“To be sure,” said Minogue
An interpretive center in the Burren area of his home county had been left half-completed after protests about it had overruled the local peoples’ support for it.
“Aoife can give you the ins and outs of all the things that need to be juggled and managed for this one. God knows! It’s not just money at all, at all. She worked on Mullaghmore too. I remember she saw it coming too, the showdown over that. Anyway, the Fields will be a showpiece entirely. There’ll be no slip-ups with this one. It was heritage funds from Europe that made the big difference.”
“She’s putting the finishing touches to this whole project, you say?”
“Oh yes,” said Garland. “We have the funds, the plans approved. We’re into tenders already and the nitty-gritty. There’s great support all over. Sure the planning and approval process was nearly a love-in. A lot of that was due to Aoife She has that combination: a real expert in her field, and she knows how to manage outside of the fieldwork. Ideal.”
Minogue searched Garland’s face for any irony.
“We’re ahead of the pack here in Ireland,” he went on. “People are coming to Ireland for a lot more than the forty shades of green now. They want to see nature yes, but they want to see a place and a people full of history too, people on the periphery of the continent. I’m not sure that we know what we’re sitting on here.”
Minogue watched a customer looking down the wine menu. These Carra Fields was nearly as far into the west as you could get without falling off into the sea.
“Yes indeed,” Garland added. “Like the economists say, we have good fundamentals, in the line of history. Tremendous historical resources.”
“Our time has come, has it,” Minogue said.
“It has indeed,” said Garland. “And not a moment too soon.”
“How do you mean?”
Garland rubbed at his nose. He looked at Minogue’s writing in his notebook.
“Well, it’s an open secret the way things had been going,” he murmured “So much had been lost.”
“Lost,” Minogue said.
“Yes. Chalices from monastic sites were dug up and melted down hundreds of years ago. Finds that were never reported. Standing stones used to hold up fences. The Beara Chalice, do you remember that?”
“From the field down near Ballyfernter there a few years ago?”
“That’s the one,” Garland said “We had to give thirty thousand pounds to the finder for goodwill. Honest man he was, that turned it in, and him after turning the field one October and there was the chalice lying there with a big dent in it from the harrow… But sure what matter. A bog will push stuff up and you can never tell when or where. The thirty thousand was to tell people they’d be well paid to turn in things rather than be conniving or just breaking things up and selling them. And nowadays any fella in off the street can buy any number of electronic gadgets.”
“Like what?” from Malone.
“Metal detectors — curse of God on them. Well I remember the meetings we used to have back in the early ’70s, when we got the first of the satellite images and we had a bit of money to do the aerial surveys. Oh, you’d laugh — or cry, maybe.”
Garland looked over his shoulder at the group he had left.
“It was Hobson’s choice there,” he said. “We had to decide back then if we should even be making public the digs and the finds until after we had the sites set up and secured.”
Minogue had a second after the tickle before the sneeze erupted. When he finished blowing his nose he looked up to find Garland staring at him.
“Tell you what I can do,” Garland said. The fingers, so short that the inspector couldn’t stop staring at them, were tugging, poking under Garland’s chin. “Come around to the office with me. I’ll see if there’s anything lying around there that’d give us any help.”
CHAPTER 1O
Garland wheezed as he walked down the lane to the car. His gait reminded Minogue of a hen walking ahead of a vehicle trying to get into the farmyard. The inspector slowed.
“It’ll be me looking through her appointment diary,” Garland said. “More than that, I’d have to get advice on.”
Minogue took in the flushed face, the chest rising and falling.
“You can see the situation, now, can’t you?”
“Fair enough.”
Malone drove around the green and down Dawson Street. He asked Garland about the mummies. Everyone wanted to know about the mummies and when they’d be back. Not a day went by without someone asking after them. What about the bog man, Malone asked then, the one that looked like a shoe. And the bloodstained tunics from the 1916 Rising, were they out being cleaned or something? Minogue almost smiled. Malone, like thousands of people probably, wanted these grisly, tatty, extravagant relics, the meat and potatoes of childhood visits to the museum, back on show. Garland sidestepped Malone’s inquiries. He began talking about regional museums, sites, interpretive centers, restoration. Minogue eyed the group of young men drinking cans of something by the Kilkenny Design shop.
Garland told them that Viking Dublin was unexpectedly popular now. There was an interactive exhibit on Swift’s Dublin being set up too.
“What, we’d get to talk to him,” said Malone. “Have a pint with him?”
Two Guards on duty by the gates to Leinster House eyed them as they passed.
“Virtually,” Garland said. “Go around by the car park here. The staff door.”
Minogue eased his way out of the Nissan. A Guard who had been sitting in a squad car closer to the Shelbourne stepped out. Minogue met him halfway The Guard looked over the photocard and then nodded at Malone. Minogue had forgotten who the statue was that they passed in the middle of the car park. A quartz streetlamp began to buzz and glow dimly by the corner of Molesworth Street.
Garland was having trouble finding his key. Minogue looked up to the camera over the door. Garland huffed and puffed, said damn, keyed in. A security guard met them inside the glass cubicle. Garland helloed him and signed in.
“Anybody above, Kevin?”
The security guard had long hair.
“Studio lad I think.”
Garland led the two detectives down a hall to a staircase. Minogue pinched the bridge of his nose but he couldn’t clear it. He glanced at the names on the doors, the titles: resource outreach coordinator, curators, field facilities.
“Where do you keep the mummies now?” Malone wanted to know. Minogue heard Garland’s wheezes.
“Ah that’d be telling. Let’s say they’re under wraps for now.”
A door opened on to a newly decorated foyer. It was gray with bottle-green signs, its lights hidden under a plinth by the ceiling. Garland opened a door that led into a large wmdowless room lit only by three security lights set into the ceiling. Moveable partitions ran the length of the room.
Minogue took in the computers in each cubicle. Postcards from Thailand and Donegal and New York, Israel, those rock-cleft palaces in Jordan. He slowed to eye a poster for the Carra Fields. Why the hell leave it black and white with masses of clouds looming overhead? Lugubrious, mystical Celt guff. Of course, that was it. the writing on the bottom was German. Calculated, marketed: smart.
Garland and Malone were waiting for him by one of three doors. Garland tugged at his ear. Dr. Aoife Hartnett (Litt M, MBA). Minogue tried to figure out the number of years that had taken.
“Tell you what,” said Garland “Let me just go into the studio and ask them if Aoife’s checked in since. Come in and have a look if you want.”
The third door: multimedia. That was something to do with computers. The hum from it was music. There were cartoons on the door about engineers, computers with faces, a Murphy’s law, a caveman with a laptop under his arm.
The man facing the computer screen turned in his chair and pushed it back on its rollers. He didn’t stand.