A Carra King

by John Brady

  “Indeed, ma’am. I —”

  “Whist, will you! ‘And there,’ says Dan, ‘there you’d meet me and my family.’ Never entered the minutes, needless to say. Churchill almost threw a decanter at him, so he did. Oul toper, God forgive him. Hated Ireland, always. You’d be proud to claim relation with the likes of Dan Minogue! A huge funeral . . .”

  “I must commend you on your memory.”

  “Hah,” she scoffed. “Patronizing a woman of fourscore years. I worked for Dev for thirty years. Now, that was long before the corner boys and counter jumpers insinuated themselves, you’ll understand. Long before the sloothering and shuttling off to Brussels and Strasbourg and the like, olagóning for grants and favours and hand-outs. Begging to be let sit with the fat boys over there, with their shiny suits and their sleek — ”

  “Mrs. Garland, please: I don’t want to waste the resources of the Gardai sending out Guards to find him.”

  Mrs. Garland said nothing. Minogue listened harder to the rustling sounds.

  “Hello?”

  “Don’t be interrupting me! I’m checking his appointments here.”

  Minogue looked across at Murtagh. He was on hold on another call. He grinned wearily and shook his head. He heard Mrs. Garland whisper, pages turning.

  “Now . . . Here we are. Yesterday was . . . Wait . . . What kind of people are we?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Set-aside: do you know about that?”

  “I do, ma’am.”

  “Do you now? We have farmers paid by the paper boys in Brussels not to grow anything. And a lot of them spray the fields to prove they can’t put in a crop there so’s they’ll get the grants. Poison, man — rank poison! Can you credit that? With everything we have, someone in Brussels tells Irish farmers to set aside land, a thing we fought and died for — even to poison it — and we do it? Sure land means nothing anymore. What have we turned into, answer me that. We might as well call ourselves a new name. Euroworms or something. Is that the way to start the next thousand years, is it?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Here we are now. Seán is at one of his regular things. They go to a restaurant below the back of Merrion Street there. Do you like Gilbert and Sullivan?”

  “Which place, ma’am?”

  “L’Avenue.”

  “He’s at a function there is it?”

  “He’s eating his dinner there. They go off to a pub afterward. Tuohy’s. Do you know Tuohy’s? Do you know what they did to it?”

  An ex-football player had lavished a million and something pounds to disassemble a country pub and reassemble it, board by board, in the middle of Dublin. Minogue gave her no chance to start in on it.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Garland. I do. Here’s a number for me if I should miss him. If he phones, would you be kind and tell him that I’m leaving this minute to find him, ma’am?”

  Minogue threw more water on his face. Still his eyeballs ached. He studied the droplets falling from his nose into the sink. The sneezing hadn’t yet proved a cold was here. Maybe it was working its way expressly and stealthily to his chest though.

  Malone was waiting for him by the door. He had phoned L’Avenue, gotten to speak to Garland. Garland had told him he’d wait for them there. He nodded at Murtagh hunched over his desk.

  “John’s gotten a hold of the sister. The Hartnett woman’s, like.”

  Minogue took an extension and listened. Fiona Nolan was close to hysterical. Murtagh asked if she could give the key to a Guard and they’d let themselves in. Caught between panic and suspicion, Fiona Nolan said she’d have to discuss it with her hubbie.

  Murtagh kicked off against the desk. He rolled no more than a foot.

  “She’s freaking out, boss,” he whispered.

  “Get her husband to bring the key then.”

  “See what she — Yes. Mr. Nolan? Yes. Garda John Murtagh, attached to the Technical Bureau.”

  Nolan asked if there was an investigation in which his sister-in-law figured. Murtagh rolled his eyes, gave Minogue a look and pointed at the phone. Can’t, Minogue mouthed. He put down the extension. He heard Murtagh begin to explain to Nolan as he headed for the door.

  Malone took Thomas Street. He drove directly through the Coombe to Kevin Street where they met with the last of rush hour. He said L’Avenue several times, trying out different inflections each time.

  “It’s oo, Tommy. Not yew.”

  “Lava-noo.”

  “You’re close.”

  “Doesn’t sound right. Sounds like Lava Noo. Who learned you your French anyhow?”

  “Nobody. I picked it up.”

  “Garland’s gay, I betcha.”

  “Why?”

  “He lives with his ma.”

  “You were living at home until not too long ago.”

  “That’s different. That was on account of the brother.”

  Minogue answered Murtagh’s call as Malone drew up in front of the laneway. He eyed the painted sign for L’Avenue high up on the wall.

  Nolan, the brother-in-law, was willing to let them into Aoife Hartnett’s place, but only in an hour.

  “What!” said Minogue. “After he’s been through it?”

  “I suppose,” said Murtagh.

  “Tell him to smarten up, John. We’re not across from one another in court.”

  “I levelled with him. He’s worried. He’ll come around quick enough.”

  Malone turned into the laneway. There was an interior design place, a cake shop with a Russian-sounding name, an architect’s office that looked like some of Daithi’s Lego from twenty years gone by.

  “There’s nowhere to park,” said Malone. “I’ll park back out by the bank.”

  L’Avenue was half full. There were skylights, vines that looked real, wrought-iron dividers. Garland was sitting with two men and a woman. One of the men looked familiar. He had the guarded expression of someone who’s well known. Minogue couldn’t place him.

  “I’ll come quietly,” Garland said.

  Minogue managed a brief smile in return. The size of the head on this fella, he thought. And why did he remind him of a pigeon? The giant’s head, the ruddy face over swelling wattles, and a spotted bow tie stole Minogue’s attention for several moments. On the end of his short arms were fingers like sausages. Minogue made an effort to keep his eyes on Garland’s face.

  The others at the table returned the Inspector’s nod. The woman smiled. Garland grasped his jacket. He eyed the Inspector.

  “God, your timing is perfect. Inspector?”

  “Matt.”

  “A close call entirely — Colm here was about to extort more wine from us.”

  Garland must have told them there’d be a Guard coming to call. Glamorous, no doubt, a whiff of danger, something to tell their cronies about.

  “Oh, yes,” Garland went on. “He was getting ready to explain the subtexts in A Rebel Hand.

  ”

  That’s who the Colm was: Colm Tierney, newspaper columnist, prognosticator. Minogue’s nose began to tickle. He searched his coat pocket for hankies but he couldn’t find any.

  He knew the surge of irritation wasn’t just from having a cold coming on. There was something about these people here that annoyed him. Crank he was, and prejudiced. He knew it, and he felt badly about it, but he knew that wouldn’t alter much of his impressions later.

  “Colm’s the man, I don’t know if you’re aware of it now …”

  Garland waited for Minogue to blow his nose.

  “Well, Colm broke the news that Ireland had disappeared several years ago. ‘The man who lost Ireland,’ we call him.”

  Tierney’s lips pursed. The smile, or whatever it was supposed to become, never made it. He looked down instead at the glass he was turning on the cloth.

  “I keep on finding it,” said Garland. “But he doesn’t believe me! He’s our resident postmodernist — here, did anyone hear the one where some scientist crossed a Mafia boss with a postmodernist?”
/>   Malone had entered the restaurant. He spotted Minogue and made his way over. Minogue finished blowing his nose and glanced at Garland. He’d caught a bit of the punchline, something about an offer you couldn’t understand.

  “Can we chat here at one of the empty tables?”

  A waitress followed the three. Minogue asked if the coffee was fresh. He gave Garland the once-over again.

  “It’s like I was saying to you on the phone, Dr. Garland,” he began.

  “Seán. Please.”

  “Seán. We’re trying to locate Ms. Hartnett. We need her help in our inquiries.”

  Garland looked from Minogue to Malone and back.

  “She’s gone to Portugal. That’s what I know at the moment.”

  “Did she tell you anything about the hows and wheres of her trip?”

  “Well, in a word, no. She has oodles of overtime built up, so — well, she did mention to me that she’d found a seat-sale thing . . . ”

  “Did she give a name, a destination?”

  Garland’s frown changed his face completely.

  “No,” he said after several moments’ thought. “She’d be just notifying me as a courtesy now, not asking me. We’re civil servants and all, but it’s more like a, well, a crowd of academics really. Aoife’d decide on leave and suchlike.”

  “Travelling on her own?” Minogue tried.

  “Well, now. I really don’t know.”

  “‘I’m going to Portugal’ or ‘We’re going to Portugal’?”

  Garland scratched under his chin.

  “No, no,” he said slowly. “I’m afraid not. No. . . . Now, is this connected with this American that you were looking for, the man who was found the other day?”

  Minogue nodded. The coffee arrived in a small cup. He glanced up at the waitress. Was there something else, she asked. A bigger cup, a lot less jazz on the speakers, windows. A pint; at home with a book. He smiled and shook his head.

  “Now I’m worried,” said Garland. “What can I do here, what can we do?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Garland. Seán. We’ve been in touch with others about Ms. Hartnett’s whereabouts. She has or had a sometimes boyfriend, and a sister here in Dublin. The sister thought she was going with a gang from work, a girls’ week type of thing. That’s what she told her. So here we are. Do you and she work together on a daily basis, now?”

  Garland’s frown deepened.

  “No, not every day at all,” he said, “but we’d be bumping into one another pretty well every day. Aoife headed up project teams with the OPW. We have regular meetings and consultations. Now, it’s very informal too, of course.”

  “The Office of Public Works, is it?”

  “Yes, sorry. We work very closely with their Historic Properties Section there. That’s their National Monuments Department.”

  “The last time being . . .?”

  “Thursday, I think — yes, Thursday. I thought back after you phoned. I left the office at lunchtime. She was going off to lunch as well. Aoife had been meeting with people to do with an interpretive centre. ”

  He glanced down at Minogue’s notebook.

  “After one,” he added. “I remember. How’d it go, I asked her. Great, she said.”

  “She left alone?”

  “So far as I know yes. I was talking to someone. Des McNally, yes. Out in the hall by the stairs, and she went by.”

  Minogue wrote two ls for McNally.

  “We do be flexible in this environment,” said Garland. “Everyone works hard. There’d be stress at certain times, of course, like any other . . .”

  He returned Minogue’s skeptical gaze. Then he gave a short laugh.

  “Stress you’re thinking — in a museum? Not like your work now, but . . .”

  The missed sleep, the late-night calls, Minogue thought. The hunkering over a corpse, for hours sometimes; the ever-new bafflement and disgust, the moment of truth for families and lovers.

  “Ms. Harnett’s in a high-pressure job, do you mean?”

  “Well, no, not exactly. She’s an assistant curator. She has responsibilities for several key parts of heritage. There’s an awful lot going on these days.”

  Minogue leaned in over his cup. A couple was steered to the adjourning table.

  “Tell me what that means in her case, will you?”

  Garland put on a puzzled expression.

  “I’m not sure now that this is where we should be going, now, er, Matt.”

  Minogue let the pause linger. He knew Malone would be giving Garland the look. That quiet barrage of indirect scrutiny, the restrained irritation, the aggressive indifference of a seasoned Garda to the fate of anyone who tried to bollock him usually had the desired effect. He lifted his cup and looked around the restaurant. Not bad at all, at all, the coffee. He watched Colm Tierney finish a glass of wine. Ireland’s disappeared, he thought. Had it now.

  “What I mean,” Garland said then, “is that of course I’ll be very glad to help out in any way I can.”

  “I’m much obliged, Seán,” he managed. Garland sighed.

  “I’m not comfortable discussing a colleague’s professional life,” he said.

  Minogue watched Malone poke gently at the edge of his eyelid.

  “Maybe I’ve given you the wrong impression here now, meeting here with a bit of socializing going on. I forget sometimes, you know. We tend to, well you can tell, try and stay informal. To someone outside looking in, it might look different.”

  Minogue nodded. He looked into his cup.

  “Sorry now,” Garland went on. He gathered himself in his seat. Fifteen stone, Minogue was thinking. Was that a hundred kilos?

  “But I have to step back into my job and be duly cautious.”

  “Don’t be sorry at all,” said Minogue. “Enough said now. At this moment there’s a Guard on his way to Ms. Hartnett’s place to see if we can locate her, now.”

  Garland sat back.

  “My God,” he whispered. “You mean we have reason to be worried, do we?”

  “Well now. This much I can tell you, Seán. We can’t find Ms. Hartnett on any flight out of Dublin. I’d be most obliged if you were to keep this to yourself, Seán. We need to contact others, her family. It may all turn out to be a misunderstanding. A series of misunderstandings.”

  “But Aoife is not under investigation by the Guards, is she?”

  “Not a bit of it,” Minogue replied. “Now, you were good enough to phone us about a visit from this man who is the current focus of our investigation. Did you know anything about what he and Ms. Hartnett discussed with this American?”

  Garland adjusted his dickey bow again.

  “Well, I don’t really,” he said. “It was only after me seeing the picture in the papers that I remembered him. I wonder if Aoife herself knows who he is, sorry, who he was. You see, we get a lot of people and groups and requests coming through the department. An awful lot.”

  Garland leaned in over the table.

  “Culture and history and heritage, they’re all very hot issues now. We’re answerable for a lot more than digging up an oul pot and putting it in a glass case for a busload of schoolchildren to gawk at now. The way histories are handled and researched and presented is all very contentious.”

  “There’s more than one history now?”

  Garland gave Minogue the eye in return.

  “Oh, there’s a right can of worms there. There are any number of people and interest groups and the like — stakeholders, they call them — in heritage now. That’s a side of the job that takes a lot of time and training. It takes delicate enough management by times, I can tell you. I have three staff with MBAs, even.”

  “So you’re busy, then,” said Minogue. “Inquiries, visitors, conferences?”

  “All that and more, to be sure.”

  “Would Ms. Hartnett have discussed the visit with anyone else at the office? The American, I mean. Mr. Shaughnessy. She kept notes maybe?”

  Garland looked up at a recessed
light for several moments.

  “To tell you the God’s honest truth, I’ve no idea. Aoife’s very organized. She’d probably have a note if there were something to it. She’d certainly have come to me if there were prospects from this thing, this meeting. But she’s a fierce busy person. She’s project leader on a big site plan that’s moving ahead fast.”

  “Which, now?”

  “The Carra Fields, out in Mayo.”

  Minogue knew that Malone had heard too.

  “There was an opening of an exhibition about that recently?”

  “There was indeed,” said Garland. “With all the plans and models for the interpretive centre laid out. Marvellous. It rewrites a lot of history, so it does.”

  Minogue met Malone’s eyes for a moment.

  “I’ve a colleague who’d like to persuade me that Mayo people are civilized.”

  “Well now, he’s got you,” said Garland. “Stone Age people — late enough on in the Stone Age, to be sure. There were thousands of them — a huge cleared enclosure, with grazing and crops. And a big surprise was that there were no fortifications or the like. All of them living a grand existence without the rowing and beating one another we have later. Can you imagine?”

  “Very civilized,” said Minogue. “For Mayo. A Garden of Eden.”

  “Oh, I could go on and on,” said Garland. “It’s excited a lot of interest in Europe. It’s the most important site since, well, we know what happened at Mullaghmore.”

  “To be sure,” said Minogue.

  An interpretive centre in the Burren area of his home county had been left half-completed after protests about it had overruled the local peoples’ support for it.

  “Aoife can give you the ins and outs of all the things that need to be juggled and managed for this one. God knows! It’s not just money at all, at all. She worked on Mullaghmore, too. I remember she saw it coming too, the showdown over that. Anyway, the Fields will be a showpiece entirely. There’ll be no slip-ups with this one. It was heritage funds from Europe that made the big difference.”

  “She is putting the finishing touches to this whole project, you say.”