killer could have surprised him handily enough… back turned for a moment, the killer has his opportunity. Resources? Rope.
'The string or rope, Shea. That the kind of thing you'd find lying around handy in this man's house?'
'Good one,' Hoey allowed. 'That's where I go off a bit on tangents. A premeditated murder, a killer with the instrument ready in his pocket or whatever. The victim doesn't look to have been a handyman at all. His housekeeper says he never did repair stuff about the house but had tradesmen do it. We better dig up a solid motive for premeditated, more than a robbery trick…'
'How long did you get with her?' asked Minogue.
'Mrs Hartigan? Three-quarters of an hour, sir. She's a bit out of it.'
Keating edged up to the doorway and looked at the carnage in the kitchen again.
'Lunatic,' he said.
'Money,' Minogue echoed. 'Tip-off from someone who knew or thought the old man kept money in the house… Expected to find money and didn't. I wonder about that. Or came with the intentions to kill… You told the Stepaside lads doing the local interviews to look for psychiatric cases around here?'
'Didn't have to. They copped on straightaway. They're on deliverymen, postmen, too. Any repairmen fixing the house. You know, Combs must have been out,' Hoey said. 'The smashing and breaking would have raised an awful racket. Like I say, there was some stuff under the body, so the job was underway when he came home. Even if it was a solo job, he'd have seen the car lights and known to get out cause the victim was coming home.'
'Drove, I suppose,' said Minogue. 'Hardly out for a walk in the dark. And if the robber saw the old man's car, he wouldn't have started his job at all. Okay, so. Would he have seen the car lights at the end of the lane, where the victim's car was found?'
'Likely, sir,' Keating argued. 'This is an isolated spot, after all.'
'Why didn't the victim drive up the lane and park by the house?'
Hoey shrugged.
'Turning space is a bit tight around the door here, sir… I don't know.'
'All right,' Minogue sighed, shaking himself out of his speculation. 'Enough of this headbanging. Let's start on filling in the blanks on this poor devil. See if we can place him for this past few days. I better start me prowl. Give us that Polaroid, Pat. Just in case.' spacebarthing
Minogue entered the house. He tiptoed over the clear plastic sheets which the technicians had spread on the floor. Minogue's steps found a creaking runner as he went up the stairs. There was a strong smell of whiskey, stronger as he ascended the stairs. There was little furniture in the hall, nothing that didn't have a daily utility. A hamper for dirty laundry had been overturned. A coat and umbrella stand had been toppled. The coats scattered on the floor looked like human scarecrow figures to Minogue as he glanced down over the banisters at the carnage below. The landing was narrow and dark, with no natural light but what an open door lent from one of the rooms. The technician walked heavily to the door.
'Is that you, Hoey, ya bollocks?' he said.
Minogue turned as the technician stepped over the threshold and into the landing.
'I'm not Hoey, I'm somebody else,' Minogue said.
The stricken technician froze, the horsehair brush dangling from his plastic-gloved fingers.
'Oh, I thought it was — '
Minogue's feet sounded on the polished wooden floor. The smell of whiskey was overpowering now. A skylight had been cut into the roof over this room. Although the room was small, there was a space enough for a drafting table and an easel. Paper had been swept into a heap on the floor. Pencils and small paintbrushes were scattered all over the room. Minogue heard whispering from the hallway. He heard his own name mentioned, and he wasn't at all displeased at the alarm with which it was hissed out.
'Are ye done in here?' Minogue called out.
'Nearly, sir. Nearly,' an earnest voice replied. Built-in shelves flanked both sides of the chimney-breast. The fireplace itself had been walled in and covered up by an electric heater. Pieces from the shattered whiskey bottles had reached every corner of the room. Scores of books had been knocked off the shelves, gathering in a heap by an overturned chair. Minogue glanced at some of the titles. Ancient monuments of the Irish countryside, a Spanish- English dictionary, books by Gerald Durrell about animals. A sink had been fitted into the wall next to the window. The walls themselves were covered in drawings. The drawings didn't look showy to Minogue-rather they seemed to be attempts to better draw a subject, pointers to improve the next version.
'Yes, we're all done in here, sir. And then there's daylight tomorrow and-'
'And ye'll be back with a vengeance,' said Minogue. He turned to the two faces in the doorway. Grown schoolboy faces awaiting reprimand.
'And excuse the language, if you don't mind, sir. It's just that we know him and we do be slagging him. You know how it is.'
Minogue put on his best version of a mollified teacher's face.
'To be sure, lads. Tell me, how long more here tonight?'
'Half an hour about. It's an awful sight, isn't it?'
Minogue nodded and turned to examine the room again. Drawers of clothes had been upended on the floor. He tiptoed around the clothes and stood by the window. It faced east so far as he could tell. He walked closer and looked out. A scattered sprinkle of lights from other houses tucked under the mountains.
There was nothing on the easel. What would be worth painting from this window? He hunkered down by the sheets of drawing paper which had been swept violently to the floor. Straightening one, Minogue felt a tremor of recognition. He stood back and studied the pencil drawing. The work showed practice and mastered technique on what Minogue would have said was a very difficult project. Though these concentric patterns could be found on other ceremonial stones from Ireland's prehistory, Minogue was certain that the stone and patterns in this drawings were from the ruins of Tully church. Minogue's hands remembered the warm, smooth granite of Tully. Succour. Was it that which attracted Combs there?
Minogue had been drawn to Tully and its stones by his sense that it had been built, like so many other churches, on a site of druidic worship. Several fields away was a tumulus, the burial site of a chieftain, which predated the upstart saints Patrick and Bride by a millennium. Less than a mile over the fields was one of the best- preserved dolmens in the country, ranking even with those stark masses of the ridges of The Burren in County Clare.
He flattened out other sketches from the heap of paper. There were charcoal sketches of stones with whorls worked into them, symbols of sun and moon. Beneath the sketches were pencil drawings of a dolmen, the huge menacing boulder on its three stone legs.
'Mr Combs was English?' Minogue called out.
'I believe so, sir,' said the technician, a brick-red-faced young man with the beginnings of a porter-belly. He had the heavy blond eyebrows of Norse descendants in County Wexford.
'Yes, sir. They have his passport and everything taken away in the bags, but he was definitely from across the water.'
Minogue turned toward the window again. When he didn't hear the two moving, he turned back to them. They couldn't help his puzzlement any more than he could himself.
'Thanks very much, lads.'
He prowled the other rooms upstairs. A bedroom that Combs must have used, with the clothes torn off the bed. The mattress had been slashed on both sides. Looking for money in there…? A bathroom with new fixtures. The medicine box had been emptied out, too. Next door was an empty room the size of a box-room. The old man had been economical to the point of asceticism with furnishings. Minogue kept expecting to open a door on a room that would be cluttered with the stuff which should fill houses. There was none. He couldn't decide if the sense of incompleteness here was a sign of transience or a permanent feature of an austere life. If this was it, Minogue thought, then the old man had led a lonely life.
Downstairs again, Minogue spied Hoey sitting on the kitchen doorstep. He was lighting a cigarette. Minogue looked into the kitchen- Almost like snow. Eerie. A fly was trapped between the curtain and the glass. It buzzed noisily, throwing itself against the glass, then rested. The outline on the linoleum tiles was the shape of a body lain on its side with the knees drawn up a bit, arms into the chest. A flash and the motorised ejection whirr of the Polaroid startled Minogue. He had been leaning on the button. Iijit…
