“Huh. A lot you’d know about going to Mass. I’ll tell you this: you could find out a lot more that’d surprise you, if you try to give me the shitty end of the stick with this, this…whatever bollicking around you’re going to do between Hoey and Tynan.”
“I’ll bear that in mind now, James.” He waved the file at Kilmartin.
“Watch your back, that’s my advice,” Kilmartin called out. “And keep your eye on the ball.”
Did he mean Tynan? Hoey? Crossan? Minogue rolled his eyes at Eilis as he hurried out into the sunlit morning outside.
Minogue caught sight of Hoey immediately he turned the corner by the National Gallery. He stopped behind a lamp post to observe him. Hoey was leaning against the lip of a water trough set into a monument opposite the Gallery. Sunlight filtered through the branches hanging over the railings of Merrion Square. Very occasionally, a leaf fell to the footpath, unhurried by the passage of the constant traffic on Merrion Row.
Framing Hoey with its tired splendour was a memorial fountain erected two centuries ago to the Duke of Rutland. Dublin’s coal-smoke winters had rendered most of the cornice moulding and the edges of the pilasters above Hoey indistinct. It had been over a century since either lion’s head had spewed water into the troughs. Minogue had been used to seeing down-and-outs lying on the stone benches at the foot of the monument. He watched Hoey watching a couple as they marched by arm in arm and kicking at the leaves. His features were tight and drawn as though a wind unknown to others on the same street was blowing dust into his face. The Inspector took a deep breath, put on a smile and skipped across the street. Hoey watched him approach.
Minogue gained the broad footpath, and the stone mass loomed over him. Hoey stood on his cigarette and shoved his hands into his pockets. Minogue glanced up at the monument. Sculpted stone panels that had contained figures in mourning were incomplete. Other sorrowing figures in Roman dress were missing heads; supplicating arms had broken off at the forearms. Noble death in classical relief, Minogue thought. And here’s Hoey, a round-shouldered and pasty-faced survivor in a creased coat, looking small and defeated. Minogue’s stomach went wormy and the fake smile began to lock his jaws.
Hoey nodded and looked to a passing bus. Minogue nodded back but could think of nothing to say.
“Well,” he tried at last. “Let’s pick up some stuff from your place and put it in the car. Then we don’t have to be chasing wardrobes around the town.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Stay at our place awhile, Shea.”
“Well…”
He smiled witlessly at Hoey and shrugged. Hoey’s suspicious squint lasted several seconds. Minogue looked around at the trees and waited. He thought of Hoey at his desk, tired, smoking while he did the work he was best at, organising evidence. Tagging, notating, receipting, filing-preserving impeccable chains of evidence for the State case. Minogue worked well with him, believing that, like himself, Hoey could let his thoughts become still when he needed to. Methodical and routine but acutely sensitive to nuances at a scene, Hoey instinctively absorbed details. Minogue knew that his colleague left those details in suspension while he waited and then coaxed the impressions and facts into some trajectory as he felt their gravitational pull stronger. Hoey was sizing him up.
“Come on, Shea. I have the car parked down in Nassau Street.”
Hoey began to say something but Minogue was gone. Hoey caught up with him.
“Your man says hello, by the way,” Hoey said.
“Herlighy? Great.”
Minogue kept striding down Nassau Street. Part of him observed the passing faces, the doors, the signs and traffic, the commonplace mysteries of his city. Its every detail seemed too sharply present in the November sunlight. His mind went to Ennis, Bourke’s eyes in shadow outside the Old Ground Hotel. Maybe today Bourke was standing across from Howard’s constituency office. Crossan’s wryly chiding words about forgetting to do his devotions for All Souls, to hang his cloth by the holy wells for a cure, came to him then: there are no ghosts in Dublin?
“Are you going to see Herlighy again?” he heard himself ask Hoey.
Hoey stopped and lit a cigarette. Minogue watched him exhale and look away down the street.
“I will, I suppose.”
“Good. After we get set up in the clothing and toothbrush line, what do you say to going wall-eyed looking at a microfiche?”
Hoey kept his stare on the railings of Trinity College ahead. Minogue recalled that a car bomb had gone off by this part of Trinity’s wall, killing seven or eight people. Wasn’t one of them a child? The wall and the railings had withstood the blast, but scars remained gouged into the limestone.
“A microfiche of what?”
“Has to do with a thing down in Clare years ago. Newspaper reports. Sort of dabble in the archaeology business a bit. What do you think?”
Hoey’s one-eyed gaze wandered past Minogue’s. It settled on the far end of the street where sunlight cannonaded out of the mouth of Grafton Street, a golden vision that seemed unattached to the rest of Dublin city.
“Ow!”
“What?”
The one with the ear-ring took his thumb out of his mouth.
“That big stone I dropped on me thumb the other day. I don’t know if it needs looking at. Ow!”
The driver was about to look over when he saw the figure step out from the hedge.
“Jesus.”
In the gloom ahead he saw the cars parked tight in to the hedge. A Guard wearing a reflective waistcoat stepped out into the middle of the road.
“Don’t get all panicky,” hissed the passenger. “There’s nothing we have to worry about.”
The driver rolled down the window. To his right he saw movement in a gap in the hedge. There were two men in the ditch. They held submachine pistols close to their sides.
“Howiya,” the driver called out. The Guard was young, and he wore a flak jacket under the fluorescent green waistcoat. The driver remembered him from a checkpoint by Rannagh a few days ago. He looked cold.
“Lads,” the Guard called out. He stood on tiptoe looking through the open window. “Are ye done for the day?”
“We jacked it in for the day, all right,” said the driver. “Had enough battering stones and pouring cement.”
“Open up the back and I’ll take a look,” said the Guard.
“Fire away,” said the driver.
Driver and passenger turned in their seats to watch the door swinging up. A plainclothes Guard joined the one in uniform. A flashlight was snapped on.
“Are ye nearly done with it?” the Guard said.
“Another couple of weeks and we’ll be out,” the driver replied. “A palace entirely.”
“Good work being done, is there?”
“Only the best.”
The plainclothes Guard seemed to deliberate about going around to the other door. He shrugged and looked in at the two.
“All right, lads.”
He drove away from the checkpoint slowly and nodded at the two in the ditch. The evening had already taken over the ditches and hedges. The headlights swept over their faces. They didn’t move, but their eyes followed the van until it was past them.
“Whoa, Jases!” said the passenger and whistled. “They’re getting very fucking serious! Did you see the pair in the ditch? Wearing their guns out in the open?”
“Good.”
“Good? Oh, right. Yeah. There’s that to it. Ow.” He put his thumb in his mouth. “Bloody planning permission and all the shagging stones and cement they want in, just to make it look like it belongs here,” he mumbled around his thumb.
“The vernacular, they call it,” said the driver. “Native materials.”
The passenger sniffed.
The driver concentrated on the road ahead. He wondered if there was another checkpoint ahead. They had spent most of the day carrying and sorting the stones they needed for the walls of the addition. The stone is local, he thought, the tradesmen are local and we’re being paid by a man from Dusseldorf. And this guy wants his holiday cottage in fucking Ireland to look really Irish.