“So you came here to try and make a go of things.”
She took out a cigarette and toyed with it. “Yes. Mel is a bit of a curiosity about town. It’s not a holiday for her anymore, though. She gets fed up. She finds school hard here and the kids here are innocent really. But the nuns are very good to her. Whatever else you can say about the nuns…” She lit the cigarette.
“Why did you run today, so?”
She nodded once at the ashtray and pointed her cigarette at Minogue as though locating his head along a gunsight.
“Don’t ask me that again or I’ll fucking throw that at you.”
“Point taken.”
“I don’t plan on getting burnt like what I had done to me before. Now, can you get that through your thick skull? I have responsibilities. I have enough on me plate with a daughter full of hormones, and me with no man here in Tralee. I do me work and I pay me rent. Why would I be volunteering to be put through the mill again?”
“You had a tough time on the stand back then, I believe,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed.
“What do you know about what I went through? You and your ‘tragedy’ and a big long face on you like a dog fishing for his dinner.”
She flicked ash at arm’s length toward the ashtray. It fell a foot short.
“You. Ralphie. Howard. Jamesy Bourke. Your brains in your trousers. Full of chat and buying drinks and joking. All ye want is a poke. Then ye’re gone on to the next one. Do you think for one minute that Jamesy Bourke was different, do you?”
“I didn’t say he was a saint.”
“A saint,” she mimicked. Minogue asked for the same again from the barman.
“When you’re a man, you have the power,” she went on. “Rich or poor, black or white. And when you’re a man that has money in his pocket, or when you have a uniform, the world is your oyster.”
“As a matter of fact, my uniform doesn’t fit me anymore.”
She gave him a scornful grin and waved the cigarette at the ashtray again.
“What about Dan Howard?”
She spoke with little feeling. “Dan Howard is a fucking bastard. And his wife is a jumped-up, money-grubbing bitch. And Tidy Howard, as for that old bags…”
She seemed to catch herself then as if she had spotted herself in a mirror.
“You were dragooned into taking the stand.”
“I was,” she murmured. “I was called as a witness, and I was picked up by the Guards. That prick-Doyle. He was the Sergeant in Portaree at the time. Little did I know that I’d be in court to dirty someone else’s name.”
The barman, a rheumy-eyed man not ten years from retirement, laid down the drinks.
“I had no dinner,” she said. “If I have another one of these, I’ll be plastered. Have to watch the figure and that too.” Minogue watched her poke at the ice and then lick her finger. “There might be a bachelor farmer on the look-out, you never know.”
Her smile was brief and it fell away quickly. She took a gulp of the new drink. Minogue looked at his own Jamesons sitting implacably next to him. How could he preach to Shea Hoey about drink? It’d be like Kilmartin delivering advice about etiquette.
“I was told back then that I could help Jamesy Bourke get off lighter,” she said. “Fool that I was, I didn’t think about how it was going to be done. I half felt sorry for him. My mistake. We both know where that got him, don’t we?”
“You thought he didn’t deserve-?”
“Look,” she broke in. “Jamesy and the rest of them were gobshites. But it wasn’t entirely his fault. Even I could see that, and me knowing Jane. What was the use of throwing one life away for another? The world is full enough of revenge and killing. What use would locking him up for his life be to anyone? I’ve been roughly used in my time. I’ve seen the bad side of people but I’ve survived and still come out human. When you’ve been through what I’ve been through over the years, you don’t be so certain, cocked up in your armchair and looking down your nose while you’re discussing how people go to the bad. He was too simple for the real world. Too stupid, maybe. The way we all are sometimes, maybe. But you can’t live your life like that. You have to wake up sometime.”
“You were given the boot,” said Minogue.
“You said it,” she snapped. “Treated like dirt. Like an iijit. I didn’t see it coming.”
“What for? Liking Jane Clark?”
“I did, you know.” She cast a bitter look at Minogue which caused him to sit still. “Not in the way you people’d like to be thinking it either. Not the way they threw it around in court. Ask yourself how the whole matter came up in that damned courtroom. Go on. You’re the cop. Go on, ask me, then.”
Minogue took a deliberately slow drink of Jamesons.
“You mean that you and Jane Clark had a relationship?”
“Relationship,” she cackled, and coughed. “Where did you get that word? In one of your courses, or off the telly or something?” The coughing took control of her again.
“Go on, say it,” she wheezed. “Say the word!”
She sat upright at the front of her chair, trying by her posture to stave off more coughing. Minogue knew he had to meet her gaze, but the effort of looking over to her was almost too much for him.
“Say it,” she growled. “I bet you like to think about it. Two women. You’re like the rest of them. Come on now, don’t let your side down!”
“Jane Clark and you had a love affair of sorts,” he said.
There was triumph in her eyes.
“Say it like they kept on saying it that day. Lesbian. Homosexual. Perverse.”
The barman looked up from the paper.
“Not all of us are cavemen, you know-”
“‘I’m not like the other ones.’ Like hell you’re not, mister.” She drew fiercely on her cigarette.
“There I was, an ignorant skivvy up on the stand, being made to paint a picture of a lesbian for all the learned gentlemen. Guards and reporters and the judge, and the women-they were worse than the men. They looked at me like I was a piece of shite. There are plenty more words for it and I’ve heard them all, so I have. There I was, in tears, being made to tell people that Jamesy Bourke was provoked by the fact that she was a lesbian as well as a whore. And that she had laughed at him when she was with me, for his efforts at playing the Casanova. Sure with the drink he had every day he wouldn’t have been able to get it up with a crane.”
“I’m just trying to find out what happened. If she was lesbian, well…”
“Hah,” she scoffed, and returned the barman’s stare. The barman let his eyelids down slightly and returned to pencilling in something in the paper.
“Sure, how could she, and she taking up with Dan Howard and Bourke?” she asked. Minogue considered the Jamesons lolling in his glass.
“You’re the cop. You tell me how Bourke’s lawyer, that weaselly looking…what was his name?”
“Tighe.”
“Yeah, him. How the hell did he get wind of me and her, to get me on the stand and take the oath so that the wide world would know that Jane Clark and myself had put our arms around one another?”
“Dan Howard must have told him.”
She squinted through a ribbon of smoke. “You’re not as thick as you look.”
“Because Dan Howard would have heard it from her,” he added. “And in the heat of the row with Bourke, he’d have been doing his best to put Jane Clark down. To persuade Bourke that she wasn’t worth fighting over.”
“Nice work there, Guard. I’ll tell you something, now”-she leaned forward to better deliver the sarcasm-“and it’s this. Dan Howard told him-Jamesy Bourke-sure enough. That must have driven Bourke wild. Does Dan Howard end up on the stand for inciting Bourke to go out there and set her house on fire? Does he? He might as well have handed Jamesy Bourke the order and the bloody matches.
“Yes,” she continued after a scrutiny of her cigarette and some part of her palm, “she was like that. She’d tell him straight out. I know that he knew because he’d come by the hotel with his wandering hands, pushing himself against me. Asking me if I’d try out a man for a change. Jamesy Bourke was the same way. Chasing skirts and
