John Brady - Unholy Ground

Murray recalled the black-and-white framed snapshot which he kept in his desk. The confident, boyish face and the haircut they had laughed about. It was 1971, of course, and even Murray himself had grown sideburns. "Passing out at Sandhurst" had been the joke when Ian Murray had his arm around his younger brother's neck in a chokehold, laughing into the camera. Ian the doer, Ian the adventurer. A ham, a litany of broken arms and legs through youth, the ebullient extrovert. The same Ian Murray on a greasy footpath in Belfast three years later, dead before he hit the pavement, the dumdum spraying his brains and teeth twenty feet further down the path.

Did Mervyn Ball have a photo like that, too? One of his own brother, one he looked at before he went to Combs' house that night? Donald Ball had been a Royal Greenjacket, Ian Murray a Para. Ball told him that he had a letter from Donald describing the mountains outside Belfast-"once you're out of bloody Belfast, it's a marvellous country, believe it or not". Three days later, his brother was dismembered by a bomb in a roadside culvert… believe it or not.

The taxi inched forward.

"It's the silly season, in'nit then?" said the cabbie.

Murray took out his wallet and looked at the meter. He handed three pounds to the driver and opened the door himself.

"Ta, mate. Bloody bombers are probably back safe in bloody Ireland by now, sitting in a pub laughing. The bastards."

Murray paused before slamming the door.

"Safe in Ireland?" Murray echoed with a sneer. "No such thing."

Minogue had finished a jumble of cauliflower, potatoes and stringy mutton. The vegetables were barely tolerable and he had little relish for the mutton'. For his pains, the waitress could only offer him the choice of jelly or ice cream.

"I'll go jelly then," he said.

"Tea or coffee?"

"Neither thanks. I'm saving myself for Bewley's later on. Don't tell anyone or I'll be in trouble."

When Minogue saw the cubes of jelly shivering on the bowl under him, he knew that he didn't have the heart for it. Still, he trapped a cube under the edge of the spoon, cut it and tasted it. Wicked. Was jelly the kind of thing that old people living on their own would eat? Like in America with the TV dinners you bought and could just sling into the oven and eat right out of the package? Old people living alone… Maybe Mrs Hartigan had fed Combs right. Minogue felt his thoughts slump. Damn and damn again. There had to be something she'd know to get this moving.

When Minogue reached the Squad HQ in St John's Road, the smell of Turkish tobacco stopped him in his tracks. Yes, Paris, Minogue remembered, with his wife giggling at his French: the smell of Gauloises, piss and diesel in the early morning streets by Mont-martre.

Eilis nodded at him. Her air of impatience served to keep groundlings at bay. She had had enough of humans, it seemed, but not enough that she did not entertain a Trinity College professor as her lover. So the rumour went anyway. The ones who raised their eyebrows the most were the policemen who were about the same age as Eilis, married men.

"It's yourself that's in it, is it?" she breathed. Wisps of her dark red hair had escaped the clasp gathering her hair over the collar of her blouse.

"And how's our Inspector?" she continued in Irish.

"Fine and well," Minogue replied in her vernacular. "He says hello to all and sundry here."

Eilis sat down. She almost smiled at Minogue's pun. On the surface, "fine and well" in her vernacular of Munster Irish meant that the party so described was happily drunk.

"I have reams of stuff to give you, you'll be thrilled to hear," Eilis muttered around her cigarette. The smoke was irritating her eyes, the more so as she leaned over to unlock a cabinet.

Minogue took the folder and decamped to his desk and chair. Combs passport number along with a black-and-white snap-one taken in a Woolworth's box, by the cut of it-clipped onto a sheet was on top of the sheaf of papers. Combs had been looking back at the lens as if to challenge it, to make sure it reported a true picture of him. He looked older than seventy-three even then. Froggy, tired eyes on him, loose skin bundled under his chin. Sick-looking? Fleshy-looking anyway. How often did UK citizens have to renew their passport photos?

The photocopies of the visa pages from his passport showed a stamp from Malaga declaring that Combs had been a turista when he went there two years ago. Could have been over and back to Britain a million times, too; no passport needed. A poorly typed summary-a reluctant Hoey clattering on the keys on late Sunday night-listed names: Mrs Hartigan, James Molloy (barman), Joey Murphy (wit. in Fox's pub), Jackie Burke (do.), Larry O'Toole (do.), Mulvaneys (Barnacullia).

"Somebody phone the embassy of next-of-kin?"

"Master Keating did," replied Eilis.

Minogue returned to his papers. Copies of car insurance, an Irish driver's license and, handwritten below, two account numbers for the Bank of Ireland, College Green. Minogue called the bank and asked for Bill Hogan, another Clare expatriate.

"You'll phone me then, Bill, will you? Here's my number. I'll follow up with the paperwork later on in the week. What's the story on any safety deposit boxes or use of a big bank safe, will you find out about that?"

Hogan would. Unasked, Hogan would also offer Minogue twenty quid at four to one against Offaly making it all the way to the hurling final. Minogue asked if Hogan could perhaps effect a loan on his behalf for that amount. Hogan barked a laugh and hung up. Minogue then phoned Keating at Stepaside Garda station.

"What about your three divine persons?" Minogue inquired.

Keating couldn't keep a touch of disappointment from his voice.

"You were right,' sir. They're bad articles, but they're all blather."

Minogue heard the pages of Keating's notebook turning slowly.

"… Moved a few hot cars along and delivered the odd shotgun no questions asked. Shag was convicted three years ago for fencing stuff. He did six months… We questioned them separately but they came up clean so far. They're no strangers here. They want to know what we're holding them under."

"And is there anything ye can lean on them with? Anything around the house?"

"No, sir. A few dirty books and a new set of mechanic's tools that the likes of the Mulvaneys can't afford. And they have an independent alibi, all three of them, up'til five o'clock in the morning. Sort of tears the arse out of things," Keating spoke slowly.

"Well, they weren't saying the rosary all night. They were playing cards and drinking at a house in the village."

"All of them?" Minogue interjected.

"All of them. One of them, let me see… Shag, yes, Shag. He was put out of the game because he was blackguarding with the cards. But he sat in the kitchen, drinking with another fella."

Keating filled in more details from the interviews. Minogue was half-listening. The other half of him was thinking of the drawings in Combs' house. The whorls in the granite had been rendered in all their stark softness in his drawings: stone gnawed over by centuries of wind sun and rain. How many hands had caressed those stones? These extraordinarily ordinary images in a house that was empty of any trappings of family life, those other artefacts from which Minogue had fashioned bits of his own religion. Trappings, perhaps that was a word for it, all right. Maybe Combs never wanted to be entrapped by a family, and these drawings could only be produced by a man outside the rag-and-bone comforts of a family, those things which had brought Minogue back to life. Combs a transient? For two years? A man who couldn't conceal his feeling for such stones and signs was hardly a transient. It looked like he had found something.