Minogue said nothing. Crossan’s hand strayed to his Adam’s apple. Minogue heard his fingertips seeking out bristles.
“Basically I was trying to make him see that he shouldn’t take it so much to heart. That we should be friends despite it. Despite her, I mean.”
Crossan’s baleful gaze remained fixed on Dan Howard. Noting Crossan’s stillness, Minogue felt something brush around his thoughts. Was this Crossan’s idea of fun? He took up the thread again.
“So ye went drinking then. Did he continue to talk about her?”
“Awhile, yes. He was mighty annoyed at her and he was still sour on me, even after a few rounds of drink. But I couldn’t get mad at him, even when he was trying to give me a box in the teeth.”
“How do you mean?”
“Not to be shooting meself in the foot here,” Howard whispered, and looked up from the fire at Minogue with a sad and faintly amused look. “And me a self-respecting, tax-paying TD-”
“Spare us the speech, can’t you,” Crossan broke in. “If it’s a revelation you’re about to land on us, you won’t lose votes from the present company over it.”
“Nor gain them either, I suppose, Alo,” Howard added. He gave a quick smile before continuing.
“Well, it wasn’t hard to feel sorry for Jamesy. He had all his eggs in the one basket, you could say. Jamesy was convinced that she was his and that the pair of them could set up shop, her with her pottery and her photography gallery and him with his plays and poems. And that they’d travel the world.”
“Did he tell you that himself?” Minogue feinted.
“He didn’t.” Minogue heard Howard breathe out slowly. “She did.”
“I remember wondering if and when she’d run out of patience with him-or all of us, for that matter-and she’d let him have it. Lower the boom on him, maybe pack her bags and bale out.”
“Do you mean she led him on?”
Howard took a deep breath and held it in with his shoulders. Then he let it out and sagged back into the sofa.
“Maybe she did. It’s not for me to say. Jamesy wanted everything, you see. For all his wild ways, the same Jamesy was far from, what can I say, frivolous about her. Jane wanted to flit around and to dabble and to experiment. She had a lot of experience of men. She did things and said things that surprised me. I mean, at the time, I thought I knew a lot, but I had never met a woman who was so…”
“Assertive,” said Crossan.
“Come on now, Alo,” Howard snorted and sat up again. “You can do better than that. You knew her too. She wasn’t a man-eater, no. That wouldn’t be fair to say that of her, now.”
“I think,” Crossan said momentously, “that perhaps she was so exciting because she gave the impression that she could do what she liked. She wasn’t stuck to the land. She was a free spirit.”
Howard smiled with a tired look and he held two fingers to his forehead in mock salute. “There you have it,” he said. “Bachelor wisdom that can’t be beat.”
“But you had plenty of eggs,” Minogue said. “Or do I mean baskets?”
“Baskets,” said Crossan.
“Whereas Jamesy Bourke had but the one. Or thought he had.”
Howard nodded, serious again. “At the time, yes,” he murmured.
Minogue struggled to keep up a momentum whose direction he couldn’t determine.
“What did ye talk about in the pub, though?”
“Well, a lot of it was about Jane Clark,” Howard said wearily. “There were other lads there too, and I was hoping we could get Jamesy off the subject of you-know-what or you-know-who. There was crack and music and plenty of drink. I remember him talking to me about some poetry and a plan he had to go to the States for a while so he could make money to live on.”
More details came to Howard, but none of them sparked Minogue to intervene. While Howard talked and Crossan stared into the fire, Minogue’s eyes strayed to the windows. From his earliest days in school, the Inspector had realised that he was a better listener when he wasn’t intent on the talk. As though, by looking to the side, one could see a star better, Minogue had come to depend on this faculty of understanding without the effort of listening closely, this keen reverie. The window facing away from the town was a panel of violet where the absolute country night pressed on the glass.
Howard’s voice stopped and then resumed. Minogue listened, heard and waited, but he allowed his inner eye to leave through the window. He imagined the ghostly heights of the Burren. The names on the huddles of houses and villages came to him: Carron and Gortleca, Kilshanny and Rinnamona. Reciting their names within gave him an odd pleasure. He tried to list more villages from memory but the names drifted away. Ruins of fort, village and church: Corcomroe Abbey, he remembered, Holy Mary of the Fertile Rock. Those scarred terraces crowning the landscape above Ailwee Cave which had caused Kathleen to stare at them that day they had the puncture on the way to the farm. Howard continued.
Sheila Howard was backing in the door with a tray of tea things and a plate of biscuits. Howard sat forward in the sofa and began rubbing his hands together. He stopped after several moments and looked at his hands with a frown as if they were new to him. Crossan coughed and crossed his legs.
“This may sound corny,” said Howard. “But I will always regret to my dying day that I pushed drink at Jamesy that night. I thought it would…”
“Incapacitate him?” Minogue prodded. “Settle him down?”
Howard’s voice fell lower to a monotone.
“I suppose.”
He watched his wife sit down beside him as though it were for the first time.
Minogue said thanks to Sheila Howard. He was keenly aware of her in the room, near to him. Was she still annoyed? He was relieved that he had gained some control over himself. Still, he felt the restlessness return as a sag somewhere in his chest, the heat at his collar. At least he wasn’t sitting here glowing like a beetroot, flustered and dripping from the jowls, he thought with sour gratitude. She shoved the plate across the table toward him and he saw that her hands were big. There was no daintiness about her nails. Some surprise twisted at his mind: she wasn’t a bird in a gilded cage.
“We talked about anything and everything,” Howard was saying. Minogue watched him pour tea for his wife. “The way two lads who are drunk can talk.”
“Huh,” said Crossan.
“What kind of order was he in by the time you left the pub?” asked Minogue.
“Drunk.”
“Was he on his feet at least?”
“Barely,” said Howard. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying much attention at that stage myself.”
“Tell me,” said the Inspector in a tone he hoped didn’t sound too urgent, “did Bourke leave the pub very annoyed at her yet?”
Howard shrugged and then sat very still. A frown came to his face.
“I couldn’t honestly tell you now. I seem to remember him saying things at some point during the night, but I can’t tell you when, I just know it was in the pub, that that was how they are over there.”
“‘They’ meaning Canadians, is it?” Minogue asked.
“Canadians, Americans, I suppose,” Howard murmured.
Minogue stirred his tea without allowing the spoon to touch the inside of the cup.
“Did he tell you that he might try to make up with Jane Clark that night?”
Crossan had moved in to the table. Howard reflexively pushed a cup and saucer toward him.
“I’m trying to remember, now,” said Howard.
“He did,” said Sheila Howard.
Minogue hid his surprise.
“I forgot, Mrs Howard,” he said. “You met up with them late in the evening.”
“That’s right. I came in late from Galway. And I stopped in at the Hotel to listen to a bit of music and see the girls before heading home.”
“Yes,” said her husband, “there was a mighty session on that night. Tourists all over the place. The weather was good, strange to say.”
