banish the arthritis seizing more of her husband by the year? Crossan laid his napkin on his knees and leaned in toward the Inspector.
“There’s stuff I meant to bring but you hijacked me before I could go to the office and get it. Will you, em, stop by the office with me after? A little postprandial too, maybe?”
Minogue paused in his work of separating his salmon fillet. Did Bourke know that he’d be…?
“I will, I suppose,” he answered.
Crossan’s office was in Bank Place, a terrace of early Victorian houses. His rooms were high-ceilinged, stately, cluttered. Minogue followed him past the secretary’s desk, the only business-like aspect to the place. The long windows, one of the terrace details which more openly aped Georgian, looked down on the street through wrought-iron railings. Some modern devices intruded, Minogue noted, but the fax and photocopier seemed devalued by being half-hidden under papers. A faded rug, its intricate designs formerly blue and probably yellow, took up the floor in the middle of the room. Numbered prints of landscapes covered up one wall.
“I’ve a secretary,” Crossan was saying. As though landing a fish, he lifted a bottle of whiskey out from behind a stack of folders. “But she’s only part-time.”
Which part of the time, Minogue was tempted to ask: the time she was asleep?
“She’s on her honeymoon. In Greece, if you don’t mind.”
Alerted by the weight of the filling tumbler, Minogue looked up at Crossan. “Whoa, man! Are you trying to do me in?”
Crossan tipped the bottle back up and sat down himself. “Tell me something now. What keeps a man like you going? In your line of work, like.”
Minogue couldn’t decide whether Crossan was pulling his leg or testing his temper. He looked to the rows of leather-bound books on Crossan’s shelves.
“Are you trying to interview me for a job here, is it?”
“Pretend that I was.”
“We try to give an accounting for someone murdered.” He felt Crossan’s eyes drill into him.
“I meant how or why do you stick at it. What drives you?”
“God, what a question. Fairness, I suppose. Especially for the people who are left…”
“There’s more?”
The Inspector looked hard at the lawyer for any hint of a sceptical reception.
“You give something back to the victim too, even though they’re dead. Their dignity, maybe. Now, are these conversational tidbits leading anywhere?”
Crossan sniffed at the remains of his whiskey as though contemptuous of the comfort it offered.
“All right. Jamesy Bourke-”
“Let me ask you something straight out first,” said Minogue. “Did you tell Jamesy Bourke that you were getting in touch with me?”
Crossan grinned shyly and nodded his head. It changed his face entirely.
“I must confess that I did. I told him that you were related to a client of mine.”
“And the meeting at the hotel?”
“No, no. But I’d lay money that he happened to see the Howards there. It’s happened before. Can I get away with that without suggesting that Jamesy is in fact trailing the Howards?”
Minogue studied Crossan’s lopsided smile.
“Another preliminary matter there now, counsellor. You wangled the participation of various members of my family in setting up this exchange of pleasantries we have current here.”
“I believe I did at that. Are you offended?”
Minogue thought of Maura Minogue’s laughter, her infectious cheer.
“I’m not now.”
“Well, I can go on, so. Jamesy Bourke came to my office here a few months back. Frightened the wits out of me, I can tell you. Walked right in that door, so he did, and just stood there. Now remember, this is twelve years or so after he was put away. He’s a recovered alcoholic, but he seems to have managed to come out from under that, too. He’s on medication for manic-depression. He has episodes where he, er, ‘sees things.’”
“You’re giving me all the good news first?”
“I want you to know that my eyes are wide open as regards Jamesy Bourke. At any rate, he wanted me to listen to the ideas he had concocted over the years.”
“And?”
“Well, I took a look at what there was. There was the summary, the book of evidence. Phoned his counsel at the time, Tighe. Newspaper reports about the trial printed some of the court testimony. Those I copied and stuffed in the envelope for you. I ended up telling Jamesy that I could find nothing which could be construed as legally or procedurally improper in the proceedings of the trial.”
Minogue let several seconds pass.
“Well,” he said. “That was it, then?”
Crossan snorted but did not smile. He began rubbing his glass around his palm with sudden hasty movements.
“Maybe I should have prefaced that by starting with ‘in spite of everything.’ You see, Tighe had entered a plea of not guilty because he knew the State’s case was circumstantial. But at some point in the second day of the trial, Tighe told me, Jamesy just seemed to give up. Fell apart, Tighe said. Lost his temper on the stand, ranting and raving about witnesses and the Guards. Didn’t impress anyone, I can tell you.”
“What did Bourke say when you told him that?”
“I think he didn’t hear me. I told him he’d have to persuade me or help me by bringing forth new evidence. That was the only way. Shouldn’t have opened my mouth there, I thought afterwards, because next thing is he produces that twenty-page thing, that epistle that I gave you.”
“Has it made a difference to you, then?”
“No. I’d have to agree with your reading. Rambling, unreliable. Downright weird. There wasn’t one thing I could take from it and seek verification with. It could be used to have him admitted to a psychiatric ward.”
“So how come we’re…?”
Crossan looked at the Inspector as though he were deciding whether he would buy something frivolous.
“All I can say is this: I decided that one day-fee or no fee-I’d dig up the whole Bourke thing. The trial, the police investigation. The whole thing. Of course you know about ‘one day’-it never comes. But I began to hear more about Jamesy and what he was up to. People see him hanging around the ruin of the house where the fire happened. Talking and shouting to himself as he rambles the roads. I don’t want to say that he’s following the Howards exactly, but… Jamesy seems to be on the high road to a lot of trouble. I think he might go off the deep end.”
“So you thought you’d calm him down by telling him you’d do something. I see.”
“I wonder if you do,” said Crossan quickly. “There’s more to it than just feeling sorry for him. I have this feeling that Jamesy didn’t get himself a fair trial at all.”
“Didn’t you just tell me that you had nothing to go on?”
Crossan shifted in his chair and gave the Inspector a doleful look.
“There’s a strange feel off the material, the records. Sounds terribly professional, I know. But the stuff I saw from the Book of Evidence putting Jamesy at the fire with the proverbial match in his hand and the proverbial motive pinned to his chest-well, it didn’t look that strong to me.”
“Maybe Tighe was not as good a barrister as you would have been in his place.”
Anger flared in Crossan’s eyes but it dissolved and he almost smiled.
“You don’t believe that Bourke was guilty, then,” said Minogue.
“That’s not what I said.” Crossan’s hand rose from the table and stayed poised in mid-air.
“The investigation, the evidence looked shoddy and put-together. At least from what I saw in summary form, I’d have to admit.”
“Come on now, Mr Crossan. You need to bait your hook, man. The whiskey isn’t that good.”
Crossan’s smile was forced.
“Well, all the work was done by local Guards, for one thing.”
