A Carra King

by John Brady

  The copilot leaned around the doorway.

  “About five minutes now,” he shouted.

  Minogue folded the newspaper. He unfolded it again to look at the picture of Larry Smith on the third page. He wasn’t going to let it distract him. Why no pictures of all the addicts and the maimed people who’d run through Smith’s hands before someone shot him? Inner-city families knew that, at least. His ears popped. Was it raining below? The nerve of the Smiths: “demanding” a public inquiry into why the murderers hadn’t been caught.

  The plane dipped, and droning louder, it rose sharply. Minogue’s stomach followed the tilt. Fields and hedges came into view below the wing now, far-off hills and mountains. The high peak of the shrine passed under them.

  “Will we be stopping in for a dose of holy water?” Malone called out. Minogue glared at him: a pilgrimage to Knock wasn’t part of the plan. He wondered what Malone might say at the sight of barefoot pilgrims and penitents climbing Croagh Patrick: where do you get a hamburger around here?

  The engines slowed. The hills to his left slid by and arranged themselves as the plane settled on an approach. Jumbos landed at Knock, didn’t they? There was talk of several planes booked from the States direct to Knock for a commemoration of something. Coffin ships from the Famine, was it . . .? He stared at the seat back ahead of him as the plane closed on the runway. The wings’ sudden tipping caused him to glance back. The wheels bounced back once, settled, and the nose of the plane eased down. He was surprised how little runway it needed to slow to a brisk walking pace. He spotted the squad car by the terminal as the plane turned.

  Minogue slipped on the ladder but Malone shouldered him back onto the step.

  “Watch the moves there,” he said. “You wouldn’t try that back in Dublin.”

  The tarmac was wet in patches. Farm, he smelled. Over the hedges rose the hills of east Mayo. He eyed the canopy fluttering feebly by the runway. A turboprop was parked near the terminal and, beyond it, two light planes and a minibus.

  “A bit like Heathrow,” said Malone. “Except there’s no people. Or buildings.”

  The squad car made its way at a leisurely speed from the terminal. Minogue took his bag from the pilot and squinted at the windscreen of the Vectra.

  The driver was an affable, droopy-eyed Garda McGurk. He had the tonsured look of a monk and a bushy, Gallic moustache. The passenger was a Sergeant Ryan.

  “Pat,” said Ryan and shook hands. His eyebrows were black, as were the few hairs high up on his cheeks, but his hair was a well-maintained ash-grey thatch. Folds of loose skin swelled against his collar and lapped over when he nodded.

  Would they mind stopping in at Ballina station and have a chat with Inspector Noonan before heading up? No bother, from Minogue.

  Minogue sat in the back with Malone. McGurk took the Vectra across the Claremorris Road and settled onto a narrow lane. The windscreen was filthy at the margins. There was a pig farm nearby, Minogue knew. The smell comforted him.

  “The back way up through Kiltimagh,” Ryan said.

  Minogue looked out at the passing hedgerows.

  “I thought ye’d go on to Castlebar,” Ryan tried again. “The airport there.”

  “Ah, we couldn’t pass up Knock,” Minogue had to say. “Pilgrims, we are. Or refugees, from Dublin. But does there be a high season for the shrine at all?”

  “It’s steady enough,” replied Ryan. “There was a plane in from England Monday. Irish, the most of ’em, but. It was part of a bus tour thing.”

  Minogue shifted his knees against the back of the driver’s seat.

  “Have we news yet?” he said. “Up at Cahercarraig there. The car.”

  Ryan scratched at the back of his head. Minogue tried yet again to gauge the territorial quotient. The Dublin Experts: right. Sure. The car wallowed and jerked as it hit a dip in the road. Ryan unhooked the transceiver, checked the volume.

  “I’ll check for you now.”

  Malone kept up his study of the countryside as they left Kiltimagh.

  “Lots of rocks and things,” he said. McGurk glanced over his shoulder.

  “How much would you pay for, say, a ticket to a concert up in the Big Smoke?” he asked Minogue.

  “What type of concert, now?” Minogue said, half-listening to the radio transmission. Ryan repeated that they were on their way to Ballina.

  “Groups,” said McGurk. “Big name.”

  “Traditional stuff, like?”

  “God no. The big ones. What do you call the place, the Point.”

  “A fair whack,” said Malone. “Depends, but.”

  “Okay. The Works. Them, say. What would you pay?”

  Minogue looked at McGurk’s bald crown.

  “Twenty,” said Malone. “Just to get in. Fifty if you want to get a look at ’em.”

  McGurk shook his head.

  “Holy God,” he said. “I told herself. She wouldn’t believe me.”

  McGurk couldn’t be far short of forty, Minogue decided. He studied the points of his moustache in profile. Was this corpulent Guard an off duty-rocker and general satyr? The rural Irishman at his simple, unfathomable best.

  “They’re deadly though,” said McGurk. “You have to admit.”

  “They’re all right,” Malone said.

  “‘Bless the virgin, meek and mild; cruise the strip and save the child.’”

  Minogue found himself trying to suppress a smile.

  “Yeah,” said Malone.

  “I don’t know what it means,” said McGurk. “But I keep thinking about it.”

  “They have a way of throwing words together, I suppose.”

  Trowen, Minogue thought. Dee english language trowen on the fukken shoals of a Dubbalin — man’s ideas, loike.

  “You’re not mad about them, are you?”

  “Since they went big, I don’t know. The edge is gone offa them. Washed up.”

  “Do you think? Who’s on the edge then, now like?”

  Malone studied a tractor as the squad car finally moved around it. He waved back at the driver.

  “GOD. Now they’re the business.”

  McGurk looked around at him.

  “GOD? You’re joking me.”

  “Why am I joking you?”

  “They’re head cases, aren’t they? I heard two of them are lezzers, man.”

  Malone cracked his knuckles.

  “What’s the story on the drug scene these days?” said Ryan. “Up in Dublin.”

  “Bad,” said Minogue. “Been bad a long while now.”

  “It’s all over now, of course,” Ryan said. “Isn’t it?”

  So this was a territorial nark coming out. Minogue sensed that Malone had picked up the dig, too. Drugs were an obvious plot by Dublin to defile rural Ireland. As well as Murder Squad luminaries landing on them here to tell Guards how to do their business. Being flown here, for the love of God, because they were so high and mighty. McGurk began to take a keener interest in negotiating the turns. They braked for a stop sign. Two articulated lorries swept by on the Castlebar Road.

  “Another bit of a jog and we’ll come up near to Foxford,”

  said McGurk.

  “They’ve brought up the drug squad to seven in Castlebar,” said Ryan.

  All Dublin’s fault, Minogue was ready to agree.

  “Terrible, isn’t it,” he murmured instead.

  “Five years ago, there wasn’t one.”

  Why was it taking so long to get a call back from Ballina.

  “At this rate — ”

  Ryan didn’t get the chance to finish. Malone too looked away from the window to listen better. They had floated the Nissan Micra off the rocks just a half an hour ago at high tide. A body had been recovered. Female, matching the description of the missing person. McGurk half-turned in the seat. He offered the mike to Minogue. The Inspector shook his head.

  “Ask him where they’re taking it,” he said. “If you please.”

  Chief Inspector Noonan w
as 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 on 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 harbour. 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. Jurisdictional, 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 amongst 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 . . .?”

  SIXTEEN

  Noonan drove. He waved at people. He rolled down the window and slowed to greet an old man labouring 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?”

  “Mairéad 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 Mairéad 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’ll be for you, Tommy,” Minogue murmured.

  Malone tugged at the door release. Minogue caught the tail end of Mairéad 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.

  “Mairéad’s father was a legend,” said Noonan. “Peadar O’Reilly. He died last June twelvemonth. A great loss. If it wasn’t for him now, well, Mairéad’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 dilapidated garage at the junction of the Cahercarraig 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 it, Mairéad,” 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 boghole. 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,” Mairéad 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 when it was finally excavated,” said Noonan. “Was he?”

  Minogue watched her eyes roam the hillsides. Her s
mile 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 Mairéad 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, declining 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.