John Brady - Unholy Ground

Whoever had held the nylon rope around Combs' neck, whoever had shoved a knee between Combs' shoulder-blades as the life was choked out of him, needn't have been a Hercules. Combs was seventy-three, a decrepit seventy-three. He had thrashed briefly and died. His swollen face and bulging, yellowed eyes greeted Mrs Hartigan, his housekeeper, on Sunday as she was on her way home from evening Mass.

She had walked up to the open door, halloing as she went. Would Mr Combs be wanting dinners during the week or? No, he wouldn't, she saw then. The kitchen was frosted. She closed her eyes then unbelieving. Mrs Hartigan stood in the doorway, feeling the weight of her own body press gently on her hips, her feet rooted to the floor. Her back ached familiarly, almost a comfort to her now. She wanted to sit down. Birds chortled and fussed in the hedge by the window. The tap dripped slowly, a dull, irregular pat on enamel. The frost was spread over a floor littered with broken crockery, tins and shattered jars, utensils and packages from the cupboards. Through a confusing blend of smells, the kitchen still held that stale bachelor smell she recognised. It was now mixed with the stench of the old man's indignity in death.

The hand resting on the doorhandle was her own, she realised after some time, and this brought her back. She looked out the doorway at the fields beyond. A flock of starlings clouded overhead. The birds landed together under a hedge. Within seconds they were in the air again, swarming. Mrs Hartigan asked herself if this could really be happening. The kitchen like a room unopened for centuries, the dust but more like snow white, angel, Christmas, dead her thoughts ran again: it's like a tomb, for all the world

Something terrible had happened. She backed away from the door, only then feeling the ice grasp her heart. Is there a murderer here still maybe? Her heart fluttered. She thought of the phone in the hall, beyond the kitchen. Couldn't go in, no. Spots formed and burst slowly in her vision as she dithered by the door. A lark sang high, unseen, at the end of the day. Mrs Hartigan whispered a prayer, asking God to get her down to the end of the lane alive.

That same Sunday evening, Minogue's gaze was drifting down a row of trees lining a narrow country lane. His eyes wandered over the trees to the Dublin Mountains beyond. One straggly, mustard cloud remained over Two Rock Mountain. To the east, over Killiney Bay, the sky had already darkened. The air was very still, waiting for the first stars. Minogue looked for a moon but found none. A necklace of lights blinked under Killiney Hill. Eight miles out into Dublin Bay, the Kish lighthouse beamed foolishly.

The air was full and moist. Scoutch grass bushed out onto the road. Next to a stile built into the wall opposite, nettles and dock plants reached up to the brambles swelling out from the wall. He gazed at the ruins of the church which lay fifty feet beyond his car, the Romanesque arch there, the gravestones choked with grass. Minogue was spending an hour of his Sunday evening sitting at the base of a cross in Tully, County Dublin. The cross, eleven centuries old, was anchored in a massive granite block itself mounted seven feet up off the road on a bulwark of limestone rocks. The stone, warmed from the day, had no sharp edges to it. When Minogue ran his palm across the warm granite, his thoughts let go at last and he found himself ten minutes later, still stroking the stone but wondering why he couldn't see so clearly now.

Before he climbed down, Minogue stood by the cross and stretched. He turned to look at the ring of mountains. The circulation eased in his legs and he turned to back down the steep steps. Descending, he inadvertently laid his hand on dried bird droppings. He thought he heard a bird chortle in the gloom of the brambles to his right. Wasn't that what they called pathetic fallacy? Down now, he wiped his hand on the back of his weekend trousers.

He smiled when he thought of Jimmy Kilmartin, an Inspector in the Gardai and a pal, and how Kilmartin might envy the birds' ways. Starting Monday, Minogue was to stand in for Kilmartin. Jimmy had finally had to have an operation on his bowel; otherwise, as he confided sheepishly to Minogue, he'd be properly banjacksed for the rest of his days. Minogue had resisted telling him that it might be wise to have the operation now rather than be caught between two stools in later years.

For devilment, Minogue drove back toward Cabinteely and the Bray Road. He drove with only his sidelights on. The road from Tully was now a dark green tunnel, wide enough for but one car. There were very few houses on the road. Minogue slowed to look at a horse which surprised him on a bend. The horse stood motionless in a gap made by the gate in the gloom with the western sky behind. Not for the first time in his life, Minogue felt that there could be no better animal than a horse.

Minogue sighed as he turned onto Brennanstown Road. A half-mile from Cabinteely, it was lined with the houses of the fat-bellied country boys who were retiring behind the burglar alarms and the Tudor mansions here, now that they had gutted Dublin with their office blocks and ghettos. Minogue had heard moaning from Gardai in Cabinteely station about needing more staff to handle the telephone calls. The grandees up on the Brennanstown Road were seeing intruders everywhere. They were worried about their houses being violated while they were holidaying in Miami or Nice. Grubby hands fingering the locks on their gates, pawing their Jags, maybe even looking in the window as they watched television. Couldn't the Gardai mount extra patrols in the area? Minogue had retained enough of the folk memory of the Famine from his native County Clare-where families, farming fields of rock, yielded up life and even merriment-to believe these intruders could be ghosts of their dark fathers.

The traffic-lights in Cabinteely were red. As often happened to him in his waking life, Minogue was reluctantly coming out from a minor road onto a busy one. He was obliged to yield, to wait and watch a stream of cars speeding along the highway. He slouched in his seat, wondering. Of an evening at Tully Cross, he had imagined druids with their followers looking out on the present from the darkness gathering under the trees. And what of the O'Tooles and the O'Byrnes who later raided from the hills, snapping at the edges of the English Pale? What would they make of the place now?

Minogue's light turned green and he pulled away from the white line. Tires howled on the road nearby. A crowd of young lads in a BMW deciding at the last minute not to crash a red light. Minogue pulled around them slowly. Three of them, laughing; dressed and coiffed to the nines, rich snots on the way into Dublin, by the cut of them. A cigarette flicked out the window bounced on the roadway, sparking the gloom. Minogue steered his arthritic Fiat onto the new Bray Road. Before he let go of his acid thoughts, he resolved to side with the raiding O'Tooles and the vanquished druids. The gombeen sons could have their BMWs: he would have his pagan stones.

Detective Garda Seamus Hoey telephoned Minogue's home at six fifteen Sunday evening.

"C-O-M-B-S, like you'd comb your hair?" Minogue asked.

"Yes, sir," Hoey replied.

Minogue asked if the scenes-of-the-crime technicians from the Garda Technical Bureau had started the first sweep of the murder-site. Hoey said that they had. The victim's body had already been removed to Loughlinstown Hospital, pending autopsy in James' Hospital. Minogue's eyes followed the pendulum on the heirloom clock hanging in the hall while he listened to Hoey.

During a pause while he heard Hoey turning a page, Minogue said, "Strangled only? Nothing before or after?"