John Brady - Kaddish in Dublin

Autumn. A farmer’s wife in Tipperary had stabbed her husband thirty-seven times on the previous Saturday night. He had not struggled.

“He was terrible drunk and him coming home from the pub,” Kilmartin said. “She might have hit him dead on with the first one. No wonder he didn’t stir.”

“They have five children. She has, I mean,” said Minogue.

Chief Inspector James Kilmartin looked to the front of the report. “Five is right. The oldest is nine and there’s an infant just a year old.”

“She never reported him at all. Not even to her own family,” Minogue continued.

“And that may be what’ll sink her in court, I don’t mind telling you, Matt. She’s in dire need of someone to corroborate the beatings. Even a record of a complaint, a remark to a friend. But sure you saw yourself where they live. A pigsty.”

Kilmartin and Minogue had gone the previous Wednesday to Cahir, Co. Tipperary, where the woman, Marguerite Ryan, was held in jail, and had been driven out to the Glen of Aherlow by two local Gardai. The farmhouse was a squat, whitewashed affair with cement floors. Minogue walked through it, appalled. Clothes lay scattered in the bedrooms, as though a violent storm had moved through the house. The blood had dried to a chocolate colour on the bedclothes. The woman’s sister had taken the children. Minogue, a farmer’s son, had been unnerved by the filth of the place, the rusted pieces of scrap iron and refuse which had gathered in small mounds by the front of the house over the years.

“She admitted that he just came in and fell into bed: he didn’t lay a hand on her,” Kilmartin said. He turned two pages and searched for lines he had noted.

“ ‘He was in a terrible drunken state’-this is her statement-‘and he was muttering and cursing and I didn’t know what he was saying. He got into the bed and he was asleep almost straight away. I was in a humour of great despair and fear for several weeks, seeing as my husband had been drinking heavily and threatening myself and our oldest, Sean’,” Kilmartin intoned.

“What do you make of that bit-‘in a humour of great despair and fear’? Melodrama. It’s like an expression out of a book.”

Minogue, irritated with Kilmartin’s remark, said nothing.

“Or sounds like words someone else would use — barrister defending her, don’t you think? ‘My client was in a humour of great-’ ”

“Come on, Jimmy. Let’s not be picking holes in things.” Minogue cut him short.

“ ‘And I lay awake for many hours that night as had been my affliction these many months, waiting for the first light of day’-aw Jases, Matt, this is nearly too much. It’s like a romance book or some class of a thing. ‘The first light of day.’ ”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m saying that it’s a mighty peculiar way of saying things, mighty peculiar entirely for a first statement… It’s like she practised it in her mind before saying it, preparing a defence. You know what that is, Matt, don’t you?”

“It’s florid prose.”

“It means she had her mind made up a long time ago. That’s how her account comes out so put-together.”

“Like she had her speech from the dock prepared well in advance.”

“Yep. She had everything planned. That’s premeditated murder, if the State has the nerve to so prosecute Mrs. Ryan.”

Minogue did not want to argue the toss with Jimmy Kilmartin. Mrs. Ryan was being held for the murder of one Francis Xavier Ryan, her husband of ten years and the father of their five children. Mr. Ryan had farmed seventy-odd acres of good land (in fact his wife had done most of the work) near the village of Newtown in the Glen of Aherlow. Ryan, named after a favourite saint of Irish Catholics, had been twelve years her senior. He farmed poorly, drank most of the money which came into the house, and was jealous of their oldest child, frequently berating him and knocking him about for neglecting chores on the farm. Fran, as he was known locally, had been beating his wife regularly and methodically within months of their marrying.

“And prosecuting’s exactly what the WAM are daring us to do,” Kilmartin added.

“WAM… wait a minute. Oh, yes: the Women’s Action Movement.”

“The same bunch. They sound like bloody paratroops. A crowd of well-fed radicals and students and actresses from Dublin, never did a hand’s turn on a farm. They’re the ones that don’t eat meat and tell the bishops to eff off. Lesbians and what have you.”

“They’ve raised money for Mrs. Ryan already.” Minogue tried to divert him.

“Sure haven’t they plenty of it, isn’t that what I’m saying? All well-to-do. They’ll make a big thing out of this, so they will.”

Both policemen fell to reading paragraphs from the report again.

“… And see this here, page what is it, page seven, I have it marked, where she says, ‘Were it not for my children I would not have endured these years.’ ” Kilmartin paused. “I’ll never understand that. Fair enough, I say, but how were the children brought into the world in the first place, I say. It takes two to tango, amn’t I right?”

“Jimmy, have you ever heard of contraception? Can you remember back that far?” Minogue murmured.

Kilmartin who, like Minogue, was within five years of early retirement, affected to smile.

“Ah, you’re not one of those maniacs wanting to put any girl over the age of ten on the pill and turn the churches into bingo halls, are you? Sure, all a woman has to do is say no.”

“And if she says no but her husband has his way anyway, that’s rape then, isn’t it?”

“Here, hold on a minute,” Kilmartin temporized with his palms up as he worked on staunching Minogue’s attack of logic. “That’s not how things are done, Matt. That’s a grey area, I mean. There’s no plain and simple answers to this business.”

“Let’s be reasonable. Marriage is a sacrament too. Man proposes, God disposes.”

Minogue held off his sarcasm. “Well, do you think she’ll be charged with murder in the first degree?”

Kilmartin frowned. “Well now, it’s not my decision, is it? The Director of Public Prosecutions lays the charges. Tell you the truth, I’ll be as happy as Larry if this Women’s Action Movement crowd concentrate their efforts on the mob in the Department of Justice and leave us Gardai to get on with the work. I don’t relish the thought of another effort like the Kerry Babies,” Kilmartin said, sucking in air through his teeth.

Minogue had had an earful on that topic from his daughter, Iesult. Even Kathleen had prodded at him. A woman in Kerry had been charged with infanticide some time before. The police work had included bullying her during interviews to invent evidence for her trial. Minogue had not seen Iesult so angry since she had been a small child. She had been quite right when she shouted at him that the woman was condemned-what had she called the detectives? Brutal, patriarchal rednecks? — for being some class of a whore and consequently was obviously guilty of the lesser crime of killing her child at birth. ‘Tried and sentenced before she even got near a courtroom!’ Iesult had shouted down the stairs at him as he headed out the door one morning.

“You’re right there,” Minogue concluded. He well knew that Inspector James Kilmartin of the Murder Squad had a different reason than he for wishing to ward off such an eventuality.

Kilmartin’s secretary, Eilis, drew a draught of cigarette smoke and the smell of paint into his office when she entered.

“Is it yourself that’s in it, Eilis,” Kilmartin said. Minogue noted the mixture of slight apprehension and irritation in his voice. Perhaps Eilis treated Jimmy Kilmartin thus by way of goading him into asking her to knock on doors first? It was widely believed amongst the detectives who worked in the Murder Squad that Jimmy Kilmartin feared his secretary.