Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16 by Bartholomew Gill

painful—and, McGarr suspected, the ever-painful—reality of their lives.
    “Got much homework?” He twisted the key and put the car in gear.
    “Reams and reams of it.”
    When they arrived at their house on Belgrave Square in Rathmines, he reached for her before she could get out. “I want you to forgive Brianna, and be gracious when she apologizes to you.”
    “Peter! You think I won’t?”
    “No, I knew you would. But I thought I’d mention it.”
    Probably because he himself wished he could fo r give whoever had worked the two deaths, but he knew he never would. It just wasn’t in him.
    And because he did not want the poison that had spilled into his life with the murder to spread to his child.
    The bar up the street from Raymond Sloane’s house was a relic from the Liberties of old—a low, dim kip clouded with smoke from the clutch of old men at the bar and a sooty fi?re that was smoldering in the hearth.
    McGarr pulled back a stool, the red leatherette seat of which was split and curled like the skin of an apple. He sat, noting that all conversation had ceased.
    The others were staring at him, one man even having rose from his seat to get a better look.
    Climbing down from her own stool positioned at the farther end of the bar, a slatternly old woman with a pronounced limp and a cigarette at the corner of her mouth approached, muttering something he couldn’t quite make out.
    He thought he heard, “Fookin’ cop shite...never see them...grass on the locals.”
    She stopped in front of him and raised her head to look through a pair of grimy glasses on the end of a long nose. Her wrinkled face was the shade of putty; her brown eyes were milky with age.
    “Yeh drink on duty, it’s said.”
    “By whom?”
    “It’s why you did what you did on the teley.” She fl?apped a hand at a screen that was showing a rugby match. “Drunken snit. It’s on all the channels. With young Sloane—who’s known as J.C. hereabouts—sa y ing yous two broke in the back of his house, roughed him up, then grilled his mammy and sisters. Before he busted out.
    “Then there’s yourself, beatin’ the piss out of the press. Finally. At last. Feckin’ bunch of fakes, frauds, and fairies. What are ye havin’ besides the time of day?”
    “Malt.”
    She shuffl?ed around to reach for a bottle. “If you want ice, you can go to feckin’ Iceland and hell in that order. We serve no feckin’ ice here.”
    Some of the others began laughing.
    She poured the drink and placed it before McGarr.
    He slid some Euros toward her, but she slid them back. “You gave me a laugh, which is hard to come by these days.”
    McGarr nodded thanks. “Why J.C.?”
    “Jesus Christ. It’s how he once looked, with a dust mop beard and feckin’ sandals in winter. And because ‘J.C.’ browned him off. But all that’s gone. Now he’s Kojak with a ring in his nose.”
    “Like a feckin’ bossy cow,” said one of the men at the bar.
    The old woman pulled the stub of cigarette from her mouth and fl?icked it at the man. “Another word from you, and you’re out of here. The man’s speaking to me.”
    “The father, Sloane, he came in here.” It was not a question.
    “Not to drink. No toper, Raymond Sloane.”
    “Why drink? How high is up?”
    “That’s it. You’re gone.”
    The man turned his head and smiled to the others. He did not move.
    “Feckin’ ee-jit.”
    “Drugs?”
    “Raymond?” She nodded. “Years ago. Him with a steady job but the family and no money, the missus told me. Any other place but Trinity—bein’ a college and all—would have booted his arse into Liffey, where it belonged. But he did the rehab, and then he was back acting...different.
    “At fi?rst we put it down to the ‘pink cloud’ thing— you know, clean. Off the shit. I get ’em in here all the time. Turning over a new leaf, clean—yous is all drunken mots and bowsies, they say. Then, sooner or later, they show up, worse than before. Locked—