights of the Garda car above the heather. Next to it was a sign. They rounded a bend and came in sight of a cleared graveled patch joined to the road by a makeshift bridge. Noonan took the car slowly over the ruts. He parked by a granite boulder sticking out of what looked to Minogue like an abandoned turf bank. He took a walkie-talkie out of the glove box. Minogue felt the anticipation worm in his stomach again, his chest grow tight.
“We’ll go up now and introduce ourselves?” Noonan was asking him.
Minogue savored the give, the juicy sponge of the bog underfoot. His wellies sucked as he drew them out of the muck where he’d been standing. He held the edges of the map tight. Mairead O’Reilly ran a finger along the line.
“That’s us there,” she said. “And there’s tracks and boreens here. And here.”
How the hell could you get a car up here, he wondered. Malone was hunkered over a track fifty yards away with Noonan pointing to something. Minogue looked beyond them to the parked cars by the Office of Public Works sign.
“So the site here is wide open really, you’d have to say,” he said.
She pointed over to the fence surrounding a pit.
“That’d be to stop people falling in,” she went on. “Liability, I don’t know This is all rock here up on the left and…” She looked down at the map again. “I think it’s here they’ll put in his plaque and what have you. A seating area too.”
She looked over again.
“Da wouldn’t be one for all the fuss. But he’d like it, I know. A nice touch.”
Minogue looked from the map up onto the bog again. The only road most likely to have been fit to bear the weight of a small car was somewhere behind the other fenced-off place, the court tomb.
“Am I right now for that road here?”
She looked at the map.
“Yes indeed now. That definitely leads over to the cliff. Unless now they’ve added a road of their own. There’s going to be some kind of an observation spot up over the cliffs there, I suppose.”
Minogue folded the map and looked around. There were no ancient peoples striding through the heather toward him. There was only Carra Hill, heather, clouds like candy floss, the softest of breezes stirring the heather. He looked down at his boots. He hadn’t been mistaken: the mud was over his ankles already. He pulled each out in turn. Mairead O’Reilly gave him a sympathetic smile and tucked her hair in under a headscarf. Henna, that was the name of the stuff, he remembered now.
He realized that his nostrils were no longer blocked. He tested the Velcro on the video camera grip and wondered if he’d get through this excursion into this sodden and desolate hinterland of Mayo without passing some remark to Noonan about the plodding boot prints of the Guards last night. All over the damn site, it looked like. He imagined Noonan’s reply, and it’d be the correct one: wasn’t my idea to send fellas in here in the dark. What did you expect would happen?
“Will I carry anything?” she asked.
“No thanks, Mairead. No.”
The breeze freshened closer to the cliffs. Malone changed films in the Polaroid. Minogue looked back at the white sticks he’d left stuck into the side of the track. Though blurred and worn away by the rain there were traces of vehicle tires in two spots.
Noonan was a man who liked marching through heather, it seemed.
“A week, do you think?” he called out. Minogue nodded. The hush in the background must be the sea. The edge of the cliff was but a hundred yards ahead.
“We have to get a fix on the last time anyone was up here, Tommy. If the car has been at the bottom of the cliff for a week…”
Malone bent over to shield the film as he inserted it.
“Who’d be up here, for Jas — I mean, do people go walking and hiking up here? In the pissing rain, like?”
He looked up over at Noonan and Mairead O’Reilly. She was explaining something to him. He followed her outstretched arm as she swept it in short arcs from the tomb site to the large pit. A good five hours before the light would fail. An hour to get the search team lined up and ready.
Noonan seemed to have guessed what he was about to ask.
“Well are we set to go over the place now?”
“If you please. How many staff can we expect?”
“Sixteen or seventeen. A few in from Castlebar.”
Noonan nodded. Minogue
wondered if the chief inspector was holding back a smile. Minogue faced Carra Hill while Noonan radioed the squad car. They’d have to go to the farm again to phone in. Noonan pocketed the walkie-talkie.
Minogue pointed at the cliff edge on the map.
“We’ll start there,” he said to Noonan “Tommy and myself.”
Malone shrugged his leather jacket and zipped it higher.
“If ye’d split into teams,” Minogue added, “pairs say, one covering the other so there’s overlap and start in from the road. Mairead would be with me, please.”
“All right,” said Noonan “Mind yourselves. It’s dodgy enough by the edge.”
Noonan glanced at Malone’s mountaineering boots. The muck had already come up to his calves.
“Those alpine jobs will come in handy there.”
Malone looked down at his encrusted shoes.
“You’re only slagging ’cause you don’t have any,” he said.
“It’s bleeding slippery here, boss.”
Minogue looked over. Malone’s head appeared between tussocks of grass.
“Anything?”
“Nothing,” Malone replied. “And I’m not diving off the bloody cliff and poking around underwater.”
Minogue looked across at the ragged, distant line of Guards coming in from the Cahercarraig Road. Mairead O’Reilly was sitting in the squad car now. He felt he should say something to her. Thank her for coming out to help them sort out the paths and holes. He decided to see how the identification crew in from Castlebar was managing with lifting casts of the wheel ruts.
“Go over to the identification crowd there, Tommy See them right, will you.”
He picked his way back across the clumps of frockins and heather to the graveled area. There were three Garda cars there now beside the van from the Castlebar section. Noonan had made his way in from the line that was moving north toward the fenced-in excavation.
“Does she be needing to get back to school?” Minogue asked.
“Ah no,” said Noonan. “She knew it might be the whole afternoon. If Mairead can help, that’s what she wants to do. Bred into her, and all of them.”
