care if she’s gone these twenty years. If she’d a been a woman and a wife proper, sure who knows how things would have turned out? She made a baby out of little Dan, so she did. I sometimes thought it was revenge she was after for having had to dirty herself, by God, to get up the pole in the first place. God help her, she’s dead.”
Naughton licked his lips and snorted.
“It’s not natural for a man to marry someone who spent every night with her skinny legs turned around one another like a hawthorn bush inside a night-dress made of feckin’ chain-mail. With her back to the wall and her rosary beads in her hands…”
It was Hoey who asked the question Minogue had framed in his own mind.
“How do you know all this?”
Naughton made no reply, but his eyes slipped out of focus.
Minogue recalled Eilo McInerny’s account of Tidy and his cronies gathering in the pub after closing-time for a few jars while she had to make sandwiches for them.
“You never married yourself,” he said to Naughton. Naughton’s eyelids almost closed.
“Keep your fucking nose out of my private life. What would you know about anything? I looked after me mother and five brothers and sisters, so I did. Living in this very house. I put a sister through nursing in London. And I liked my job, by God.”
“You’d have known everyone in town, then.”
“Damn right, I did. I knew the Bourkes better than they knew themselves, some a them.” Naughton paused and pointed a finger at his head.
“Wild out, the lot of them. Wasters and madmen. Only the mother was there, they’d be all in jail or in some mental hospital. You say Bourke’s after getting himself killed? Well, I could have told you something like that’d happen to him. I could have told you that twenty years ago.”
“So Bourke was completely to blame for the death of Jane Clark.”
Naughton flicked away Minogue’s words with a snap of his fingers. Hoey stood up.
“What the hell would you like to tell me next?” Naughton was almost shouting now. “ ‘Death by misadventure’? You fucking iijit! Or that Bourke should have been given five years for manslaughter? That it was an accident? Don’t you be starting with this mollycoddle stuff the social workers are full of, that Arthur Guinness did it, or the Pope of Rome.” He pointed at Minogue.
“Let me tell you something, Mr Know-It-All.” Tiny gobs of spittle flew out from Naughton’s lips into the sunlight.
“I’ll tell you what really killed that one. She did it herself! Yes, she did. She was a whore. That bitch. She had more rides than a bike. There was nothing she wouldn’t do, no poor iijit she wouldn’t drag into her web. The more I heard about her, the worse it got.”
“What sort of things do you mean?”
The kettle was almost boiled now. Naughton’s reply came in a savage whisper.
“She fucked half the parish.” His eyebrows went up and he gave a bark of laughter. “For free too.”
Naughton sank into the chair and shook his head at his own humour. He enjoyed it the more because neither Minogue nor Hoey was smiling. The Inspector studied Naughton’s changed face and guessed that he’d go for the drink again any minute now. He glanced down at the mess on the floor and then returned Hoey’s anxious stare for a moment.
“You seem to remember that night well, then,” said Minogue.
The amusement stayed in Naughton’s eyes but he said nothing. He looked out the window and let his face slide into a slack mask of indifference.
“You think you’re going to find out something worth finding out if you poke away at this long enough, don’t you?”
Minogue shrugged. “I’m trying to fill in gaps in what we know about that night.”
“I thought you knew everything, smart-arse. I was out in the car that night. I saw the fire a long ways off.”
“No one phoned you?”
Naughton looked away and rubbed at his forehead. Then he looked back at the Inspector, frowning as if he were looking at a child who had been warned off mischief but had promptly done it again.
“Did Crossan put you up to this? Christ, Crossan’s pot-boy, you are. Hah. Send a Guard to bait a Guard, is that it? How much is he paying you? You turn against your own, is it, and run with the likes of Crossan?”
Minogue didn’t answer. Hoey was still standing next to the window. Naughton laid his palms on his knees and slowly stood upright. Halfway up he grasped his forehead, making Hoey recoil in anticipation. The contempt slid off Naughton’s face.
“Jesus, it’s like the kick of a donkey I got,” he whispered. “You can have your tea. I’m due a smathan.”
He walked carefully to the dresser and opened it. From behind a dinner-plate he took out a half-bottle of clear liquid and unscrewed the top. He drank from the bottle, paused and took another mouthful.
“There, we’re right,” he whispered hoarsely. “A fella should always start the day with holy water.”
He probably had caches of drink all over his house, Minogue guessed. Poteen gave off little smell. He probably had a cheap and ready supply of it, and his breath wouldn’t reek of shop whiskey.
“Tell me about Dalcais,” said Minogue.
Naughton stood still and blinked once, slowly.
“You have shares in it. The Howards’ company. Have you forgotten, maybe?”
“Oh, I’m only now beginning to see what kind of a man you are.” Naughton spoke in a gentle voice. “You won’t be happy until…”
He closed his eyes and gave himself over to swallowing the poteen until he had drained the bottle. When he opened his eyes again, they were watery. His bellows of laughter rolled about the house. Suddenly they stopped and Naughton rubbed his wet eyes slowly before looking down into the empty bottle. He looked at the policemen with a melancholy amusement.
“So there, Lord Muck down from Dublin.”
The steady, watery eyes rested on some point on the wall behind Minogue and he sensed the words waiting to be said, the doubts warring in Naughton’s mind. Naughton rubbed at his chin and a faint smile flickered around his lips. A bashful expression crossed his face and lifted his eyebrows, taking years off the crusty face.
“There, what?” Minogue asked.
Naughton’s face darkened suddenly with anger.
“I know what you’re looking for,” he hissed. “You want to know if I did me job that night. Me sworn job as a Guard. I’ll tell you how I handled that night’s work, mister-like I always did me job, that’s how,” he snarled. “I did it well. I did right by God and man. And that’s more than many are doing these days.”
Naughton sniffed, covered one nostril with his thumb and then looked at the floor by his feet as though surveying a place to spit. Minogue made another foray.
“You saw a fire and you drove over?” said Minogue.
Naughton spoke vaguely as though he had moved on to other thoughts. “That’s it.”
“Where was Doyle, the Sergeant? When did he get to the house?”
Naughton leaned back against the edge of the countertop. A plume of steam came from the boiling kettle behind his shoulders.
“You saw Bourke at the house,” Minogue went on. Naughton’s eyes slipped out of focus.
“Like a monkey with fleas,” he murmured. “Leaping about, he was.”
“There was no one in the car with you? Out from town, I mean?”
Naughton didn’t answer but stared at the empty bottle.
“Did you know Eilo McInerny-she worked at Howard’s hotel?”
“A fat kind of a girl with big agricultural ankles,” Naughton muttered. “She’s another one.”
“Another what?”
Naughton ignored the question.
“She’s another what?” Minogue asked louder.
“Another fly in that one’s trap,” Naughton said. “Sleeping with her. Whatever they do with one another. Fucking animals. What am I saying, animals? Animals don’t do that.”
“Eilo McInerny doesn’t have fond memories of Portaree, the way she was treated,” said Minogue.
