The Death of a Joyce Scholar (26 page)

At length it was switched on, nearly blinding him, but still he said nothing. He only kept watching while a wet coat was shaken out and hung up, a pair of Welly’s kicked off, and long, dark hair pulled out from under a collar and raked back with fingers.

Even when a tap was turned on and a teapot filled, McGarr wasn’t seen. Not until a moment later, from the stove.

“Don’t move,” said McGarr. “Stay where you are. Bernie,” he called to the door leading to the spare room.

It opened, and after a short pause a figure appeared in it. He was tall and his face was patched with bandages. The cast on his right arm was supported by a sling.

“This the person?” McGarr asked.

Jammer’s eyes shifted from the figure at the stove to the floor. He nodded.

“Say it!”

“Yes, it is.”

Said McGarr, “This is the person into whose care you surrendered Kevin Coyle on the night of his murder?”

McKeon, who was standing by Jammer, nudged him.

“Yes.”

“At that point Coyle was well?”

“He was drunk.”

“But he was conscious?”

Jammer nodded.

“What did this individual say to you?”

“‘Ah, Professor Coyle,’ or something like that, ‘how surprising to see you here and in this condition.’”

“And you?”

“I left with the things Coyle had on him.”

“He gave them to you?”

“No—I took them, like. For having gotten him there.”

“And did you see this person again?”

“A day later, he came to me in my kip.”

“The shelter over the wall?”

Jammer nodded.

“And what was said to you then.”

“I was asked to go out and buy a set of knives. I was given money for the knives and for a set of clothes so I wouldn’t look like I was.”

“And you were given other money?”

Jammer again nodded.

“How much?”

“One hundred pounds.”

“Didn’t you think it extraordinary?”

Jammer hunched his shoulders. “What’s ordinary? It was a hundred pounds. It seemed legal. And then I’d have the suit and all, wouldn’t I?”

“And so you did as you were asked?”

McKeon, who was standing near Jammer, said, “Answer, please,” and adjusted a dial on the machine he was holding.

“Yes. I bought the knives, like I was asked, in McNabb’s in D’Olier Street. I paid cash and was waited on by a girl.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I brought them back here, like I was told.”

“To this house?”

“Yes.”

“And you handed them over?”

“Just one. There was somebody coming down the alley, which is where we were, and I was left with the rest. I took them back to me kip. I thought maybe I’d use them, or in a pinch get a few quid for them.”

“Did you see this person again?”

“No. We don’t get on anymore. A couple a days later, that thing with the cop happened in Merrion Square, and I began asking after—”

“What had happened to bring the law down on you?”

“Yes.”

“And you learned…?”

“That a bloke name of Coyle had been stabbed.”

“Murdered.”

“Yes. I guess it’d been in all the papers, but—”

“Had you ever seen this person before?” McGarr meant the person standing with the teapot in hand.

“Of course.”

“But recently?”

“At the bus stop. Mornings. And sometimes—you know—at night.”

“Had you spoken?”

“A nod. Like I said, we don’t get on now.”

“For the record”—McGarr pointed to the machine in McKeon’s hands—“what is your name?”

“James Harrold Geoffrey Holderness. People call me Jammer. Me mates.”

McGarr stood. “Please place the teapot on the table.” That done, he continued, “David Allan George Holderness, you are charged with the murder of Kevin Coyle.” Nearly a month earlier Holderness had moved in with Catty Doyle. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“Certainly. This man lies. He lied as a child, as an adolescent, and now as an adult. He is a criminal with a record and a history of having done violence to others.

“On the night of Kevin Coyle’s murder, he had Coyle in tow when he knocked on the back gate. We’ve never gotten along, not even as children, and then Coyle was drunk and abusive. I refused to let him in, but this man insisted. He
pushed Coyle into the kitchen and then began taking things: the ashplant stick, which he smacked on the table, threatening both of us. He picked a clock—there, you can see by the paint where it used to hang—right off the wall.

“When Coyle objected to the rough way in which he was being handled, he began pulling Coyle’s blazer off him, he snatched at the hat. Coyle objected to that even more strenuously, saying, ‘The stick and the blazer I said you could have, but
not
the boater.’ This man proved quicker, however, and got the hat off. Coyle, summoning himself, went for him. Coyle is—
was
—a man about my size,
his
size, and strong, especially when impassioned. Before Trinity he worked in the brewery. He kept going on drunkenly about it being Joyce’s hat and that he’d paid four hundred and fifty pounds for it. They grappled and wrestled until this man, having been clipped in the face by Coyle, reached back, seized the filleting knife from the set you see there, and plunged it into Coyle’s chest.

“He died instantly. Right on the spot. He was dead on his feet and hadn’t yet fallen before this man had the hat on his head. He turned to me and said, ‘You too?’ Or, ‘You want some of the same,’ or some such thing, and I stepped into the hall there. I’ve always abhorred violence. It’s so senseless. I locked the door and waited.

“I heard some moving about. I heard Kinch, the dog, bark. And when—after, say, a dozen minutes—I heard nothing more, I unlocked the door and found them gone, apart from a single bloodstain here between the cutting board and the fridge.” He pointed to a narrow gap between the two objects that looked as though it would be difficult to clean. There was a small dark spot on the tile. “I left it there for just the eventuality that has confronted me this evening. With genetic matching, I’m sure you’ll find it’s Coyle’s definitely.”

McGarr was surprised that Holderness would know of such a procedure, but then Holderness prided himself on his intelligence and on being informed. It had been the point of contention between him and Coyle. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“This man is my brother. The child of my parents. And then I was not—I
am
not—sure of what good it would have done anybody involved: Catty especially, or me, people knowing how Coyle and I had quarreled. As I said, Coyle, with all his early experience, was strong and fierce, and he was drunk. And finally, it wasn’t as though it had been premeditated—at least that part of the crime.”

McGarr only waited. Holderness had something more to tell them.

“The other part—the knife appearing under the seat of Hiliary Flood’s car—was pure Jammer. Ever since he’s been a child, he’s had to have somebody to blame. This time it was to be me and my woman friend.”

Or her father, McGarr thought. How would Jammer have known it was the Floods’ Fiat 500 and not some other? How would he have known where the Floods lived?

“He’d witnessed Flood dropping Coyle off, and he knew where the Floods lived since he’d been to school with Hiliary. This knife”—Holderness pointed to the new filleting knife in the rosewood sheath—“he replaced a few days later. If you check his police record, you’ll find illegal entry to be one of his specialties. Jammer is, to his pride, a ‘second-story’ man of no mean ability. I also think you’ll find that he recently purchased a set of knives somewhere in the Dublin area. Then—let me see—the clock is still missing as well. I bought another for Catty.” He pointed to a smaller clock hanging below the circle of brighter wall. “She says she’ll have to get the painters in. She has to have everything just so, don’t you know.”

Did McGarr see a small smile flicker across his thin lips? He thought he did.

McGarr reached into his jacket and shook a cigarette from its packet. He tapped it on the stove, then lowered his head to light it from the gas ring. He felt the hair of his eyebrows crinkle in the heat of the flame.

Exhaling, he glanced at Jammer, as though to say, Your turn.

“He met me and Coyle at the gate. I’d already taken the blazer and stick, but Coyle said I should know that the hat was his and his alone, until somebody more deserving, or something like that—he was drunk—could take it from him.

“When David here saw us, like I said, he knew yer mahn, who called him ‘the sober solipsist,’ whatever that means, and told him to tell Catty that sensibility, wit, intelligence, and something for the human…something or other had arrived, and it was time to chuck something that sounded like minimalist bullshit and ‘incompetently incompetent, at that’—I remember that part—out on its arse. ‘Well, if you can’t think your way into’ something like ‘the collective unconscious,’ says he, ‘you might as well fuck it. Or’—here the bloke began laughing—‘a motto for you for the nineties, Holderness: fuck it, I’ll fuck it. You can call it Incompetence at its Rawest, or simply, Incompetence in the Raw.’ I remember that ’specially since it stuck in me mind later on.”

While he was in the cemetery with Sweets? McGarr wondered.

“The fella was witty. David tried, but he was never really witty. It was then David invited him in, offered him a drink. He took the hat from his head, as though he would hang it up, but when I’d gotten Coyle onto a kitchen chair, he slipped it to me and pointed to that door, like he wanted me to leave. I had…someplace to go, so I left, David closing the gate after me. That was the last I saw of him—Coyle—
until me mates and me were coming back through the laneway maybe two hours later. That was when we saw him up against the wall, like I told you earlier.

“The clock
he
brought me when he came ’round to ask me to buy the knives in McNabb’s and to give me the hundred pound. Would I have kept the clock or the knives if I’d a known, much less done it? And why? Hiliary Flood and I went to school together, yes. But that was years ago, and she was maybe four forms below me. Just a wee girl then, and now…? I have no idea where she lives.

“The bloke—Coyle? I’d seen him, sure, around here now and again. But for me there was always a nod or a wave, and we had a jar together once in the Brian Borimhe when we were both walking across Cross Guns Bridge and it began pelting out cats and dogs. And come ’ere while I tell ya, it was almost like he
gave
me the stick and the blazer, because he said that was it. He was tired of ‘cloning’ or ‘clowning’ Joyce to a bunch of ‘fallow’—I heard—drunks and foreigners, that after his new ‘fookin’ book came out’ he wouldn’t ‘fookin’ work for ‘fookin’ tips again ever.’ It was how he was talkin’. To me.

“And let’s get another thing straight—it wasn’t me who was always having to blame things on others, it was him.” Jammer jabbed a finger at his brother. “He was the oldest and best, and they believed everything he ever said about us. Always.”

McGarr drew on the cigarette. Noreen had told him he’d have to give up the butts, that no daughter of theirs was going to be “invested at an early age” in any “sordid habit.” His drinking, of course, would be next; he could see it coming. And did she say daughter because she
knew?
When he’d asked, she had only given him a clever, knowing smile and said they’d see how he came along with not smoking in the house. She wouldn’t insist on total abstinence.

He exhaled the smoke, and thought of how quickly relationships, like things, could change. Change was the order of things, at least on the surface of life. He thought of
Ulysses,
and at once of how much and how little Dublin had changed over what now amounted to nearly a century. “And where was Catty all this time that Jammer here was struggling with Coyle?”

“Asleep, I believe,” David Holderness replied.

“Through the stick being cracked on the table and Coyle complaining and finally falling to the floor?”

“In the mirrored room. As I said to you before, you really must see it. It’s insulated so completely no sound can get in or out. She was exhausted, and fell asleep there. I myself went into the bedroom. Catty prefers to rise alone. Perhaps she mentioned that herself.”

She had and she would again. McGarr motioned to Ward, who opened the door to the sitting room. Catty Doyle was standing in the doorway, having overheard the entire exchange.

Said Holderness, “Tell them about your room, Catty. Maybe they’d like a peek themselves.”

Her eyes met his directly. “I won’t lie for you, David. Months ago I told Superintendent McGarr how it was, and I won’t change the truth. For you or anybody.”

“Not even for yourself? Think before you speak. Think of your room upstairs and of Mary Sittonn and even of the Coyle volumes the three of you hoarded against the day that they’d rise in value. Then there’s your relationship with Coyle while ostensibly you were so friendly with his wife. It’ll all come out in the press, I promise. You’ll give publishing and Hollis and Murken a bad name, to say nothing of Irish arts and letters. Why—you might even lose your job.”

Catty Doyle turned her eyes to McGarr. “As I told you in the Shelbourne on the day of the book launching, Superin
tendent, it was half-one to the minute when David got to my house. I remember because he asked me what Fergus Flood could possibly be doing in the neighborhood at that hour. I was in my
bedroom,
waiting for him. He said he’d missed all but the last bus to Phibsborough and he had to walk from the quays. He said he saw the car, the little Fiat, heading up the Finglas Road. He said he saw Flood clearly on the driver’s side, and there was another figure in the car.

“I remember nothing more of the night until Kinch’s barking woke me up. We then heard some noise out in the back garden, near Kinch’s house and the back gate. And knocking. David said he’d go down and find out, and I put a pillow over my head and went to sleep.

“I woke up when I again felt his presence beside me in the bed. He said, and I quote, ‘It was just some punks,’ and he had Kinch with him so the dog wouldn’t bark anymore. When I woke up, he was gone. David. Kinch was in his house in the garden.”