John Brady - Unholy Ground

Jimmy Kilmartin, Inspector Kilmartin, had lots of comforts around his hospital room but no visitors until Minogue arrived. Minogue noted the stack of Sunday papers and magazines, the bottles of Lucozade, tissues, slippers side-by-side under the bed and a radio with headphones. Kilmartin's room had a colour telly on a stand in the corner, too.

"They let you in, bejases," Kilmartin marvelled. "It's nigh on eleven o'clock." He made an effort to sit upright in the bed.

"I had them check from the desk to see if you were still awake," Minogue replied as he eyed the colour television.

"Nice place to be ailing, James."

Kilmartin snorted.

"Ailing, is it? I never felt better. Too fresh to sleep, I am. Rarin' to go."

Minogue handed Kilmartin a bag of muffins.

"Kathleen says to ask the nurse if you're allowed to eat these yokes. I had them in the car with me."

"Gob and I'll try me best," Kilmartin affirmed. "And you'd no trouble getting in here?"

"No. The night duty boss is a girl from Feakle. I heard them playing twenty-five and knew the accent. 'Damn your sowl, why di'nt you lay the deuce and you with the knave in your fisht as well?'"

Kilmartin laughed lightly.

"Jases. The Clare mafia at it again."

Minogue wondered where Kilmartin's family was that they weren't visiting him. Sundays in Ireland involved visiting someone in hospital or else paying one's respects in a graveyard. Kilmartin scrutinised one of the muffins at close quarters, turning it around in his fingers and pressing into its side with his thumb.

"Full of nourishment, I'll wager. There'd be a ton of bran in them. Roughage, right?" Kilmartin looked up.

"That's it."

"Oh, suffering Jesus that died on the cross. 'Roughage.'"

Kilmartin's eyes followed his supplications heavenward.

"Me heart is broken with that word. I have books about fibre and roughage and the like that would give your arse heartburn reading them, so they would."

Kilmartin's brow lowered to gloom, then lightened. He pointed toward the chair.

"The main thing is that I'm on the mend and that's what counts, isn't it?" Kilmartin continued.

"Precisely."

Kilmartin settled himself against the pillow. He's actually happy to see me, Minogue realised.

"How's the family, Jim?"

"Topping. This is Maura's bridge night," Kilmartin said a little too earnestly.

"The young lad has a job selling ice cream in New Jersey, he wrote and said. He'll come back speaking like a Yank… Isn't life wonderful?" Kilmartin added.

Minogue had an image of Maura Kilmartin with her overpowering perfume and her huge hands. She was from Leitrim and her flat drag-out-the-word-and-then-beat-it-over-the-head accent came through stronger after a sherry. Minogue had last met her at a retirement do for a Superintendent. He remembered her big, red farm-girl's face, the plump fiftyish body distending the sybaritic designs of her silky dress. She had whispered a dirty joke to Minogue. He was too distracted to get it straightaway, but she slapped her knees and almost dislodged her top set of teeth with laughter.

He remembered Kilmartin's sober face contorting in the kind of smile you'd see on a donkey chewing barbed wire. When Kilmartin said that he'd like Minogue to stand in for him and would it be all right to recommend him for a secondment for the six weeks, Minogue privately assigned a large percentage of at-fault-as regards Kilmartin's complaint-to Maura Kilmartin: Jimmy's shame, a farmyard wife too real for Dublin politesse.

"Ah, I feel sorry for the young people these days," Kilmartin drawled expansively from the bed. "So much pressure."

"You have hit the nail on the head," Minogue said.

Kilmartin warmed to the role of bedridden philosopher. He leveled a finger at the television set across the room.

"I blame that bloody idiot-box for a lot of it. You could watch that thing for a whole day, from early morning to late at night, and there wouldn't be ten minutes of it that'd be worth talking about. The rest of it you can throw your hat at."

"You're right, Jimmy, you're right."

Minogue wondered how much Kilmartin actually watched.

"Did you see the news?" Kilmartin asked.

"I heard it on the radio," Minogue replied.

"About that business up in… where is it?"

"Kilternan."

"That's the place. Do you know," Kilmartin leaned forward for emphasis, "but nobody tells me a damn thing here?"

"You're supposed to be resting yourself, Jimmy."

"Hoey and Keating doing the legwork?"

"They're very good. You have them trained to a tee, jimmy."

"Well?" Kilmartin asked indignantly. "Aren't you going to tell me what's going on?"

Minogue thought that Kilmartin would not manage his retirement very well at all if this was what six weeks' sick-leave was doing to him.

"Sorry. Yes. A man by the name of Combs. His housekeeper said he's English. Mr Arthur Combs, seventy-three years of age."

"How was he killed?"

"Strangled, Jimmy. Hoey says he'd put money on it being a bit of nylon cord the way his neck was marked. There was no row or anything. The body was within arm's reach of the door he came in. It looks like he came home from the pub, in the door and… that was it."

"Stuff was robbed. Money, antiques," Kilmartin said tersely.

"The place was ransacked all right. I don't know what was taken yet," said Minogue.

"A crowd of young lads, I bet," Kilmartin tried again. "Looking for easy money. Give the oul lad a few digs so he'd get the money out of the mattress kind of effort. Was he beat up?"

Minogue shrugged.

"Doesn't look like it. No. We haven't placed him for the few days before the murder. Saturday night he was killed, it looks. The housekeeper only does the dinners for him on the weekdays, so…"

Minogue tried to let this part of the conversation die.

Kilmartin squirmed slightly under the sheets. He began to stroke his lower lip.

"I hope to God we have sheets on a few horrors who specialise in this class of crime. If you could call killing an old man and robbing his house by the title of 'crime' even."

"I hope so meself," added Minogue somberly and yawned.

"Um. Bastards. Cowards. Sounds like young lads to me still though," Kilmartin murmured. "Drink, drugs. They mightn't have records, these yahoos."

The conversation died on Kilmartin's contempt. Minogue resurrected a husk of what had been normality before Kilmartin's savage commentary.

"Wouldn't you like a bit of company in a semi-private room, Jim?"

Kilmartin glared at Minogue.

"I would not. Some fella coughing and spluttering next to me? Or someone with fifteen children from Ballyfermot and they all in visiting and blathering away? I'd as lief be here where it's quiet and I can read in comfort," Kilmartin declared.

He went back to stroking his lip. Minogue acknowledged the defeat of his diversion.

"Well maybe I can come by tomorrow. Will I give you a ring in the morning anyway, would that do?"

Kilmartin's eyes widened suddenly.

"Do that. Yes, would you? This place gives me the willies. It's full of sick people." spacebarthing

"Isn't that near one of your haunts, Matt?" Kathleen asked. Minogue watched his wife fork scrambled egg onto the plates. It was a quarter to eight. Minogue had woken up in the same position he last remembered before falling asleep. He was not sure if he was awake yet.

"Your home ground, like?" she persisted.

"Up near that ruin of a church?" their daughter Iseult added.

"Iseult, would you put down the book and be having your breakfast, love." Kathleen said.

"It says on the back that it can't be put down. 'Very gripping,' it says."

"There's a slim chance that your poor parents might want to hear from you," Minogue murmured. "To see how your life is running along."