by John Brady
Minogue let several seconds pass.
“Well,” he said. “That was it, then?”
Crossan snorted but did not smile. He began rubbing his glass around his palm with sudden hasty movements.
“Maybe I should have prefaced that by starting with ‘in spite of everything.’ You see, Tighe had entered a plea of not guilty because he knew the State’s case was circumstantial. But at some point in the second day of the trial, Tighe told me, Jamesy just seemed to give up. Fell apart, Tighe said. Lost his temper on the stand, ranting and raving about witnesses and the Guards. Didn’t impress anyone, I can tell you.”
“What did Bourke say when you told him that?”
“I think he didn’t hear me. I told him he’d have to persuade me or help me by bringing forth new evidence. That was the only way. Shouldn’t have opened my mouth there, I thought afterwards, because next thing is he produces that twenty-page thing, that epistle that I gave you.”
“Has it made a difference to you, then?”
“No. I’d have to agree with your reading. Rambling, unreliable. Downright weird. There wasn’t one thing I could take from it and seek verification with. It could be used to have him admitted to a psychiatric ward.”
“So how come we’re…?”
Crossan looked at the Inspector as though he were deciding whether he would buy something frivolous.
“All I can say is this: I decided that one day-fee or no fee-I’d dig up the whole Bourke thing. The trial, the police investigation. The whole thing. Of course you know about ‘one day’-it never comes. But I began to hear more about Jamesy and what he was up to. People see him hanging around the ruin of the house where the fire happened. Talking and shouting to himself as he rambles the roads. I don’t want to say that he’s following the Howards exactly, but… Jamesy seems to be on the high road to a lot of trouble. I think he might go off the deep end.”
“So you thought you’d calm him down by telling him you’d do something. I see.”
“I wonder if you do,” said Crossan quickly. “There’s more to it than just feeling sorry for him. I have this feeling that Jamesy didn’t get himself a fair trial at all.”
“Didn’t you just tell me that you had nothing to go on?”
Crossan shifted in his chair and gave the Inspector a doleful look.
“There’s a strange feel off the material, the records. Sounds terribly professional, I know. But the stuff I saw from the Book of Evidence putting Jamesy at the fire with the proverbial match in his hand and the proverbial motive pinned to his chest-well, it didn’t look that strong to me.”
“Maybe Tighe was not as good a barrister as you would have been in his place.”
Anger flared in Crossan’s eyes but it dissolved and he almost smiled.
“You don’t believe that Bourke was guilty, then,” said Minogue.
“That’s not what I said.” Crossan’s hand rose from the table and stayed poised in mid-air.
“The investigation, the evidence looked shoddy and put-together. At least from what I saw in summary form, I’d have to admit.”
“Come on now, Mr Crossan. You need to bait your hook, man. The whiskey isn’t that good.”
Crossan’s smile was forced.
“Well, all the work was done by local Guards, for one thing.”
Minogue thought of Kilmartin’s grim amusement when he recounted the sloppiness of Guards in securing evidence, those arrows in the Chief Inspector’s quiver he used when defending his Squad. “Mullocking and bollicking about,” Kilmartin called those blunders.
“Maybe the local Gardai had the resources and the competence to do it,” said Minogue.
Minogue wondered if Crossan would detect the tongue-in-cheek. The lawyer leaned to one side and took an envelope from under a notepad.
“Interesting you should say that, now,” he murmured. “That’s the same tune they played at the time too. Here, open this up.”
Minogue wanted to ask about it but Crossan kept talking.
“Back then I was articling in Limerick. Learning the ropes. Used to come home weekends.”
Minogue slid out a photograph and a folded newspaper clipping. Crossan swished more whiskey into their glasses.
“Dan Howard,” said Minogue.
“Good for you. You wouldn’t know the others, I’ll bet.”
Minogue squinted at the faces. The snapshot had been taken with a cheap camera and the cyanotic hue of the emulsions reminded Minogue of murder victims. Glare from the flash had whitened a face too close to the lens. Bottles around the room reflected the flash. Red pupils like vampires, a sweaty sheen on the faces. One of the men was playing a guitar backwards. Another was holding a bottle out to toast, but the flash had caught him with his eyelids almost completely closed. Crossan pushed the glass of whiskey at Minogue and poked his finger at one of the faces.
“Come on, try.”
Minogue looked again at the long, blonde hair parted in the middle. The girl was smiling, but not in earnest. Her eyes with the eerie pink pupils were looking directly toward the lens.
“Sheila Howard,” said Minogue.
“Sheila Hanratty, she was then,” Crossan corrected. “Now. See the fella standing up, waving the bottle. The fella with his eyes half closed, looks like he just got hit by lightning.”
Minogue looked at the sweaty faces again and shook his head. “Whoever he is, he looks like he’s well-on there.”
“But can you tell me who he is?”
“Mo, I can’t. I’m from Clare, fair enough, but I don’t keep census details in me head.”
“He’s from your end of the parish.”
“So’s half the country.”
“That’s Jamesy Bourke.”
Minogue’s brain flashed a picture of the bearded man: the dog, the bags of newspapers, the slinging off into the night outside the pub last night. The ghost standing across from the hotel dining room at dinner. Crossan had hinted that Bourke was obsessed with the Howards. The barrister fingered open the clipping, held it out and put on a haughty air as he read it aloud. Minogue sipped at his whiskey.
“This is the original of one of the pieces I sent you. Christ, the flow of language. My God, man, you can’t beat the prose of a reporter on a provincial Irish newspaper. ‘While in a state of drunkenness, aggravated by the same narcotic substances bringing ruin to so many young lives, James Bourke killed Jane Clark of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in an act of manslaughter… In delivering his decision, Justice Sweeney called the case a tragedy but one that has clear lessons for society. The behaviour and lifestyle which drink and drugs bring in their wake promote the abandonment of the very values that bind a society together and give it strength. Despite the convicted man’s involvement with narcotic substances and a self-admitted drinking problem, and notwithstanding his confession and remorse over what he had done, Justice Sweeney noted, these factors do not diminish decent people’s dismay and horror at the death of this young woman, a visitor to our shores…’ Will I go on?”
Minogue shook his head. Crossan let go of the clipping. It fell to his lap folded in upon itself. Minogue peered at the snapshot again.
“Typical Sweeney. A spoiled priest, they used to say. Always thought the Bench was a bloody pulpit. Was it merely bad luck that Jamesy Bourke drew the same Sweeney for trial?”
“That’s the girl there, the one with the tan?”
Crossan nodded. “Tell me who took the picture, if you can.”
“You did,” said Minogue.
Crossan smiled briefly.
“So,” Minogue resumed with clear exasperation. “Ye were friends.”
Crossan puckered his lips and exhaled. He spoke in a subdued tone now.
“We were all friends then. Jane Clark was a breath of fresh air here. She was wild out, but so what? She came to stay a few days and ended up staying the whole summer.”
“Longer than that,” said Minogue.
“That’s right, yes. She had rented that cott
age out on the Leckaun Road and she was setting it up to do a bit of pottery. She was here to stay, she said. We used to be slagging her for being a tourist, you know, a blow-in that’d be gone by the autumn. Jamesy was head over heels from the minute he set eyes on her. He wrote her poems. But Jamesy was a tearaway lad, with his music and his poetry, flying around in every pub between here and Ennis. Not cut out for the farming, Jamesy.”
Minogue glanced up at Crossan. The lawyer was nodding his head slowly while he bit his lip.
“She’s buried out in Canada,” Crossan said. “What was left of her after the fire.”
The Inspector placed his hands on the armrests. Crossan didn’t seem to notice the hint.
“The story is that Jamesy set fire to the cottage in the early hours, about one o’clock. After he put a match to it, he sat out by the front door with the remains of a bottle of whiskey in his fist and waited for Jane Clark to run out the door and into his arms. Like a film he had running in his head. Mad drunk.”
“Out of his mind,” said Minogue. “We’re getting to the point here now, I think.”
“When she didn’t come out, he lost it,” Crossan went on. “Started screaming. He had had a big row with her earlier on that evening, on account of her sharing her favours with someone else.”
“Yourself?” Minogue tried.
Crossan snorted. “Spare me. No, it was Dan Howard.”
Minogue sat back in his chair. He thought of Dan Howard’s ready smile.
“Ray Doyle was the Sergeant the time,” Crossan continued. “Not the worst, I’d have to say. A bit thick, really. Naughton was the Guard most involved. Tom Naughton. He was the old hand around Rossaboe, a Limerickman. He was also a bollocks of the first order. Naughton was the one who got things done around Rossaboe, really. He was first on the scene that night. Well, Tom Naughton went out of his way to nail Jamesy and get him locked up as quick as he could for as long as he could.”
“Personal thing with him, was it?”
“Yes. He had it in for Jamesy. Jamesy was always one step ahead of the Guards here as regards any general mischief. Naughton himself was partial to the drink and that was well known. Jamesy was a terrible mimic-to beat the band, really. He’d have us all in stitches in the pub. Naughton hated him. Vindictive type of a man, Naughton. A real bastard.”
“We number some in our ranks,” Minogue offered after several seconds. “Did Doyle go after any other, em, Bohemians in the area? Such as yourself and Master Howard, like.”
“Hah,” Crossan sneered. “He’d never go after Dan Howard or myself, for all the mischief we might have been up to. We were gentry after a fashion, safe enough with our wild oats. But Naughton was in a lather over Jamesy Bourke and the carry-on out at the cottage. The attitude with Naughton was that Jane Clark was a one-woman crime wave with a mission to subvert the morals of the whole bloody country. He’d called on the cottage a few times, poking around, but she knew her onions as regards the law, as I recall. Search warrants and what have you. She wasn’t afraid of him.”
Minogue placed his glass down heavily on the desk at his elbow.
“All right,” he said. “Now. One question.”
Crossan stared at the Inspector.
“Why now?”
Crossan paused before answering. Minogue realised that Crossan had thought about this, had expected it.
“Well. I could start with circumstances. It was when I was talking to Eoin that you came up. He didn’t tell me much about you, except that you were up in Dublin these years. Your job, of course. Then there was Jamesy hanging around, haunting the bloody place, standing out there on the footpath looking up at the bloody window. Even when I’m not there he stands around, sometimes for an hour. It’s as much as I can do to stop the secretary from calling the Guards when she sees him. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Howards, one or the other of them, finally has too much of Jamesy gawking at them.”
“Even after you told him the whole thing was a non-starter from a legal point of view?”
“Yep. One day there, a couple of weeks ago, I came back from court and there’s Mary in tears. She says he was around. ‘Looking at me,’ she says. Wants to quit. Thinks Jamesy is out to do what he did to Jane Clark. Very upset. The next time I see Jamesy, by God, I’m annoyed, so I go pelting down the stairs and look him in the eye. What does he tell me? He tells me that his memory is coming back to him better than ever. ‘It’s all coming back to me,’ says he, with his eyes like bloody saucers, sitting there where you’re sitting now.”
Crossan sat back and let his legs straighten out in front of him.
“He had electroshock after his breakdown and he’s been on medication for years.”
Minogue felt his own irritation rising again. A dinner of salmon, a glass of whiskey and Crossan’s humour over dinner had seemed bargains at the time.
“His memory, you say.”
Crossan waved away Minogue’s sarcasm.
“I know, I know. And there’s everyone else running around here trying to forget things, building bloody folk-village museums to bury the past by putting it behind glass or something.”
Minogue feigned shock.
“Dear God, counsellor. A radical?”
“Objection sustained. Anyway. I told him maybe I’d look into it again. And so, between the jigs and the reels, your name came up.”
“Thanks very much.”
Crossan abashed looked surprisingly vulnerable to Minogue. He looked at his watch. The barrister leaned forward in his chair.
“He told me that he thinks he might have been-get this: thinks he might have been-in a car sometime that night. He remembers drinking from a bottle and spilling a bit down his shirt because the car was moving. That never came up at the trial as far as I could ascertain. But how am I to ever know Jamesy hasn’t imagined all this?”
“Tell me about it,” said Minogue dryly. “What about setting fire to the house? Is he getting his memory back on that too?”
Crossan glared at the Inspector. Threads of remorse brushed against Minogue’s whiskey-dulled mind.
“Even if you had the full steno transcript of the trial, it wouldn’t necessarily help,” he said.
Crossan nodded, and ran his fingertips along his neck.
“So, presuming any material evidence is long gone, the only avenues open to you are to go to the people who testified?”
Crossan nodded again. His nails scraping against the bristles filled Minogue’s attention with their rasping. He sensed that Crossan was expecting him to say aloud the words that were foremost now, that he had next to nothing-a lost cause. A motorcycle howled by on the street outside.
‘“Why now?’” Crossan asked as the noise receded. To Minogue it seemed that the barrister had lost interest. “Christ, I don’t know. The time of year, the day that’s in it, I don’t know. We were friends once, all of us. But now there’s none of Jamesy left the way he was. He was destroyed.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Minogue asked.
Crossan’s face was slack.
“You’ve already done it; you sat and listened. I can ask no more. You could put it in your file of yarns to tell your pals in the pub after work, I suppose.”
The tailflick of sarcasm stung Minogue. He gave Crossan a cool appraisal. What made this barrister tick? He had refused payment from Mick and Maura for Eoin in lieu of something he valued more? For a moment, Minogue saw again the sour glee on Crossan’s face at the Howards’ embarrassment. Maybe Crossan was trying to make some Guards look stupid too. But what if this marble-eyed lawyer was nothing more than kind-hearted, a man however contrary but decent?
“Well, now, Mr Crossan,” Minogue began, puzzled still. “Smart-alecking with me is hardly the best way to…”
He let the rest of the sentence die. Crossan set his jaw and jerked up from his chair. Had he just given up?
“Have to go,” said Crossan.
Minogue was slow to stand. He felt the exasperation stronger now.
It had taken Crossan, a man whose job routinely involved him in flaying Garda witnesses in court, a lot to come to a Guard for help. Was it fair of him to sit here and sell Crossan a line about the local Guards being expert murder investigators?
“Well,” he began.
Crossan turned. His eyes were straining now. Minogue looked at a print on the wall.
“I don’t know now,” he muttered, “and I can’t make a promise.”
“Okay,” said Crossan. “That’s a start.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Come on, damn you,” he said. His voice was thick.
A band of afternoon sunlight blazed on the wall. Its reflected glow made their skins look tanned. She slipped his jeans over his hips and slid her fingers under the elastic belt of his underpants. He squirmed.
“Jesus,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t make me beg.”
“Or else?” she said. Sometimes images came to her mind for a moment: she could take his gun, straddle him and point it in his face. Now! You do it, you do that!
“Or else I’ll be well and truly fucked,” he said breathlessly. They both laughed.
“And isn’t that what you want?”
He groaned, “Don’t be such a tease. You’re killing me here. Come on.”
He closed his eyes and, again, the image of her over him, shoving the gun in his face, came to her. She cupped him in her palm. He whispered something but all she could catch was “do it.” His head went from side to side on the pillow. The cheesy smell came to her nostrils, and she watched the skin draw back slightly, the purple orb bud.
“You’ve never had to wait for anything in your life, have you?” she murmured.
Again she felt it throb and she closed her hand around it. All it is is a muscle, she thought. He pees there, he pulls and scratches himself there. He makes me take it in my mouth, and he thinks I really care or mind or like it or dislike it. Her thumb peeled back the foreskin a little more. And this is what he shoves in me like a stick. Wanting her to say things to him. Dirty boy talk, like the stuff he kept in the van. Often he came with a big fuss before he had managed to get inside her. Well, don’t be telling me to do the other stuff first, she had told him. And he was pissed off. She had said no, forgetting that that would only make him do it more.