But I felt so bad for her then. ‘Plenty more fish in the sea,’ I remember saying to her. Stupid things you say, you know? She sort of smiled. She knew, I think. That I knew, like. Do you know what I’m saying?”
He waited for several moments. She frowned and looked at her hanky.
“What else did you know of that side of Aoife?”
“That’s it. There should have been someone for her, that’s what’s been getting to me this last hour, yes.”
Her eyes went to a corner of the ceiling.
“What about Dermot Higgins, maybe?”
“Dermot here?”
Minogue nodded. Her lips twitched.
“Ah no, that wasn’t on. You’d easy fall for him though, wouldn’t you? If you were a girl, like. No. Dermot doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Everyone knows ”
“What, now?”
“Dermot’s gay.”
Minogue tried not to let his bewilderment show. Didn’t gay men all have short hair and earrings these days? The giveaway voice and mannerisms?
“She did say something that day, now,” Eileen Brogan began again. “Now, if only I can remember it. I thought it was a person she was talking about. Her ex maybe, but I didn’t ask. It was like she was making a crack about it, I don’t know, a fish or something. It was something else though, I suppose ”
“What did she say, can you remember?”
Minogue watched her face as she seized on some recollection, met his gaze, then frowned again as she lost it.
“Oh God, if I could remember it… it was just that I thought of it when I said fish. Something that sounded like a sissy. I was thinking to myself, what kind of a fish is that, a piranha or something? You’re no sooner at the top of a hill than you’re right back at the bottom again, I think she said. Back where you started. A sissy…?”
She dabbed at her eyes again. Minogue didn’t push it. He began to arrange the pages. He looked over the poster of the Carra Hill. How many people, how many centuries had it taken to make it? The size of the rocks, how could one person — he looked up at her then.
“Sisyphus?”
Her eyes widened. She nodded once.
“That’s what it was, yes. How did you know that?”
Malone leaned against the doorjamb. Minogue looked down at the files he had scanned already.
“Well,” said Malone, “not one of them worth getting a proper statement out of. How do you like that?”
Minogue sat back.
“Well-respected,” said Malone “Not a bad word about her. Bit of a workaholic. Is that what you’re getting too?”
Minogue nodded. He closed the folder on the pages from O’Reilly’s booklet about Carra Hill and the stone.
“Here, that’s the book your woman had down there yesterday,” said Malone. “It’s another copy, Tommy.”
Malone sat on the edge of the desk and looked up at the pictures.
“What’s that?” asked Malone and pointed at one. “It’s like a giant soccer ball there. That big rock.”
“That’s the Burren.”
“Who put that big boulder there?”
“God. Some giant. Finn MacCool maybe.”
“You were there when it happened, were you.”
“It was always there. The weather did that to it.”
“Don’t you just want to put the boot to it, like? Give it a little shove, watch it rolling — hey, wait a minute. Haven’t you got a picture of something like that back at the office? That Magoo, Magray…?”
“Magritte,” said Minogue. He’d phone Mairead O’Reilly.
“There was something at the place, Tommy.”
“What? She was strangled, and her car pushed over the cliff, yeah.”
“Something at the place…”
“Like?”
Minogue looked up from the cover of the folder. He thought of O’Reilly’s decades of digging, the patient, stubborn mind refusing to give up its belief. Maybe he needed to believe in things to keep going.
“I found these inside that book.”
Malone picked up the photocopies.
“What are the numbers there — wait. They’re measurements, yeah. This is part of her job, isn’t it?”
Minogue didn’t answer. He watched Malone turn some sideways and return each to the back of the sheaf.
“Seen some of ’em before,” said Malone. He dropped them on the desk and looked at Minogue. “In pictures and that.”
Minogue plucked one out and put it on the desk in front of Malone.
“Seen it.”
“Boa Island.”
He dropped another.
“No,” said Malone. “Don’t know it.”
“Drumlin. County Roscommon. This one’s in the museum already.”
“Okay,” Malone said. “But so what?”
“I don’t know.”
Malone gave his boss a long, slow blink.
“So we’d better get back to work then.”
Minogue gathered the pages again and slid them into the folder.
“They’re all heads, Tommy.”
“Good. Try tails next time.”
“She knew the Carra Fields stuff inside out.”
“Right,” said Malone. “That was her job, yeah?”
“That history, the one O’Reilly wrote, the one I took home the other day. There’s a page and a half on a description of the stone, the one they say had to be carried up the hill.”
“For the new fella to be crowned? The next king, like?”
“Yes. Why has she all these pictures from all kinds of books and magazines and even tourist brochures in next to that page?”
Malone rubbed his palm on the short hairs over his crown.
“It’s her job, boss. Same as we’d, I don’t know, make points of comparison with statements or MOS. Scene summaries?”
“There’s more to it than that, Tommy.”
Malone stood away from the doorjamb
“Well, let me ask you something, so,” he said. “How much of what your man wrote is true? I was there yesterday. Even the daughter knows there was stuff made up. Your man was into it all his life, you know. All the legends and stuff- well, I mean, how much of that is just his own inventions? Like, bullshit…?”
Minogue made no reply. He looked at his watch instead. Half-two. Well? he heard from Malone. Still he said nothing. He let his cuff over his wrist again. O’Reilly had no sources for what he’d written. A stone the weight of a bull, carried up a hill? Heroic entirely, but best left in myth. Damn. Why hadn’t he heard what they’d turned up in her apartment? Phone Murtagh.
Murtagh went slowly down his list.
“Spell that again, John. What’s it for, do you know?”
“Antidepressant. It’s just the label bit you get from the chemist. She probably took the stuff with her.”
