A Carra King (29 page)

“There'd be the crowning there,” she said, “with all the goings-on over by the road. That all died out, of course. But it started up again after the Famine for a few years. It never caught on again after that. The people emigrating . . .? I don't know.”

“Your father had all this researched,” Minogue tried. She shifted in her seat.

“He did, he did,” she replied. “But some of it turned out what you might call fanciful. Or at least that's what the ex — well, the history people thought. Da was an amateur, you see. And proud of it, too: the Latin root, he'd always say —
amo, amas, amat
— to love something is not necessarily to carry a degree from some university around with you as authority. Those were his ways.”

Was it the warmth of the sun, he wondered, or the pleasure of being away from Dublin that made him dreamy. Maybe it was the idea of this country schoolteacher for decades doggedly unearthing a forgotten history. He imagined O'Reilly in the classroom, singing, declining obscure Irish verbs, dependably clattering the odd dunce, roaring at one of his charges errant or lackadaisical with a hurley stick. Quite a breed, the country schoolteachers then, and some lost genius in many. He remembered the books given to him by his own teacher, McMahon, as a parting gift: Chekov and Gogol, Maupassant. McMahon, run over by a car at midnight on a road ten years later. Asleep in the middle of the road, drunk.

“People thought he was mad, of course,” she was saying. “But sure everyone loved him. The kids adored him. Oh, but he was strict! I get people writing me and telling me about Da. University, heads of companies, even people who ended up in Australia. A man sent us a thousand pounds from Sydney. He'd had Da as a teacher back before the war, but he hadn't forgotten. ‘A habit of mind for learning' Da would say, ‘A cast of mind for truth.' The old school, I suppose some would say.”

Minogue suppressed a yawn and tried to smile at her.

“Well, of course the world caught up to Da,” she went on. “But do you know, it didn't interest him much. He went on about his business after retiring, gathering the stories and the poems and the songs. He was going to buy a computer, he told me a week before he died. So as he could do the things he'd collected. He had eyewitness stories of the Famine, sure. People who were children when it happened. All that way back. He'd taken them down when he started teaching. His first notebook is 1928, when he was in school himself. A born historian. So there.”

“Here we are,” said Noonan, “up ahead.”

Minogue saw the rooflights of the Garda car above the heather. Next to it was a sign. They rounded a bend and came in sight of a cleared gravelled patch joined to the road by a makeshift bridge. Noonan took the car slowly over the ruts. He parked by a granite boulder sticking out of what looked to Minogue like an abandoned turf bank. He took a walkie-talkie out of the glove box. Minogue felt the anticipation worm in his stomach again, his chest grow tight.

“We'll go up now and introduce ourselves?” Noonan was asking him.

Minogue savoured the give, the juicy sponge of the bog underfoot. His wellies sucked as he drew them out of the muck where he'd been standing. He held the edges of the map tight. Mairéad O'Reilly ran a finger along the line.

“That's us there,” she said. “And there's tracks and boreens here. And here.”

How the hell could you get a car up here, he wondered. Malone was hunkered over a track fifty yards away with Noonan pointing to something. Minogue looked beyond them to the parked cars by the Office of Public Works sign.

“So the site here is wide open really, you'd have to say,” he said.

She pointed over to the fence surrounding a pit.

“That'd be to stop people falling in,” she went on. “Liability, I don't know. This is all rock here up on the left and . . .” She looked down at the map again. “I think it's here they'll put in his plaque and what have you. A seating area, too.”

She looked over again.

“Da wouldn't be one for all the fuss. But he'd like it, I know. A nice touch.”

Minogue looked from the map up onto the bog again. The only road most likely to have been fit to bear the weight of a small car was somewhere behind the other fenced-off place, the court tomb.

“Am I right now for that road here?”

She looked in on the map.

“Yes, indeed now. That definitely leads over to the cliff. Unless now they've added a road of their own. There's going to be some kind of an observation spot up over the cliffs there, I suppose.”

Minogue folded the map and looked around. There were no ancient peoples striding through the heather toward him. There was only Carra Hill, heather, clouds like candy floss, the softest of breezes stirring the heather. He looked down at his boots. He hadn't been mistaken: the mud was over his ankles already. He pulled each out in turn. Mairéad O'Reilly gave him a sympathetic smile and tucked her hair in under a headscarf. Henna, that was the name of the stuff, he remembered now.

He realized that his nostrils were no longer blocked. He tested the Velcro on the video-camera grip and wondered if he'd get through this excursion into this sodden and desolate hinterland of Mayo without passing some remark to Noonan about the plodding boot prints of the Guards last night. All over the damn site, it looked like. He imagined Noonan's reply, and it'd be the correct one: wasn't my idea to send fellas in here in the dark. What did you expect would happen?

“Will I carry anything?” she asked.

“No thanks, Mairéad. No.”

The breeze freshened closer to the cliffs. Malone changed films in the Polaroid. Minogue looked back at the white sticks he'd left stuck into the side of the track. Though blurred and worn away by the rain, there were traces of vehicle tires in two spots.

Noonan was a man who liked marching through heather, it seemed.

“A week, do you think?” he called out. Minogue nodded. The hush in the background must be the sea. The edge of the cliff was but a hundred yards ahead.

“We have to get a fix on the last time anyone was up here, Tommy. If the car has been at the bottom of the cliff for a week . . .”

Malone bent over to shield the film as he inserted it.

“Who'd be up here for Jas— I mean, do people go walking and hiking up here? In the pissing rain, like?”

He looked up over at Noonan and Mairéad O'Reilly. She was explaining something to him. He followed her outstretched arm as she swept it in short arcs from the tomb site to the large pit. A good five hours before the light would fail. An hour to get the search team lined up and ready.

Noonan seemed to have guessed what he was about to ask.

“Well, are we set to go over the place now?”

“If you please. How many staff can we expect?”

“Sixteen or seventeen. A few in from Castlebar.”

Noonan nodded. Minogue wondered if the Chief Inspector was holding back a smile. Minogue faced Carra Hill while Noonan radioed the squad car. They'd have to go to the farm again to phone in. Noonan pocketed the walkie-talkie.

Minogue pointed at the cliff edge on the map.

“We'll start there,” he said to Noonan. “Tommy and myself.”

Malone shrugged his leather jacket and zipped it higher.

“If ye'd split into teams,” Minogue added, “pairs say, one covering the other so there's overlap and start in from the road. Maireád would be with me, please.”

“All right,” said Noonan. “Mind yourselves. It's dodgy enough by the edge.”

Noonan glanced at Malone's mountaineering boots. The muck had already come up to his calves.

“Those alpine jobs will come in handy there.”

Malone looked down at his encrusted shoes.

“You're only slagging 'cause you don't have any,” he said.

“It's bleeding slippery here, boss.”

Minogue looked over. Malone's head appeared between tussocks of grass.

“Anything?”

“Nothing,” Malone replied. “And I'm not diving off the bloody cliff and poking around underwater.”

Minogue looked across at the ragged, distant line of Guards coming in from the Cahercarraig road. Mairéad O'Reilly was sitting in the squad car now. He felt he should say something to her. Thank her for coming out to help them sort out the paths and holes. He decided to see how the Ident crew in from Castlebar was managing with lifting casts of the wheel ruts.

“Go over to the Ident crowd there, Tommy. See them right, will you.”

He picked his way back across the clumps of frockins and heather to the gravelled area. There were three Garda cars there now beside the van from the Castlebar section. Noonan had made his way in from the line that was moving north toward the fenced-in excavation.

“Does she be needing to get back to school?” Minogue asked.

“Ah no,” said Noonan. “She knew it might be the whole afternoon. If Mairéad can help, that's what she wants to do. Bred into her, and all of them.”

Minogue smiled in at her. She let go her folder, rolled down the window.

“I hope we've not stolen the day on you now,” he said.

“Not a bit of it,” she replied. “I'm in a grand spot here, the bit of peace and quiet. It's like old times, so it is.”

Minogue glanced down at the folder. The pictures were amateur-looking. She lifted it.

“This?” she said. “It's just something to be reading. Again.”

“It's the digging your father did years ago. . .?”

“It is. It's old now of course, but sure it was never meant to be the final word. More folklore now, they say.”

Minogue tried to get a better look at the open pages.

“Here, by all means,” she said.

He took it through the open window. Noonan stepped to his side.

“There's the man himself,” Noonan said. “God rest him. When would that be, Mairéad?”

“Nineteen forty-eight.”

Minogue glanced over at her.

“After that terrible winter of '47. A hundred years after the worst times of the Famine, he never stopped telling us. He's standing where that court tomb is opened up now. Well, I can't say now that he knew then what he was standing on. He says he did.”

Minogue read down. It had been poorly typed, and the copy was patchy.

“Well, he added in the bits of stories and reading he'd done there. The whole locality. The Carra Fields, all that. Those roads there he put down to try and map things out. Twelve feet down he had to go.”

“A court tomb now,” said Minogue. “They're scarce enough, aren't they?”

“You're right,” she said. “It'd be the well-to-do, the chieftain, being put in there, you see. Interred.”

Minogue looked up from the page.

“Would there be any class of comforts sent along with him,” he said. “Like our friends beyond in Egypt?”

“The cruiskeen lawn,” said Noonan and grinned. “Poteen?”

“There would,” said Mairéad O'Reilly. “But there was nothing found here at all. That tomb, now, it was all done by the museum people and the OPW. Two years they were at this part, as I recall.”

Minogue returned to the folder. He turned the pages slowly in reverse order. Mairéad O'Reilly stepped out of the car and buttoned up the collar of her coat.

“That's yours truly there,” she said. “In the middle. I was four years old.”

Minogue grinned back.

“Don't be asking me if it was before or after the Carra Fields were inhabited.”

Noonan laughed.

“There's the whole slew of us there,” she went on. “Mam, God rest her, Eileen, John. That's Finbarr. Uncle Ger with the eyes rolling back in his head . . .”

She tugged her scarf tight and watched the Guards searching the heather.

“Take that back to Dublin with you,” she murmured.

“Thank you. Are you sure?”

“Indeed and I am. I have other copies made. You can go home and spread the fame of the Carra Fields.”