be wide awake, that’s all I’m saying. They’re bigger than even the Guards know. I’m telling you. They don’t care, some of them. You know?”
Minogue took his time on the stairs. He waited by the hallway leading to the museum cafe for a minute to get his breath. Kilmartin couldn’t have picked a better time to be on a fortnight’s jaunt in the States. Had he known? He thought of Tynan. The commissioner had spoken to him more in the past few days than in the past six months. Chess, moving pieces to gain advantage. He rubbed hard at his eyes to try to clear the suspicion and anger surging up into his thoughts.
“You’d qualify as a prominent person, Mrs. Shaughnessy,” he said. “ ‘It’s better to be safe…’ is the approach, I imagine now.”
Minogue looked at the detective who had been eyeing the doorway, the bored-looking one with the skimpy beard and the polo shirt under his leather jacket.
“Could I trouble you to set us up with a cup of something here?”
A pause and a blink before he nodded. Minogue exchanged a look with the older detective.
“You won’t mind if Mrs. Shaughnessy and I were to chat alone there over in the corner?”
The coffee was too hot. The detective slid the change onto the table. A fifty-penny coin rolled to the edge and fell to the floor. He took a seat near the door. Minogue picked up the coin. The only other clients, a couple with wire-rimmed glasses and hair so blond Minogue believed it could be dyed, were exchanging maps and sheets of paper at a table by the counter.
“They’re certainly different from the Guards I knew,” Mrs. Shaughnessy said. “Hard to tell they’re Guards at all really.”
“That’s the idea, I think.”
“Are they armed?”
Minogue nodded. She looked away.
“On bicycles, I remember,” she murmured. “Armed only with their tongues. Little enough for them to do back then of course. How things change.”
From what airy suite Geraldine Shaughnessy had been summoned to be told of her son’s death, he wondered. He imagined a city skyline at night, all glass and pastel carpet, a piano. -
“I do appreciate all that you’re doing,” she said “Especially this now. I dreaded the thought of going to a Garda station to… I’m embarrassed, really.”
Minogue smiled. Fifty, looked thirty-five — if even. Girlish yet: coltish, was that a word? He couldn’t tell if she had makeup. The freckles were scattered sparsely along the back of her hands. Her eyes were bloodshot, the lids pink and tight-looking. He wondered if she’d tell him that Johnny Leyne was in hospital. Maybe she didn’t know herself. Hardly.
“Can you tell me if you have anything new on, what’s happened?”
N-oo: nooze. Her native Cork accent clicked handily with American.
“I can tell you what we know, but it’s far from being anything we can seize on as a solution.”
She studied the tabletop while she listened. Her eyes didn’t rest on Minogue when she looked up. He noted her hand shaking on the cup. Her eyes were glassy now. She didn’t reach for a handkerchief. She wasn’t going to try drinking the rest of her coffee. The German or Dutch or Swedish couple decamped. That could have been the real color of their hair, he decided. He watched the bearded detective adjust something under his arm. Surly young fella: like to pin him someday, wise him up to manners.
A woman with a stream of white hair down her back entered the restaurant. The two detectives exchanged a glance. Mrs. Shaughnessy asked Minogue to repeat words. Place-names and people. Did she want to take notes maybe? She thanked him but no. He began to feel terrible for her. Alone she seemed, composed and dazed and polite and refined. She began to roll a thin silver bracelet up and down over her wrist. He took a delicate line on the cause of death. She stopped tugging on her bracelet.
“As a result of…?”
Pale enough to start with, he believed she seemed to have shrunk since they sat down. He lowered his voice.
“There’d have been blood loss. I think the doctor would describe it as shock.”
“But the beating,” she murmured. She began rolling the bracelet again.
“Severe. Not many blows but, well, a lot of force applied.”
She closed her eyes. Minogue saw her chest heave.
“Your sister,” he said. “Would you prefer…? She’s waiting below, isn’t she?”
She opened her mouth and breathed out through her mouth. “Hah,” Minogue heard.
“No I asked her not to come up with me. John, of course, well he couldn’t.”
She picked up her handbag and took out paper hankies.
“Are you married? I suppose you are.”
She blew her nose. She paused, stared at something on the table, and dropped the hanky into her bag.
“I am.”
“The person you marry is a different person than — ”
She caught herself and looked at Minogue.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s you need to get information from me, and here I am blathering.”
“It’s all right. Don’t be worrying about that.”
Her eyes went to the white-haired woman. Surrounded by a pot of tea, cakes, and books, she had begun to write in a copy book.
“John and I got along well. Odd, isn’t it? But we married different people — when we married, I mean. He’s not well, you know.”
Minogue nodded.
“He asked me on the plane coming over. I knew he couldn’t sleep, that he’d been thinking about it, that it hurt him so terribly. He asked me if it would have made a difference to Patrick if we’d had more children. Oh, it wasn’t sniping or blame or anything.”
She dabbed at her eyes with a fresh hanky.
“Without going into detail let me just say it wasn’t medically possible back then. It was me, not John. Things didn’t go well. Patrick was premature The delivery didn’t go well even. I was left with complications. We would have liked more kids. Patrick had difficulties. That was clear right from the start. This was before they had all the lingo they have nowadays. ADD — do you have that over here?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Hyperactive kids? Attention Deficit Disorder?”
“I think I’ve heard of it.”
“Learning disabilities?”
“Oh, to be sure. Now I’m with you. Plenty to go around here.”
“Good health though, that was Patrick. Nannies came and went. He’d be up all night as an infant. I had no idea kids could be like that. He couldn’t sleep sometimes. And he had a tough time of it dealing with other kids when he went to the nursery — the only child thing now. It was more than he couldn’t really manage everything that was going on around him… One specialist thought it was a kind of manic depressive thing, even.”
“He lashed out at people?”
She let down the rolled up hanky on her saucer.
“Yes.”
“It carried into adult life, did it?”
Her voice was low when she replied.
“I think you know that by now. John and I agreed we could hide nothing.”
Minogue watched the white-haired woman cleaning her glasses. An albino — of course. Albina?
“If he brought it on himself we must face up to that,” she said.
Minogue wondered if Patrick Shaughnessy had struck his mother.
“The thought occurred to me, Inspector, that my son — ”
He saw her bite her lip. He wasn’t ready for the glimpse of her contorted face as she lowered her head. He stood and drew his chair around beside her. The detective with the beard was watching him. Her words came out in
