by John Brady
“She really had one over on them. And I don’t know if they ever knew it, Jamesy or Dan. Dan”-she blew out a vast quantity of smoke, the first work on a fresh cigarette-“what a gobshite. Dan, only Dan. Curly wee Dan. Hah. He’d get up on a table if the tablecloth looked enough like a skirt, so he would.”
“But what did you get out of this?” Minogue tried again. “What did Naughton mean?”
“Did you get in the wrong queue when God was handing out the brains or what? Do you honestly think that Naughton would do away with himself over some revelation like this, a parlourmaid like yours truly here, that no one cared enough to believe?”
She taunted Minogue with a wide-eyed stare. The Inspector didn’t try to hide his exasperation now.
“Look, Eilo. Stop mullocking about here, like a good woman. We’re trying to do the right thing. What did she have over these people, Jane Clark?”
“The right thing? Huh. What the hell use is it for me to tell you? It’s all done with.”
The Inspector rubbed at his stinging eyes. His battered Fiat was full of smoke, and he had a pain over his eyes that wasn’t going away and would probably get worse. He was homesick for the ordinariness of his home, his wife, his adopted city. He wanted to be sitting in front of the fire with a glass of whiskey and errant thoughts. He had travelled the roads of west Clare more in this last week-and for what? It came to him with the sudden force of a truth he had hidden from wilfully, that the Hoey he had dragged along, that the faded, greenish-coloured snapshots of Jane Clark, that the dreams of that familiar stranger and his own claustrophobic premonitions about Kathleen’s apartment plans were part of one story, a story he couldn’t make sense of. It didn’t matter how, he knew. What mattered was his own obstinate will to see this through. Still, he was angry.
He was out of the car quickly, the Tralee air rushing into his lungs. The force of the door slamming rocked the Fiat and it squeaked on its shocks. The sea, he thought while he waited for his anger to ebb, and the porpoises. Their domain the water, their senses beyond what we could imagine-the very core of the earth itself guiding them, or the stars, perhaps, the squeals of their kind as they surfaced and dived, surfaced and dived.
“Shit,” he said.
The roof of the car was cold under his palms. He spread his hands wider. Cigarette smoke issued out thinly from Eilo McInerny’s window.
“What the hell got into him?” he heard her say. “He should get a grip on himself or something.”
People, he almost shouted-humans. Images flew through his mind. Fire in the night and the stone walls reaching for the sea in darkness.
“He’s fed up with being taken for an iijit,” he heard Hoey reply. “He doesn’t get like this very often, I can tell you.”
Hoey said something else to her but in a tone too low for the Inspector to make out the words. Minogue turned and leaned back against the window, folding his arms. Overhead a dozen seagulls hovered white against the sky. The sunlight was brass on the side of the street. Naughton was in the morgue and his house was sealed. The bang reverberated in Minogue’s mind again and he shuddered. The gun Naughton had used was on its way to the laboratory in Dublin, thence to Moran, the Gardai’s resident ballistics expert. Would Moran be able to put parentage on the gun, link it to others? Ward, the detective who had interviewed him for a half-hour, had asked him twice if he had suspected that Naughton had had a gun. Stupid question. If Matt Minogue had so much as wondered whether Naughton had a gun somewhere, he’d never have gone near the damned house. Where did he get the gun?
“Oi,” he heard. He sat back into the Fiat.
“I have me job to go to,” Eilo McInerny said. “Mel’ll be home from school. I have to phone her and give out to her about her homework.” She paused to take a last pull on the cigarette.
“Then I’ll go back to Tom and Bridie and Maureen above in the hotel, and I’ll serve up a dinner to a crowd of people. Me feet will be hanging off me when I get home. But I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and put a bit of money aside for a trip to London. It’s for Mel. I promised her we’d go sometime.” She turned up the cigarette and studied the smoke rising from the tip.
“And I might just stay up late and have a few jars with Tom.” She looked up at Minogue. “And I might have a bit of fun. The Russian hands and the Roman fingers, you know?”
Minogue stared back into her eyes. People, he thought. It’s a fallen world, there’s no doubt.
“And then I’ll go home. And that’ll be that. Naughton’s dead, and Jamesy Bourke’s dead, and if I wait long enough, by Jesus, the rest of ‘em will fall into their graves too. Or get shoved into them. But I’ll sleep and eat and have rows with Mel and Tom. I’ll see all of them down, that crowd. Do you hear me?”
Minogue was caught between respect for her tenacity and dismay at her bitterness.
“All too well,” he said.
“Well, because you’re not a gobshite Guard-at least not according to your pal here-”
Both Minogue and Eilo McInerny looked over at Hoey. The detective examined his nails. His hands were trembling again, Minogue saw. He stared at Hoey’s forehead, willing him to look up.
“-who tells me you’re different, to the extent that you’re having rows with even the Guards in Ennis about Jamesy Bourke. Now that is something. And now I hear from him here that you’re ready to move heaven and hell to get at what happened to Jane.” Her eyes stayed on Hoey. He glanced at Minogue and looked out the window. “The oddest pair I’ve ever come across,” she murmured. “Ye remind me of some story I heard and I was in school-I forget it now. Some fool and his pal going around the country looking to fix things. Making iijits of themselves, it turned out. And me the iijit here too now, about to be taken in by ye. It’s the right fool I am, God help me, and I’ll never be cured of it.”
“Look here,” said Minogue. “We’re not out to cod anyone.”
She seemed not to have heard him. A smile began to form at the sides of her mouth. “After all I’ve been through… It must be the look of your man’s face here.” She turned to Minogue and her eyes narrowed. “Well, I’ll tell you a few things now. So listen. Gimme another one of those Majors. You. Shea. What’s-your-name.”
Eilo McInerny hammered in the cigarette lighter and settled back into the seat with a sigh. She concentrated on the lighter knob, her hand poised for it to pop out.
“You know how I was treated on the stand when I was called,” she began. “I was working that night. Saw Howard and Bourke getting plastered and the rest of it. But there’s one thing that never came up at the trial and I kept it to myself until after.” The lighter popped and she grasped it.
“I remember”-she paused, speaking through the smoke-“I remember thinking to myself that I could keep it up my sleeve. I thought of it as my ticket out of there.” Her eye watered from the smoke and she rubbed at it with a soft clicking sound.
“I went up to the bitch and I told her what I’d heard and what I’d seen, with her and Tidy Howard having the row that night. I let her think what she liked, that I had heard what they had been rowing about. She said nothing, just looked at me like I was some class of a lower form of life. That was her way, of course.” Into Minogue’s mind shot the image of Sheila Howard’s face.
“Yeah,” she murmured between her teeth. “Looked down her nose at me. Said nothing. But I knew there was something fishy going on. The next day, ould Tidy takes me aside and asks me if I had ever thought of bettering myself. Whatever the hell that meant. Would I try London, says he. He’d pay my way and give me the address of a landlady, as well as some money to get me started in digs there and so on. I’d think about it, says I.” She coughed and shifted around in the seat.
“Next day, a Guard-Doyle-came by and told me that I’d be asked to be a witness at the trial because Jamesy Bourke was after being charged. I was to stay around because the trial’d come up within a few months. Sure enough, it did. Like an iijit, I thought I’d just be asked about what I s
aw in the pub that night. But I walked into an ambush. And you know the rest. I came back to the hotel in a flood of tears-raging mad, I was too, and frightened. Then in came this fella, you probably don’t know him-a kind of a do-for, a crony of Howard-and he says the dirtiest things. About me, about Jane Clark. Says he doesn’t want to walk the same streets of the same village where I live.”
“Who was he?” Hoey asked.
“A lug. He came into the bar a fair bit. Duignan…Day-God, it goes to show you that I can’t remember-”
“Deegan?” said Minogue. “Big, running to fat?”
“Deegan, yes. I hardly knew him. He did odd jobs and he rented farmland from the Howards, I heard. So there it was: Get out of town. After your man Deegan had gone, in comes Tidy himself, with an envelope of money and an address. ‘Twould be better for all concerned,’ says he. Liar. Bastard. Pig. There was a thousand quid in the envelope. I couldn’t believe it. I was always sure that it was me saying what I said to her ladyship got me the ticket out.”
His headache was gone. He kept his eyes on Eilo McInerny’s broad back as she trudged up the steps into the hotel. Minogue imagined her body in a rococo painting of a goddess reclining in a glade. With her hand on the door, she looked back at the two policemen before flicking the cigarette over the roof of the Fiat. Hoey waved tentatively and let his hand drop into his lap.
“You told her what had happened to you?”
Hoey nodded.
“Why?”
Hoey rubbed at the side of his nose. “She’s been through a lot. I sort of thought that she needed to know that we’re not per-well, I mean, that we were all looking for a cure for something. That I was, I mean.”
“We,” said Minogue. “You were right the first time.”
Hoey raised a hand as if to make a point but let it drop again.
“If only Tidy Howard could-” he began.
Minogue shook his head.
“What I want to know is whether Dan Howard knew anything about all this.”
“He must,” said Hoey. “He’s married to the woman, for God’s sake. Married people don’t keep secrets, like.”
Minogue laughed aloud.
“What’s so funny?”
“The bit about married people.”
Hoey’s tone suggested irritation as well as embarrassment. “Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?”
Minogue started up the Fiat to distract himself from laughing again. Hoey lit another cigarette, coughed and rolled down the window. A lorry towing a trailer full of pigs stopped next to the car. Their trotters scrambling on the wood, their squeals and the smell of pig shit made Hoey roll up the window again. The lorry moved off slowly. Minogue drove around the corner and switched off the engine.
“What’s the matter?” said Hoey.
“Have to think out loud for a minute. That night: Eilo’s working and she sees Dan Howard and Jamesy Bourke drunk in the bar. She remarks to herself that there’s a lot of drink in front of Bourke. Later on she remembers seeing Sheila Hanratty and her friends. Then Eilo’s off about the place, ‘working’-which means she went out to a storehouse for a smoke and a drink from a bottle of vodka she kept out there. She sees Sheila Hanratty come across the yard after Tidy Howard and they’re arguing. Naturally she hides. She doesn’t hear what they’re squabbling about but she’s surprised that Sheila Hanratty should be shouting at Dan Howard’s father.”
“But she does hear one thing that Tidy shouts at her: ‘You live your life, I’ll live mine.’”
“And some bad language from the both of them. Surprised her to hear Sheila Hanratty like that. Had the name of being well-reared.”
“Right. Sheila Hanratty walks off in a huff. Eilo is able to get out of her hidey-hole, and she goes back in to help clear the bar. She follows Sheila Hanratty.”
Hoey nodded.
“And the same Sheila Hanratty goes through the bar and straight out the door onto the street.” Minogue looked to Hoey for comment but his colleague merely considered the tip of his cigarette.
“This is half-ten, now,” Minogue went on. “There’s another hour before the pub closes. Come closing-time, Eilo sees that she’s back, and she’s in a buzz around the boyos up at the bar. The same boyos are well and truly pissed by this time. Pretty soon afterwards they’re out on the street and Sheila Hanratty drives Dan home.”
“Right,” murmured Hoey. “The Howards didn’t live above the place.”
“Here’s my question: If Dan Howard can’t leg it the half-mile or so back to his house, how can Jamesy Bourke walk as far as Jane Clark’s cottage? If Bourke is as far gone as Dan Howard, don’t you know.”
“I don’t know,” Hoey offered. “Nobody knows. Bourke himself didn’t know.”
“Back away from that for a minute. How do we know that Sheila Hanratty actually went anywhere after her kerfuffle with Tidy Howard? Eilo says she saw her go out the door. Just assumed she got into the car. But she might have driven around the corner and come back to the bar directly. She might have gone to get something in the car. Her handbag or something. Then again, she might have been upset or the like, and needed…”
The thought of Sheila Howard distraught over something, using bad language, gave Minogue a feeling of faint but not unpleasant aversion.
“She might have come back in a matter of minutes. Eilo mightn’t have seen her until later,” Hoey was saying.
“Yes.” Minogue was still mired in his sliding thoughts.
“Then again,” Hoey added with unmistakable irony, “it’d be nice to know where she actually did go, and for how long.”
Minogue awakened to Hoey’s mood and glanced across at him.
“Yes and no, Shea. There’s Crossan taking digs at the Howards. I’m far from satisfied that Crossan is as pure as the driven snow here. He may be the happier man to see Dan Howard and Sheila Howard with plenty of mud on them.”
“You’re lumping Eilo McInerny in there too?”
“It struck me that there’d be a certain, what can I call it, a certain relish that Eilo’d enjoy if the Howards, Sheila Howard included, got in the way of scandal.”
“You think she’s a muck-raker.”
“That’s not what I said. I’m saying that she could put a cast on her recollections. I’m wondering…I’m wondering exactly what Crossan told her the times he was talking to her recently. Maybe Crossan sort of enlisted her-not outright hired her, I mean, but-”
“Crossan? You don’t believe her, then.”
“I’m saying that she might be embellishing. She didn’t actually hear the conversation between Tidy Howard and Sheila Hanratty. And she didn’t actually see her drive off, much less where.”
“All right,” said Hoey. He blew out under his upper lip. “All right. But she didn’t claim to have seen or heard everything.”
The afternoon sun was just above the rooftops now, and the copper hint of evening was already on the streets. The sun had warmed the car’s interior and brought up the smell of cigarette ash even stronger. Hoey had become more fidgety.
“Crossan,” said Hoey. “You’ve got him in your sights, haven’t you?”
Minogue nodded.
“Back to the money thing, then,” Hoey tried. “She says that Tidy Howard gave her money for the train and then for digs over in London. A lot of money. Maybe because he had her on his conscience?”
“Take-it-or-leave-it type of deal?” said Minogue.
“Right. He rapes her and then later he kicks her out after throwing a bit of money at her. But the way she talks about him, it wasn’t in character for him to give a damn about that sort of thing. Why did he wait until after that night to talk her into going away?”
“Bears out her version of why she got the money, all right.”
“Yeah. The main reason was that she knew that something was going on that night,” said Hoey. He sat forward and began counting on his fingers.
“Look. She sees Tidy Howard and Sheila Hanratty ha
ving some kind of row. Sheila storms out, obviously not getting the answer she wants. She goes somewhere. When Eilo sees her again, she’s back in the bar looking a lot less glamorous than the first time she appeared. We have to go after her. Sheila Howard.”
Minogue took a deep breath and looked at his watch. “With what?”
“Naughton got paid off-”
“Can’t prove a damn thing now, and you know it.”
Minogue’s shirt-collar began to irritate his neck. The sun came around the door-pillar. There was a glint in Hoey’s eyes and his fingers moved the cigarette around quickly.
“Ask Mr and Mrs Howard,” he growled. “Round two. This time put the squeeze on ’em.”
Minogue longed for a cup of coffee, to be alone for a while. A vague apprehension had taken the place of the emptiness, itself part of the leftovers of shock. Hoey scratched his bottom lip with his thumbnail. The Inspector slid deeper into his seat and looked down the street.
The afternoon light had stretched the shadows across the street. They had begun their relentless ascent on the buildings to the western side. Soon the roofs, the aerials and the chimneys would take the glare all to themselves and the street below would fall into darker shadow. Gold and bronze had already taken fire in several windows. Minogue watched a mother pushing her pram toward the car. Her face was set firm as if she had just had news that disappointed her. She stopped the pram and called out to a boy crying on the footpath behind her. The boy stood staunchly with his face contorted.
“All right so, bye-bye,” the woman called out.
She was too tired to be really angry, Minogue believed. The child continued crying and pivoted toward a parked car. He began fingering a door handle, tracing patterns in the dust on the door panels. His Hallowe’en costume had held together well, the Inspector noted. The cloak’s high collar suggested Dracula but perhaps he was mistaking it for Superman or Batman. Would this stubborn child insist on wearing his hero’s clothes night and day until they fell off in flitters?
