The hulking man’s tone turned suddenly gentle. He rubbed slowly at his head and his expression changed into something Minogue would later recall as a smile.
“Have you been digging into this a long time?”
“Awhile.”
“And what did yiz find?”
That faint smile held fast at the corners of Naughton’s mouth. His hand came away from the red swelling over his eye and, as though it were independent of him, began to massage his neck. He looked out the small window to the roof of what might have been an outdoor privy. A battered-looking ginger cat walked languorously across the corrugated surface, its shadow black on the sunlit grey. Minogue looked at Naughton’s hand stroking the bristling neck. People paid a lot of money for haircuts like Naughton’s these days, he thought.
“Did yiz meet up with Dan Howard at all?” murmured Naughton. The cat stretched and turned its eyes away from the sun.
“Yes, I did,” replied Minogue.
“Our home-grown statesman,” said Naughton to the window.
“He doesn’t claim to be,” said the Inspector.
Naughton wheeled on his heels from the window.
“ ‘He doesn’t claim to be.’ What do you know? Dan Howard’s a fucking child!”
Minogue felt an instinctive anger. To be young and unstamped with adult knowing was for Naughton contemptible.
“Nothing to his da, by Jesus,” Naughton went on. “But sure look at the da now. He’s like a cabbage or something, lying in the bed. Fed with a tube, like he’s being watered. Hah. I hear that Sheila Howard visits him more than does Dan himself. What does that tell you?”
“Have you seen Tidy Howard since he had the stroke?”
Naughton fixed a look on Minogue. There was condescension in it, hostility too. The kettle began to sigh and give low cracking sounds as the element began to disperse and move the water within.
“Mind your own fucking business.”
“Who phoned the station that night?”
Naughton made a pitying smile.
“Dan Howard’s not a man at all. Oh, he can talk the best you ever heard, along with the rest of them. But, sure, what’s talk? He can smile and play the game, and I don’t doubt that he’ll get elected again.”
Naughton returned to rubbing his swollen eyebrow. Thwarted yet in his efforts to come to grips with this man, Minogue still sensed something to the side of Naughton’s contempt.
“Dan Howard doesn’t know what made him,” Naughton murmured. “That’s why he’ll never be the man his father was.” He looked sideways at Hoey before glaring at Minogue.
“I don’t know about you but this pal of yours here, I can tell. Soft, like the rest of ’em his age. Complaining about getting a tap in the bollocks. But you”-Naughton closed one eye and squinted at the Inspector-“one minute you’re all business and the next minute you’re asking for tea! Maybe you’re a fuckin’ head-case or a good one gone soft yourself. No balls, hah?”
To Minogue, Naughton seemed to be both deflated and made even more monstrous at the same time. Maybe he had had his morning gargle and by now the drink had set free the impulses and thoughts of a bachelor too long unshackled from the daily routines of being a Guard.
“You didn’t know Bridie Howard. How could you?” Naughton went on in a monotone. “She should have gone to the nuns the way she wanted to before she up and married a man like Tidy Howard. A dried-up bitch and I don’t care if she’s gone these twenty years. If she’d a been a woman and a wife proper, sure who knows how things would have turned out? She made a baby out of little Dan, so she did. I sometimes thought it was revenge she was after for having had to dirty herself, by God, to get up the pole in the first place. God help her, she’s dead.”
Naughton licked his lips and snorted.
“It’s not natural for a man to marry someone who spent every night with her skinny legs turned around one another like a hawthorn bush inside a night-dress made of feckin’ chain-mail. With her back to the wall and her rosary beads in her hands…”
It was Hoey who asked the question Minogue had framed in his own mind.
“How do you know all this?”
Naughton made no reply, but his eyes slipped out of focus.
Minogue recalled Eilo McInerny’s account of Tidy and his cronies gathering in the pub after closing-time for a few jars while she had to make sandwiches for them.
“You never married yourself,” he said to Naughton. Naughton’s eyelids almost closed.
“Keep your fucking nose out of my private life. What would you know about anything? I looked after me mother and five brothers and sisters, so I did. Living in this very house. I put a sister through nursing in London. And I liked my job, by God.”
“You’d have known everyone in town, then.”
“Damn right, I did. I knew the Bourkes better than they knew themselves, some a them.” Naughton paused and pointed a finger at his head.
“Wild out, the lot of them. Wasters and madmen. Only the mother was there, they’d be all in jail or in some mental hospital. You say Bourke’s after getting himself killed? Well, I could have told you something like that’d happen to him. I could have told you that twenty years ago.”
“So Bourke was completely to blame for the death of Jane Clark.”
Naughton flicked away Minogue’s words with a snap of his fingers. Hoey stood up.
“What the hell would you like to tell me next?” Naughton was almost shouting now. “ ‘Death by misadventure’? You fucking iijit! Or that Bourke should have been given five years for manslaughter? That it was an accident? Don’t you be starting with this mollycoddle stuff the social workers are full of, that Arthur Guinness did it, or the Pope of Rome.” He pointed at Minogue.
“Let me tell you something, Mr Know-It-All.” Tiny gobs of spittle flew out from Naughton’s lips into the sunlight.
“I’ll tell you what really killed that one. She did it herself! Yes, she did. She was a whore. That bitch. She had more rides than a bike. There was nothing she wouldn’t do, no poor iijit she wouldn’t drag into her web. The more I heard about her, the worse it got.”
“What sort of things do you mean?”
The kettle was almost boiled now. Naughton’s reply came in a savage whisper.
“She fucked half the parish.” His eyebrows went up and he gave a bark of laughter. “For free too.”
Naughton sank into the chair and shook his head at his own humour. He enjoyed it the more because neither Minogue nor Hoey was smiling. The Inspector studied Naughton’s changed face and guessed that he’d go for the drink again any minute now. He glanced down at the mess on the floor and then returned Hoey’s anxious stare for a moment.
“You seem to remember that night well, then,” said Minogue.
The amusement stayed in Naughton’s eyes but he said nothing. He looked out the window and let his face slide into a slack mask of indifference.
“You think you’re going to find out something worth finding out if you poke away at this long enough, don’t you?”
Minogue shrugged. “I’m trying to fill in gaps in what we know about that night.”
“I thought you knew everything, smart-arse. I was out in the car that night. I saw the fire a long ways off.”
“No one phoned you?”
Naughton looked away and rubbed at his forehead. Then he looked back at the Inspector, frowning as if he were looking at a child who had been warned off mischief but had promptly done it again.
“Did Crossan put you up to this? Christ, Crossan’s pot-boy, you are. Hah. Send a Guard to bait a Guard, is that it? How much is he paying you? You turn against your own, is it, and run with the likes of Crossan?”
Minogue didn’t answer. Hoey was still standing next to the window. Naughton laid his palms on his knees and slowly stood upright. Halfway up he grasped his forehead, making Hoey recoil in anticipation. The contempt slid off Naughton’s face.
“Jesus, it’s like the kick of a donkey I got,” he whispered. “You can have your tea. I’m due a smathan.”
He walked carefully to the dresser and opened it. From behind a dinner-plate he took out a half-bottle of clear liquid and unscrewed the top. He drank from the bottle, paused and took another mouthful.