The Going Rate Read Online Free PDF

the vomeronasal organ, J. Edgar Hoover’s belief that De Valera was a secret Jew?
    He and Kilmartin still went on the walks each week. They were on varying days: one up at Carrickologan, the other at Dunlaoghaire Pier, or Killiney Beach. The walks had begun as a gesture but they had passed quickly through routine, into habit, and they ended up as duty. Minogue was less than thrilled about his. His real walks – as distinct from strolls with Kathleen – had been in the spirit of Augustine, solitary and self-escaping. James Kilmartin was a ruiner of walks.
    But to his credit, Kilmartin had never been first to bring up mention of his travails. It had been Minogue who had worked up the nerve to ask him about Maura in the weeks and months after she had tried to kill herself. He had been met with an uneasy silence. The topic was a nogo area.
    Kilmartin didn’t join in the mischief and slagging at get-togethers in Clancy’s pub with the other veterans of the Murder Squad. Tommy Malone, their colleague from Murder Squad glory days didn’t give up trying, however. He offered Kilmartin openings galore, with talk of culchies and cowshite and country music, all delivered in the disdainful nasal Dublin drawl that Kilmartin had tried to mimic. But these sterling efforts had done little to animate this new James Kilmartin who had emerged from the shambles of that night when everything had gone up in smoke on him: wife, job – Kilmartin’s whole life, pretty well.
    He seemed to have settled on renouncing things. The house that he and Maura had been so proud of was up for sale. His Audi was sold. No cigars. He took only the occasional drink, and rarely ate a meal in a restaurant. Though he now rented a boxy apartment near Thomas Street, he actually spent a lot of time on the family farm in Mayo. That was where his older brother Sean, gone very bad with the arthritis, was avoiding making decisions about the future, Kilmartin told Minogue. None of his brood wanted to make a go of the farm, apparently.
    Kilmartin’s time there in boggy, wild and wet Mayo were more in the nature of dude ranching, he told Minogue. Bringing in the cows, driving the tractor; fixing drainage in the same boggy fields he had worked decades before; repairing sheds, the barn. Biding his time.
    One evening, he listed his foods for Minogue. It was as though they were a guide to the New James Kilmartin: cabbage for the dinner – spuds of course; porridge every day; fish on Friday. Evenings on the farm meant sitting by the fire, reading the paper or the odd bit of television. No satellite tolerated, no sirree. A game of cards with the neighbours, or he’d try reading books he wished he had read years ago. A bit of yoga too, imagine that. He was trying to improve himself, he told Minogue, filling in gaps, so to speak.
    Kathleen Minogue had spotted Kilmartin early in the New Year, looking through the self-help section in a Dublin bookshop. She swore that she had seen earphones and the tell-tale white wire of an iPod on him too. Minogue felt a strange embarrassment and even pity when he had heard this.
    For Minogue’s part, he kept track of the progress of the internal investigation into the shennigans at the Kilmartins’ house that night. The Ombudsman’s Office had been up and running nearly two years now, but it was still the Commissioner who had the final say in discipline.
    Minogue had now been interviewed three times about that night at Kilmartin’s – or as Plate Glass Sheehy had whispered in his ear one evening at Clancy’s pub, in a parody of a come-all-ye that Kilmartin would have appreciated in better times, “The Night Before Jimmy Was Stretched.” Well, nearly stretched.
    The interviews had been low-key, and terribly polite all the way. Two of the “chats” had been with that reed-thin sergeant, Feeney; Feeney of the strangely white teeth and peppermint breath, Feeney with the skin