Minogue leaned in over his cup. A couple was steered to the adjacent table.
“Tell me what that means in her case, will you?”
Garland put on a puzzled expression
“I’m not sure now that this is where we should be going, now, er, Matt.”
Minogue let the pause linger. He knew Malone would be giving Garland the look. That quiet barrage of indirect scrutiny, the restrained irritation, the aggressive indifference of a seasoned Garda to the fate of anyone who tried to bollock him usually had the desired effect. He lifted his cup and looked around the restaurant. Not bad at all, at all, the coffee. He watched Colm Tierney finish a glass of wine. Ireland’s disappeared, he thought. Had it now.
“What I mean,” Garland said then, “is that of course I’ll be very glad to help out in any way I can.”
“I’m much obliged, Sean,” he managed. Garland sighed.
“I’m not comfortable discussing a colleague’s professional life,” he said.
Minogue watched Malone poke gently at the edge of his eyelid.
“Maybe I’ve given you the wrong impression here now, meeting here with a bit of socializing going on. I forget sometimes, you know. We tend to, well you can tell, try and stay informal. To someone outside looking in, it might look different.”
Minogue nodded. He looked into his cup.
“Sorry now,” Garland went on. He gathered himself in his seat. Fifteen stone, Minogue was thinking. Was that a hundred kilos?
“But I have to step back into my job and be duly cautious.”
“Don’t be sorry at all,” said Minogue. “Enough said now. At this moment there’s a Guard on his way to Ms. Hartnett’s place to see if we can locate her, now.”
Garland sat back.
“My God,” he whispered. “You mean we have reason to be worried, do we?”
“Well now. This much I can tell you, Sean. We can’t find Ms.. Hartnett on any flight out of Dublin. I’d be most obliged if you were to keep this to yourself, Sean. We need to contact others, her family. It may all turn out to be a misunderstanding. A series of misunderstandings.”
“But Aoife is not under investigation by the Guards, is she?”
“Not a bit of it,” Minogue replied. “Now, you were good enough to phone us about a visit from this man who is the current focus of our investigation. Did you know anything about what he and Ms.. Hartnett discussed with this American?”
Garland adjusted his dickey bow again.
“Well I don’t really,” he said. “It was only after me seeing the picture in the papers that I remembered him. I wonder if Aoife herself knows who he is, sorry, who he was. You see, we get a lot of people and groups and requests coming through the department. An awful lot.”
Garland leaned in over the table.
“Culture and history and heritage, they’re all very hot issues now. We’re answerable for a lot more than digging up an oul pot and putting it in a glass case for a busload of schoolchildren to gawk at now. The way histories are handled and researched and presented is all very contentious.”
“There’s more than one history now?”
Garland gave Minogue the eye in return.
“Oh there’s a right can of worms there. There are any number of people and interest groups and the like — stakeholders, they call them — in heritage now. That’s a side of the job that takes a lot of time and training. It takes delicate enough management by times, I can tell you. I have three staff with MBAS, even.”
“So you’re busy, then,” said Minogue. “Inquires, visitors, conferences?”
“All that and more, to be sure.”
“Would Ms.. Hartnett have discussed the visit with anyone else at the office? The American, I mean. Mr. Shaughnessy. She kept notes maybe?”
Garland looked up at a recessed light for several moments.
“To tell you the God’s honest truth, I’ve no idea. Aoife’s very organized. She’d probably have a note if there was something to it. She’d certainly have come to me if there were prospects from this thing, this meeting. But she’s a fierce busy person. She’s project leader on a big site plan that’s moving ahead fast.”
“Which, now?”
“The Carra Fields, out in Mayo.”
Minogue knew that Malone had heard too.
“There was an opening of an exhibition about that recently?”
“There was indeed,” said Garland. “With all the plans and models for the interpretive center laid out. Marvelous. It rewrites a lot of history, so it does.”
Minogue met Malone’s eyes for a moment.
“I’ve a colleague who’d like to persuade me that Mayo people are civilized.”
“Well now he’s got you,” said Garland. “Stone Age people — late enough on in the Stone Age, to be sure. There were thousands of them — a huge cleared enclosure, with grazing and crops. And a big surprise was that there were no fortifications or the like. All of them living a grand existence without the rowing and beating one another we have later. Can you imagine?”
“Very civilized,” said Minogue. “For Mayo. A Garden of Eden.”
“Oh, I could go on and on,” said Garland “It’s excited a lot of interest in Europe. It’s the most important site since, well, we know what happened at Mullaghmore.”
“To be sure,” said Minogue
An interpretive center in the Burren area of his home county had been left half-completed after protests about it had overruled the local peoples’ support for it.
“Aoife can give you the ins and outs of all the things that need to be juggled and managed for this one. God knows! It’s not just money at all, at all. She worked on Mullaghmore too. I remember she saw it coming too, the showdown over that. Anyway, the Fields will be a showpiece entirely. There’ll be no slip-ups with this one. It was heritage funds from Europe that made the big difference.”
“She’s putting the finishing touches to this whole project, you say?”
“Oh yes,” said Garland. “We have the funds, the plans approved. We’re into tenders already and the nitty- gritty. There’s great support all over. Sure the planning and approval process was nearly a love-in. A lot of that was due to Aoife She has that combination: a real expert in her field, and she knows how to manage outside of the fieldwork. Ideal.”
Minogue searched Garland’s face for any irony.
“We’re ahead of the pack here in Ireland,” he went on. “People are coming to Ireland for a lot more than the forty shades of green now. They want to see nature yes, but they want to see a place and a people full of history too, people on the periphery of the continent. I’m not sure that we know what we’re sitting on here.”
Minogue watched a customer looking down the wine menu. These Carra Fields was nearly as far into the west as you could get without falling off into the sea.
“Yes indeed,” Garland added. “Like the economists say, we have good fundamentals, in the line of history. Tremendous historical resources.”
“Our time has come, has it,” Minogue said.
“It has indeed,” said Garland. “And not a moment too soon.”
“How do you mean?”
Garland rubbed at his nose. He looked at Minogue’s writing in his notebook.
“Well, it’s an open secret the way things had been going,” he murmured “So much had been lost.”
“Lost,” Minogue said.
“Yes. Chalices from monastic sites were dug up and melted down hundreds of years ago. Finds that were never reported. Standing stones used to hold up fences. The Beara Chalice, do you remember that?”
“From the field down near Ballyfernter there a few years ago?”
“That’s the one,” Garland said “We had to give thirty thousand pounds to the finder for goodwill. Honest man he was, that turned it in, and him after turning the field one October and there was the chalice lying there with a big dent in it from the harrow… But sure what matter. A bog will push stuff up and you can never tell when or
