A Carra King (19 page)

Minogue leaned in over his cup. A couple was steered to the adjourning table.

“Tell me what that means in her case, will you?”

Garland put on a puzzled expression.

“I'm not sure now that this is where we should be going, now, er, Matt.”

Minogue let the pause linger. He knew Malone would be giving Garland the look. That quiet barrage of indirect scrutiny, the restrained irritation, the aggressive indifference of a seasoned Garda to the fate of anyone who tried to bollock him usually had the desired effect. He lifted his cup and looked around the restaurant. Not bad at all, at all, the coffee. He watched Colm Tierney finish a glass of wine. Ireland's disappeared, he thought. Had it now.

“What I mean,” Garland said then, “is that of course I'll be very glad to help out in any way I can.”

“I'm much obliged, Seán,” he managed. Garland sighed.

“I'm not comfortable discussing a colleague's professional life,” he said.

Minogue watched Malone poke gently at the edge of his eyelid.

“Maybe I've given you the wrong impression here now, meeting here with a bit of socializing going on. I forget sometimes, you know. We tend to, well you can tell, try and stay informal. To someone outside looking in, it might look different.”

Minogue nodded. He looked into his cup.

“Sorry now,” Garland went on. He gathered himself in his seat. Fifteen stone, Minogue was thinking. Was that a hundred kilos?

“But I have to step back into my job and be duly cautious.”

“Don't be sorry at all,” said Minogue. “Enough said now. At this moment there's a Guard on his way to Ms. Hartnett's place to see if we can locate her, now.”

Garland sat back.

“My God,” he whispered. “You mean we have reason to be worried, do we?”

“Well now. This much I can tell you, Seán. We can't find Ms. Hartnett on any flight out of Dublin. I'd be most obliged if you were to keep this to yourself, Seán. We need to contact others, her family. It may all turn out to be a misunderstanding. A series of misunderstandings.”

“But Aoife is not under investigation by the Guards, is she?”

“Not a bit of it,” Minogue replied. “Now, you were good enough to phone us about a visit from this man who is the current focus of our investigation. Did you know anything about what he and Ms. Hartnett discussed with this American?”

Garland adjusted his dickey bow again.

“Well, I don't really,” he said. “It was only after me seeing the picture in the papers that I remembered him. I wonder if Aoife herself knows who he is, sorry, who he was. You see, we get a lot of people and groups and requests coming through the department. An awful lot.”

Garland leaned in over the table.

“Culture and history and heritage, they're all very hot issues now. We're answerable for a lot more than digging up an oul pot and putting it in a glass case for a busload of schoolchildren to gawk at now. The way histories are handled and researched and presented is all very contentious.”

“There's more than one history now?”

Garland gave Minogue the eye in return.

“Oh, there's a right can of worms there. There are any number of people and interest groups and the like — stakeholders, they call them — in heritage now. That's a side of the job that takes a lot of time and training. It takes delicate enough management by times, I can tell you. I have three staff with MBAs, even.”

“So you're busy, then,” said Minogue. “Inquiries, visitors, conferences?”

“All that and more, to be sure.”

“Would Ms. Hartnett have discussed the visit with anyone else at the office? The American, I mean. Mr. Shaughnessy. She kept notes maybe?”

Garland looked up at a recessed light for several moments.

“To tell you the God's honest truth, I've no idea. Aoife's very organized. She'd probably have a note if there were something to it. She'd certainly have come to me if there were prospects from this thing, this meeting. But she's a fierce busy person. She's project leader on a big site plan that's moving ahead fast.”

“Which, now?”

“The Carra Fields, out in Mayo.”

Minogue knew that Malone had heard too.

“There was an opening of an exhibition about that recently?”

“There was indeed,” said Garland. “With all the plans and models for the interpretive centre laid out. Marvellous. It rewrites a lot of history, so it does.”

Minogue met Malone's eyes for a moment.

“I've a colleague who'd like to persuade me that Mayo people are civilized.”

“Well now, he's got you,” said Garland. “Stone Age people — late enough on in the Stone Age, to be sure. There were thousands of them — a huge cleared enclosure, with grazing and crops. And a big surprise was that there were no fortifications or the like. All of them living a grand existence without the rowing and beating one another we have later. Can you imagine?”

“Very civilized,” said Minogue. “For Mayo. A Garden of Eden.”

“Oh, I could go on and on,” said Garland. “It's excited a lot of interest in Europe. It's the most important site since, well, we know what happened at Mullaghmore.”

“To be sure,” said Minogue.

An interpretive centre in the Burren area of his home county had been left half-completed after protests about it had overruled the local peoples' support for it.

“Aoife can give you the ins and outs of all the things that need to be juggled and managed for this one. God knows! It's not just money at all, at all. She worked on Mullaghmore, too. I remember she saw it coming too, the showdown over that. Anyway, the Fields will be a showpiece entirely. There'll be no slip-ups with this one. It was heritage funds from Europe that made the big difference.”

“She is putting the finishing touches to this whole project, you say.”

“Oh yes,” said Garland. “We have the funds, the plans approved. We're into tenders already and the nitty gritty. There's great support all over. Sure the planning and approval process was nearly a love-in. A lot of that was due to Aoife. She has that combination: a real expert in her field, and she knows how to manage outside of the fieldwork. Ideal.”

Minogue searched Garland's face for any irony.

“We're ahead of the pack here in Ireland,” he went on. “People are coming to Ireland for a lot more than the forty shades of green now. They want to see nature yes, but they want to see a place and a people full of history too, people on the periphery of the continent. I'm not sure that we know what we're sitting on here.”

Minogue watched a customer looking down the wine menu. These Carra Fields were nearly as far into the west as you could get without falling off into the sea.

“Yes, indeed,” Garland added. “Like the economists say, we have good fundamentals, in the line of history. Tremendous historical resources.”

“Our time has come, has it,” Minogue said.

“It has indeed,” said Garland. “And not a moment too soon.”

“How do you mean?”

Garland rubbed at his nose. He looked at Minogue's writing in his notebook.

“Well, it's an open secret the way things had been going,” he murmured. “So much had been lost.”

“Lost,” Minogue said.

“Yes. Chalices from monastic sites were dug up and melted down hundreds of years ago. Finds that were never reported. Standing stones used to hold up fences. The Béara Chalice, do you remember that?”

“From the field down near Ballyferriter there a few years ago?”

“That's the one,” Garland said. “We had to give thirty thousand pounds to the finder for goodwill. Honest man he was, that turned it in, and him after turning the field one October and there was the chalice lying there with a big dent in it from the harrow. . . But sure what matter. A bog will push stuff up and you can never tell when or where. The thirty thousand was to tell people they'd be well paid to turn in things rather than be conniving or just breaking things up and selling them. And nowadays any fella in off the street can buy any number of electronic gadgets.”

“Like what?” from Malone.

“Metal detectors — curse of God on them. Well I remember the meetings we used to have back in the early seventies, when we got the first of the satellite images and we had a bit of money to do the aerial surveys. Oh, you'd laugh — or cry, maybe.”

Garland looked over his shoulder at the group he had left.

“It was Hobson's choice there,” he said. “We had to decide back then if we should even be making public the digs and the finds until after we had the sites set up and secured.”

Minogue had a second after the tickle before the sneeze erupted. When he finished blowing his nose he looked up to find Garland staring at him.

“Tell you what I can do,” Garland said. The fingers were so short that the Inspector couldn't stop staring at them as they were tugging, poking under Garland's chin.

“Come around to the office with me. I'll see if there's anything lying around there that'd give us any help.”

T
EN

G
arland wheezed as he walked down the lane to the car. His gait reminded Minogue of a hen walking ahead of a vehicle and trying to get into the farmyard. The Inspector slowed.

“It'll be me looking through her appointment diary,” Garland said. “More than that, I'd have to get advice on.”

Minogue took in the flushed face, the chest rising and falling.

“You can see the situation, now, can't you?”

“Fair enough.”

Malone drove around the green and down Dawson Street. He asked Garland about the mummies. Everyone wanted to know about the mummies and when they'd be back. Not a day went by without someone asking after them. What about the bog man, Malone asked then, the one that looked like a shoe? And the bloodstained tunics from the 1916 Rising, were they out being cleaned or something? Minogue almost smiled. Malone, like thousands of people probably, wanted these grisly, tatty, extravagant relics, the meat and potatoes of childhood visits to the Museum, back on show. Garland sidestepped Malone's inquiries. He began talking about regional museums, sites, interpretive centres, restoration. Minogue eyed the group of young men drinking cans of something by the Kilkenny Design shop.

Garland told them that Viking Dublin was unexpectedly popular now. There was an interactive exhibit on Swift's Dublin being set up too.

“What, we'd get to talk to him,” said Malone. “Have a pint with him?”

Two Guards on duty by the gates to Leinster House eyed them as they passed.

“Virtually,” Garland said. “Go around by the car park here. The staff door.”

Minogue eased his way out of the Nissan. A Guard who had been sitting in a squad car closer to the Shelbourne stepped out. Minogue met him halfway. The Guard looked over the photocard and then nodded at Malone. Minogue had forgotten who the statue was that they passed in the middle of the car park. A quartz street lamp began to buzz and glow dimly by the corner of Molesworth Street.

Garland was having trouble finding his key. Minogue looked up to the camera over the door. Garland huffed and puffed, said damn, keyed in. A security guard met them inside the glass cubicle. Garland helloed him and signed in.

“Anybody above, Kevin?”

The security guard had long hair.

“Studio lad I think.”

Garland led the two detectives down a hall to a staircase. Minogue pinched the bridge of his nose but he couldn't clear it. He glanced at the names on the doors, the titles: resource outreach coordinator, curators, field facilities.

“Where do you keep the mummies now?” Malone wanted to know. Minogue heard Garland's wheezes.

“Ah that'd be telling. Let's say they're under wraps for now.”

A door opened on to a newly decorated foyer. It was grey with bottle-green signs, its lights hidden under a plinth by the ceiling. Garland opened a door that led into a large windowless room lit only by three security lights set into the ceiling. Moveable partitions ran the length of the room.

Minogue took in the computers in each cubicle. Postcards from Thailand and Donegal and New York, Israel, those rock-cleft palaces in Jordan. He slowed to eye a poster for the Carra Fields. Why the hell leave it black and white with masses of clouds looming overhead? Lugubrious, mystical Celt guff. Of course, that was it: the writing on the bottom was German. Calculated, marketed: smart.

Garland and Malone were waiting for him by one of three doors. Garland tugged at his ear. Dr. Aoife Hartnett (M. Litt, MBA). Minogue tried to figure out the number of years that had taken.

“Tell you what,” said Garland. “Let me just go into the studio and ask them if Aoife's checked in since. Come in and have a look if you want.”

The third door: Multimedia. That was something to do with computers. The hum from it was music. There were cartoons on the door about engineers, computers with faces, a Murphy's law, a caveman with a laptop under his arm.

The man facing the computer screen turned in his chair and pushed it back on its rollers. He didn't stand.

“Dermot,” said Garland. “You're the night owl entirely.”

Minogue nodded at him.

“Dermot Higgins,” said Garland. He had to ask Malone's name before introducing him.

Minogue registered the stubble, the cropped hair, the T-shirt of a fake Egyptian fresco with microchips amongst the figures. If he'd tidy up the face, his dark looks would fit handily on a paperback cover: a hero, the shirt in flitters and lathered in sweat, carrying your basic swooning, busty heroine away from a burning castle.

Minogue's eyes strayed to the monitor. The screen filled with fog and slowly cleared to reveal a map of Ireland. Small pictures the size of postage stamps surfaced from the map and began to glow and pulsate.