“There, we’re right,” he whispered hoarsely. “A fella should always start the day with holy water.”
He probably had caches of drink all over his house, Minogue guessed. Poteen gave off little smell. He probably had a cheap and ready supply of it, and his breath wouldn’t reek of shop whiskey.
“Tell me about Dalcais,” said Minogue.
Naughton stood still and blinked once, slowly.
“You have shares in it. The Howards’ company. Have you forgotten, maybe?”
“Oh, I’m only now beginning to see what kind of a man you are.” Naughton spoke in a gentle voice. “You won’t be happy until…”
He closed his eyes and gave himself over to swallowing the poteen until he had drained the bottle. When he opened his eyes again, they were watery. His bellows of laughter rolled about the house. Suddenly they stopped and Naughton rubbed his wet eyes slowly before looking down into the empty bottle. He looked at the policemen with a melancholy amusement.
“So there, Lord Muck down from Dublin.”
The steady, watery eyes rested on some point on the wall behind Minogue and he sensed the words waiting to be said, the doubts warring in Naughton’s mind. Naughton rubbed at his chin and a faint smile flickered around his lips. A bashful expression crossed his face and lifted his eyebrows, taking years off the crusty face.
“There, what?” Minogue asked.
Naughton’s face darkened suddenly with anger.
“I know what you’re looking for,” he hissed. “You want to know if I did me job that night. Me sworn job as a Guard. I’ll tell you how I handled that night’s work, mister-like I always did me job, that’s how,” he snarled. “I did it well. I did right by God and man. And that’s more than many are doing these days.”
Naughton sniffed, covered one nostril with his thumb and then looked at the floor by his feet as though surveying a place to spit. Minogue made another foray.
“You saw a fire and you drove over?” said Minogue.
Naughton spoke vaguely as though he had moved on to other thoughts. “That’s it.”
“Where was Doyle, the Sergeant? When did he get to the house?”
Naughton leaned back against the edge of the countertop. A plume of steam came from the boiling kettle behind his shoulders.
“You saw Bourke at the house,” Minogue went on. Naughton’s eyes slipped out of focus.
“Like a monkey with fleas,” he murmured. “Leaping about, he was.”
“There was no one in the car with you? Out from town, I mean?”
Naughton didn’t answer but stared at the empty bottle.
“Did you know Eilo McInerny-she worked at Howard’s hotel?”
“A fat kind of a girl with big agricultural ankles,” Naughton muttered. “She’s another one.”
“Another what?”
Naughton ignored the question.
“She’s another what?” Minogue asked louder.
“Another fly in that one’s trap,” Naughton said. “Sleeping with her. Whatever they do with one another. Fucking animals. What am I saying, animals? Animals don’t do that.”
“Eilo McInerny doesn’t have fond memories of Portaree, the way she was treated,” said Minogue.
Naughton looked up at the Inspector. “How was she treated, so, if you know so much?”
“Drummed out,” replied Minogue. He heard the indignation rising in his own voice. “Kicked out of her job. No family to go home to. Turfed out.”
Naughton rose to his full height and let his arms down by his side. He left Minogue a look of easy contempt and turned to the kettle.
“She did better out of it than she deserved, let me tell you,” he said into the steam.
He flicked off the socket switch and reached for a teapot sitting next to a plastic bowl in which a head of cabbage was soaking. Minogue waited for Naughton to turn around. He considered this hulk’s life here amidst the stale world of boiled cabbage and whiskey, porridge and ironing, the stacks of newspapers in a home that reminded Minogue of a guard room. Naughton made the tea slowly, moving with deliberate care.
“Here, I’ll get the cups.”
Naughton spoke in a tone so soft that Minogue was startled. The Inspector had been meeting men like Naughton all his life: Kilmartin himself, the Mayo colossus minor to Naughton but filled with a like mix-the cynical exuberance at another’s folly, then the disarming, implacable loyalty to those he had become close to. Policemen trusted policemen and few others. That was part and parcel of the job, Minogue understood. But many Guards were immured in their distrust of people, and Minogue had moved beyond feeling sorry for them.
He watched Naughton, so light on his feet now, his movements dexterous and measured as he took down good china cups and saucers. Naughton balanced them expertly while he drew out milk from the fridge and then stepped daintily around the pieces of the broken bottle. For a moment Minogue believed that he caught a glimpse of what could have been a fussy parent, a man who would like to cook for his wife or children. Did Naughton drink to escape these things or to indulge them, he wondered.
“There, now,” said Naughton, “we’re right. Oh, spoons,” and he turned on his heel.
“Most of us are retired out by now, I daresay,” he went on. “It’s a lot different since I walked out the door here one fine morning, with my letter in my fist and my new suit in my case and the ma waving. Then in the train to Templemore.”
He paused, his hand in the drawer, and turned toward the two wary policemen with a boyish smile.
“God, but they were great days.” His eyes lost their sharp contact with Minogue’s then. “The most of ’em. But the people now, they hardly have a pick of respect for the law. It’s the sex thing and”-he looked sheepishly down at the shattered bottle-“of course, the human frailties, as my mother would say.”
He nodded his head conclusively and bit his lower lip. How much of a burden had that harelip been to him, Minogue wondered. Branded for life, made him hostile to any softness in himself? Shamed him with girls? Left him angry at a world whose imagined recoil from his features had closed him off from others?
“My father, and him dying above in St. Lukes in Dublin-God, I hate that bloody town, I wish we had’ve sold it to the British-my father told me that God always sends the devil to test everyone that’s born into the world. The devil can take any shape at all. It might even be somebody who sits next to you in school. Or a woman. Or something that happens in your work. To test you and remind you to be vigilant, be on your guard, like. Do you believe that?”
Lessened by long exposure now, the whiskey smell had given way to the smell of drawing tea. The sweet, strong aroma took Minogue’s thoughts for several seconds. Home. Morning, breakfast in bed. Talk, night. The blue sky framed in the window seemed to beckon him to hope. To test you, he heard Naughton’s words again. He saw Sheila Howard’s face but he felt no shame now. Hoey sat very still. Naughton let the small bundle of spoons free from his fingers onto the table.
“I do,” said Minogue. “I know what you mean.”
The spell of immobility in the room was broken now. Naughton’s words yet unreleased began to exert a stronger force on the Inspector. Hope came as a dull excitement in his stomach. Naughton knows something, he tried to tell Hoey with his eyes. Wait. Naughton grinned again at some recollection.
“It’s up to God in the end,” he whispered, and spread the spoons on the table. “But do you know what the hard thing is? I bet you don’t. I can nearly tell in a man’s face if he knows this…”
“What is it?”
“God doesn’t care. He doesn’t, you know. I found that out too late. If there is a God, well, He doesn’t care. And what sort of a God is that, then?”
He turned back to the open drawer and took out folded dishcloths. Minogue looked to the sky again. A diesel lorry droned by on the street, its exhaust echo resonating in the window. Naughton flipped open the bundle of cloths, sighed and lifted the revolver up, clasping and unclasping it as if to test its weight.