All souls imm-4

by John Brady

  “All right, lads.”

  He drove away from the checkpoint slowly and nodded at the two in the ditch. The evening had already taken over the ditches and hedges. The headlights swept over their faces. They didn’t move, but their eyes followed the van until it was past them.

  “Whoa, Jases!” said the passenger and whistled. “They’re getting very fucking serious! Did you see the pair in the ditch? Wearing their guns out in the open?”

  “Good.”

  “Good? Oh, right. Yeah. There’s that to it. Ow.” He put his thumb in his mouth. “Bloody planning permission and all the shagging stones and cement they want in, just to make it look like it belongs here,” he mumbled around his thumb.

  “The vernacular, they call it,” said the driver. “Native materials.”

  The passenger sniffed.

  The driver concentrated on the road ahead. He wondered if there was another checkpoint ahead. They had spent most of the day carrying and sorting the stones they needed for the walls of the addition. The stone is local, he thought, the tradesmen are local and we’re being paid by a man from Dusseldorf. And this guy wants his holiday cottage in fucking Ireland to look really Irish.

  “He’s gone back to Dublin,” said the driver.

  “Who is?”

  “Your man. The uncle.”

  “So there never was anything to him,” said the passenger.

  “The undercover thing? Doesn’t look like it now, does it? Coincidence.”

  The passenger began to laugh. The driver looked over.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking. The other night. What your man must have done when the bullets started flying. In the window. It’s lucky he was in the jacks!”

  The passenger slapped his knee.

  “Ow. Mw thumb!”

  Hoey had fallen asleep without Minogue noticing. The Inspector drew into the shopping centre and began scouting for a parking spot near to the supermarket. The setting sun crested Two Rock Mountain and flooded the car. Hoey’s breathing turned to snores. Minogue looked at the sleeping policeman and wondered if he should wake him. Hoey looked somehow smaller to him. Deltas of blood vessels stood out on Hoey’s purple eyelids. The face was waxen and his lips were again dry and cracked. He recalled that Hoey had swallowed a pill as they had got into the car. Antidepressant? He levered himself slowly onto the pavement and let his door rest against the latch.

  The Inspector rubbed his eyes as he trudged toward the entrance to the supermarket. His eyes still stung and ached from the two hours at the microfiche reader. He might have to concede on a matter of vanity, he reflected, and finally go to an ophthalmologist. No more of his errant bragging to Kathleen about having hunter’s eyes, that he could see what he wanted to see, when he wanted to see it. Hoey had tried to show an interest during the afternoon, but had gone out for a smoke several times. Twice Minogue had sneaked out to make sure Hoey hadn’t fled. From the microfiche he had copied two newspaper reports that hadn’t been in Crossan’s envelope. He had studied them on the reader and again from the photostats, but he’d still found nothing that went beyond what Crossan had already dug up and copied. He’d had to struggle several times to remind himself of the point: it was what hadn’t surfaced that had kept Crossan’s interest.

  As he entered the supermarket, Minogue felt the task of shopping to be suddenly exhausting. His mind buckled under the weight of relentless details, of shelves full of foods and household cleaners and spices and a frightening number of things you could fill your home with. He reached for a basket and tried gamely to start his task. Some holiday. Milk, he remembered. Bread? Should he have woken Hoey up and at least asked him what foods he liked?

  He balanced two bags of groceries in either arm as he headed back to the car. In the ten minutes he had spent in the shop, half the daylight had drained away into a crucible of cooling yellow which glowed above the shopping centre. He looked ahead for Hoey’s form but couldn’t see him against the sunset glare on the windscreen. Minogue laid his bags down by the boot and poked with the key before looking in the back window. Hoey was gone. He clutched the keys and stepped around the passenger side. Dazed, he stared at the empty seat. His thoughts couldn’t form. He looked over the rows of cars and squeezed the keys in his palm. He was alert now, with an ache low in his stomach.

  The Inspector skipped down to the bus-stop and searched the faces of a dozen people there. Had a bus come and gone in the last few minutes? No, said a wary teenager. Minogue wanted to run but he didn’t know where. Had Hoey gone to a pub? Just run away? If Hoey was on the run from him, he meant business. He stood still and felt the panic take hold of him. Hoey the quiet one, the one who had left no hint of what he was going through, had scarpered. Had he woken up suddenly, stricken by the uselessness of things, his defences robbed in sleep?

  Minogue ran back to the car-park and headed for the walkway that led to the centre of the shopping centre. Maybe Hoey had gone looking for him in the supermarket. Minogue ran by his car and then stopped short. The two bags of groceries were gone. He leaned down and looked in to find Hoey smoking a cigarette, the glow stronger in the gloom as he drew on it. Minogue held his breath, let it out slowly and sat in behind the wheel. He could not resist a glance at his colleague.

  Hoey rolled down the window to let out more smoke.

  “Did you forget something?” he asked.

  Minogue was still trying to hold his breath. “I did.”

  “I woke up and I had no fags,” Hoey murmured. “I thought I might bump into you beyond.” He pointed his cigarette toward the supermarket. “I put the stuff in the back seat.”

  Minogue tried to breathe normally as he steered out onto the Lower Kilmacud Road.

  “Hard to see anything now, but.” He heard his inane words again. “One minute it’s all right and the next thing you know is that it’s night.”

  Hoey nodded and crooked his arm to squint at his watch. Minogue’s heartbeat was slowing now but he could not stop words rushing out of himself.

  “The days are getting very short now, yes, they are.”

  By nine o’clock, Minogue was both exhausted and uneasy. He was trying not to notice Hoey’s fidgeting. Trying so hard, he noticed it all the more. He looked up from the guidebook to Greece. After a long bath, Hoey was half-heartedly watching a documentary on grizzly bears in Canada. Minogue felt trapped in his own house. Kathleen had discovered that the Costigans up the road needed a visit, and she had left Minogue with a furtive glance of commiseration. Hoey had flicked through some of the books Minogue had left near the fireplace, but the one he had settled on lay open on the same page in his lap this last hour. The ads came on. A well-known comedian began singing about shampoo.

  “So this Crossan thinks poorly of the whole thing,” Hoey murmured.

  “Yes. More to the point, how it was gathered.”

  Minogue ached for a glass of Jamesons. Hoey’s constant shifting in his chair-the leg-crossing, the foot tapping air, the hand straying to his nose and mouth, the incessant flicking of ash into the fireplace, the throat-clearing and the swallowing of phlegm-had all accumulated somewhere in Minogue’s mind until he himself was jittery. He had read exactly four pages of his book in the last hour, and he was beginning to have trouble hiding his irritation.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Hoey and yawned. “Kind of hard to get excited about it.”

  He lit up another cigarette. Minogue counted the butts in the ashtray and divided the number into one hundred, the number of minutes he estimated that they had been sitting here. Still layers of smoke shaped by the light overhead reminded Minogue of the holy pictures of his youth. He slid out of his chair and opened the window a crack.

  “Sorry,” said Hoey, and began coughing. “I forgot.”

  “Smoke away, man. It’s not as bad as what Jim Kilmartin puts out. Between the cigars and the farts-and then those damned Gitanes of Eilis’s.”

  Hoey gave a wan smile and rubbed the side of his cigar
ette around the saucer. He looked around the living room as though assessing the knickknacks and pictures, those weights and anchors of home.

  “Did Crossan put any of this down in writing?” Hoey asked. “Any documentation, like?”

  “Just Bourke’s ramblings on paper. A few copies of newspaper reports.”

  “You didn’t talk to Bourke?”

  Minogue shook his head. He joined Hoey in watching a tranquillised grizzly being lifted into a wooden crate and then airlifted, dangling in a net under a helicopter. The nasal tone of the commentator against the bat-bat of the rotors detailed the hopes of the biologists for the grizzly.

  Minogue wondered what effects Hoey’s pills had. He watched as the grizzly’s crate came to rest on a small plateau somewhere in the Rockies. Two men entered the picture and began setting up the door of the crate for the bear’s release. Minogue’s exasperation crested. He thought of a walk of the neighbourhood.

  “What would you be doing of an evening at home, now, Shea?”

  Hoey kept his eyes on the screen. The biologists retreated to safety, ready for the release.

  Hoey replied with a cheer which Minogue found disquieting,

  “Tell you the truth, I’d probably be in a pub.”

  The Inspector struggled to recover from his own folly. He studied Hoey’s profile as the door of the grizzly’s crate was opened. Was it the glare from the screen or was there really a dull sheen of sweat on Hoey’s forehead? Hoey didn’t look keen on a walk. Minogue wanted a bloody drink and couldn’t for fear of tempting Hoey: a prisoner in his own home. He picked up his book and tried to read again. The phone trilled twice before he recognised it as a phone at all.

  Crossan screwed the top on the bottle and waited for Minogue to answer. He took a belt of the whiskey and rubbed the glass in a slow semicircle on his desk. An hour ago he had felt that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from puking, but the anger had taken over and had saved him this humiliation and a greater one-being sick in front of two Guards. They’d have it all over the town by tea-time that the great Aloysious Crossan had made a gobshite of himself when the going had got tough. He still felt the outrage and shock like acid in every part of his belly. Ahearne and another Guard, along with Tom Igo, the county coroner, had been waiting for him in the morgue of the County Hospital. The body had been brought there just after nine o’clock last night. It was only this morning, after several hours of Gardai trying to find next of kin, that Ahearne had thought of contacting Crossan.

  Jamesy Bourke’s chest had taken most of the charge, but a scatter of pellets from the blast had lodged in his neck. Like those black spots, Crossan thought numbly, recalling from his youth the warts treated with burning lotion. Bourke’s jacket was shredded and soaked in blood. His eyes were still open in shock. One minute Crossan’s throat was tight with outrage, and then, with the sheet pulled back, his stomach had fallen, almost taking his control with it. Only anger and will had prevented him from vomiting. He remembered turning to meet the eyes of the Guards, Ahearne and Murphy, defying their expectations. Yes, I attest that this is the body of James Bourke, known to me personally. The bitter formality had registered on the faces of the two Guards, and Crossan had walked steadily out of the morgue, knowing that he had seen a hint of shame on both faces. Through the rushing noise and the nausea, Crossan had heard Tom Igo whispering wheezily next to his ear that Bourke had “gone instantly.”

  Two rings. Where was Minogue? Maybe half-ten was a bit late to be phoning him. What the hell took him back up to Dublin anyway? So he could avoid being bloody-well asked to do something for Bourke. He thought again of Jamesy Bourke’s body being lifted from the compost heap as though he, like his dog, had merely to be disposed of. “Gone instantly”-no: Jamesy Bourke had died slowly over the last twelve years.

  The phone was picked up at the other end.

  “Minogue?”

  Minogue packed two changes of clothes, extra socks and a few books in a soft-sided overnight bag and went downstairs to wait for Kathleen. He tried to imagine her reaction. Would she laugh? She’d want him to take up the job of talking to Mick and Eoin again. Hoey had stretched out his legs and was pouring more tea while the ads rolled. Minogue sat across from him and watched an aging rock star peddle soft drinks.

  “Last night,” Hoey said.

  “Around eight o’clock, he said,” replied Minogue. “According to what the Guards told Crossan, this Spillner fella thought that it was the same thing that had happened the night before at another place.”

  “Was Bourke…?”

  “Not at all. He was mooching around the man’s car, looking for something.”

  Hoey drew on a fresh cigarette, blew out smoke and scratched at the back of his neck. The pop star of forty-five landed improbably on his feet and was surrounded by teenagers who made skilled, jerky motions in a wave around him. He grabbed one of them-a delighted girl-and she hung on to his arm while stars burst behind them.

  “Well, I don’t want to be…”

  Hoey left the sentence unfinished and fell to staring at the fireplace. Minogue squirmed and thought of phoning Kilmartin tonight. He looked down at his watch and decided against it. Half-ten. God

  Almighty wife of mine hiding out at Costigans’ while we sat here like iijits watching rubbish on the box.

  “I don’t want anything backfiring, Shea,” Minogue stated. “I feel bad enough about not having talked to Bourke. I have to go down and find out what happened, at least. But I can’t be looking over me shoulder. You know what I’m saying now.”

  Hoey’s puffed eyes remained fixed on the fireplace.

  “I might be shaky, but I’m game,” he muttered.

  “Look, Shea. It mightn’t be smart to be getting involved in something like this. At this stage.”

  Hoey drew hard on his cigarette.

  “Did the Squad get a call on it at all yet?”

  “Don’t know. I’ll ask Eilis in the morning. This Spillner fella who shot him was brought to the station. He’s been moved to HQ in Ennis since. Crossan told me that he heard that there’s someone coming down from the German Embassy to sort it out too.”

  “Where did he get the shotgun?”

  “Well, I’m only going on what Crossan was told. Apparently Spillner brought it with him in the boot of his car on a trip here last summer. Since the trouble below in Clare and Limerick and so forth. The arms finds and the shooting and the foofaroo starting up about the tourists buying up places. Last I saw of him he was sitting next to a musician, clapping his hands.”

  Kathleen opened the hall door. He intercepted her in the hall as she was taking off her coat.

  “Guess where I’m going?” He paused and decided. “Where we’re going, tomorrow. Shea and myself.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  A bad patch of road outside Nenagh jostled Hoey’s lolling head against the headrest. He elbowed up slowly and licked his teeth. Minogue looked at his watch. Two and a half hours from Dublin: that was fast.

  “Sorry,” said Minogue. “But that’s Tipperary County Council for you. Did you sleep last night?”

  “I did, I think,” said Hoey. “Better than the other night, I can tell you. These bloody pills. Stayed up awhile talking to Kathleen. It’s too bad she didn’t want to come down…”

  He looked out at the fields. It was midday now and sluggish clouds had moved in from the coast. Minogue had expected rain since Portlaoise.

  “Nenagh,” Hoey whispered. He stretched and felt his pocket for the orange bottle of pills.

  “That’s it. We’ll be in Ennis before you know it.”

  The Inspector had made several phone calls before leaving Dublin. Kilmartin, still in his kitchen, hadn’t argued with him as much as he had expected. Eilis reported that no call had been logged to the Squad yet about Bourke. Minogue had phoned Crossan and arranged to call to his office by dinner-time.

  “Look at that,” said Hoey.

  By a bend in the road Minogue spotted what he too
k to be a County Council crew working with little vigour to remove slogans spraypainted onto a wall. Hoey turned in his seat as the car passed them.

  “EC Robbers Beware. What’s the other one? Irish Land for Irish People.”

  “Maybe they should write their slogans in German or Dutch or whatever,” Minogue murmured.

  Forty minutes later he was accelerating out the Ennis Road from Limerick.

  Ennis had changed, he believed. The town of bright streets and busy shops was now slow, dulled by clouds and stillness. The streets were almost deserted. Not every day can be market day, he tried to reason with himself. That logic didn’t gain any ground against his impressions. The air felt heavy. The walls of the buildings seemed to be thicker, their windows turned inward. He reached Bank Place and drew into the curb by Crossan’s office. He touched the horn and looked up at the windows along the terrace. Crossan appeared at one and waved once. A minute later, he closed the door behind him, paused to throw on a raincoat and swept down the steps toward the Fiat.

  Minogue introduced Hoey.

  “Let’s go to the Garda Station first,” said Crossan.

  “Have you heard more about Spillner?” Minogue asked.

  “Well, I don’t know if he got bail yet.”

  “I’d expect him to be held over for even having the gun,” said Minogue.

  “Word is that Tom Russell, the Super in Clare, has asked Dublin for new commando-type outfits to patrol the place,” said Crossan. “The ones trained to eat their children and run through walls with their heads.”

  Minogue crossed the bridge and turned down the cul-de-sac toward the Garda Station. He debated telling Crossan about his run-in with the Special Branch out at the farm but decided against it.

  “So Russell and Co. haven’t phoned your mob for expertise,” Crossan went on. “Maybe he lost your number, do you think?”

  Minogue parked behind a black Mercedes. Crossan squinted at the CD plate on the grille.