“Go to hell. I don’t have to do anything.” Drinking, Minogue decided, but that wouldn’t stop him.
“We can have this out in front of your fella here, Mr Cordon Bleu, or-”
“He’s not my fella.”
“Or we can call for a squad car and do the job right.”
“You’re talking shite,” she scoffed. “Take it away with you.”
“Naughton. Garda Tom Naughton. You remember him, don’t you?”
Eilo McInerny shifted on her feet and folded her arms. Her eyes narrowed.
“Let’s talk somewhere,” said Minogue.
“There’s a crowd coming in from an office for a retirement do.”
Minogue returned the chef’s gaze.
“Come on, Eilo, before I have to have you hauled out of here.”
She shook her head once and made for a door by a set of sinks.
“I’ll be back in good time, Tom,” she said.
“No hurry,” said the chef. His limp, glistening eyes followed Minogue. Hoey opened the door as she put out her hand.
“Jesus,” she started, and stepped back on Minogue’s toe. “Where the hell did you come out of? You look wicked.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hoey muttered. They followed him to a door that led into an alley.
“Any fags?” she asked. “I left mine back in the kitchen.”
Minogue opened the passenger door of the Fiat first, turned the ignition. Hoey extended his packet and she plucked one before she sat in the car. She coughed with the first drag of the Major and her shudders and gasps shook the car. Minogue adjusted the heater.
“Christ,” she wheezed. “No wonder you’re so skinny. Coffin nails.”
She looked contemptuously at her cigarette and took another drag on it. Minogue leaned against his door and turned to her.
“You sold us a pup the last time, Eilo. Now I want to hear the bits you left out. No messing either.”
“What the hell can I tell you except what I done already?”
“Smarten yourself up, Eilo. I’m not codding.” Minogue waved away the smoke billowing from her cigarette. He saw the look of worry pass across her face before she recovered the pout. She looked out the window.
“You’re not codding,” she murmured.
“Tom Naughton said you did better out of Portaree than you deserved. What did he mean?”
“Ask him, why don’t you?” she muttered.
Hoey cleared his throat before he spoke. “Tom Naughton blew his own brains out not four hours ago. Right in the middle of talking to us.”
She looked away from the window to Hoey and blinked.
“So we’re not in the humour of playing games here now,” said Minogue. “You’ll appreciate.”
His words seemed to have no effect on her. She stared right through Hoey.
“Look, Eilo, this is what he told me. I’m not going to hold anything back. You have to know we’re not trying to trap you into anything or play off what you say against anything else.”
She let the smoke out of the corners of her lips, like white paint poured into a slow eddy of water.
“You knew Naughton, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I knew him, all right.”
She had spoken in a voice so soft that, for a moment, Minogue wondered if she were the same woman he had confronted not five minutes ago. He knew that she believed them now because her eyes shone with hatred and joy.
“Everything comes to them that wait,” she murmured.
“What do you mean?”
She ignored Hoey’s question. “I always heard that and I believed it, too. I prayed for that to happen a thousand times. Everything comes around again.”
She let out a mouthful of smoke but, like a waterfall reversed, she snorted it back into her nose. Then she blew out the smoke. The ferocity slid away off her eyes and her gaze dropped to the dashboard.
“So Naughton did for himself, did he,” she muttered. “Well, by Jesus, there’s a cure for everything.”
“You got something out of your time in Portaree,” said Minogue.
“You fucking iijit!” she lashed out suddenly. “I got heartache and misery!”
“And what did Naughton have to do with that?”
“He was like the rest of them, only worse. He was the Guard. He should have been on my side.”
“In what?” Hoey asked.
“He knew I was telling the truth. With that dirty smirk on his face.”
“He knew what?”
“He knew what they were like, Tidy Howard and the rest of them. Oul’ goats like him. Hah. Tidy towns and clean streets. There’s a joke like you never heard before, mister. They all sat and talked with one another too, I can tell you. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Tidy and Doyle and Naughton, sitting in the parlour after they had cleared the shop. ‘Eilo! Make up a bit of something! Eilo! Run up a sandwich for the Guards here now!’ One o’clock in the morning sometimes, can you credit that? Sure Howard had them in his pocket-”
“Wait a minute,” said Minogue. “What do-”
“Ah, you’re not that much of a thick, are you? The Guards’d come by the odd night to make sure we weren’t serving drink after hours. They’d make a big fuss about clearing the pub and the rest of it. Then they’d go behind the counter and start up gargling themselves. Tidy knew what nights they’d be in, so for every one night they’d show up, there’d be weeks and weeks of him pouring drinks up to twelve o’clock.”
“That’s the size of it then?”
“Do you think he’d tell me what games he was playing, is it?” she shot back at Minogue. She looked away and her glare softened.
“‘Eilo! Run up a bit of something!’ Hah. And Naughton laughing all the while. He had dirty eyes.” She darted a look back at Minogue then.
“I asked a nurse I met in London once about strokes, after I heard about Tidy collapsing. She told me that the mind can be working fine and well, but that the body could be paralysed. Just think, that oul’ bollicks trapped inside his own body. The price of him, I say.”
As though ashamed of her feelings, she looked down at her hands. Hoey was about to say something, but Minogue flicked his head at him. They waited.
“When I got to the hotel first, there’s Tidy telling me he’d look after me like a father. What kind of a father would do that though? But what did I know? All I knew was that I could lose me job and he could make up stories about me. I’d never get a reference off him. That’s what Naughton said. The bastard.”
“What happened?” Hoey asked.
She looked up under her eyebrows and Minogue believed she was about to launch herself at one or both of them. Her words issued out in a purr.
“None a your fucking business, you whey-faced iijit.”
“You have your own life now, Eilo,” Minogue argued. “You won. So help us out and don’t be throwing things at us.”
“I won?” she almost laughed. The contempt froze on her face but her eyes ran up and down Minogue, the disbelief plain. He noticed for the first time that she had bags under her eyes-how had he missed that before?
A teenager with the back of his head shaved and a long piece flowing down from the crown freewheeled by, no hands, on a bike painted fluorescent pink. Minogue looked at Hoey. The silvery film of fatigue and suspicion was clear on his colleague’s eyes. Blotches of colour by Hoey’s nostrils gave him the look of a child in from cold weather.
“Tidy Howard took me… had me,” she said.
“He…?”
“Yes, he did,” she whispered. “He took me and he dragged me and he pulled at me-and he choked me. Then he was on top of me. I couldn’t move. I wasn’t always this, what’ll I say…”
“Comfortable?” Minogue tried.
