All souls imm-4

by John Brady

  “You had a tough time on the stand back then, I believe,” he said.

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “What do you know about what I went through? You and your ‘tragedy’ and a big long face on you like a dog fishing for his dinner.”

  She flicked ash at arm’s length toward the ashtray. It fell a foot short.

  “You. Ralphie. Howard. Jamesy Bourke. Your brains in your trousers. Full of chat and buying drinks and joking. All ye want is a poke. Then ye’re gone on to the next one. Do you think for one minute that Jamesy Bourke was different, do you?”

  “I didn’t say he was a saint.”

  “A saint,” she mimicked. Minogue asked for the same again from the barman.

  “When you’re a man, you have the power,” she went on. “Rich or poor, black or white. And when you’re a man that has money in his pocket, or when you have a uniform, the world is your oyster.”

  “As a matter of fact, my uniform doesn’t fit me anymore.”

  She gave him a scornful grin and waved the cigarette at the ashtray again.

  “What about Dan Howard?”

  She spoke with little feeling. “Dan Howard is a fucking bastard. And his wife is a jumped-up, money-grubbing bitch. And Tidy Howard, as for that old bags…”

  She seemed to catch herself then as if she had spotted herself in a mirror.

  “You were dragooned into taking the stand.”

  “I was,” she murmured. “I was called as a witness, and I was picked up by the Guards. That prick-Doyle. He was the Sergeant in Portaree at the time. Little did I know that I’d be in court to dirty someone else’s name.”

  The barman, a rheumy-eyed man not ten years from retirement, laid down the drinks.

  “I had no dinner,” she said. “If I have another one of these, I’ll be plastered. Have to watch the figure and that too.” Minogue watched her poke at the ice and then lick her finger. “There might be a bachelor farmer on the look-out, you never know.”

  Her smile was brief and it fell away quickly. She took a gulp of the new drink. Minogue looked at his own Jamesons sitting implacably next to him. How could he preach to Shea Hoey about drink? It’d be like Kilmartin delivering advice about etiquette.

  “I was told back then that I could help Jamesy Bourke get off lighter,” she said. “Fool that I was, I didn’t think about how it was going to be done. I half felt sorry for him. My mistake. We both know where that got him, don’t we?”

  “You thought he didn’t deserve-?”

  “Look,” she broke in. “Jamesy and the rest of them were gobshites. But it wasn’t entirely his fault. Even I could see that, and me knowing Jane. What was the use of throwing one life away for another? The world is full enough of revenge and killing. What use would locking him up for his life be to anyone? I’ve been roughly used in my time. I’ve seen the bad side of people but I’ve survived and still come out human. When you’ve been through what I’ve been through over the years, you don’t be so certain, cocked up in your armchair and looking down your nose while you’re discussing how people go to the bad. He was too simple for the real world. Too stupid, maybe. The way we all are sometimes, maybe. But you can’t live your life like that. You have to wake up sometime.”

  “You were given the boot,” said Minogue.

  “You said it,” she snapped. “Treated like dirt. Like an iijit. I didn’t see it coming.”

  “What for? Liking Jane Clark?”

  “I did, you know.” She cast a bitter look at Minogue which caused him to sit still. “Not in the way you people’d like to be thinking it either. Not the way they threw it around in court. Ask yourself how the whole matter came up in that damned courtroom. Go on. You’re the cop. Go on, ask me, then.”

  Minogue took a deliberately slow drink of Jamesons.

  “You mean that you and Jane Clark had a relationship?”

  “Relationship,” she cackled, and coughed. “Where did you get that word? In one of your courses, or off the telly or something?” The coughing took control of her again.

  “Go on, say it,” she wheezed. “Say the word!”

  She sat upright at the front of her chair, trying by her posture to stave off more coughing. Minogue knew he had to meet her gaze, but the effort of looking over to her was almost too much for him.

  “Say it,” she growled. “I bet you like to think about it. Two women. You’re like the rest of them. Come on now, don’t let your side down!”

  “Jane Clark and you had a love affair of sorts,” he said.

  There was triumph in her eyes.

  “Say it like they kept on saying it that day. Lesbian. Homosexual. Perverse.”

  The barman looked up from the paper.

  “Not all of us are cavemen, you know-”

  “‘I’m not like the other ones.’ Like hell you’re not, mister.” She drew fiercely on her cigarette.

  “There I was, an ignorant skivvy up on the stand, being made to paint a picture of a lesbian for all the learned gentlemen. Guards and reporters and the judge, and the women-they were worse than the men. They looked at me like I was a piece of shite. There are plenty more words for it and I’ve heard them all, so I have. There I was, in tears, being made to tell people that Jamesy Bourke was provoked by the fact that she was a lesbian as well as a whore. And that she had laughed at him when she was with me, for his efforts at playing the Casanova. Sure with the drink he had every day he wouldn’t have been able to get it up with a crane.”

  “I’m just trying to find out what happened. If she was lesbian, well…”

  “Hah,” she scoffed, and returned the barman’s stare. The barman let his eyelids down slightly and returned to pencilling in something in the paper.

  “Sure, how could she, and she taking up with Dan Howard and Bourke?” she asked. Minogue considered the Jamesons lolling in his glass.

  “You’re the cop. You tell me how Bourke’s lawyer, that weaselly looking…what was his name?”

  “Tighe.”

  “Yeah, him. How the hell did he get wind of me and her, to get me on the stand and take the oath so that the wide world would know that Jane Clark and myself had put our arms around one another?”

  “Dan Howard must have told him.”

  She squinted through a ribbon of smoke. “You’re not as thick as you look.”

  “Because Dan Howard would have heard it from her,” he added. “And in the heat of the row with Bourke, he’d have been doing his best to put Jane Clark down. To persuade Bourke that she wasn’t worth fighting over.”

  “Nice work there, Guard. I’ll tell you something, now”-she leaned forward to better deliver the sarcasm-“and it’s this. Dan Howard told him-Jamesy Bourke-sure enough. That must have driven Bourke wild. Does Dan Howard end up on the stand for inciting Bourke to go out there and set her house on fire? Does he? He might as well have handed Jamesy Bourke the order and the bloody matches.

  “Yes,” she continued after a scrutiny of her cigarette and some part of her palm, “she was like that. She’d tell him straight out. I know that he knew because he’d come by the hotel with his wandering hands, pushing himself against me. Asking me if I’d try out a man for a change. Jamesy Bourke was the same way. Chasing skirts and slobbering over women and pints. God’s gifts to women.”

  “Do you recall Crossan at all?”

  “Ah, he was kind of gawky. Tall and skinny, with eyes like Hallowe’en. Nice enough, I suppose, but he wasn’t around much. A Protestant, I believe. Sort of aloof, like you’d be careful talking to him. But I remember thinking he sort of followed Howard around a bit. He was never up to the high jinks that Howard’d get up to. Quiet type.”

  Minogue watched her put out the cigarette. Resignation had crept into her face, her tone. He thought of Crossan for a moment, the glaze on the barrister’s eyes when he’d spotted the Howards.

  “I wanted a bit of comfort,” she muttered. “That was my big sin. I had no mother, you see. She died when I was three, she was hit b
y a car. My da was useless. I couldn’t wait to get away. Never keen on the schooling. Fool that I was, I took up as a chambermaid and general skivvy in the hotel in Portaree. It was all right during the summers. You’d be busy and you’d meet people that’d keep your interest. The winters were the pits. Damn the bit of difference I made at the end of the trial anyway. I got me walking papers. He said he couldn’t employ a person of my character. Fucking bastard.”

  Minogue sat up again.

  “Tidy Howard,” she muttered. ‘“Old Dan’ some of them called him. I hear he’s alive still, in some nursing home after a stroke or something. Another bastard. I hope he rots before he dies.”

  The barman folded his newspaper noisily. Minogue looked over at him.

  “Is that everything you need to know now, Guard?” she asked. “Cause I don’t want to talk to you again.”

  Minogue could think of nothing to say.

  The door squeaked open as Hoey and Melanie McInerny returned.

  “He solves muhdahs, Mum. Is nit cryeepy?”

  Eilo McInerny looked from Minogue to Hoey.

  “We’ll hang around here a few minutes,” Minogue said to Hoey.

  Eilo McInerny laboured upright.

  “Do what ye like,” she said. She pushed her daughter who tottered with the suitcase ahead of her. “But don’t be bothering us again.”

  The door swung closed. Minogue sat down heavily on the vinyl seat. The scent of tired-out perfume hung in the air.

  “That girl is wild out,” said Hoey. “A maniac. I can’t believe she’s thirteen.”

  Minogue looked down at the remains of his whiskey. A young couple, the beginnings of an after-work crowd, entered the pub.

  “Another round, men?” the barman called out.

  Minogue gave him a look of manic intensity. “What would we want more drink for? Do you want us to be dragging ourselves out of Tralee with no shoes on our feet? Our pockets hanging out? What kind of a man are you at all? We’ve been very ably fleeced here already. Where’s your telephone?”

  The barman maintained his expression of solemn detachment.

  “You’ll be passing it on yer way out.”

  Minogue yawned and stretched all the way to the ferry dock in Tarbert. They arrived just in time to see the ferry twenty yards offshore, heading away from them. The estuary was at full tide and the Clare shore was softened by a veil of drizzle. Muddy, grey-green swells were beginning to splash against the rocks with more insistence by the minute. He was only now beginning to get the better of the whiskey. He turned the key and tapped at the wiper lever. Hoey was smirking.

  “I’m glad to see that one of us is in fine form at least. What has you so chipper?”

  “The pair in Tralee,” said Hoey. “Ever see anything like them? They’re a team, there’s no doubt.”

  “You missed her speaking her mind about the Howards etcetera.”

  “I’d say she laid it out straight as a die,” Hoey said. Minogue looked away to the water. Hoey’s voice dropped to a monotone now. “You badly want to show them up here in Clare, don’t you? Russell and company.”

  “I suppose I do, at that,” murmured Minogue. “But more than that, I’m going to find out what happened that night. To answer your question, though, it would please me to find out that they had made a mess of the Bourke case, yes.”

  The smirk returned to Hoey.

  “It’d please the Killer more,” he murmured. “Here. I have to take a leak after all that 7-Up.”

  Minogue watched his colleague slouch out into the rain. He gave up trying to see clearly through the windscreen and thought about Jane Clark. She had been a woman with the nerve and the will to set herself up in a foreign country, in rural Clare. She had had experience of the world well beyond whatever Jamesy Bourke or Dan Howard might pretend to. Here was a woman who had slept with the both of them and made iijits of them into the bargain. Her mocking had probably excited Bourke and Howard even more. Howard could have laughed in return, and even encouraged more, but Bourke would have been more touchy. He thought of Kathleen and himself, in the sand-dunes in Brittas Bay, frantic, whispering, wrestling. He squirmed in his seat as the desire pulsed though him and ground in his stomach.

  She had slept with Eilo McInerny: low score on the inhibition scale. Back with Howard: yes, he might even have enjoyed her mockery. Not Bourke: rooted locally by land, by habit, but fired with the ambition of being a poet, what Kilmartin would describe as a few sandwiches short of a proper picnic. How would Bourke have reacted to her reciting the names of a score of lovers? Was Howard more free and easy or just less involved? Howard might have been the duller man, unimaginative. Son and heir, he could grin and move on to the next. Bourke would have idealised her. Her scorn would have flayed him.

  The warmth surged in his belly, stirring his loins. What a land for Bourke to find a woman with a sex drive she wasn’t ashamed of. He shifted again. His mouth was dry. He thought of Sheila Howard, and his forehead became suddenly itchy. Did she contain this boyo of a husband? Was she charged with an eroticism in private? A wave of prickly heat settled around the top of his forehead. Damnation, he thought, getting flustered, sitting here swelling up like a teenager. He opened the window and received for his trouble a spray of fine, cold rain. Eilo McInerny’s words came back to him. Crossan, aloof: jealous of Howard? Hoey got into the car in a hurry and slammed the door hard against the weather.

  “God, it’s hot in here,” he muttered.

  Minogue’s mind flared with embarrassment. Had Hoey sensed what feelings had bullied him these last few minutes?

  “We need to talk to Dan Howard,” said Minogue.

  “If he’s in town,” said Hoey.

  Minogue switched on the ignition and batted the stick for the wipers. Was it getting darker, or had the clouds settled lower over the water? A finger’s width from the blurred Clare shore, the ferry had embarked on its return trip. The Inspector blinked back to the present. The air in the car was stale and damp, full of the smell of Hoey’s wet coat, itself redolent of cigarette smoke. Minogue flicked on the wipers again. The ferry was clearer now, half-way, he calculated. He watched it breast the estuary waves, bucking slightly. In the mirror he studied the faces in a car nosing in behind. Two subdued-looking children to either side of an infant asleep in the back seat looked out opposite windows. The infant’s face was turned awkwardly, mouth agape, and the expression suggested he or she was about to cry. The driver, a farmer with heavy sideburns, wore a dark suit and a look of resignation. From the passenger seat, a woman stared at the water. A funeral?

  He looked again to the ferry and saw smaller creases in the waves alongside it. He held his hand on the wiper-switch and concentrated on that part of the water.

  “Well, I declare,” he began to say, “if those aren’t porpoises or seals or something. They’re following the boat, man!” Hoey turned to stare at the ferry too.

  The weight of the afternoon, all its irritations and disappointments, dropped off the Inspector’s shoulders. Across time and place, beyond time and place, he relived the days he had fished with his uncle off Doonbeg. His uncle had pointed them out as they approached the rowboat. Minogue, eight or nine and afraid, had dropped his rod. Not to worry, his uncle had said. He recalled his uncle’s face going blank as he’d looked toward the glistening bodies arcing and slicing the water nearby. Not to worry, they had come to inspect us, that’s all. Now the same wonder stirred Minogue, but, he realised, in his own rising exhilaration was envy.

  “They’re seldom here. Maybe the water is warmer this year, and we don’t know it.”

  The ferry in, the porpoises headed back toward the mouth of the estuary. Minogue waited for three cars to disembark and then drove on. The car with the yawning, sombre family followed. The wind drove rain and sea against the boat and the sprays of rain hissed against the windscreen. The Inspector stepped out into the water-world and felt the muffled throbbing of the engine rising up through his bones. Waiting on the deck
for even a minute meant a thorough drenching. He entered the small waiting-cabin under the bridge and had to pull the door hard against the wind. Despite the rain on the windows here, he’d still get a fair view of the porpoises.

  Rain lashed the windows harder as the ferry moved away from the dock. Minogue scanned the waters. Five minutes passed but he couldn’t find the porpoises again. They were out there somewhere, gleeful and rapturous, he knew. Shudders of waves slapping against the hull passed up through his legs as he stared at the water. Disappointment came to him as a tired ache in his shoulders, with gravity and age winning easily at the end of the gloomy afternoon. He made one last sweep of the waters before stepping out onto the car-deck.

  Hoey was smoking and listening to traffic news from Dublin. Minogue took a notepad from the glove compartment.

  “They’re gone,” he said. He began writing names on the pad. Hoey watched him but said nothing. Minogue took out photocopied pages from the envelope and glanced down at his own notes in the margins.

  “Tom Naughton, the Guard who worked with Doyle, was first on the scene. Maybe we’re a bit late for doing anything more today.”

  Hoey glanced at the clock. Minogue’s stomach registered the ferry’s yaw.

  “Where will we put up, so?” Hoey asked.

  “One of the B amp; Bs out the Clarecastle Road. I thought of my brother’s place but…”

  Another wave thudded against the hull and the air in the car vibrated with the relayed shock. The wind smeared raindrops across the windscreen. The ferry was eased expertly into the Killimer dock, its engine rallying and slowing to negotiate the waves. Minogue felt the faint lateral sway of the boat, drawn by the waves, before it came to rest with a bump. He waved at the man lifting the gates and called out through the slit in the window as he inched the Fiat forward onto the ramp, “Damp.”

  The man was young, and his face shadowed in the hood of his rain-suit reminded Minogue of a monk. The Fiat hesitated at the bottom of the ramp before beginning the incline up to the Kilrush Road.