Unholy Ground imm-2

by John Brady

  "Mr Moore? Sergeant Minogue, Mr Moore. Concerning Mr Combs?"

  "Yes, yes. Hello, Sergeant. Thank you for calling back so promptly. I must say I didn't expect your call this soon."

  Eilis, Minogue fancied. Left him hanging because of his English accent?

  "Nothing to it. You're here to fix Mr Combs' estate, now?"

  "I'm here from Mr Combs' bank, actually. I'm supposed to settle his affairs. For the moment anyway, until we can do a thorough search for relatives and locate a will."

  "Where there's a will, there's a relative," Minogue observed.

  "Quite so, Sergeant. I must remember that one. That's a good one."

  They must be hard up for jokes across the water, Minogue surmised.

  "No family, I hear, Mr Moore. Not like here. A man can't throw a stone over a wall without hitting a relative of his."

  "Indeed, Sergeant. No family here at any rate. Odd but by no means unusual, I'm afraid. Some people actually resist making wills. As though a will might hasten death, I suppose," Moore said.

  "Like a body with a pain in his chest wouldn't go to the doctor, for fear he'd find out there was something amiss?"

  "How true, Sergeant, how true. You have that phenomenon here in Ireland, too, do you?"

  No, Mr Moore, we eat raw meat. And pray to statues by the roadside. After we've mangled a few of our fellow countrymen with Armalite rifles and gossip.

  "In any event, not a happy occasion really," said Moore.

  Which is exactly when the law profession steps in and makes pots of money, hand over fist, Minogue reflected. He listened while Moore described what he planned to do. It wasn't that anyone feared that Mr Combs' effects would be interfered with, Moore stressed, but his firm prided itself on handling such matters promptly… to ensure the integrity of the deceased's worldly estate.

  Moore had a nice armchair BBC accent, Minogue thought. So far he hadn't laughed. A bit too tactful, though. Maybe he had been reading a How to Deal with People in Ireland, UK version, on his way over from London. Nice of him to be polite, especially on the telephone: absolutely no hindrance to the investigation… could be of any assistance to the investigation, more than glad to… a few days at most, an inventory, see to any possible claims on the estate from Irish sources… arrange for the remains to be returned… take advice, of course, from authorities here. Moore said that it was likely that Combs had a life insurance policy, but he didn't know where it might be.

  "Of course," Minogue replied. "By the way, you speak the Irish vejry well."

  "I beg your pardon?" from a tentative Moore.

  "Gardai. You knew the word for the police here."

  Moore gave a rather breathless laugh. Out of practice, Minogue wondered.

  "We prepare ourselves. It wouldn't do for the legal profession to be putting their feet in their mouths."

  The man was a comedian entirely.

  "No more than it would the Gardai, Mr Moore. Look. I must tell you that I don't know the procedures on this class of thing. I don't doubt but there are affidavits and applications and letters of authority and God knows what else to be dealt with. I think that if it were Jesus himself being taken down from the cross, there'd be a line-up of civil servants with reams of forms waiting."

  "Don't trouble yourself, Sergeant," Moore interjected. "This is merely a courtesy call to let you know I'm here. I have to settle my presence with some of your civil service departments, I believe. Your Foreign Affairs for a start. A Land Registry for ownership of the house and lands, I think… Doubtless some officials who deal with death duties and taxes."

  "Department of Finance, Mr Moore. Death Duty Section."

  "But mainly to seal the house and see what the estate consists of. Frankly, I'd be relieved if I can find a will. Of course, for selfish motives, I mean; I would then be directed by a sound legal instrument. But just to do right by Mr Combs, there's that, too. Perhaps to benefit those he would have liked to benefit. A charity, some relative. To bring something out of this tragedy. Might I call on you or your staff, so that I can get into Mr Combs' house?"

  "You can, of course. Can you find your way to our offices here in St John's Road? The middle of the day, say?"

  Minogue allowed himself several seconds' pause after putting down the receiver. He heard men's voices, not their words, resonating in the building. Laughter then, a jibe: still no words. Was it still raining? He walked to the barred window. A margin of sodden fields rose sharply up from the village. He located a puddle and saw that it was not disturbed. Maybe step outside for a breath of air and not be drowned now. Minogue retraced his steps through the hallway. He stepped out the back door of the station into a yard which served as a carpark. The air was clear as though it had been scrubbed. What day was it today, Tuesday? Three days gone by. Minogue leaned his hip against a squad-car and drew in the mountain air.

  It did not worry him that he might have been remiss about placing an appeal in the papers and on the telly before today. It was politic to wait and pull all the loose threads which he found locally. Minogue looked to his anniversary-present, fancy quartz watch and saw half three looking implacably back at him. Quartz watches didn't fib, that was the trouble. Keating could hold the fort here and finish off with Joyce. Could Joyce kill a man? Rejecting sexual advances from Combs?

  Minogue met Tobin in the hallway. The Garda was balancing three plates of chips and dangling a bottle of ketchup as well. Minogue followed him upstairs. Tobin put the plates on the table and then stood inside the door, his hands in his pockets. Minogue saw that Keating didn't know how to get rid of the sulking Tobin.

  "If I might lean on your generosity again, Garda Tobin. A pot of tea would be just the thing. If I could trouble you," Minogue added.

  Tobin did not tell him that it was no trouble at all. He glared at Keating, who had wisely turned his attention to a plate of chips. Minogue sat on the edge of the table and picked a chip.

  "Ye had better dig in, the pair of yous. Being polite will leave you hungry when I'm around a plate of chips."

  While Joyce began working on one plate, Keating drew Minogue back into the hall. The two policemen stood plucking chips at the head of the stairs.

  "While you were gone, sir. Joyce maintains he visited Combs several times," said Keating. "He called around once in a while in the evenings when he knew the housekeeper wouldn't give him the bum's rush at the door."

  "Combs would pour him a drink, and how could he refuse, says our tink-our traveller. They'd chat, if you can believe it."

  "About what?"

  "About everything and anything, he says. Combs seems to have been interested in finding out about Joyce's family and background."

  "Any indication of the sexual thing?" Minogue asked.

  Keating deftly caught a chip, which he had upset on the edge of the plate.

  "I haven't put it directly to him, sir. I'm waiting for a hint. Then I'll press."

  "'Talk,' 'chat'? Yarns, like?"

  "Maybe Joyce romanced about the gypsy-rover life. That'd have been good for a few evenings by the fire, I'm sure," Keating added with irony. He plucked another chip from the plate.

  "Is he lying to us, Pat? Obstructing at all?"

  "I don't get that sense. Yet, anyway. When I asked him about anything he might have learned about Combs' affairs, he got on his high horse a bit. 'A man has to mind his own business in another man's house' says he."

  Minogue shook his head.

  "And that was it?"

  "Well, you were only gone the twenty minutes, sir. I took your cue and let him blather away for fear he might clam up and forget something. I had to go over dates with him. The man has no idea what a calendar is, I'm thinking. I think he believes us about Combs' being dead now, but he doesn't want to believe it. He'd probably believe it if anyone other than a policeman-a peeler-told him."

  "Never bumped into the housekeeper, Mrs Hartigan?"

  "He said he was turned away from the door by her once. After that, nothing.
"

  Keating fell upon the remaining chips.

  "So they'd have a few jars and yap. Did Joyce stay late?" asked Minogue.

  "No. He made a remark about that. That Combs didn't want him getting jarred and into trouble, so he used to ration him with the drink and send him home. After their chat, like. He says that Combs used to like to hear about what went on around the place; you know, people in the area, the weather, the local goings-on. He was interested in where Joyce had travelled, all over the country. That class of talk."

  "I see," Minogue murmured.

  "And what it was like living by the side of the road; had, em, travellers anyone to stand up for them as regards housing or trouble with the law?" Keating was saying.

  "Joyce didn't think that the man was a bit nosey to be asking him things like that? Prying, maybe?"

  "You know how it is with this bloody country, sir. Even with the tink-travellers. Sure don't we pour our hearts out to Yankee anthropologists who'd be asking us about sex or the like, before we'd say a word beyond the weather to the man next door."

  Minogue half-smiled at Keating's truth, a sizeable mental benchmark for living in this country. Keating had finished the chips.

  "Do you know, but it's true for you," Minogue concluded.

  He remained outside the door while Keating went to the toilet downstairs. He heard Joyce cough once behind the door. Minogue realised that he was tired now, irritable even. He watched Keating plod back up the stairs. Then Minogue opened the door to find Joyce standing by the table.

  "Come on, we'll go home now," he said to Joyce. "I'll drop you off."

  Joyce's suspicion gave way to a cautious relief.

  "Are we done, sirs?"

  Minogue gave his Fiat a tall order on his way home. He had left Joyce by the side of the road at Heronsford Lane. Joyce looked like a man who hadn't slept all night. He stood in the ditch, gathering his jacket around him, his shoulders hunched. Home was a cream-coloured caravan, still on its wheels but thrust into the brambles. A face appeared at the window, Joyce's wife. A child with a mop of red hair ran out onto the road from behind the caravan, a dog following. More faces appeared in the window. The dog sniffed one of Minogue's tires and lifted a leg. Joyce shouted at the dog and startled it away. He picked up the child. Boy or girl, Minogue couldn't tell. The child's belly-button peeped out as its jumper rose. A face streaked with dirt, a runny nose, an expression curious and defiant. Minogue saw the dog in his mirror this time as it made to piss on his car again. He drove off. A last glimpse of Joyce hoisting another one of his children, the two figures one now, becalmed in the wet squalor, surrounded by discarded clothes and bits of metal. Joyce half-waved.

  Minogue knew what few others knew: there was a short-cut up this lane over a rocky track and down a worse piece of road back to the tarred lane which led by Tully. The closed gates might dissuade faint-hearted people if the potholes did not. Minogue knew what right-of-way was, so he unlatched the wide farm gate, drove through, parked and returned to secure the gate again. He stopped, his hand on the bolt, and looked down the fields. Three horses were grazing by a clump of trees in the middle distance. Minogue saw no harnesses or nose-gear on any of the animals. Free, to the edges of these fields anyway.

  His mind swung gently from raiding chieftains on horseback to Joyce, a disinherited Irishman, but regal with a horse; perhaps Combs had savoured that irony, sympathised. Tinkers, we call them, men and women who sleep by the roadside but cling to their horses and let them graze by the sides of the road, while the motorised Irish look down their passing noses at these horsemen. Landless but horse-mad. His hand on the wet gate, another hand pushing home the bolt so hard that it shook raindrops off the bars, Minogue was surprised by the rush of anger. If he were Joyce, he'd steal Jags and Mercedes and money and anything, all day and all night until someone stopped him.

  The Fiat wallowed and bottomed on its struts four times before Minogue reached the tarred part of the road. Keating was probably back in the city now, getting up a press release to appeal for scraps of information they hadn't trawled yet.

  Minogue and Kathleen had but themselves for company at tea-time.

  "And did I tell you that his bank already has a legal eagle here to close up the house and run up a list of pots and pans and knives and forks?"

  "Go on," Kathleen said. "That's banks for you. Scavengers."

  "I suppose. No relatives, so what do you expect? That's how they make their money and do their business."

  "Maybe he came over to make friends. Someone may have told him how friendly we are over here," Kathleen offered.

  "Nosey, you mean."

  "But you say he kept to himself. So he didn't come here for the company, did he? Unless it was just to be with people without being too personal."

  Minogue had no reply for that. He decided to leave the matter. They sat through a second pot of tea and listened to the half-past-six news on the radio. He rose from the chair and began to clear the table in advance of washing the dishes.

  Iseult breezed in the back door. She switched off the tape-machine which was draped across her shoulder. She yanked off the headphones but caught a strand of hair to one side.

  "Ow!" She drew her hair gently through to free the apparatus.

  "Why are you shouting?" asked Kathleen.

  "I had the volume up. I must be deaf. Ow."

  "Can you still breathe with that thing unplugged?" Minogue asked.

  "Nice welcome. Am I interrupting a comedians' convention?"

  "I'll bet your head is like a washing machine inside after listening to one of those things. And you probably walking into walls and hopping along the street with your head full of that stuff," Kathleen observed.

  "It's great stuff. It helps me think."

  Iseult plonked down a bag with hairy tassels.

  "I have presents for you. The both of you," Iseult said. She rummaged in the bag and drew out two postcards. She handed one to Kathleen, the other to Minogue. Kathleen turned hers over. It was a Modigliani, head and shoulders, a woman. Minogue snorted when he saw his.

  "Isn't that the limit?" he smiled. "I've seen that one in the books but I never thought I'd ever get a postcard of it."

  "Do you dig the title, though?" Iseult asked.

  Minogue laughed again. Magritte had called his painting of a glass of water balancing on an open umbrella, Hegel's Holiday.

  "Is it the right way up? Maybe it's upside down. What's the idea of the glass of water?" Kathleen asked.

  Recovered a little, Minogue said that it was a cavil.

  "How do you mean?"

  "I think that Monsieur M. was taking a poke at Hegel and Idealists in general."

  "I thought it was contrary enough for you, all right, Da."

  "I think it has to do with standing things on their head," she added.

  "Or on their ear, drunk," Kathleen said.

  "Karl Marx stood Hegel on his head, you see," Iseult replied airily.

  "He did what?" Minogue asked.

  "Turned him inside out. Got down to brass tacks with the real world. Hegel was airy-fairy basically. Everything was ideas for him at the end of the day."

  "Is this part of your training to be a teacher?" Kathleen asked.

  "No. Pat told me. He's interested in that stuff, too. As well as the psychology."

  Electrodes. Conditioning. Primates. Hegel, Minogue reflected. This Pat might yet be troublesome.

  "Aren't you very'lucky to have met a philosopher and psychologist in one?" Minogue murmured.

  CHAPTER 9

  Kenyon had his first contact from Moore just after three o'clock that afternoon. It had arrived from the bank, typed up, marked "transcribed and complete." The envelope, which was addressed to Mr Glover, had been hand-delivered to Bowers. On the face of it, Moore was reporting his progress to his liaison in Sampson Coutts Bank. He had telephoned and, as arranged, asked that his news be passed on the Mr Glover. His message was that he was landed and installed in a hot
el. He had spoken with the investigating officer, Sergeant Minogue. He was to meet him on Wednesday at mid-day. Moore would phone later "re accreditation." That telegraphic term meant that Moore had sought what clearances he needed to get into Combs' house.

  Moore's second message came at seven-thirty. The secretary who took the call merely announced herself and taped a monologue. It took her forty minutes to transcribe what Moore had said. She photocopied the three pages and telephoned Mr Glover. A messenger had the envelope on Kenyon's desk within twenty minutes.

  Moore had moved quickly, he read. The leisurely, remote phone manner must have been for public consumption, Kenyon mused. Moore had been in Dublin only since lunchtime, but he had already contacted Minogue and a senior civil servant in the Department of Justice. He had also been in touch with a Mr Hynes, who went by the deceptive title of Assistant Secretary in a department called Foreign Affairs. It was Hynes who had prompted him to call the Department of Justice, where his call would now be expected, seeing as Hynes had referred to them the matter of what Moore might want. Moore, that bookish and slightly arrogant don, calculated that he'd have the necessary authorisation, in writing, by mid-day tomorrow.

  Kenyon sniggered and shook his head. He felt his stomach loosen, a late reminder of the tension which he didn't want to admit. The phrase which offered him the relief and mirth had come at the end of the lawyer's call. Had Moore purposely uttered the phrase: subject to verification from my principals at the firm? Kenyon wondered if spy paperbacks which called MI5 "The Firm" were known at all in Ireland.