“Shit,” he said.
The roof of the car was cold under his palms. He spread his hands wider. Cigarette smoke issued out thinly from Eilo McInerny’s window.
“What the hell got into him?” he heard her say. “He should get a grip on himself or something.”
People, he almost shouted-humans. Images flew through his mind. Fire in the night and the stone walls reaching for the sea in darkness.
“He’s fed up with being taken for an iijit,” he heard Hoey reply. “He doesn’t get like this very often, I can tell you.”
Hoey said something else to her but in a tone too low for the Inspector to make out the words. Minogue turned and leaned back against the window, folding his arms. Overhead a dozen seagulls hovered white against the sky. The sunlight was brass on the side of the street. Naughton was in the morgue and his house was sealed. The bang reverberated in Minogue’s mind again and he shuddered. The gun Naughton had used was on its way to the laboratory in Dublin, thence to Moran, the Gardai’s resident ballistics expert. Would Moran be able to put parentage on the gun, link it to others? Ward, the detective who had interviewed him for a half-hour, had asked him twice if he had suspected that Naughton had had a gun. Stupid question. If Matt Minogue had so much as wondered whether Naughton had a gun somewhere, he’d never have gone near the damned house. Where did he get the gun?
“Oi,” he heard. He sat back into the Fiat.
“I have me job to go to,” Eilo McInerny said. “Mel’ll be home from school. I have to phone her and give out to her about her homework.” She paused to take a last pull on the cigarette.
“Then I’ll go back to Tom and Bridie and Maureen above in the hotel, and I’ll serve up a dinner to a crowd of people. Me feet will be hanging off me when I get home. But I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and put a bit of money aside for a trip to London. It’s for Mel. I promised her we’d go sometime.” She turned up the cigarette and studied the smoke rising from the tip.
“And I might just stay up late and have a few jars with Tom.” She looked up at Minogue. “And I might have a bit of fun. The Russian hands and the Roman fingers, you know?”
Minogue stared back into her eyes. People, he thought. It’s a fallen world, there’s no doubt.
“And then I’ll go home. And that’ll be that. Naughton’s dead, and Jamesy Bourke’s dead, and if I wait long enough, by Jesus, the rest of ‘em will fall into their graves too. Or get shoved into them. But I’ll sleep and eat and have rows with Mel and Tom. I’ll see all of them down, that crowd. Do you hear me?”
Minogue was caught between respect for her tenacity and dismay at her bitterness.
“All too well,” he said.
“Well, because you’re not a gobshite Guard-at least not according to your pal here-”
Both Minogue and Eilo McInerny looked over at Hoey. The detective examined his nails. His hands were trembling again, Minogue saw. He stared at Hoey’s forehead, willing him to look up.
“-who tells me you’re different, to the extent that you’re having rows with even the Guards in Ennis about Jamesy Bourke. Now that is something. And now I hear from him here that you’re ready to move heaven and hell to get at what happened to Jane.” Her eyes stayed on Hoey. He glanced at Minogue and looked out the window. “The oddest pair I’ve ever come across,” she murmured. “Ye remind me of some story I heard and I was in school-I forget it now. Some fool and his pal going around the country looking to fix things. Making iijits of themselves, it turned out. And me the iijit here too now, about to be taken in by ye. It’s the right fool I am, God help me, and I’ll never be cured of it.”
“Look here,” said Minogue. “We’re not out to cod anyone.”
She seemed not to have heard him. A smile began to form at the sides of her mouth. “After all I’ve been through… It must be the look of your man’s face here.” She turned to Minogue and her eyes narrowed. “Well, I’ll tell you a few things now. So listen. Gimme another one of those Majors. You. Shea. What’s-your-name.”
Eilo McInerny hammered in the cigarette lighter and settled back into the seat with a sigh. She concentrated on the lighter knob, her hand poised for it to pop out.
“You know how I was treated on the stand when I was called,” she began. “I was working that night. Saw Howard and Bourke getting plastered and the rest of it. But there’s one thing that never came up at the trial and I kept it to myself until after.” The lighter popped and she grasped it.
“I remember”-she paused, speaking through the smoke-“I remember thinking to myself that I could keep it up my sleeve. I thought of it as my ticket out of there.” Her eye watered from the smoke and she rubbed at it with a soft clicking sound.
“I went up to the bitch and I told her what I’d heard and what I’d seen, with her and Tidy Howard having the row that night. I let her think what she liked, that I had heard what they had been rowing about. She said nothing, just looked at me like I was some class of a lower form of life. That was her way, of course.” Into Minogue’s mind shot the image of Sheila Howard’s face.
“Yeah,” she murmured between her teeth. “Looked down her nose at me. Said nothing. But I knew there was something fishy going on. The next day, ould Tidy takes me aside and asks me if I had ever thought of bettering myself. Whatever the hell that meant. Would I try London, says he. He’d pay my way and give me the address of a landlady, as well as some money to get me started in digs there and so on. I’d think about it, says I.” She coughed and shifted around in the seat.
“Next day, a Guard-Doyle-came by and told me that I’d be asked to be a witness at the trial because Jamesy Bourke was after being charged. I was to stay around because the trial’d come up within a few months. Sure enough, it did. Like an iijit, I thought I’d just be asked about what I saw in the pub that night. But I walked into an ambush. And you know the rest. I came back to the hotel in a flood of tears-raging mad, I was too, and frightened. Then in came this fella, you probably don’t know him-a kind of a do-for, a crony of Howard-and he says the dirtiest things. About me, about Jane Clark. Says he doesn’t want to walk the same streets of the same village where I live.”
“Who was he?” Hoey asked.
“A lug. He came into the bar a fair bit. Duignan…Day-God, it goes to show you that I can’t remember-”
“Deegan?” said Minogue. “Big, running to fat?”
“Deegan, yes. I hardly knew him. He did odd jobs and he rented farmland from the Howards, I heard. So there it was: Get out of town. After your man Deegan had gone, in comes Tidy himself, with an envelope of money and an address. ‘Twould be better for all concerned,’ says he. Liar. Bastard. Pig. There was a thousand quid in the envelope. I couldn’t believe it. I was always sure that it was me saying what I said to her ladyship got me the ticket out.”
His headache was gone. He kept his eyes on Eilo McInerny’s broad back as she trudged up the steps into the hotel. Minogue imagined her body in a rococo painting of a goddess reclining in a glade. With her hand on the door, she looked back at the two policemen before flicking the cigarette over the roof of the Fiat. Hoey waved tentatively and let his hand drop into his lap.
“You told her what had happened to you?”
Hoey nodded.
“Why?”
Hoey rubbed at the side of his nose. “She’s been through a lot. I sort of thought that she needed to know that we’re not per-well, I mean, that we were all looking for a cure for something. That I was, I mean.”
“We,” said Minogue. “You were right the first time.”
Hoey raised a hand as if to make a point but let it drop again.
“If only Tidy Howard could-” he began.
Minogue shook his head.
“What I want to know is whether Dan Howard knew anything about all this.”
“He must,” said Hoey. “He’s married to the woman, for God’s sake. Married people don’t keep secrets, like.”
Minogue laughed aloud.