'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 Minogue 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
