Hoey bought fish and chips in Ringsend village, and they ate them while driving out on the Coast Road. Hoey turned up through Sandymount and landed on the Merrion Road within sight of the television mast which marked RTE but two miles away.
“Little enough in the flat, so,” said Hoey.
“I didn’t find what I was looking for in the line of pads of paper and appointment books. I’m hoping his desk has more of that class of stuff,” Minogue replied. “Plus there are those tapes. God knows how many hours of stuff is on them. He might have kept memos on tape.”
“No word-processor or magic computer in the flat,” Hoey added. “I thought they all had them now. Anyone in touch with his wife, his ex-wife? She’s in London, isn’t she?”
“Justice Fine said he’d have to phone her,” Minogue replied slowly. “But I was just wondering to myself… how to hell we can get started on this.”
“Motives, you mean?”
“Yep. I can’t see the killer. I just can’t. We need something a lot more direct than some phone call from a group of I-don’t-know-whats. Any iijit can make a telephone call. Did you get the text of what was said?”
“ ‘ This is the voice of Free Palestine. We are the League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People’… hold on, what did they… Oh yes: ‘ Let the world take note.’ No- hold on a minute, they mentioned Fine at the end… ‘ no spy or aggressor who works against the cause of Palestinian freedom and justice is safe from retributing. Fine has paid the price. ’ Some mouthful, that.”
The ‘freedom and justice’ soured Minogue more than most cliches.
“But, just for the sake of argument,” said Hoey, “don’t fanatics get very het-up if one of their members sorts out his head and leaves them? Say if Fine was a Leftie back in university, but now he meets his old cronies, Palestinian sympathizers even, and antagonizes them with common sense?”
“Go on,” said Minogue.
“Well, Fine might have rubbed shoulders with radicals back then, maybe stayed in touch with them. Say he meets up with some of them again and says he’d like a contact to someone who knows anything about links between, I don’t know, Libya and the IRA… So they look him up and down, thinking to themselves, well this Fine boy is gone very, let’s say middle-class-”
“Bourgeois.”
“That too. And the nerve of him, coming back and trying to mine them for touchy info that could land them in trouble,” Hoey continued.
“And being as they are very put-out about bourgeois backsliders, and paranoid by nature…”
“A hothead says that Fine is now an agent of the imperialist running-dog whatever, by way of being a traitor too, I suppose. What do you think?”
“I have little enough insight into the paranoid mind, but you may have something. When did they call the Press?”
“Close on half-ten.”
Half-ten, Minogue echoed within. Last seen by Miss Connolly on Sunday morning. No more than twenty-four hours in the water.
“How do tides work, Shea? I mean, if you threw something or somebody into the water, would it be washed up in the same place it was thrown in, if the tide was coming in, like?”
“I haven’t a clue. I believe that a tide will do different things depending on the lie of the land around the coast. It’s a shocking complicated business.”
Hoey turned off Nutley Avenue and into RTE.
“Do you know what, though?” Hoey murmured. “Aside from this crap about ‘working against the cause’ or whatever-I mean to say, that’s a mystery until we find out more about what Fine was up to that might have rubbed someone the wrong way-I wonder why they didn’t call until the Monday morning, and him being murdered already on the Sunday? Maybe they had some crooked reason, I don’t know. Do you think they knew the body would be washed up?”
“You have me there,” Minogue replied.
Beyond the barrier and the security guard at the entrance to Radio Telifis Eireann, Minogue phoned to confirm a five o’clock pow-wow on the Fine murder. As the murder appeared to have been committed in Dublin, the State Pathologist could autopsy the body. Minogue had not seen a coroner out on Killiney strand before he and Kilmartin had left for the hotel. They might not have bothered to have him come to the scene: gunshot wounds on a body, along with ‘clear signs of wounds from the effects of an explosive detonation’, were at the top of the list for mandatory post-mortem examination. By five o’clock today Minogue would have something from the Technical Bureau’s forensics, those incongruous boiler-suited men who had inched and kneeled their way over the beach. These scenes-of-the-crimes examiners knew of but didn’t much like the name which Minogue most often heard them referred to: bagmen.
Mickey Fitzgerald had to be paged from the security desk which met the visitors to the RTE radio building. Minogue spent the two minutes’ wait gawking at the employees who entered and left the building. Hoey jabbed him in the arm once and nodded toward a duo of stylish men leaving.
“That’s your man, what’s-his-name. Reads the news most days.”
“Him?”
“Yes. The one with the baggy suit that looks like wallpaper.”
“The up-to-the-minute Italian suit that costs three hundred quid, you mean. Sinnott?”
“Yep.”
Fitzgerald was a tall, skinny man with a beard. A few strands of grey stretched out to the fringe which almost touched the rim of his wire spectacle frames. Minogue thought of John Lennon. Fitzgerald shook Minogue’s hand.
“I know you,” he said and turned to Hoey.
“Detective Officer Seamus Hoey, also of the Investigation Section,” said Minogue.
“Ah, what a relief it is,” Fitzgerald said without any evident humour. “At least yous’re not part of An Craobhinn Aoibhinn.”
Minogue rather liked the caustic sarcasm. This nickname for the Special Branch had little to do with the mythical ‘Sweet Branch’, the fount of turn-of-the-century irredentist poetry with the mists of the Celtic Revival swirling about it.
“Were you expecting a bust of some type, Mr. Fitzgerald?” Minogue probed.
“We police ourselves here, lads,” Fitzgerald replied with more cynicism than coyness this time.
Minogue did not take up the bait. He would be no match for Fitzgerald as he, Fitz, presumably knew every in and out of the Broadcasting Act. A section of this act forbade RTE from airing interviews with members of proscribed organizations. Successive Irish governments had consistently subscribed to the notion that what didn’t appear on television could not exist in the minds of television viewers.
On this issue, executives in RTE were uncertain how to react. They were partly flattered by the implication that television was such a powerful medium of communication; they also took it for granted that, unlike the US, their Irish fellow-citizens knew there was life outside television. Rather than have a Minister slap an order on the service over any particular item, therefore, RTE had undertaken to keep its censorship in-house.
Fitzgerald led the two policemen through the building and toward the current affairs workroom. His department consisted of a huge room held in by walls of glass. Minogue decided not to make a comment about glass houses. The room was sectioned off by cloth-covered room dividers and desks stood in cosy spaces created by the high squares of orange and blue. It was all very modern, very dynamic, Minogue believed.
Less than half the desks they passed were occupied. A cluster of people sat at and around one desk, smoking and talking in low tones. They fell silent and looked to the policemen as they passed. Typewriters clacked at a distance. A radio was playing reggae music. Posters extolled visits to Madrid and an exhibition of Escher drawings which had come and gone at a Dublin gallery six years previously.
Fitzgerald stopped by one desk.
“That’s Paul’s. I put all his stuff in the drawers and that vertical cabinet there and I locked them. That was yesterday when I heard the news.”
He looked blankly to Minogue who was aware of the group still staring at them.
“And you have the keys?”
“I have. I swept his stuff off the desk and stuffed it all into his drawers and cabinet. The newsroom heard it first and a fella came over to us. We were terribly shocked here, just couldn’t believe it. Even with my expert knowledge of police procedure from watching the telly, it took me ten minutes to get my head together and fix up his desk. Hardly anyone here locks their desks. I turned the keys and put ‘em in me pocket.”
“Good man. I’ll be wanting to look at this stuff later, Mr. Fitzgerald,” said Minogue.
“And I’ll be wanting a list and a receipt detailing anything you take,” Fitzgerald replied.
Minogue looked back to the silent group and met their gaze for several seconds.
“I have me own private cell over here,” said Fitzgerald.
Seated in Fitzgerald’s office, Minogue took in the furnishings while Fitzgerald phoned for Brendan Downey. When Downey appeared, Minogue recognized him for one of the group huddled about the desk outside.
“What did Paul Fine do here, as regards his job?” Minogue asked then.
“He was a reporter/researcher: that’s his job description. He’d be one of eight people who works for the producer, i.e. me. He was a journalist and a reporter. Basically he would have called himself a journalist. He had been on the afternoon programme-”
“Day by Day?”
“Good for you, Inspector. We squeeze in segments of between five and ten minutes’ live time. It’s a magazine format that takes us to news-time on this channel.”
“To the Angelus, you mean,” said Minogue.
It was hard to tell what went on behind the beard, Minogue realized, but he believed that he saw Fitzgerald’s amusement push his glasses up slightly. Fitzgerald had made no secret of his opinions on institutions like the Catholic church. Minogue struggled to recall when it was that several bishops had jointly written an open letter to the newspapers, complaining about a sinister anti-clerical undertone to many current affairs programmes on RTE radio. To the credit of the Director General, he had asked them for proof. In a religion which regards the notion of ‘proof’ as an upstart provincial relative to horned heresy-stigmata, moving and bleeding statues excepted-this was an impertinence. Fitzgerald, a tenacious weed, still held his job.
“True for you. Sort of sets the tone for the news, wouldn’t you say?” said Fitzgerald.
Minogue almost smiled. Fitzgerald was no more than forty. He’d have allies, a common passion, support now. Minogue could remember the dull bells of the Angelus broadcast forty years ago in that pious, somnolent Ireland, summoning people to prayer at midday and at six. Fitzgerald, and his generation, could jibe now: he was educated and tough. It had taken Minogue thirty and more years to know that within the vague narrative which made up his life was retained the precise anger of his own rebellion. There had been few Mickey Fitzgeralds then. Minogue was now almost content that his anger had been blunted into detachment; Fitzgerald had made no such concession, he was sure.
Downey smiled tightly as though anti-clericalism was but an exchange of pleasantries. Hoey looked lost. Minogue stretched. Fitzgerald’s teeth showed for an instant. He took off the Leon Trotsky intellectual glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Bren here did some stuff with Paul,” he said.
“Before we go into whatever stuff you or he was working on, can you tell me if there were any peculiarities about Paul Fine recently?” Minogue began. “I mean if he was under stress or under some threat? Losing his job, a dangerous assignment, something of that nature? Did he behave in an unusual manner recently, make any odd comments?”
Fitzgerald shook his head.
“Anybody come looking for him here, asking after him here?”
Fitzgerald looked enquiringly at Downey who shrugged.
“Appear worried about anything? His personal life?” Minogue tried again.
“No,” said Downey.
Downey was well able to talk. Minogue interrupted him several times. The first time was when Downey mentioned Libya.
“No, nothing to do with the, er…” Downey looked to his boss to share the quip. “ ‘Proscribed organizations’ and all that. No, it was off-the-wall, we were talking over a pint one night, you know, talking up possible projects for the programme. We knew there’s a fair number of Arab students here on student visas. We were just wondering if there was any story in that, you know-if any of the Arabs had connections with members of the, er, you know.”
Minogue looked to Fitzgerald rather than Downey. “Lookit, lads, can we stop this pussyfooting around with the terminology?”Proscribed organizations“ and the rest of it? Call them the IRA or the Provos or whatever you like. My colleague here is not a tape-recorder or a lie-detector either, in case you’re wondering. He’s only jotting down notes. If I want a statement out of ye, I’ll ask ye. So can we talk like we’re citizens of the same planet?”
Fitzgerald’s arched eyebrows gave way to a shrug.
“Like I say,” Minogue added. “We’re not the mind police or anything. We can only do good work if people are co-operative with us. Now, this is a murder investigation so don’t spare our sensibilities. We tend to like getting straight to the point. We’re tough nuts the pair of us, aren’t we, Shea?”
“We’re awful tough, so we are,” Hoey obliged.
“Matter of fact I can safely say that I don’t even go to Mass and I suspect that Detective Hoey here doesn’t go to confession either. So can we hurry it up here?”
Downey resumed. “He said he’d do a bit on that, just to get a feel for it. We just decided off the tops of our heads to start with any Libyan connection first, seeing as Gadaffi’s very much in the public eye. He’s on record as supporting the IRA.”
“Ever heard of that group, The League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People?”
Fitzgerald shook his head too. “I know from reporting on stuff like that that some other outfit will invent a name to cover some incident, just to keep it at arm’s length and see what public reaction will be,” he said.
“What outfits?”
“Well, in this case I don’t know. There’s no Palestinian Liberation Organization or Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Dublin,” Fitzgerald said emphatically. “And there’s no Jihad that I can tell. I bet that yous know them or at least your Branch does. There are none of the madmen from Lebanon here either, the Hezbollah crowd or other pro-Iranian groups. That’s not how those organizations work, as I understand my reading. They don’t send members here as students to be farting about with the IRA in secret. Sure, there are sympathizers and militants amongst any group of students from Arab countries. I’d bet there are even informal groups where PLO sympathizers give a speech here in Dublin. That doesn’t translate into guns and bombs, though.”
“The links are organized on the Continent,” Downey added. “You know, Paddy Murphy from Belfast goes to Amsterdam or Copenhagen and meets So-and-so. They don’t come here offering guns.”
“We knew all that but we still thought it was worth a second look. The situation changes. Libyans might be interested in causing a commotion here,” said Fitzgerald. He began polishing his glasses with a paper handkerchief. Idly Minogue wondered if Fitzgerald had more in common with the keen, cerebral pugnaciousness of a Jesuit than he realized.
“Did Paul Fine actually get to the stage of going out and meeting these students?”
“I don’t think so. We were just starting up, catching up on background at this stage. It was his story basically, he was just picking my brain a bit. Same as we all do here,” Downey added a little defensively. Minogue caught Fitzgerald’s eye for an instant. Had Fitz powers of mind-reading, from that look on his face after Downey’s mention of picking one another’s brains? Minogue had instantly thought of a family of apes grooming themselves.
“Do you keep a notebook, Mr. Downey? Could you tell us the names of persons you or Paul Fine were to meet with in this regard?”
Downey blinked. Fitzgerald continued cleaning his glasses, taking excessive care with his handiwork. Hoey tapped his pencil lightly on the pad and glanced at Minogue.
“Such names would be a great help to us, Mr. Downey. They would in no way incriminate anybody,” said Minogue.
Downey looked to Fitzgerald but had no guidance there. Fitzgerald breathed on the lenses again.
“It’s not the custom for policemen to be asking journalists for their diaries or notebooks. Excepting places such as Chile, perhaps,” Fitzgerald observed.
“I didn’t know you for a man who revered customs,” replied Minogue. “I rather like novel approaches myself.”
“Thanks but no thanks,” said Fitzgerald conclusively. “I appreciate your appreciation. A free Press does not involve policemen following up names in a journalist’s notebook and questioning them on what they may or may not have said to that journalist.”
“I don’t much care what they said to Mr. Downey here. I want to know what they knew of Paul Fine.”
Fitzgerald put his glasses on, curling them around his ears carefully. Minogue saw a brain-warrior girding his loins.
“Seeing as we’re talking man-to-man here, Inspector, let me ask you this: is it because Paul’s Da happens to be a Justice of the Supreme Court that you are so pushy?”
“Not principally,” Minogue answered.
Fitzgerald rested a languid gaze on Minogue for several seconds, then he turned to Downey. Downey left the room. Must have known and made their minds up before I ever actually asked, Minogue thought.
“It’s because Paul Fine is a Jew, isn’t it?”
“That could well be,” said Minogue slowly. “But I don’t like to say it out loud. Every victim of a murderer gets our best. I may look like a superannuated culchie cop to you but I am in fact a lunatic-a lunatic in the sense that I am a stubborn weasel when I get to grips with the murder of a person. My bite is very bad indeed, Mr. Fitzgerald, and I’m at the age where I don’t much care for jaded slogans like ‘the freedom of the press’. Not that I’m not a democratic person. It’s that I tend to lose track of public rituals when I seek out fairness for someone like Paul Fine. We’re his advocates, in a sense. Now if you want to get on your high horse and find my superiors’ ears in order to have me taken to task, fire away. But you’ll be surprised. This is a very personal business. You get to know who was treated so unfairly that they end up on a slab in the pathology department of a hospital and turn into a heap of reports on your desk. Frequently you get to like those victims and the people they were stolen from: you even get to like some of them inordinately. And it tears at your stomach and it can make you ill yourself, this grief and madness. Do you know what I’m saying at all? Let me know when I’m trampling on your civil rights, won’t you?”
Minogue heard Fitzgerald breathe out heavily through his nostrils. He looked to his watch.
“Tea?” said Fitzgerald. Minogue believed he had won something.
Downey brought the tea. He sat next to Hoey as they doctored their tea and pointed to names in his notebook. Hoey began copying them.
“If you think that Paul was by way of being very religious, you’d be wrong there,” said Fitzgerald. “I don’t know if there are lapsed Jews like there are lapsed Catholics but he didn’t wear his religion on his sleeve. I asked him when he came to me with the bit about the Arabs, the students, if he hadn’t an interest to declare there. He laughed it off, treated it as a joke.”
“A joke,” Minogue echoed with a leaden emphasis.
“Yes. Because being a Jew he’d necessarily be expected to have it in for any Arab. Stereotyping. Get this, now: Paul was an unashamed progressive, like a lot of people here. Your mob call it Leftie, I don’t doubt. Let’s just say that Paul wasn’t a gobshite. We have to fight our corner here on this programme. There’ll always be complaints, and dinosaurs from the bog wanting to put us off the air and have more ‘entertainment’, less looking at the Emperor. Paul wouldn’t have been working here if he was a bread and circuses man. It was a personal challenge to him to go out and meet these students, he said. He actually had a lot of sympathy for Palestinians. We think there are no shades of opinion in Israel, you know, and we assume that every Israeli-and therefore, every Jew the world over-supports what has happened in Israel over the last ten years. Not so.”
“It’s getting a bit murky for me,” Minogue murmured. “It seems odd to me that he should be murdered for being a Jew who was apparently taking an interest in Arab goings-on as regards Ireland.”
“That’s putting it a bit crudely. I don’t think any of those students would do that, even if they knew Paul was Jew. Remember that he was an Irishman, a Dubliner. Would you have known him for anything but that if you’d met him in the street?” asked the rhetorical Fitzgerald. Dead with a hole the size of a tenpenny piece in his forehead, Minogue wanted to reply. The back of his head pulped too, Mr. Smart-arse Fitzgerald.
“Point taken. What if there are more militant students coming here now? Like you were wondering about, ones with some brief to be involved with our crop of IRA? What if one of them knew precisely that Paul was a Jew?”
Fitzgerald shrugged. Minogue drained his cup and he watched as Fitzgerald rummaged in a drawer of his desk. A grainy newspaper photograph of Daniel Ortega fluttered to the floor by Minogue’s feet. He picked it up and laid it on Fitzgerald’s desk. Fitzgerald smiled then and laid a key by Minogue’s cup. Minogue couldn’t suppress a snigger.
“There: now you know for sure. Don’t tell the bishops,” said Fitzgerald.
“I didn’t think you kept pictures of the Sacred Heart in there, Mr. Fitzgerald. Don’t be worrying about shocking me.”
Fitzgerald announced that he had to get back to work. He had allotted nearly an hour to the Gardai, holding off calls and conferences for this interview. Now he had to get on top of this evening’s programme.
Minogue asked him what other stories Paul Fine had been working on.
“Bren will tell you those. I knew some of them. He did a story on chemists down the country refusing to stock contraceptives. Em, he trimmed something we got about Thatcher’s own constituency, you know, how the locals view her. What else? The Arab student thing, of course. Oh, I forgot: it was his turn to hunt for some scandal.”
“Scandal? Journalists?” said Minogue, not quite carrying it off.
“We’re always interested in what sulking backbenchers might be bellyaching about. Especially with the Ard Fheis, our glorious governing party’s convention, coming up in a week and a half. Not a lot of Party members will talk to our programme, you see-before the Ard Fheis, I mean. We have the name of stirring up trouble, making mountains out of molehills because our format pretty well dictates that we can’t give them a half an hour to gab. Still, we try. There’s always a grumbling TD out there, a fella who would like to air his notions.”
“I take it you mean a bit of muck-raking.” Fitzgerald affected shock. “Seeing as we’re talking man-to-man here,” Minogue added.
“You’re not a bishop in disguise, are you?”
“I’m merely a pawn,” replied Minogue.
“It’s not muck-raking. It’s called accountability and scrutiny of public officials and it’s rather popular in textbook discussions on democracy. I mean that we might want to check how many holidays a Member of Parliament or councillor takes and if the State purse is being devoted to projects a little too close to home for these boyos. Recreations, expense accounts, that sort of thing. See how they vote on certain issues, who they’re rolling around in the sack with. Who’s on the up-and-up, what Cabinet decisions for whom. Squeeze all that into a quickie magazine format for tired motorists, and you’re a better man than I. There are the obvious limitations.”
“Sounds mighty exciting,” Minogue fibbed.
“I’ll tell you what I like the most about it,” said Fitzgerald. He rubbed his hands together theatrically. “Aside from raising the wrath of the curators of culture and family life here, it’s knowing that the whole mob listen to our programme so they can get any dirt on their rivals. Then they pretend to condemn us for finding something isn’t quite square. I love it.”
“Did Paul do much of this stuff?”
“No he didn’t, actually. He hated it, if you really want to know. I rotate staff through that job. It’s a constant issue, potentially anyway.”
“Did he do well at it?”
“Well… he didn’t, I’d have to say. His strengths were in other areas. He didn’t have the killer instinct really-”
Fitzgerald stopped.
“What a stupid thing to say, after what has happened. What I meant to say was that Paul found this part of the work pretty distasteful.”
“What did he like to cover in the line of his work then?”
“He liked fairy stories.”
“I don’t follow.”
“That’s what we call them here. Sort of like good news, news that has or could have a happy ending. A new centre for adult education, more money for battered wives’ shelters, something progressive in the schools. Paul wasn’t a hungry bollocks like the rest of us, keen to tear at the vitals of those who misgovern and undo us. A bit nice, was our Paul.”
Fitzgerald’s demeanour changed with the last sentence, said slowly as if considering something foreign to him. His eyes were now less alert and guarded, Minogue believed.
“That doesn’t get any one very far, does it?” Minogue said.
Fitzgerald looked glum when he left them with Downey to open Paul Fine’s desk. Minogue had twenty minutes to look through its contents. He found two card indexes, a half-dozen school copybooks, some used, a small cassette-recorder you could shove in your pocket. No cassette in it, none in the drawer. Over a dozen hanging-file folders. Minogue left the files in the cabinet and looked through the copybooks. Fine had apparently kept notes. Minogue could read most of the pages, some home-made shorthand excepted. The most recent date appeared to be almost three weeks previously-notes from an interview which concerned agricultural fertilizers turning up in rivers.
One card index held names and addresses, listed alphabetically. The other, also bound with a rubber band, detailed lists of subjects. Minogue made sense of most of the topics. Fine had dated previous broadcasts on some items. Opening to P, Minogue saw ‘ Papal Visit- expenses’, followed by references to radio and television broadcasts. An idea for a future story on the radio, probably. Minogue checked ‘ Israel’ and found sub-topics too: ‘ Irl-Isl. (dpltc.)’, ‘Isl.- S. Africa’, ‘Isl.-West Bank’. Fine’s system also noted related subjects and programmes with some references to print media: ‘ I.T.’ for Irish Times, ‘Gdn.’ for Guardian, ‘Ind’ for the British Independent. The different media references were colour-coded, yellow for radio programmes, black for newspapers, red for television. Nothing under A for Arab. Stupid to expect that. No ‘ League for Solidarity… ’ either. Minogue found entries for the IRA and Intelligence Services. Methodical fella, Paul Fine. If he was bored some day or short of a topic he could go to his Index and even whet his appetite further by looking at some previous treatments of topics. None of his sources was dated earlier than two years back. Maybe he skimmed off the older entries at the end of every year and started new cards to stay up-to-date…
Hoey was fingering through the file folders in the drawers of the desk. Fitzgerald had indeed stuffed what he had found on the top of the desk into the drawers. A packet of Carroll’s cigarettes, a telephone message on red paper to call Mary. Minogue took the number to check against Mary McCutcheon’s. A small internal phone directory was pinned to the partition in front of the desk with postcards and cartoons next to it. There were several receipts and credit-card flimsies in the drawer, none less than a week old, and pens, pencils and biros in profusion. Minogue noted the Access card number to check for attempted uses since Fine’s death, and found a slip of paper with two names on it. He was able to read one of the names directly: H. All. The other looked like Khatib. Sounded Arabic, too. Surnames? He copied them.
Minogue pocketed the copybooks and flattened them in the inside pocket of his jacket. He handed the two card indexes to Hoey who promptly stuffed one in each pocket.
Minogue locked the desk. He found Fitzgerald with his head encased in headphones the size of polite teacups behind the glass wall of a studio.
“I’m holding on to the key,” said Minogue. “It’s out of your hands for the moment, but thanks very much for acting promptly and securing what may be valuable clues. It may prove useful, I don’t know. There’ll be a detective back to go through the stuff properly. Phone me if you have something, would you? Questions, recollections, anything you hear. Complaints too, if you want.”
Fitzgerald nodded without removing the apparatus. As Minogue turned away, Fitzgerald beckoned to him and he pried one of the headphones away from his ear.
“Do you have anything to do with the Ryan business down in Tipperary?”
“I did,” replied Minogue.
“We’re going to be having a WAMmer here for a live interview about twenty after. Do you know of the Women’s Action Movement?”
Minogue nodded but didn’t take the bait. “I’d better make haste then,” he murmured.
“Aha, I see. I just wanted a detail cleared up. Someone suggested it to me last night and it stuck in my head. You know how everyone has an opinion on this-whether it should be considered murder and all that?”
“All we do is give our evidence to our department up in the Park. They process it, file evidence, word it and then they throw it to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP lays the charges on behalf of the State.”
“OK. I know for a fact that this woman from WAM is going to be talking about the case being a psychological watershed.”
Minogue thought of incontinence. “What’s a psychological watershed when it’s at home?”
“The Ryan woman killing that husband of hers, fighting back. All the claims about wife abuse in holy Ireland. The line you’ll hear this evening will be about a revolution in Irish life, women not taking it any more from Church or State or husband.”
Minogue fixed on Fitzgerald’s ‘line’. Everything was a ‘line’ in this racket, then. Minogue knew the fascination which the Ryan case seemed to hold for many people all over the country and he was suspicious of it. Jimmy Kilmartin himself, that distant look in his eye, was that a portent of ‘a psychological watershed’?
“It’s the whole bit about the strong woman figure in the Irish psyche, I was told last night. That’s what strikes a chord with everyone,” Fitzgerald continued. “So tell me, do the Gardai recognize any significance in how Fran Ryan was killed?”
“He was stabbed to death with a kitchen knife,” Minogue replied cautiously. “Not on any altar of sacrifice or anything. No incantations or signs painted on the wall…”
“Yes, but how many times?”
“Ah, I bet you know yourself, Mr. Fitzgerald.”
“Thirty-seven, am I right?”
“You are,” replied Minogue.
“So yous don’t see any significance or ritual thing about that?”
“To do with where the planets were, is it?” Minogue tried.
“No. Fran Ryan was thirty-seven when he died.”