by John Brady
“Well, Eilo came in. She wanted a packet of fags.”
“How long ago?”
Her fingers stopped turning the lock of hair and she darted a look at Minogue.
“Are you a Guard?”
Minogue tried to smile again but immediately knew it was phony.
“Yes, I am. But that’s not why I’m calling on Eilo.”
“Herself and Melanie are gone down the road there.”
“To her car, is it?”
She tugged a lock of hair out until it was inches from her eyes and looked at it.
“It’s not the likes of us has cars. Her Melanie walks my little one home. Usually.”
A picture of two girls walking home from school hand-in-hand together came to him. It sawed into his chest. Iseult, he thought, she’s probably of an age with Iseult.
“We have the children all right, but we didn’t manage to hold on to their fathers.”
She let go of the lock of hair and it uncoiled quickly. He recognised the disdain, the small leavening of humour in her eyes. No matter what he said, he was a Guard. He was far across other chasms from her too: husband and father, middle-class. Detector, pursuer, catcher. Moses down from the bog, via Dublin, full of law and order. How could he persuade her otherwise?
“Do you know where she might be going?” he asked. He watched her pick up another box. How could they look so heavy and they only potato chips, he wondered?
“Where would you be going with a bag in your hand?” she asked as she turned back to the shelf.
On a bloody holiday, he almost growled. She kept packing the shiny plastic packets on the shelves. Steadily the rows of Cheese and Onion, Salt and Vinegar filled. He muttered his thanks and yanked the door, almost pulling a pensioner in on the floor of the shop as he did. He kept the old man upright and asked him where Tralee’s bus and train stations were.
“The one place,” he said to Hoey, and turned the wheel sharply in a U-turn. “The buses and trains. She had to wait for the child to show up from school or from her playing.”
“What’s she running for?”
Minogue shook his head. “Who knows? Bred into her, maybe.” He reversed in the middle of the street, crunched the gears and shot forward.
“Maybe she has an outstanding on her,” Hoey said. “Or maybe she’s not a fan of the Gardai.”
“Perish the thought.”
Minogue braked at the head of a one-way street, deliberated and turned down, grunting over the wheel. He took out the key and stepped out onto the footpath. A bus revved behind the high wall of the station, punching diesel smoke into the air. Hoey went off to his right. Minogue stepped into the bus and looked down at the faces on each side of the aisle.
“Board at the platform,” said the driver. “And a ticket’ll come in handy.”
“Are there buses or trains gone out in the last little while?” Minogue asked. The driver was a grey-haired Dubliner, with a decade’s commerce with culchies in his approach.
“Which one are you hoping to be on?”
“Dublin, say. Or Cork,” Minogue asked with more urgency. The driver nodded toward a herd of buses half-hidden by a wall.
“There’s a Dublin bus due to hit the trail now, if it’s real excitement you’re looking for.”
Minogue skipped off the bus and jogged around the wall toward the other buses. Clusters of passengers stood near the door to one. Hoey appeared from the ticket office and waved. Minogue surveyed the faces as he headed toward him.
“Dublin,” said Hoey. “A woman and a girl with an English accent, chewing gum and blowing bubbles with it. The girl is black.”
“What?” said Minogue.
Hoey looked beyond him to the people boarding. “That’s what the man said. I dunno.”
Minogue realised he didn’t even know what Eilo McInerny looked like. She had a bag of some sort and a daughter with her. A black girl? He walked to the end of the shortening queue by the bus door and waited for the last passenger to step into the bus.
“I’m looking for a woman travelling with her daughter. I have a message for her.”
The driver gave Minogue an expert scrutiny in the space of three seconds.
“Not on here.”
Minogue looked down at the passengers settling in. “Are you sure now?”
The driver arched his eyebrows.
Minogue stepped down and looked about the oil-stained tar macadam of the station-yard. A bus wheeled by and Minogue studied the faces in the windows. Hoey was beside him then.
“Come on,” said Hoey. Minogue was still a little dazed. Diesel smoke settled in the air around him. Had Eilo McInerny bought tickets to Dublin and then decided to wait for a later bus? Maybe she had forgotten something and had gone back to her place, or to the hotel.
Hoey was breathing hard from his canter back into the yard.
“I took a look down the street the far side of the station,” he said. “There’s a taxi rank out there but no taxis. A woman carrying a bag’s heading off down the street. Come on quick or we might lose them.”
Minogue skipped along beside Hoey. “What did she look like?”
“Who cares what she looks like,” Hoey said over his shoulder. “There was a girl with her.”
The woman was walking hurriedly, but her short legs could not propel her stocky body fast. She stalked on, hand-in-hand with a girl in a school gaberdine. The girl’s hair-do brought her height to almost a head over her mother. Eilo McInerny knew that the two policemen were closing on her. Resolute, she pressed on, struggling with her suitcase as it clattered against her leg, refusing to look back. Her hand grasped her daughter’s tightly, and their joined hands waved stiffly in a martial parody. Drops of rain began to spot the pavement.
Hoey caught up with Eilo McInerny. She ignored him and turned the corner sharply. By the time Minogue rounded the corner, Hoey was walking backwards next to her, trying to explain something. The girl said something and Hoey looked over to her. The trio slowed and Minogue closed in on them. Eilo McInerny’s suitcase banged into a pole and she staggered back a step.
“Wot chew wont wiv moy muwer?” Minogue heard the girl say. Her upper body canted forward as she addressed Hoey. “Loyve ass uloawn, yeou cryeep!”
Hoey, still backpedalling, careered into a rubbish bin bolted waist-high to a bus-stop. He staggered away from it grasping his back and wincing.
“Missus McInerny, wait a minute,” Minogue said. “We only want a word with you-nothing more than that.” An elderly woman clasped her string bag closer and looked with pursed lips at the group across the street, “We mean no harm!”
He moved around Hoey who was hopping about now holding his back.
“Wait, can’t you! My friend here is liable to walk under a bus or something if ye don’t let up.”
The girl turned and made a face at Minogue.
“Loyve ass ulaown!” she shouted.
Her mother tugged sharply at her arm and pulled her further along the footpath. Hoey’s dance was slowing now. The Inspector caught a glimpse of Eilo McInerny’s face. A short, wide woman, she looked tired and determined, her face flushed with exertion.
“We’re trying to clear up what happened to Jamesy Bourke, the trial… We need your help.”
Eilo McInerny locked her gaze straight ahead and tried to move even faster. Her suitcase scraped the doors of parked cars and bumped into a lamp-post. With a sudden rip, it was on the pavement. She stopped and looked at the handle still firm in her grip. Her chest rose and fell rapidly. She licked her bottom lip, blinked and then threw the handle with great force across the street where it bounced off the roof of a car and fell to the pavement.
“Let me,” said Minogue.
“Pack oaff in don’t bower moy muwer nao mower!” hissed the girl.
Minogue stepped back and looked into the huge eyes of Eilo McInerny’s daughter. Great God, he thought, she has that look in her eye that it wouldn’t bother her at all to kick a Guard in the family jew
els. Eilo McInerny wrenched her daughter’s hand, reached up with her free hand and gave the girl a clout across the side of her head. The girl raised her hands to her head as she ducked, but her mother hung on.
“Don’t be talking like a tramp, you! It doesn’t matter who they are or how they provoke you!”
Minogue looked into her face. Eilo McInerny’s lips were white with anger, but her face glowed. Nearer forty than thirty, he believed. She wore a white blouse and black skirt under her coat. Work clothes, he guessed. He placed himself out of range of a kick from her daughter and picked up the suitcase in his arms.
“Here’s your getaway bag now,” he said.
“Give it to me and then push off and leave me alone,” said Eilo McInerny.
He heard a Clare accent rooted under the cat’s meow into which he understood Londoners extended their O’s.
“You could help someone if you’d only talk to us awhile,” he tried.
Hoey limped up. Eilo McInerny took the suitcase from Minogue and held it across her chest. Her daughter caught Minogue’s eye. She stuck out a her tongue at him. “Piss off, copper,” she mouthed.
“Leave off that,” warned her mother. “Or as true as God I’ll hit you a thoose here in the street with everyone looking on, so I will.” She looked with open contempt to Minogue.
“This is my daughter Melanie. She’s not like this normally. That’s all I’m going to tell you.”
Melanie McInerny was long-limbed and brown, her perfect teeth framed by pink lips which Minogue considered wondrous. She still wore her school pinafore under the gaberdine coat. Left in a hurry, Minogue thought. She was within a few inches of his height. He tried to pin the insolence in her eyes with a forceful civility.
“Hello, Melanie.”
“Piss oaff, coppah! Pig!”
“Sacred Heart of Jesus,” sighed Eilo McInerny. The suitcase fell with a soft crunch on the footpath. Before Melanie could make a run for it, Eilo McInerny had grabbed her daughter’s forearm.
“Not on my account,” Minogue protested. “Please. I’ve been called worse. Even by people who know me. Couldn’t we go somewhere and sit down so as tempers can cool?”
Eilo McInerny looked at Minogue, her arms poised. The rain had begun to tell on the concrete now. A passing car’s wipers squeaked across its windscreen. The road was greasy. Melanie tried to duck away.
“Yew dzoan’t hiv to tork wiv ’em, Mum!”
“And I don’t have to listen to you either, you bould strap! I’m martyred with you! The fucking language out of you is a disgrace!”
“We just need to clear up a few things, Mrs McInerny,” Minogue rallied.
Eilo McInerny didn’t take her glittering eyes off her daughter.
“There’s nothing I can do for you, mister. Leave us be, I tell you.”
Melanie was smiling now. The Inspector realised that this scene had happened before. Anger betrayed love: sisters more than mother and daughter? Eilo and her daughter were gently rocking now, the younger one trying halfheartedly to free herself. Hoey took a deep breath and rolled his eyes.
“Where were you off to in such a hurry?” asked Minogue.
“What running am I doing? This is a free country.”
“Crossan phoned you and said we’d be coming. You said all right. What’s changed?”
The rain seemed to make Eilo McInerny relent. She let go of her daughter’s arms.
“You bought a ticket to Dublin and then walked out of the station,” Minogue added. “But you’re off somewhere else on a mad rush. What’s the matter?”
“Asking me for help,” she scoffed. “Jesus, the ways of the world. The Guards asking me for help. Hah! You must take me for a right iijit.” She turned toward her daughter. “Come on, Mel.”
“But ’sroiyning, Mum.”
“Of course it’s raining,” snapped her mother. “This is Tralee you’re in!”
“It might be that we could clear Jamesy Bourke’s name after all these years,” said Minogue.
She snorted derisively, and he saw the disbelief cross her face. She wrestled with the suitcase again and staggered down the footpath. She spoke in a withering tone.
“That gom. Me help him? Him and his poems and his drink. He was the same as the rest of them in the end. All after the one thing.”
Minogue took up the pursuit again.
“I know it may seem too late to do anything,” he began.
“Damn right,” said Eilo McInerny.
“Crossan told you how Jamesy died, did he?”
She stopped and turned to Minogue. Melanie stood by. Her expression suggested to Minogue that she imagined each drop of rain that landed on her smooth, cafe au lait face might be acid.
“What?”
“He was shot dead the other day.”
She frowned and looked down at the pavement as though she had just dropped a coin on it.
“To do with the IRA or something?”
“No. A case of mistaken identity, I suppose you could describe it.”
“I’d heard he had a bad run of things in prison,” she murmured.
The drops were heavy now, and Minogue felt them plop and burst on his skull. Tralee counted as a place where, like West Clare, one would be thought wise to build a commodious boat and begin rounding up pairs of animals when rain was on the way. Hoey was holding his collar tight under his chin.
“You told Crossan you’d talk to us,” Minogue said.
“Mum-” bleated Melanie.
“Be quiet, can’t you?” hissed her mother. She looked up warily. “Down from Dublin, are ye?”
“We are. And we have no right to ask you for your time or one iota from you.”
Eilo McInerny shot a look into Minogue’s eyes.
“I don’t need trouble. I’m a lot of years away. Are you going to try and cod me into thinking things’ve changed since I left?”
Minogue let his bewilderment show.
“You Guards, you do what ye like,” she said with quiet disgust. “You’re all hand-in-glove with one another. ‘You scratch my back’ and the rest of it. You’re on the inside and the likes of me are on the outside. You do what you’re bid, by them what bids it.”
“Well, I can stand here getting soaked,” he said, “or I could try to persuade you otherwise.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wot happened wiv yeou enyway?” Melanie McInerny asked Hoey. Hoey’s arm froze, the cigarette within inches of his lips, and he gave her a startled look. She sucked on the straw again and rolled ice at the bottom of her glass.
“How do you mean?” he asked. He cleared his throat while completing his arm’s trip with the cigarette but rested his knuckles against his lips as he coughed.
“Theowse black ooiyes iv yose. Who ’it chew?”
Minogue looked over. Eilo McInerny drank from her vodka. They were sitting in the otherwise deserted lounge of Spring’s Kingdom Bar.
“A car accident,” Hoey murmured with a hint of affronted pride.
“Yeou shuddn’t smoake, should yeou? Dzo yeou jog or anything?”
The surprise was twisted off Hoey’s face by another cough.
“Stop giving him the treatment, Mel,” said Eilo McInerny. “He’s the cop, not you.”
“Yeou smoake too, Mum. It’s desgasting.”
Minogue could only smile. He tried again to reboard the derailed conversation.
“I don’t expect you to have a perfect recall of what happened back then.”
Eilo McInerny took another drink but she would not get back on track.
“Imagine that,” she murmured, the glass poised under her nose. “Shot dead, just like that. By the fella who ran over his dog. The bad luck folleyed him and caught up to him in the end.”
“It’s a tragedy, to be sure, but can we-”
“Tragedy, is it? What the hell would you or the likes of you know about tragedy?”
Melanie looked over at her mother. “Yeou shuddn’t drink nao moahr, Mum.”
That was the bottom half of her second drink, Minogue realised. He was already drifting nicely offshore in the lee of one Jamesons. He hoped he wouldn’t have to keep pace with her. Hoey looked steadfast enough with his 7-Up.
“She gits loike that,” said Melanie with a superior air.
“What?” barked Eilo McInerny, as though returning from a distant place. “What?”
“Shea, you have to get some cigarettes, I daresay,” said Minogue. “Melanie, would you be kind enough to direct my friend here to a shop? Maybe you could help him pick a box of chocolates too, a gift I should maybe bring back to relatives. He’s not really with it as regards that sort of thing.”
Both Hoey and Melanie frowned and stared at Minogue.
“Mum?”
“Go on with you,” said Eilo McInerny. “He won’t bite you.”
Melanie McInerny plodded to the door as though to a firing squad. Her mother watched her go.
“I don’t know from one day to the next if I’m doing the right thing with that one,” she muttered. Minogue heard less of the English accent now. “I couldn’t leave her with Ralph. Ralphie’s an iijit. Nice, but he’s a slob. It’d be neglect with him. He wouldn’t notice her going to the bad. No, I couldn’t leave her there with him.”
“So you came here to try and make a go of things.”
She took out a cigarette and toyed with it. “Yes. Mel is a bit of a curiosity about town. It’s not a holiday for her anymore, though. She gets fed up. She finds school hard here and the kids here are innocent really. But the nuns are very good to her. Whatever else you can say about the nuns…” She lit the cigarette.
“Why did you run today, so?”
She nodded once at the ashtray and pointed her cigarette at Minogue as though locating his head along a gunsight.
“Don’t ask me that again or I’ll fucking throw that at you.”
“Point taken.”
“I don’t plan on getting burnt like what I had done to me before. Now, can you get that through your thick skull? I have responsibilities. I have enough on me plate with a daughter full of hormones, and me with no man here in Tralee. I do me work and I pay me rent. Why would I be volunteering to be put through the mill again?”