by John Brady
“I don’t want you caught up in any conniving,” Kathleen said. “That crowd in Clare are tricky.”
Minogue gave her a one-eyed scrutiny. She elbowed him back to attention in time for him to dodge a taxi. The conversation died until they reached Elm Park hospital fifteen minutes later.
“I’d prefer to go up on my own, if you don’t-”
“I knew you would. Go on up with you. I’ll wait in the foyer and read the magazines or something. Tell Shea I was asking for him.”
Minogue tried several times to decipher his wife’s mood as he negotiated his way through the wards. Was she still annoyed that he hadn’t persuaded Mick and Eoin about something? Hoey was in a private room. The Inspector held his breath, tried out a smile and knocked.
He believed that Hoey had lost weight. He studied the bruise that extended from the eyebrows up to his hairline.
“Does the Killer know?” Hoey asked.
“I don’t think so. Not yet.”
Hoey’s eyes remained fixed. His cracked lips were colourless and dried saliva clung to the corners of his mouth. Minogue sat back in the chair and stared at a purple and green weal which lay smack in the middle of Hoey’s forehead. The day had caught up to the Inspector. He felt something welling up slowly in his chest. Hoey glanced back into his scrutiny but Minogue ignored the hint. He tried to clear his throat but lapsed into coughing. Minogue looked away.
Hoey’s cough subsided. “Won’t do much for the looks,” he whispered.
“Look, Shea. You were never much of a talker. Isn’t it time for a bit of a change?”
Hoey squinted out from his good eye. “What do you think the Killer will make of it?”
“You weren’t breathalysed or sampled after they pulled you out of it, so there’s nothing formal to trip over. Yet.”
“Won’t stop Kilmartin.”
“You could have talked, Shea. Should have.”
“About what?”
“Whatever the hell is bothering you. Here you go, obviously pissed, behind the wheel of a car, and you wreck-”
“It’s my business.”
Minogue’s anger began to uncoil behind his ribs.
“I came up from Clare after I heard from Eilis to see-”
“Ah, fuck it, man! I’m out!”
Hoey sat up, rolled slowly off the bed and began walking stiffly around the room. Except for his shoes he was fully dressed. Minogue noted the streaks of dried blood on his shirt. The compound smells of the hospital began to add to his claustrophobia. He counted to five.
“What do you mean ‘out’?”
“Look. The Killer won’t have me back anyway. A head-case. I can just see him. I’m sick of the whole bloody caper anyway.”
Hoey whirled around to face the Inspector, his hands out.
“How the hell did I ever wind up here? That’s what I’d like to know.”
Minogue sat forward. His joints had turned mushy on him.
“You went on a tear and you ran your bloody car into a wall. It’s not the end of the world.”
“Not that,” Hoey snapped. “The job! How the hell did I end up dealing with the likes of that fucking yob the other night? I mean, it suddenly struck me…”
“Nolan?”
“So he’s been on your mind too. See? Here I am thinking, will Nolan get bail? Will Nolan do something like this again? Will someone nail him in prison? God Almighty!”
“Forget Nolan. I’m hardly in a mood to be sympathetic now with the crooked humour you’re in. You’re damn lucky you weren’t badly hurt. Or worse: you could’ve taken someone with you.”
Hoey turned away. His hands were fists by his sides. He seemed to be staring out the window into the yellow street-lit haze over the southern suburbs of Dublin.
“Lucky?” he said.
The word came back clearly from the glass to the Inspector. Hoey’s fists found their way to the window-sill. His body canted stiffly forward until his head touched the glass.
“I knew what I was doing. Or I thought I did. Sure I turned the wheel myself.”
Minogue let himself fall back in the chair. He closed his eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
Look, Shea. It’s half-ten. Kathleen’s downstairs. I’d better go down and let her know what’s happening.”
Hoey gave the Inspector a bleak look. His coat had a dark stain across the lapel.
“Sign yourself out, will you,” Minogue went on. He still felt numbed. “I’ll meet you downstairs. Have you any more tests?”
Hoey shook his head and returned to combing his hair in front of the mirror.
“X-rays or anything? You weren’t concussed, were you?”
“No.”
“Pills you need?”
Hoey shrugged. Minogue watched him appraising his own battered face in the mirror. Hoey worked on a stray lick of hair over his ear. Minogue saw his colleague lose a battle to keep his hand from trembling as it remained poised over his head for several moments.
“Okay then?”
Hoey returned Minogue’s earnest look in the mirror for a moment before he took a step back and jammed his hands in his pockets.
“Jesus Christ,” he spat out. “I look terrible. I feel terrible. I’m not going. I don’t know. Can’t you leave me alone?”
“You missed a button there. Second one down on your shirt. Come on now, let’s go.”
Kathleen kept her shock well-hidden, Minogue thought. They walked to the car-park.
“Well, Shea,” she said as she waited for her husband to unlock the passenger side. “We’re right now, aren’t we?”
Hoey squinted at the cars in the car-park. “Well, Kathleen,” he murmured, “to tell you the truth, if I was right, I wouldn’t be here.”
Kathleen got into the car and gave her husband a look of alarm. Minogue grinned.
“That’s the style, Shea,” he said. Kathleen’s laugh was forced.
Minogue let the Fiat out onto Nutley and aimed it up toward the Bray Road. He began whistling softly between his teeth. Kathleen kept her gaze fixed on the road ahead until they stopped by the lights at Montrose. There she rallied and began working on Hoey’s embarrassment. She spoke in a tone of mock reprimand.
“Sure, what’s wrong with staying out in Kilmacud awhile? Himself here is at a bit of a loose end. Hang around, can’t you, and see that he doesn’t make an iijit of himself.”
Hoey sat back in his seat and began licking his bottom lip. Minogue eyed him in the mirror.
“Yes,” Kathleen went on, “Daithi’s room is going a-begging. You might as well…”
Minogue sensed the hesitation in her voice. She had almost said that Iseult’s room was available too, that Iseult and Pat… But that would be to admit aloud what she had yet to admit to herself.
“There’s the garden, you know,” she went on boldly. “There’s transplanting to be done before the winter proper. I must say now that I only like it for walking around in. But you people from the country, I suppose…?”
Minogue looked at the dashboard clock. It wasn’t too late to phone Kilmartin at home and have a pow-wow about this. Organise some leave for Hoey, park stuff with Murtagh. He resumed his Handel but hummed instead of whistled. He’d phone Herlighy, the psychiatrist, at home tonight too.
As the evening clouds retreated from the sky over Dublin that night, they took with them some of the yellow nimbus of light which had been reflected from the city below. The air grew colder. Although there was no moon, the summit of Two-Rock Mountain became sharp and purple under the stars. Hoey sat wrapped in an eiderdown by the window. He left the window open a crack with the ashtray next to it. He had taken his pills after the bath, but he did not feel tired. He watched two cats walk along the block wall that separated Minogues’ yard from the neighbours‘. A light breeze had the remaining leaves whispering dryly.
Hoey had no handkerchief and, as there were times when he couldn’t stop crying, he used a towel to wipe his face. He worried about waking the Minogu
es and that, ridiculously, made him cry even more than thinking about Aine. He had grown into the habit of imagining her as his wife in future years. How had he done that? When had he started? For long stretches of time that night he was certain there was no future, but then some indistinct, wishful feeling would crawl into his chest.
He shivered and drew the eiderdown tighter. The sky was full of stars and they held his fascination for a long time. He remembered them as a child just being there, company for wonder and excitements like Hallowe’en and Christmas, familiar and near at hand, like a ceiling. Now they seemed impossibly far. As though the sky were no longer a roof over the world but an opening to confusion and indifferent space. The lid had come off his own world, he thought, the roof torn off the house. He thought of light-years, of stars exploded these millions of years but whose light had only lately reached earth. Seeing them in the night sky when they no longer really existed.
His mind moved wearily through memories. They flared and died and flared again around his heart. He craved a drink of neat whiskey, and he panicked at the thought of a future without a drink. The stitches over his eyebrow began to feel hot and his eyes seemed to swell even more. He tried to picture Africa: huts and black people smiling. Kids singing or clapping for their teacher. Aine. How hot would it be? He lay down then. Did they have lions and stuff in Zimbabwe?
Minogue parked in Dawson Street, and he and Hoey legged it smartly across to Bewleys in Grafton Street. The sky was blue, it was not yet nine o’clock and Dublin was at its best. Hoey’s face drew stares. One child pulled on her mother’s arm and pointed at him.
“A bit of everything,” Minogue urged the waitress. “We’re in from Kilmacud and we’re demented with the hunger.”
The Inspector was obliged to eat most of Hoey’s breakfast. Hoey tried a second cup of coffee, lit another cigarette and waited for Minogue to answer a question he had posed about the psychiatrist, Herlighy.
“Yes, the one I had. Just a chat. He knows Guards. Size him up. Then, if you think he’s okay…”
Hoey blew a thin stream of smoke out under his lip.
“Don’t think that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing,” he murmured.
“And don’t you be worrying about the Killer. I’ll push him around. He’ll be all right. Really.”
Hoey gave a snort. The Inspector concentrated on his saucer.
“You won’t know yourself in a while, I’m telling you, Shea.”
Hoey let smoke stream out his nostrils.
“I thought the whole idea was to know yourself better,” he muttered. “Or stuff like that.”
“No doubt,” Minogue shrugged. He chewed on the tail of a fatty rasher while he searched for a rebuttal which might buoy Hoey.
Hoey cleared his throat again and looked warily around the restaurant.
“He’ll want to know about the love-life and the da and the ma and the rest of it, no doubt.”
“What?”
Hoey’s gaze had settled on a table where five women sat smoking and laughing over coffee.
“Herlighy,” said Hoey. “The shrink.”
“Oh, yes.” Minogue felt his body ease back into the chair. “Yes. Probably, I mean. And he may ask you what you want. How you see yourself after this, you know…”
Hoey pushed a butt to the rim of the ashtray.
“He didn’t push the church at me, you’ll be glad to hear,” said Minogue.
“Huh,” sighed Hoey. “I’m not much on the church and devotions this long time, I can tell you. Even with Aine and the lay missionary thing out beyond in Zimbabwe.”
He paused to take a drag on a fresh cigarette.
“We had rows about it. I asked her what the hell the Church could do for people in Africa. Christ, the damage we’ve done out there already. The white people, I mean. Not to speak of the famines and poverty. Do you want to hear her answer? This’ll give you an idea of how it went sour.”
Minogue said nothing.
“She said I had seen too much of the bad side of people. In the job. All I know is that I’m not about to be running up to hug the altar rails at this stage.”
Minogue was relieved when the talk lapsed. Hoey sat forward in his chair, an elbow on the table, while he stared out at the floor. Minogue recalled people, notably Kilmartin, taking pride in the missionary zeal of the Irish abroad. Television programmes on catastrophes in Africa always seemed to interview Irishmen and women there.
Hoey breathed out heavily.
“Africa,” he said, and turned his one good eye back on Minogue. “I read where we’re all from Africa. The one mother or something like that.”
The Inspector thought of the children’s swollen bellies he had seen on the poster in Galway city.
“Here, Shea. It’ll take you the best part of fifteen minutes to get to his office. I’ll be waiting for you at the gates of the National Gallery at twelve.”
Hoey rose slowly from the table, patted his pockets for his cigarettes and then followed a meandering path around tables toward the exit. Minogue followed him, noting the head and shoulders down on Hoey as he threaded through to the doors.
Kilmartin was cagey. Solicitous and polite, his suspicion masked, he slouched in his chair and waited for a cue from Minogue.
“So there,” Minogue said. “He’s going to stay with us a few days until this gets sorted out.”
“Jesus,” said the Chief Inspector. “He looked a bit shot at the other day, I must say. I don’t mind telling you that I was on the point of taking him aside and…”
Minogue fingered change in his pocket and looked out the window of Kilmartin’s office. Clouds from the west ran low over the city.
“I’m on holidays, remember. All I want is for Shea not to get trampled on.”
“Oi! Don’t get on your high horse, mister. You know, and I know, that we can’t overlook things like this. I only wish he’d so much as, you know, hinted-”
“Maybe he did and we didn’t read it.”
“You sound like you’re blaming the world and his mother for this. That he was bamboozled, like. More excuses.”
Minogue ignored Kilmartin’s provocation.
“You’ll set up a leave of absence for him, will you?” he said.
Kilmartin’s tone turned righteous.
“Course I will,” he replied. “We look after our own.”
The Chief Inspector’s eyes slid around the room before lighting back on Minogue. He loosened his tie. His hand strayed to his collar and began stroking his neck.
“Think he’ll try it again, do you?”
“Try what?”
“He tried to top himself, man. Don’t play me for a gobshite here, I all right?”
Minogue held his breath. A Guard at the scene had probably let his suspicions slip and the remark had found its way to Kilmartin.
“Won’t be the same again, that goes without saying,” Kilmartin added.
“What won’t be?”
Kilmartin flung a glare at his friend.
“He won’t be! Hoey. The fella who is as of this moment hiding behind your bloody skirt!”
Minogue knew he mustn’t goad Kilmartin now.
“It’s a good thing he won’t be the same again,” he began. “Who’d want to be the same again? All hemmed in, at the end of his tether. It’s out in the open now. Between the people who care about him, I mean.”
Kilmartin’s eyes took on a glint.
“God, you’re the cute hoor. Out in the open is right. That’s the trouble! Lamb of Jesus, Matt, I can’t have a head-case on staff!”
Minogue clenched his teeth. The Chief Inspector tapped a cigarette against the packet.
“You took me on, Jimmy. Remember?”
“You never tried to do yourself in, man! You had a lot going for you back then. Never looked back either, if I may be so bold as to remark.”
“Shea has a lot going for him.”
Kilmartin spoke as though he hadn’t heard Minogue.
�
��Never one to lay his cards on the table, Hoey. I mean, I like him and all the rest of it. He’s done great work. But we can’t have things jumping out of the woodwork at us. Especially these days.”
Kilmartin was still now, his cigarette poised above the box. Minogue cast a glance at his colleague. The Chief Inspector stood up and stretched. Then he stood back on his heels and scratched across his belly. He had tried to keep his stomach in over the years, but his frame-his gait, his manner, his words-all mocked the idea of containment.
“The last cases were ugly, to say the least,” said Minogue. “Maybe Shea couldn’t leave them behind him in the Squad room. The pressure-”
“Oi, oi! What’s this, mister?” Kilmartin waded in. “A fucking sermon? Don’t talk to me about pressure! My insides are like the AA map to pressure! There’s surgeons building holiday homes and buying Jags and retiring early with what stress has done to my insides. Hoey doesn’t have to answer to the public and those fucking jackals in the media-I do. How many people do you know who could take that kind of pressure?”
Minogue nodded his head and pretended to listen. Kilmartin concluded his peroration and tapped him on the shoulder. The Inspector looked through the window at a gap in the clouds. He decided to drive along the seafront by Sandymount on his way home.
Kilmartin grunted and raised a conciliatory arm as if to conjure away the stupidity of those who could never understand him. Minogue knew that his colleague was coming down from his vituperative peak.
“I mean to say, Matt. We’re getting it from both sides, man.”
Minogue decided it was time to light a fuse.
“Absolutely,” he murmured. “Never more important to stick together than now.”
“Definitely,” Kilmartin declared, and tapped his forehead with his cigarette. “As long as we’re 100 per cent upstairs. The lift has to go to the top floor in our line of work, Matt, and don’t forget it.”