through the house like a whirlwind. Haunting; poltergeist.
'Could we try a different term than haunt, if it's not too much trouble?' Minogue asked.
'I think it's creepy up there, so I do, with all the trees and the bushes growing out over the road. The holy ground, I ask you…' Iseult said. She poured tea into her mother's cup and then into Minogue's.
'If there's any haunting going on up there, it's not the likes of me that'd be doing it,' Minogue declared, with the sliver of rasher poised under his nose. 'After all, I'm a lively type of character. Amn't I, Kathleen?'
'For your age,' Kathleen said. Iseult laughed. Kathleen turned back to her husband.
'That's not up where those people used to worship the sun, is it, Matt?'
'No, actually. That's Katty Gallagher, the far side of the Smelting Chimney.'
In a glade to the inland side of the abrupt stony lump that made up Carraigologan-or Katty Gallagher as the locals called it-Minogue had found a plaque. It had been placed there to commemorate a handful of Victorians who had for decades risen to worship the sun daily from the hill top. Minogue had sometimes imagined himself joining them each morning, with the Irish Sea unfolding before them. Inland, behind, a plateau of pastures was girdled by the ring of hills and mountains: the Great Sugar Loaf to the southeast, the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains to the west.
Often as he stood atop the hill, the wind teasing his jacket, Minogue thought that all the good land in west Clare would amount to less than the ordered land below him. Looking north from the summit, you could see the Mourne Mountains if the air over Dublin city wasn't bad. On a good day you could see Wales to the east. Minogue could almost feel the hilltop breezes tunnelling into his shirt still.
'Da. What do you do up in that place?'
'Tully? I visit the place is what I do.' Minogue felt defensive yet.
'Yes, but do you do anything, though? Like, would you explore?' Iseult went on.
'Sometimes.'
'And would you explore the graveyard, for instance?' Iseult harried him from behind a slice of bread she drew to her mouth.
'Honest to God, Iseult,' Kathleen interrupted. 'Do you think your father does be digging them that's buried there these hundreds and hundreds of years up out of their graves and talking to them?'
Iseult leaned back in her chair. She flicked her hair back over one shoulder, then another. She held her hand to her mouth and began coughing and laughing.
'It's nice to have the place to yourself at that time of day. And it doesn't cost me anything. So there.'
'All right, Da. I believe you, but thousands wouldn't.' Minogue tried to put some sense on the way the conversation was weaving.
'Anyway. I was a bit out of the way when that man was murdered. If you're looking for an alibi, I can only say that I'm very disappointed in you. All I can plead, is that I was up at Tully, thinking,' Minogue protested.
'That's your story and you're sticking to it, right?' Iseult added.
'Ask me if I can prove that I was thinking,' Minogue retorted.
He lifted a quarter of a not-quite-ripe tomato off the end of the fork with his tongue. What he called thinking, his mother would have called romancin'. His father would have called it idling, and he would have been right for the wrong reasons, Minogue reflected.
'No way, Da. Not a bit of it.' Iseult resumed earnestly. 'Anyone can see that you do your thinking. Pat says that you have the look of a man that's always thinking.'
'You may congratulate Pat for his prescience. But remind him that he'll have to find less obtrusive ways of ingratiating himself with his girlfriend's parents than by having such flattery reported indirectly. Suggest perhaps that he comment on your mother's cooking,' Minogue said lightly.
Pat was Iseult's new boyfriend. He had appeared at the Minogue house riding an ungainly bicycle. In Minogue's youth such tall bicycles were called High Nellies. Policemen rode these heavy, gearless bikes imperiously on rural patrols, farmers rode them up and down bog roads with buckets dangling from the handlebars. Pat wore cropped hair in the manner of a foreign legionnaire or a jailbird. All his wardrobe appeared to be black.
Iseult left her dishes by the sink and headed for the kitchen door. Minogue and his wife sat without speaking for ten minutes. A bluebottle dithered noisily around the window, stopping and starting. He or she finally made it to the open window. The smell of cut grass came in from the neighbour's lawn. Minogue noticed Kathleen's hands as they fingered saucers, the sugar bowl. Back to the saucer. This is what life is, Minogue thought, it happens this way. He was waking up.
'Better be off. I'm Jimmy Kilmartin today. Work to be done.'
'Matt. Before you go. I heard Daithi taking the Holy Name and effin' and blindin' out of him the other day when he thought I couldn't hear him. I take great offence at the use of The Holy Name, I needn't tell you.'
Minogue almost agreed aloud that she needn't. Daithi had been saying such things for effect. They had found their mark.
'You'll have a word with him then, will you?' Kathleen said, 'I'd only be giving out to him.'
What word, Minogue wondered. Am I to keep the troops in line with orders from on high? Is she blind to the fact her husband is beyond this stuff?
'I'll have a word with him. Yes, I will, Kathleen.'
'And if he's not willing to get up at a decent hour and do a day's studying…'
'I'll see to it,' Minogue whispered. Kathleen picked up on his awkwardness. Daithi's repeat exams were coming up in two weeks. If he failed these ones, he'd have to repeat his final year. That was bad enough in itself. What Minogue and Kathleen most feared was that Daithi wouldn't have the interest to do the year again if he failed this time around. She looked at him. He did not want to leave her this morning with an acid remark hanging in the air behind him. She kissed him.
CHAPTER 3
James Kenyon walked out from Cadogan Gardens onto a Monday morning Sloane Street. He walked briskly, ignoring the noise of traffic. Kenyon crossed with the lights at Pont Street and within ten minutes he was passing the Chelsea Holiday Inn. Hyde Park Barracks filled up the junction ahead, where Sloane Street met with Brompton Road and Knightsbridge.
Kenyon glanced at his reflection as he strode by the glass-and-chrome fashion shapes. Cecil Gee's wanted four hundred quid for a two-piece suit that looked like something a client would willingly leave behind in a Neapolitan knocking shop? He took note of his own preoccupied face sliding along the windows, a face which usually said forties, not fifty-three this September. The mannequins in the windows repelled him. They looked tough and cutting, determined survivors, the grimly handsome of Maggie's shopkeeper Britain.
Kenyon had not met Alistair Murray in person, but Murray's slight Scottish burr over the telephone had irritated him. Maybe it was the air of unctuous assurance he heard in Murray's voice. He had noted some faint condescension, as though Murray were using his rank while he tried to soothe Kenyon. Kenyon didn't want soothing; he wanted facts. Murray had slipped up. Kenyon had to find out how much, and quickly.
Kenyon had been in the Security Service, MI5, long before the Soviets had rolled tanks into fraternal Czechoslovakia. Both MI6, what some politicians preferred to call the Secret Service, and MI5 had predicted the invasion as imminent four months previously, but the Foreign Office had pooh-poohed them. Since that intelligence fiasco the Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham had helped to improve on the divergences in different agencies' evaluations by bringing out and circulating daily summaries to agencies like the Foreign Office and MI6.
Aside even from the gargantuan cock-ups where MI5 was being run by a double agent, and the fact that the Americans simply didn't trust either service anymore, the gaffes and security problems had continued. There had even been a threatened strike at GCHQ, a place that the public was not supposed to know even existed, and the papers had had daily reports about the staff's efforts to join unions there. Comical, but with a sharp edge of lunacy. An East German defector had told Kenyon how his former boss had laughed until tears ran down his cheeks at the trade-union problem. His boss had said that the Worker's State would have taken out the malcontents and shot them.
