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 churches 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
