“This is my daughter Melanie. She’s not like this normally. That’s all I’m going to tell you.”
Melanie McInerny was long-limbed and brown, her perfect teeth framed by pink lips which Minogue considered wondrous. She still wore her school pinafore under the gaberdine coat. Left in a hurry, Minogue thought. She was within a few inches of his height. He tried to pin the insolence in her eyes with a forceful civility.
“Hello, Melanie.”
“Piss oaff, coppah! Pig!”
“Sacred Heart of Jesus,” sighed Eilo McInerny. The suitcase fell with a soft crunch on the footpath. Before Melanie could make a run for it, Eilo McInerny had grabbed her daughter’s forearm.
“Not on my account,” Minogue protested. “Please. I’ve been called worse. Even by people who know me. Couldn’t we go somewhere and sit down so as tempers can cool?”
Eilo McInerny looked at Minogue, her arms poised. The rain had begun to tell on the concrete now. A passing car’s wipers squeaked across its windscreen. The road was greasy. Melanie tried to duck away.
“Yew dzoan’t hiv to tork wiv ’em, Mum!”
“And I don’t have to listen to you either, you bould strap! I’m martyred with you! The fucking language out of you is a disgrace!”
“We just need to clear up a few things, Mrs McInerny,” Minogue rallied.
Eilo McInerny didn’t take her glittering eyes off her daughter.
“There’s nothing I can do for you, mister. Leave us be, I tell you.”
Melanie was smiling now. The Inspector realised that this scene had happened before. Anger betrayed love: sisters more than mother and daughter? Eilo and her daughter were gently rocking now, the younger one trying halfheartedly to free herself. Hoey took a deep breath and rolled his eyes.
“Where were you off to in such a hurry?” asked Minogue.
“What running am I doing? This is a free country.”
“Crossan phoned you and said we’d be coming. You said all right. What’s changed?”
The rain seemed to make Eilo McInerny relent. She let go of her daughter’s arms.
“You bought a ticket to Dublin and then walked out of the station,” Minogue added. “But you’re off somewhere else on a mad rush. What’s the matter?”
“Asking me for help,” she scoffed. “Jesus, the ways of the world. The Guards asking me for help. Hah! You must take me for a right iijit.” She turned toward her daughter. “Come on, Mel.”
“But ’sroiyning, Mum.”
“Of course it’s raining,” snapped her mother. “This is Tralee you’re in!”
“It might be that we could clear Jamesy Bourke’s name after all these years,” said Minogue.
She snorted derisively, and he saw the disbelief cross her face. She wrestled with the suitcase again and staggered down the footpath. She spoke in a withering tone.
“That gom. Me help him? Him and his poems and his drink. He was the same as the rest of them in the end. All after the one thing.”
Minogue took up the pursuit again.
“I know it may seem too late to do anything,” he began.
“Damn right,” said Eilo McInerny.
“Crossan told you how Jamesy died, did he?”
She stopped and turned to Minogue. Melanie stood by. Her expression suggested to Minogue that she imagined each drop of rain that landed on her smooth, cafe au lait face might be acid.
“What?”
“He was shot dead the other day.”
She frowned and looked down at the pavement as though she had just dropped a coin on it.
“To do with the IRA or something?”
“No. A case of mistaken identity, I suppose you could describe it.”
“I’d heard he had a bad run of things in prison,” she murmured.
The drops were heavy now, and Minogue felt them plop and burst on his skull. Tralee counted as a place where, like West Clare, one would be thought wise to build a commodious boat and begin rounding up pairs of animals when rain was on the way. Hoey was holding his collar tight under his chin.
“You told Crossan you’d talk to us,” Minogue said.
“Mum-” bleated Melanie.
“Be quiet, can’t you?” hissed her mother. She looked up warily. “Down from Dublin, are ye?”
“We are. And we have no right to ask you for your time or one iota from you.”
Eilo McInerny shot a look into Minogue’s eyes.
“I don’t need trouble. I’m a lot of years away. Are you going to try and cod me into thinking things’ve changed since I left?”
Minogue let his bewilderment show.
“You Guards, you do what ye like,” she said with quiet disgust. “You’re all hand-in-glove with one another. ‘You scratch my back’ and the rest of it. You’re on the inside and the likes of me are on the outside. You do what you’re bid, by them what bids it.”
“Well, I can stand here getting soaked,” he said, “or I could try to persuade you otherwise.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wot happened wiv yeou enyway?” Melanie McInerny asked Hoey. Hoey’s arm froze, the cigarette within inches of his lips, and he gave her a startled look. She sucked on the straw again and rolled ice at the bottom of her glass.
“How do you mean?” he asked. He cleared his throat while completing his arm’s trip with the cigarette but rested his knuckles against his lips as he coughed.
“Theowse black ooiyes iv yose. Who ’it chew?”
Minogue looked over. Eilo McInerny drank from her vodka. They were sitting in the otherwise deserted lounge of Spring’s Kingdom Bar.
“A car accident,” Hoey murmured with a hint of affronted pride.
“Yeou shuddn’t smoake, should yeou? Dzo yeou jog or anything?”
The surprise was twisted off Hoey’s face by another cough.
“Stop giving him the treatment, Mel,” said Eilo McInerny. “He’s the cop, not you.”
“Yeou smoake too, Mum. It’s desgasting.”
Minogue could only smile. He tried again to reboard the derailed conversation.
“I don’t expect you to have a perfect recall of what happened back then.”
Eilo McInerny took another drink but she would not get back on track.
“Imagine that,” she murmured, the glass poised under her nose. “Shot dead, just like that. By the fella who ran over his dog. The bad luck folleyed him and caught up to him in the end.”
“It’s a tragedy, to be sure, but can we-”
“Tragedy, is it? What the hell would you or the likes of you know about tragedy?”
Melanie looked over at her mother. “Yeou shuddn’t drink nao moahr, Mum.”
That was the bottom half of her second drink, Minogue realised. He was already drifting nicely offshore in the lee of one Jamesons. He hoped he wouldn’t have to keep pace with her. Hoey looked steadfast enough with his 7-Up.
“She gits loike that,” said Melanie with a superior air.
“What?” barked Eilo McInerny, as though returning from a distant place. “What?”
“Shea, you have to get some cigarettes, I daresay,” said Minogue. “Melanie, would you be kind enough to direct my friend here to a shop? Maybe you could help him pick a box of chocolates too, a gift I should maybe bring back to relatives. He’s not really with it as regards that sort of thing.”
Both Hoey and Melanie frowned and stared at Minogue.
“Mum?”
“Go on with you,” said Eilo McInerny. “He won’t bite you.”
Melanie McInerny plodded to the door as though to a firing squad. Her mother watched her go.
“I don’t know from one day to the next if I’m doing the right thing with that one,” she muttered. Minogue heard less of the English accent now. “I couldn’t leave her with Ralph. Ralphie’s an iijit. Nice, but he’s a slob. It’d be neglect with him. He wouldn’t notice her going to the bad. No, I couldn’t leave her there with him.”
“So you came here to try and make a go of things.”
She took out a cigarette and toyed with it. “Yes. Mel is a bit of a curiosity about town. It’s not a holiday for her anymore, though. She gets fed up. She finds school hard here and the kids here are innocent really. But the nuns are very good to her. Whatever else you can say about the nuns…” She lit the cigarette.