by John Brady
“Who phoned the station that night?”
Naughton made a pitying smile.
“Dan Howard’s not a man at all. Oh, he can talk the best you ever heard, along with the rest of them. But, sure, what’s talk? He can smile and play the game, and I don’t doubt that he’ll get elected again.”
Naughton returned to rubbing his swollen eyebrow. Thwarted yet in his efforts to come to grips with this man, Minogue still sensed something to the side of Naughton’s contempt.
“Dan Howard doesn’t know what made him,” Naughton murmured. “That’s why he’ll never be the man his father was.” He looked sideways at Hoey before glaring at Minogue.
“I don’t know about you but this pal of yours here, I can tell. Soft, like the rest of ’em his age. Complaining about getting a tap in the bollocks. But you”-Naughton closed one eye and squinted at the Inspector-“one minute you’re all business and the next minute you’re asking for tea! Maybe you’re a fuckin’ head-case or a good one gone soft yourself. No balls, hah?”
To Minogue, Naughton seemed to be both deflated and made even more monstrous at the same time. Maybe he had had his morning gargle and by now the drink had set free the impulses and thoughts of a bachelor too long unshackled from the daily routines of being a Guard.
“You didn’t know Bridie Howard. How could you?” Naughton went on in a monotone. “She should have gone to the nuns the way she wanted to before she up and married a man like Tidy Howard. A dried-up bitch and I don’t care if she’s gone these twenty years. If she’d a been a woman and a wife proper, sure who knows how things would have turned out? She made a baby out of little Dan, so she did. I sometimes thought it was revenge she was after for having had to dirty herself, by God, to get up the pole in the first place. God help her, she’s dead.”
Naughton licked his lips and snorted.
“It’s not natural for a man to marry someone who spent every night with her skinny legs turned around one another like a hawthorn bush inside a night-dress made of feckin’ chain-mail. With her back to the wall and her rosary beads in her hands…”
It was Hoey who asked the question Minogue had framed in his own mind.
“How do you know all this?”
Naughton made no reply, but his eyes slipped out of focus.
Minogue recalled Eilo McInerny’s account of Tidy and his cronies gathering in the pub after closing-time for a few jars while she had to make sandwiches for them.
“You never married yourself,” he said to Naughton. Naughton’s eyelids almost closed.
“Keep your fucking nose out of my private life. What would you know about anything? I looked after me mother and five brothers and sisters, so I did. Living in this very house. I put a sister through nursing in London. And I liked my job, by God.”
“You’d have known everyone in town, then.”
“Damn right, I did. I knew the Bourkes better than they knew themselves, some a them.” Naughton paused and pointed a finger at his head.
“Wild out, the lot of them. Wasters and madmen. Only the mother was there, they’d be all in jail or in some mental hospital. You say Bourke’s after getting himself killed? Well, I could have told you something like that’d happen to him. I could have told you that twenty years ago.”
“So Bourke was completely to blame for the death of Jane Clark.”
Naughton flicked away Minogue’s words with a snap of his fingers. Hoey stood up.
“What the hell would you like to tell me next?” Naughton was almost shouting now. “ ‘Death by misadventure’? You fucking iijit! Or that Bourke should have been given five years for manslaughter? That it was an accident? Don’t you be starting with this mollycoddle stuff the social workers are full of, that Arthur Guinness did it, or the Pope of Rome.” He pointed at Minogue.
“Let me tell you something, Mr Know-It-All.” Tiny gobs of spittle flew out from Naughton’s lips into the sunlight.
“I’ll tell you what really killed that one. She did it herself! Yes, she did. She was a whore. That bitch. She had more rides than a bike. There was nothing she wouldn’t do, no poor iijit she wouldn’t drag into her web. The more I heard about her, the worse it got.”
“What sort of things do you mean?”
The kettle was almost boiled now. Naughton’s reply came in a savage whisper.
“She fucked half the parish.” His eyebrows went up and he gave a bark of laughter. “For free too.”
Naughton sank into the chair and shook his head at his own humour. He enjoyed it the more because neither Minogue nor Hoey was smiling. The Inspector studied Naughton’s changed face and guessed that he’d go for the drink again any minute now. He glanced down at the mess on the floor and then returned Hoey’s anxious stare for a moment.
“You seem to remember that night well, then,” said Minogue.
The amusement stayed in Naughton’s eyes but he said nothing. He looked out the window and let his face slide into a slack mask of indifference.
“You think you’re going to find out something worth finding out if you poke away at this long enough, don’t you?”
Minogue shrugged. “I’m trying to fill in gaps in what we know about that night.”
“I thought you knew everything, smart-arse. I was out in the car that night. I saw the fire a long ways off.”
“No one phoned you?”
Naughton looked away and rubbed at his forehead. Then he looked back at the Inspector, frowning as if he were looking at a child who had been warned off mischief but had promptly done it again.
“Did Crossan put you up to this? Christ, Crossan’s pot-boy, you are. Hah. Send a Guard to bait a Guard, is that it? How much is he paying you? You turn against your own, is it, and run with the likes of Crossan?”
Minogue didn’t answer. Hoey was still standing next to the window. Naughton laid his palms on his knees and slowly stood upright. Halfway up he grasped his forehead, making Hoey recoil in anticipation. The contempt slid off Naughton’s face.
“Jesus, it’s like the kick of a donkey I got,” he whispered. “You can have your tea. I’m due a smathan.”
He walked carefully to the dresser and opened it. From behind a dinner-plate he took out a half-bottle of clear liquid and unscrewed the top. He drank from the bottle, paused and took another mouthful.
“There, we’re right,” he whispered hoarsely. “A fella should always start the day with holy water.”
He probably had caches of drink all over his house, Minogue guessed. Poteen gave off little smell. He probably had a cheap and ready supply of it, and his breath wouldn’t reek of shop whiskey.
“Tell me about Dalcais,” said Minogue.
Naughton stood still and blinked once, slowly.
“You have shares in it. The Howards’ company. Have you forgotten, maybe?”
“Oh, I’m only now beginning to see what kind of a man you are.” Naughton spoke in a gentle voice. “You won’t be happy until…”
He closed his eyes and gave himself over to swallowing the poteen until he had drained the bottle. When he opened his eyes again, they were watery. His bellows of laughter rolled about the house. Suddenly they stopped and Naughton rubbed his wet eyes slowly before looking down into the empty bottle. He looked at the policemen with a melancholy amusement.
“So there, Lord Muck down from Dublin.”
The steady, watery eyes rested on some point on the wall behind Minogue and he sensed the words waiting to be said, the doubts warring in Naughton’s mind. Naughton rubbed at his chin and a faint smile flickered around his lips. A bashful expression crossed his face and lifted his eyebrows, taking years off the crusty face.
“There, what?” Minogue asked.
Naughton’s face darkened suddenly with anger.
“I know what you’re looking for,” he hissed. “You want to know if I did me job that night. Me sworn job as a Guard. I’ll tell you how I handled that night’s work, mister-like I always did me job, that’s how,” he snarled. “I did it well. I did
right by God and man. And that’s more than many are doing these days.”
Naughton sniffed, covered one nostril with his thumb and then looked at the floor by his feet as though surveying a place to spit. Minogue made another foray.
“You saw a fire and you drove over?” said Minogue.
Naughton spoke vaguely as though he had moved on to other thoughts. “That’s it.”
“Where was Doyle, the Sergeant? When did he get to the house?”
Naughton leaned back against the edge of the countertop. A plume of steam came from the boiling kettle behind his shoulders.
“You saw Bourke at the house,” Minogue went on. Naughton’s eyes slipped out of focus.
“Like a monkey with fleas,” he murmured. “Leaping about, he was.”
“There was no one in the car with you? Out from town, I mean?”
Naughton didn’t answer but stared at the empty bottle.
“Did you know Eilo McInerny-she worked at Howard’s hotel?”
“A fat kind of a girl with big agricultural ankles,” Naughton muttered. “She’s another one.”
“Another what?”
Naughton ignored the question.
“She’s another what?” Minogue asked louder.
“Another fly in that one’s trap,” Naughton said. “Sleeping with her. Whatever they do with one another. Fucking animals. What am I saying, animals? Animals don’t do that.”
“Eilo McInerny doesn’t have fond memories of Portaree, the way she was treated,” said Minogue.
Naughton looked up at the Inspector. “How was she treated, so, if you know so much?”
“Drummed out,” replied Minogue. He heard the indignation rising in his own voice. “Kicked out of her job. No family to go home to. Turfed out.”
Naughton rose to his full height and let his arms down by his side. He left Minogue a look of easy contempt and turned to the kettle.
“She did better out of it than she deserved, let me tell you,” he said into the steam.
He flicked off the socket switch and reached for a teapot sitting next to a plastic bowl in which a head of cabbage was soaking. Minogue waited for Naughton to turn around. He considered this hulk’s life here amidst the stale world of boiled cabbage and whiskey, porridge and ironing, the stacks of newspapers in a home that reminded Minogue of a guard room. Naughton made the tea slowly, moving with deliberate care.
“Here, I’ll get the cups.”
Naughton spoke in a tone so soft that Minogue was startled. The Inspector had been meeting men like Naughton all his life: Kilmartin himself, the Mayo colossus minor to Naughton but filled with a like mix-the cynical exuberance at another’s folly, then the disarming, implacable loyalty to those he had become close to. Policemen trusted policemen and few others. That was part and parcel of the job, Minogue understood. But many Guards were immured in their distrust of people, and Minogue had moved beyond feeling sorry for them.
He watched Naughton, so light on his feet now, his movements dexterous and measured as he took down good china cups and saucers. Naughton balanced them expertly while he drew out milk from the fridge and then stepped daintily around the pieces of the broken bottle. For a moment Minogue believed that he caught a glimpse of what could have been a fussy parent, a man who would like to cook for his wife or children. Did Naughton drink to escape these things or to indulge them, he wondered.
“There, now,” said Naughton, “we’re right. Oh, spoons,” and he turned on his heel.
“Most of us are retired out by now, I daresay,” he went on. “It’s a lot different since I walked out the door here one fine morning, with my letter in my fist and my new suit in my case and the ma waving. Then in the train to Templemore.”
He paused, his hand in the drawer, and turned toward the two wary policemen with a boyish smile.
“God, but they were great days.” His eyes lost their sharp contact with Minogue’s then. “The most of ’em. But the people now, they hardly have a pick of respect for the law. It’s the sex thing and”-he looked sheepishly down at the shattered bottle-“of course, the human frailties, as my mother would say.”
He nodded his head conclusively and bit his lower lip. How much of a burden had that harelip been to him, Minogue wondered. Branded for life, made him hostile to any softness in himself? Shamed him with girls? Left him angry at a world whose imagined recoil from his features had closed him off from others?
“My father, and him dying above in St. Lukes in Dublin-God, I hate that bloody town, I wish we had’ve sold it to the British-my father told me that God always sends the devil to test everyone that’s born into the world. The devil can take any shape at all. It might even be somebody who sits next to you in school. Or a woman. Or something that happens in your work. To test you and remind you to be vigilant, be on your guard, like. Do you believe that?”
Lessened by long exposure now, the whiskey smell had given way to the smell of drawing tea. The sweet, strong aroma took Minogue’s thoughts for several seconds. Home. Morning, breakfast in bed. Talk, night. The blue sky framed in the window seemed to beckon him to hope. To test you, he heard Naughton’s words again. He saw Sheila Howard’s face but he felt no shame now. Hoey sat very still. Naughton let the small bundle of spoons free from his fingers onto the table.
“I do,” said Minogue. “I know what you mean.”
The spell of immobility in the room was broken now. Naughton’s words yet unreleased began to exert a stronger force on the Inspector. Hope came as a dull excitement in his stomach. Naughton knows something, he tried to tell Hoey with his eyes. Wait. Naughton grinned again at some recollection.
“It’s up to God in the end,” he whispered, and spread the spoons on the table. “But do you know what the hard thing is? I bet you don’t. I can nearly tell in a man’s face if he knows this…”
“What is it?”
“God doesn’t care. He doesn’t, you know. I found that out too late. If there is a God, well, He doesn’t care. And what sort of a God is that, then?”
He turned back to the open drawer and took out folded dishcloths. Minogue looked to the sky again. A diesel lorry droned by on the street, its exhaust echo resonating in the window. Naughton flipped open the bundle of cloths, sighed and lifted the revolver up, clasping and unclasping it as if to test its weight.
Minogue saw the object imperfectly in his side vision. He turned his head, already startled. Hoey pushed back in his chair and grasped the table-top. Naughton swallowed and cocked the hammer. The scratch and click of the metal banished any doubt from the policemen’s minds. Naughton tried to smile but Minogue saw that he couldn’t. The Inspector felt nothing. The world had stopped. Waiting. Somewhere Minogue heard a voice telling him that there was nothing he could do. Something in him struggled against this and tried to resurrect his reflexes, but his body didn’t move. Naughton’s whole attention was on the gun. His eyes were fixed on it as though it had appeared by sleight of hand, a conjuror practising, proud of his skill.
“Jesus Christ,” Minogue heard from far off. It was Hoey. Seamus Hoey’s arm came up, his fingers splayed open, a look of terror twisting his face.
“So do your duty, boys,” Naughton whispered. “And I’ll do mine.” He lifted the gun up and shoved the muzzle under his chin. His hand wavered but he redirected the gun back, shoved it under his jawbone tighter and worked his finger inside the guard. Then he yanked the trigger.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Which of you, er, puked, lads?”
The Sergeant was a slight man named Ward who wore an expensive English raincoat and a paisley tie. Minogue had been thinking of those few seconds after Naughton had dropped to the floor. The shock waves of the report in the air, the sound itself reverberating in the room and then, long after that, echoing in Minogue’s thoughts. The puff of smoke dissipated slowly. It reached Minogue’s nostrils and stung while the shouts and the gunshot continued to roar in his ears. Hoey groaned softly and held his face before drawing his hands d
own his cheeks. Spots of blood had been slapped on the ceiling and upper part of the wall. Several of the spots had begun to drip but then stopped, several inches down the wall. Minogue looked up again at the black spot, darker than the others, where the bullet had gone after it had exited Naughton’s head.
“Was it yourself, em, Matt?”
Minogue shook his head and looked around the parlour. He didn’t give much thought as to why Ward asked. Was it to appear exacting and professional or to taunt him while he had the chance? An ambulance blocked the window onto the street. Occasionally a head peeped around the window frame, its owner squeezing into the space left by the ambulance on the footpath. Several times Minogue heard a man’s voice telling someone to keep moving.
When the echo of the gunshot had died away, Minogue thought he had heard a sigh escape Naughton, but it was not so. For several moments the blood seemed to be the only thing that had any life there. Minogue remembered standing up weakly, dizzy even, looking for a path to the phone which would keep him out of the growing pool that spread out on the floor beneath Naughton, advancing in its own time out and down, beyond his twisted legs toward the table. Hoey said something and then began vomiting, the stream hitting the floor with force, but he stayed on his feet as he backed away. Minogue, still too bewildered to be shocked, had the sense that something had come into the room and that it was still there, a force or presence that suggested to him that it was perusing the situation, lingering even, to see if there was more it should do or effect. How the hell had Naughton come by a gun?
Hoey had trouble with his matches. His lips clenched around the cigarette were a pastel purple slash on a parchment-coloured face. Ward turned his attention to Minogue again.
“Are you sure you can… Now, I’m not suggesting that you’re not up to it, or that you can’t, no, no…”
Ward continued this unsolicited argument with himself, and he touched the bridge of his nose as if to demur.
“After all, ye’re the ones with the expertise and all-”
“I can do it,” Minogue said. “Shea can too, I imagine. Right?”