“Jesus,” she almost smiled. “You’re the sweet-tongued bastard. Anyway. A big heavy pig of a man and his false teeth coming loose-I could feel them pressed onto my teeth, I remember. My lips were bleeding. Pushing on me. I thought I’d faint. I couldn’t breathe. I stopped fighting ’cause I thought I wouldn’t make it out from under him. That’s the truth.” She puffed out a ball of smoke and blinked.
“And when you tried to…?”
“They were in cahoots. Drinking ’til all hours. The next day there’s the oul’ bastard on the front page of The Clare Champion, shaking hands with some German that was opening a knitwear factory.”
“You told Naughton what had happened?”
“I did. And what an iijit I was to go and do a thing like that.” She paused. “When I think of it…” She took a long drag from the cigarette, grimaced and cast about for an ashtray.
“Fire it out the window, can’t you?” said Minogue. She looked down over her shoulder at the Inspector.
She rolled down the window and flicked the butt expertly across the street. Minogue was surprised at the distance she achieved with such economical effort. She turned to him with a piercing look.
“So what are you going to do now? What can you do? Naughton’s dead, so you tell me. Tidy Howard is up in the nursing home with his plot bought and his box picked out and ready. There’s nothing left. So what are you two after?”
“What did Naughton mean about you doing well out of it?”
“Fuck Naughton,” she hissed. “I’ll tell you what Naughton said to me. I’m sure ye’d like to hear. You want to hear the dirt, don’t ye? So you can tell your pals back up in Dublin one night and ye having a few jars. I’m only sorry I don’t have a few pictures to show ye.”
“It’s not like-”
“Don’t give me lectures about what it is and isn’t like! This is all the help Naughton was to me: ‘Did someone ride you right?’ was what he said to me. ‘Did he ride you straight and did you get cured?’ says he. Fucking worm. And him a Guard.”
Minogue kept his eyes on the Fiat insignia on the horn. An urge to lean on the horn and hold it came to his hands.
“Only sorry he didn’t have a go himself,” she whispered. “He knew everything. I’m sure Tidy Howard told him, and them sniggering and drinking.”
“Knew what?” Hoey asked.
“About me. About Jane Clark. Her and me. That’s what he meant about ‘straight,’ you thick. With a man, like. Here. Give us one of those Majors.”
Hoey held out the packet opened already. She didn’t light it but studied it instead, as though it were a weapon.
“So what did you get out of this, then?” asked Hoey. “It doesn’t make much sense.”
“I knew things,” she murmured. “I knew about Jane and what she was doing. But she told too. She was like that. She wasn’t afraid of anything. She laughed in their faces. ‘What century do you think you’re in?’ she’d say. That’s what she was like. And I liked that about her. She could say things that I’d…”
She shook her head as though trying to dislodge a bee caught in her hair and reached across to thump in the cigarette lighter.
“Does this part of your limo work?” she asked.
“Wait and see,” said Minogue. “But listen, you lost me there.”
“Ah! Dan Howard and Jane. Jamesy Bourke and Jane. She told me. She kind of saw it like a big adventure and a bit of a comedy too. Oh, Christ, but she’d have me in stitches. ‘You can learn all you want about Irish history and civilisation when you have one of them burrowing away at you’ she told me. The things they said to her when they were, you know…close.” The lighter popped out.
“She really had one over on them. And I don’t know if they ever knew it, Jamesy or Dan. Dan”-she blew out a vast quantity of smoke, the first work on a fresh cigarette-“what a gobshite. Dan, only Dan. Curly wee Dan. Hah. He’d get up on a table if the tablecloth looked enough like a skirt, so he would.”
“But what did you get out of this?” Minogue tried again. “What did Naughton mean?”
“Did you get in the wrong queue when God was handing out the brains or what? Do you honestly think that Naughton would do away with himself over some revelation like this, a parlourmaid like yours truly here, that no one cared enough to believe?”
She taunted Minogue with a wide-eyed stare. The Inspector didn’t try to hide his exasperation now.
“Look, Eilo. Stop mullocking about here, like a good woman. We’re trying to do the right thing. What did she have over these people, Jane Clark?”
“The right thing? Huh. What the hell use is it for me to tell you? It’s all done with.”
The Inspector rubbed at his stinging eyes. His battered Fiat was full of smoke, and he had a pain over his eyes that wasn’t going away and would probably get worse. He was homesick for the ordinariness of his home, his wife, his adopted city. He wanted to be sitting in front of the fire with a glass of whiskey and errant thoughts. He had travelled the roads of west Clare more in this last week-and for what? It came to him with the sudden force of a truth he had hidden from wilfully, that the Hoey he had dragged along, that the faded, greenish-coloured snapshots of Jane Clark, that the dreams of that familiar stranger and his own claustrophobic premonitions about Kathleen’s apartment plans were part of one story, a story he couldn’t make sense of. It didn’t matter how, he knew. What mattered was his own obstinate will to see this through. Still, he was angry.
He was out of the car quickly, the Tralee air rushing into his lungs. The force of the door slamming rocked the Fiat and it squeaked on its shocks. The sea, he thought while he waited for his anger to ebb, and the porpoises. Their domain the water, their senses beyond what we could imagine-the very core of the earth itself guiding them, or the stars, perhaps, the squeals of their kind as they surfaced and dived, surfaced and dived.
“Shit,” he said.
The roof of the car was cold under his palms. He spread his hands wider. Cigarette smoke issued out thinly from Eilo McInerny’s window.
“What the hell got into him?” he heard her say. “He should get a grip on himself or something.”
People, he almost shouted-humans. Images flew through his mind. Fire in the night and the stone walls reaching for the sea in darkness.
“He’s fed up with being taken for an iijit,” he heard Hoey reply. “He doesn’t get like this very often, I can tell you.”
Hoey said something else to her but in a tone too low for the Inspector to make out the words. Minogue turned and leaned back against the window, folding his arms. Overhead a dozen seagulls hovered white against the sky. The sunlight was brass on the side of the street. Naughton was in the morgue and his house was sealed. The bang reverberated in Minogue’s mind again and he shuddered. The gun Naughton had used was on its way to the laboratory in Dublin, thence to Moran, the Gardai’s resident ballistics expert. Would Moran be able to put parentage on the gun, link it to others? Ward, the detective who had interviewed him for a half-hour, had asked him twice if he had suspected that Naughton had had a gun. Stupid question. If Matt Minogue had so much as wondered whether Naughton had a gun somewhere, he’d never have gone near the damned house. Where did he get the gun?
“Oi,” he heard. He sat back into the Fiat.
“I have me job to go to,” Eilo McInerny said. “Mel’ll be home from school. I have to phone her and give out to her about her homework.” She paused to take a last pull on the cigarette.
“Then I’ll go back to Tom and Bridie and Maureen above in the hotel, and I’ll serve up a dinner to a crowd of people. Me feet will be hanging off me when I get home. But I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and put a bit of money aside for a trip to London. It’s for Mel. I promised her we’d go sometime.” She turned up the cigarette and studied the smoke rising from the tip.
“And I might just stay up late and have a few jars with Tom.” She looked up at Minogue. “And I might have a bit of fun. The Russian hands and the Roman fingers, you know?”
Minogue stared back into her eyes. People, he thought. It’s a fallen world, there’s no doubt.
“And then I’ll go home. And that’ll be that. Naughton’s dead, and Jamesy Bourke’s dead, and if I wait long enough, by Jesus, the rest of ‘em will fall into their graves too. Or get shoved into them. But I’ll sleep and eat and have rows with Mel and Tom. I’ll see all of them down, that crowd. Do you hear me?”
Minogue was caught between respect for her tenacity and dismay at her bitterness.
“All too well,” he said.
