by John Brady
All souls
( Inspector Matt Minogue - 4 )
John Brady
John Brady
All souls
A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone, not always one who has done something.
— Marcus Aurelius
CHAPTER ONE
Minogue made another quick study of the man’s face. The eyes were lazy and red from the drink, the pocked skin still oily. Thomas Martin Nolan, known to his few mates and the man he had killed three hours earlier as Jelly Nolan, seemed sober. Nolan’s eyes were fixed on a ventilation grate high up on the wall where grey lines of dust, years’ worth, edged the metal. He drew on his cigarette. Nolan was twenty-two but he looked five years older. His red hair was cropped close, and the ends of his thin moustache curled into the corners of his mouth. His body was already thickening from too much drink and stodgy food. Nolan fingered the studs in his ear before he squashed his cigarette into the saucer with his left hand. Then he examined his hands carefully, pausing to stare at the nicotine-stained fingernails. Although Minogue had all he needed from the earlier session twenty minutes ago when Hoey and he had done the interview, the Inspector decided that he might as well get as much as he could from Nolan before Legal Aid showed up.
Nolan cleared his throat. “Any more fags?”
Minogue shook his head. Hoey had left the room five minutes ago. “Well, fuck you and the horse you robbed to get to Dublin on, you culchie bastard.”
Minogue was suddenly seized by an urge to reach across the table and hammer Nolan in the face. He grasped the table-top and searched Nolan’s face again. Jelly Nolan had kicked a man to death outside a pub in Drimnagh. Nolan had known the victim, John McArdle, all his life. McArdle had worked as a deliveryman for a Dublin newspaper. He had loaned Nolan twenty quid a week ago and last night in the pub he had asked for it back. When Nolan wasn’t forthcoming, McArdle had taunted him. Nolan had gone drinking elsewhere but had returned at closing-time and followed McArdle down a lane. There he had felled McArdle from behind and kicked him in the head until McArdle lay dead in a puddle of cranial blood fed from his ears and nose. McArdle hadn’t known that Nolan was in a corner already, running from a local shark to whom he was in hock fifteen hundred quid. Caught knocking off food, Nolan had also been sacked from his job stocking supermarket shelves. He had run out of friends, run out of a future. Minogue had heard of the shark, Carty, before. Cash Carty and his brother, Shocko, collected debts with legendary brutality.
Nolan glared back under his eyebrows at the Inspector.
“What’s the big bleeding staring match about? Here I am doing your job for you. All I want is a few fags. You got everything you want there, haven’t you? I signed your bleeding statement. I didn’t give yous any run-around. So what’s the big deal?”
He was sure he could take Nolan handily. He was also afraid he’d not stop with the first blow. Nolan frowned and leaned back in the chair. His white boiler suit reminded Minogue of a patient awaiting surgery. Detective Garda Shea Hoey opened the door of the interview room. He looked at Minogue, raised his eyebrows and broke the Inspector’s stare fixed on Nolan. Minogue lurched out into the corridor. Hoey introduced a sleepy-eyed woman in jeans and a leather jacket as Kate Marrinan from Legal Aid. She spoke tonelessly to Minogue.
“Has he made a statement?”
“Yep,” replied Minogue. “Got the caution in front of a witness, signed the waiver.”
Not much older than Iseult, he guessed. Kate Marrinan had short fair hair with a touch of red. She looked at her watch, yawned and swung a shoulder bag around front. Minogue’s anger had ebbed. He wanted real coffee, a chance to chat to Kate Marrinan about her work. Both hopes were long shots and he knew it.
“He’s all yours. Mr Jelly Nolan. I think he’s relieved to be in custody. Almost looking forward to being put away.”
She wrote “Jelly Nolan” on a notepad.
“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself, Inspector?” She hadn’t taken her eyes from the notepad.
“I’ve been accused of worse,” he tried. “But I think people cod me with comments like that because of my easygoing disposition.”
Kate Marrinan squinted at him. She remembered him now.
“Huh. I heard different. Who’s codding who here?” Minogue almost smiled. There were pleasant dangers to being known as a character in Dublin.
“We have seen to the rights of the accused in every respect,” he began. “He was quite keen to tell us about what he did up that laneway and how he did it-”
“ If he did it, you mean.”
“Twelve o’clock today, his clothes and shoes will come out of the lab with evidence tags on them,” Hoey weighed in. “Open and shut.”
“Signed in at one o’clock,” Minogue murmured. “He’ll go to the Bridewell and get remanded over first thing in the morning.”
What sounded like a sigh to Minogue escaped from Kate Marrinan. She hugged her shoulder bag and laid her hand on the door handle.
“Where’s the fags?” Nolan called out. “And a bit of tea or something so as I can keep me bleeding eyes open.”
The door opened.
“Who’s she?” the detectives heard Nolan ask.
“I’m your legal counsel,” Kate Marrinan said. “And I don’t smoke.”
Hoey and Minogue huddled in the doorway and watched the fine rain glow around the streetlights. Through the hush of rain, Minogue heard trains being shunted at Heuston Station at this western end of Dublin’s quays. Hoey spoke through a yawn.
“I know what you’re saying.”
“Nearly let him have it, all right,” Minogue murmured again. “I must be losing it or something.”
“It wouldn’t have done him any harm.”
The rain was steady and gentle, as though it were being sprinkled methodically. Drains gurgled in the middle distance; a gutter drummed tinnily next to the door. Hoey took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. He turned from Minogue and a folded airmail envelope fell to the pavement. Minogue picked it up and nudged Hoey’s upper arm. The detective turned back in a cloud of smoke.
“Fell out of your pocket.”
Hoey hesitated before taking it. He coughed once and plucked it from the Inspector’s hand. “The latest epistle. St. Aine to the pagans.” Minogue registered the ironic tone but said nothing. “Says the people are very nice,” Hoey went on. “The Zimbabweans. Did I say that right?”
Minogue wondered if Hoey kept all his girlfriend’s letters in his pockets. “Sounds right. Here, I’ll be in sometime in the morning proper. See if I can sleep this off. Maybe I’ll wake up and find out it was just a bloody dream or something.”
Hoey flicked a glowing butt out onto the street. It hissed and was carried as it landed. The two detectives watched as it was propelled along, spinning, by a lazy runnel of water. Trapped for several seconds on a drain-grate, the butt bobbed before it was snapped abruptly into the darkness below.
Minogue tried to stay clear of the bottle of Jamesons whiskey which he knew was kept beneath the kitchen sink. Kathleen Minogue had had new cabinetry installed that spring but the cupboard under the sink remained her detention area for whiskey. Her husband read its proximity to cleaning agents as her subconscious rebuke.
He was too restless to go to bed. He thought about tea-coffee would wake him up too much-and then he thought about a man being kicked to death in a laneway awash with rain. Kate Marrinan would doubtless try for manslaughter, that was her job: no hard feelings. My client is also a victim, a victim of hopelessness, of alcohol, of inadequate education; he is prey to vicious social evils endemic to working-class areas — drug abuse, loansharking; he is a young man of inadequate personality…
Minogue was an Inspect
or in the Investigation Section of the Garda Technical Bureau. His office was in St. John’s Road, hard by Garda H.Q. in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Although seniority would have allowed him to dodge an on-call shift after ten o’clock at night, Minogue insisted on his name being entered on the rota. He partnered Seamus Hoey, a Garda fifteen years his junior from Galway. In the six years he had worked with him, Minogue had been unable to figure him out. He liked Hoey a great deal and didn’t mind his colleague’s moods.
He heard stirring upstairs: his wife turning over in bed, he decided. Kathleen had become a heavy sleeper since they had had the house to themselves. Their daughter, Iseult, had moved to a flat in Cabra, to be with her fella, Pat the Brain, Minogue guessed. Kathleen knew this too and pretended not to know. Iseult worked mostly with embroidery out of a shared studio in Temple Bar. This last year she had been given a grant to travel the length and breadth of the country working up murals on school walls. Sometimes he liked to think of his daughter as beginning a mural in Donegal and painting it all the way down to Kerry, cutting a swath of colour and life across the island.
The Minogues’ son, Daithi, was biding his time in Boston, three months away from a Donnelly visa allowing him to work legally in the U.S. Daithi had displayed an American girlfriend on a visit home eighteen months ago. He had spoken feelingly of the States being full of opportunity. Kathy had slept in the attic, talked glowingly of her Irish ancestors and been unremittingly cheerful during her two-week stay. She had an enthusiasm for learning more about the Celts and learning Gaelic. Even Kathleen had been impressed.
The rain seemed to have let up. He moved away from the window and again considered the Jamesons. Maybe read for a half-hour to settle his thoughts down. He pulled down glossy folders from the top of the television set and studied the floor plans. Kathleen had the bug about selling their house and moving into these apartments or a townhouse. What about a garden, he had asked. What for, was her answer to that. Land, he had told her-something to walk on, somewhere to plant things that she thought still came mysteriously from the supermarket. No need to be sarcastic, she had replied, and then took the high road: why not something different from the run-of-the-mill? A terrace, a Japanese style of place with lumps of rock and shrubs and what have you, somewhere he could sit and read. He had retired from the fray at that stage and had spent his energies in avoiding the topic since.
He yawned and studied the floor plans. Fitted kitchens, security systems, prestigious addresses, easy access to the city. Huh, he thought. “Easy access to the city”: Dublin? Must be a joke. He felt the resentment prowling behind his thoughts then. He dumped the folder on the chair and hot-footed it to the kitchen with the words sour and ugly in his mind: lifestyle, state-of-the-art, unrivalled. Kathleen worked as a secretary for an auctioneer and came home with these brochures almost daily now. Her employer could get them a deal, she argued. How could he tell her that the last thing he wanted was a deal? Kathleen had been the thrifty and sensible gatherer all these years but he had lately begun to see in himself a stronger urge to shed. He grasped the bottle of Jamesons and cast about for a tumbler. He paused then and, leaning against the counter kitchen, stared at the sink. Manslaughter’d have Jelly Nolan on the street inside five years. If Cartys, the loan sharks, didn’t do for Nolan one way or another, inside or outside the nick, that is.
Minogue’s thoughts fastened suddenly on Shea Hoey. Hoey was drinking. He, Minogue, second-in-command to Jimmy Kilmartin-the Killer, as he was known for his leadership of the Murder Squad-had not approached anyone about it. Hoey had had a smell of drink to him two days in a row last week, Minogue remembered. Looked washed out. What to say, what to do.
The Jamesons was sharp and it cut at the back of his throat. There was nothing new about Gardai drinking hard off-duty. Hoey’s girlfriend, Aine, had signed up to teach for a stint in Zimbabwe and had flown out in September. Minogue had met Aine twice. She was cheerful, freckled and opinionated. That was teachers for you, he supposed. Hard on the heels of his last gulp from the tumbler came an urge for more. Duty-free, Minogue’s familiar gargoyle jeered nearby. Might as well at that price, go on, can’t you? He took the bottle into the living room, slipped out of his shoes and lay on the couch.
The prevailing winds sweep in from the Atlantic and skim spume from the waves before they slam into the cliffs and inlets of west Clare. Carried up over the cliffs come the faint and massive slaps of the water’s battery, the screeches of sea birds, the winds’ roar. Behind the cliffs’ edges, the grasses flatten and hiss as the gales buffet the headlands of this western edge of Clare and Ireland and Europe known as the Burren. The winds whistle through gorse and heather before they move across the patchwork of fields and drystone walls which creep up the Burren hillsides. Above the fields, boulders appear as a thickening crop which the soil cannot resist pushing to the surface. Higher yet, on the plateaus where the boulders give way to fissured limestone terraces, the gales race on. But in this wilderness which looks to be the work of nature alone, a careful eye can spot marks of ancient settlement. The Famine completed the work of centuries of erosion and left the Burren almost deserted. Behind them, the waves of settlers have left their ruined castles and churches, their deserted villages, their ancient ring-forts and their graves.
Over Fanore and Kilcorney, through Lismara and Tuamashee, the winds course, battering and caressing, rippling the surfaces of turloughs, those seasonal lakes brimming with dark water. Like cattle labouring home full, the clouds move with the wind over the towns and villages and the long wet ribbons of roads that lead across the midland plains. With rain on the wind, the whole island can be wet within hours of those first clouds descending on the Burren. Although the hills on the west coast draw down heavy, dreary rains, they still leave enough for the midland pastures and even for Dublin city. In the Kilmacud suburb of that city, Minogue, long exiled from the precincts of the Burren, slept fitfully on the couch.
Kathleen Minogue, Dublinwoman, opened the bedroom curtains just in time to see the Dublin Mountains fade into the mist as the rain rolled down into the suburbs. She plugged the kettle in, tiptoed back to the doorway and surveyed her husband. He stirred and laid an arm over his eyes. Asleep in his jacket even, she thought. She was caught between exasperation and pity. He was very long.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he murmured. She started. His eyes stayed dosed as he raised his forearm from his eyes and stretched. The kettle wheezed and ticked stronger in the kitchen.
“Don’t be so sure of yourself,” she said.
Awake but fuzzy from the whiskey, Minogue tried to pull back a piece of his dream as it fell into obscurity. All that remained was a face indistinctly recalled and fading fast: a man, young, smiling at him, asking him or telling him something. Familiar, gone. At least it wasn’t Jelly Nolan’s face.
“Looking over the wreckage and wondering, I’ll bet,” he said. “Go on, tell me you aren’t now. I’m a detective. You can’t cod me.
“We have an early start on Hallowe’en here with you on the couch. Frankenstein or something.”
“Now I know where Iseult gets her wit.”
She folded her arms and watched Minogue’s eyelids flutter. A tight and pleasant ache cradled itself in her stomach and rose up in her chest. At my age, she thought. Last week he had reached for her in bed, stifling her giggles. She remembered him keen and gentle, whispering to her, saying her name as he coiled about her. Not heavy at all but arching easily, waiting. She flushed and tightened the belt on her dressing gown.
“Raining again,” he said.
“Go up to bed, can’t you.”
“I will not,” he declared. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “And what’s more, I have news for you. You can tell that boss of yours, that go-by-the-wall auctioneer, that after-shave gurrier, that you need a holiday. Are you listening to me?”
“A holiday,” she echoed. “In this? Where were you, in dreamland? It’s nearly winter, mister.”
“Santorin
i. I saw a picture of it in a window the other day. Blue and white and nothing else.”
Kathleen Minogue headed back to the kitchen. He followed her.
“I heard that all they do there is get twisted drunk and dance on the tables,” she said.
“What’s wrong with that?”
She made a face at him and scalded the teapot.
“God. Have a sup of tea with me and you’ll wake up and talk sense.”
“There are more tears shed over answered prayers,” he muttered.
“Smart remarks department is closed today,” she said. Minogue stared out the window.
“Have you forgotten we’re going down to Clare tomorrow?” Minogue groaned inside. He had forgotten. Maura Minogue, a sister-in-law whose cheerfulness and vivacity seemed invincible to Minogue- the more a miracle, he considered, because she had been married to his brother Mick for over thirty years-had been on the phone to Kathleen. Maura hadn’t asked for anything, but she had cried on the phone once. His nephew Eoin had recently been arrested and charged with possession of a gun which the Guards had taken from a bag in the boot of his car. The bag belonged to his friend but Eoin, weaned on his father’s Republican cant and full of a touchy and twisted sense of loyalty to the friend he had given a lift to, had delayed his own acquittal by making haughty speeches to the Guards. Eoin was to inherit the farm from Minogue’s ailing brother Mick, who was now too arthritic to do anything but token jobs on the farm. Farmers had fallen on hard times in the last few years. Now that she was marooned on the farm with Mick, finances a bit sticky maybe, Maura’s morale was hitting bottom, Minogue surmised.
“Did you hear me?”
Kathleen had read her sister-in-law’s conversation to mean that Maura wanted him to try and talk Mick and Eoin into selling part of the farm while there was still value in it. Minogue closed his eyes.
