“Okay then?”
Hoey returned Minogue’s earnest look in the mirror for a moment before he took a step back and jammed his hands in his pockets.
“Jesus Christ,” he spat out. “I look terrible. I feel terrible. I’m not going. I don’t know. Can’t you leave me alone?”
“You missed a button there. Second one down on your shirt. Come on now, let’s go.”
Kathleen kept her shock well-hidden, Minogue thought. They walked to the car-park.
“Well, Shea,” she said as she waited for her husband to unlock the passenger side. “We’re right now, aren’t we?”
Hoey squinted at the cars in the car-park. “Well, Kathleen,” he murmured, “to tell you the truth, if I was right, I wouldn’t be here.”
Kathleen got into the car and gave her husband a look of alarm. Minogue grinned.
“That’s the style, Shea,” he said. Kathleen’s laugh was forced.
Minogue let the Fiat out onto Nutley and aimed it up toward the Bray Road. He began whistling softly between his teeth. Kathleen kept her gaze fixed on the road ahead until they stopped by the lights at Montrose. There she rallied and began working on Hoey’s embarrassment. She spoke in a tone of mock reprimand.
“Sure, what’s wrong with staying out in Kilmacud awhile? Himself here is at a bit of a loose end. Hang around, can’t you, and see that he doesn’t make an iijit of himself.”
Hoey sat back in his seat and began licking his bottom lip. Minogue eyed him in the mirror.
“Yes,” Kathleen went on, “Daithi’s room is going a-begging. You might as well…”
Minogue sensed the hesitation in her voice. She had almost said that Iseult’s room was available too, that Iseult and Pat… But that would be to admit aloud what she had yet to admit to herself.
“There’s the garden, you know,” she went on boldly. “There’s transplanting to be done before the winter proper. I must say now that I only like it for walking around in. But you people from the country, I suppose…?”
Minogue looked at the dashboard clock. It wasn’t too late to phone Kilmartin at home and have a pow-wow about this. Organise some leave for Hoey, park stuff with Murtagh. He resumed his Handel but hummed instead of whistled. He’d phone Herlighy, the psychiatrist, at home tonight too.
As the evening clouds retreated from the sky over Dublin that night, they took with them some of the yellow nimbus of light which had been reflected from the city below. The air grew colder. Although there was no moon, the summit of Two-Rock Mountain became sharp and purple under the stars. Hoey sat wrapped in an eiderdown by the window. He left the window open a crack with the ashtray next to it. He had taken his pills after the bath, but he did not feel tired. He watched two cats walk along the block wall that separated Minogues’ yard from the neighbours‘. A light breeze had the remaining leaves whispering dryly.
Hoey had no handkerchief and, as there were times when he couldn’t stop crying, he used a towel to wipe his face. He worried about waking the Minogues and that, ridiculously, made him cry even more than thinking about Aine. He had grown into the habit of imagining her as his wife in future years. How had he done that? When had he started? For long stretches of time that night he was certain there was no future, but then some indistinct, wishful feeling would crawl into his chest.
He shivered and drew the eiderdown tighter. The sky was full of stars and they held his fascination for a long time. He remembered them as a child just being there, company for wonder and excitements like Hallowe’en and Christmas, familiar and near at hand, like a ceiling. Now they seemed impossibly far. As though the sky were no longer a roof over the world but an opening to confusion and indifferent space. The lid had come off his own world, he thought, the roof torn off the house. He thought of light-years, of stars exploded these millions of years but whose light had only lately reached earth. Seeing them in the night sky when they no longer really existed.
His mind moved wearily through memories. They flared and died and flared again around his heart. He craved a drink of neat whiskey, and he panicked at the thought of a future without a drink. The stitches over his eyebrow began to feel hot and his eyes seemed to swell even more. He tried to picture Africa: huts and black people smiling. Kids singing or clapping for their teacher. Aine. How hot would it be? He lay down then. Did they have lions and stuff in Zimbabwe?
Minogue parked in Dawson Street, and he and Hoey legged it smartly across to Bewleys in Grafton Street. The sky was blue, it was not yet nine o’clock and Dublin was at its best. Hoey’s face drew stares. One child pulled on her mother’s arm and pointed at him.
“A bit of everything,” Minogue urged the waitress. “We’re in from Kilmacud and we’re demented with the hunger.”
The Inspector was obliged to eat most of Hoey’s breakfast. Hoey tried a second cup of coffee, lit another cigarette and waited for Minogue to answer a question he had posed about the psychiatrist, Herlighy.
“Yes, the one I had. Just a chat. He knows Guards. Size him up. Then, if you think he’s okay…”
Hoey blew a thin stream of smoke out under his lip.
“Don’t think that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing,” he murmured.
“And don’t you be worrying about the Killer. I’ll push him around. He’ll be all right. Really.”
Hoey gave a snort. The Inspector concentrated on his saucer.
“You won’t know yourself in a while, I’m telling you, Shea.”
Hoey let smoke stream out his nostrils.
“I thought the whole idea was to know yourself better,” he muttered. “Or stuff like that.”
“No doubt,” Minogue shrugged. He chewed on the tail of a fatty rasher while he searched for a rebuttal which might buoy Hoey.
Hoey cleared his throat again and looked warily around the restaurant.
“He’ll want to know about the love-life and the da and the ma and the rest of it, no doubt.”
“What?”
Hoey’s gaze had settled on a table where five women sat smoking and laughing over coffee.
“Herlighy,” said Hoey. “The shrink.”
“Oh, yes.” Minogue felt his body ease back into the chair. “Yes. Probably, I mean. And he may ask you what you want. How you see yourself after this, you know…”
Hoey pushed a butt to the rim of the ashtray.
“He didn’t push the church at me, you’ll be glad to hear,” said Minogue.
“Huh,” sighed Hoey. “I’m not much on the church and devotions this long time, I can tell you. Even with Aine and the lay missionary thing out beyond in Zimbabwe.”
He paused to take a drag on a fresh cigarette.
“We had rows about it. I asked her what the hell the Church could do for people in Africa. Christ, the damage we’ve done out there already. The white people, I mean. Not to speak of the famines and poverty. Do you want to hear her answer? This’ll give you an idea of how it went sour.”
Minogue said nothing.
“She said I had seen too much of the bad side of people. In the job. All I know is that I’m not about to be running up to hug the altar rails at this stage.”
Minogue was relieved when the talk lapsed. Hoey sat forward in his chair, an elbow on the table, while he stared out at the floor. Minogue recalled people, notably Kilmartin, taking pride in the missionary zeal of the Irish abroad. Television programmes on catastrophes in Africa always seemed to interview Irishmen and women there.
Hoey breathed out heavily.
“Africa,” he said, and turned his one good eye back on Minogue. “I read where we’re all from Africa. The one mother or something like that.”
The Inspector thought of the children’s swollen bellies he had seen on the poster in Galway city.
“Here, Shea. It’ll take you the best part of fifteen minutes to get to his office. I’ll be waiting for you at the gates of the National Gallery at twelve.”