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believed they knew something. Those willing to show themselves at leasthad the courage of their convictions, which was the operative word in the office.
    An hour went by, then two, then six and eight. Utterly exhausted now, McGarr was about to reach for his hat and drag himself home for a hot meal and a long sleep when McKeon appeared in the doorway.
    “There’s a Tinker woman in the dayroom, Chief, who says she wants to speak to the ‘head shadog and nobody else’ about what she thinks is a murder. She rang up this morning, and she’s come all the way from Ballinasloe. I tried to get the story, but she won’t tell me any more than it’s about two people”—McKeon glanced down at a slip of paper—“Biddy Nevins and Mickalou Maugham.”
    “The bagpiper?” Who was also a Tinker, which was the term McGarr thought more traditional and apt but was now used mainly by people of his own generation and older. “Traveler” was a more recent term that the Traveling people now used to describe themselves. “Itinerant” was used by the media, and “Knacker” by bigots.
    McKeon shook his head.
    Could there be two people with such an unlikely name? Mickalou Maugham was, arguably, the finest musician in the country on the uillean pipes, the Irish bagpipe, which was inflated by means of a bellows under the arm rather than by blowing into a bladder. McGarr’s own grandfather had been a noted piper in his native Monaghan, and McGarr occasionally took out the instrument, which had been left him. But he played only poorly.
    Maugham’s touch, on the other hand, was sweet and deft, and McGarr had a number of his CDs. More to the man’s credit, he had set about at an early age to record the music of his own people, the Travelers, and later to set down in musical notation all the unrecorded bagpipe music in the rural parts of Ireland and Scotland. A series of articles in the Irish Times had detailed the technique he had employed to extract the tunes from bagpipers in isolated areas wherepeople were suspicious of strangers. The effort was nothing short of brilliant.
    Setting himself up in the principal pub in a village or wherever people congregated on market day, he would make a show of pulling his bagpipe from his kit. Then he would take great pains to tune and adjust the instrument—all to make sure that he had an audience. Finally he would begin to play, running through simple songs to more difficult numbers and ending with the most complicated and difficult music that he knew. Only when he could not continue would he stamp his foot on the floor and say in English, Irish, or Scottish—depending on the venue—“Beat that!”
    Some local piper was sure to pick up the gauntlet, and the competition would be on, sometimes lasting for days as word spread of Maugham’s presence and additional pipers appeared. Later on, when the others had gone to bed, Maugham would stay up late into the night, writing down what he had heard. Every now and then for over a decade a small press in Dublin would issue a book in his name titled The Pipe Music of Ulster or of Iona and Mull or the Eastern Highlands, where Maugham would play the Scottish pipes. McGarr had them all.
    But because so much of his time was spent in pubs, where—McGarr supposed—he was bought jars by appreciative listeners, Mickalou Maugham developed a drink problem that later led to drugs, “which are more efficient,” he told The Times. It was a thought that had never occurred to McGarr, and he remembered. Fair dues to the man, however: He put himself into hospital, kicked his habit, and had remained drug-free for a number of years at the time the article was written, which was a good few ago. Four or five.
    He had married another Traveler, a tall, pretty young woman whom he had met in rehab, and she had gone on to become the premier pavement artist in Dublin, always drawing a page from the Book of Kells there at the top of Grafton Street across from the gate into