it.
“Well. I could start with circumstances. It was when I was talking to Eoin that you came up. He didn’t tell me much about you, except that you were up in Dublin these years. Your job, of course. Then there was Jamesy hanging around, haunting the bloody place, standing out there on the footpath looking up at the bloody window. Even when I’m not there he stands around, sometimes for an hour. It’s as much as I can do to stop the secretary from calling the Guards when she sees him. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Howards, one or the other of them, finally has too much of Jamesy gawking at them.”
“Even after you told him the whole thing was a non-starter from a legal point of view?”
“Yep. One day there, a couple of weeks ago, I came back from court and there’s Mary in tears. She says he was around. ‘Looking at me,’ she says. Wants to quit. Thinks Jamesy is out to do what he did to Jane Clark. Very upset. The next time I see Jamesy, by God, I’m annoyed, so I go pelting down the stairs and look him in the eye. What does he tell me? He tells me that his memory is coming back to him better than ever. ‘It’s all coming back to me,’ says he, with his eyes like bloody saucers, sitting there where you’re sitting now.”
Crossan sat back and let his legs straighten out in front of him.
“He had electroshock after his breakdown and he’s been on medication for years.”
Minogue felt his own irritation rising again. A dinner of salmon, a glass of whiskey and Crossan’s humour over dinner had seemed bargains at the time.
“His memory, you say.”
Crossan waved away Minogue’s sarcasm.
“I know, I know. And there’s everyone else running around here trying to forget things, building bloody folk- village museums to bury the past by putting it behind glass or something.”
Minogue feigned shock.
“Dear God, counsellor. A radical?”
“Objection sustained. Anyway. I told him maybe I’d look into it again. And so, between the jigs and the reels, your name came up.”
“Thanks very much.”
Crossan abashed looked surprisingly vulnerable to Minogue. He looked at his watch. The barrister leaned forward in his chair.
“He told me that he thinks he might have been-get this: thinks he might have been-in a car sometime that night. He remembers drinking from a bottle and spilling a bit down his shirt because the car was moving. That never came up at the trial as far as I could ascertain. But how am I to ever know Jamesy hasn’t imagined all this?”
“Tell me about it,” said Minogue dryly. “What about setting fire to the house? Is he getting his memory back on that too?”
Crossan glared at the Inspector. Threads of remorse brushed against Minogue’s whiskey-dulled mind.
“Even if you had the full steno transcript of the trial, it wouldn’t necessarily help,” he said.
Crossan nodded, and ran his fingertips along his neck.
“So, presuming any material evidence is long gone, the only avenues open to you are to go to the people who testified?”
Crossan nodded again. His nails scraping against the bristles filled Minogue’s attention with their rasping. He sensed that Crossan was expecting him to say aloud the words that were foremost now, that he had next to nothing-a lost cause. A motorcycle howled by on the street outside.
‘“Why now?’” Crossan asked as the noise receded. To Minogue it seemed that the barrister had lost interest. “Christ, I don’t know. The time of year, the day that’s in it, I don’t know. We were friends once, all of us. But now there’s none of Jamesy left the way he was. He was destroyed.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Minogue asked.
Crossan’s face was slack.
“You’ve already done it; you sat and listened. I can ask no more. You could put it in your file of yarns to tell your pals in the pub after work, I suppose.”
The tailflick of sarcasm stung Minogue. He gave Crossan a cool appraisal. What made this barrister tick? He had refused payment from Mick and Maura for Eoin in lieu of something he valued more? For a moment, Minogue saw again the sour glee on Crossan’s face at the Howards’ embarrassment. Maybe Crossan was trying to make some Guards look stupid too. But what if this marble-eyed lawyer was nothing more than kind-hearted, a man however contrary but decent?
“Well, now, Mr Crossan,” Minogue began, puzzled still. “Smart-alecking with me is hardly the best way to…”
He let the rest of the sentence die. Crossan set his jaw and jerked up from his chair. Had he just given up?
“Have to go,” said Crossan.
Minogue was slow to stand. He felt the exasperation stronger now. It had taken Crossan, a man whose job routinely involved him in flaying Garda witnesses in court, a lot to come to a Guard for help. Was it fair of him to sit here and sell Crossan a line about the local Guards being expert murder investigators?
“Well,” he began.
Crossan turned. His eyes were straining now. Minogue looked at a print on the wall.
“I don’t know now,” he muttered, “and I can’t make a promise.”
“Okay,” said Crossan. “That’s a start.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Come on, damn you,” he said. His voice was thick.
A band of afternoon sunlight blazed on the wall. Its reflected glow made their skins look tanned. She slipped his jeans over his hips and slid her fingers under the elastic belt of his underpants. He squirmed.
“Jesus,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t make me beg.”
“Or else?” she said. Sometimes images came to her mind for a moment: she could take his gun, straddle him and point it in his face. Now! You do it, you do that!
“Or else I’ll be well and truly fucked,” he said breathlessly. They both laughed.
“And isn’t that what you want?”
He groaned, “Don’t be such a tease. You’re killing me here. Come on.”
He closed his eyes and, again, the image of her over him, shoving the gun in his face, came to her. She cupped him in her palm. He whispered something but all she could catch was “do it.” His head went from side to side on the pillow. The cheesy smell came to her nostrils, and she watched the skin draw back slightly, the purple orb bud.
“You’ve never had to wait for anything in your life, have you?” she murmured.
Again she felt it throb and she closed her hand around it. All it is is a muscle, she thought. He pees there, he pulls and scratches himself there. He makes me take it in my mouth, and he thinks I really care or mind or like it or dislike it. Her thumb peeled back the foreskin a little more. And this is what he shoves in me like a stick. Wanting her to say things to him. Dirty boy talk, like the stuff he kept in the van. Often he came with a big fuss before he had managed to get inside her. Well, don’t be telling me to do the other stuff first, she had told him. And he was pissed off. She had said no, forgetting that that would only make him do it more.
She thought of the times they did it in the kitchen. Dimly reflected in the glass of the cooker, she witnessed his lust and shock and helplessness. She had known then that she had won something. Dare you. Do it, so, she remembered murmuring to him, turning back to look out the window again. She had seen enough. She heard his breath and believed he was a little frightened as he tugged at his trousers and stumbled into her, panting with those tiny, squeaky sounds, rough. When he asked her, she had told him she wanted it this way.
“I can’t wait,” he wheezed. “You’re a savage, so you are.”
I am that, she thought. He opened his eyes and they wandered around her skin, hardly ever looking into her eyes. He had grabbed her at the door and pulled their clothes off. All fingers and shoving, he had pinned her against the wall with his hips. Probing, shoving, his fingers. All he thought of was between her legs. He had pulled her hair
