Naughton looked up at the Inspector. “How was she treated, so, if you know so much?”
“Drummed out,” replied Minogue. He heard the indignation rising in his own voice. “Kicked out of her job. No family to go home to. Turfed out.”
Naughton rose to his full height and let his arms down by his side. He left Minogue a look of easy contempt and turned to the kettle.
“She did better out of it than she deserved, let me tell you,” he said into the steam.
He flicked off the socket switch and reached for a teapot sitting next to a plastic bowl in which a head of cabbage was soaking. Minogue waited for Naughton to turn around. He considered this hulk’s life here amidst the stale world of boiled cabbage and whiskey, porridge and ironing, the stacks of newspapers in a home that reminded Minogue of a guard room. Naughton made the tea slowly, moving with deliberate care.
“Here, I’ll get the cups.”
Naughton spoke in a tone so soft that Minogue was startled. The Inspector had been meeting men like Naughton all his life: Kilmartin himself, the Mayo colossus minor to Naughton but filled with a like mix-the cynical exuberance at another’s folly, then the disarming, implacable loyalty to those he had become close to. Policemen trusted policemen and few others. That was part and parcel of the job, Minogue understood. But many Guards were immured in their distrust of people, and Minogue had moved beyond feeling sorry for them.
He watched Naughton, so light on his feet now, his movements dexterous and measured as he took down good china cups and saucers. Naughton balanced them expertly while he drew out milk from the fridge and then stepped daintily around the pieces of the broken bottle. For a moment Minogue believed that he caught a glimpse of what could have been a fussy parent, a man who would like to cook for his wife or children. Did Naughton drink to escape these things or to indulge them, he wondered.
“There, now,” said Naughton, “we’re right. Oh, spoons,” and he turned on his heel.
“Most of us are retired out by now, I daresay,” he went on. “It’s a lot different since I walked out the door here one fine morning, with my letter in my fist and my new suit in my case and the ma waving. Then in the train to Templemore.”
He paused, his hand in the drawer, and turned toward the two wary policemen with a boyish smile.
“God, but they were great days.” His eyes lost their sharp contact with Minogue’s then. “The most of ’em. But the people now, they hardly have a pick of respect for the law. It’s the sex thing and”-he looked sheepishly down at the shattered bottle-“of course, the human frailties, as my mother would say.”
He nodded his head conclusively and bit his lower lip. How much of a burden had that harelip been to him, Minogue wondered. Branded for life, made him hostile to any softness in himself? Shamed him with girls? Left him angry at a world whose imagined recoil from his features had closed him off from others?
“My father, and him dying above in St. Lukes in Dublin-God, I hate that bloody town, I wish we had’ve sold it to the British-my father told me that God always sends the devil to test everyone that’s born into the world. The devil can take any shape at all. It might even be somebody who sits next to you in school. Or a woman. Or something that happens in your work. To test you and remind you to be vigilant, be on your guard, like. Do you believe that?”
Lessened by long exposure now, the whiskey smell had given way to the smell of drawing tea. The sweet, strong aroma took Minogue’s thoughts for several seconds. Home. Morning, breakfast in bed. Talk, night. The blue sky framed in the window seemed to beckon him to hope. To test you, he heard Naughton’s words again. He saw Sheila Howard’s face but he felt no shame now. Hoey sat very still. Naughton let the small bundle of spoons free from his fingers onto the table.
“I do,” said Minogue. “I know what you mean.”
The spell of immobility in the room was broken now. Naughton’s words yet unreleased began to exert a stronger force on the Inspector. Hope came as a dull excitement in his stomach. Naughton knows something, he tried to tell Hoey with his eyes. Wait. Naughton grinned again at some recollection.
“It’s up to God in the end,” he whispered, and spread the spoons on the table. “But do you know what the hard thing is? I bet you don’t. I can nearly tell in a man’s face if he knows this…”
“What is it?”
“God doesn’t care. He doesn’t, you know. I found that out too late. If there is a God, well, He doesn’t care. And what sort of a God is that, then?”
He turned back to the open drawer and took out folded dishcloths. Minogue looked to the sky again. A diesel lorry droned by on the street, its exhaust echo resonating in the window. Naughton flipped open the bundle of cloths, sighed and lifted the revolver up, clasping and unclasping it as if to test its weight.
Minogue saw the object imperfectly in his side vision. He turned his head, already startled. Hoey pushed back in his chair and grasped the table-top. Naughton swallowed and cocked the hammer. The scratch and click of the metal banished any doubt from the policemen’s minds. Naughton tried to smile but Minogue saw that he couldn’t. The Inspector felt nothing. The world had stopped. Waiting. Somewhere Minogue heard a voice telling him that there was nothing he could do. Something in him struggled against this and tried to resurrect his reflexes, but his body didn’t move. Naughton’s whole attention was on the gun. His eyes were fixed on it as though it had appeared by sleight of hand, a conjuror practising, proud of his skill.
“Jesus Christ,” Minogue heard from far off. It was Hoey. Seamus Hoey’s arm came up, his fingers splayed open, a look of terror twisting his face.
“So do your duty, boys,” Naughton whispered. “And I’ll do mine.” He lifted the gun up and shoved the muzzle under his chin. His hand wavered but he redirected the gun back, shoved it under his jawbone tighter and worked his finger inside the guard. Then he yanked the trigger.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Which of you, er, puked, lads?”
The Sergeant was a slight man named Ward who wore an expensive English raincoat and a paisley tie. Minogue had been thinking of those few seconds after Naughton had dropped to the floor. The shock waves of the report in the air, the sound itself reverberating in the room and then, long after that, echoing in Minogue’s thoughts. The puff of smoke dissipated slowly. It reached Minogue’s nostrils and stung while the shouts and the gunshot continued to roar in his ears. Hoey groaned softly and held his face before drawing his hands down his cheeks. Spots of blood had been slapped on the ceiling and upper part of the wall. Several of the spots had begun to drip but then stopped, several inches down the wall. Minogue looked up again at the black spot, darker than the others, where the bullet had gone after it had exited Naughton’s head.
“Was it yourself, em, Matt?”
Minogue shook his head and looked around the parlour. He didn’t give much thought as to why Ward asked. Was it to appear exacting and professional or to taunt him while he had the chance? An ambulance blocked the window onto the street. Occasionally a head peeped around the window frame, its owner squeezing into the space left by the ambulance on the footpath. Several times Minogue heard a man’s voice telling someone to keep moving.
When the echo of the gunshot had died away, Minogue thought he had heard a sigh escape Naughton, but it was not so. For several moments the blood seemed to be the only thing that had any life there. Minogue remembered standing up weakly, dizzy even, looking for a path to the phone which would keep him out of the growing pool that spread out on the floor beneath Naughton, advancing in its own time out and down, beyond his twisted legs toward the table. Hoey said something and then began vomiting, the stream hitting the floor with force, but he stayed on his feet as he backed away. Minogue, still too bewildered to be shocked, had the sense that something had come into the room and that it was still there, a force or presence that suggested to him that it was perusing the situation, lingering even, to see if there was more it should do or effect. How the hell had Naughton come by a gun?
Hoey had trouble with his matches. His lips clenched around the cigarette were a pastel purple slash on a parchment-coloured face. Ward turned his attention to Minogue again.
“Are you sure you can… Now, I’m not suggesting that you’re not up to it, or that you can’t, no, no…”
Ward continued this unsolicited argument with himself, and he touched the bridge of his nose as if to
