Minogue and Hoey were five minutes late for the meeting. Minogue guessed Gallagher for the one who looked like a graduate student, subtly raffish and smart, mustachioed and clad in denim. Kilmartin was whispering with a sergeant whom Minogue recognized as a forensic technician who was always trying to organize golf tournaments which were a cover for lengthy booze-ups.
He walked to Gallagher and introduced himself. Gallagher’s accent was the faintly interrogative earnestness of Donegal.
“You don’t mind guiding these fellas here through your stuff too, do you?” asked Minogue as he glanced around the room. “We’re all off the Squad here. Keating. That’s Shea Hoey there I came in with. The world and his mother knows Jimmy Kilmartin, I’ll bet: ‘The Killer’ himself. The one he’s talking to has a preliminary from the scene and we’re waiting for anything from the autopsy. It’s early days yet with the pathology, though, so we shouldn’t be expecting anything proper until later this evening.”
Gallagher stroked his moustache. “I can give you the broad picture, but this League crowd… I might as well tell you now, I never heard of them.”
“Well, tell us about the overall situation, then, will you?” He felt drowsy. Now.
Kilmartin lumbered over as Minogue took his seat. “You have a green light,” he confided. “God Almighty was on the blower to me an hour ago. ‘Results!’ says he. You know what that means: steam-roller. The pressure is on, man.”
Kilmartin glanced quickly in Gallagher’s direction. “If that Gallagher drags his heels or sulks a bit, I’d bite him,” he said slowly.
Gallagher stood and nodded at Minogue.
“We’ll start, so,” said Minogue.
Minogue drew several circles around ‘9mm’. He drew squares around ‘. 30,’ ‘. 32- 7. 62, ’7. 65 mm‘.
“Whatever calibre it was, the gun was fired from between one and two feet away. Few particles in the scalp, a radius of nearly four inches. Very little scorching within that area. Em…” The assistant to the State Pathologist was reading from handwritten notes in a binder. “The first shot killed him. Instantly. A subsequent shot took a piece of vertebra here. A shot to the neck blew out the artery. The blood loss has to be a consequence of how the body lay after the shooting.”
He turned to the overhead projector and used his pencil to home in on a point on the diagram. To Minogue he looked like a younger Vincent Price. The upward glow from the apparatus high-lighted his face and the smoke being drawn like a silk scarf toward the fan beneath the projector. The smell of hot plastic and cigarette smoke mixed with the odour of stale clothes-his own? he wondered-had made Minogue sleepy. He looked to the probable height of the killer, an estimate of the angle of entry for the first shot. Fine was five foot ten in his socks, the angle no more than thirty degrees before the bullet went slightly awry. The one who fired the gun had to be no smaller than five foot eight… if he or she was standing in ordinary shoes, on a spot level with Fine. Sitting, though? If Fine had been sitting down? Minogue’s mind reeled.
“How about him being shot as he sat down?” Hoey said.
The assistant turned to the projector again and waved his pencil over shaded areas on the figure.
“We can’t tell from the bruising here if-do you see those bruisings there over the forehead? Well the drawing, I mean, obviously-he banged his head after being shot and falling to the ground. In a chair, say, he’d pitch roughly forward, then to one side when his upper body’d meet with his knees and… it’d take us a while to suggest probabilities. One thing worthy of mention, as I was saying earlier, was the degree of bruising. With the possible exception of that bruise near the hairline, the bruises were occasioned after death. None is severe and that is important.”
Occasioned. I like that verb, thought Minogue.
“It’s safe to say that the victim was not intentionally clobbered or abused at all. The motion of the water and the nature of the materials on the water’s edge accounts for the abrading and slight bruising which forms nearly all of what we’re talking about.”
Tides, thought Minogue. Time and tide wait for no man. Time of death (he remembered the feeble attempt at humour on that: ‘Ah now lads, no miracles, please’) was between eighteen and twenty-four hours of the time of discovery. The body, cruciform, drifting in the darkness as the moon drew and released tides around the island.
Kilmartin flicked the Venetian blinds open and Minogue rubbed his eyes in the glare. Gallagher waited until the assistant had left and his audience was all commissioned Gardai. He began with the file which the Special Branch had maintained on Paul Fine. With a sense of decisive deliberation, Gallagher said the file was inactive. The last entry had been three years previously.
“What status was Fine’s file?” asked Minogue.
“Status?” Gallagher resisted.
“Was he regarded as a high priority?”
Gallagher didn’t reply immediately. Minogue caught sight of the mild warning in Kilmartin’s glance. Fine and well to bite Gallagher if he was surly, but not in front of other policemen.
“Er, no. Fine was a student in Trinity College for two years, studying Political Science. His name came to our attention a few months after he started college when he appeared on a membership list for a certain organization, one we routinely keep track of,” Gallagher lisped, without looking up from the sheet he had drawn out of his jacket.
“Hardly the Legion of Mary, ha, lads?” said Kilmartin. The policemen grinned obligingly.
“You may know the organization,” Gallagher rode in on Kilmartin’s attempt to head off awkwardness. “Eco-Al. Let me give you a sketch on this group. Eco is just eco, the way it sounds. It can mean economy and ecology. Al is for alliance. Say it quick and it sounds like ‘equal’. All intentionally clever. We have reason to believe that Eco-Al got some funding from unusual sources on the Continent. There’s common stuff between Eco-Al and other movements: the Green Party, CND in Britain, Greenham Common women, Animal Rights movements. Take it as understood that Eco-Al has received money from an organization in Paris called Accord International. It’s by way of being a quartermaster for cash which is thought to originate in Eastern Europe and probably the Soviet Union. There is no doubt in the wide world that Eco-Al has been infiltrated by persons with other priorities, secret or
otherwise, including Trotskyite groups and ex-members of RS.”
“RS?” asked Kilmartin. “If you say that quick, it’s ”arse“, isn’t it?”
Even Gallagher laughed at that.
“Not intentional this time, but you might be on to something there. I’ll pass it along.”
More laughs.
“Revolutionary Struggle. They’re nearly all students. The ones that aren’t are hangers-on who want to get off with rich girls who have fallen in love with the proletariat. They’re not all the ideologues and screamers they look. One of ‘em turned up at a post-office robbery last year in Castlebar with an assault rifle under his armpit. He’s number two on our list since. We think he’s in Amsterdam. Anyway…”
“Any cross-over between this mob and the IRA?” asked Kilmartin.
“No,” answered Gallagher. “That Eco-Al thing fell in on itself in fact, whatever about in name. You couldn’t keep a coalition like that together in Ireland. It was a hothouse thing. All that’s left of Eco-Al is a small group of university graduates who meet over pints and write letters to the paper about acid rain and the state of the nation’s water resources.”
“Right enough, I know that crowd,” said Kilmartin. “They let their children run around with no nappies. Want to give fish and sheep the vote and outlaw flush toilets and motor-cars.”
“Let’s get back to the other business,” said Minogue, struggling against a sluggish afternoon mind. “Palestinians and their sympathizers.”
Gallagher stretched his arms and began fiddling with a pencil. Minogue deduced that Gallagher was restive at having to explain basics to crime ordinary detectives. Hoity-toity Special Branch: Supermen with their own liturgy.
“The Palestinian thing is not a cut-and-dried affair in Ireland. It’s an odd business. Palestinians find common cause with Republicans here. Then there’s a lot of people saying that Irish nationalism has so much in common with Zionism and that results in support for Israel.”
“So you’re telling us that it’s confused.”
“No. A good rule of thumb here is that Lefties here tend to stick to the Palestinian side. You and I know that IRA personnel have trained and travelled and received munitions from various places in the Middle East.”
“Wait a minute, Pat,” said Minogue. “Sooner or later we have to consider the possibility of a some quid pro quo thing, a favour done by our local gunmen in return for arms or money.”
“It could well be a Provo loaning out a gun or two,” added Gallagher. “They’re still at the rent-a-gun for bank jobs, I grant you. But,” he paused, “why not take the line of a paid-up contract murder? A professional killer or terrorist, in and out from the Continent or someplace.”
“All right so,” said Minogue, still scrabbling for some hold. “You’ve brought the meeting to that contentious point, Pat. We’re trying to profile a killer. Trying to see him clearly. I’ve given the matter some thought, the possibility of a professional killer being responsible, for whatever motive. I think we can’t be distracted by thinking about some international hit-man or hit-men: that would be discouraging. Let’s plug away with the lines we have. Stay flexible. Even if we are chasing a pro, we need to find the locals who set it up. A pro doesn’t just walk in and pick anyone. What we can try to focus on is some small cell, one fella even, who’s a cross-over between IRA or Left-wing and other groups with strong interests in the Middle Eastern business. Not just in Palestinian matters but militant Muslim groups.”
Gallagher nodded and continued stroking his moustache as if trying to drain something out of it, looking toward the ceiling as he listened.
“But like I said,” Gallagher murmured finally,“if it’s a pro or semi-pro floated in for this, paid for the job and gone already…”
“Shite,” said Kilmartin. “The hell kind of a chance do we have if the killer got a gun and a passport and a fistful of money out of a diplomatic bag and he’s back in Paris or Beirut or whatever?”
Gallagher shrugged. “Then we have our work cut out for us,” he said. He continued mulling over the question and then shook his head slowly.
“We can usually pick names out of our heads for certain jobs. If you said: ‘We’re looking for someone who knocks off post-offices using assault rifles and works with two others and steals four cars for one job, ’ I could reel off three or four names. But right now we can’t point to anyone in or out of the groups we monitor who is fired up enough and savage enough to do this murder. Three shots in the head suggests expertise to me, that’s all I can say. Our militants are a fairly tight family bunch, to tell you the truth. The home-grown real hit-men don’t care a damn for anything outside the IRA-Brit side of things. They wouldn’t do freelance stuff like killing Fine for an Arab cause. Very, very unlikely.”
“Humph,” grunted Kilmartin, shifting himself in his seat. “Don’t forget the call to the newspaper was an Irish accent. Let’s say some foreigner, some fella from the Middle East, did it but had an Irish mate to do the phoning. They’re cut-throats out there in the Middle East, you only have to watch the news to know that.”
“You may have something there,” Gallagher allowed cautiously. “It’d also make it look like there was an organization here, some support for their cause.”
No one spoke for several moments.
Gallagher’s quizzical glance toward Minogue brought him out of his thoughts and he suppressed a yawn. “Yes, Pat. Sorry. Yes. Will you carry on with the student thing now, if you please? Middle Eastern students and groups and what-have-you here in Ireland?”
Chair legs scraped and policemen rearranged themselves while Gallagher prepared his notes again. Minogue lapsed into his chair, retreating within.
He had been lucky, if luck was the word. After the nightmare of carrying the body through the bushes and briars in the early hours of Monday morning, the panic and fear and sweat like a fever gripping him, he had hefted and dragged, rested with then wrestled with the corpse for an hour, getting him down off the damn hill. His body remembered the dank night air off the sea enveloping him like a clammy cloak.
He had seen dead bodies before, plenty of them. Those villagers shredded in the Bekaa Valley, the dust of their pulverized homes still settling on their faces where the flies fed. Never so close, though: close enough to see the head jerk, hair part suddenly as the shot spread shock through the skull, the body drop like a stone, as though thrown to the ground. Had to make certain then, and not think: shoot and hold and shoot again, quickly before you scream yourself. Must watch, too, as the head hopped and the legs twitched.
He shuddered as he changed gear for the first traffic lights on the outskirts of Bray. His armpits prickled. He couldn’t remember getting this far, just following the rush-hour traffic south on the Bray Rd. His face felt swollen with the sweat. He crunched third gear, missing the gate. The car felt strange to him still. Could the drivers next to him imagine what he had been going through, what he was still going through? He had found the shell casings, scrabbling in the grass and briars; he had rolled the body into the bushes. A dog barking somewhere, rustling in the foliage. People used this park, of course they did. Not of his choosing at all. Panic had burst like a flare in his chest, leaving every part of his body aching. Dog barking again, breaking the tremendous weight of silence of a warm autumn afternoon. Dull echoes of the thumps as he had fired still pulsed in his mind. Then looking up and seeing the child watching him. Luck? Paralysed, beyond any thought or action. Couldn’t touch the child. A boy dressed up in his Boy Scout uniform, stick in hand: there had to be more of these youngsters nearby. He remembered trying to smile at the boy but something was shouting inside his head, knowing he couldn’t control his facial muscles. The boy had moved off. Luck?
He accelerated with the green light and turned down toward the wasteland of rubble which girdled this corner of the town. He passed a metal foundry, long abandoned, where teenagers drank and pelted bottles against the few remaining walls, where bonfires scarred and blackened the stones, where rats scurried in the dock-weeds and scattered bricks and rubbish. It was tea-time, the lanes were deserted. Rusting hulks of cars stood in the nettles, by mounds of rubble. He eased the car over bricks and burst plastic bags full of refuse and steered toward a roofless building. Small shapes moved around the debris. The tyres spun as he worked the car over a concrete parapet where steel rails were still embedded. More car wrecks, many burned too.
Seize the chance, just go through with it. That’s how war is. War? He swore at the burn of confusion and anger which erupted around his heart. Struggling with a dead man down a hill in the hopes he’d never be found; nauseous with loathing and disgust and weariness, embracing the stubborn body of a man he had killed as though it were a penance. Cursing and praying, nearly in tears, stumbling with his load while everyone slept. Dark night of the soul, he had wondered later. The life of one man for the greater cause. One man-it was as though another voice had said that aloud next to him in the car. Panic and rage made a tremor race up his back. He cast a glance toward the covered body. Now it was two.
He stopped the car and switched off the engine. When he tried to move he found that he couldn’t. He bowed his head and prayed but the hands on the wheel remained as fists, tight and tighter as he struggled. Lucky, he thought again with savage irony. Lucky because he was still sane enough to get this far.
He checked his watch again. He imagined the body moving, rising, casting off the blanket, going for his throat. Less than an hour ago he had killed the other man who now lay huddled across the seat. The man had shouted once but the bar had thudded into the side of his turning head before he got his arm up. Hit him again, this time on his knees, putting him out. The film of yellow light had seemed to pulse and brighten as he had stood over the man, listening to the deep breaths whistling in his nose. He had fumbled the cord out of his pocket, finished him. Desperate then, feeling this could not be real, he had heard himself sob as he tightened the cord, his hands cramping with the strain until he let go at last. A blob of blood had issued from the man’s ear.
He had watched the street then, but no one had passed. He had opened the garage door, driven in the car, and swung the door down again. It had taken him ten minutes to wrap the body, drag it to the car and bundle it into the back seat. Then he had gone through the kitchen, cleaned the blood from the lino and latched the door. After that, he had driven away with his cargo, out into the beginnings of the evening rush-hour traffic toward the comfortable suburbs of Dublin’s south side…
He skirted the buildings and debris carefully, stopping to look back at the car. This needn’t have happened, he knew. He might have had an option, some hope of avoiding it, if that journalist hadn’t drifted in on the tide. He choked off the remorse with anger and looked about the site. Joyriders set fire to the cars they stole around here, he had heard. Beer cans lay heaped beside half-melted plastic cider bottles. He listened to the clacking of the suburban train, the DART, in the distance. The nearest houses were almost a quarter mile off. He looked back at the car again. People’d see smoke but the most they might do would be call the fire brigade. Even at that, the petrol would have done its work. Couldn’t wait, anyway.
He uncapped the petrol and doused the upholstery. The petrol soaked the blanket and began dripping on to the floor. He let the string into the can and drew it out slowly, looped one end around to the underside of the front seat and tied the other end to the top of a reinforcing bar which stuck out obliquely from the rubble nearby. Before lighting the cigarette he squeezed the string to make sure it was moist enough. Then he cupped clay and dirt into a small mound under the string. Slowly he plugged the cigarette into the clay. He left an inch between the smoking tip and the string. Four, five minutes, he thought. When he stood, the scene seemed to gather itself around him, crushing him. He felt his stomach stir with nausea. Dizzy, too, he breathed in deeply and rubbed his eyes hard. A funeral pyre, he thought, or a sacrifice. He forced himself to utter a short prayer. Through the fear and the unbelieving, as he heard his own heart beat loud, he knew that he had held fast. As grotesque as this was, as clumsy as it was, he had been lucky-blessed, perhaps-and he had held fast. He jogged across the acres of rubble and the derelict shells of factories, and headed for the train station.
The briefing ground on. Minogue could feel the bafflement, the tiredness of the detectives hanging in the air. While he waited for a pause in Gallagher’s delivery he watched a detective yawn.
“Will you run up a list of likelies from what ye know about extremists here who are interested in matters Middle Eastern?” Minogue asked finally. “Students and citizens not necessarily affiliated with Republicans here too?” he added.
Gallagher blinked and studied the table-top.
“I can put the request through the Palace in the Park to cover you,” Minogue said. He could think of no less ominous way to remind Gallagher that the request could have the Garda Commissioner’s scrawl on the end of it after going through his office in Garda HQ in Phoenix Park.
“Ah no, it’s not that,” Gallagher said awkwardly. “I know we have to get the lead out, and free up personnel and info if ye want it. I was just thinking ahead, trying to figure an easy way. We don’t have the files cross-indexed, you see. We go by names, we go by organizations. Then we have files from the Aliens Office for resident foreigners. I can run up a list, all right, but it’ll take time…”
“And the Ports of Entry data, to follow up on an in-and-out killer from abroad?” Minogue probed gently.
“To be sure,” Gallagher replied quickly.
Somebody’s belly rumbled, Kilmartin’s. “Jases! Did you hear that war-cry, lads? I could eat the cheeks off a Jesuit’s arse through the confessional grille.”
Whether planned or not, Kilmartin’s grumble loosened the tension which Minogue had felt settling after he had made his request for Branch material.
“How many students are we talking about?” asked Kilmartin.
“Students from the Middle East? I don’t know for sure. There are upwards of 200 Lebanese students here. I only know that because I heard it the other day. The Lebanese are very keen on university education. I don’t know what religion the Lebanese here are, even. I’d bet a lot of them are Maronites, Christians.”
“Libya. Syria. Places with big Muslim populations.”
“Iraq too? Do you want to know about Iran?”
Kilmartin looked exasperated enough for Gallagher to skip any answer.
“Here’s a rough guess then: 450. That’s a generous estimate. Included in that are militants and ordinary people who don’t beat any drums. You might find a PLO member and then you might find a member of the Irish-Arab society-both ends of the spectrum.”
“Right so,” said Minogue. “Let’s get on to specifics with this League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People, then.”
Gallagher sat back in his chair and tugged at his moustache. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything on them. I never heard of them-and I’m the expert,” Gallagher shrugged. “Are you sure you got the name right- the girl on the switchboard, I mean.”
“Shite,” said Kilmartin.
It was seven o’clock.
“Sandwiches?” asked Minogue.
“Hamburgers and chips,” Keating said.
Minogue caved in. “Let’s give ourselves a few minutes before we get down to brass tacks as to what we’re going to do here,” he murmured. He asked Hoey to copy the names from Fine’s index cards on to the blackboard. Gallagher stayed in his chair and watched Hoey scrawling on the board.
“Now I might be able to plug into that,” said Gallagher, nodding toward the board. “Where’d you get those names?”
“An index of Paul Fine’s. We found it in his office.”
Minogue walked by Gallagher and out into the hallway. Kilmartin, there ahead of him, turned to Minogue.
“I phoned the lab for an up-date just now,” he grunted. “They’re ready to put it in writing that Fine was shot somewhere else than the beach. We’ve had men up and down the beach since the middle of the day.”
Minogue thought about the manpower which Kilmartin had suggested calling in. He’d need at least fifty men: Killiney Bay stretched miles down to Bray. The body probably hadn’t made it more than a couple of hundred feet offshore before the tide had drawn it in. Minogue didn’t want to think about Fine being shot aboard a boat and being dumped over. Fifty Gardai to do the hotels along the promenade in Bray, all the entrances to the beach… the railway stations for a sighting. Fine hadn’t owned a car. Go on the radio news tonight, at least. Wait until tomorrow for the telly, get a good clear recent snap for the papers too. Door to door? There couldn’t be more than a handful of older houses directly adjacent to the beach, houses built before the State decided that the foreshore was State land. In every place along the beach that Minogue could think of you’d have to be right down on the sand to see anything happening at the water’s edge. And who’d be down on the beach at night, anyway? Curriers with cans of lager and joints and their doxies for a wear. Model citizens: the least likely to step forward.
“I think we’d better set about it, all right,” Minogue concluded.
Kilmartin could call in detectives from the Central Detective Unit in Harcourt Street as well as other crime ordinary detectives from District Detective Units around the country.
“Let’s start by posting a car at every and any car entrance to the beach. Stop anyone going down to the beach and ask if they were around on Sunday or Sunday night. I’m sure there are regulars who drag the dog out and what-have-you every day there. Then to the beach accesses for pedestrians only. As for ourselves here, we should look at possibles from Fine’s card index for one thing.”
“Be more than fifty, Matt. Tell me a hundred.”
“Can we do it?”
“According to the phone call I got this afternoon from You-know-who, we’d better,” Kilmartin replied sardonically.
“I see. Let’s put men to yacht clubs and boat clubs, then, and boaters out of any harbours south from Sandymount,” said Minogue. “All the way to Bray. Anything stolen in the line of boats, people seen tampering with boats, boats going out after dark. Railway stations on the suburban system, in case he got on or got off on the south side. Leave a photo at every ticket office, for starters.”
Minogue heard his assumptions creak insistently as he widened the net which he knew was in untried waters. Who was to say that Fine hadn’t been shot anywhere in Dublin and then left on the beach or in the water after dark? So far they hadn’t met anyone who could tell them where Paul Fine might have been on Sunday after he’d left his flat. Minogue mentally underlined Mary McCutcheon’s name again.
He walked out into the yard and took in some of Dublin’s stale air. Kilmartin sauntered out after him.
“I called God Almighty and I got the Assistant Comm instead,” Kilmartin muttered. “Are you ready for thirty men tonight? Give them your mind after we set them up at a meeting tonight and then we’re off and running already.”
Minogue wanted to be away from Kilmartin, away from this swell of impossibility rising toward him. Fine’s friends-someone-must have been with him some time over the weekend. Kilmartin flicked his cigarette away and spat expertly.
“I don’t see myself as the one to bang the drum for this crowd tonight, then,” murmured Minogue. “Will you give them the run-down and I’ll sort out individual assignments with Shea Hoey?”
“Fair enough,” said Kilmartin brightly, chastening the surprised Minogue. “Do you have an idea where you’ll want to start?”
“Six men to go over cassettes and videos we found in the flat. I’ll earmark another six experienced interviewers for whoever Gallagher thinks is worthwhile off Fine’s index. Those are my main ones for now anyway… I don’t know if the Branch will insist on using their men for any suspects they pull out of their own files.”
Kilmartin nodded, looked to the sky and yawned long. Minogue thought he heard Kilmartin’s dentures click when they dislodged during the yawn. Age, he reflected dully.
“Here’s something I was thinking about just now,” said Minogue. “Do you think that whoever shot him knew that the bullets would go clean through?”
Kilmartin didn’t look away from the skyline.
“You’re the crafty boyo, aren’t you now? I know what you’re getting at.”
Minogue felt guilty stepping into the pub with Kilmartin. It was ten to eleven.
“That’s what I worked all these years to set up, Matt. Don’t be looking like a whipped pup. Hoey probably knows the ropes better than I do now, and Keating is no slouch either. Murtagh just looks stupid; he’s actually a sly bollocks with plenty of brains, just a bit lazy. Don’t be worrying about no skipper at the helm. No one is indispensable, they say.”
Kilmartin knew the barmen in Nolan’s. Minogue declined whiskey, settling for a pint of stout instead. Kilmartin had a Powers whiskey and a bottle of stout.
“Here’s to retirement. The golden years and all that,” Kilmartin toasted ambiguously. The stout was too heavy and too chilled for long gulps. “Let’s not be fretting about international gangsters. We’ll come up with some Provisionals link yet, wait’ll you see.”
Minogue thought about the work which was afoot already tonight. Gallagher had settled on the names of eleven students which he believed might help. One of the detectives had asked if they should Section 30 any students. Reluctantly, Minogue had assented, and told the detectives to throw the Offences Against the State Act at people on the list if they dragged their heels.
“I’m not happy sending them out to interview those students with nothing under their belts to poke at them with, no way to see if they’re being entirely truthful,” said Minogue reflectively.
“No other way around it, Matt,” Kilmartin countered decisively.
Was this what rank did, Minogue ruminated. Another pint of stout was slapped on the counter in front of him.
“Ah, Jimmy, I can’t.”
“You can’t leave it behind you, that’s a fact.”
He watched Kilmartin scoop the change from the fait accompli off the counter.
“Lookit, wait and see what turns up on these tapes. Maybe Fine had a diary on him and it was lost. Stolen? Maybe they took it, whoever did him in, don’t you see. No sign of a wallet or anything, am I right? So he may have had vital things on him when he was killed.”
Kilmartin was right to keep doors open, Minogue reflected. For himself, he needed a night’s sleep, to be away from this.
Minogue re-read the letter, posted nine days ago somewhere in New York City. At least the boy wasn’t writing from the bridal suite of some dive in Las Vegas. Kathleen buttered more bread. It was half-past seven. Minogue had managed to steal into bed without disturbing anyone last night. He awoke to the alarm, lying in the same place as he had when he first stretched out in the bed. He felt dull, bunched.
“Cathy with a C. I don’t know. I can’t tell from this letter, I’m hardly an expert,” Minogue tried.
“Your own son, mister. Don’t you see what he’s getting at?”
“I don’t, I suppose.”
“He’s interested in her, that’s what. To my way of thinking he’s not telling us the half of it. ‘Irish’, he says. As if that’s supposed to impress.”
Minogue believed that Kathleen was more nervous than angry.
“Everybody’s Irish over there, I suppose, if they want to be. You see he’s after meeting her family and everything,” she added.
Minogue folded the letter and placed it under his saucer. Hopefully the saucer might devour it.
“He’s testing us out. A fella can be very nervous when he meets a nice girl,” said Minogue. Listening to himself he heard the stupidity of the remark.
“Nervous, is it? He’s there in New York without a visa, working on the sly for some computer company and he’s nervous? What about his poor parents?”
“Cathy… same name as Kathleen basically. A very nice name that. He has the same good taste as his father. I was nervous when I met you,” Minogue tried to divert her.
“Pull the other one, it has bells.”
“We said we’d give him the fare, so that was that. The boy is enjoying himself a bit. He knows he can’t stay there forever.”
“That’s what I’m getting at,” Kathleen said. “Don’t you see? He may have it in the back of his head to marry this Cathy girl and stay there.”
Minogue returned to his egg. It looked up from the plate at him, begging not to be slashed. For a moment he remembered nearly emigrating to the States thirty years ago. Did genes act like that, wait and ambush the next generation?
“So will you drop him a line and make him see sense.”
Not the time to be asking her what ‘sense’ she meant, Minogue knew.
“I will.”
Iesult slouched into the kitchen in a dressing-gown.
“You’re only missing the curlers and a cigarette in your mitt,” welcomed Minogue.
Iesult stopped and sneered theatrically.
“When’s the wedding? I hope it’s one of those vulgar parties with everyone decked out in iijity clothes,” she fluted.