by John Brady
Minogue smiled in at her. She let go her folder, rolled down the window.
“I hope we’ve not stolen the day on you now,” he said.
“Not a bit of it,” she replied. “I’m in a grand spot here, the bit of peace and quiet. It’s like old times, so it is.”
Minogue glanced down at the folder. The pictures were amateur looking. She lifted it.
“This?” she said. “It’s just something to be reading. Again.”
“It’s the digging your father did years ago…?”
“It is. It’s old now, of course, but sure it was never meant to be the final word. More folklore now, they say.”
Minogue tried to get a better look at the open pages.
“Here, by all means,” she said.
He took it through the open window. Noonan stepped to his side.
“There’s the man himself,” Noonan said. “God rest him. When would that be, Mairead?”
“Nineteen forty-eight.”
Minogue glanced over at her.
“After that terrible winter of ’47. A hundred years after the worst times of the Famine, he never stopped telling us. He’s standing where that court tomb is opened up now. Well I can’t say now that he knew then what he was standing on. He says he did.”
Minogue read down. It had been poorly typed, and the copy was patchy.
“Well he added in the bits of stories and reading he’d done there. The whole locality. The Carra Fields, all that. Those roads there he put down to try and map things out. Twelve feet down he had to go.”
“A court tomb now,” said Minogue. “They’re scarce enough, aren’t they?”
“You’re right,” she said. “It’d be the well-to-do, the chieftain, being put in there, you see. Interred.”
Minogue looked up from the page.
“Would there be any class of comforts sent along with him?” he asked “Like our friends beyond in Egypt?”
“The cruiskeen lawn,” said Noonan and grinned. “Poteen?”
“There would,” said Mairead O’Reilly. “But there was nothing found here at all. That tomb, now, it was all done by the museum people and the OPW. Two years they were at this part, as I recall.”
Minogue returned to the folder. He turned the pages slowly in reverse order. Mairead O’Reilly stepped out of the car and buttoned up the collar of her coat.
“That’s yours truly there,” she said. “In the middle. I was four years old.”
Minogue grinned back.
“Don’t be asking me if it was before or after the Carra Fields were inhabited.”
Noonan laughed.
“There’s the whole slew of us there,” she went on. “Mam, God rest her, Eileen, John. That’s Finbarr Uncle Ger with the eyes rolling back in his head…”
She tugged her scarf tight and watched the Guards searching the heather.
“Take that back to Dublin with you,” she murmured.
“Thank you. Are you sure?”
“Indeed and I am. I have other copies made. You can go home and spread the fame of the Carra Fields.”
He watched Malone get up from his hunkers
“That’s rain,” said Noonan. “By God, you could depend on it.”
Minogue noted the few flecks on the car roof. The casts should be up by now, for the love of God. He’d have to get in touch with Galway to see what they could get up for recovery of bits from the seabed where the car had landed. Frogmen working in close to rocks and cliffs, if the wind rose? He checked his watch. No wonder his feet were like lumps, his fingertips clumsy, they’d been here two and a half hours. He’d been up and down by the track five times, all the way to the cliff. His shoulder ached from the chafing of the video camera.
Malone’s whistle was piercing. All the search teams looked over too. Minogue waved them on.
“A bit of rain won’t harm us,” said Noonan.
“Let’s try the hospital again, see if the doctor’s showed up for the PM.”
Noonan chewed spearmint gum. The windows were fogged up. Mairead O’Reilly shifted in the seat next to Minogue. Malone unzipped the carry case for the cameras, looked inside, and zipped it up again.
“Ah, we’ll go on,” said Noonan. “I don’t know what’s — ”
The radio came alive. Minogue remembered the voice from the conversation earlier. He rubbed the glass and looked out at the puddle he had been using as his gauge for the rain. Steady drizzle, small drops. Two of the other Garda cars had their engines running now. The Guard at the Keogh farmhouse had just received the call back from the hospital. There was a pathologist, Kelly, up from Galway. When would there be an officer attending?
Malone shifted and looked back at Minogue. The inspector asked Noonan how long it would take to get back to the hospital. Under half an hour.
“Will you get word then, if you please?”
Minogue waited for Noonan to finish on the radio. He turned back to the page he’d kept his thumb on.
“Don’t take that now as gospel,” Mairead O’Reilly murmured. “That’s legend. Da wasn’t shy of adding his own bits of conjecture.”
He nodded. The search teams had met by the track just before the rain had turned into the monotonous, steady drizzle that would be down for the evening.
“If you could, leave a car here by the road,” he said. “And ask them to step up the questioning. Stop anyone going along by the car park and see if they can fill in anything this past week or two.”
Noonan got out of the car and walked over to the squad car. Minogue rubbed the back window and took in the car park. A hundred yards in on that track and a car would be out of sight of the Cahercarraig Road.
Noonan sat back in and started the engine.
“Thanks, Tom, yes,” said Minogue. “The hospital.”
The tires spun gravel as Noonan steered over the culvert. Better not forget the casts, Minogue thought, along with the faded, washed-out cigarette boxes, the illegible pieces of newspaper already almost a soggy dough. Some would doubtless turn out to have been used by one of the workmen to wipe his arse.
The car took the bend and began its descent back down from the highlands that formed the Carra Fields. He stole a glance at Mairead O’Reilly. Sitting there with her thoughts away off years ago, it looked like. Was she too still wondering how the thousands of souls had lived here so contentedly, had left so little trace beyond the stone walls of their houses and a solitary, empty tomb? Or was she remembering the days of her childhood and youth trekking up with her father and family to dig and to picnic and to play in the heather?
He returned to the page, with the car bouncing and dropping as the bog road leveled out. Conjecture, was it, all this love of heroes and chieftains her father had had. A geis, like the jobs dished out to Hercules, to build a hill for the king so he could survey his lands and people, take his last earthbound breath and die happy.
“Some job of work,” he murmured. Mairead O’Reilly looked over.
“Building that hill, Carra Hill. And then to heft that boulder up to the top.”
“Ah, don’t forget we had giants to do it back then,” she said.
“They’ll make much of that when the center is made and opened up then.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “But what of it.”
“Isn’t it important, like?”
“Well Da thought it was. To him the stories got to be more important than the actual turning up things in the dig. What use was a collection of oul stones, he’d always say. Stones don’t do much talking. It’s the people we want to hear.”
Minogue looked out at a passing house, a cottage tucked in under rhododendrons and scruffy firs. He sometimes forgot how rain in the west left you thinking you were cut off from the planet. Noonan beeped the horn as he passed the short laneway where a squad car was parked.
“Your father believed in the stories then. That they were there in history.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “And he’ll be proved right, maybe. That gave him
great satisfaction to see how he was able to turn them around. The museum people.”
“They were skeptical?”
She smiled wanly.
“Oh, they were,” she said “They didn’t put much stock in the dowsing. Sure why would they? They’re scientists really.”
“The museum people were a bit slow off the mark then.”
“They were that. But this was back after the war — long before they had the money and the staff. They didn’t begin to cotton on to the Fields until, well, twenty years ago, really. They kept coming up with more, everywhere they put down the rods. Well, they’ve come around. It turned out to be a city, just like what Da said.”
“How did he know‘”
She smiled again
“Well now. He didn’t really, I suppose. He believed it was, so it became one.”
Noonan met Minogue’s eyes in the mirror.
“Teachers have a sixth sense,” he said. “Did you always do your homework?”
Mairead O’Reilly laughed.
“Oh, we’re still the same,” she said. “The sixth sense. But it works.”
Minogue recalled a long and wandering and sometimes humorous chat with Tynan a few years ago. what makes good cops. Dowsing without the stick, Minogue tried, being a chancer too. Intuition, was Tynan’s take: unconscious expertise.
The car hit a dip, wallowed, bounced back up. Minogue went back to the pages on Carra Hill. The last crowning stone was to be the throne for the king to retire to and to take his leave. O’Reilly allowed that the practical truth of the hill, if it were built by people at all, could have been something as prosaic as a keep, a retreat in time of war or battle, a place where a king could stage his heroic last battle and die gloriously, surrounded by his enemies.
“Your father allowed that there could be more to the Fields than a crowd of easygoing and well-behaved farmers.”
She looked away from the window.
“The hill,” he said. “Maybe a defense?”
“Oh, yes. After the son and heir had finished the job. Yes indeed.”
The wipers creaking, the car’s hissing passage over the wet roadway, had made Minogue fierce dopey again. The rain was lighter in town. He took in a new housing estate built by a deserted and crumbling ball alley, a new shopping center. A half mile further was a new plant making plastic bags. Noonan radioed in. There was a call in for a Chief Inspector Minogue, to call back Dublin. Who, Minogue asked Noonan. An O’Leary. Minogue exchanged a look with Malone.
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, Tom.”
CHAPTER 17
Minogue watched Malone working a stone out from between the cleats of his Nikes with a large version of a Swiss army knife. Seventy, eighty quid for the boots. Thirty-odd quid for the knife. Where the hell was O’Leary? The earpiece irritated his ear. An attendant wheeled a toothless man by on a wheelchair. Minogue eyed the drip feed on a stalk. Malone wiped the knife, watched the pair move down the hall.
“Sorry,” said O’Leary. “I was on another line.”
“You’re all right. We’re indoors here.”
“What’s the story with this woman’s car? I’m asking for himself, like.”
“Hard to say, tell him,” Minogue said “There’s an identification going on the body”
“But it’s her, is it? Unofficially?”
“It looks like it, Tony. The body’s going to Dublin tonight for the next of kin before the full PM. I’ll phone it through to the squad as soon as I can get positive here. We have the photos to match. John Murtagh’ll pass it on. Now: is that enough to do you?”
“Got that,” said O’Leary. “And thanks. I have to pass on something to yous The boss is busy until about seven. He was talking to Leyne’s minder. Freeman? Well, he phoned us. They’d heard the car was found. It was on the radio news.”
Minogue watched the wheelchair heading back his way. Skin and bone eyes vacant, inward turning on… nothing, maybe. He nodded back at the attendant.
“They’ll hear in due course,” he said to O’Leary.
“That’s ‘go to hell and leave us to hell alone to do our job,’ is it?”
“Approximately, Tony. Look, it’s tough enough.”
“Okay, I’ll translate that. Any help knowing himself said the same to them?”
“Nice to know, I suppose. The same phrases, I wonder?”
“You must be joking,” said O’Leary. “He gave it out in theologian mode.”
Minogue had to smile. Tynan’s code when he resorted to the biting irony and the endless clauses would be harder to take than a clear FO. That it would have been over Freeman’s finely coiffed American spin-doctor, legal-minder, courtier’s head might have made it even funnier to witness.
“Here’s the thing though,” said O’Leary. “Why I had to call you now. Leyne took a turn. He’s in the hospital, the clinic out in Blackrock.”
Minogue thought of the scar tissue he’d seen in the open-necked shirt. An unconscious thing with Leyne, he had wondered, displaying his wound, exposing it to the healing of the light and air. Or an I-don’t-give-a-damn?
“He’s had bypasses and open heart,” said O’Leary. “He’s not out of the woods at all. He took dizzy or something, said Freeman, so he’s signed into that clinic.”
“Before or after he’d heard the news about Aoife Hartnett?”
“Two and two makes five,” said O’Leary. “You decide. He’s ‘comfortable,’ says Freeman. Cohm-foht-abbel.”
“Well, they worked,” Malone declared. He left his mountaineering boots by the wall, picked up their trailing laces, and dropped them inside. Minogue tugged on his change of socks. He noted half-past four looking back skew-ways at him from his watch.
“Dry as a bone, man.”
Minogue looked at his own wellies.
“Bet you it was the shock,” said Malone. “Maybe he knew all along.”
Minogue looked up sideways at him.
“You say Leyne knew the son murdered her?”
“Capable of, I’m saying. Want to bet the son phoned him from here, from Ireland, I mean?”
“How will we know that until he gets out of the hospital, is the question.”
“Ah,” said Malone and threw his head back. “What they call diplomatic flu, boss. The timing?”
Minogue looked up at his colleague. The scorn was plain enough.
“What,” he said to Malone. “He’s putting moves on us?”
Malone rested his chin on his knuckles and stared at the boots.
“Why’d he bring the handler with him? Covering up for the son, boss.”
Malone brushed his hair with his fingers, ran his palms around his face and breathed out heavily. He shook his head once. Minogue reached down to zip his bag tighter. Then he stood and moved his toes around in his shoes. There’d been no offer of lab coats or even aprons. He and Malone had been steered into this changing room and left to themselves. He glanced down at Malone, still immobile.
“Are you any better now?” he asked
Minogue had known straightaway it was her. He’d heard Malone gasp at the bloated body. Whatever had been feasting on her legs and her belly had seemed to be methodical. Dr. Kelly, a man so like Minogue’s dentist that the inspector had asked him if he was related, had made two pages of notes. His hands had been shaking, Minogue had noticed. He looked down at his own notes. He’d been studying his own handwriting too long not to notice the dropped endings of the letters and even the words, the scattered look to the page.
“Looked like she was pregnant,” Malone murmured. “The bloating, like.”
He lifted his head and squinted at Minogue.
“Crabs, is that what he said?”
“I think so, Tommy. A guess.”
“Jesus. If I had a known that.”
Minogue closed his notebook and slid it into the pouch in his carryall.
“I didn’t write a bleeding word, boss Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Do you think you’ll make it?�
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Malone looked around at the lockers and the stacked boxes.
“Well, Jases, I’m not staying here and that’s a fact.”
An orderly came in and began taking his clothes out of a locker. Minogue exchanged the greeting with his own estimates of the weather and quick agreement with the orderly’s scorn for forecasts. Malone wrapped his boots in a plastic shopping bag and closed his travel bag.
Malone didn’t look much better by the time Minogue finished his call from the phone at reception. Noonan would have a car over for them in five minutes.
“Cup of something, Tommy?”
“Not in here.”
They watched an elderly woman inch her way down the hall using a walking contraption. Is that in his own near future too, Minogue wondered.
“Well that was the worst yet,” Malone said. “She must have broken every…Ah well, what’s the point of talking about it.”
At least five days in the water, was Kelly’s estimate. The marks of the string or rope had gone maroon. The X rays showed a broken spine and a fractured skull from the impact of the drop. Her lungs did not have enough water in them to suggest drowning. Minogue had welcomed with relief that numbness that had come over him when he had looked over Aoife Hartnett’s body for the first time. His hands had made notes, while some other part of him had issued the questions of Kelly. He remembered his repeated queries for clarifications, the patient fencing with Kelly’s irritated and defensive reluctance to say anything conclusive about how long ago Aoife Hartnett had been killed.
“Hoey told me he never got used to it,” Malone said. “It’s why he walked.”
The drive outside was wet but it had stopped raining again. Minogue was pleased to see the expansively mustached and double-chinned Garda McGurk of the drooping eyelids and the rock concert query driving the squad car up to the door.
“There’s our man,” he said.
“Are they looking after you?” was McGurk’s greeting. Minogue sat in beside him and sized up the face offering the gently mocking glances.
“In a manner of speaking now, and thanks.”
“Back to the station, is it?” McGurk asked
