A Carra King

by John Brady

  “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. University, 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 rooflights of the Garda car above the heather. Next to it was a sign. They rounded a bend and came in sight of a cleared gravelled 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 savoured 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. Mairéad 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 in on 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. Mairéad 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, Mairéad. 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 Mairéad 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. Maireád 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. Mairéad 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 Ident crew in from Castlebar was managing with lifting casts of the wheel ruts.

  “Go over to the Ident crowd there, Tommy. See them right, will you.”

  He picked his way back across the clumps of frockins and heather to the gravelled 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 Mairéad can help, that’s what she wants to do. Bred into her, and all of them.”

  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, Mairéad?”

  “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 said. “Like our friends beyond in Egypt?”

  “The cruiskeen lawn,” said Noonan and grinned. “Poteen?”

  “There would,” said Mairéad 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. Mairéad 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. Mairéad 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,” Mairéad 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 Mairéad 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 levelled 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. Mairéad 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 Centre 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 dousing. 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?”

  Mairéad 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 defence?”

  “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 centre. 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.