Back in the the car, Kilmartin became almost expansive.
“They tried everything, I heard,” he said as Minogue turned down the lane toward the church. “Lourdes, even.”
The place reminded Minogue of an oasis, with small, hilly fields hard-won from the bog, and clumps of trees. Cars had been parked tight into the banks that lined the lane. Minogue had to wait for people to walk ahead of his car before he could follow the directions toward a parking place.
“A great turn-out,” said Kilmartin.
Though the church itself nestled amongst a stand of mature trees, the banks and the small, hilly fields seemed to form a funnel for the wind.
Kilmartin suddenly unhitched his seat belt.
“What are you at?”
“I can’t,” said Kilmartin. He pulled at the door release. “Sorry. I just can’t.”
“Christ almighty Jim, don’t jump out. At least let me stop the car.”
“I’m sorry, Matt, I am.”
The wind tore the door from Kilmartin’s hand, and Minogue felt it bounce back hard on its hinge. Papers erupted behind Minogue with a loud flapping sound. Two, then three pages, were whipped out the open door, one bouncing off a hedge before soaring and twisting in the wind.
“Close the door at least, can’t you!”
His belt held him back. He pulled up the handbrake and released his belt, and dove across the passenger seat to get at the door handle. Another page hit the top of the door, curled, cracked, and flew out. Another was flattened against the front window. Minogue lunged at it, and crumpled it just in time to have another nick him in the cheek as it went by.
He cursed again. Kilmartin, hunch-shouldered and indifferent to anything but his own hurried strides along the muddy lane, did not look back.
Pages hurtled over car roofs, one slapping a windscreen of a Nissan. It was one of the hospital pictures, the full-on one of the man’s swollen face streaked with blood. One of the laser-printed photos was inching its way up his window. It flapped once and then took off, higher than any of the others.
Cars were waiting behind. Minogue let off the handbrake and headed toward a gap in the high bank by a bend, where a man was waiting to direct him.
The farmyard was half-full of cars already. He turned off the ignition and leaned back to get the folder from the back seat. There were only two pages left in it. He heard paper rustle when he moved his feet by the pedals. There was another page half under the seat. Ten pages missing, fifteen?
He took out his mobile and he waited, his thumb over the Send, trying to compose a sensible question: Eilis, thank God you got a transfer over to Liaison, you know how thick I am, so you won’t mind asking for copies of that file…?
A man rose up from a crouch in Minogue’s side vision, holding up one of his pages. Minogue closed his phone.
Kilmartin’s face had changed completely. The page flapped enough to tear as he held it up to eye level. He tugged on the door handle, and holding the door against the wind, slid into the passenger seat with a sigh.
“Mother of God, Jim. What the hell was all that about?”
Kilmartin didn’t look up when he spoke.
“It’s hard to explain.”
“There’s three-quarters of my briefing notes flying around Wicklow — scene photos, personal information!”
“No need to be roaring at me. I couldn’t help it.”
Minogue looked around the farmyard for any of the pages.
“A savage bit of wind,” said Kilmartin, quietly. “Always like this up here?”
“It’s March,” Minogue declared. “That’s what it is.”
“Fierce bleak too. Bog, bog, and more bog.”
Minogue threw another glare at Kilmartin. Sure enough, he had that faraway look again.
Within a few moments Kilmartin started out of his thoughts, and ran his hand along the armrest.
“It was a panic attack,” he said.
“A panic attack.”
Kilmartin nodded.
“No warning?”
Kilmartin shook his head.
“It has to do with the other business,” he murmured. “You know.”
Minogue waited.
“I get these, well…,” Kilmartin went on, his voice dropping even more, “…images, I suppose you’d call them. Sometimes I get them in dreams.”
He looked up suddenly at Minogue and smiled bleakly.
“‘The Half-Three Devils,’ I call them,” he said. “They kind of crowd in all of a sudden. And you don’t know whether you’re awake, or whether you’re asleep. Ever have them, back when, you know, the, em, episode?”
The bombing he meant, Minogue knew.
“I suppose I did,” he heard himself reply.
This seemed to release Kilmartin from something. His voice took on its customary assurance again, and he sat back.
“Funerals,” he said. “Churches. Graveyards even. It keeps coming back, that I could be going to Maura’s. Sort of a flash-forward, not a flashback. You see?”
Minogue nodded. Somehow, his patience had returned.
“I remember you talking to me years ago about your little lad,” said Kilmartin. “Eamonn. How you’d see him at different times. And you couldn’t go into the bedroom for fear you might see him again, and you knew you couldn’t get to him in time.”
The waving new growth on the banks all about suddenly faded for Minogue.
“Am I out of order in bringing it up?” Kilmartin asked. Minogue shook his head.
“For me, it comes down to this,” Kilmartin went on. “With Maura, I couldn’t protect her, I couldn’t save her. And that’s the crux of the matter. Where the shite hit the fan for me. Simple enough to say, but…”
The seconds ticked by. Minogue listened to the wind hissing around the car, trying to see if there was a melody in it. “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” skittered through his mind, his father’s favourite tune. Or was it “The Pigeon on the Gate”?
“So what’s that word again,” Kilmartin was saying. “Lugubrious, is it?”
“Listen to you,” Minogue said. “You and your Half-Three Divils.”
“You can laugh. Hey, you’re allergic to churches, as I recall.”
“I don’t be leaping out of cars when I get near one, do I.”
“Each to his own, but.”
Kilmartin let out a long breath through pursed lips. Then he held up the page he had grabbed on the laneway.
“Well, here’s one of your bits of paper,” he said. “Makes no sense to me.”
“It’s Polish.”
“Good. I thought I was after having a stroke or something.”
“Half the County Wicklow will think the same thing, when they read it.”
Kilmartin reached inside his jacket and took out another sheet.
“Well this belongs to you too then.”
“Any more you’re hiding on me?”
“As if I would. But what’re you doing with scene photos? You’re not in the game anymore, remember?”
Minogue gave him the eye.
“What,” Kilmartin said. “I’m only making conversation.”
His gaze returned to the muddy tire tracks in the yard alongside.
Minogue jammed the remaining pages between his seat and the console. He recalled Kilmartin’s talk about being powerless to protect his wife, and the panic attacks he got. Maybe Kilmartin had really gone over the edge that night, and there would be no coming back — at least to his job as a Garda.
Someday he’d ask him if he had really believed that Rynn or one of his gunmen had been out there in the garden that night, coming to kill him and Maura. Things you remember, but things the mind decides to hide under the bed. But the body remembers things. At times, Minogue himself could feel the broken china and glass under his elbows that night in the Kilmartins’ shattered kitchen, scrabbling and grappling for Kilmartin’s arm — or rather the police-issued automatic at the end of that arm — then the blinding floodlights, and the shouting.
Betrayed was an odd word. It had an old-fashioned sound to it. It was plain that Kilmartin loved his wife. Minogue knew that because he had sat with Kilmartin for two nights at the hospital after Maura Kilmartin had overdosed. It had been exactly one week after the fiasco at their home. The whole thing had been his fault, not hers, Kilmartin had said several times. After all, what kind of a detective was he, that he’d miss something right under his nose for years?