One of the nuts was very tight and he paused several times to secure his grip. He felt himself being watched but, when he turned to Kathleen, her back was to him. He looked over the rocks. Nobody. The nut gave way suddenly and the wrench clattered onto the road.
“Mind yourself,” she called out, and turned back toward the uplands.
He stood up, stretched his back and rolled the spare wheel over. He eyed her while he tightened the nuts again. She looks as if she sees something up there that she doesn’t want to see, he thought. Suddenly aware of his eyes on her, she looked over and shivered.
“God, it’s like a different continent or something.” Her voice trailed off but her frown remained.
Guided by the light from the kitchen window, the Inspector stepped into the cobbled farmyard. He had forgotten how dark a country night could be. He hoped that the cutting night air would banish the headache he felt coming on. It was only half nine. He shivered as he walked over the stones toward the car. He stopped by the gate and let the memories swirl around him. A breeze hissed through the hawthorn still rooted by the gate. A dog barked twice in the far distance and then fell silent. Minogue shivered again. Fretting breezes and gusts batted turf-smoke from the kitchen range down into the farmyard around him. The sweet smell almost warmed him. The back door of the farmhouse opened and light spilled across the yard. Eoin came out into the yard, wrestling his way into a coat.
“The da’s just getting himself ready,” Eoin said.
Minogue sat into the back seat of the Opel. Eoin left the door half-opened and the interior light stayed on. Minogue studied his nephew’s profile for several moments. The same high cheekbones as his mother, the same thick, wavy hair even, but he had his father’s thin lips. Even Mick’s mannerisms, Minogue reflected dispiritedly.
“That was great ye came down now,” Eoin said. “Mamo has been a bit odd this last while.”
“She’s had it tough this last while, all right,” said Minogue.
Eoin turned in his seat. “How do you mean, like?”
Minogue considered backing away.
“You said she’s had it tough. Is there something she’s been keeping from us here-”
“No. I meant the farming, of course.”
“True for you, Uncle Matt. True for you.”
“And that gun in the boot of your car,” Minogue added. He heard his nephew draw in a breath.
“I wondered if you’d bring that up. I had no idea that Liam was carrying a gun in his bag.”
“If you had known, would you have kicked him out of the car?”
“Think what you like, Uncle Matt. I don’t have anything to do with that kind of stuff.”
Minogue thought of the fire glowing in the Aga in the kitchen, Maura laughing, a hand of cards maybe. Tell stories, a glass of whiskey. But Kathleen had dispatched him to the pub with a twenty-pound note to loosen tongues. And that bloody envelope was still lying on the hall table for him.
“Tell me something, Eoin,” he began. “Have ye considered selling a bit off, maybe? A few acres. Who knows, you could probably get planning permission for houses or something.”
“We’re farmers here,” Eoin declared. “We put the food on your tables up in Dublin.”
“You and some poor divils growing onions in the arse end of Spain, you mean.”
Anger flashed out of Eoin’s eyes.
“With all due respect, Uncle Matt, what do you know and you up in Dublin this thirty years?” His voice rose, “Dublin’s a different world entirely. Maybe you’ve forgotten who we are here.”
“Forgotten what?”
Exasperation rippled across Eoin’s face.
“The family farm and all that it means. ’Twas the country people brought us our freedom in ’21. The people of Clare and plenty more that won our land back from the landlords in Parnell’s day. We took pikes in our hands when we had no guns. We deserve every blade of grass that’s under our feet.”
Eoin’s eyes strained as they looked into his uncle’s. Whatever he saw there didn’t seem to be the right answer. He blinked and returned to tapping the steering wheel. A speech worthy of his father, Minogue thought, as Mick Minogue stepped awkwardly out into the yard and began his laboured, sideways walk to the car. He thought of the afternoon’s drive through the Burren. Notions of property or boundaries seemed to falter and then fade entirely on the slopes of the desolate hills. Minogue suddenly felt his nephew’s angry bewilderment as something familiar now, without menace.
“I farmed these fields, Eoin,” he murmured. “It was hard then, too.”
“All right,” Eoin said. “So you know what it’s like to see some bloody foreigner with pucks of money come in and snap up scraps of fields that’d mean the world to us. They put up bloody holiday homes… They’re killing our way of life. I don’t want to end up making their beds and cooking their dinners.”
Mick Minogue let himself slowly down into the passenger seat. The Inspector again studied his nephew’s face. Its frown of sincerity and anger, regret then as the brows lifted, moved Minogue. Dublin is a different world? The cold coming in under his arms and along his legs made Minogue shudder. Eoin talked while he drove the three miles into the coastal village of Portaree. It was a conversation that his passengers neither wanted to keep alive nor let die. So-and-so had sold out their twenty acres. Talk was that the buyer had planning permission for holiday homes. A folk village and museum was to be built nearby, too. At least the buyer was local, Eoin added.
“Who?” asked Minogue.
“Who else?” said Eoin. “Dalcais. Tidy Howard’s outfit. Dan Howard runs it now.”
“With the blessing of that bloody association, of course,” Mick grunted.
“Which?”
“The PDDA,” said Eoin. “The Portaree and District Development Association.”
“There’s one bloody farmer in that outfit,” Mick said between his teeth. “Townies grubbing for money. It’s a long way from Tidy Towns they’ve come.”
Dan Howard, Senior, had put Portaree on the map years ago by promoting it in Ireland’s Tidy Town contest, and the village had won the title several times since. Window boxes and fresh paint had been taken for granted in the town for two decades now. In tribute to Howard’s astute business sense in connecting tidiness with tourism with development, the local people had wryly tagged him with his honorific, Tidy.
“I didn’t know Tidy was gone,” said Minogue.
“Oh no,” said Mick. “Not gone to glory yet. He’s in a nursing home after a stroke. They say he’s lying up in the bed like a vegetable or something. They’re not sure if he has his wits about him. Poor divil. For all you might have said ag’in him when he was in the whole of his health…”
The Opel shuddered on a pothole and Minogue glimpsed his brother’s grimace. The first lights of Portaree flared on the windscreen.
A craft studio, a restaurant with candles and American Express signs in its windows and a big grocery shop slipped by their car. A flux of memories took over Minogue’s mind. Save for market days and Saturdays, his Portaree had been like a town asleep. He remembered cycling in for pints, cycling home again, drunk and dreamy, sometimes bitter, with escape carved on his heart. Mick seemed to read his brother’s thoughts.
“Money in town now,” he said. “We’d fork souls into the mouth of hell if the money were right.”
The pub was half-full. Faces turned to the Minogues and heads nodded greetings. They drew up to the bar. Minogue noted the brass foot-rail, the oil-lamps hanging from the wall. The dismal shebeen of his own youth had been made over several times by the Howards. A barman unknown to Minogue raised his eyebrows at him. Before Minogue had asked Mick and Eoin what they would drink, a fat man turned on his stool by the bar. He cocked his cap back on his head, settled it and greeted Mick.
“Gob now, Mick Minogue, is it yourself that I’m seeing in a pub? It must be the Christmas.”