me along.”
“I didn’t want two Guards, Shea. It’d change the atmos-”
He saw her in jeans then and the Fiat seemed to get unbearably warm. Sudden heat prickled under his armpits and by his ears. Her blonde hair, her head turning in the lamplight, the swell of her breasts under the sweater. His heart kept up its tattoo and he knew that it was futile to try and disguise the colour rising in his face. He looked away down the street and switched off the engine. The car rolled back half a foot and the tyres bounced dully on the curb. The street ahead was a striped and jumbled shadow play, glare adjoining gloom under a sky already lightening at the edges. He didn’t bother to look at his watch. An hour and they’d need headlights. It’d be dark and them getting into Ennis. What the hell would he say to Sheila Howard?
Hoey looked away down the street before taking out a cigarette. The mother with the pram and the laggard infant were crossing the street in the middle distance. She yanked on the child’s arm as Hoey tapped a fresh cigarette on his knee and led it to his lips. There it rested for several seconds. Then he gently plucked the cigarette out again. His dry lips stuck to the filter. He replaced the cigarette carefully in the packet and then nudged his colleague. It was a gesture of intimacy that startled Minogue.
“What’s the big hurry back up to Ennis anyway?” said Hoey. “I’ll stand you a mug of something.”
Minogue nodded and kept his eyes on the opening of the street where the mother, pram and child had disappeared. Swallowed up, he thought, as they turned the corner. He wanted them to return but he didn’t know why. The anticipation he felt while staring at the corner made him alert again. His body felt flabby and loose in the seat. His eyes ached and he rubbed at them. The more he rubbed, the more colours appeared. He thought of his brother’s family sequestered on the farm with the night about to come down over their fields, the bleak heights of the Burren which rose around the farm given over to winter again. He stopped rubbing his eyes but held his eyelids closed and watched the wash of red and yellow, the dark blotches spreading. Still as the land might look, there were squad cars parked on sidestreets, Guards sitting by phones waiting: a shooting, a suspect on the move again, a vehicle approaching… For a moment, Minogue was hovering over it all again, as in that dream. Fire blazed up from the thatch, the screaming Bourke, the firelight dancing on the stone walls.
“Well, what do you say?”
Like the yarns he had heard as a child about travellers falling into the underworld, he had fallen through a hole somewhere, he saw then. There the pookas and fairies still held sway, marshalling spells and riddles to entrap the arrogant who had inherited the upper world. Great God, what an iijit I am still. Decades in Dublin, cute from years of dodging traffic and chancers, criminals and superiors, later content in interior victories. Almost educated, he liked to think. Now he saw that his judgement had gone out the window. Sheila Howard, thinking about her half the day. Hoey had been sitting next to him to witness his blunders. Upside down, reversed: measures confounded, rules obscured. Humiliation grasped at his guts and held. God, what an iijit. Hoey opened his door gently and waited. Minogue looked over at the open door but didn’t see anything. He felt he was nearing the surface now, but he was still pursued by images and words. Iseult’s hunger for life, her scorn keeping her keen; Daithi working toward an immigrant life in the States; Kathleen’s steadfast love, her patience and indulgence. Kilmartin pausing in mid-oratory, face framed by anxious cynicism. The porpoises alongside the boat, carefree taunts from their world.
“She’s probably up in Dublin by now,” he heard himself mutter.
“What?” asked Hoey, and bent down to look in the car.
“She’s up in Dublin with Dan Howard, I imagine.”
He rubbed his eyes again. His eyelashes clung together when he stopped. When he tugged his eyelids open, there was still no sign of the Superman who had been dragged into oblivion by his mother. The shadows seemed deeper now.
“I’ll phone the Killer,” he said.
Hoey nodded.
“But Shea.” Hoey bent down again. “When we get back to Ennis, when we walk in the door of Crossan’s office…” Again the words disappeared, despite his wish to sound resolute.
“We’ll tell him what we know,” Hoey said quietly.
“Yes, I know. But as for speculating, that’s not really on, okay?”
“Look,” said Hoey, and he looked down the street. “There’s an eating-house down there. Maybe they’ll have something there.”
Minogue tumbled wearily out onto the path.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Had he slept? Jesus Christ. Minogue’s heart gave a leap, and he grasped the steering wheel tighter. He stared toward the limit of the headlight beam and flicked it on to full. A red band of sky bled into honey was alongside them, whipped by passing trees. Branches wrung from the trees by last month’s gales still lay in ditches, their white stumps catching the headlights. How had he got this far on automatic pilot? Hoey was half-slumped, half-curled into his seat. Minogue had seen his eyelids batting occasionally. Where the hell were they now? As if on cue, a sign to Kilmihill lit up on the curb ahead. Another twenty minutes to Ennis, so. Closer to the sign he made out the white paint on the wall underneath: “Brits out now.” He slowed and decided that the clumsy picture drawn on the wall was a rendition of an M-16. The paint had dribbled down, like white blood, the Inspector thought. The Fiat’s lights followed the bend, straightened and dropped the slogan into the night again.
He remembered coming over the bog roads from the ferry, the boot-lid rising and falling, snapping against the string which had slackened. The River Shannon had been silver as the ferry nosed out into the estuary toward Clare. He remembered the salmon light from the west reaching out to cover the water too, and he had looked for the fins and backs on the water. Ten minutes of strained searching over the water had yielded nothing more than disappointment. The two cups of coffee in Tralee had kept him going until they drove up the ramp on the Clare shore. Minogue was perplexed by the strange fusion of relief and foreboding he felt as they hit the back road toward Ennis.
A half-dozen cars trailed an articulated lorry driving against them. Their lights burned into Minogue’s gritty eyes. Hoey blew out a cloud of smoke. He seemed little concerned with concealing his sarcasm.
“Any more dispatches from HQ?”
“No,” replied Minogue. “He said he’d locate the Howards for us. I’ll phone in the morning to find out from him.”
“You didn’t go into any detail about how we’re getting on, though?”
“No. I don’t know how we’re getting on, that’s why.”
“And being the man he is, he’s waiting to see what comes of it,” said Hoey. “At a safe distance, of course.”
Minogue detoured around by Market Street, drove by the Friary and parked outside the Garda Station.
“Let’s check if there are any, em, breakthroughs here,” Minogue said to Hoey’s unspoken question. Hoey followed the Inspector through the towering gate pillars.
“Whoa,” said Minogue, slowing, “Look at them.”
Two vans with Dublin registrations were parked on a tarred island in front of the station door. Orange glare from quartz lights over the avenue fell on a car which Minogue and Hoey recognised.
Ahearne, the sergeant, came through the doorway behind the counter and said hello to Minogue. He was in civvies, brown corduroy jeans and a hand-knit beige jumper over his blue uniform shirt.
“And how are ye?” he whispered.
“A bit on the tired side.”
“Aha.” Ahearne’s eyes went from Minogue to Hoey and back.
“We were passing so we just dropped in to see what headway there was with this incident last night,” said Minogue. “Over at the Howards.”
“Oh, that business,” said Ahearne. Now Minogue was sure that Ahearne was buying time.
“Yes. The shooting thing,” Minogue repeated.
“Terrible, to be sure, wasn’t it?” said Ahearne. “Well, I’m not very well up on that at all, being as I’m-”