matching the description of the missing person. McGurk half-turned in the seat. He offered the mike to Minogue. The inspector shook his head.
“Ask him where they’re taking it,” he said. “If you please.”
Chief Inspector Noonan was well over six feet. He had an odd bump at the bridge of his nose and fine, dark- red hair that reminded Minogue of a horse. Dyed, he wondered, but decided it couldn’t be. The chief inspector had sandwiches and a pot of tea waiting for his visitors. Minogue wondered if he’d already struck up a liking for Noonan before he’d been offered the sandwiches. The expression maybe, the one eye open slightly more than the other, the quiet tones
“Floats,” said Minogue again. He glanced at the edge of the tomato slice peeping out from between the slices. Yellow more than green.
“Quite something, I tell you,” said Noonan. “One fella went down from the boat, made two or three paddles back to the boat, gets enough for four points, and that’s that.”
“As easy as that.”
“Child’s play,” Noonan said “They inflated them open when they were ready. Up comes the car. The boat took it out from near the rocks and it’s up on a winch and the boat’s back in the harbor. You sort of forget how strong air is.”
“Isn’t that something.”
“Tell you the truth, we were lucky,” said Noonan He pushed the second plate of sandwiches toward Minogue. “The fisheries crowd and the recovery gear were handy in Belmullet.”
Minogue took a long sip of tea. The female removed from the car was in the morgue of the county hospital. The female, well who else could it be. The Micra was wrapped and headed to Castlebar in a lorry. “Juris-dictional,” Noonan said flat-out. In the spirit of decentralization. It was Divisional HQ, and the forensic work was usually done there. Minogue glanced at the photos on Noonan’s wall. There were two former commissioners among a group of smiling officers.
“Isn’t it though?” Noonan asked again.
“Which now?”
“The means. Give us the tools. Sure, isn’t that what’s going on in Dublin?”
He had missed whatever preamble Noonan had given.
“I, er, well, there’s always some new initiative, isn’t there?” he managed.
“Law reform is the tool,” said Noonan. He looked from Malone to Minogue.
“The whole Smith thing, sure, how come he was ever out on the streets at all? He should have been behind bars for life.”
Minogue returned Noonan’s quizzical smile. So the chief inspector wanted to chew the fat about Larry Smith, did he? He declined Noonan’s offer of more tea.
“Sure it’s the wild west above there isn’t it? Gangs, the whole shooting gallery? Something has to be done.”
The gentle smile lingered. Noonan inviting a confidence, assent: Ah, you’re right, the law’s an ass. We should take the likes of Smith out ourselves if the law won’t. Noonan tilted his cup and rubbed it around the saucer. The Old Guard, Minogue thought. Noonan, with the countryman’s innate hospitality, but the two former commissioners he was proud to display himself standing beside had been renowned as wallopers.
“How best can we get to the site?” he asked. “The cliffs…?”
CHAPTER 16
Noonan drove. he waved at people. He rolled down the window and slowed to greet an old man laboring with a walking stick and a shopping bag.
He pulled in beside a railing that Minogue took to be a sign of a national school.
“Now,” Noonan said. “I’ll bring out our guest. She’ll give us a bit of a background.”
“Who, now?”
“Mairead O’Reilly. Her father was the teacher out by Cahercarraig these years. It was Peadar, the father, who got the whole thing started — but sure let Mairead tell you all about it.”
Minogue studied the bars on the railing, imagined the headlong dash of the schoolchildren at the bell, charging through the gap in the wall and pushing off from the railing, scattering down the footpath.
Noonan returned smiling and talking to a thickset woman with large glasses and a three-quarter length suede coat. She carried a bag in one hand and a set of Wellington boots in the other.
“Maybe they’re for you, Tommy,” Minogue murmured.
Malone tugged at the door release. Minogue caught the tail end of Mairead O’Reilly’s quip about the Guards taking the principal away in a squad car. Noonan took her wellies and dropped them in the boot.
A brisk, keen handshake as she sat in beside Minogue. She smiled and made no rebuttal to Noonan’s joke about the pupils having the rest of the day off. Minogue introduced Malone.
“Mairead’s father was a legend,” said Noonan. “Peadar O’Reilly. He died last June twelve-month. A great loss If it wasn’t for him now, well, Mairead’d tell you all about it if she wasn’t so modest. She and I go back a long ways.”
“Not that far back now, Tom.”
Minogue obliged with a grin. A schoolmistress not averse to being coy? She turned to Minogue.
“I’ve a brother a Guard in Roscommon,” she said.
The squad car passed a dilapadated garage at the junction of the Ca-hercarraig Road. What was it about teachers, Minogue wondered. Self-assured from years of being up in front of others, he supposed: authoritative, complete, custodial. Always wanted the last word.
“He started before the war, didn’t he, Mairead,” said Noonan. “The Fields?”
“In the thirties,” she said. “Well, ever since he heard about it in school, I suppose, so earlier yet. He was always interested in the folklore and the history. He’d be walking the roads and talking to people. Of course sure he knew everybody. With the sports and the music and everything.”
“A Renaissance man,” Noonan said.
“Well now, he amassed a lot of information that would have been lost otherwise, I suppose.”
“So your father discovered the Fields basically,” said Minogue.
“He did that. He’d been out in the bogs one summer cutting turf. Some of it was for home and some of it for the school. Can you imagine? You’re not Dublin, now are you?”
“I’m not. Clare, but bygone days.”
She smiled.
“You had the one-room school, did you?”
“Indeed we did. A crowd of us, all shapes and sizes. I don’t know how the teacher did it.”
“Well how far we’ve come. I wonder what Da would say if he took a look at the Internet we’re getting into the school next week. My God, I stare at the screen there when John Doyle’s banging away on it and my mind, it goes, well I don’t know. Connected to the whole world. I can’t believe it. Satellites, signals flying through the air. From Mayo. Isn’t it wonderful?”
The sun broke through as they slowed for a blind bend. Noonan drove in a puddle to leave room for an oncoming Harp lorry. Sunlight flooded in Minogue’s side, caressed his neck and shoulders. Noonan steered over a narrow bridge.
“He was in Cahercarraig until they closed it,” she said. “In 1962. The same year Kennedy came. The end of an era, I suppose you’d say. But we were reared out by Bruach. Seven of us. Oh, many’s the Saturday we were out on Carra. I always think of those times as sunny days. Up on the bog — sure Ma must have been martyred with us, so she must. While Da was doing his digging.”
She looked back at a boarded-up house.
“I remember once he dug a trench,” she went on then. “It must have been nearly ten feet deep. Ma was petrified it’d fall in on him. The bog, you see. And she persuaded my uncle Ger to go up with him so’s he’d not fall
