by John Brady
“I have to be sure. One of her mates is on holliers in Kilkenny since Tuesday but he’s checking out sound anyway. Him and the wife and the kids visiting in-laws. She had a secretary who’s very shaky now. Eileen Brogan. I got her to go through the desk for us, appointment diaries, messages and that.”
Malone was tapping his Biro on his knuckles now. Minogue watched it hop. Malone stopped.
“Phone Garland, John,” said Minogue. “Ask him to free up the people she was closest to there. I’m going over there myself.”
TWENTY
Garland stared out the window of Aoife Hartnett’s office and rubbed at his eyes again. Minogue could hear Malone’s tones in the adjoining room, a meeting room where staff were now coming in one by one, some in tears, to tell him what they could of Aoife Hartnett. Minogue was waiting for Eileen Brogan to return from the toilet so he could interview her.
“But they must be connected,” said Garland finally. “I don’t remember seeing this Shaughnessy character at those things, but there he is in the picture. There were loads of people there.”
“Aoife went on leave the twenty-eighth, I have here?”
“That’s it,” said Garland and blew his nose. “I checked.”
“And the sick leave was in April. Two weeks, was it?”
“The seventh to the eighteenth. Yes.”
Minogue fixed the eight in eighteenth. His Biro wasn’t putting out. Garland slid one across to him. April is the cruellest month; who wrote that one?
“We’ll be needing to know why.”
Garland squirmed, laid his hands on the table.
“Well is that not confidential information still?”
“I don’t mean why you didn’t tell us the other night about her sick leave,” Minogue said. “I mean the reason for her taking the leave.”
“Well, you’ll be consulting with Aoife’s doctor, maybe?”
“When we need to. Her apartment’s being investigated as we speak.”
Garland looked down at the desktop. He made a table setting of two Biros and a pencil.
“As much as I’m allowed to divulge, now, I suppose,” he whispered.
“Aoife’s dead, Mr. Garland.”
Garland swallowed. His eyes darted to Minogue’s.
“We’re all on the one side here, I’m thinking,” Minogue added. “She’s being examined today here in Dublin. There’s not much privacy left in the process now, if you follow me.”
Garland leaned to one side of his chair and rubbed at his nose. He sighed and ran his hand down his face. He left his eyes closed for several moments.
“Well, if you can talk to her doctor. She was getting treatment this last while.”
“For what, now?”
“Depression,” said Garland. “I think it was more burnout. Aoife needed time away from the job. I think she finally realized that.”
“Was there something that helped her realize that, something specific?”
Garland held his breath for a moment while he sized Minogue up.
“Yes.” The breath rushing out seemed to make him suddenly tired.
“Remember that Aoife and I worked together, God, nine years now. She’s a first-class scholar and archaeologist. None better, let me tell you. Single-minded, dedicated — always the one to go the distance. Very, very dedicated. I still, well . . .”
Minogue watched Garland swallow and pinch his eyes. The dickey bow had gone askew. Garland took out another paper hanky and turned away. Minogue studied the postcards and photos. Columns: Greece, Rome? Turkey, it turned out.
“Mr. Garland. Is there something you’re leaving out? Out of respect for Aoife?”
Garland’s face was blotchy now. He stared dully at Minogue.
“Do you always look for the dark side?”
Minogue held back his first answer. He raised his eyebrows instead.
“I’d hope I could persuade you that I’m not trying to dig up dirt,” he said. “I can think of no other way to say it at the moment. So: sorry. Help me, help us. That’s what’s needed.”
Garland cleared his throat.
“All right so. The leave was for Aoife to think over what she wanted to do. Where she wanted to go. In her career, her life, I mean.”
Minogue thought of the group he had detached Garland from the other night at L’Avenue. He’d heard the phrase so often lately: What I want to do with my life.
“Was it an ultimatum to her?”
“God, no!” said Garland and sat back. “We all liked Aoife. She lived for her work, you know, but things hadn’t been going her way or at least she’d maybe forgotten the knack of adapting.”
“Give me a for instance, can you?”
“Well the job itself: on the one hand we have fewer staff and more responsibilities. She took them all on, to be sure, but there were weeks on end that I know she was here until ten or eleven at night. She managed great until a few bumps in the road came along.”
“Which, now?”
“Well, to be blunt, there were things disappearing. From sites.”
“Monuments, do you mean?”
“Yes. There were three gone in April of last year. They were set into walls even and Public Works themselves thought they’d be secure against anything. But these people were determined and up to the job it seemed.”
“Stolen? Did they turn up?”
“Not here they didn’t. Oddly enough it died down this year. It’d be an impossible job to keep them all safe, short of bringing them in here. We took in several after Crom Dubh below in Kerry. Did you hear of that one last year?”
“I seem to remember something.”
“Fifteen hundred years old. But pre-Christian to be sure. No trace.”
“Is there money in these?”
“I don’t rightly know. No one does. But I’ll bet there is.”
Minogue looked down at Garland rearranging the Biros.
“What does this have to do with Aoife?”
“Well, technically the Assistant Keeper would be responsible for securing sites — along with the OPW, of course. The Office of Public Works, sorry. Aoife was up to her eyes already. She wanted a lot of it taken down and brought in here for safekeeping. But there were other interests, local groups wanting things kept, for the tourism thing, it came down to really. But Aoife’s idea was to put all these things out to the world internationally. That was the project she got funding for, the computer stuff you had a look at there . . .”
“Oration?”
“Ovation. The logic was sound: the pieces would be seen by millions, and they’d be secure. Irish culture would reach around the world. A bit like the missionary work the monks were doing in Europe all those centuries ago. Funny in a way, isn’t it.”
Minogue’s hands remembered the feel of the stone cross at Tully, the centuries of weather and other hands coming through his skin to entrance him.
“Oh something like that,” Garland was saying. “But without leaving your home. Yes, it’s cheap — oh, there are umpteen perfectly good, rational reasons . . .”
A redundancy, Minogue thought. Too reasonable maybe, too well thought out.
“And she got some European funding,” said Garland. “‘The past is the future,’ do you get it?”
The words were out before he’d thought about it, and Minogue regretted them almost immediately.
“You don’t mean Bosnia, I take it,” he heard himself say. “Or Belfast.”
Garland stopped wiping his nose and fixed a look on Minogue.
“By God,” he murmured and started rubbing again.
“You’d fit right in with the crowd up in L’Avenue, my crowd: ‘The past is a nightmare from which we struggle to awaken’ and all that. My overeducated generation, far from bare feet now. Dublin intelligentsia, with their mental theme parks.”
“I take it you have a different point of view then.”
“The past is real,” said Garland. Minogue saw the keenness in Garland’s eyes. “It’s with us.
It’s not a nightmare. Stephen Daedalus was a bit too precious for my liking.”
“It was Nietzsche,” said Minogue. “Mister Joyce didn’t invent it.”
Garland sat back. A smile began to break through.
“You’re serious,” he said. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this from a, a Garda.”
“Don’t be fretting now. I do be reading a lot when I can’t sleep.”
Garland’s eyes took on a new light. He sat over the desk again.
“You, you would know about the past more than anyone,” he said. “Of course — yes: when you go trying to solve a . . .?”
Minogue wanted out. He kicked himself for drifting into this.
“Maybe,” he said. “I — ”
“Exactly! We both try to extricate something from the . . . I have to think this out . . .”
“Computers,” said Minogue. “We strayed off talking about Aoife’s job?”
The frown slid back down Garland’s forehead.
“Yes, yes,” he murmured.
“Bringing ancient Ireland to someone in a library in say, Milan?”
Garland hadn’t completely left the other conversation yet. Minogue took to staring at him. Garland suddenly saw Minogue’s eyes, blinked.
“Virtually, like. Yes. . . . Point and click, isn’t that the expression?”
Minogue was suddenly back in Ryan’s pub. A crowd in from Fraud celebrating, Kilmartin too, of course. Who had said that there? It was about the Smiths: point-and-click.
“Wizzywig,” said Garland. “That’s another paradigm we hear.”
“Pardon?”
“Oh, it’s more of the jargon,” said Garland. “What-you-see-is-what-you-get. Pictures, little film clips. Next will be virtual reality, Dermot told me. Someone in Japan could ‘log on’ and go around the museum here. All electronic of course, but they could even pick things up and turn them around. Makes the mind go quite giddy on me, I have to say.”
Minogue wrote “Ovation” in his notebook.
“Did this computer thing get in the way of Aoife’s other duties?”
“Well now,” Garland began. Minogue detected the quick slide into caution, the clear signal from the considered pause. “Ovation began to take up a lot of time. Very taken up with it, she was. Yes, I had to speak with her about that project.”
“By way of being a row, would you say?”
Garland nodded.
“It turned out to be. She was insisting I sign an approval in advance for the funding renewal that was to come up six months down the road. I just, well, I couldn’t really. She needed to show what the project had done so far, I told her.”
“How bad a row?”
The pause was longer now. What food for thought Garland was considering in his study of his own thumbnails, Minogue didn’t much care to wonder about. He felt his own impatience turn to annoyance.
“Well, I haven’t seen too many like it in my career,” said Garland. “But I knew in my heart that Aoife was not getting personal about it.”
“Personal. Could you fill in the gaps there a bit for me?”
“Ahhh . . .” Garland’s gasp surprised Minogue. The words came out in a hoarse whisper. “What a strange and terrible thing to be sitting here, what kind of a day is it or world is it . . . that I sit here with a policeman talking about someone I’ve known and . . .”
Minogue looked away while Garland cried. His annoyance ebbed. It was the recall of the bunch at L’Avenue which had been worming away at him all the while, he began to understand. Some vestige of his irritation with them had made him want to fence with Garland over some stupid philosophizing about what the past meant. Navel-gazers, chatterers, intellectuals. The men who lost Ireland: Garland had the wit all right. He thought of Leyne again, the self-made battler, grasper and fixer, his derision for experts. But both so familiar, so Irish, Minogue had to agree as the muted sounds of grief, and the sighing between sobs flowed around and through his thoughts. Don’t worry you’re all right, was all he could say to Garland’s choked off apology as he tried to regain some control. He rambled by Tully Cross again while he waited for Garland, and then slipped away to the waves at Fanore.
“You’ve been in these situations a lot, I suppose,” from Garland finally.
The Inspector nodded.
“You cope?” said Garland. “You have to, I suppose.”
Minogue had to let go of his wanderings down the lane to Gleninagh pier.
“It’s always bad,” he said. He met Garland’s blurry eyes. “Tell me what she said. When ye had your disagreement, I mean.”
Garland sighed and wiped his eyes again.
“Oh, I hadn’t the vision. The vision — me. Aoife could put her case very well. Did I not see the implication the future of the new media, et cetera. Eco-tourism came into it somewhere. Distributed learning, walls coming down . . .”
“Is there a book of less than twenty pages where I could figure out what any of that means?”
Garland smiled briefly and blew his nose.
“Maybe she was right,” he resumed. “That’s the hard thing to take right now. That we — that I — thwarted her, God forgive me.”
Garland had more hankies in his pocket. Minogue jotted down “medication?” in his notebook. She must have confided in someone.
“A catalyst it was,” Garland said, “when you think about it now. The artifacts being stolen, I mean. We very quickly saw the need to bring in some of the vulnerable pieces. There was no doubt about that. There was good agreement there in committee, I mean. But the computer stuff available all over the world, well it seemed to be an answer for some time in the future, maybe.”
“But not from your point of view.”
“I’d still have to stand by that. It’s not just that these things should be kept in their area, the indigenous area, for tourists to spend money getting there in their rented cars and eating their dinners in the local hotel and that. It’s that these things belong there. The vernacular. I don’t know if that makes sense now to the man in the street . . .”
He stopped wiping his eye and eyed the Inspector.
“Do the Guards speak MBA now? ‘Re-engineering’? ‘Vision statements’ . . .?”
“I don’t know,” Minogue said. “We get odd memos by times, to be sure.”
Garland took a breath. Minogue heard it escape slowly.
“Well, it was my idea she take a leave. I only hope now I didn’t do wrong. Putting time on her hands then.”
“April,” Minogue said.
“Yes.”
“And how was she since?”
“Oh, good. Everything running smoothly. The project ready . . .”
“Did you know her socially, like, would she be in your milieu?”
A flicker on Garland’s face gave Minogue a pleasant twinge. Garland didn’t know whether this Guard meant it sarcastically, and he wouldn’t ask.
“No. She liked the arts. Well, obviously. Her ex was an opera fan, I believe.”
“She didn’t discuss her personal life with you?”
“No. We’d chat, go to dos together but nothing of a personal nature, no.”
“Who did she mix with, relate most to, here at the office?”
Garland eased back. Minogue listened to the chair back taking the weight.
“Well, she was friendly with everyone really. Eileen, her secretary would be in there now. Dermot Higgins, she had a lot of time for him.”
“Was she involved with him?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I never heard anything to . . .”
“She had a job to come back to here when she left on leave?”
“Of course she did.” Said like a retort, Minogue registered.
“And she knew this?”
“Absolutely. I told her. We’d stand by her, without a doubt.”
“She didn’t mention resigning, did she.”
“No.”
“Or moving? Departments, jobs?”
“God, no. There’d be no place really, well that I can think of. Her expertise and all you know?”
Minogue fell to staring out the window. Garland blowing his nose brought him back.
“Thanks,” he said. “You’ll be here for the afternoon? In the office, I mean.”
Garland said that he would. Minogue watched him leave. He waited for several minutes. He couldn’t very well go out and drag in Eileen Brogan if she was so upset still. Maybe he should leave her until the afternoon. No, he couldn’t.
He looked around the walls of Aoife Hartnett’s office again. There were pictures of kids, the niece and nephew, he guessed, on the corkboard by the postcards. The Algarve — she’d been, the writer thanked her for steering them to the best hotel — Moscow, Paris. Milan. Thirty-eight, that wasn’t old. Smart, hard-working. She worked late, she did her homework. She took on loads of work, more than she should have, probably. Had she reached the top in the job and then found there was nowhere to go? Where did she want to go anyway, and who with? Shaughnessy? Christ, he thought, and the weariness fell on him. She’d had a nervous breakdown, big or small — that’s what pushed everything off the rails.
Minogue heard shoes on the carpet outside. It was Eileen Brogan who tapped on the open door. Already, he thought: things might go his way at last.
“Mrs. Brogan? Thanks now.”
She stood in the doorway.
“You’re great now,” he said. “I’m wondering if you could give me some of your time first to go over her messages. Voice mail and that too, if you can?”
She glanced back toward the main office.
“We won’t be long now,” he said. “Tell me, are you long here?”
“Three years,” she said. “I was at home but then I did a job-training thing. Word processing and that.”
“You’re well ahead of me then,” he tried. “I’m an iijit still in that line.”
She tried to smile but a tear dropped from her eyelash.
“I saw you on the telly the other night,” she whispered. “Asking about the man at the airport.”
Minogue looked around her freckled face.
“It was your good self who alerted Mr. Garland to phone us, Mrs. Brogan. I’m obliged to you. Thank you.”
She stared at him, the surprise winning out over the frown or wariness.
