slobbering over women and pints. God’s gifts to women.”
“Do you recall Crossan at all?”
“Ah, he was kind of gawky. Tall and skinny, with eyes like Hallowe’en. Nice enough, I suppose, but he wasn’t around much. A Protestant, I believe. Sort of aloof, like you’d be careful talking to him. But I remember thinking he sort of followed Howard around a bit. He was never up to the high jinks that Howard’d get up to. Quiet type.”
Minogue watched her put out the cigarette. Resignation had crept into her face, her tone. He thought of Crossan for a moment, the glaze on the barrister’s eyes when he’d spotted the Howards.
“I wanted a bit of comfort,” she muttered. “That was my big sin. I had no mother, you see. She died when I was three, she was hit by a car. My da was useless. I couldn’t wait to get away. Never keen on the schooling. Fool that I was, I took up as a chambermaid and general skivvy in the hotel in Portaree. It was all right during the summers. You’d be busy and you’d meet people that’d keep your interest. The winters were the pits. Damn the bit of difference I made at the end of the trial anyway. I got me walking papers. He said he couldn’t employ a person of my character. Fucking bastard.”
Minogue sat up again.
“Tidy Howard,” she muttered. ‘“Old Dan’ some of them called him. I hear he’s alive still, in some nursing home after a stroke or something. Another bastard. I hope he rots before he dies.”
The barman folded his newspaper noisily. Minogue looked over at him.
“Is that everything you need to know now, Guard?” she asked. “Cause I don’t want to talk to you again.”
Minogue could think of nothing to say.
The door squeaked open as Hoey and Melanie McInerny returned.
“He solves muhdahs, Mum. Is nit cryeepy?”
Eilo McInerny looked from Minogue to Hoey.
“We’ll hang around here a few minutes,” Minogue said to Hoey.
Eilo McInerny laboured upright.
“Do what ye like,” she said. She pushed her daughter who tottered with the suitcase ahead of her. “But don’t be bothering us again.”
The door swung closed. Minogue sat down heavily on the vinyl seat. The scent of tired-out perfume hung in the air.
“That girl is wild out,” said Hoey. “A maniac. I can’t believe she’s thirteen.”
Minogue looked down at the remains of his whiskey. A young couple, the beginnings of an after-work crowd, entered the pub.
“Another round, men?” the barman called out.
Minogue gave him a look of manic intensity. “What would we want more drink for? Do you want us to be dragging ourselves out of Tralee with no shoes on our feet? Our pockets hanging out? What kind of a man are you at all? We’ve been very ably fleeced here already. Where’s your telephone?”
The barman maintained his expression of solemn detachment.
“You’ll be passing it on yer way out.”
Minogue yawned and stretched all the way to the ferry dock in Tarbert. They arrived just in time to see the ferry twenty yards offshore, heading away from them. The estuary was at full tide and the Clare shore was softened by a veil of drizzle. Muddy, grey-green swells were beginning to splash against the rocks with more insistence by the minute. He was only now beginning to get the better of the whiskey. He turned the key and tapped at the wiper lever. Hoey was smirking.
“I’m glad to see that one of us is in fine form at least. What has you so chipper?”
“The pair in Tralee,” said Hoey. “Ever see anything like them? They’re a team, there’s no doubt.”
“You missed her speaking her mind about the Howards etcetera.”
“I’d say she laid it out straight as a die,” Hoey said. Minogue looked away to the water. Hoey’s voice dropped to a monotone now. “You badly want to show them up here in Clare, don’t you? Russell and company.”
“I suppose I do, at that,” murmured Minogue. “But more than that, I’m going to find out what happened that night. To answer your question, though, it would please me to find out that they had made a mess of the Bourke case, yes.”
The smirk returned to Hoey.
“It’d please the Killer more,” he murmured. “Here. I have to take a leak after all that 7-Up.”
Minogue watched his colleague slouch out into the rain. He gave up trying to see clearly through the windscreen and thought about Jane Clark. She had been a woman with the nerve and the will to set herself up in a foreign country, in rural Clare. She had had experience of the world well beyond whatever Jamesy Bourke or Dan Howard might pretend to. Here was a woman who had slept with the both of them and made iijits of them into the bargain. Her mocking had probably excited Bourke and Howard even more. Howard could have laughed in return, and even encouraged more, but Bourke would have been more touchy. He thought of Kathleen and himself, in the sand-dunes in Brittas Bay, frantic, whispering, wrestling. He squirmed in his seat as the desire pulsed though him and ground in his stomach.
She had slept with Eilo McInerny: low score on the inhibition scale. Back with Howard: yes, he might even have enjoyed her mockery. Not Bourke: rooted locally by land, by habit, but fired with the ambition of being a poet, what Kilmartin would describe as a few sandwiches short of a proper picnic. How would Bourke have reacted to her reciting the names of a score of lovers? Was Howard more free and easy or just less involved? Howard might have been the duller man, unimaginative. Son and heir, he could grin and move on to the next. Bourke would have idealised her. Her scorn would have flayed him.
The warmth surged in his belly, stirring his loins. What a land for Bourke to find a woman with a sex drive she wasn’t ashamed of. He shifted again. His mouth was dry. He thought of Sheila Howard, and his forehead became suddenly itchy. Did she contain this boyo of a husband? Was she charged with an eroticism in private? A wave of prickly heat settled around the top of his forehead. Damnation, he thought, getting flustered, sitting here swelling up like a teenager. He opened the window and received for his trouble a spray of fine, cold rain. Eilo McInerny’s words came back to him. Crossan, aloof: jealous of Howard? Hoey got into the car in a hurry and slammed the door hard against the weather.
“God, it’s hot in here,” he muttered.
Minogue’s mind flared with embarrassment. Had Hoey sensed what feelings had bullied him these last few minutes?
“We need to talk to Dan Howard,” said Minogue.
“If he’s in town,” said Hoey.
Minogue switched on the ignition and batted the stick for the wipers. Was it getting darker, or had the clouds settled lower over the water? A finger’s width from the blurred Clare shore, the ferry had embarked on its return trip. The Inspector blinked back to the present. The air in the car was stale and damp, full of the smell of Hoey’s wet coat, itself redolent of cigarette smoke. Minogue flicked on the wipers again. The ferry was clearer now, half- way, he calculated. He watched it breast the estuary waves, bucking slightly. In the mirror he studied the faces in a car nosing in behind. Two subdued-looking children to either side of an infant asleep in the back seat looked out opposite windows. The infant’s face was turned awkwardly, mouth agape, and the expression suggested he or she was about to cry. The driver, a farmer with heavy sideburns, wore a dark suit and a look of resignation. From the passenger seat, a woman stared at the water. A funeral?
He looked again to the ferry and saw smaller creases in the waves alongside it. He held his hand on the wiper-switch and concentrated on that part of the water.
“Well, I declare,” he began to say, “if those aren’t porpoises or seals or something. They’re following the boat, man!” Hoey turned to stare at the ferry too.
The weight of the afternoon, all its irritations and disappointments, dropped off the Inspector’s shoulders. Across time and place, beyond time and place, he relived the days he had fished with his uncle off Doonbeg. His uncle had pointed them out as they approached the rowboat. Minogue, eight or nine and afraid, had dropped his rod. Not to worry, his uncle had said. He recalled his uncle’s face going blank as he’d looked toward the glistening bodies arcing and slicing the water nearby. Not to worry, they had come to inspect us, that’s all. Now the same wonder stirred Minogue, but, he realised, in his own rising exhilaration was envy.
