“You were part of a crowd?” Minogue asked Sheila Howard.
She nodded. “The way girls hang around together. Our mothers told us to hunt in packs.”
Kathleen had issued the very same admonitions to Iseult. Did every Irish parent have the same script? He gathered his thoughts to frame the next question.
“Do you recall if Bourke himself was teased about what had happened back at the cottage, if he had his sensitivities tested on the matter by people in the pub that night?”
It was Dan Howard who answered.
“Well, people tend to slag a lot. It’s a pastime of sorts, and that’s common knowledge.” He rubbed at his chin and looked at a landscape print on the wall as though he believed it held the words and knowledge he needed.
“I didn’t slag him at all and I’ll tell you why: I didn’t want a puck from him. Even while he was drunk, he could still rear up on you and throw shapes. We were out in the street around half twelve or so.”
“Your people owned the pub, didn’t they?” Minogue interrupted. Howard frowned.
“Yes, yes. My father did. I mean, he still does, yes… Oh, I see what you mean. We didn’t live over the pub at all, oh no. Our house was out the Ennis Road. We had a man living over the pub. We hung around on the street awhile, a few of us. It was a warm night.”
“Jamesy went his own way,” Sheila Howard said.
“You were there?” asked Minogue.
“Yes, I hung around. I wasn’t tired really. But I went off home myself a little later.”
“After she drove me home,” Howard added.
Minogue began to draw detail out of the fog. “Ah, the car.”
“I had loaned the Mini to Sheila, remember?” said Howard. “She was gone to Galway for the day.”
Minogue put on his sage and satisfied expression to cloak his rambling thoughts. Were the Howards daring him to put pointed questions-police-like ‘were you aware’s-to them in their own house? He felt Crossan’s eyes on him and he looked over. The lawyer’s eyes were not at full-bore, but his expression was both expectant and mocking as he hooded his eyes slightly to signal Minogue. The Inspector looked away, baffled. Something was going on here that escaped him. He bargained for time by reaching for the teapot. Howard took some turf from a basket, placed it on the fire and sat back with a sigh.
Was this Crossan’s moment of spiteful triumph, having finagled a Garda Inspector into Howard’s home to embarrass the TD and his wife? Doubt clawed at Minogue.
“Yes,” said Howard, “I retired in disarray that night. Sheila poured me into the car and left me at home.”
Minogue decided to brazen his way out of his predicament.
“Did you offer a lift to Bourke?”
“No, I didn’t,” Sheila Howard replied. “I wish to God that I had. I wish that Dan or someone had shoved him into the car.”
“Now,” said Dan Howard. “We’ve been over that a thousand times. Don’t be taking it upon yourself.”
“I know, I know.” She cut him short and looked to Crossan. He returned her level, appraising look.
“I wouldn’t have been safe in the car with Jamesy.” She looked down at the teapot. “I’ll get more tea.”
Crossan sat back and crossed his legs.
“Just between us men,” he murmured. “Jamesy had a tendency to be mauling girls.”
“Rough, in any sense?” Minogue asked. “If they weren’t interested, like?”
“Not to the extent that you seem to be implying,” said Howard.
“Well,” said Crossan from his slouch. “The training in the law stood you in good stead with that one.”
Howard let out a breath.
“I’m sorry. I grew up overnight after that. I don’t mind admitting what I was like before that either. There was privilege and money in my family and I could do as I pleased, really. I didn’t have to look forward to buckling down to the farming like Jamesy would have had to. But I can tell you this.” Howard paused and looked up with a pained expression. “I can’t go around full of remorse about it the rest of my life. Yes, Jamesy saw in her the love of his life and all the rest of it. But I was hail-fellow-well-met, playing the field. It’s not my fault that Jamesy was the way he was, God rest him.”
“Thank you for being so candid,” Minogue said. “Rely upon this being a confidential matter between us.”
Howard nodded and looked to the fresh sods of turf beginning to catch fire.
“If only she had come down to the pub that night,” he murmured, “and got rip-roaring drunk with us, things might have been much different. She wouldn’t open the door to him at that hour of the morning, and, sure, why should she? Sick of the pair of us, I’ve no doubt.”
Minogue asked where a bathroom might be and excused himself. He stopped in the hall and looked into the greenhouse kitchen. Terra-cotta tiles, dried flowers, real wood panels and all the wizard devices. Here was something he had seen only in the colour supplements of the English Sunday papers. He had tried to persuade Kathleen that such kitchens existed only in showrooms and advertisements but here was proof otherwise. He heard a kettle purr stronger and a paper turn- Sheila Howard was there, he realised, and he moved off.
He switched on the light in the toilet. Blue water in a green porcelain toilet startled him. For that moment before he recognised modernity, he imagined some disease in a household member. He remembered that Kilmartin’s new home in Killiney harboured the same gentility. Tired, tired, he thought. No toys underfoot. A damn fine house, the Inspector decided. And the Howards seemed to be polished, accomplished people, with none of that gombeen smugness he had expected. They seemed well-used to one another and even intimate in ways he felt were sincere. He could not imagine them having a screaming row. There was the touch of the resting champion to Dan Howard at home here, the certainty of his return to dynamism and diligence tomorrow. Parliamentarian and businessman, Howard gave Minogue the impression of one who advanced steadily and relentlessly on some goal.
He flushed the toilet and stared at his face in the mirror. Howard’s no mere base charmer, he thought. He had that air of durability, a man you could dependably expect to be there in twenty years, higher in the constellation of public life. Maybe shaking hands with one of those plain-suited, smiling Japanese billionaires, both togged out in hard hats as the sod is turned for a factory to manufacture whats-its in Portaroe or Ennis or Gortaboher.
There was nothing providential about Sheila Hanratty’s success either. She gave Minogue the same sense of diligence and control as did her husband. Tolerating Crossan, knowing that he knew that she and her husband could outlast him, she went her own way. Were they going to remain childless, Minogue wondered with sudden pity? Maybe a shared sadness there had given them their composure and solidarity?
He draped the towel carefully on the rail. There on the wall to his left was a print, a scene of stones and grasses topped by the orb of a golden sun. He squinted at the print close up, but found no place that he recognised exactly. Then he thought of that warm evening twelve years ago, young men and women, not yet out of their careless years. A summer’s night with music spilling out into the night-street from the open doors and windows of the pub. The Portaree Inn, or Howard’s Hotel as Minogue had known it in his youth, had been uninspiring enough, but Tidy Howard had seen his chance and he had plumbed, nailed, illuminated and painted his way into presenting what tourists might imagine a traditional country inn could or should have looked like.
Minogue recalled the stone walls of the Portaree Inn shiny with coats of polyurethane, the light from brass lamps, their lustre factory-aged, glistening on the stone. Locals who had laughed laughed no more. Their sons found work building houses and fixing roads, pouring drink for visitors. Commerce in high gear had pounced on Portaree, and a population which had known only episodic bursts of comfort in the form of work for non-inheriting children leapt at the opportunities. Minogue had himself observed the prospering village on his many forays to his home county over the years. The disingenuity of the “traditional” being hawked in the Portaree Inn-the Inn and the Out of it, Mick still called it-and the ingenuity of Tidy Howard, by now a figure of stature in more ways than one, had impressed Minogue. He had returned to Dublin after those holidays unable or unwilling to join in his brother’s disparagement. Mick had carried on the farm and forced emigration was unknown to him, Minogue reasoned. Why be ashamed of wanting prosperity?