by John Brady
Minogue waited out her derailed train of thought. As though roused from sleep, she started and looked glassily from Minogue to Hoey.
"Here I am rambling along. Maybe it's not what you want to hear."
"You're doing grand," Minogue whispered. "But look, can you go back in your mind to recalling any visitors. Anybody he talked about?"
She cast her eyes to the ceiling and held her gaze there.
"I know you asked me that before, this young man with you. Try as I can, isn't it odd? He didn't seem to need people, like individual people. He liked to know about people in general, he said. Human nature. I remember him saying to me once… it stuck in my mind. He liked it here, you know. 'A pity I didn't come here when I was a lot younger' says he to me once. For all I know he kept up his friends back in England with his letter-writing and so on."
"Any phone calls that you remember as being peculiar?"
"No. No. An old-style type of a man, always writing letters and educating himself. That's what I thought of him. A cultured gentleman, I always said to Joseph."
"Letters to…?"
Mrs Hartigan's eyes focused suddenly on Minogue.
"I never in my life read another body's letters or the like."
"I beg your pardon, Mrs Hartigan. I merely meant if you had seen the outside of the envelope. A name, an address."
Mrs Hartigan shook her head curtly. Minogue diverted.
"Something a little different now for a moment, Mrs Hartigan, if you please. Did you ever think or believe that anybody was snooping about the place, maybe sizing the place up for burglary? For instance, did you have anyone coming to the door looking for directions or that class of thing?"
"Oh," she sighed, "I'd have to think about that one. Me mind is very slow now. The doctor told me I'd feel like lying down… let me think."
Minogue stretched his legs out straight while he waited.
"Joe," Mrs Hartigan called out. "Joe."
Joseph Hartigan slid into the parlour.
"Are yous finished?" he asked.
"Joe. A sup of tea. I can't think at the moment. And these gentlemen, too…"
Minogue looked at Hoey. A tight smile of yielding and Hoey nodded.
"Yes, please," said Minogue.
Until the forensic work began to trickle in, Mrs Hartigan was the best help they had.
Jimmy Kilmartin, Inspector Kilmartin, had lots of comforts around his hospital room but no visitors until Minogue arrived. Minogue noted the stack of Sunday papers and magazines, the bottles of Lucozade, tissues, slippers side-by-side under the bed and a radio with headphones. Kilmartin's room had a colour telly on a stand in the corner, too.
"They let you in, bejases," Kilmartin marvelled. "It's nigh on eleven o'clock." He made an effort to sit upright in the bed.
"I had them check from the desk to see if you were still awake," Minogue replied as he eyed the colour television.
"Nice place to be ailing, James."
Kilmartin snorted.
"Ailing, is it? I never felt better. Too fresh to sleep, I am. Rarin' to go."
Minogue handed Kilmartin a bag of muffins.
"Kathleen says to ask the nurse if you're allowed to eat these yokes. I had them in the car with me."
"Gob and I'll try me best," Kilmartin affirmed. "And you'd no trouble getting in here?"
"No. The night duty boss is a girl from Feakle. I heard them playing twenty-five and knew the accent. 'Damn your sowl, why di'nt you lay the deuce and you with the knave in your fisht as well?'"
Kilmartin laughed lightly.
"Jases. The Clare mafia at it again."
Minogue wondered where Kilmartin's family was that they weren't visiting him. Sundays in Ireland involved visiting someone in hospital or else paying one's respects in a graveyard. Kilmartin scrutinised one of the muffins at close quarters, turning it around in his fingers and pressing into its side with his thumb.
"Full of nourishment, I'll wager. There'd be a ton of bran in them. Roughage, right?" Kilmartin looked up.
"That's it."
"Oh, suffering Jesus that died on the cross. 'Roughage.'"
Kilmartin's eyes followed his supplications heavenward.
"Me heart is broken with that word. I have books about fibre and roughage and the like that would give your arse heartburn reading them, so they would."
Kilmartin's brow lowered to gloom, then lightened. He pointed toward the chair.
"The main thing is that I'm on the mend and that's what counts, isn't it?" Kilmartin continued.
"Precisely."
Kilmartin settled himself against the pillow. He's actually happy to see me, Minogue realised.
"How's the family, Jim?"
"Topping. This is Maura's bridge night," Kilmartin said a little too earnestly.
"The young lad has a job selling ice cream in New Jersey, he wrote and said. He'll come back speaking like a Yank… Isn't life wonderful?" Kilmartin added.
Minogue had an image of Maura Kilmartin with her overpowering perfume and her huge hands. She was from Leitrim and her flat drag-out-the-word-and-then-beat-it-over-the-head accent came through stronger after a sherry. Minogue had last met her at a retirement do for a Superintendent. He remembered her big, red farm-girl's face, the plump fiftyish body distending the sybaritic designs of her silky dress. She had whispered a dirty joke to Minogue. He was too distracted to get it straightaway, but she slapped her knees and almost dislodged her top set of teeth with laughter.
He remembered Kilmartin's sober face contorting in the kind of smile you'd see on a donkey chewing barbed wire. When Kilmartin said that he'd like Minogue to stand in for him and would it be all right to recommend him for a secondment for the six weeks, Minogue privately assigned a large percentage of at-fault-as regards Kilmartin's complaint-to Maura Kilmartin: Jimmy's shame, a farmyard wife too real for Dublin politesse.
"Ah, I feel sorry for the young people these days," Kilmartin drawled expansively from the bed. "So much pressure."
"You have hit the nail on the head," Minogue said.
Kilmartin warmed to the role of bedridden philosopher. He leveled a finger at the television set across the room.
"I blame that bloody idiot-box for a lot of it. You could watch that thing for a whole day, from early morning to late at night, and there wouldn't be ten minutes of it that'd be worth talking about. The rest of it you can throw your hat at."
"You're right, Jimmy, you're right."
Minogue wondered how much Kilmartin actually watched.
"Did you see the news?" Kilmartin asked.
"I heard it on the radio," Minogue replied.
"About that business up in… where is it?"
"Kilternan."
"That's the place. Do you know," Kilmartin leaned forward for emphasis, "but nobody tells me a damn thing here?"
"You're supposed to be resting yourself, Jimmy."
"Hoey and Keating doing the legwork?"
"They're very good. You have them trained to a tee, jimmy."
"Well?" Kilmartin asked indignantly. "Aren't you going to tell me what's going on?"
Minogue thought that Kilmartin would not manage his retirement very well at all if this was what six weeks' sick-leave was doing to him.
"Sorry. Yes. A man by the name of Combs. His housekeeper said he's English. Mr Arthur Combs, seventy-three years of age."
"How was he killed?"
"Strangled, Jimmy. Hoey says he'd put money on it being a bit of nylon cord the way his neck was marked. There was no row or anything. The body was within arm's reach of the door he came in. It looks like he came home from the pub, in the door and… that was it."
"Stuff was robbed. Money, antiques," Kilmartin said tersely.
"The place was ransacked all right. I don't know what was taken yet," said Minogue.
"A crowd of young lads, I bet," Kilmartin tried again. "Looking for easy money. Give the oul lad a few digs so he'd get the money out of the mattress kind of effort. Was he beat
up?"
Minogue shrugged.
"Doesn't look like it. No. We haven't placed him for the few days before the murder. Saturday night he was killed, it looks. The housekeeper only does the dinners for him on the weekdays, so…"
Minogue tried to let this part of the conversation die.
Kilmartin squirmed slightly under the sheets. He began to stroke his lower lip.
"I hope to God we have sheets on a few horrors who specialise in this class of crime. If you could call killing an old man and robbing his house by the title of 'crime' even."
"I hope so meself," added Minogue somberly and yawned.
"Um. Bastards. Cowards. Sounds like young lads to me still though," Kilmartin murmured. "Drink, drugs. They mightn't have records, these yahoos."
The conversation died on Kilmartin's contempt. Minogue resurrected a husk of what had been normality before Kilmartin's savage commentary.
"Wouldn't you like a bit of company in a semi-private room, Jim?"
Kilmartin glared at Minogue.
"I would not. Some fella coughing and spluttering next to me? Or someone with fifteen children from Ballyfermot and they all in visiting and blathering away? I'd as lief be here where it's quiet and I can read in comfort," Kilmartin declared.
He went back to stroking his lip. Minogue acknowledged the defeat of his diversion.
"Well maybe I can come by tomorrow. Will I give you a ring in the morning anyway, would that do?"
Kilmartin's eyes widened suddenly.
"Do that. Yes, would you? This place gives me the willies. It's full of sick people." spacebarthing
"Isn't that near one of your haunts, Matt?" Kathleen asked. Minogue watched his wife fork scrambled egg onto the plates. It was a quarter to eight. Minogue had woken up in the same position he last remembered before falling asleep. He was not sure if he was awake yet.
"Your home ground, like?" she persisted.
"Up near that ruin of a church?" their daughter Iseult added.
"Iseult, would you put down the book and be having your breakfast, love." Kathleen said.
"It says on the back that it can't be put down. 'Very gripping,' it says."
"There's a slim chance that your poor parents might want to hear from you," Minogue murmured. "To see how your life is running along."
"Isn't Daithi out of the bed yet? I thought I heard him stirring," said Kathleen.
"Who cares?" Iseult shot back. She yawned and laid the book face down by her cup.
"Yous should be glad that I'm able to read and amuse myself and still keep yous company," Iseult added moodily.
"In our old age, is it?" Kathleen paused with the fork.
Iseult yawned again. Minogue stole a glance at his daughter as she stretched. Why weren't girls called handsome? She rubbed her eyes.
"Well, is it up that way, Da?"
"It looks close on the map, I grant you. But there's topography to consider," he answered.
"Up near your favorite haunt, is it?" Iseult prodded.
A fleeting image of last night came to Minogue. Garish floodlighting around Combs' house, violence passing through the house like a whirlwind. Haunting; poltergeist.
"Could we try a different term than haunt, if it's not too much trouble?" Minogue asked.
"I think it's creepy up there, so I do, with all the trees and the bushes growing out over the road. The holy ground, I ask you…" Iseult said. She poured tea into her mother's cup and then into Minogue's.
"If there's any haunting going on up there, it's not the likes of me that'd be doing it," Minogue declared, with the sliver of rasher poised under his nose. "After all, I'm a lively type of character. Amn't I, Kathleen?"
"For your age," Kathleen said. Iseult laughed. Kathleen turned back to her husband.
"That's not up where those people used to worship the sun, is it, Matt?"
"No, actually. That's Katty Gallagher, the far side of the Smelting Chimney."
In a glade to the inland side of the abrupt stony lump that made up Carraigologan-or Katty Gallagher as the locals called it-Minogue had found a plaque. It had been placed there to commemorate a handful of Victorians who had for decades risen to worship the sun daily from the hill top. Minogue had sometimes imagined himself joining them each morning, with the Irish Sea unfolding before them. Inland, behind, a plateau of pastures was girdled by the ring of hills and mountains: the Great Sugar Loaf to the southeast, the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains to the west.
Often as he stood atop the hill, the wind teasing his jacket, Minogue thought that all the good land in west Clare would amount to less than the ordered land below him. Looking north from the summit, you could see the Mourne Mountains if the air over Dublin city wasn't bad. On a good day you could see Wales to the east. Minogue could almost feel the hilltop breezes tunnelling into his shirt still.
"Da. What do you do up in that place?"
"Tully? I visit the place is what I do." Minogue felt defensive yet.
"Yes, but do you do anything, though? Like, would you explore?" Iseult went on.
"Sometimes."
"And would you explore the graveyard, for instance?" Iseult harried him from behind a slice of bread she drew to her mouth.
"Honest to God, Iseult," Kathleen interrupted. "Do you think your father does be digging them that's buried there these hundreds and hundreds of years up out of their graves and talking to them?"
Iseult leaned back in her chair. She flicked her hair back over one shoulder, then another. She held her hand to her mouth and began coughing and laughing.
"It's nice to have the place to yourself at that time of day. And it doesn't cost me anything. So there."
"All right, Da. I believe you, but thousands wouldn't." Minogue tried to put some sense on the way the conversation was weaving.
"Anyway. I was a bit out of the way when that man was murdered. If you're looking for an alibi, I can only say that I'm very disappointed in you. All I can plead, is that I was up at Tully, thinking," Minogue protested.
"That's your story and you're sticking to it, right?" Iseult added.
"Ask me if I can prove that I was thinking," Minogue retorted.
He lifted a quarter of a not-quite-ripe tomato off the end of the fork with his tongue. What he called thinking, his mother would have called romancin'. His father would have called it idling, and he would have been right for the wrong reasons, Minogue reflected.
"No way, Da. Not a bit of it." Iseult resumed earnestly. "Anyone can see that you do your thinking. Pat says that you have the look of a man that's always thinking."
"You may congratulate Pat for his prescience. But remind him that he'll have to find less obtrusive ways of ingratiating himself with his girlfriend's parents than by having such flattery reported indirectly. Suggest perhaps that he comment on your mother's cooking," Minogue said lightly.
Pat was Iseult's new boyfriend. He had appeared at the Minogue house riding an ungainly bicycle. In Minogue's youth such tall bicycles were called High Nellies. Policemen rode these heavy, gearless bikes imperiously on rural patrols, farmers rode them up and down bog roads with buckets dangling from the handlebars. Pat wore cropped hair in the manner of a foreign legionnaire or a jailbird. All his wardrobe appeared to be black.
Iseult left her dishes by the sink and headed for the kitchen door. Minogue and his wife sat without speaking for ten minutes. A bluebottle dithered noisily around the window, stopping and starting. He or she finally made it to the open window. The smell of cut grass came in from the neighbour's lawn. Minogue noticed Kathleen's hands as they fingered saucers, the sugar bowl. Back to the saucer. This is what life is, Minogue thought, it happens this way. He was waking up.
"Better be off. I'm Jimmy Kilmartin today. Work to be done."
"Matt. Before you go. I heard Daithi taking the Holy Name and effin' and blindin' out of him the other day when he thought I couldn't hear him. I take great offence at the use of The Holy Name, I needn't tell you."
Mi
nogue almost agreed aloud that she needn't. Daithi had been saying such things for effect. They had found their mark.
"You'll have a word with him then, will you?" Kathleen said, "I'd only be giving out to him."
What word, Minogue wondered. Am I to keep the troops in line with orders from on high? Is she blind to the fact her husband is beyond this stuff?
"I'll have a word with him. Yes, I will, Kathleen."
"And if he's not willing to get up at a decent hour and do a day's studying…"
"I'll see to it," Minogue whispered. Kathleen picked up on his awkwardness. Daithi's repeat exams were coming up in two weeks. If he failed these ones, he'd have to repeat his final year. That was bad enough in itself. What Minogue and Kathleen most feared was that Daithi wouldn't have the interest to do the year again if he failed this time around. She looked at him. He did not want to leave her this morning with an acid remark hanging in the air behind him. She kissed him.
CHAPTER 3
James Kenyon walked out from Cadogan Gardens onto a Monday morning Sloane Street. He walked briskly, ignoring the noise of traffic. Kenyon crossed with the lights at Pont Street and within ten minutes he was passing the Chelsea Holiday Inn. Hyde Park Barracks filled up the junction ahead, where Sloane Street met with Brompton Road and Knightsbridge.
Kenyon glanced at his reflection as he strode by the glass-and-chrome fashion shapes. Cecil Gee's wanted four hundred quid for a two-piece suit that looked like something a client would willingly leave behind in a Neapolitan knocking shop? He took note of his own preoccupied face sliding along the windows, a face which usually said forties, not fifty-three this September. The mannequins in the windows repelled him. They looked tough and cutting, determined survivors, the grimly handsome of Maggie's shopkeeper Britain.
Kenyon had not met Alistair Murray in person, but Murray's slight Scottish burr over the telephone had irritated him. Maybe it was the air of unctuous assurance he heard in Murray's voice. He had noted some faint condescension, as though Murray were using his rank while he tried to soothe Kenyon. Kenyon didn't want soothing; he wanted facts. Murray had slipped up. Kenyon had to find out how much, and quickly.
