A stone of the heart imm-1

by John Brady

  A stone of the heart

  ( Inspector Matt Minogue - 1 )

  John Brady

  John Brady

  A stone of the heart

  CHAPTER ONE

  Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart

  WB Yeats, "Easter 1916"

  Mary Brosnahan alighted from the train at Pearse Street station. Although she was going to be late for Miss Black-she could see Miss Black's tight little mouth saying 'nine sharp'-Mary was not one for running. Her only sister, Francie, had had a stroke three years ago and Francie was only fifty-three, three years younger than Mary.

  Mary pressed into the Friday morning crowd which was flowing toward the top of the stairs. Behind her, the station began to vibrate and thunder with the starting train's efforts to push itself on to the south suburbs of Dublin. Mary had known these same trains for thirty years. Like most other Dubliners starting into the 1980s in their greying city, Mary had insulated herself with a benign cynicism. No matter what they said, the new electric trains were a pipe dream concocted to catch votes. Never happen, not in a million years.

  While Mary was on the train she had caught sight of the headline on the Independent. Now it appeared to her again in the stacks of papers by the foot of the stairs: "Kidnapped RUC man found dead." Another one, she thought.

  Mary's attention was then taken up with negotiating the murderous traffic in Pearse Street. She pressed the button for the pedestrian light and waited. Momentarily, she recalled the headline again and the photograph of something (clothes? a sack?) lying in a ditch, with policemen and soldiers standing around. As the light changed, she scurried through the crowd and made her way toward the back gate of Trinity College.

  Mary worked as a skip in the college. Her job was to house-clean the students' rooms and other residences. She had been doing this for fifteen years. She entered the grounds and immediately headed for the passageway between the gymnasium and the science blocks. A bicycle hummed by slowly with its chain rattling. Again Mary recalled the photograph in the Independent. This time, she summoned up the memory of the daily glimpses of the Dublin mountains she caught as her train crossed the Liffey by the Custom House. Mary seized on this recollection to quell the feather touch of anxiety she felt coming over her.

  She emerged from the passageway to face the broad playing fields lined with trees. Mary did not miss the propriety of the flowers and shrubs held in by the tended beds which followed alongside the path. There was care taken here and things were kept in order-at least that could be said for the place, no matter the likes of Miss Black who ran it. Outside the walls, Dublin had gone to pot in Mary's estimation. Where was the polite and decent city she had grown up in? You'd be run over by cars and you on the footpath even, she had concluded. The clerks in the shops didn't so much as look at you these days. People eating in restaurants and houses being knocked down for shops and offices.

  "It's them Johnny-Jump-Ups from outside of Dublin has the place gone to hell. What do you call them, the entrepreneurs and the like. Hucksters and bogmen. They take the money and run," Mick said.

  The thing was, it was happening all over the world. Like Father

  O'Brien said in the pulpit, things were changing too quickly. We didn't have our priorities right, he said. That's it, Mary thought, we don't have our house in order, we don't have our priorities right.

  Mary quickened her pace. She consoled herself that at least it was Friday. Miss Black and her 'nine sharp.' Little dry old Protestant face on her, Mary thought scornfully. What was it one of the other skips said she'd like to ask her…? 'O Miss Black, how's your arse for cracking walnuts?'

  Mary imagined the house they'd buy after they retired. It'd be out in Portmarnock with a bit of sea air, near the amenities. A bungalow with a garden for Mick, someplace a person wouldn't be beat up or burgled or run over by traffic. At least it wasn't like up the North, with men shot dead at their doors in front of their families, she thought.

  Mary's eye was caught by the sight of a piece of white plastic bag lying in the clump of bushes. Late as she was, Mary was affronted by this. She looked around at the groups of students who passed. None of these youngsters would bother to pick it up of course. Exasperated, Mary stopped and sought a way into the clump which would allow her to get at the bag without getting up to her ankles in muck. She became even more irritated.

  Mary walked around the back of the bushes and bent to get into the bag. Bent over, she poked at it with her umbrella, pinning it to the earth. Then she tried to flick it back toward her. She couldn't. The bag was full of something. Mary became angry. She inched in further and looked down at it. It was full of bits of paper. It had to have been some student blind drunk last night who had thrown his notes away. Probably one of them engineers, she surmised, dealing out justice to the anonymous culprit.

  Mary picked up the bag. She noticed the sleeve of a coat some six feet away. She hadn't seen it from where she had stood before. She looked at the shrubs nearby. Some of the stalks and branches were showing spots of white where they had been broken. There must have been drink taken last night, she decided. Mary made her way over, her anger now tempered by anxiety and the embarrassment at being in the middle of a bed of shrubs, late for work.

  A group of Modern Language students had stepped out of the library to have a smoke and a sit-down in the chairs facing College Park. One of them was ridiculing a psychoanalytic reading of the character of Hamlet when a scream came across the air from behind them. Then another scream.

  As they turned, Mary came thrashing out of the bushes with her mouth open and her hat snagged on a bush behind her. She tripped and fell over a waist-high red-leafed bush. Her forearms beat into the ground to save her fall. She scrambled to get up, sliding in the clay again. Mary Brosnahan was quite unconcerned about being late for Miss Black, moving to Portmarnock or fretting about Dublin's lost civic pride. Her chief concern was to get away from that clump of bushes and shrubs, where her pattern of day-to-day life had been wrecked completely for some time to come by finding the corpse with its head bashed in.

  That Friday afternoon saw Inspector James Kilmartin, offices in Dublin Castle, in the company of Garda Tom Connors, of Kevin Street Garda Station but seconded for training to the Murder Squad, sitting in a navy blue unmarked Garda car.

  Kilmartin and Connors had just stepped out of the side gate of Trinity College. Kilmartin had listened to Mulholland and then Lacey from Garda Forensic while Connors stood with his hands pocketed, his hair tossing almost in rhythm with the flapping ends of the plastic cordon pegged around the site. The two detectives from Forensic took turns pointing to spots in the bushes. Three other men crouched in the bushes as they talked. Kilmartin watched the three as they inched their ways from spot to spot on their hunkers. He considered that they would make reasonable gardeners but that they'd need something better than tweezers and plastic bags.

  "No, sir. No sign of whatever gave him the clout," Lacey had said.

  "Nothing like a little hatchet or that class of thing?" Kilmartin murmured.

  "Divil a bit, sir. He was brought over here all the same. We might do better now when we find out where he was done in."

  "Dragged, is it?" Kilmartin asked.

  "Carried would probably be it, sir. He's a hefty lad so…"

  "Did ye take any casts, then?"

  "We took two, sir. They were women's shoes."

  Kilmartin looked over at Connors and then beyond him to the pallid sky above the Georgian parapets of the college buildings. Connors was staring at the three policemen in the bushes. They reminded him of fowl on the lookout for grains in a farmyard.

  Back in the car, Kilmartin sighed.

  "Rain, is it, Co
nnors?"

  "You'd never know now, sir. It has the look of it."

  Kilmartin lapsed into silence. Connors had learned to wait. Two youngsters with skinhead cuts appeared on Connors' side of the car. The two laughed and tapped on the glass. Connors glanced at Kilmartin before rolling down the window.

  "How fast does it go?" asked one of them. "A hundred? Do you have a gun? Aren't you a detective? Show us how the radio works. Any bulletproof glass? Give us a bit of the siren."

  Kilmartin, a giant to the two and a man who was out of short trousers in Ballina, County Mayo, some forty years earlier, shifted his weight in the passenger seat.

  "Who's your man?" said one of the youngsters, eying Kilmartin.

  "I'm Kojak. The wheelman here is Danno. Book 'em, Danno. Murder one." Kilmartin said.

  The youngsters began laughing again. Connors pulled away from the kerb. Kilmartin wasn't as sour as he looked.

  "The telly is a divil, isn't it Connors?"

  "The kids are nice though. You'd never imagine them turning turk on you in a few years," said Connors.

  "God, haven't you the black heart in you today. Arra, you'll be all right. Sure isn't it Friday?"

  Connors grinned again. "My Ma told me that people in parts of Dublin eat their young, so she did," Connors said.

  "God knows now she might be right," agreed Kilmartin. He thought about putting on his seat-belt but decided he'd have too much trouble reaching in for his cigarettes.

  "Any messages?"

  "None, sir."

  "Off to Pearse Street. We'll talk to the lads on the spot."

  "What was the name of the student?" Connors asked.

  "A fella by the name of Jarlath Walsh. Jarlath Walsh."

  Kilmartin spent no more than twenty minutes listening to the reports from the two Gardai in Pearse Street station. Kilmartin had worked out of Pearse Street and he hated the building. It gave him the willies. It was old and grimy and cramped. Plenty of action there though, too much. A rough start for a Guard just out of the training college in Templemore. He'd be on the beat right in the middle of Dublin. Kilmartin hated it the day he stepped in the door those many years ago. He had hoped to be posted to a fair-sized town in the West, to be near his folks. He had lived and raised a family in Dublin, however.

  He told Connors not to make any notes. It might discourage candour and memory. It would look impertinent too. These two Gardai were well senior to Connors though not in rank. They sat on the wooden chairs poking into their notebooks, their sky-blue shirts making Kilmartin think of Spain.

  "About fourteen minutes after nine, sir," one of them was saying. No, no rocks nearby. The body was lying on its back. The forensic team was there at half past ten. Yes, there were some marks in the clay around the body, like shoeprints, dug in at the heel, sort of. That'd be that woman, Brosnahan, leaping around like a madwoman, Kilmartin thought. Shouldn't be so hard on her. Twigs broken and bent back, yes. Nothing in his hands. Sure it was a he straight away? Yes, the lower part of the face was intact. A bit of a moustache. A white plastic supermarket bag, they'd be for the notes and books. Why did a student have to use that as a school-bag? Trinity College students not able to afford school-bags? Four hundred years of Anglo-Irish privilege walled up in the place and a student couldn't afford a bag for his books?

  Kilmartin noticed a growing sense of pessimism leaking into his chest. It wasn't a run of the mill one, one of those unglamorous family squabbles that ended in a death with the whole thing more or less wrapped up in twenty-four hours. The public wouldn't be much thrilled to find out how petty the causes were for most murders. No, they wanted the headlines, a bit of sex involved, a name they knew, maybe an international link. This was shaping up to be none of these, it seemed. More like a lunatic on the loose or some panicky young fella on drugs. Twenty years of age, a student.

  The two men had stopped talking and, along with Connors, were looking at Kilmartin.

  "Thank you, gentlemen. Will you please give your notebooks to the desk sergeant for safe keeping. I'll be requiring them at a later date perhaps."

  The two Gardai stood up and left the room without a word.

  "How's the old enemy, Connors?"

  "Half past four, sir."

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Kilmartin thought, the traffic would be like the chariot race in Ben Hur.

  "Tempus fugit. Off to the Castle. You can leave me there."

  A photocopy of a handwritten Forensic Bureau report lay in a wire 'In' basket on Kilmartin's desk. Under these pages he found a crisp envelope conjaining fourteen black and white photographs and nine smaller Polaroid colour snapshots. Kilmartin had given up trying to get used to the luridly colourful violence he found on the snapshots. Somehow he still expected holiday scenes, people with pink eyeballs at parties.

  As he looked through the photographs his pessimism drifted into a stoic pragmatism which was to attend his reading of the draft report. Nothing doing in the boy's bag, save the peculiarity of the bag itself for carrying lecture notes. A train ticket from Dun Laoghaire, bits of things that made up a life. A proper hanky (fresh cotton), six pounds and change, glasses, keys, a watch. Snaps of the site looked like wild Borneo. The body was neater than it could have been; a little care in arranging things?

  Walsh, Jarlath Walsh. Student. Kilmartin ruminated for several minutes. It would be late this evening before he'd have copies of statements and a who's-who around the life, now gone but reborn in print in a fattening Garda file, of Mr Jarlath Walsh.

  Kilmartin phoned the desk. As the detective answered, Kilmartin languidly wrote down the names of the one detective and four uniformed Gardai who were interviewing Walsh's tutor and his pals in the college. It had fallen to the detective to go to Walsh's parents.

  "And have Delaney telephone me at home by eleven tonight, like a good man."

  Kilmartin looked through the photographs again. There wasn't much blood on or around the head. Dragged? Carried? The flash had been a little close and the skin seemed to glow with a luminescence which made the gaping mouth all the more odd. Kilmartin noted the tips of the upper teeth showing. His gaze roved to the slight opening between the eyelids, the deceptive sign of life. The forehead was darkened and misshapen, flattened.

  An acidy space in his stomach widened. That would be his conscience. Kilmartin became exasperated, but he couldn't settle on a reason for it. "Out with it," he said aloud. Well, sure who else would be able for this one? Shag it. He wrote Minogue's name in his notebook, ripped out the page and stapled it to the reports. Shite, no staples. Rather than sit in Dublin's Friday evening traffic, Kilmartin extricated a poor quality cigar from the back of his desk. He eased his buttocks onto one side and allowed himself a fart, a breezer they called them as children. The fart was in some respects less offensive than the cigar. The world at bay, Kilmartin's stoicism eased a little. Trusting his own mistrust, Kilmartin decided he would give his squad until Monday, but he would call Minogue before then. Kilmartin drew on the cigar. Not for the first time, he tried to understand why he wanted Minogue in on this and why that prospect made him nervous.

  Because he felt that Minogue was owed something? Maybe he, Kilmartin, was superstitious and wouldn't admit it to himself.

  Kilmartin blew a ring across the desk. It was over a year now since the British Ambassador had been blown to smithereens outside the residence in Stepaside. Somehow Minogue had avoided the same fate, by feet, by seconds. Freakish but hardly magical, no.

  Even before that, Kilmartin had been conscious of currents in Minogue which marked him apart. Kilmartin believed that his unease with Minogue was the key to Minogue's rank, rather the lack of it. Minogue doubtlessly made his superiors a bit nervous, the same way he made Kilmartin weigh his words or put on the facade of casual conversation. A circumspect man, Minogue, some powerful imminence in him. He was rumoured to have a terrific sense of humour.

  Some months after Minogue came back on duty, Kilmartin wondered if Minogue had snapped maybe, or ha
d become depressed. Minogue had not been publicly outraged, he hadn't sought vengeance. He hadn't relentlessly questioned his hospital room visitors about the investigation. Minogue seemed to have liked the lying in bed, the long afternoons reading in the hospital. His tall frame humping the sheets up, his head resting on a farmer's hand, his other hand holding a book. Minogue didn't shave for weeks. His wife, Kathleen, didn't fuss him.

  When Kilmartin went to see him one Sunday, Minogue was asleep. Kathleen had fallen asleep in the chair next to the bed. The broadcast of the hurling match could be heard from the transistor radio. Clare and Offaly at it. Why did Kilmartin remember that detail? Something had impressed itself on him, this scene of a sleeping couple, one supposed to be watching over the other.

  Kilmartin had begun a note to leave with them, rather than wake them. Just as he finished, the daughter came in, Iseult. A name out of the past, a darkly Celtic presence: jet-black hair, the same as Minogue had had, tall. A long peasanty black dress and a shapeless coat. Fashion, is it? The fine arts stuff sent them all a bit off. Minogue stirred awake. His eyes opened and he was fully awake, just like that. A book slipped off the bed and woke Kathleen. She replaced it. A book by that fellow Victor Hugo, Les Miserables. What kind of a shagging book was that to be reading and him barely back from the dead after that bombing? A year ago nearly.

  Kilmartin stood and looked out the window. The street might as well be a carpark with the traffic. Les Miserables, he thought, stubbing out the cigar. Must have been set in Dublin. "Fucking city," Kilmartin whispered, almost disinterestedly.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On Sunday morning, Minogue and his wife left after Mass in Kilmacud at about a quarter to ten. Mrs Minogue, more devout than any of her family, much favoured the condensed richness of a quick sermon. She infinitely preferred the apt word to the hyperbole which the younger priests seemed to be fond of. Father O'Rourke still gave them the goods though. His sermons lasted about five minutes and they were deceptively simple. Then, on with the Mass and the next thing you knew, you were out the door three quarters of an hour later. That was just about time for Minogue to be more or less awake.