by John Brady
The kettle filled, he placed the lid on and plugged it in. How does one draw or paint night anyway? Anytime there was a bright moon Minogue could not resist turning out the lights in the room to admit the moonlight. Moon, luna. Lunatic.
"Don't be falling asleep there, Da," Iseult said.
Kathleen resumed her interrogation of Pat. She asked about his brothers and sisters. Pat likely knew that this wasn't the first time he'd have to account for himself and his background to his girlfriend's mother, Minogue thought. Mrs Hartigan, the housekeeper. How could she not notice if Combs was homosexual?
He unplugged the burbling kettle and poured a little of the water into the teapot to scald it. Minogue would only drink tea that had been drawn in a fresh pot which had been scalded first. As he poured the tea, he tried again to shake himself of the passport photo: Combs' flabby, tired face, those candid eyes staring into the camera.
Minogue allowed himself an hour and a half of Tuesday morning for the State Pathologist's report, additional pages from Garda Forensic and the State Lab, and typed-up reports based on interviews done by Gardai in Stepaside. Arthur Combs had consumed approximately four small whiskies and one, perhaps two, half-pints of beer in the two hours before his death. Fond of it? Minogue wondered. Murtagh's trips to the gay bars had produced nothing. Only one pub had phoned back when the new shift had had a chance to see the photo of Arthur Combs. A barman in Lydon's pub thought that an older man, like the one in the photo, had come in some Friday nights over a year ago. If his memory was good-and Minogue couldn't silence the cynical gargoyle within-the man had read a sporting paper, probably horse-racing, and had left the pub after a couple of drinks. Alone. What next? the gargoyle whispered. Go to all the bookies in Dublin? Another motive for doing in a man who owed money to a bookie? But no, Minogue realised: Combs wasn't short of money. Horses, a little betting. Tinkers?
He rang Stepaside station and asked for Driscoll.
"One Michael Joseph Joyce, sober," said Minogue. "Reliable, usable testimony. It may be twelve and me getting there but…"
"No bother. He can cool his heels here."
Minogue turned to the forensic report. No pressure prints or UV traces of prints on victim's skin. No cord, twine or string of any description found on premises. Shoe-prints in the laneway matched brogues found in Combs' kitchen. Thirty-seven recoverable prints lifted from kitchen. Twenty-two from Combs, twelve definites from Mrs Hartigan, awaiting more intensive comparison checks on three marginals. More from the car and other rooms in Combs' house. All matches to Combs, none pending even. Tire treads that matched the radials on Combs' Renault. Didn't trust himself to drive up the narrow laneway after a few drinks? Didn't mean that no other car had parked in the laneway, Minogue brooded. Clues like asymptotes: nowhere he could see. Ahhh…
He phoned the Garda Forensic Lab and listened for almost twenty minutes while he was told much the same as he had read. Still no prints outside of Mrs Hartigan's and Combs'. Only eight pending for matches now. Any amount of ones smudged, unrecoverable. No, no one had done the end of the laneway. Why not? It was examined and found to be virtually all stones coming up through the soil. No tire marks visible. Clothes, any struggle at all, nails? No. Had to be something in all these pages, some clue.
Michael Joseph Joyce, itinerant, age thirty-eight, currently residing in Heronsford, Ballcorus, Co. Dublin. Married, wife Josie (Josephine), seven children. Minogue pushed away from his desk using his knee. He didn't get far. One of the rollers under his chair was seized.
"Tea, your honour," from Eilis, by his side. He hadn't heard her walk over to him. Smoke followed her and began to settle on him, a smell from the Levant. A souk, coffee-like tar in thimbles? Maybe a stone-flagged square with gristled and moustachioed men at dusk. Anatolia, Minogue wished. Wouldn't mind being there.
"Thanks, Eilis."
Eilis slouched back toward her desk. It was a quarter after eleven. It had been lashing rain since Minogue awoke at six.
Joyce: no relation to the one writing the dirty books beyond in Paris, of course. Joyce is a Galway name. Galway is the City of the Tribes. Travellers, itinerants, often converged on Galway city, the gateway to the west. Michael Joseph Joyce had been found malingering around the outside of Mr Combs' house by a member of the Gardai. Garda Eoin Freely was answering a telephone call from a concerned citizen, one Brian Mahon, who happened to be driving by with his brother. Happened to be driving by? Mahon lived in Stepaside. He had come by to see "the murder house." More lurid sightseeing, Minogue snorted.
Joyce had drink taken. Not completely legless but intoxicated enough not to be sensible to the waking, official world. Michael Joseph Joyce told Garda Eoin Freely that he was on Mr Combs' property to see to it that "the horse was fed and watered." Garda Freely did not report that he laughed at this explanation. He did report that he promptly took Joyce to Stepaside Garda Station for further questioning. No questioning had been done of course. They had rung Hoey by then and Minogue had issued his edict. Heronsford, where Joyce was camped, was three miles and more from Combs' house. What really brought Joyce that far from home at that hour of the night?
Minogue sipped more tea. It tasted slightly of washing-up liquid. Garda Freely would hardly have called Joyce a Mister any more than he would have listened to the man's protestations last night. Joyce was, after all, a tinker. Tinkers were shifty, dishonest, cunning. They drank themselves into a stupor, they stole things. Tinkers left mounds of rubbish behind them when they moved their caravans to a new site.
Tinkers had to be taken in hand, evidently. Garda Freely was no different from any of his colleagues: no song-and-dance stuff, pick him up and make no bones about it. Let the social workers and the do-gooders blather on about "itinerants" or "travellers," the Gardai held the fort against tinkers.
Minogue paused at the phrase "currently residing." He imagined a leaky caravan or a canvas tent surrounded by bits of scrap iron and clothes, a gaggle of half-dressed children, treacherous mongrels growling under the caravan. They lived over a ditch and moved to a new ditch when they were thrown out of an area. Travellers, that's how they described themselves; and they usually kept horses or donkeys, if not by their camps, then with another member of their family. At thirty-eight, Joyce had lived the same portion of his expected life as Minogue, at fifty-four, had of his own. The settled Irish conferred very little romance on these descendants of dispossessed peasants. They were the starving losers in a run-in with Oliver Cromwell and his mounted metal men who hacked at the Irish by way of bringing in the Modern Age.
Tinkers like Joyce sent their women and children out to beg. O'Connell Bridge in Dublin usually drew a dozen of these'"shawled outlaws with ruddy faces cajoling and pressing for money or else sitting in the rain by a piece of a cardboard box with pennies in it. The men would go door-to-door, too, but looking for scrap iron. Wary householders generally held that tinkers a-begging at their door were really sizing up the houses for burglarising later.
Because of his gormless explanation, Michael Joseph Joyce nearly didn't get to go home to his Josie and his seven children. Had he actually entered the house? Unless he knew the Gardai had seen him, Joyce would hardly admit to that. Minogue put his mug of tea aside. Hoey was standing by Eilis' desk now.
"There's a reply from the London police on the telex. Do you want it?" said Eilis.
The afternoon stretched out ahead of him as he read the half-page telex message. If it was raining here in the city, then Kilternan and Glencullen would be awash. Combs had retired as a Customs Inspector, sold his house in a suburb of London and moved to Ireland. What would Joyce and his family, the seven children who were probably the survivors of a family which could have been twice that number, what would they do in rain like this? Her Majesty's Government sent Mr Combs a pension and the bank with the funny name sent him an annuity, which Combs had bought with some of the money from the house he had sold. Tinkers are like untouchables among us, he thought, a Christian country full of chu
rches and priests and nuns and roadside statues… and people living under canvas in the ditches. The Sampson Coutts crowd said they'd be sending someone to look after Mr Combs' estate in Ireland and-
"Very quick off the mark," he murmured aloud.
"Who is?" Hoey yawned.
Minogue read the last sentence aloud and added in "Reply for attn. Inspector Newman. Rgds."
"What's 'rgds'?"
"He means'regards' I suppose," Hoey replied.
"Oh. So this policeman says that a bank is sending over a lawman to settle Mr Combs' affairs here… " Minogue's voice trailed off.
"That's banks for you," Hoey said vacantly. "Rob the eye out of your head and come back for the eyelasrk telling you you look better without it."
"Today or tomorrow, it says," Minogue said. Keating appeared at the door. Minogue promptly appropriated him and the radio car.
"Stepaside, Pat. And don't dally about," he said.
Moore was not detained in passport control at Dublin Airport. A middle-aged man with a skeptical cast to his face and glasses down on his reddened nose asked him if he was importing any plants. Had he been to a farmyard in the immediate past? Moore had been allowed to keep his clothes as cabin baggage along with his briefcase. He found himself precipitously outside Customs, looking down the hall at windows running with the downpour.
The airport could have been in Britain, he thought, when the plane had skimmed under the low clouds into a grey, green world. He noted signs in Gaelic on the sides of vans and on advertisements in the terminal. He saw no armed policemen or army. He noticed the two plainclothes police near passport control, though. They wore their indifference rather affectedly. Neither gave him more than a momentary glance.
Moore had never been to Ireland before. His only connection to the place was his surname. His greatgrandfather, a bricklayer, had emigrated to Britain in 1892, had married an English woman and had spent the rest of his lift happily becoming as English as he could. Moore's grandfather had bought some real estate and in two generations had brought the Moore family from provincial town builder to the appearances of landed money.
Moore rounded a partition and found himself facing a throng of people who appeared to be waiting to greet passengers off his plane. He looked at several faces. He felt he was on show. He gathered his wits and headed for the greater spaces of the terminal. As he followed the signs for the taxi rank, he shelved his efforts to put a finger on what exactly was so different about the faces here. He asked a woman who was leaning listlessly on an information counter how much taxi fare to the City Centre was.
"Why would you want to take a taxi?" was the reply.
"I have to make good time actually," he answered.
"To the Burlington Hotel? You wouldn't see much change out of a ten-pound note."
"That's near the City Centre, I understand," Moore said.
"And a bit more too, now. It's over the south side. Tell the driver to take you over the new bridge. Otherwise those fellas would drive you all over the country."
"Ah, I see," Moore said.
"Why don't you take the bus and save yourself a bundle of money?"
Moore telephoned the hotel to confirm his booking. Although it was almost one o'clock, he wasn't hungry. He stood by the window watching people running in from the rain, surrendering bags to the security check by the doors. A double-decker bus drew up at the stop outside and that decided him. He entered the bus, paid and opened out a map of the city. Combs' house was beyond the suburbs even, on the map for County Dublin.
Moore followed the bus route on his map as it made for the city centre. The driver was whistling in a dispirited way, losing track of the air and changing his whistle to one made between tongue and teeth. He stopped his whistling only to mutter to himself or to wipe condensation off the side window. As Moore was leaving the bus, the driver spoke to anyone who would listen to him.
"Ah, you'd be tired of all that sunny weather, wouldn't you?"
Moore got into a taxi at O'Connell Bridge. The Dublin he had seen while he was coming in on the Airport Road was a dishevelled, grey sprawl. There were kids all over the place, on bikes, running, walking in wet groups. From his street map he knew that the trip to the Burlington Hotel was a short one.
The hotel was a clone of every and any nondescript hotel that had been designed in anonymous American Vulgar. It was like an office block, quite without features local to where the developer had slapped it up. Moore thought that the taxi-man had gone less directly to the hotel than he could have, despite his protestations of roads being "up" and one-way streets. Moore declined an offer of help from a doorman with a florid drinker's face, a stage Irishman who probably even enjoyed donning the silly livery he wore. The gear reminded him of Emperor Bokassa.
Moore followed a young woman from the Reception. She flicked his room-key against her thigh as she walked. Her badge said Maura.
"That rain is down for the day," she said without turning to him. "As soon as I woke up and looked out the window this morning, I knew we'd be swimming in it all day."
"Yes," he said.
"That's Dublin for you," she added and showed a distracted smile while she watched the floors light up in the ascending lift. Moore was wondering how best to explain his business here in case the police asked. Would they know enough to wonder why Combs' bank had not simply called on a law firm here in Dublin to do the work? He could say, as Kenyon had suggested in his briefing this morning, that his firm prided itself on being on the spot promptly and that it had the necessary expertise to negotiate affairs in the new Europe. The European Economic Community and all that. He could deflect any curiosity by talking about how much new law membership in the EEC had brought with it. Even if they knew he was lying, they'd probably believe that he was boasting more than anything else, or greedily chasing commissions even outside Great Britain.
Maura stopped and unlocked the door into the room. Moore couldn't understand why she had led him. Why not give him his key and let him find his own way? He had already refused help from a doorman and a porter at Reception. Couldn't they take a hint?
She entered the room and stood to the side of the bed. It was clean, luxurious even. There was no smell of stale ashtrays from the last boozy travelling salesman either. Moore didn't hide his approval.
"It's nice, isn't it?" she said.
Moore snorted lightly at the incongruity of it all. What kind of a place was this where a porter or portress would stand in his hotel room and comment on the place? More amused than baffled, Moore agreed. She left without hanging around for a tip. He sat on the bed.
Yet again, Moore mentally rehearsed a scene where anyone might query his haste in coming to Dublin to settle an estate. At least it was easier than having to explain why he was there in the first place: inventory effects as soon as possible and thereby secure them for disposal later. Had to be tactful, though, about insinuating that an Irish thief might be a shade quicker off the mark or more heartless about breaking into a dead man's house and lifting stuff. Moore had heard of instances in Britain where thieves had kept an eye on death notices in the papers and plundered houses even as the funerals were taking place. He could mention that, and emphasise that it happened in Britain, of course. Of course… Plus the idea that Combs may have had valuables around the house.
Moore found the telephone book in a drawer. He didn't know what "Cuid a hAon" might mean, but the numbers were for Dublin. It took him two calls before he heard a woman with a thick singsong accent, but who sounded bored too, tell him that he had reached the Investigation Section. Moore glanced at the name in his notebook again as if one more look might finally tell him how to pronounce it now that he had to try and utter it.
"Sergeant Min-ogg, please."
"Sergeant Minogue?"
"Yes. May I speak with him please?"
Moore's gaffe with the pronunciation abruptly reminded him that his own accent was beginning to sound different to him. A foreign country, just off the coast o
f Britain?
"He's not here at the moment. You might leave a message."
"It's in connection with a Mr Combs. I'have just arrived from London to try and settle Mr Combs' estate."
"Give me your name and where you can be gotten in touch with," Eilis said instead.
Moore wondered if her offhand manner was typical of what he could expect from anyone else on the island.
"The Burlington, is it?" she asked.
"Yes. I'll be starting just as soon as I can, you see, and I need to okay it by the police rather than surprise them at Mr Combs' house."
Moore, like many other well-meaning Britons, assumed that a little humor oiled the wheels when dealing with the Irish on their home turf.
"You had better not stir as regards the matter until you meet up with Sergeant Minogue," Eilis said stonily. "I'll see to it that he telephones you within the hour. Is that good enough for you?"
CHAPTER 8
It took Minogue forty minutes to get to Stepaside. To be exact, it took Keating forty minutes to drive himself and Minogue to Stepaside. Minogue dozed on the trip. He stretched before opening the car door. Two Gardai ran by them to the door of the station, one with a newspaper held over his head.
