out the points of reflected light in her pupils.
“I think so,” he said.
“‘The tourists, Miss Hanratty?’ he says. ‘You have to be careful, now, and avoid contact until this is cleared up,’ and ‘Why did you wait until now?’ As if I had answers for him.”
She flicked her hair back again and looked away. The gun moved in small arcs as she talked, as if she needed it for balance.
“I knew there was something wrong because I had a lot of pain. Dan, of course. Idiot. So I finally wanted to know. You can guess, Guard, can’t you?”
“Jane Clark?”
She nodded, as if considering a point in an abstract discussion that had gone on too long.
“I didn’t know what to do.” She paused and took a deep breath, her chin down on her chest.
“I knew I wanted to tell her that she had left her mark. I shouldn’t have waited. But that’s human nature, isn’t it? Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die. I sort of knew that Dan had been seeing her-”
“But if you tried to have it out with him about it, he’d have left you out in the cold?”
“Dan didn’t care. That’s just the way he is. He does what he wants. There are some things he cares about. I don’t doubt but that he has you fooled to the hilt too.”
She stared at him for several seconds.
“How many kids have you got?” she asked.
“Two. We had a boy earlier but he died. For a long time, we thought he was our last chance.”
“Well, she took a lot of my future with her when she went,” she resumed, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I came back to the village late and I went straight to the hotel bar. I wanted to have it out with Dan but sure when I got there he was twisted drunk. And I couldn’t drag him away.”
“You collared Tidy Howard and gave him a piece of your mind instead?”
“You’re damned right I did,” she snapped. “And of course his attitude was, what do you want me to do about it? Messing around like that was ‘immoral’ says he. And him chasing chambermaids! Well, I left that hotel raging. Yes, I drove out. And she was still up. She answered the door. She wasn’t drunk, I know that. Not then. She might have taken a few drinks after I left. But I think she knew that there was something wrong, maybe the look on my face. We had a row. She didn’t just sit there and listen, I can tell you. There came a point that she laughed at something I said, something to do with tourists. I hit her. With my hands. She was strong, but I was really mad. I threw things around and… Well, she said then that she was going to call the Guards. She had no phone, of course. I had taken a few lumps out of her, some scratches and that. It wasn’t that serious to my mind. After all, I was the one who had been wronged. I got in the car and drove off. I sort of believed her about the Guards. I was still mad, but on the way back I started getting worried.”
Minogue looked up from the waving gun. She seemed to realise that he had been observing some part of her that she wasn’t in control of, and her eyes narrowed. Her stare moved away from him.
“I came back to the hotel and I told Tidy Howard what had happened. I told him-I was still mad, you see-that I wanted to kill her. Jane Clark, like. He was staring at me like I had just landed off Mars. And I told him that when his darlin’ boy woke up in the morning and could hear, I was going to give him a right going-over too. And him looking at me and staring at me, and a smile starts to come across his face. I took a slap at him but he caught my arm. He was a big block of a man. And him laughing… He said to me, he said, ‘Don’t worry your little head, girleen.’ I remember him saying that. He told me to get myself fixed up with whatever it took, to go to Dublin if I wanted, and he would pay for it. I was taken aback, I can tell you. The same Tidy Howard who had made little of me the first time. He didn’t know any more than I knew at the time that the scar tissue would stop me from- Well, I remember him saying, and him laughing and holding my wrists, looking into my eyes: ‘Don’t beat the poor boy. Marry him!’ Laughing. He thought it was funny. That’s the kind of man he is…he was.”
Her eyes had glazed over now.
“I know this much,” she whispered, “that if I had had this with me that night, I would have killed them all. Right then and there. But I was very shook. And when I could think straight, I decided that I’d look out for myself in the long run and do my best. Yes. But I was full sure I’d find some treatment that’d work but…”
Minogue’s fear had given way to bafflement.
“You just had a row with her?”
“Tidy had it in his head to do something about all this that night,” she said. “He knew all the Guards. Naughton was his man more than anyone. Naughton’d give him the nod if the Guards were going to come around at closing time. But Tidy didn’t get the Guards that night, not until later. He sent someone else out, then and there, to put a fright into Jane Clark so as she’d pack up and run. Instead of her going to the Guards the following morning, like.”
“Who did he send?”
She ignored his question.
“Well, he got carried away. The way she talked to him-she had a sharp tongue on her, everyone knew, and she wasn’t afraid of much.” Her voice dropped back to a whisper.
“He got carried away and he wanted to…you know. Because she was a whore. She hit him with something and he hit her. Knocked her out. I wasn’t there, I only heard later. And it looked bad, he said. There was blood coming out of her nose. He came back to the hotel and told Tidy. That’s when Naughton came into the picture.”
“Whose idea was it to dump Jamesy Bourke at the cottage, then?”
Her eyes crept back to meet Minogue’s.
“Naughton’s. Bourke was a thorn in everyone’s side around there. As for Jane Clark, Naughton didn’t give a damn.”
Naughton had covered for them all, then, Minogue thought. Dan Howard, wayward, hapless, spoiled, drunk; Sheila Hanratty, determined to make a husband of him; the man Tidy Howard had sent to bully Jane Clark. He did not feel the cold anymore. His hands still tingled but the cord seemed to have lost its bite. He tried to squeeze his hands into fists but they felt swollen and weak. There were so many questions he wanted to put to her but his concentration was being stolen by his hands, his cramped knees. He stared at the wall and let his gaze slide down to the floor. His head felt unbearably heavy now. Thirsty, weak. How many were involved? Did Dan Howard know? He must. Had Naughton set the place on fire?
“Well, that’s all past,” she said. “No going back now.”
“Look,” he whispered. “You know this can’t work.”
She frowned.
“Keeping me here. A hostage or whatever. Those other fellas don’t know it, but I think you do. They’re all washed up now. They’ve screwed up royally. You let them shoot up the house-while you’re in it, even- so’s we’d all be scared off or something. But you couldn’t carry on whatever it is you’re doing without one of them making a mess of something-”
“Me!” she hissed, and bent down, her face inches from Minogue’s. He saw her chest heaving like his own, smelled her musky scent. “Me? I’ve screwed up? That’s what really galls me! My husband is screwing around in Dublin, playing the fucking statesman and I’m the one that’s screwed up?”
Minogue recoiled from her, pushing the chair up off its front legs. She pointed the gun at the ceiling.
“Look,” she said. “Even his own bloody father knew that my husband was a good-for-nothing waster. He got me to marry Dan because he thought I could put some backbone into him. And I worked and I worked and I worked at it! I prayed for him, for us, for damn near everybody. I tried everything-surgery in London, even. I went to New York to a specialist. I lived on bloody herbs and yoghurt for six months. Then I find out it’s too late.”
She lowered her arm and poked his chest with the gun. He held his breath. The light in the room dimmed and discoloured.
“And I even got over all that, so I did,” she whispered. “And I came back and I got on with life. I played the part. It was bred into me to be loyal, to try no matter what. That’s how we are. We know life is hard and you have to fight. Christ, we’re millionaires now, did you know that? Dan has money stashed away in France and in the States. ‘Slush funds.’ The ones he told me about anyway.”
She gave a mirthless laugh and brushed away her hair with her free hand.
“The tourists are swarming in. He’ll get re-elected, business is booming. Everything’s rosy. All I have to do is
