“I’m going!” said the mother. She turned and pushed the pram.
Minogue watched her staged resolution and he wondered how far she’d walk before she turned for another ultimatum. Some vague feeling rustled in his chest. The child howled wait, mommy, wait. The mother walked by the Fiat and glanced in at the two detectives. Reflected sun from a window was on her face as she turned. The glare caught every line, the cast of her mouth, her eyelashes. Wait, mommy, wait, cried the child, but he stayed on the footpath.
“I’ll do no waiting! Get up off the ground this instant and hurry on with you, you bold boy!”
The threat of abandonment worked. The child tried to swallow his cries and rose to his feet. Boys, thought Minogue, and remembered Daithi’s infant temper-a lot more work than girls. Little pleased with her victory, the mother had more conditions.
“And no more whinging out of you!” she warned.
“I’d say she’s something, that one,” murmured Hoey.
“With the pram?”
“No. Sheila Howard.”
The surprise worked its way down to his stomach. Hoey’s mind was off on its own course. He was giving his colleague and nominal boss a cool survey. Minogue started the car hastily enough to grind the starter motor. He gritted his teeth, tightened his seatbelt and busied himself lickering with the controls for the choke and then the heater. Up the Listowel Road and on to Tarbert and the ferry to Clare; meet with Crossan, see if he had anything new; try not to take a swipe at him. Try not to have a row with Hoey en route either. He took a deep breath and released it. Hoey was still eyeing him when he turned to check for traffic. The Inspector trod heavily on the brake pedal.
“What the hell are you looking at?” he growled at Hoey.
Hoey said nothing, but he kept looking at him. Minogue searched his colleague’s face. Hoey’s expression reminded him of one of those bench-marks of marriage, a high-water mark, when one partner looks at the other in the wake of a thoughtless hurt. He disengaged the clutch.
“What’s up with you, Shea? Quit giving me the treatment.”
“What’s up with you, you mean.”
“This is not a good time to be playing games with me. You’ve got something on your mind? Do you resent being dragged up and down the country, is that it? Well, if that’s the case, all you need do is-”
“What the hell use is it to me to say something to a man with his fingers stuck in his ears?”
Minogue understood that something had lurched out into his path like an inescapable drunkard weaving toward him on the footpath, mirroring his efforts to sidestep him. He had defended the Howards to Crossan, a man who knew them far better than he, Minogue, did. Now he was annoyed that he had to defend them again to Hoey. He, Minogue, had turned away from something, but part of him-that part of him which over the years had become his real intelligence-had been trying to make itself known to him.
“It was just you and Crossan the other night. Going to see her,” Hoey said. “I wondered why you didn’t ask me along.”
“I didn’t want two Guards, Shea. It’d change the atmos-”
He saw her in jeans then and the Fiat seemed to get unbearably warm. Sudden heat prickled under his armpits and by his ears. Her blonde hair, her head turning in the lamplight, the swell of her breasts under the sweater. His heart kept up its tattoo and he knew that it was futile to try and disguise the colour rising in his face. He looked away down the street and switched off the engine. The car rolled back half a foot and the tyres bounced dully on the curb. The street ahead was a striped and jumbled shadow play, glare adjoining gloom under a sky already lightening at the edges. He didn’t bother to look at his watch. An hour and they’d need headlights. It’d be dark and them getting into Ennis. What the hell would he say to Sheila Howard?
Hoey looked away down the street before taking out a cigarette. The mother with the pram and the laggard infant were crossing the street in the middle distance. She yanked on the child’s arm as Hoey tapped a fresh cigarette on his knee and led it to his lips. There it rested for several seconds. Then he gently plucked the cigarette out again. His dry lips stuck to the filter. He replaced the cigarette carefully in the packet and then nudged his colleague. It was a gesture of intimacy that startled Minogue.
“What’s the big hurry back up to Ennis anyway?” said Hoey. “I’ll stand you a mug of something.”
Minogue nodded and kept his eyes on the opening of the street where the mother, pram and child had disappeared. Swallowed up, he thought, as they turned the corner. He wanted them to return but he didn’t know why. The anticipation he felt while staring at the corner made him alert again. His body felt flabby and loose in the seat. His eyes ached and he rubbed at them. The more he rubbed, the more colours appeared. He thought of his brother’s family sequestered on the farm with the night about to come down over their fields, the bleak heights of the Burren which rose around the farm given over to winter again. He stopped rubbing his eyes but held his eyelids closed and watched the wash of red and yellow, the dark blotches spreading. Still as the land might look, there were squad cars parked on sidestreets, Guards sitting by phones waiting: a shooting, a suspect on the move again, a vehicle approaching… For a moment, Minogue was hovering over it all again, as in that dream. Fire blazed up from the thatch, the screaming Bourke, the firelight dancing on the stone walls.
“Well, what do you say?”
Like the yarns he had heard as a child about travellers falling into the underworld, he had fallen through a hole somewhere, he saw then. There the pookas and fairies still held sway, marshalling spells and riddles to entrap the arrogant who had inherited the upper world. Great God, what an iijit I am still. Decades in Dublin, cute from years of dodging traffic and chancers, criminals and superiors, later content in interior victories. Almost educated, he liked to think. Now he saw that his judgement had gone out the window. Sheila Howard, thinking about her half the day. Hoey had been sitting next to him to witness his blunders. Upside down, reversed: measures confounded, rules obscured. Humiliation grasped at his guts and held. God, what an iijit. Hoey opened his door gently and waited. Minogue looked over at the open door but didn’t see anything. He felt he was nearing the surface now, but he was still pursued by images and words. Iseult’s hunger for life, her scorn keeping her keen; Daithi working toward an immigrant life in the States; Kathleen’s steadfast love, her patience and indulgence. Kilmartin pausing in mid-oratory, face framed by anxious cynicism. The porpoises alongside the boat, carefree taunts from their world.
“She’s probably up in Dublin by now,” he heard himself mutter.
“What?” asked Hoey, and bent down to look in the car.
“She’s up in Dublin with Dan Howard, I imagine.”
He rubbed his eyes again. His eyelashes clung together when he stopped. When he tugged his eyelids open, there was still no sign of the Superman who had been dragged into oblivion by his mother. The shadows seemed deeper now.
“I’ll phone the Killer,” he said.
Hoey nodded.
“But Shea.” Hoey bent down again. “When we get back to Ennis, when we walk in the door of Crossan’s office…” Again the words disappeared, despite his wish to sound resolute.
“We’ll tell him what we know,” Hoey said quietly.
“Yes, I know. But as for speculating, that’s not really on, okay?”
“Look,” said Hoey, and he looked down the street. “There’s an eating-house down there. Maybe they’ll have something there.”
Minogue tumbled wearily out onto the path.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Had he slept? Jesus Christ. Minogue’s heart gave a leap, and he grasped the steering wheel tighter. He stared toward the limit of the headlight beam and flicked it on to full. A red band of sky bled into honey was alongside them, whipped by passing trees. Branches wrung from the trees by last month’s gales still lay in ditches, their white stumps catching the headlights. How had he got this far on automatic pilot? Hoey was half-slumped, half-curled into his seat. Minogue had seen his eyelids batting occasionally. Where the hell were they now? As if on cue, a sign to Kilmihill lit up on the curb ahead. Another twenty minutes to Ennis, so. Closer to the sign he made out the white paint on the wall underneath: “Brits out now.” He slowed and decided that the clumsy picture drawn on the wall was a rendition of an M-16. The paint had dribbled down, like white blood, the Inspector thought. The Fiat’s lights followed the bend, straightened and dropped the slogan into the night again.