you live again? Dundrum, someplace?”
“Near enough. Why?”
“Any pets missing there?”
“Pets? I don’t know. Why?”
Murph let smoke out the corner of his mouth.
“Cute, cuddly little pets? Kittens, like?”
Fanning stared at him until Murph looked up.
“Now, are you happy?”
Something shrank in Fanning’s stomach, and he looked away. Everything was crowding in on him now, the smells, the faces, the slow movements of the men, all under the milky overhead light that cast soft shadows and a pale, dun cast over everything and everybody here.
He half-heard Murph say something about jaws, and teeth, and stamina.
“A hundred, I said.”
“What?”
“Give me two fifties, is what. We’re going to do a bet.”
“Go ahead, yourself. I’m here for research. Not gambling.”
“Yeah, well research me the money or we’re leaving.”
Fanning gave him the eye. Well, at least he had tried. Slowly, he reached into his jacket.
“Fifty for me, fifty for you,” Murph said. “Winner splits anyway.”
“Bets!” Delaney yelled. “Your bets!”
Chapter 10
After the service, Minogue found himself making his way to the churchyard wall. From there, he had a view of the mourners coming out after him, and a place to smoke on the sly. The wind cut into his coat, but he welcomed it, as he did the patches of sunlight that had appeared on the sides of the hills behind the church.
“Very creative,” said Kilmartin, sidling up. “Very unique. Is that normal for a Protestant thing nowadays, I wonder.”
“I’m hardly the one to ask.”
“Bet you liked it all the same,” Kilmartin said. “Right up your alley. That sort of pagan aspect. Unless you want to try telling me it was a hundred percent Christian.”
Minogue made a quick study of Kilmartin’s face for signs of mischief.
“It wasn’t bad, I suppose,” he said. “Pity you weren’t up to coming in.”
“Anyway. What was that plant she was talking about again, in the bogs?”
Minogue knew that Kilmartin had hung around the door to the church. He would have heard plenty from the speakers. Three women who had met outside the door to the church began to laugh like seagulls.
Kilmartin eyed Minogue.
“‘Celebration of life,’” he said. “Right?”
Minogue was reasonably sure now that Kilmartin missed the traditional, lugubrious funeral service he had hoped for.
“Ash-, As- Ash something, what was said in the service,” said Kilmartin then. “I must Google it.”
“Asphodel.”
“It’s a plant?”
“Bog Asphodel.”
“Grows on the bogs? Funny I never knew the names of the things you’d find growing in a bog. All the years I spent mullocking about in or near bogs too. Ironic, or what. And some legend? What was that about?”
“Persephone.”
“I’ve heard of her. Okay. But who was the other one? Dam, Dem…?”
“Demeter. Her mother looking for her every year, and she in the Underworld — Persephone, I mean. The seasons. All that class of stuff.”
“The Underworld.”
“That asphodel is Persephone’s flower.”
“That’s nice, I suppose.”
Minogue had had years of practice returning Jim Kilmartin’s goads with his own.
“It’d be a sacred flower too, then. Obviously.”
“Oh obviously. Very nice entirely.”
Minogue felt for his car keys. A bird scolded from a hidden place nearby. Was it the same one, he wondered, he had half-believed was calling to him in the middle of that old Irish hymn, Be thou my vision. For a moment, he took it to be a cry of grief and anger from the birds who themselves would miss Rachel Tynan, painter and worshipper in their domain.
“But why all the pagan stuff in a church? I’m only saying.”
“It had to do with resurrection,” Minogue replied. “I suppose.”
“Right,” said Kilmartin, thoughtfully. “Easter and all that. But you’d have to know poetry or that, mythology, to get that. Bit over my head. Other people too.”
Minogue did not agree. That disagreement was not sufficient to prompt him to discuss the matter further. Kilmartin shifted his feet so he was looking over Minogue’s shoulder into wilder Wicklow.
“Never in all my life did I think I’d hear people singing in Irish in a Protestant church,” he said. “It was Irish, wasn’t it? But fierce old Irish…?”
Minogue was suddenly weary of Kilmartin’s archaic approach. Maybe Jim Kilmartin would be wondering next why the hesitant fiddle playing of the nine-year-old girl for the hymn had brought everyone to tears.
“I want to ask you something now,” Kilmartin said, clearing his throat. “And of course it goes without saying, I understand your position.”
Minogue waited.
“Any word on whether Tynan is going to call you in?”
“Why would he call me in?”
“You know what I mean. A straight answer is all I’m asking.”
“He’s busy,” Minogue said. “As you can see.”
This drew a scowl.
“The whole Garda doesn’t just shut down if Tynan’s out of the picture, does it? All I want to find out is one simple thing: how long is he going to leave me hanging. He’s the man with final say. Something’s got to give here.”
Minogue spotted Sergeant Brendan O Leary emerging from the church. He was talking to a short, older man with a hearing aid. O Leary took his leave of the man, and he began to thread his way toward Minogue and Kilmartin.
“What more does he want,” Kilmartin went on. “Listen, Tynan has had all the documentation for what, three months now? What’s stopping him?”
Minogue pulled his coat tighter around his chest.
“Well,” he said, “if he calls me, in I go. I suppose.”
“Of course you do — but not without an AGSI go-ahead, right?”
Minogue had already had two calls from the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors on the matter. He had not told Kilmartin.
“Maybe you should give me your script and I’ll just memorize it.”
Kilmartin took a step back.
“Kick a man when he’s down. Very nice, I’m sure.”
Minogue watched the Commissioner’s aide, Sergeant Brendan O Leary, talking to a grey-haired, fiftyish man in a navy-blue Loden overcoat. O Leary eyed Minogue, and the man looked over too, squinting against the unexpected patches of sunlight. He began to make his way toward Minogue.
