A stone of the heart imm-1

by John Brady

  Their children confused Minogue's silence in the mornings with bad humour although he rarely had a cross word to say. He usually said nothing at all if something irritated him. Through twenty-four years, Kathleen Minogue knew almost all the signs: his head would go down, his eyebrows would raise a frown on his forehead. He'd look around for more tea or maybe fiddle with the cup. It was Minogue's idea to make the walk down the pier in Dun Laoghaire after Mass on Sunday. The idea was to let their two children get up late and make all the fuss and hullabaloo they wanted. Iseult could be depended on to come in at about one and Daithi before three every Sunday morning. These hours started when both of them started university. Minogue wondered if that was cause and effect.

  Kathleen was for putting the hammer down, 'as long as you're in this house, you'll… ' kind of thing. Minogue's own anxiety about their children brought him to a delicate equilibrium. He persuaded Kathleen to hold off on her plan, but every now and then he had to renegotiate with her. The idea was not to talk about Mass or coming in late but to come back home by about mid-day Sunday after a walk and read of the papers. Iseult would have dinner on and Daithi would be presentable, no questions asked. It worked.

  Kathleen had been making the mistake of going to wake up Daithi on Sunday mornings. When she had opened the bedroom door, not only was the room like the wreck of the Hesperus, but there was also an appalling smell of stale boozy breath and a night's release of beer farts. Minogue had then been pointed toward the stairs and encouraged in no uncertain terms to rouse their son, express the joint parental disapproval and air the room. Minogue, who had been on a tear manys a time at Daithi's age but now knew better and feared for his insides, worried about Daithi's crowd. A crowd of engineering students put next to a rake of drink brought on a lot of high jinks.

  Minogue climbed into the car and handed the Sunday Press to Kathleen. The car rocked as it took Minogue's weight. While Kathleen began scanning the headlines, Minogue fumbled the keys into the ignition.

  "Dun Laoghaire, for a walk, will we?" he asked.

  "Down the pier is it? Tell him Inspector Kilmartin, that is to say, Jim Kilmartin, called. I'll telephone him at dinner time. Good day to you, now."

  In Minogue's Kilmacud home, Daithi put down the phone and cursed his awakening by a policeman, no less. Daithi's neck was stiff and his bowels were groaning. A part of his mind registered that seeing as he had swallowed about seven pints of stout the night before, some issue would have to come of it and rapidly. Iseult eyed him and murmured over her handmade teacup.

  "Well, brother. In the arms of Bacchus last night?"

  "What?"

  "Did you fill up well last night?"

  "And if I did? I'm not the kind of yo-yo to sit around like the artsy-fartsy crowd talking about the state of the world."

  "Like me?" Iseult said.

  "Like your pals, anyhow."

  "Did you hear about the Irish homosexual, brother dear? Preferred women to drink."

  "Nothing personal, I suppose. You want me married off like the Ma, is that it? "

  "Arra no, stay home and look after your mother," she replied.

  "You're cracked, so you are. When'll the parents be home?"

  "Half past twelve."

  "An Inspector Kilmartin will be calling for the Da on the blower."

  "Matt, did you read that someone told Gay Byrne to eff off on the 'Late Late' last night?" Served him right, thought Minogue. Byrne and the rest of them were a crowd of yobboes.

  "No, I didn't. What prize will the fella be getting? For his candour I mean," Minogue said.

  "Now would you lookit," Kathleen said quickly. "I suppose he got a rise out of this fella. Liam Cullen. You know, that painter who makes a religion out of being from Dublin."

  "Well, they're your crowd, Kathleen. Good Auld Dublin," quipped Minogue. He inched the car into the line-up leaving the church carpark.

  "Well, Dublin or not, there was no call for making a show of us with the language," Kathleen added.

  "They give the name of the young lad killed the other night.

  Inside in Trinity College. Jarlath Walsh. He's not a Walsh we know, is he now, Matt?"

  "I can't place him, no."

  "Not Jackie Walsh in Bray, his lad?"

  "No, that's Brendan."

  "God, isn't it terrible, a young lad to be murdered like that?" Kathleen said.

  Minogue allowed that it was. As Kathleen read on, Minogue's thoughts ran adrift.

  Minogue would have liked to buy one of the British newspapers, like the Observer or the Times. Minogue used to buy the Sunday Telegraph years ago, but since the North, the newspaper had come out in the open as a Tory rag. Minogue tried the Times and the Observer, but they shoved in enough slurs to turn him away from them. The Irish Sunday papers were rags too.

  Approaching Monkstown, Minogue awoke to the understanding that he had not remembered driving away from the church. How had they made it to here and him daydreaming? He glanced over at Kathleen. High cheekbones on her, her eyes disappeared when she laughed. Was she fifty this year?

  "Do you know something? I'd love to pick up on the French again. I'll get myself a Paris Match " Minogue said to his wife.

  The car breasted the hill looking down into Dublin Bay. Howth rested across the postcard-blue water, beyond the East Pier.

  Kathleen looked over at him. Senile dementia, it had been called in her mother's day. At fifty-two? Clare people are a bit off anyway.

  "Would you now, lovey? Maybe you can teach me a bit and we can go on a holiday to France someday."

  She's learning, thought Minogue. Far more effective than coming out with 'Matt Minogue, are you going a bit quare?'

  Minogue smiled. He parked the car close to Dun Laoghaire train station. Kathleen and he began strolling toward the pier.

  "We're practising for Paris now, Mrs Minogue. We're boulevardiers" said Minogue.

  Kilmartin turned aside from the hurling match on the telly that Sunday afternoon. It was a slow game. The playing field was sodden. The players were all splatted in mud from the opening minutes and the greasy leather ball slipped from players' fingers and off the ends of their sticks. Maybe the Canadians had the right idea, Kilmartin mused, put it on ice and call it hockey.

  He fingered through his notebook and practised phrases silently. He felt awkward talking with Minogue, especially since Minogue's injury. Kilmartin dialled. Minogue answered. As he waited for Minogue to finish the greeting, those two seconds brought the image of the Commissioner confiding over his glass in The Bailey those months ago: jobs which will take his interest, challenges. He refused the disability pension and he still another eight years before the pension. No, he's not handicapped at all outwardly. What we need to do, because he's one of our own, is to give him a new hurley stick, a new reason to go back into the game, if you follow my analogy. That was fine and well, thought Kilmartin in the hissy quiet after Minogue's greeting, but Minogue might translate it as pity. He'd bridle at that to be sure.

  "Good day to you, Matt. Tell me, are you following the match on the telly?" asked Kilmartin.

  "I'm not, Jimmy, but I might take a look at what the opposition might be like come the final this year."

  "Gob now, aren't you Claremen very cocky now? And how do ye know ye'll get by Cork?"

  "Well now. I'm surprised at you, Jimmy, and you a Mayoman rooting for the Cork crowd, but the game is the thing I suppose…" said Minogue?

  "And will the Clare team be wearing shoes on the field this year, Matt?" Kilmartin jibed.

  "Well now. The thing is, Jimmy, the lumps of raw meat were left in the usual spots in under the rocks. God in his providence will decide what class of person will come down and how they'll be attired. The ones who carry sticks, we call them hurlers and we don't look to the footwear. Fate and natural selection have decided the rest by now."

  None of which was true, of course, thought Kilmartin. Minogue's mannerly dissembling was his way of keeping an order. Here was Mino
gue doing and saying exactly what one might expect, as if he were subtly mimicking the images people had of him, but with no rancour that Kilmartin, at least, could detect. Where was the twist, Kilmartin wondered. How did Minogue get him to think like this?

  Kilmartin asked him if he had read the papers. Minogue replied he had. Had he read about the murder of the student in Trinity? He had. On Saturday's paper, it had been: 'Body of student found in suspicious circumstances with foul play suspected.'

  "It was in today's paper, Jim."

  "Well. I have a feeling about this one. Nothing has turned up from the lads looking to it right now. I have the feeling it requires the likes of yourself to come at it."

  Silence. Kilmartin wondered if Minogue saw charity in this, if Minogue felt he was being deeded a case to keep him interested. Maybe to test the waters and see if his brain was on the ball after last year.

  "Well now. It has the makings of a good little detective thriller, Jimmy."

  Equivocal silence again. Kilmartin, who had large feet and plenty of nerve, went direct.

  "Would it be something you could drop your current duties for?"

  Minogue realised it was not a roundabout question. He knew that Kilmartin could requisition him. In case Kilmartin had forgotten the hierarchy, Minogue placed the formal step out for him.

  "As soon as Jack Higgins gives the imprimatur, I expect."

  "I took the liberty, Matt. Although he says his office will suffer while you'd be away."

  Indeed, thought Minogue. The conversation had really quite run away with them both. He smiled at the almost mechanical way the pleasantries and face-saving entered, registered and left the talk. Miss me, he thought and smiled again. There'd be plenty more bits of housebreaking today and tomorrow and the day after, and Detective Superintendent Jack Higgins would still manage.

  "All right so, Jimmy," said Minogue.

  "I have all the stuff that's coming for the moment up in the Castle. Will you come up about ten tomorrow?"

  "I will that, Jimmy."

  "To be sure. To be sure. Connors, my aide-de-camp, will go over to Donavan, the State Pathologist, with you. Needs the experience. How about one o'clock and ye can meet here and go off to Donavan?"

  "Grand, so."

  "And how's the family?" Kilmartin asked.

  "The usual. They have me driven mad. Business as usual."

  "Remember me to Kathleen, Matt."

  So, Minogue thought as he began strolling toward the kitchen. They want to see if I'm the full round of the clock still. He stopped and looked at the copy of Magritte's Memory which Iseult had bought him for his birthday. Now why had she done that? She had said that when she saw it, she knew it was for him. That was the way young people talked, that throwaway, confident exaggeration. Still, he liked the picture's coolness and its stillness. It reminded him, for no reason that made sense, of his father playing "The Moon behind the Hill" on the melodeon nearly a half century ago. Minogue had learned that daughters more or less broke their fathers' hearts effortlessly.

  By half past two, Connors and Minogue were sitting outside the State Pathologist's office. Donavan was already late.

  Connors was thinking about the new side to Kilmartin he had seen but an hour before. When Connors was called in, Minogue was sitting while Kilmartin was propelling himself around the room with small talk. Signs on, Connors concluded, the two men had known each other for a long time. Minogue managed to say little, maintaining a thoughtful if distant expression.

  "And Connors will drive over with you, Matt, and sit in with ye, if you don't mind. Connors is new to the department and will benefit from the experience to no end entirely. Am I right?"

  "To be sure, Inspector," Connors had said.

  On the way over to Donavan's office, Minogue asked him if he was related to the Horsey Connors or the Hurling Connors. Connors replied that he knew of neither.

  "Well there's Connors in Kilrush now and they were born with hurley sticks in their teeth. The Horsey Connors are from East Clare and they break the bookies in England regularly. As easy as kiss hands."

  "Maybe I should have claimed relations with them, Sergeant, because I have no luck on the ponies at all. There's nags I put money on in Leopardstown and bejases I'd say they're still running."

  "Oh, a bad sport to an honest man, the same horses," Minogue murmured. "There was another family of girls in Ennis but I would never ask if you have any kin with those Connors, not at all."

  "Well, the ones in Ennis, are they Connors or O'Connors?"

  "Oh they're Connors too, but they'd be nothing to you at all, I'm sure. A family of girls that never married."

  "The Horsey Connors, the Hurley Connors," Connors mused.

  "And the ones in Ennis," Minogue sighed.

  "Who were they?"

  "Well they were called the Whore Connors, so they were," Minogue said resignedly. "Silly of me to bring them into the conversation."

  Minogue didn't smile but began to stare out over the bonnet of the car as if he were deep in thought.

  Footsteps on the stairs and Donavan appeared from around the corner.

  "Good morrow, men," said the doctor.

  The two policemen eyed Donavan. He was a well-known eccentric. He wore a greying beard under owlish eyebrows with a red face bursting out from behind the hair. Donavan was crammed into a three-piece tweed suit tailored in the manner of suits of Minogue's father's day.

  The office was a morass of paper and knicknacks. Connors observed bottles containing yellowy lumps of something, immersed in clear liquids. It dawned on him that these polypy lumps might well be pieces of flesh, preserved to be viewed and pondered over. A faint odour like a chemist's shop came to Connors as his eyes slipped out of focus and he swallowed, trying to rid himself of an unpleasant sweetness near his tonsils.

  Minogue studied Donavan as the pathologist took off his jacket. A rugby player of old, exactly the kind of man who could fall down the stairs sober and not hurt himself, Minogue thought.

  "Matt Minogue, Doctor. And my colleague, Detective Connors."

  "And how is the bold Inspector Kilmartin back at the ranch, men?"

  "Oh, pulling the divil by the tail, Doctor."

  Donavan sat heavily into his seat. He pulled a file from under a brimming ashtray.

  "Do ye want the pictures, lads?"

  "No thanks, Doctor. We'll defer to your description."

  "The mob in Pearse Street handed this over to you as a matter of course? The deceased was a young man in good health. I suspect that he had been killed on Thursday night at about 9 P.M. Well he was dead between eight and twelve hours. There. Isn't pathology wonderful?"

  "To be sure, Doctor," said Minogue.

  "Well. To cut a long story short. There's no doubt this young man was killed by whoever set about it. There was no trick acting and playing kiss-my-arse-and-kiss-my-elbow with this. This wasn't a brawl that got out of hand. I found a moderately severe contusion on the left side of the head. My feeling is that this was a blow rendered by some object such as an iron bar, perhaps a good quality bicycle pump or the like of that. It would have been enough to put him out. It certainly wouldn't have killed him at all, at all. What did in this unfortunate lad was the stone or whatever was used on his head. It appears to have been applied several times. The person wielding it would of necessity have to have given good swings at it… maybe from the height of a man's shoulders. Now, I'm speculating here. However, he was given a coup de grace, if you like, with a lot of force applied toward the end of the episode."

  "With the same object?" Minogue interrupted.

  "To be exact and evasive at the same time, with an object of the same material, surface area and weight. Perhaps another stone."

  Connors looked up from his notes, his mouth a little open.

  "Scrapings under the nails, nothing."

  No struggle? wrote Connors.

  "This young man had had a glass or two of wine and some class of Italian food."


  Donavan looked directly at Connors.

  "Perhaps the Garda would require to see details…?"

  Connors looked up abruptly from the notes and swallowed. Minogue glanced at him.

  "Leave it in the file for the moment if you please, Doctor," said Minogue.

  "Could have used a bit of exercise. But couldn't we all? Non-smoker. A bit fond of his rashers and eggs. No signs of sexual activity, if you follow me. Teeth all his own. Isn't the National Health great?"

  "One blow, then others?" queried Minogue.

  "Exactly. The thing is that the head would have to have been lying on a surface with no give in it when these stones or the stone were dropped. That alone would account for the particular shattering effect at the back too, you see. A simple principle really, no great shakes. Think of nutcrackers. One side couldn't be make of rubber or the like."

  Donavan arched back in his chair and filled a pipe. The file lay open on the desk. They listened to Connors' diligent pencil scratching. The window was full of green, like a big sponge, waving slowly. Nothing like a willow tree to show the time passing, thought Minogue.

  "Bad cess to the fecking thing," Donavan said mildly. He threw the lighter across the desk. "I don't doubt that Nora paid twenty pound for this bloody gas lighter with the flame thrower thing for the pipe. And you think it works because it cost an arm and a leg? Not a bit of it," he muttered.

  Minogue carried a box of matches to remind himself that he was a free man. If he chose to smoke, he would. Minogue offered his box of matches.

  As he did so, he caught sight of Connors' glassy stare. That's what it was, the 'arm and the leg' bit. Minogue tried hard not to laugh.

  "Detective, would you check with headquarters on the radio to see if there are further matters requiring our consideration, if you please? I'll be down presently."

  Connors made no delay in leaving.