Minogue noticed a faint smell of shaving soap. Joyce had several nicks on his neck. Although he was wearing the jacket of a suit over what had been a white shirt, Joyce was shivering slightly. He ran his hand quickly over a full head of red hair, which might have owed its styling inspiration to a 1955 Elvis Presley. Joyce looked out under his eyebrows at the two detectives.
'Mornin', sirs,' he said hoarsely. He licked his upper lip with rapid side-to-side stabs of his tongue.
'A poor one, I'm thinking. I'm Sergeant Minogue. This is Detective Keating.'
Joyce looked plaintively to the closing door.
'I have to go to the toilet, sirs. I'm here all the morning,' Joyce said.
Minogue nodded to Keating. A fidgety Joyce followed Keating out the door. Minogue saw only two chairs, one with a bockety leg, to go with the formica-topped table. He waited by the window for the pair to return, his own mind adrift as he gazed at the teeming rain on the glass. Tobin arrived with a tray before Joyce appeared at the door. He eyed the shifty Joyce as Minogue directed him to a chair. Joyce sat on the edge of the chair, blinking.
'But now, sirs, how is it ye'd be wanting to see the likes of me?'
Minogue had insisted on Keating taking the other chair. He slung a leg over the corner of the table and held out a cup of tea to Joyce. Joyce's jaw dropped.
'Deal out your own sugar,' Minogue said.
Joyce spooned four heaped teaspoonfuls of sugar into his cup, spilling half of the last spoonful in transit.
'We want to know what you were doing at that house the other night,' said Minogue.
'On my oath, I was up looking to the horse, sir, and nothing else, and I went up the lane a bit and I had my eye out for the horse. I needn't have looked far, but I had a bit of drink on me and I don't deny that. Sure wasn't the creature tethered up to the gate and he was after eating all around him, but if you-'
'Hold on there. Hold your horses,' Minogue raised his hand.
'And here I am locked up in the barracks all morning-'
'Look it,' Minogue said sharply. 'Stop running away with yourself here.' Joyce's nostrils went in and out like bellows. He could not stop from spilling more tea. Minogue reached out, grasped his forearm and guided the tea to the table.
'Didn't I tell the peelers last night to get the man of the house and he'd know me?' Joyce blurted.
'Who?'
'Mr Combs. I told them to knock on the door and t'would be all fixed up as right as rain and they'd see what I was at and that there was no harm to it.'
Minogue knew from Keating's stillness that he was startled, too. Minogue spoke very slowly now.
'Well now. Would you care to telephone Mr Combs now and we can clear it all up?'
'Sure wouldn't I be after doing that if I could have?' Joyce replied, a little less agitated now.
'Well, why didn't you then?'
'I don't have the reading and the writing, sirs, no more than I have a telly-phone. If ye'll find his phone number in the book, I'll phone him this instant and he'll tell ye what ye want to know.'
'What did the Garda say to you last night when you said you wanted to knock on the door so as Mr Combs could vouch for you?'
'Didn't he laugh at me and tell his pal that I was arse-over-tip drunk!'
'You remember everything that was said and done last night?'
'Well, I do get a bit shaky every now and then, but I know what I know. Mr Combs will tell you, so he will. If he wasn't at home the other night, then he'll be home today and he's the man'll set things to rights. A shocking nice man is Mr Combs. He's after forgetting to untie the horse, but sure that's no big thing. Oh, yes, that's my horse above in his field, with one of his legs gone to the bad and him getting it tangled in barbed wire. I do go up and have a look at the horse every now and then, and sure enough the animal is in the best of fettle now with a field full of grass inside of him and oats and the divil knows what else that Mr Combs does feed him. And he paid for the vet, too.'
This overtaxed Keating. He looked up from his notebook and pointed his pencil at Joyce. Joyce gulped some tea.
'Mr Combs fed your horse and let it graze in one of his fields?' Keating asked in a tone of open disbelief.
'Bits of barley and molasses he did, something I never did in my life. True as God, the animal must have thought he'd gone on to paradise. I would have et the stuff myself,' Joyce said with new assurance.
'So this horse of yours went to the vet, was fed and watered by Mr Combs, not to say pampered entirely,' Minogue said, 'and he let the horse roam around that field and graze where it pleased?'
'He did, sirs.'
Tethered, Minogue wondered. Had the horse tried to escape before? Bad-tempered perhaps?
'He had a soft spot for horses, so he did,' Joyce added. 'He told me once that he had a pony and him growing up, years and years ago in England. And that that pony was the best pal he'd ever had and could hope to have. Did you ever hear the like of that?'
Joyce showed brown teeth in a nervous smile.
'Tell you the truth, I think Mr Combs tied up the horse near the gate so as he could pet it and what have you. Don't tell him I said that. Sure an old man couldn't be chasing a horse around the field, could he? Sure that same horse was fit and able to come home with me last week. But I think the poor man likes the bit of company. I wanted to sell the horse last week, and that's what I went to tell Mr Combs. I hadn't the heart to tell him until yesterday. The drink, you see. Didn't he buy a gorgeous bit and bridle for the animal, to dress it up, like? Presents, like.'
'Presents for the horse, your horse,' Keating said in a monotone.
'That's the way of the world, isn't it, sirs. Everybody's different in their own way. And there's no explaining it in the end. There's people that love animals and there's people that don't…'
Keating rubbed his eyes. He laid his pencil on the table to get a better knuckle into his eye. Minogue watched him massage his writing hand then, stretching out the fingers, flexing them. The sound of the rain was a constant dull percussion on the roof.
'Jesus and Mary and all the saints and archangels will tell ye that Michael Joseph Joyce had no mischief on his mind and, please God, never will have again. A man can have enough trouble and run-ins with the law in his life, and he can get sick of the badness. Sure aren't we all the same, sirs, all trying to keep the arse in our trousers and have a roof over our heads? Aren't we all the same? Under our skins, don't you see…?'
Pleased with his logic, Joyce sat back in his chair.
'And can't I tell them, when I go home, that it was all a confusion like, and ye perhaps thinking I was a blackguard and up to divilment?' he added. 'Oh, there's nothing like visit to the police barracks with hard-working gentlemen like yourself to waken a man up and put him to rights. Even if it is the wrong man ye have,' Joyce added earnestly.
Barracks, Minogue was thinking. Gentlemen. Sirs. Language and suspicions that belonged in another age when more than the tinkers of Ireland were outcasts in the ditch by the roadside. The servility was a foil to conceal the contempt it was bred from. He felt Keating looking at him now, wanting him to pull the cork on Joyce.
'We'll be back in a moment, Michael Joseph,' Minogue murmured. 'Wait here like a good man. We'll not be long.'
Keating followed Minogue into the hallway.
'Well?' Minogue looked at Keating.
Keating shrugged. He was a bored policeman with a sore hand.
'God, he has a desperate mouth on him for talk. When he wasn't putting me to sleep, he was driving me up the walls with the blather out of him. But not a hint of any homo thing.'
'But he never once makes a slip,' said Minogue. 'Never once lets on that he knows Combs is dead. I think if he had his way, he'd march up up to Combs' place now so that we could talk to Combs and that'd be that,' said Minogue with an edge of irony.
'You know,' Keating began wearily, 'the way he talks about Combs and himself having a drink in Combs' kitchen every now and then, it doesn't sound like he's telling a pack of lies.'
'I can see that, too,' Minogue agreed. 'Well, after tea when Mrs H wouldn't be around to know… and be scandalised. I'm not saying that I buy Joyce's yarn though.'
'He did say that Combs let him into the house once or twice and even gave him a bottle of whiskey an odd
