Minogue waited for Noonan to finish on the radio. He turned back to the page he’d kept his thumb on.
“Don’t take that now as gospel,” Mairead O’Reilly murmured. “That’s legend. Da wasn’t shy of adding his own bits of conjecture.”
He nodded. The search teams had met by the track just before the rain had turned into the monotonous, steady drizzle that would be down for the evening.
“If you could, leave a car here by the road,” he said. “And ask them to step up the questioning. Stop anyone going along by the car park and see if they can fill in anything this past week or two.”
Noonan got out of the car and walked over to the squad car. Minogue rubbed the back window and took in the car park. A hundred yards in on that track and a car would be out of sight of the Cahercarraig Road.
Noonan sat back in and started the engine.
“Thanks, Tom, yes,” said Minogue. “The hospital.”
The tires spun gravel as Noonan steered over the culvert. Better not forget the casts, Minogue thought, along with the faded, washed-out cigarette boxes, the illegible pieces of newspaper already almost a soggy dough. Some would doubtless turn out to have been used by one of the workmen to wipe his arse.
The car took the bend and began its descent back down from the highlands that formed the Carra Fields. He stole a glance at Mairead O’Reilly. Sitting there with her thoughts away off years ago, it looked like. Was she too still wondering how the thousands of souls had lived here so contentedly, had left so little trace beyond the stone walls of their houses and a solitary, empty tomb? Or was she remembering the days of her childhood and youth trekking up with her father and family to dig and to picnic and to play in the heather?
He returned to the page, with the car bouncing and dropping as the bog road leveled out. Conjecture, was it, all this love of heroes and chieftains her father had had. A geis, like the jobs dished out to Hercules, to build a hill for the king so he could survey his lands and people, take his last earthbound breath and die happy.
“Some job of work,” he murmured. Mairead O’Reilly looked over.
“Building that hill, Carra Hill. And then to heft that boulder up to the top.”
“Ah, don’t forget we had giants to do it back then,” she said.
“They’ll make much of that when the center is made and opened up then.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “But what of it.”
“Isn’t it important, like?”
“Well Da thought it was. To him the stories got to be more important than the actual turning up things in the dig. What use was a collection of oul stones, he’d always say. Stones don’t do much talking. It’s the people we want to hear.”
Minogue looked out at a passing house, a cottage tucked in under rhododendrons and scruffy firs. He sometimes forgot how rain in the west left you thinking you were cut off from the planet. Noonan beeped the horn as he passed the short laneway where a squad car was parked.
“Your father believed in the stories then. That they were there in history.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “And he’ll be proved right, maybe. That gave him great satisfaction to see how he was able to turn them around. The museum people.”
“They were skeptical?”
She smiled wanly.
“Oh, they were,” she said “They didn’t put much stock in the dowsing. Sure why would they? They’re scientists really.”
“The museum people were a bit slow off the mark then.”
“They were that. But this was back after the war — long before they had the money and the staff. They didn’t begin to cotton on to the Fields until, well, twenty years ago, really. They kept coming up with more, everywhere they put down the rods. Well, they’ve come around. It turned out to be a city, just like what Da said.”
“How did he know‘”
She smiled again
“Well now. He didn’t really, I suppose. He believed it was, so it became one.”
Noonan met Minogue’s eyes in the mirror.
“Teachers have a sixth sense,” he said. “Did you always do your homework?”
Mairead O’Reilly laughed.
“Oh, we’re still the same,” she said. “The sixth sense. But it works.”
Minogue recalled a long and wandering and sometimes humorous chat with Tynan a few years ago. what makes good cops. Dowsing without the stick, Minogue tried, being a chancer too. Intuition, was Tynan’s take: unconscious expertise.
The car hit a dip, wallowed, bounced back up. Minogue went back to the pages on Carra Hill. The last crowning stone was to be the throne for the king to retire to and to take his leave. O’Reilly allowed that the practical truth of the hill, if it were built by people at all, could have been something as prosaic as a keep, a retreat in time of war or battle, a place where a king could stage his heroic last battle and die gloriously, surrounded by his enemies.
“Your father allowed that there could be more to the Fields than a crowd of easygoing and well-behaved farmers.”
She looked away from the window.
“The hill,” he said. “Maybe a defense?”
“Oh, yes. After the son and heir had finished the job. Yes indeed.”
The wipers creaking, the car’s hissing passage over the wet roadway, had made Minogue fierce dopey again. The rain was lighter in town. He took in a new housing estate built by a deserted and crumbling ball alley, a new shopping center. A half mile further was a new plant making plastic bags. Noonan radioed in. There was a call in for a Chief Inspector Minogue, to call back Dublin. Who, Minogue asked Noonan. An O’Leary. Minogue exchanged a look with Malone.
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, Tom.”
CHAPTER 17
Minogue watched Malone working a stone out from between the cleats of his Nikes with a large version of a Swiss army knife. Seventy, eighty quid for the boots. Thirty-odd quid for the knife. Where the hell was O’Leary? The earpiece irritated his ear. An attendant wheeled a toothless man by on a wheelchair. Minogue eyed the drip feed on a stalk. Malone wiped the knife, watched the pair move down the hall.
“Sorry,” said O’Leary. “I was on another line.”
“You’re all right. We’re indoors here.”
“What’s the story with this woman’s car? I’m asking for himself, like.”
“Hard to say, tell him,” Minogue said “There’s an identification going on the body”
“But it’s her, is it? Unofficially?”
“It looks like it, Tony. The body’s going to Dublin tonight for the next of kin before the full PM. I’ll phone it through to the squad as soon as I can get positive here. We have the photos to match. John Murtagh’ll pass it on. Now: is that enough to do you?”
“Got that,” said O’Leary. “And thanks. I have to pass on something to yous The boss is busy until about seven. He was talking to Leyne’s minder. Freeman? Well, he phoned us. They’d heard the car was found. It was on the radio news.”
Minogue watched the wheelchair heading back his way. Skin and bone eyes vacant, inward turning on… nothing, maybe. He nodded back at the attendant.
“They’ll hear in due course,” he said to O’Leary.
“That’s ‘go to hell and leave us to hell alone to do our job,’ is it?”
“Approximately, Tony. Look, it’s tough enough.”
“Okay, I’ll translate that. Any help knowing himself said the same to them?”
“Nice to know, I suppose. The same phrases, I wonder?”
“You must be joking,” said O’Leary. “He gave it out in theologian mode.”
