A Carra King (34 page)

Minogue sipped at the whiskey again. He tried to imagine a country schoolmaster toiling away in a remote part of the west of Ireland. Postwar Ireland, asleep and detached, a man rearing a large family in a place being stripped of youth and history by emigration. O'Reilly, like so many of the teachers Minogue remembered, probably had an appetite for heroism and drama thwarted by making a living. This teacher had done much and worked in obscurity. Separated from those who were official custodians, no wonder he let his imagination fill in the gaps.

The stone was to crown the hill, Carra Hill. A signal, O'Reilly claimed, that the king was dead but that the new king was already installed. Maybe carrying the stone was practice for carrying the king up by himself when the time came.

The Bushmills still had bite. He flipped to where O'Reilly had thrown in stuff from the more widely known legends. It was common in legend for a man to be given a
geis
, a task, to fast or go out on the hills and live off berries and watercress. And it wasn't just poets and holy men like the mad poet Sweeney, lovesick and off the rails entirely, walking through hawthorn thickets like an iijit. Purification for the
geis
: to devour no creature, to abjure meat and milk, to abandon the sustenance his civilization had grown strong on.

Minogue held a sip of whiskey on his tongue. He looked over at the bank calendar open on a picture of a lake in Connemara. Wind, the curlew's cry, wild: he should go back and read those translations of the ancient poems again.

So: after three days of steering clear of meat, this candidate was purified, light-headed and headed down with a boulder, “an effigy of the king.” But was there a stone carved for every succeeding king? Twenty thousand people in a well-organized, peaceful settlement: there must have been craftsmen, ritual. Loaded down, your man was pointed toward the hill: off you go, son, find your way up there and you can unload at the top. Had many made it? If the chosen one didn't make it, what happened? O'Reilly didn't have a go at that. Wisely, probably. Nor had he much to say about a revival of the thing back in the 1840s.

He let the pages fall back to the one of O'Reilly standing over the exposed wall. Nineteen fifty-two, the start of him being taken seriously: definitely a told-you-so look. He would continue for another fourteen years after he'd handed it over to the museum, or rather the museum had moved in.

He brushed the yellow stickies with his thumb. Where was the section on Donegal again? Carrick, that village on the road in to Glencolumbkille? Every second town in Ireland was Carrick-something. He opened the guidebook again. Wasn't there a Glen road to Carrick song? Donegal: Dún na nGall, literally the Fort of the Foreigner. Shaughnessy had been over that road not two weeks ago. Looking for . . .?

Minogue was getting addled now. He let the guidebook close. He took up O'Reilly's folder again. “. . . A chieftain to the North . . .'' — he'd seen it two or three times on one page. Cattle raids and knocking heads were part of the folklore epics and mythology. Taín bó Cuailgne, the Cattle Raid at Cooley. The North: couldn't mean the Vikings, they came a thousand years later . . . there. O'Reilly had it that the settlement went into decline when they had to give too much heed to guarding against northern raiders carrying off maidens and cattle and possessions.

There was nothing about the people of the Carra Fields just wearing out the pasture with cattle. Maybe that's why O'Reilly was held at a distance by the experts. They could spout about rainfall patterns, erosion and nutritional decline in grasses and social dislocation. That was science, those were facts. O'Reilly, the obsessed amateur, would wander into the
béaloideas
, the oral tradition that still came through by the open fires and in the twinkling eyes of the aged, the stories O'Reilly would have listened to and rewritten later.

Minogue squinted at the words: the customs among the
dreams
, the tribal groups. Ransom perhaps, forced marriages, local wars. He yawned and slid back in the chair. He sat listening to the fridge and surveying the empty glass and the books and notes scattered on the table until he couldn't take the pain from the chair back grinding into his shoulders anymore.

He closed and stacked the maps and folders, shoved them to the wall. He probably wouldn't be able to sleep. He fought off the thought of another half-glass of whiskey. The list he'd made might look downright stupid in the morning. So what: he'd make time somehow. He wondered if Geraldine Shaughnessy was sleeping in her suite, wherever that suite was. Was her husband — her ex-husband — awake himself, in his hospital room.

He paused by the door and laid his hand on the light switch. And Aoife Hartnett coiled up in the water for days, that band around her neck where she'd been choked turning brown as the tissue decayed. Pieces of her torn and chewed by whatever lived at the bottom of the Carra Cliffs.

Kathleen grunted and swallowed as he lay next to her.

“Are you all right?”

Talking in her sleep. He clamped his eyelids shut. It wouldn't be the first time he fibbed.

“I am,” he said.

N
INETEEN

“F
ine by me,” Minogue repeated. One coffee wasn't enough. He studied the edge of the carpet by the hall door. Anne Boland had a Cork accent. He wanted her to keep talking, about anything really. She was explaining how Geraldine Shaughnessy, her sister, was so nervous about going to an interview in a police station.

“It's not that she's trying to, well . . . She's what you might say a bit phobic. She may be trying to keep some hope alive, you know, now? Going into a barracks now would be a real trial for her, I'm thinking. She doesn't know I'm phoning now. I stayed with her last night. Sure she hardly slept a wink.”

“I understand, Mrs. Boland. There'll be no bother. But at some point we'd be needing to get an interview.”

“She'd never phone yourself now . . .”

“So you'll steer her over to Grafton Street then?”

“I will, indeed. I'll wait for her, too. I have my eldest Gráinne here, too. We'll all be driving down to Mallow when ye're finished, please God.”

Minogue said goodbye and put down the receiver. Anne Boland had suggested the hotel but Minogue had said Bewleys. He finished his coffee and packed the folder in his briefcase. He set the house alarm under the stairs, quick-stepped out the hall door and turned the dead bolt.

He tilted the sunroof and cursed the return of that rubbery ache behind his eyes. Ranelagh was all right for a change. The traffic lights by the canal were out of kilter. A cyclist tried to pull a stunt on the footpath as Minogue worked around a bus with a foot of space to his left. The cyclist came close to taking a header across the front of the Citroen. Minogue stared him down. The man slapping tickets on windscreens on Molesworth Street needed more coaxing than Minogue thought fair for a senior Garda detective with a hangover.

He skipped across Dawson Street with his eyeballs jiggling up and down in their sockets in a way that surprised and appalled him. He arrived on Grafton Street almost in time to be crushed by a milk delivery lorry. He hadn't a leg to stand on when the driver called him a fucking yob: the street wasn't pedestrian only for another hour. Bewleys offered him no comfort this morning. The nod from Kevin Kelly, an enormous, sweaty and good-natured ex-soldier turned floor man, seemed guarded, solemn even.

“What's the story there, Matt.”

“This is an awful town Kevin. How're Theresa and the kids keeping?”

“Top form. Thanks. Jasmin's into the art still.”

Minogue hammered on the lift button again. Kelly's face turned grave.

“Saw her looking at her dinner the other day, but. Very strange look on her face.”

“That a fact now, Kevin.”

“Yeah. Asked me if we have any pictures of the Holy Family anywhere.”

Minogue knew better than to expect any trace of humour on the Dubliner's face.

“Go easy there, Kevin.”

“What are you hammering on that button for? The lift is bollocksed.”

Minogue sighed and looked up through the metalwork.

“You better not be having me on, Kevin.”

“Where are you off to in anyhow? You're a Main Floor man.”

“The Museum.”

“Well you're late then, aren't you.”

“I should give you another dig for that. What are you saying?”

“Party of five gone up ahead of you. Two women, a teenager, a girl. Looked important enough. Even without the two heavies.”

Minogue put his foot on the first step. Four flights, a sore head.

“Two of ours, is it?”

Kevin nodded.

“Unless everyone in town is walking around with radios and shooters tucked in the back of their trousers.”

Kevin Kelly cleared his throat and tugged at his shirt cuffs. He had risen to corporal before jumping ship.

“Tell them not to look so shagging shifty, Matt.”

Minogue stepped aside to allow a wheezing bedraggled man down the steps. Kelly moved in and grasped the elderly man under the arm.

“Heard a strange thing.”

Minogue looked away from the busker setting up across the street from the restaurant. He noted the excessive care Kevin was taking with the old man.

“You're being fitted up for something.”

Minogue looked around at the passing faces.

“Your outfit I mean. The job.”

Kelly had a big smile for a young woman carrying an armful of books. He spoke out of the side of his mouth.

“Well, am I right?”

“Kevin, I can't be doing business here now.”

“Don't be so bloody contrary, will you. Bernard, my lad, well one of his mates was in a pub there last week. Some of the Smith crowd were there; hangers-on.”

Kelly's face suddenly gave way to a smile and a wink at a couple. Minogue remembered that it was Kevin Kelly's size and charm that had allowed Bewleys to stay open late for several years now.

“Anyway. He overheard some talk. There was something mentioned, something about ‘quits.' Oh sure, pub-talk. But he's in tight enough with the Smiths, Bernard says.”

Minogue glanced at Kelly's beefy hands adjusting his tie. He must work hard to keep the belly in, he decided.

“What kind of ‘quits'?”

“Something serious.”

“Like using a Garda squad car at Griffith Avenue for target practice?”

“Might be connected, I don't know. I'm only passing it on.”

“Any name?”

Kelly shook his head.

“A friend of a friend — and all that. There's no comeback on it. Just something I heard third-hand.”

“All right, Kevin. Thanks.”

“Now I'm not a tout, for Jases' sake. Okay? But if I hear more, I'll let you know. If it's the Smiths, you better be wide awake, that's all I'm saying. They're bigger than even the Guards know. I'm telling you. They don't care, some of them. You know?”

Minogue took his time on the stairs. He waited by the hallway leading to the museum café for a minute to get his breath. Kilmartin couldn't have picked a better time to be on a fortnight's jaunt in the States. Had he known? He thought of Tynan. The Commissioner had spoken to him more in the last few days than in the past six months. Chess, moving pieces to gain advantage. He rubbed hard at his eyes to try to clear the suspicion and anger surging up into his thoughts.

“You'd qualify as a prominent person, Mrs. Shaughnessy,” he said. “‘It's better to be safe . . .' is the approach, I imagine now.”

Minogue looked at the detective who had been eyeing the doorway, the bored-looking one with the skimpy beard and the polo shirt under his leather jacket.

“Could I trouble you to set us up with a cup of something here?”

A pause and a blink before he nodded. Minogue exchanged a look with the older detective.

“You won't mind if Mrs. Shaughnessy and I were to chat alone there over in the corner?”

The coffee was too hot. The detective slid the change onto the table. A fifty-penny coin rolled to the edge and fell to the floor. He took a seat near the door. Minogue picked up the coin. The only other clients, a couple with wire-rimmed glasses and hair so blond Minogue believed it could be dyed, were exchanging maps and sheets of paper at a table by the counter.

“They're certainly different from the Guards I knew,” Mrs. Shaughnessy said. “Hard to tell they're Guards at all really.”

“That's the idea, I think.”

“Are they armed?”

Minogue nodded. She looked away.

“On bicycles, I remember,” she murmured. “Armed only with their tongues. Little enough for them to do back then of course. How things change.”

From what airy suite had Geraldine Shaughnessy been summoned to be told of her son's death, he wondered. He imagined a city skyline at night, all glass and pastel carpet, a piano —