“Let me tell you something now,” she went on. “You put most of the bits together and I have the feeling you could probably sort it out in the end. There was something about you that sort of… I told them too, that you could be a problem. But if you did get to the stage of putting bits together, you’d be in a lot of…trouble.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d have opened the door on something more important, that’s why. And you still want me to believe that you walked into the whole thing blind?”
He felt that something was rolling toward him, a wave about to crest and lift him high.
“Do you really want to know what happened?” she asked in a soft voice. “Do you?”
She shook her face clear of hair and leaned her shoulder against the wall again. Her head seemed to be shaking a little, he believed. In the space between them, Minogue dazedly took in her anger. She held her breath behind her teeth as she spoke.
“I went to Galway that day because I had an appointment. A doctor’s appointment. Why did I go to Galway? Because I didn’t want anyone knowing my business around here. The doctor, a man of course, Coughlan, he had a kind of a wart on his nose and it got redder. I remember looking at it and thinking that he had seen me staring at it and maybe he was mad at me for doing that. He told me I had an infection. As if I didn’t know. Looked at me like I was a tramp. Asks ‘Do you have more than one boyfriend, Miss Hanratty?’” She returned Minogue’s stare.
“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” she murmured.
Though her hair had fallen down again and her eyes had returned into the shadow, the Inspector could make out the points of reflected light in her pupils.
“I think so,” he said.
“‘The tourists, Miss Hanratty?’ he says. ‘You have to be careful, now, and avoid contact until this is cleared up,’ and ‘Why did you wait until now?’ As if I had answers for him.”
She flicked her hair back again and looked away. The gun moved in small arcs as she talked, as if she needed it for balance.
“I knew there was something wrong because I had a lot of pain. Dan, of course. Idiot. So I finally wanted to know. You can guess, Guard, can’t you?”
“Jane Clark?”
She nodded, as if considering a point in an abstract discussion that had gone on too long.
“I didn’t know what to do.” She paused and took a deep breath, her chin down on her chest.
“I knew I wanted to tell her that she had left her mark. I shouldn’t have waited. But that’s human nature, isn’t it? Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die. I sort of knew that Dan had been seeing her-”
“But if you tried to have it out with him about it, he’d have left you out in the cold?”
“Dan didn’t care. That’s just the way he is. He does what he wants. There are some things he cares about. I don’t doubt but that he has you fooled to the hilt too.”
She stared at him for several seconds.
“How many kids have you got?” she asked.
“Two. We had a boy earlier but he died. For a long time, we thought he was our last chance.”
“Well, she took a lot of my future with her when she went,” she resumed, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I came back to the village late and I went straight to the hotel bar. I wanted to have it out with Dan but sure when I got there he was twisted drunk. And I couldn’t drag him away.”
“You collared Tidy Howard and gave him a piece of your mind instead?”
“You’re damned right I did,” she snapped. “And of course his attitude was, what do you want me to do about it? Messing around like that was ‘immoral’ says he. And him chasing chambermaids! Well, I left that hotel raging. Yes, I drove out. And she was still up. She answered the door. She wasn’t drunk, I know that. Not then. She might have taken a few drinks after I left. But I think she knew that there was something wrong, maybe the look on my face. We had a row. She didn’t just sit there and listen, I can tell you. There came a point that she laughed at something I said, something to do with tourists. I hit her. With my hands. She was strong, but I was really mad. I threw things around and… Well, she said then that she was going to call the Guards. She had no phone, of course. I had taken a few lumps out of her, some scratches and that. It wasn’t that serious to my mind. After all, I was the one who had been wronged. I got in the car and drove off. I sort of believed her about the Guards. I was still mad, but on the way back I started getting worried.”
Minogue looked up from the waving gun. She seemed to realise that he had been observing some part of her that she wasn’t in control of, and her eyes narrowed. Her stare moved away from him.
“I came back to the hotel and I told Tidy Howard what had happened. I told him-I was still mad, you see-that I wanted to kill her. Jane Clark, like. He was staring at me like I had just landed off Mars. And I told him that when his darlin’ boy woke up in the morning and could hear, I was going to give him a right going-over too. And him looking at me and staring at me, and a smile starts to come across his face. I took a slap at him but he caught my arm. He was a big block of a man. And him laughing… He said to me, he said, ‘Don’t worry your little head, girleen.’ I remember him saying that. He told me to get myself fixed up with whatever it took, to go to Dublin if I wanted, and he would pay for it. I was taken aback, I can tell you. The same Tidy Howard who had made little of me the first time. He didn’t know any more than I knew at the time that the scar tissue would stop me from- Well, I remember him saying, and him laughing and holding my wrists, looking into my eyes: ‘Don’t beat the poor boy. Marry him!’ Laughing. He thought it was funny. That’s the kind of man he is…he was.”
Her eyes had glazed over now.
“I know this much,” she whispered, “that if I had had this with me that night, I would have killed them all. Right then and there. But I was very shook. And when I could think straight, I decided that I’d look out for myself in the long run and do my best. Yes. But I was full sure I’d find some treatment that’d work but…”
Minogue’s fear had given way to bafflement.
“You just had a row with her?”
“Tidy had it in his head to do something about all this that night,” she said. “He knew all the Guards. Naughton was his man more than anyone. Naughton’d give him the nod if the Guards were going to come around at closing time. But Tidy didn’t get the Guards that night, not until later. He sent someone else out, then and there, to put a fright into Jane Clark so as she’d pack up and run. Instead of her going to the Guards the following morning, like.”
“Who did he send?”
She ignored his question.
“Well, he got carried away. The way she talked to him-she had a sharp tongue on her, everyone knew, and she wasn’t afraid of much.” Her voice dropped back to a whisper.
“He got carried away and he wanted to…you know. Because she was a whore. She hit him with something and he hit her. Knocked her out. I wasn’t there, I only heard later. And it looked bad, he said. There was blood coming out of her nose. He came back to the hotel and told Tidy. That’s when Naughton came into the picture.”
“Whose idea was it to dump Jamesy Bourke at the cottage, then?”
Her eyes crept back to meet Minogue’s.
“Naughton’s. Bourke was a thorn in everyone’s side around there. As for Jane Clark, Naughton didn’t give a damn.”
Naughton had covered for them all, then, Minogue thought. Dan Howard, wayward, hapless, spoiled, drunk; Sheila Hanratty, determined to make a husband of him; the man Tidy Howard had sent to bully Jane Clark. He did not feel the cold anymore. His hands still tingled but the cord seemed to have lost its bite. He tried to squeeze his hands into fists but they felt swollen and weak. There were so many questions he wanted to put to her but his concentration was being stolen by his hands, his cramped knees. He stared at the wall and let his gaze slide down to the floor. His head felt unbearably heavy now. Thirsty, weak. How many were involved? Did Dan Howard know? He must. Had Naughton set the place on fire?