“Shea, it just occurred to me that I may have drawn you into a big pile of…”
“What?”
Minogue tried to put some order on the words.
“I wonder if maybe I’m doing something very, very stupid indeed here.” The words dried up. His mind returned to the porpoises as the suburbs of Limerick joined up with the road. He imagined them smirking as they turned from the starlit harbours of the west of Ireland out to sea.
“Look, Shea, I know you’re far from keen at this stage. I could leave you off at the train station as long as you promise me-”
Startled, Hoey looked over at Minogue. The Inspector braked hard for a traffic light by the Gaelic Athletic grounds. They were a mile yet from the Sarsfield Bridge into Limerick.
“I mean, it’s nothing to me basically,” Minogue went on, “I can take it, but you-”
“I have my career to consider?”
“Well…”
“Well, what?” said Hoey.
Minogue started off from the light but forgot that he had left the car in third. The Fiat staggered and stalled.
“I don’t want to pull you down with me,” Minogue muttered. Hoey began to laugh. He tried to stop but he couldn’t.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Minogue knocked and inclined his head to the door. Naughton’s house was at the end of a terrace. Heavy curtains hung from the one window next to the door. The window wells were freshly painted with a thick cream gloss and the two upper windows had double-glazed aluminium frames. Minogue stepped back and looked at the upstairs window. Hoey was standing in the sunshine at the end of the terrace. The door opened abruptly and Minogue turned to face a tall man with a full head of white hair brushed back over a pink face. Two clear and piercing blue eyes stared into Minogue’s. A light scent of shaving soap and brilliantine came to the Inspector, followed by house smells of tea and a fry. Naughton had said something but Minogue hadn’t heard. He had been watching the harelip scar as Naughton had uttered the words.
“Hello there, now,” said Naughton again.
He was wide and big and his hands hung low alongside his thighs. There was something of the giant about him, Minogue thought, like those ex-RIC men he had known. The physical size of those precursors of the Gardai had been adduced to be one of the prime drivers of law enforcement until the guerilla warfare of the War of Independence had swept away any grudging respect accorded them.
“Good day to you now, Mr Naughton,” he began. “I’m Matt Minogue, a Guard…”
Naughton’s eyes were on Hoey now, who had sidled down to stand beside Minogue.
“…and this is my colleague, Seamus Hoey.”
Naughton folded his arms. Minogue looked at the bulk straining the jumper. A bit of a pot on him but by no means gone to seed. A bachelor, a retired Guard, who still wore a collar and tie under his jumper.
“Well, I haven’t met ye before,” said Naughton. He looked up and down the terrace. “Are yiz here on some kind of business?”
“We’re down from Ennis-”
“Are ye attached to Ennis station?”
“No, we’re not actually-”
“So where are yiz from then?”
Minogue paused and glanced at an old woman passing on the footpath behind them.
“Good morning, now, Mr Naughton,” she crowed.
“Isn’t it now,” said Naughton.
Minogue looked beyond Naughton into the house.
“Come in, I suppose,” said Naughton. “Come in.”
The front room was a musty parlour, spotlessly clean and unused. The Inspector sat on a hard-sprung sofa and looked around the room. There were photographs of men in Guard’s uniforms of thirty years ago, one of an old woman with the face of a mischievous child, bunched in a smile. The fireplace had been fitted with a gas burning unit complete with bogus glowing coals. A nest of tables squatted under the window. Between two cumbersome chairs stood a buffet with glass doors over a series of drawers.
“Ye’ll have something?” said Naughton.
He rubbed the back of his huge right hand with the thumb of his left. Minogue associated the gesture with big men who could never lose a teenage awkwardness about their size.
“Ah, no, you’re all right there, thanks,” said Minogue.
“Are yiz sure now? A smathan, even.”
The Inspector shook his head and stole a glance at Naughton’s face again as he made to sit down. If this was what recourse to alcohol in a big way did, Minogue wondered, then maybe there was something to be said for it. But no. Something about Naughton put the Inspector in mind of a bull elephant, a creature who might go suddenly, felled by a massive stroke, crashing to the ground.
“From Ennis, you say now,” said Naughton. He sat forward, elbows on his knees, a massive hand clasped around the knuckles of the other.
“Yes.”
Minogue tried to put on a friendly face, but he continued to be distracted by details. The soapy smell from a face meticulously shaved, the faint smell of shoe polish, the razor nick by Naughton’s ear, the outline of the braces that the retired Guard still attached to his trousers. A life of habit, a man who liked and needed routines.
“But yiz are not Ennis.”
“We work in Dublin.”
“God help yiz, so.”
Minogue tried again to smile.
“It’s gone desperate in Dublin, I believe,” said Naughton. “Not safe to walk the streets, they say.”
“I suppose,” said Minogue. “But sure troubles can come anywhere. The divil has his own guide, as they say.”
“Tis true for you. Tell me, are you a Sergeant?”
“I’m an Inspector, in actual fact. They kicked me upstairs to be rid of me.”
Naughton issued a sceptical, knowing wink.
“I came down on a visit to my relations this little while back,” Minogue said. “And I, er, ran into a man above in Ennis. He told me a few things about events back, now, a good number of years back…”
“Who?”
“Aloysious Crossan.”
Naughton scratched the back of his head.
“I knew him,” he muttered. “He’s a big name in the law. Is he still at it?”
Minogue nodded. “To great effect too, I believe.”
“Hah,” scoffed Naughton. “He was mighty sharp with his mouth as I recall. But he had the name of being good for them that needed it.”
He sniffed and gave Minogue a grin with no warmth in it.
“You know yourself,” he said.
Minogue raised his eyebrows.
“His clients,” said Naughton, his hands working over one another. “He hires himself out to scuts.”
“I’ve heard that said,” said Minogue.
“If and he was a woman, he’d be a prostitute,” Naughton added. He glanced down at his own hands. Like a boxer listening to a pep talk, Minogue thought, a horse of a man. “But sure you wouldn’t know these days, with the homos and what have you, would you? Anything goes, nowadays.”
The blue eyes which came up from the stilled hands had a glaze of satisfied amusement. Minogue’s eyes were drawn to the wiry white hairs, like pigs’ bristles standing out by Naughton’s collar.
“He is a Protestant, all right,” said Minogue. “But you probably knew that.”
“Prostitute, I said.”
Minogue feigned relief. “Oh. That’s not so bad. I thought you said Protestant.”
With no movement that Minogue could detect, the face had become blank and hard.
“What do yiz want?” he said.
Minogue thought about the house afire in his dream, himself weirdly aerial over the blaze, with the sea black under the stars and the porpoises racing out to the sea.
“How much did you have to drink the night of the fire?”
“What fire? What are you talking about?”
“Jane Clark. Jamesy Bourke. Dan Howard. You.”
“Fuck off. Inspector or no inspector, you’re nothing to me. Get out of here.”