by John Brady
Minogue heard the footsteps cross the room. The others seemed to be leaving too.
“Leave the bag on him,” said the stranger. “Get him used to the dark.”
Minutes passed. Fear blurred his mind and he lost track of time. When the door scraped, Minogue’s heart leapt. The absurd plea almost came out in words: That wasn’t ten minutes… They had given up on him, they were going to just kill him because they were losing control of the situation and the time.
“Who’s there? Who is it?”
He strained again to hear any movement. The ends of his fingers began to tingle.
“Who’s-” A choking sob erupted behind his tongue and his voice broke.
“Ah,” came her voice. “You’re good and scared now, aren’t you?”
Her footsteps behind him, slow.
“You’d better tell them, you know.”
Minogue realised that his eyes were wide open. His heart was thudding as if it were outside his body. He couldn’t utter a word.
“Do you hear me? Tell them. What’s the use of trying to keep it in? What’s it worth now?”
“But there’s nothing I can tell them,” he gasped. “I’ve told the truth and they don’t seem to-”
“Don’t play that again now,” she said with a faint snort which he read as impatience. “Tell them.”
“I can’t-there’s nothing.”
He heard her move to his right side. Her voice dropped to a whisper.
“Tell me then. It was me you wanted, wasn’t it?”
The panic blocked his words again.
“Come on. Stupid, you’re not. I could tell that right away-”
“People think I know what’s happening around here, that’s what’s so-”
“They sent you because you’re from here. You’re an insider. Come on now, don’t be wasting time. They’re serious out there. They’re waiting for a lead from you-”
“‘We,’ you mean, don’t you?” he managed to say.
Sheila Howard made no reply.
“It was Crossan persuaded me that the Jane Clark case stank-”
“Look. Do you think that time is on your side here? That you can buy time? That they’ll forget about you or something? They’ll have to decide about you pretty soon.”
“‘They’?” Minogue risked. “You should know. You’re in cahoots with them. They treat you like dirt. Why would you want to-”
“Oh, shut up about that, would you? He wasn’t like this. It’s all eaten away at him, this whole thing, and he forgets sometimes. That’s how he…
“Oh what the hell would you understand?” she whispered. “Just shut up talking about that! Can’t you see? You’re the one in trouble. Start acting like you know it. What did Naughton tell you?”
The name caught Minogue off-guard.
“Well? What did he tell you?”
“He told me several things. He told me that your husband is a fool, for one thing. Then he told me that nobody called the station the night of the fire. I tried to get him to explain but he got into a dander. He took a few swipes at me and Shea-”
“That’s just it! You brought more Guards into this. What for?”
Minogue’s mind reeled. Where could he begin to explain?
“You’re holding something back. What brought you up to the house this morning?”
“You didn’t tell me that you’d left the pub in a huff after some row with Dan Howard’s father.”
“After some row. Oh, Christ, what do you know? What do you think happened that night, then?”
His panic had begun to ease and he realised that talking was giving him back some of his composure. He thought of lying to her but his words came out before he had calculated his reply.
“I think you took the car out to her cottage and you had it out with Jane Clark.”
“Had it out?” Toying with him.
“Argued, fought. I don’t know.”
“Do you think I killed her?”
He knew by her voice that she was half-smiling.
“I don’t know. She might have been in your way. I really don’t know.”
“God, you’re stupid. At the same time as being smart.” Her mood had changed again, he realized.
“Not like Romeo out there?”
She slapped him across the face before he could sense her anger.
“You bastard. Peeping Tom. You think I didn’t see you gawking?”
Something in him was satisfied to have had this effect on her. He had his head down and away, waiting another blow. Nothing came.
“So they sent you in to work your spell on me,” he said.
“One last chance,” she replied, calm again. “They mean what they say. When they come back-”
“They’ll have to figure out what to do about you too-” His words were choked off by a coughing fit. “At least let me breathe so as I can talk,” he wheezed, and lapsed into another fit of coughing.
Suddenly the sack was off. The cold air of the room fell on his skin. He blinked and took in great mouthfuls of air. A light bulb on a long cord hung from a nail in the wall. Its glare stung at his eyes and he shut them tight again.
She began to walk slowly around the room and he followed her through a slit in his eyelids. She stopped and leaned against the wall facing him. Her hair was loose and hung out from her inclined head. In her right hand was an automatic pistol.
“Do you really think it’s worth it?” she whispered.
He tried to say something but it was a hoarse whistle that ended somewhere near his teeth. He tried to clear his throat.
“They’re not going to stop at this,” he croaked.
“Don’t be stupid,” she scoffed. “I’m a hostage.” He stared into the shadows where her eyes were. “You think they trust you so much, they’ll let you witness…?”
He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence. She shifted her weight onto her other leg.
“Christ. You really don’t have a clue, do you?”
He looked down to where her finger was rubbing against the outer rim of the trigger-guard.
“Let me tell you something now,” she went on. “You put most of the bits together and I have the feeling you could probably sort it out in the end. There was something about you that sort of… I told them too, that you could be a problem. But if you did get to the stage of putting bits together, you’d be in a lot of…trouble.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d have opened the door on something more important, that’s why. And you still want me to believe that you walked into the whole thing blind?”
He felt that something was rolling toward him, a wave about to crest and lift him high.
“Do you really want to know what happened?” she asked in a soft voice. “Do you?”
She shook her face clear of hair and leaned her shoulder against the wall again. Her head seemed to be shaking a little, he believed. In the space between them, Minogue dazedly took in her anger. She held her breath behind her teeth as she spoke.
“I went to Galway that day because I had an appointment. A doctor’s appointment. Why did I go to Galway? Because I didn’t want anyone knowing my business around here. The doctor, a man of course, Coughlan, he had a kind of a wart on his nose and it got redder. I remember looking at it and thinking that he had seen me staring at it and maybe he was mad at me for doing that. He told me I had an infection. As if I didn’t know. Looked at me like I was a tramp. Asks ‘Do you have more than one boyfriend, Miss Hanratty?’” She returned Minogue’s stare.
“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” she murmured.
Though her hair had fallen down again and her eyes had returned into the shadow, the Inspector could make out the points of reflected light in her pupils.
“I think so,” he said.
“‘The tourists, Miss Hanratty?’ he says. ‘You have to be careful, now, and avoid contact until this is cleared up,’ and ‘Why did you wait until now?’ As if I had answers for
him.”
She flicked her hair back again and looked away. The gun moved in small arcs as she talked, as if she needed it for balance.
“I knew there was something wrong because I had a lot of pain. Dan, of course. Idiot. So I finally wanted to know. You can guess, Guard, can’t you?”
“Jane Clark?”
She nodded, as if considering a point in an abstract discussion that had gone on too long.
“I didn’t know what to do.” She paused and took a deep breath, her chin down on her chest.
“I knew I wanted to tell her that she had left her mark. I shouldn’t have waited. But that’s human nature, isn’t it? Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die. I sort of knew that Dan had been seeing her-”
“But if you tried to have it out with him about it, he’d have left you out in the cold?”
“Dan didn’t care. That’s just the way he is. He does what he wants. There are some things he cares about. I don’t doubt but that he has you fooled to the hilt too.”
She stared at him for several seconds.
“How many kids have you got?” she asked.
“Two. We had a boy earlier but he died. For a long time, we thought he was our last chance.”
“Well, she took a lot of my future with her when she went,” she resumed, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I came back to the village late and I went straight to the hotel bar. I wanted to have it out with Dan but sure when I got there he was twisted drunk. And I couldn’t drag him away.”
“You collared Tidy Howard and gave him a piece of your mind instead?”
“You’re damned right I did,” she snapped. “And of course his attitude was, what do you want me to do about it? Messing around like that was ‘immoral’ says he. And him chasing chambermaids! Well, I left that hotel raging. Yes, I drove out. And she was still up. She answered the door. She wasn’t drunk, I know that. Not then. She might have taken a few drinks after I left. But I think she knew that there was something wrong, maybe the look on my face. We had a row. She didn’t just sit there and listen, I can tell you. There came a point that she laughed at something I said, something to do with tourists. I hit her. With my hands. She was strong, but I was really mad. I threw things around and… Well, she said then that she was going to call the Guards. She had no phone, of course. I had taken a few lumps out of her, some scratches and that. It wasn’t that serious to my mind. After all, I was the one who had been wronged. I got in the car and drove off. I sort of believed her about the Guards. I was still mad, but on the way back I started getting worried.”
Minogue looked up from the waving gun. She seemed to realise that he had been observing some part of her that she wasn’t in control of, and her eyes narrowed. Her stare moved away from him.
“I came back to the hotel and I told Tidy Howard what had happened. I told him-I was still mad, you see-that I wanted to kill her. Jane Clark, like. He was staring at me like I had just landed off Mars. And I told him that when his darlin’ boy woke up in the morning and could hear, I was going to give him a right going-over too. And him looking at me and staring at me, and a smile starts to come across his face. I took a slap at him but he caught my arm. He was a big block of a man. And him laughing… He said to me, he said, ‘Don’t worry your little head, girleen.’ I remember him saying that. He told me to get myself fixed up with whatever it took, to go to Dublin if I wanted, and he would pay for it. I was taken aback, I can tell you. The same Tidy Howard who had made little of me the first time. He didn’t know any more than I knew at the time that the scar tissue would stop me from- Well, I remember him saying, and him laughing and holding my wrists, looking into my eyes: ‘Don’t beat the poor boy. Marry him!’ Laughing. He thought it was funny. That’s the kind of man he is…he was.”
Her eyes had glazed over now.
“I know this much,” she whispered, “that if I had had this with me that night, I would have killed them all. Right then and there. But I was very shook. And when I could think straight, I decided that I’d look out for myself in the long run and do my best. Yes. But I was full sure I’d find some treatment that’d work but…”
Minogue’s fear had given way to bafflement.
“You just had a row with her?”
“Tidy had it in his head to do something about all this that night,” she said. “He knew all the Guards. Naughton was his man more than anyone. Naughton’d give him the nod if the Guards were going to come around at closing time. But Tidy didn’t get the Guards that night, not until later. He sent someone else out, then and there, to put a fright into Jane Clark so as she’d pack up and run. Instead of her going to the Guards the following morning, like.”
“Who did he send?”
She ignored his question.
“Well, he got carried away. The way she talked to him-she had a sharp tongue on her, everyone knew, and she wasn’t afraid of much.” Her voice dropped back to a whisper.
“He got carried away and he wanted to…you know. Because she was a whore. She hit him with something and he hit her. Knocked her out. I wasn’t there, I only heard later. And it looked bad, he said. There was blood coming out of her nose. He came back to the hotel and told Tidy. That’s when Naughton came into the picture.”
“Whose idea was it to dump Jamesy Bourke at the cottage, then?”
Her eyes crept back to meet Minogue’s.
“Naughton’s. Bourke was a thorn in everyone’s side around there. As for Jane Clark, Naughton didn’t give a damn.”
Naughton had covered for them all, then, Minogue thought. Dan Howard, wayward, hapless, spoiled, drunk; Sheila Hanratty, determined to make a husband of him; the man Tidy Howard had sent to bully Jane Clark. He did not feel the cold anymore. His hands still tingled but the cord seemed to have lost its bite. He tried to squeeze his hands into fists but they felt swollen and weak. There were so many questions he wanted to put to her but his concentration was being stolen by his hands, his cramped knees. He stared at the wall and let his gaze slide down to the floor. His head felt unbearably heavy now. Thirsty, weak. How many were involved? Did Dan Howard know? He must. Had Naughton set the place on fire?
“Well, that’s all past,” she said. “No going back now.”
“Look,” he whispered. “You know this can’t work.”
She frowned.
“Keeping me here. A hostage or whatever. Those other fellas don’t know it, but I think you do. They’re all washed up now. They’ve screwed up royally. You let them shoot up the house-while you’re in it, even- so’s we’d all be scared off or something. But you couldn’t carry on whatever it is you’re doing without one of them making a mess of something-”
“Me!” she hissed, and bent down, her face inches from Minogue’s. He saw her chest heaving like his own, smelled her musky scent. “Me? I’ve screwed up? That’s what really galls me! My husband is screwing around in Dublin, playing the fucking statesman and I’m the one that’s screwed up?”
Minogue recoiled from her, pushing the chair up off its front legs. She pointed the gun at the ceiling.
“Look,” she said. “Even his own bloody father knew that my husband was a good-for-nothing waster. He got me to marry Dan because he thought I could put some backbone into him. And I worked and I worked and I worked at it! I prayed for him, for us, for damn near everybody. I tried everything-surgery in London, even. I went to New York to a specialist. I lived on bloody herbs and yoghurt for six months. Then I find out it’s too late.”
She lowered her arm and poked his chest with the gun. He held his breath. The light in the room dimmed and discoloured.
“And I even got over all that, so I did,” she whispered. “And I came back and I got on with life. I played the part. It was bred into me to be loyal, to try no matter what. That’s how we are. We know life is hard and you have to fight. Christ, we’re millionaires now, did you know that? Dan has money stashed away in France and in the States. ‘Slush funds.’ The ones he told me about anyway.”
She gave a mirthless laugh and brushed away her hair with her free hand.
“The tourists are swarming in. He’ll get re-elected, business is booming. Everything’s rosy. All I have to do is shut up and enjoy it. And all the while he’s sleeping with every bitch he can find.”
Minogue pushed back further on the back legs of the chair. She jabbed hard into his chest with the gun again. The place she struck stayed numb. Jesus, he thought, his chest about to burst, she could go off the deep end and take him with her. Beyond his terror he realised that he didn’t know her at all. She hated her husband, that was obvious. Or did she merely scorn him, hating something or someone beyond and including Dan Howard? This was her revenge, to get in with these halfwit gangsters?
She drew herself up to standing again.
“The Howards,” she muttered. “I’m not a Howard, I’m a Hanratty. My father died and I was eleven. He worked digging ditches for the County Council all his life. It wore him down because he was intelligent and he could see another life for himself. He had a heart attack before he was fifty years of age. Died of worrying. He wanted us in school and getting good jobs. But there was something he never really understood, even though he said it a lot.” She paused, looked down at the pistol and frowned.
“I found out late enough too,” she murmured. “If you have it, you’ll get it. That’s how life is. And it’s no good thinking and hoping otherwise. It’s cruel. Nothing has to be fair and equal. The Howards do well and they don’t deserve to. But the rest of us, no matter what…”
She looked at Minogue again with a doleful, momentary smile. She walked away from him then, slowly and delicately, like a dancer rehearsing moves in her mind. Hearing her footfalls behind him brought the fear back to him: She was leaving him to the others. She started to pace up and down the room behind him.
“You must be good at your job. Me coming in here trying to get you to talk, and it ends up with me doing all the talking.”
“What about your husband-?”
She laughed lightly. “What about him? ‘Does your husband know?’ Is that what you meant to say? Does my husband know that Ciaran and Finbarr will get paid good money for fixing up the damage they did? Does my husband know crates of guns and ammunition and more were moving in and out of the house for the last eighteen months?”
