Kilmartin was lying in wait for him. Hoey rose from the desk and brought what looked like statement sheets with him, as the three policemen sat at Kilmartin’s table.
“Any one of these fellas jump out and say ‘me’ to you?” asked Mingoue.
Hoey shook his head. “One we didn’t find was a Syrian fella. The other Syrian knew him, though, said he was in England visiting his sister since last week,” said Hoey. He placed the statement sheets- photocopies, Minogue saw now-on the table and began sorting them.
“Let’s start with this one, Khatib. He’s Iranian.”
Minogue’s eyes ran beyond the Judge’s Rule, the caution given to the person making the statement. Hoey read his copy again.
“It’s clean, the whole thing. We got to see this Egan that he mentions and Egan confirmed that Khatib and another student were up on some mountain in Kerry over the weekend with him. Clean living. Why can’t they go drinking like everybody else, I ask myself. Khatib never heard of Fine. Didn’t know of any murder.”
“Now, this one here, Ali. He has a Jordanian passport but Gallagher says he is or was Palestinian. We had to put him on a Section 30 to shut him up. He’s a hot lad entirely.”
Hoey did not read this one. Minogue looked up from the half-page statement once to see Hoey’s lack of interest.
“Ali more or less dared the detective-who is it? O’Reilly from Store Street-to charge him. ‘What possible offences could I have committed against the Irish State?’ sort of thing. Knows his law,” said Hoey.
“Resist at all?” asked Kilmartin.
“No sir. If he had shut up he would have been home in bed by eleven o’clock instead of walking home at half-two in the morning. He’s a member of the Irish-Arab society, quite legit. More of an intellectual than anything else. He has a tongue like a rasp on him. He knew a lot about Irish politics, if that’s any consolation. Never heard of or knew anyone called Fine. He spent Sunday afternoon studying in his flat and he gave two names to corroborate.”
Hoey turned to the next statement. Minogue knew that they had nothing to help the investigation along, with these three students. They read through the remainder slowly. Keating sat at the table quietly without announcing himself.
“Did you put in a ‘want’ to police where this Ebrahim fella is supposed to be visiting, in Nottingham?” Minogue asked.
“Yes sir. There was a reply on the telex this morning. He is there, and his sister is married and living there too.”
Gallagher’s lists, Minogue thought: have to go back to them and widen the net.
“Only one admitted to knowing about the murder. None said anything to suggest that they knew Fine at all or knew that he was a Jew,” Hoey went on. “None professed to know of any organization called the League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People. One of them, the Mahoud fella three statements back, said he’d like to hear more about them. Smart-arse. Later on, as you’ll see if you read the end of his statement again, he says that if anyone’d know of such a group, he would.”
“Bit of a braggart, is he?”
Hoey shrugged and looked around the table as if to invite optimism.
Kilmartin coughed. “If we’re going to follow along with this line,” he began slowly, “I see two possibilities.”
He paused to light his cigarette.
“The outfit we want is a splinter, maybe a whole new group. It’s baptism of fire, if you like.”
“Like a declaration to take them seriously?” said Keating.
“Yes. I can’t see IRA involvement here at all, beyond maybe renting out some guns to this group. These people are likely young and have some contact with groups who have guns. A new crowd arriving here doesn’t have that contact, but a splinter group would. As for the IRA, they wouldn’t have anything to do with killing a Jew. Pardon me putting it like that. If they wanted to take a swipe at the judiciary here, they wouldn’t have picked Fine’s son. And if they did, they would admit doing it, am I right?”
Minogue nodded.
“So you have educated or semi-educated people with heads full of theories about how the Irish are in the same boat as the Palestinians maybe,” Kilmartin went on. “Fringe people, maybe did a bit of university, enough to get themselves confused.”
“Where ignorance is bliss…” murmured Hoey.
“Now you have it. Learned just enough to stay stupid. Definitely not for the man in the street. He doesn’t give much of a shite what’s going on in the Middle East-until some of the UN troops start getting shot. The IRA will take the guns and talk about the Palestinian cause but bejases…” Kilmartin concluded with a scornful pull at the cigarette.
“Gallagher says that the IRA wouldn’t touch Muslim fanatics with a ten-foot pole, sir,” said Keating. “On account of how the Ayatollah and his mob hate anything to do with socialism.”
“Oh, does he now?” said Kilmartin.
“But there might be another kink in this, sir-if you’ll pardon me saying so,” rejoined Keating. “Remember that Fine used to be enough of a Leftie for the Branch to have a file on him. Could we be talking about some class of a falling-out here?”
“We need to know where he was killed,” Minogue interrupted. “I think we’re jumping the gun here. What was the other possibility you thought of?” he asked Kilmartin.
“Just that it might be a group we know who did the murder-except that they don’t want to get a bad name on the head of it.”
The policemen fell silent.
“The timing of the call to the paper,” said Minogue. “That’s something I’m having trouble with.”
“We up and left for Killiney after the call came through from Dalkey Station,” Hoey joined in. “While ye were on the train out, that’s when the call came into the Press.”
“Ten twenty-nine,” said the exacting Keating.
“And that was only twenty minutes or so after the body was first sighted and reported to Dalkey Station. That’s odd. Why call then to claim responsibility?”
“Maybe they were going to call that time anyway,” suggested Keating. “We can’t be sure right now that it wasn’t coincidence.”
“The world treats persons who rely on coincidences rather harshly,” said Minogue. “I think they knew that Fine was to be found shortly or had just been found.”
“Couldn’t have anything to do with the oul‘ lad who saw him though,” said Kilmartin. “Seventy-odd years of age. He’s nothing to us at all, at all.”
“Yes, but why call if there’s no body? I mean, if they dumped Paul Fine in the sea so as he might float off and not be found… They must have known that the body would be found. Leave the motive for killing him in the first place: what does it say about the planning that went into the killing? They attempted to make the body disappear, to all intents and purposes. So why would they want to call and claim responsibility for a murder, when they didn’t want the body found?”
“Unless they saw, or knew about, the oul‘ fella finding him Monday morning,” said Kilmartin. He was beginning to enjoy himself, Minogue realized, speculating out loud, prodding discussion. Maybe Jimmy Kilmartin had longed to play second fiddle for a long time so that he could throw ideas around and not have to feel silly if they came to nothing? Or was there a little malice in it, seeing how much Minogue could stay on top of an investigation which looked like it could become an intractable mess?
“Or it means that the body wasn’t dumped that far away from where it was found,” said Keating vaguely. “It could have been pushed in from Killiney beach itself, and the tide didn’t do the job they hoped it would.”
“There’d have been people on that beach until dark,” said Hoey. “They’d have seen any body floating even fifty feet offshore.”
“But the point is,” Minogue tried to recover his thread, “if they had planned this killing and they really wanted to have the body disappear, they could have arranged that. So, the timing of this killing was not of their choosing, I think. It may be that there was no elaborate plan to kill Paul Fine at all.”
The policemen took turns scrutinizing the walls.
“What word from Pat Gallagher on the Ports of Entry lists?” Minogue tried.
“Em, nothing yet,” said Hoey quietly.
“Where’s this Mary McCutcheon one?” asked Kilmartin. “Someone has to know what Fine was at over the weekend.”
“She’s up in Sligo doing a story, sir,” said Hoey. “She’s to come down to Dublin on the train this morning first thing. She only heard about it last night herself. She’s a reporter for the Irish Times.”
“Is she his girlfriend or intended or what?” asked Kilmartin.
Hoey shrugged. “Paul Fine’s Da knew of her but never met her. Mickey Fitzgerald says that she was more or less Paul’s girlfriend. Ten ten, the train schedule says, in Kingsbridge.”
“She’s not a Jew, though,” Kilmartin observed. No one answered him.
“Nobody else know where he was over the weekend? Downey or Fitzgerald out in RTE? This man had no friends, is it?” complained Kilmartin.
“Still looking, sir. He seems to have kept to himself since he came back from London,” said Hoey.
“All right. We’re taking a radio car up to Kingsbridge, meet this Mary McCutcheon. The first thing you hear off anyone at the beach today, contact us. And get a hold of Sergeant Gallagher: try and get him over here by half-eleven, we’ll meet him here. Tell him we’ll be wanting to go through the universities today. Get every name off C3 lists for Republicans and Lefties with any connection-even rumoured- to Arabs or Muslims or Palestinians. Cross-check against students and radicals, look for any match-ups. Even for travels to any part of the Middle East. See if there are any gunmen after being released from Portlaoise prison this last while, any fellas that ever did freelance stuff.”
Minogue paused. “Do we have the manpower this morning, at the beaches and the coastal points?”
“Yes, we do,” Keating answered.
“So how does it feel to be in charge of a hundred Gardai? Didn’t I tell you that Hoey and Keating can do the brunt of it? How will they ever learn if they don’t get to do the real McCoy?”
“Right, Jimmy.”
Kilmartin slammed the door while Minogue extricated himself from behind the wheel. Minogue would not tell Kilmartin that it was he, not Kilmartin or Hoey or Keating, who had to answer finally to Justice Fine and a jittery Commissioner.
The Sligo train was not in yet but it was suggested that it was running on time. Kingsbridge Station would have been a jewel of a building had it been kept up on the inside over the last fifty years. Its Victorian mass had recently drawn film-makers to use parts of it, Minogue remembered. The station lay next to the Liffey within sight of the Phoenix Park. It was not near enough to the city centre for travellers’ comfort, neither was it sure of itself in any age which did not make much of the ceremony of train travel. The quays next to the station were suffused with the sulphurous stink of the Liffey, long an open sewer, and the tangy hop smell of the Guinness brewery. Minogue, climbing out of his sleep even yet, did not welcome the characteristic Dublin stink.
“Are we going to hold a sign up with her name on it, like at the airport?” asked Kilmartin. The noticeboard clicked overhead.
“Is that the Sligo job on the way in?” Kilmartin asked a passing porter.
“Sligo and Donegal,” the porter drawled, content that he was addressing a policeman from the provinces-a culchie-who might not yet know that no trains went to Donegal.
Mary McCutcheon walked straight to the two policemen.
“Are we that obvious?” Kilmartin asked astringently.
“I’m a reporter,” she answered. Minogue introduced himself and Kilmartin, skipping the ranks. She looked like she hadn’t slept and didn’t care that she hadn’t. She smoked, inhaling the smoke deeply as though to still her darting eyes. There was something mannish about her, Minogue believed. Stayed up late, no stranger to a gin and tonic? She wore cord jeans and a blouse which looked like a shirt.
Mary McCutcheon hoisted her bag better on her shoulder and walked between the two men. “It hasn’t sunk in with me yet,” she said to neither of them. “That much I’m sure of.”
Her eyes were yellowed but still intense, with dark-bluish marks under them. Middle thirties, Minogue guessed, glancing at her again. Runs herself hard.
“Thanks for coming down so quickly,” Minogue said. “Will you tell us where you last saw Paul?”
“Last week. Wednesday. We met in Gaffney’s pub about eight.”
“Was it a date, like?”
She smiled grimly up at Kilmartin. “To anyone else it might have been. We’re old friends, put it like that. We work in the same business, more or less.”
It took considerable probing from Minogue to get by Mary McCutcheon’s edges. She seemed to lose her caution when Minogue told her that yes, Paul Fine had been shot to death. She shook herself abruptly once more after that news, when Minogue mentioned who had claimed responsibility in the call to the Press. “I heard that,” she murmured, stabbing her cigarette at the ashtray: they were in the buffet now. “Who or what the hell are they? My first reaction is not to believe it,” she said.
After a challenging look to both men she lapsed into an account of herself and Paul Fine. She was separated from her husband, who still lived in London, just like Paul’s ex-wife Lily.
“We met over there, two peas just out of our pods. There was a crowd used to go to the navvies’ pubs where we could expect to find Irish people. He was trying to sort out what he wanted and I was trying to forget my fella. Hilarious, you’re thinking. What was funny was that we both admitted that we missed Dublin terribly, more than we ever expected. You’ve seen what the city has turned into here: the back-biting and the knocking and the booze and the poverty… all that. This damn town is rotten with journalists and only a few are worth not slamming the door on. Sounds pretty flimsy, doesn’t it? Like a bad cliche-‘You don’t miss the place until you leave it.’ I don’t know.”
She looked around the buffet as if targeting something to comment on.
“Neither of us really knew what it was that dragged us back to this place. I took a drop in pay for the privilege of living here and getting taxed to hell and back again. That’s what seemed funny to us then. We didn’t believe in that emigrant nostalgia shit, but it happened. Dublin. He was Dublin for generations, a Dublin Jew. Me, I’m Wicklow about fifteen years back. Paul had been to Israel and the States.”
Minogue remembered the picture of Paul Fine standing with his parents in front of a pile of stones in some sunny, dusty place.
“He said he’d like to try Canada. A lot of his friends from school went there. But he admitted that even there he’d probably still want out. Back to Dublin.”
“So you kept in touch with him when you came back here?” asked Minogue.
“Yup. Let’s get down to basics here now. For a while we thought there might be something for us. Together, I mean. For starters, I’m a shiksa.”
“A what?”
“A Gentile. A non-Jewish woman. A non-starter for marriage prospects. Well it didn’t work out, as you probably can guess. Paul was on the rebound from Lily. He was very hurt, very guilty. Lily is a tough piece of work. Tough but fair. He always said she was right to stick with her career, that he had agreed to try London, that her job was more important. No, it didn’t take with us and we knew it wouldn’t. We took the unusual step of staying friends. I actually got even more… fond of him. Me and my mother stuff. I wanted to help him, I think. That was two years ago.”
Did she know anything about Paul’s work in RTE, Minogue asked. Very little. He liked RTE but said that some of the other people there were hatchet-men. Meaning? Too keen for any story, ones with dirt, vendettas with the church and politicians. She didn’t mind that one bit, she said: it was about time. Had he mentioned what stories he was working on recently? No. What did he do at weekends? Another few seconds’ scrutiny of Minogue this time. Visited his parents sometimes, met her for dinner if she was in town. A film, a concert. Sometimes went away for a weekend to bed and breakfast it in Galway or Mayo. He liked the west.
“Didn’t he have school-friends or pals he went to university with? Wouldn’t they stick together socially?” Kilmartin risked.
“ ‘They?’ ” she asked acidly. “You mean Jews?”
Kilmartin blinked. Minogue heard his feet moving under the table.
“Paul Fine was a Dubliner. That’s not to lay claim to anything glamorous, I know, but maybe that was part of what I saw in him, my mothery business. The difference between him and my hus-my ex-husband-was that my ex expected me to mother him when he wanted it. Paul didn’t. If I don’t bowl men over and intimidate them, I seem to mother them to death. Paul didn’t fit so well. I think he slipped through the cracks here and there. Some people might call that backing away, but I wouldn’t. He wanted to escape a few things, not in a cowardly way though… I know he didn’t attend synagogue. His friends? I don’t know. They moved away. I’m talking about educated people, doctors and accountants and dentists and engineers. To the States and Canada, London. Paul stayed. That’s all. I suppose it was stubbornness and being one of the oldest Jewish families in Ireland. I’m sure that counted for something.”
Kilmartin asked about Paul’s Left-wing aspirations. Her face showed she was mastering the temptation to cut at Kilmartin again.
“It was an intellectual commitment. He was caught in a lot of ways. For example, he could agree intellectually about Begin and the Right wing in Israel being racists themselves. But you felt that if you pressed him, he’d want to say or feel something else. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“I think I do,” Minogue said.
“Maybe it was being Dublin more than, or as much as, being a Jew too. Ideologues don’t do very well in this city. There’s that saving grace of scepticism, isn’t there?” she said morosely. “So Left wing and Right wing is diluted here, maybe even dissolved. The tribal stuff predates it, the territorial bit too.”
She seemed to gather herself in a frown of concentration. “What I mean is that nobody that I remember pressed him or took him on as regards his opinions. You can tell your Special Branch pals that Paul was very uncomfortable with extremists.”
She glared at Minogue. Her anger fell away across her face then, as speculation and remembrance took over.
“One doesn’t argue the toss with an Irish Jew, you see,” she said resignedly. “And I think he knew that people would never bite him for his opinions the way we bite one another here. Yes, it is a ‘we’ and a ‘they’, isn’t it?”
“Strangers in a strange land,” Minogue murmured. He didn’t care that Kilmartin would take umbrage at his fraternizing with the enemy she had proved she was with her sarcastic remarks.
Mary McCutcheon blinked. Ash fell from her cigarette. “He used to say that too. As a sort of a joke. Where did you hear it?”
“I heard his father use the expression the other day,” replied Minogue. No one spoke then. Minogue mustered some energy to draw himself out of the swell of pity he felt approaching.
“Tell us, Mary, if you can, any conversations you had with Paul about the Middle East or Arabs. Any connections he drew between the Middle East and Ireland, say. Did he know any Arabs or the like here?”
Mary McCutcheon did nothing to ease Minogue’s discomfort at the vagueness of his fishing expedition. She smiled, as though disbelieving the claims of a suitor.
“Right now I can remember nothing. Nothing,” she replied slowly.
Kilmartin mimicked speaking slowly into a microphone and left to check in with Hoey on the radio.
“ I’d go for a dose of tea,” Minogue said. “How about yourself then?”
Her gaze told him that she had slipped into another domain, behind a curtain which the steady vein of cigarette smoke seemed to mark. She chewed distractedly on her thumbnail, the cigarette but inches away in the clasped hands she was now holding to her mouth.
Kilmartin was back before Minogue had settled down to the pot of tea. He motioned Minogue away from the table.
“Leave the tea and cakes routine now. They’re after turning up something in Killiney,” said Kilmartin.
“On the beach, is it?”
“No, up the hill in the park. An oul‘ wan phoned in this morning and said she heard something there on Sunday evening. You know Killiney Hill, the park and everything, don’t you?”
Minogue did. Hundreds of acres of park, woods and bushes stretched from Dalkey Hill across to Killiney Hill and then down into the village of Killiney. Parts of the park were precipitous and densely wooded, almost alpine. Minogue remembered tripping over courting couples in glades when he had strolled on the Hill previously.
“A bit wild, yes,” he said.
Minogue drove through the older part of the city, the Liberties, and joined the traffic swirling around Stephen’s Green. He dropped Mary McCutcheon at the top of Grafton Street.
“Can we reach you at work if you’re not at the other number?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she replied listlessly.
Her face was showing that blankness which Minogue recognized as the first tentative and dull comprehension that someone she knew and was close to was dead. He did not like leaving her on the street corner with the crowds of shoppers with their busyness and smiles to hammer home her shock.
“It’s all right. I’m going to the office now,” she rebuffed his stillborn words.
As neither Minogue nor Kilmartin had a handset, they became lost in Killiney Hill Park. Minogue strayed from the path and was rewarded by the sight of a uniformed Garda standing against a tree having a clandestine smoke. The Garda directed them to a small clearing. Keating and Boylan, from the Technical Bureau, were standing to the edge of the clearing. A man wearing white cotton gloves was squatting under brambles to one side.
“There’s a sample gone already, sir,” said Keating.
“Was there a lot of blood?” Kilmartin asked.
“A goodly amount soaked in here,” Boylan said. “There are signs that someone dug into the ground here looking for something. It wasn’t any animal either, it was someone looking for a particular thing.” Boylan pointed to the dark maroon patches which showed under the brambles. “A penknife or a stick or something, see?”
Kilmartin tiptoed a few steps in. The forensic expert obliged with a long white-gloved finger. He reminded Minogue of a magician or a Parisian waiter.
“Looking for the bullets, hah?” Kilmartin whispered close to Minogue’s ear.
“He must be an expert, then. He checked to see if they went through and then scuffled around to get them back,” said Keating.
“It’s unlikely that the shot in the head was done with Fine being obliging enough to lie down. So the killer wouldn’t be so damn perfect about that first one. Sure enough, if Fine got the other two after falling dead already, the killer could look in the clay for those two bullets easy enough… cool, calculating bastard,” Kilmartin murmured.
Minogue looked around the glade. It was easily fifty paces from the nearest path. A silencer would have done it handily. What the hell had Fine been doing here? Sitting reading a book? Had he come in here with the murderer, an acquaintance?
“All these bits of bushes and leaves and things here, signs that the killer tried to cover him up. Fine was shot here, fell there.” Boylan’s arm swept down slowly, finally. “Got two here in the neck. He was rolled here in under the bushes and hidden. Someone dug out the two slugs then, I’d say.”
“This is where he was shot,” Minogue repeated.
“No signs he was dragged in here, sir. He walked in.”
Minogue thought for several moments. “A detector here… on the way?”
“There is,” Boylan answered. “The third slug might be around.”
Minogue was irritated by the ‘slug’, less because it belonged on American television than because it sounded crude and blunt.
“How’d he get Fine down on to the beach, then?” asked Kilmartin. “We’re talking about a ‘they’ now, aren’t we?”
“More to the point,” Keating said, unconscious of any impertinence, “why?”
Kilmartin turned to the voices coming in from the path: four forensics, two of them carrying fat briefcases, the others lugging stakes and plastic shelters. One of the latter two unloaded nylon cord and orange stakes from a plastic bag.
“What time was this oul‘ wan out with the dog?” asked Kilmartin.
“Half-five, sir. Just before her tea. She said it sounded like someone slapping something off a tree trunk; like a whip, she said, or a piece of rope against the bark,” Keating replied.
That’d be a silencer for sure, Minogue pondered. A hollow crack, a thud.
“She doesn’t remember how many she heard exactly. Two or three, with a few seconds between one and then the other or others.”A few. “ She thought it was youngsters farting about in the woods. Her dog barked and ran into the bushes, barked and barked, and she had to call it back several times. She put the lead on him and went off home and thought no more about it.”
Close to eighteen hours before the discovery of Fine’s body, Minogue thought.
“Planned?” Kilmartin squinted at him.
“There’s the question, all right. I don’t rightly know.”
“A hell of a difference between being planned and being systematic,” Kilmartin growled. Minogue liked to believe then that what he heard in Kilmartin’s voice was disgust at how Paul Fine had been murdered.
“The elements of clumsiness and a definite hint of expertise as well… I don’t understand it. On the one hand he had the neck to hang around and recover the bullets. He may even have picked high-velocity bullets so he could get them after. How did he get his hands on a handgun and a silencer, not to speak of the ammunition? I don’t like the cut of this stuff: I keep on having these visions of diplomatic bags. Not in our league at all, at all. Something else, too, that I don’t much understand is, why the effort to recover the bullets unless he believed we had a chance to trace the weapon from the bullets?”
“Maybe he plans to hold on to the gun, or has to give it back to whoever he got it from, clean as he can,” Kilmartin suggested.
“We don’t even know if it was an automatic,” murmured Minogue.
“I’ll tell you this: if he was such a cowboy as to stay and get his bullets back, you can be damn sure he picked up any casings if it was an automatic. We can’t afford to say no to that,” warned Kilmartin.
“I know. But identifying the gun loomed big enough in the killer’s mind for him to stay around and tidy up for fear…”
“Get up the yard, Matt. We never get a ballistic match on a third of the firearms we recover for commission-of-crime weapons. If it was the Provos renting out guns to a freelance, they’d move the gun around afterwards. We’d never get to look at it, you can bet your bottom dollar,” said Kilmartin, interrupting Minogue’s speculation.
Kilmartin held his palm out and looked up at the greyed sky. Minogue saw a leaf shiver as a raindrop landed on it.
“For the love of Jases! Lads, lads,” Kilmartin turned to the men in the clearing. “It’ll be pissing now in a minute, can ye get a bit of shelter up quick?”
The detective wielding the cord nodded.
The rain hit Minogue and Kilmartin full before they were half-way back to the car. They shuffled under a chestnut tree. Minogue noting the brown edges on the leaves. Already, and it only the middle of September? The rain whispered through the undergrowth, creeping around the two men. A sparrow flitted by with a hoarse twitter.
“Whatever Fine was doing here, it must have taken a couple of people to carry him down to the beach. That has to be a quarter of a mile,” said Kilmartin.
“Clumsy, you’re saying,” Minogue suggested vacantly. The rain pleased him, that he should be marooned under a tree.
“Someone with enough nerve and training and motive to shoot Fine. He shoots Fine and then the panic sets in. It happens to anyone, no matter how expert, I can tell you. He tries to cover up the body. He’s in a hurry to get out of there. Off he runs. But later on he says to himself that maybe he should move the-”
“Or someone else says to him that the body can’t be left there,” said Kilmartin.
“Fair enough. It might even be a different fella or group who moves the body. I can take on the idea of a conspiracy then. But why can’t the body be left up on the Hill?”
“Too easy to find?”
“Maybe so, but-”
“People are always walking their dogs up there or taking their moths up there for a bit of you-know-what,” said Kilmartin.
“The oul‘ wan on Sunday evening didn’t have the nerve to go into the bushes after the dog,” Kilmartin continued.
“But why would the killer care if the body was found up there?” Minogue tried again.
“Jases, I don’t know. Yet, I mean. Maybe he didn’t want Fine found at all. So he goes back after dark and drags him down to where they can sling him into the water and hope the tide carries him out. High tide was eleven o’clock Sunday night, so the tide was on the way out at midnight until two o’clock in the morning. Maybe he knew that.”
“‘They’, ‘he’. I’d like to settle on one or the other. Try this one.” Minogue looked up toward the flickering leaves overhead. “He or they decided that Paul Fine mustn’t be found up there because he’d have been seen by other people up on the Hill before he was killed. Say he’s up walking around the park, he was to meet someone. Naturally we’d be appealing for any possible witnesses who were also up on the Hill taking the air that afternoon. What if he was with someone else, a someone who lured him into that spot where he was shot? Say the person he was with who did the killing?”
“Go on, so,” Kilmartin muttered.
“It fits so far, doesn’t it? The killer could have been close to Paul, so it could have been someone he knew or trusted. Now the killer doesn’t want us to find a Sean Citizen who can tell us he saw Paul Fine walking around with someone who looks like X. But if Sean Citizen sees us on the telly asking for anyone who might have seen Paul Fine whose body was washed up on the beach, he’d say to himself that he was up on the Hill, not on the beach, so what would he know?”
“They don’t want us knowing who Fine was with, the someone who might have killed him?”
“Or helped to kill him, Jimmy. The trouble is the intent, clear intent. Leave aside the motivation for a minute. The killer brought a gun, a handgun, and not to pick daisies with it. He or his cronies intended to kill Paul Fine. But he hadn’t planned on how to dispose of the body. So it was incomplete, the planning. That’s what bothers me. It was inopportune for them, time and place. Something must have happened to make the killing necessary.”
“What if the murderer is a real expert entirely? He could have been waiting his chance a long time and just picked Killiney Hill,” Kilmartin protested.
The rain was easing. Minogue realized that he had no answer to Kilmartin’s alternative. He could not now distinguish between raindrops and rain-water draining from the leaves overhead.
“You could say that the killer didn’t get the opportunity he was hoping for: the right time and the right place. So he up and did it there, thinking he wouldn’t get his chance again,” Kilmartin said.
“You think Fine was followed, stalked?”
“Now lookit, Matt,” Kilmartin said as he squinted up through the branches. “If it was some crackpot politico, he must have followed Fine around the place.”
“Why follow him all the way out to Killiney on a Sunday afternoon to kill him? Why not shoot him one night when he’s coming home to his flat?”
Kilmartin affected to whistle. “OK, Matt,” he said then. “Let’s take the shagging bull by the horns. Fine may have been killed by someone he met out here, or someone he came out here with. He sets up a meeting with one of these Arab fellas to chat him up for a story he’s going to do for the radio. Maybe it all starts up nice and gentlemanly, but the Libyan or the Palestinian or whatever trick-of-the-loop he is pulls out a shooter and kills Fine. For poking his nose into this business.”
“We’re assuming that Paul Fine found out, or could have found out, that there really is something going on between the Libyans and the IRA, aren’t we? C3 and the Branch don’t think there’s anything to that,” argued Minogue.
Minogue’s reluctance pushed Kilmartin to snappishness. “Don’t be giving me that whipped-pup look, Matt. I’m only throwing ideas around, the same as you do yourself. Keeping our options open, man dear.”
So Kilmartin was gaining some hidden satisfaction from having him head the investigation, Minogue realized. “I’m only doing to you what you did to me with all your notions,” Kilmartin might yet say. “Now how do you like being in charge?” would surely follow quickly on that remark too.
“Listen,” Kilmartin said in a milder tone. “Listen, listen, the cat’s pissin‘. Where, where, under the chair… What I’m saying still fits because people walking around the park would remember seeing an Arab lad. He’d stand out, complexion-wise, can’t you see? If Fine came out to meet the Arab here and it was the Arab that killed him, then he’d be terrible keen to get the body away to hell from where a witness might place the Arab with poor Fine.”
Minogue nodded, hoping to give Kilmartin the impression of a sage considering worthy comment. The air was cooler after the rain and the ground was yielding up rich scents from the undergrowth. They walked quickly back to the park gate.
Minogue saw the rain out over the sea now, a grey curtain moving off beyond Killiney Bay.
Kilmartin phoned the Squad office. Eilis gave a little whinny of amusement when he announced himself.
“There’s telepathy for you now,” she murmured. Kilmartin heard her shuffle papers. “Wait a minute,” she added. “Right,” she said then and spoke as though recording private thoughts from a diary. She told Kilmartin that Gardai had found remains in the back seat of a burned-out car outside the town of Bray. Bray was eight miles south of where Kilmartin now stood.
“Shite,” said Kilmartin.
“Pardon?” Eilis asked archly.
“When?” Kilmartin grunted.
“The car was set on fire yesterday evening. The brigade took their time. It’s a dump kind of place. Vandals, they thought. They towed it away after the fire, not knowing, and left it in the yard by the station. Someone had a good look in this morning and decided it was a body, not a bit of the back seat down on the floor of the car.”
“Do they know who it is, at all?”
“No they don’t. The car was an inferno entirely when the brigade arrived.”
“God never closes one door except he slams another,” Kilmartin grumbled and turned to Minogue. Minogue was studying the patterns of the clouds as they swept over Killiney Hill. “Here, you. You’ll have to do without the benefit of my companionship on the Fine case for the moment at least,” he declared to Minogue. “Bad luck comes in pairs.”
“Tell them I’ll go myself for starters, Eilis,” Kilmartin said finally. “Give me some directions. It’ll take me a half an hour from here, I’d say.”
Minogue drove Kilmartin down to Killiney Station. “You can arrive in style on the train again,” he said.
“That’ll impress them no end,” Kilmartin said grimly. “Do you know what I’m going to tell you? Bray is one town I hate the sight of. A town full of knackers and hurdy-gurdy men. Chancers. I’ll beg a lift back later on in the day.”
Kilmartin left a curse on Bray and its inhabitants dangling in the air as he entered the ticket office.