by John Brady
“Well compared to other places maybe,” Minogue hedged. “Clondalkin say?”
Condon’s smile held. Clondalkin’s rep as El Paso was embedded in his mind yet.
“Ah go on with you. Nobody messes with… Oh what’s his name. Thing…”
A pained look took over Condon’s features then, and he began to groan.
“Oh, he was the real McCoy… Used to swim at the Forty Foot there all the year long. Brylcreemed his hair back. Kept shoe polish in the drawer of his desk for any Guard on duty who didn’t… Ach, what’s his name?”
“It’ll come to you later on, Da,” said Kevin. “Leave it, now.”
“Like Lugs. Amn’t I right? Just like Lugs Brannigan, yes. The same style…”
The awkwardness in the room seemed to swell.
“The legendary Lugs,” Kilmartin said. “But Lugs is gone to his reward this long while.” “Stop it, you! Just stop it!”
The shout made Minogue jump again. Even Kevin looked shaken.
“You’re always doing that to me! Thwarting me…! It’s no laughing matter! Lugs Brannigan, he’s the one that puts manners on gougers! 100 percent! No messing there!”
“He did that,” Minogue said. “You’re right, Pierce, he was the man to do it.”
“And the Heavy Squad! No messing with the Heavy Squad!”
“Them too,” said Minogue. “You’re right about that, Pierce.”
“Well tell Jim that! He thinks he’s being funny. Thinks I don’t know. Tell him!”
Minogue looked over. Kilmartin was trying to hold on to a calm expression.
“Jesus Christ, Matt,” Condon said, quieter but straining again. “You know who I mean, don’t you? Tell him Pierce says how-do – and that I don’t forget them days, when I was starting out, and he put us on the right track. Tell him that. Will you?”
A sliver of moon glowed between the branches. Sure enough, Kilmartin was loitering by his car. His breath came in long volleys through the night air.
“Lovely family,” he said to Minogue. “And that Kevin? Lovely fella.”
“They’re great.”
“Our own wee troubles pale by comparison, don’t they.”
Minogue pressed the keypad again, another wirp to remind Kilmartin.
“Which is not to say we should go looking for more troubles, of course,” Kilmartin added. “Or walking like a gom into them, by ignoring sound advice.”
Smith had a new Nissan. He waved as he passed. Minogue opened his door.
“We’ll be talking, no doubt,” he said to Kilmartin.
***
The Almera that pulled away from the curb next to Minogue’s house could be anybody’s. Still, it was his own hall door closing that he caught a glimpse of as he drew in. He lifted the bolt for the gate, eyeing the glittering surface of the footpath and the driveway up to the house. The rattle and clank of the swinging gate seemed louder than usual. He paused after he had drawn them open and looked up and down the road.
The new people across the road were making the most of their flat screen tonight. The street lamp next to Costigans’ still sizzled and popped like rashers on the pan. He looked up through the bare branches and over the rooftops to the milky glow of the moon. The north star was dim but where it should be. He wondered how much Pierce Condon slept, and what he thought about in the long hours when he couldn’t.
A shadow moving caught his eye: Jacko, the Costigans’ ancient, wandering cat had come for a half hour’s engine warmth before moving off to his other night stations.
“Be off with you,” he murmured in answer to the cat’s begging mewl. “Or I’ll have to get the holy water on you. You restless fiend from hell, you.”
There was a smell of candles. Kathleen’s greeting came from the dining room.
“It’s me all right,” he said. “George Clooney says he’s busy, sorry.”
“I can smell the cigars from here.”
“They’re not cigars. They’re aphrodisiacs.”
Whatever she was doing, she was in some hurry. He sniffed at his coat and took a hanger from under the stairs.
“Dessie Smith’s wife makes him hang his coat in the shed for a few days after a game of cards,” he said. “Thank God you’re more understanding.”
He played the message on the machine. It was a Skype from Daithi, with that weird, underwatery sounding echo. He’d gotten the project manager job, but the company was still downsizing. There was talk about a move farther out in the Bay Area.
Kathleen took her time coming into the hall. He looked at her.
“Looks like we’ll be getting to know San Fran a bit more.” There was that glow about her, a contentment that showed most around her eyes. Maybe it was her nurturer self, a bit of pity for Daithi’s poor father, a man with no son nearby in his own country.
“Let’s face it,” she said. “There’s nothing in Daithi’s line here. It’s bad all over.”
She was right. For him, it was the wrong kind of right, but he’d keep it to himself.
“You had a bit of a session here,” he said. “A get-together.”
“You must be a detective.”
“Candles. Men use cigars.”
“Ah, candles. Yes, we had a get-together. Maura Kilmartin was here too.”
Her face flushed, she looked around the room, and then strode to the table.
“We have to do something,” she said. “We can’t just let things fall apart.” “What’s falling apart?”
“It’s not one thing. It’s a lot of things.”
“Is this about your pal Brídín losing her job?”
Instead of lifting the tray, she stared at it for several moments.
“Well it was a success,” she said then. “That’s the main thing.”
“I’m glad it was.”
“You’re dying to know, aren’t you? Go ahead and ask. It’s okay.” He didn’t.
“Maura and me, we realized there’s a crying need, you see? You know that Maura helped organize those buses over to Knock last month?”
He could manage only a nonchalant look.
“You didn’t?” she went on. “Well that’s interesting. Jim will blather about anything – but not something like that. He’s probably embarrassed.” “Jim, embarrassed?”
“If we don’t do it, who will?”
“There you have me. I don’t know.”
“You really haven’t a clue,” she said, and smiled. “Have you?”
“Knock, pilgrimages, visions of Mary in the sky – Not much, I’d have to say.”
“There were thousands,” Kathleen said. “And that tells you something. Even that head-case, the one who swore there’s be a sign from Our Lady at three o’clock, even he couldn’t spoil it. That was what decided us then and there. We’d do what was needed.”
“So it wasn’t Avon calling here then, or Tupperware.” She gave him a pitying smile.
“You can’t help it, can you? It makes you – uneasy, is that the word? Well guess what, love. Don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s how I know I’m on the right track.”
“When the likes of me is uneasy, that’s the sign?”
“The important thing is to get things started, and that we did. It’s exciting.” “‘Started’?”
Her eyes took on a sudden intensity.
“The church isn’t a building. It’s not a cathedral. It’s not even those old ruins that you seem to have a peculiar fondness for. It’s people. It’s the people and it’s God.”
What about the god in the woods in Glencree then, he thought, or the god of the sea that kept the boat trip to the Skelligs good and dangerous, as it needed to be?
“How many were here?” he asked. “I’m guessing twelve.”
“Oh you’re funny, all right. There were seven of us.”
“Nary a man?”
She folded her arms.
“Why is that important? Would you actually want to be here for it?”
He had no answer. Actuall
y he did, but he’d be keeping it to himself too.
Chapter 15
The sound dredging Minogue from sleep was not an alarm clock. He eyed the clock anyway: 7:03. Dark still? November. He raised his head from the pillow, heard Kathleen’s breathing change.
The sound wasn’t repeated. His mobile, he realized, on the hall table.
He slowly lowered his head to the pillow again and he recalculated the time on the west coast. Daithi would be just heading to bed around now.
“I know what that was. A text, is what it was.” Her clear, long-awake voice startled him. It changed to a mumble as she rose.
“Bedtime in Seattle. Let’s see what gives with that son of ours. Let go, I’ll bet.”
He listened to her make her way down the stairs, pass over the creaking one that still resisted all his fixes, and into the hall proper. The thermostat buttons made faint beeps as she pushed them. His mobile slid along the table a little before she picked it up.
“Not our beloved,” she said, and paused to yawn. “It’s work. You want it now?”
He didn’t. Nor did he want to launch himself into a dark Irish morning either. He turned on his side again, and listened to the first ticks and hisses from the central heating.
His sojourn didn’t last long.
Kathleen had left his mobile on the kitchen table. Road Watch went on about the M50. The ad for television licences came on again. The kettle was beginning to purr.
The text had perfect punctuation and spelling: Kilmartin’s prideful trademark.
Phone me, mobile only. Very Important. Re: M.
No it wasn’t. It’d wait. Indefinitely – as in never. Enough was enough: and if Kilmartin was going to try talking about this again, he’d let him have it.
He finished his breakfast slowly. For company he had a printout that Kathleen had made of the business about the murdered Irish missionary priest. It had less of the preachy crap that he had expected. He found himself ceding a little of his well-honed take on what any Irish priest could teach to Africans. It make him no more content than it had ever done to realize out that his views on such matters were full of holes, logical and otherwise. Was there no end to this catching your own self out?
Along with the dishes, he took with him from the table the idea that he should phone Malone now before he forgot. He dialed from the sitting room.
“Listen,” he said to a dawny-sounding Malone. “I’m dropping by that Disciples place first, see if any of those characters show up there. The McArdle one got turned away from the place last night, but Sister Immaculata says she put a fatwa on him to show today. It might work, especially if it’s backed up with a dinner he likes.”
There was no reaction from Malone’s end.
“So if I’m a bit on the late side, that’s a good sign.”
“Okay. I’ll try and manage.”
“You’re fabulous, so you are. And I was thinking over other matters too. Let me know later on what you make of them. Are you with me so far?”
“Fire away.”
“I want to skip ahead a bit in the review part. Get a hold of that log from the patrol team that responded first that day. And go through their notes again.”
“I can do that.”
“Next item. Did you hear anything yesterday about any gay angle in this?”
Malone hesitated before answering. “Zero, on a gay situation.”
“That’s what I thought. So go to that Facebook thing, and look for an entry for someone called Fíor-i-gc naí. He, or she, to be saying something about gay. Guessing? Knows something? Rumours? No idea. But see what you think.”
“What does that mean? I don’t have the Irish.”
“‘The truth, always.’ You barbarian.”
“Can you spell it for me then too?”
Minogue had to repeat the spelling for Fíor-i-gc naí three times. He looked down at the notes he’d scribbled last night while he did.
“Next,” he said. “Where Larkin was found there in the park. Find out if it was known for any encounters.”
“Encounters. You mean any gay scene. Cruising.”
“Correct. And any other such places in the area.”
Dressing later, Minogue considered jeans and an old shirt. He found clothes that he had neglected over the years instead.
“Why are you wearing that stuff?” Kathleen asked. “Going gardening, are you?” “I have my reasons.”
“You should throw them out then, along with the clothes.”
“I probably will, after today.”
“I get it – you’re going back to that place again today.”
“I’ll start there. On my way to Dalkey, my glamorous new office suite there.”
The sky was layered with clouds, but a few tracts glowed at the edges. He wasn’t going to get his weather-hopes up in that regard. He got off easy dropping Kathleen at the Luas. Murphy’s Law reached out for him there again however, in the form of a newish Bimmer surging out of a side road and donating a fine spray from the roadway to Minogue’s windscreen. He let the last of his curse words expire unspoken.
The news came on. Layoffs. Bank shares trading at a new low. What would the crew out at Disciples make of that? Another statement from the Archbishop of Dublin saying that the release of the next week’s report would prove that nothing was held back. Minogue’s mind began to buzz with slurs, and he slapped the radio off.
He took the left after Blackrock, and then a quick right toward Seapoint. Waiting there for him was a half-decent look at Dublin Bay at low tide. The water was the colour of milky tea, and flat. Far out, a beam of holy-picture light shot down from a break in the clouds and turned a patch of sea silver. He found himself trying to piece together an old poem about ships that had resounded in his classroom so long ago.
Half-bare trees and the apartment block behind them blocked his view of the water. Soon the road turned sharply back toward the sea, and beyond a short terrace, bits of Dun Laoghaire Harbour began to open out. He was soon driving side-by-side with the railway line, waiting for the stone wall next the tracks to end. He knew it’d be a letdown when it did: in that view across a short span of water, the city would have already slid out of sight behind the Pier.
That same West Pier was no match for its partner, the East Pier that set out into the bay a mile or so south. Worse, it had always had a lonesome and even stricken look to it. Maybe it was because rats were to be seen there too easily amongst unkempt patches of grass. As for the boulders heaped up along its outer side, the side that faced the city, he half-admired the shag-off-with-yourself face it presented to the nation’s capital.
He searched along the first section for people walkers. Not a sinner. The foreground itself offered only the usual underused-looking fishing boats tied up at the Coal Quay. Below and to his left, he caught a glimpse of the boatyards, but they too vanished as the coast road completed its climb to the railway bridge. A shaky-looking man near the crest there reminded him that the shelter was only a couple of hundred yards off, up whatever York Road was called after it crossed George’s Street and petered out here at the Harbour. The ragged beard made the man’s face seem more swollen. In his forties? It could be sixties. He didn’t recall seeing him at Disciples. Come to think of it, he didn’t recall faces from Disciples, nor from the snapshots of Larkin’s cronies either. What might that say? Nothing very decent.
He was at Disciples sooner than he wanted. The daylight revealed dings and scuffs and stains on the door that he had not noticed on his first visit. A few cigarette butts lay scattered on the cement footpath, their filters squashed and split into facsimiles of bog cotton. He was imagining smells already. After a few trial runs at breathing through his mouth, he tugged his sleeve over his palm and grasped the door handle.
There were men playing draughts at one table. One, with a wind-burned face and darting, wild eyes the colour of some remote National Geographic lake, watched his every step. His partner, heavy-set, stroked a long, wavy and badly t
ended beard, one more salt than pepper, while he concentrated on the game.
Minogue made his way toward the sound of the dishes and the radio. Beyond the doorway there, a woman in an apron, square-set and not long into middle age. She turned a shiny face to him, and in an instant her cautious study of him began. He could only offer a smile with the question. Was Sister Immaculata about? The woman narrowed her eyes. Minogue said that Sister was expecting him. A reply came slowly: she’d be along any minute. Then her question: who was he? Mention of Garda changed her expression.