Daithi Minogue’s letter almost cost the State purse dearly in Merrion Road, where Minogue came within inches of hitting the car ahead. He had been practising phrases for putting in his letter to Daithi. None satisfied him. ‘ It’s not for me to…’ ‘Your mother and I would like to think that…’ ‘Although it may not seem quite apparent to you now…’
The brake lights on the bus were grimy and Minogue’s tyres howled to within six inches of them. Three youngsters turned around in the back seat and laughed at him. He thought of urging Daithi to take time to think things over. Maybe, Kathleen had suggested, he should send clippings from the papers to show that there were plenty of engineering jobs available here in Ireland. Daithi might repeat his protest that there was no point to working here because the income tax got you in the neck.
But there are good jobs, Daithi… Bribery of sorts. The boy didn’t want to be here.
How odd, bitterly amusing nearly, to hear a boy of Daithi’s age complain about the state of the country. Was he using that as a way to criticize his own family? Minogue began to believe that he should have headed off this problem years ago when he had first noticed the challenge from Daithi. He should have tried to stand up for Ireland then. It had to be more than that, though: the boy wanted attention from him, answers. Did Daithi like his parents too much to be able to get angry with them?
Attention, answers, someone to defend the island. Minogue couldn’t do that and not feel foolish. It might have been better to have been stricter with him, to have had prescriptions and advice, to have been the paterfamilias more. How had Minogue come adrift from the role which other men his age found so satisfying and so natural and so damned easy? Little to offer Daithi now, beyond some assurance that he could not put in words. The Oedipus stuff is rubbish, he thought. Were parents supposed to resist their children so much? It wouldn’t be any help to tell Daithi to trust his own experience. The boy was but twenty-three now. Did he want to be summoned, scolded perhaps, worried over? These were signs of love apparently. These were things parents were supposed to do?
Detective Garda Seamus Hoey was indeed as capable as Kilmartin had told Minogue-even more capable than Kilmartin thought. Kilmartin used him as a feather in his cap (how shrewd Jimmy Kilmartin was to have held on to Hoey when he had arrived as a trainee) but Shea Hoey knew to fit Kilmartin’s measures. He gave every sign of being calmly diligent. At home, in his bachelor life in the flat he had in Sandymount, Minogue could guess at a Hoey who might even play a piano for pleasure, who should marry and make someone happy.
Minogue’s gaze fled to Eilis when Hoey looked over, aware that Minogue had been looking at him. Kilmartin had that knack of spotting talents, all right. Eilis was permitted to be offhand. Her cool but unaffected Garboisms hid the fact that she was brainy, not merely distant. Eilis’ eccentricities were part of the price which intelligence paid in a world gone mad with convention and system, Minogue believed. Her job was to conduct the symphony of inquiries, meetings and reports which formed the day-to-day business of the Investigation Section.
When the mandarins in the Department of Justice decided that the Investigation Section should also deal with other serious crime, Kilmartin had stood his ground. Why not a proper paid-up Emergency Response Unit system? A Special Task Force with regular armed teams on patrol in Dublin? More resources to the Hold Up Squad? With conniving, alliances and bull-headed shrewdness, Kilmartin had helped effect all these. There was little that Kilmartin would not do to follow his passion to keep what had been called the Murder Squad together as a separate unit, if not in name then in function.
Nonetheless, Jimmy Kilmartin was not unaware of Chief Supers and Assistant Commissioners grumbling that their respective divisions should shortly have enough trained personnel for murder investigations and that they’d be needing Dublin-based expertise infrequently. This was so because Gardai circulated through the Investigation Section as trainees, learning the trade and returning to their divisions. Kilmartin had been canny enough to spot trainee talent and thus promptly appropriate detectives like Seamus Hoey, a brawny and sometimes moody Galwegian who had been stationed in Athlone, the most boring town in Ireland. Hoey soaked up information like a sponge and listened to everything. Kilmartin and Minogue had learned to be alert when Hoey began his sentences with the roundabout bashfulness of: “Well, you may think this is a bit odd of me to be bringing this up here and now but…”
Detective Garda Keating was more obviously methodical and he liked to bear the cross of filtering through enormous amounts of data. Keating was so enamoured of the new age that he had bought an expensive computer for his own use and had taught himself many things in his spare time at home. He had unwisely mentioned his purchase to Eilis in one of their almost sibling squabbles. Keating, a bachelor younger and less understanding than Hoey, had some vague notion that Eilis was to be fenced with because she was unmarried and not unattractive.
“A computer, is it,” Minogue remembered Eilis saying. “Can’t you go out and throw yourself at girls and disport yourself like a normal buck and not be sitting at one of those things getting a humpy back and a low sperm count with the radiation?”
Keating liked to be given impossible tasks with large amounts of information to immerse himself in: Photofit and Identikit features, car registration plates, clothing manufacturers’ weaves of synthetic materials, bank account transactions from ten years ago-all brought a frown to his features until he was actually in the search and enjoying the impossibility of his task away from superiors who expected him to admit it would be easy for him.
Minogue saw that Hoey had not shaved, and he guessed that he had kipped down for part of the night on a couch in the First Aid room on the ground floor. Hoey had his feet up and was smoking. If this was co-ordinating a task force of policemen, Minogue wanted to be thus trained.
“Well, Shea. You heard there may be another out in Bray?”
“Yep. The Killer phoned a minute ago to say it’s 90 per cent sure it’s a murder. The fire was started with petrol sprinkled inside the car, he thinks. Or the firemen in Bray think so.”
The Killer was Kilmartin. Minogue had heard that his own nickname, very infrequently applied because it had never caught, was Moonie.
“Have we anything from the men posted at the beaches?”
“No. There was one oul‘ lad complaining about teenagers interfering with one another and drinking Johnny-jump-up on the beach all summer. Nothing at all off Killiney beach proper. I’ve heard nothing from Killiney Hill Park, the site, either. They hit a few bits of metal with the detector but all they have is hairpins and bits of things. How do you like that for news?”
“And Paul Fine’s tapes?”
Hoey picked up a page with a handwritten list inscribed on it. He handed it to Minogue.
“Keating has three fellas now doing the videos and the cassettes again. He’s out in Fine’s flat himself, fighting off pots of tea from her nibs, Miss Connolly. I think maybe we were fibbing about him looking like Charlton Heston in the Moses film. Maybe she expected him to arrive out in one of those short little skirts the men used to wear then. I’m going by the pictures from the Catechism, do you remember?”
“Will I ever forget?” Minogue murmured the stock answer as he looked down the list. Interviews with politicians about the upcoming Ard Fheis, the party-in-government’s convention. There was almost one hour with members of the Irish-Arab Society. There were no interviews with Arab students. A ten-minute telephone interview with a David Thornbury, chairman of Middle Eastern Studies at Sussex University. Scatty interviews, taken on the hoof apparently, with bus drivers and conductors in Dublin about what they thought of the forthcoming strike. A half-hour with a self-help group of former psychiatric patients in Limerick. That’d be what Fitzgerald called his fairy stories, the good news.
“Thirteen hours in total. There’re no interviews with any of those Arab lads Gallagher was interested in after he saw Fine’s index. It looks like they were on the level about not knowing Fine. He must have been just starting out, getting names like we keep on being told. Still and all, he must have done some research or reading up on his topics, though, because… remember the newspaper references on his index of topics and stories?”
Minogue nodded.
“He must have made notes. Keating might find ‘em out in the flat. Or Murtagh, in his desk over in RTE…”
“Did we have any call-ins from the radio and telly appeal last night?”
“Let me see. I think there were three or four only last night and… upwards of ten so far today. We’ve followed up on seven of them altogether. There was a fella worked the ticket office in the train station out in Dalkey on Sunday. He thinks it might have been Fine that came through the turnstile, he says, but he’s not so sure. He saw the photos that were dropped off at all the stations. It was his missus that phoned us up; he didn’t think it was worth bothering about because he was dithering. The rest are people to do with places along the coast. Walking on the beach on Sunday evening, some of them. Fella in Bulloch harbour saw a boat going out late that night. Nothing yet.”
“So we still can’t place Paul Fine after he left his flat Sunday morning,” Minogue said gloomily.
“Not yet, sir. One of the callers-called in last night about eleven-asked for ‘the Investigating Officer’. Switchboard gave out your name but when we couldn’t give you to him on a plate he put down the phone.”
“What about those other tapes, those video-tapes from the flat? What’s on them?”
“Right,” said Hoey, swinging his feet off the desk. “I nearly forgot. They’re all off the telly. RTE programmes too, current affairs and news. Bore the arse off you, it would. The economy, unemployment… discussions off talk-shows with bigwigs out of different parties. There are-hold on, I’ll get the sheet four segments on the last Ard Fheis, last year’s, with the Chief whipping up the party faithful and promising the world.”
Minogue could imagine the scene on the video. Ireland’s Taoiseach, the Prime Minister, the Chief with his devious hawk face to match his manner and his past-a buccaneer Nero-taking the applause of sycophants.
“I watched some of them myself last night,” Hoey continued. “Had a bit of a laugh, I can tell you. There was one good one actually; maybe I shouldn’t say good one. Do you remember that series, last year, on the security situation?”
Minogue did. Having met Mickey Fitzgerald since, he could imagine Fitzgerald’s hand in such a series, even though it was on the television. A memo had been circulated right to each Garda and clerical worker in the Force after that series. The memo cautioned them that information and opinions about security and policing were not to be given out to members of the Press or the public. The programmes had made much of leaks from disgruntled Gardai doing Border duty and oblique grumbles that the Army felt ill-equipped to detect and deal with incursions by British army units into the South.
“Well, you had the Minister for this and the Minister for that, the Opposition shouting blue murder and the rest of it. Maybe Fine was trying to resurrect the issue again-that’s what the media do, isn’t it? Keep things on the boil and come back to heat up the same issues if they’re in danger of cooling down too much.”
“I suppose,” replied Minogue. “Still nothing on video to do with Arabs or students?”
“No, sir. I had a fella go to the archives in RTE. He’s to see if Fine was looking through any material to do with his stories. I found out they keep records of requests, you see.”
“Good for you. It’s as well one of us is wide-awake, Shea,” murmured Minogue.
Minogue perused his copy of the autopsy report from the State Pathologist’s office. Entry wound was consistent with impact and penetration by a high-velocity bullet. Gun could have been discharged up to two feet from the head…
Minogue then tried reading between the lines of the appended comments from the ballistics section of the Technical Bureau. The commentary seemed to have a strained, reluctant tone. Minogue wondered if this was an elaborate way of saying they had nothing with which to direct the investigation from a forensic viewpoint here. Most probably a. 38 or. 30, 32 calibre. What was that in the metric again? Minogue flicked the page and consulted the small box-chart for conversion:. 38 was 9mm, 30 was 7. 62mm, 32 was 7. 65. The bullets were almost certainly of fully jacketed construction. For the bullet to penetrate two bone barriers, it would in all likelihood have had to be round-nosed as well. There was no mention of metal traces from the bullet’s passage. Whoever wrote the ballistics report would have looked at the pathology report first anyway. No fragments of the casing which could have pinpointed a manufacturer. The Continentals tended to favour brass or even copper jackets, the Yanks went for steel or cupronickel, Minogue recalled vaguely.
Fully jacketed round-nose bullets: high velocity, high energy but low stopping power because of the penetration. Minogue wondered what Thatcher Scale meant in the report: the Iron Lady herself? For penetration of two cranial bone barriers, the bullets had to have a Thatcher value of at least fifty…
The echo of a flitting notion scratched at Minogue’s mind again. An attribution of deadly expertise, of intent, had crept into even the bland prose of the ballistics report-a report which had been cautious from the start because it was only a commentary on the pathology work: ballistics had had neither weapon nor ammunition to examine. It was a gun for working up close, not a cannon. It was very rare to find calibres larger than. 38s bothering with fully jacketed ammunition. Those handguns were designed with stopping power in mind, their bullets chosen to leave their mark, to gouge, to dredge, to flatten… to damage quickly.
Minogue shivered. He turned the page and looked below the conversion table. A hand-drawn box followed, with a summary of ammunition in use by Gardai and the Army. The Army used 7. 65mm for their sub-machine guns, but not of high-velocity manufacture. The Garda Special Branch units and squads had access to and training in machine pistols which used 9mm ammunition, a fit with the Walther PPK automatics which had rapidly gained favour over the last decade as Gardai used firearms more. The report noted that it was likely that both Army and Gardai held some stocks of high-velocity ammunition which could be used with a handgun… but such rounds would almost certainly be employed for evaluation and comparison purposes, in a restricted environment such as laboratory testing.
Great, thought Minogue darkly as his eyes wavered down over the point-form conclusions again. Barrel-length of a handgun had to be at least four and one half inches to effect high-velocity at all… He retrieved a ruler from his drawer and added two inches to the barrel. You could still carry an automatic handily enough in your jacket pocket… A reminder that automatics were much easier to secure good silencers on.
There were the more punctilious conclusions then, the writer of the report smug about showing command of his material… There were several licensed copies of the popular parabellum designs like SIG-Petters, Walthers and Berettas, but there were also over a dozen known unlicensed copies of perennials such as Walther PPKs and. 38s being mass-manufactured in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia… Consideration should be given to the large numbers of Soviet Tokarevs (formerly Mauser 7. 63 pistols) in circulation since unrest in the Middle East had become more widespread after 1967. Tokarevs were arguably the automatic pistol best suited to use with high-velocity ammunition… Diplomatic bag, Minogue’s gargoyle muttered within: this was an assassin’s gun.
Minogue snorted with exasperation. He laid the sheaf of papers back in a wire-mesh tray on his desk. He would phone Gallagher within the hour if the same Gallagher hadn’t phoned by then to tell him what the yield was from the Special Branch files. There had to be somebody close to Paul Fine, Minogue’s thoughts protested, someone to whom he chatted, or at least mentioned what he was planning for the weekend. He stood up from the desk. All the tables and desks in the squadroom were occupied and two blackboards on wheels had appeared overnight. One was used for schedules of assignments, the other was mostly blank, with entries for what they knew of the last days and hours of Paul Fine.
Minogue looked at the faces of the dozen policemen on the task force. He recognized more than half of those in the room. The ones he knew were detectives from the Central Detective Unit, rafted over from the Puzzle Palace. Kilmartin had ordered detectives drafted in on the case to squeeze into the squadroom yesterday evening to listen to Hoey. Twice as many ordinary Gardai, mostly from stations in the Dublin Metropolitan South Divisions, would receive their instructions in turn from the policemen who had attended this meeting. With the discovery of the murder site away from the beach, Minogue would now have to make a new media appeal to persons who had been taking the air on Killiney Hill on Sunday. Two full days ago…
Hoey was on the telephone now. Even Eilis looked busy as she rattled on a typewriter. A short detective with a gaucho moustache (Minogue wondered how lax the codes were becoming, as he saw an incarnation of a Venetian boatman in the detective’s face) stopped by Ellis’ desk. He held out a video-cassette to her but she nodded toward Hoey. The detective stood by Hoey’s desk until Hoey put down the phone.
After a brief conversation, Hoey smiled. The detective said something else and Hoey laughed outright. He took the tape and removed it from its case. The gaucho Venetian (Minogue thought he remembered him as a Sullivan) shrugged, smiled again, and walked away. Hoey noticed Minogue sitting on the edge of his desk, and ambled over.
“You look like you’re ready for Honolulu.”
Minogue shook himself out of his reverie. “Uh. Like yourself. I’d like to be sitting in Montparnasse with an espresso burning a hole in the table in front of me. Here, Shea, why don’t you go out yourself and get yourself a bite? A cup of tea or something.”
“I might, at that. We’re at the hump, I suppose,” Hoey answered.
Minogue nodded his assent. ‘The hump’ was Hoey’s word for the doldrums which inevitably afflicted investigators as they moved beyond the beginnings of a difficult investigation. Minogue had heard Kilmartin call it ‘the fuckin’ Sahara stage’. One evening in a pub he had gone through the plot and events of The Lost Patrol, a favourite film of his because it starred Victor Maclachlen, as a way of illustrating the trials of a murder investigation. Minogue had forgotten what Kilmartin had likened the unseen snipers of the desert to, by way of comparison with the course of an investigation, but the memory of the whole had stayed with him.
Any murder that wasn’t committed by a friend or relative of the victim, any murder that had no witnesses, was difficult. After the initial flow of information, the setting up of assignments and statements, the piecing together of a picture of the victim, came the lull. In this lull occurred the really dogged police work. Sometimes this Sargasso-sea stage lasted for months.
“Plenty of time before anything breaks, I suppose,” Hoey added wearily. “Maybe I’ll go and watch that video again. They missed a bit the first time around. A few minutes of something sandwiched into another clip. It might have been there from the time the tape was used for something else, though, because it starts suddenly and ends suddenly.”
“Anything of interest?”
“It could have been Fine on the gossip trail. Remember Fitz said it was Fine’s turn to go through the laundry basket, to see what shenanigans our elected representatives had been up to.”
“The same Mickey Fitzgerald calls it accountability, if I recall,” said Minogue.
“Hah. The Ard Fheis is coming up, so maybe they were in a hurry to find some dirt on anybody. There’s a bit of an interview with what’s-his-name, Gorman, on Meet the Press. You know that programme that does be on after ordinary people go to bed? Fifteen minutes before they shut down for the night, fellas off the newspapers poking at different politicians every week. Gorman was on; ‘the Man in the Wings’ they call him. They were trying to bait him about who’d step into the Chief’s shoes.”
“As if the same Chief is ever going to let go his grip,” said Minogue. Hoey smiled wanly at the uncharacteristic vitriol in Minogue’s tone.
“Exactly. Everyone over the age of six months knows that Gorman’d love to wake up one morning and find himself running the country.‘Ireland in the new age’ and ‘new economic realities’, that’s his line, isn’t it?”
“You know a lot more than I do about him. The brain goes dead on me as regards that stuff. I can’t tell one of them from the other when they talk like that. All I know is that he was shuffled into Defence last year, a new Minister.”
“Ah sure, it’s only the fact that Gorman is a distant relation on my mother’s side. He’s Galway, is Gorman. A lot of people at home think he’s the cat’s pyjamas entirely. He’s off the farm but he lectured in economics at the university. Speaks French, but knows how to handle a hurley stick and even swallow pints, I heard. But don’t think the Chief doesn’t know about Gorman. They have to be sort of civil to one another. Gorman is on the tape saying something about ‘unquestioned allegiance’ to the Chief. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Maybe Fine was going to interview Gorman, and he wanted to be able to quote him from that television show…”
Minogue decided to leave Hoey to his cynical pleasures with the tape. He’d have to be thinking of a dinner himself soon. He looked to the blackboards again. The conference and assessment was set for half-two today: that’d be to give God Almighty time to conjure up a weighty Press release for the tea-time news on the telly. Minogue turned away from the cacophony of phones and typewriters, settled himself in his chair, and tried the Pathologist’s report again. His eyes followed the print but took in nothing beyond an odd word. He turned to the photocopies of the notes which the policemen on telephone work had made. Some had still to be typed. Thirteen calls in all, with officers dispatched to get statements on seven. Minogue lost his concentration again.
Strangers in a strange land… Fine had used the phrase with an unmistakable irony. It might have been true for those Jewish families who had fled Russia and Lithuania to come to Ireland after the Tsar’s May Laws in eighteen-eighty-something, Minogue guessed as he tried to recall more from his visit to the Jewish Museum and his own reading. Fine must have meant it ironically. The Fines had been here for nearly 200 years; Justice Fine was a Supreme Court judge…
Paul Fine had never wanted to leave Dublin, it seemed. It was his city. Married to a Dublinwoman, Minogue had cracked some of the code which might explain Dubliners’ attachment to their shabby capital. Maybe needing to return to Dublin had cost Paul Fine his marriage? His father didn’t know the names of any of Paul’s friends beyond his schooldays, and several of these had emigrated. He knew Mary McCutcheon and Paul’s boss, whom he misnamed as Fitzpatrick. Had all Paul’s school-friends, the friends he’d met at temple as a youngster, the friends he’d spent summer holidays with-had they all emigrated? Or had he wanted some breathing space after returning from London, and avoided them? A lapsed Jew, like a lapsed Catholic, Mickey Fitz had said. In other words, there was no such thing: once in, never out. It was in your marrow, in your dreams, even fifty years after you had renounced it. Only a fool could think his life was being run by what his thoughts suggested to him on a fine sunny day. Gallagher, phone Gallagher.
Minogue was switched three times before he heard Gallagher.
“Yes, I have a tentative list of, let’s call them sympathizers. Irish, I mean. I have thirty-eight.” He sounded pleased with himself, Minogue believed. “I pulled in even the marginal ones. There are others, of course, members of associations we don’t monitor because they’re harmless.”
Minogue jumped in with both feet. “Will the Special Branch be wanting to conduct their own interviews themselves, Pat?”
“Oh I’d say there’d be interest in that here, all right. We work through our own contacts here, you probably know. On the inside, you see,” Gallagher added awkwardly. “The Chief Super knows about my assignment here and…”
Minogue remembered that Chief Superintendent Farrell of the Special Branch was rumoured to model himself after J. Edgar Hoover. The Branch was his personal army against subversives and criminals, and no one would tell him how to do his business.
“I’ll ask to clear it, then, so that Branch officers can follow up on your list and we don’t be tripping over one another,” said Minogue.
Minogue liked to think that he noticed the relief in Gallagher’s voice after that. Gallagher would not miss the hint either, Minogue was sure. When the Press release went out this evening, few would pause to wonder what the phrase ‘joint Murder Squad and Special Branch task force’ meant-beyond apparent co-operation, that was.
Kilmartin was back at his office minutes before two o’clock. Spotting Minogue, he wavered in his path and walked toward him. “Honest to God,” said Kilmartin, looking over his shoulder, “there’s a mountain of paper inside on my desk. I don’t doubt but that I’ll have a pain in me head like the kick off a horse if I have to read all that today. Did you have your dinner?”
“I had a bowl of soup and a sandwich,” Minogue replied.
“That’s what I should have had meself, I’m telling you. I ate something in a pub in Bray and bejases I still don’t know what it might have been. Steak and kidney something. Came out of a tin with a snap of Lassie on it, I bet. The heartburn is bad after that. Bray is the back of the neck.”
“What’s the story in Bray, then?”
“There’s someone burned to a crisp in the back of a Volkswagen Golf. Looks like a man, but I wouldn’t bet too much on that. The fire was so hot that bits of the damn car went and melted themselves. Metal, I mean. How do you like that?”
Minogue was tempted to reply that he didn’t think it was so hot.
Arrayed around the squadroom at half-past two Minogue counted eighteen policemen. Gallagher sat with an untidy-looking Special Branch colleague. The room was soon full of smoke. The typewriters were silent. Two detectives were sharing a joke. Hoey was back in time and Minogue let him have his head. Hoey asked to hear from the scenes-of-crime examiners first.
The blood had tested positive as Paul Fine’s type. No bullets had been found on the site. An area of forty by forty metres square had been examined so far. A dragnet of the beach had produced nothing pertinent to the murder. The detective remarked that a prophylactic had been found on the beach, and Minogue did not twig what he meant until he looked up to see several policemen smiling.
Three interviews with citizens responding to the media appeals were still in progress. The remainder had elicited no direct knowledge of anything to do with the murder. The best information to date had been the call from the woman which had led to the murder site.
These not unexpected results still moved Kilmartin to some testy rhetoric. “Why did these busybodies phone up then, I ask you? Have they nothing better to be doing?”
“All is not lost,” Hoey replied sententiously. “There is one fella, a ticket man at Dalkey Station, the one whose wife phoned up. He says he’s no more than fifty-fifty sure he saw Fine coming through the turnstile some time Sunday. Just after dinner-time, he thinks. Not very solid at all.”
“Alone?” Hoey asked.
“Yes. Seeing as he must have gotten on the train, if it was Fine who was there in Dalkey Station, we’ll get in touch with the men who were on shifts on Sunday at the train stations. We have the snapshots in all stations now, anyway.”
“Is there anything worth holding our breaths over with these calls that are going on at the moment?” Minogue asked.
“Maybe one of them, sir. He’s having a bit of trouble remembering his times on account of him having a few jars on Sunday night. He went to the beach, not actually on to the beach, but into the car-park after he came out of a pub in Ballybrack. He was courting his moth in a car. He says she was driving, if you don’t mind.”
“Maybe he’s the boyo who left the frenchies on the beach,” Kilmartin said.
“That’s a good one,” the detective lied. “Fact is he took the trouble to phone. I think that the public in general is very taken aback with this. That the victim was shot three times in the head and him being a, you know, a Jew. This fella anyway, he phoned us before he realized he didn’t really have anything of substance to offer us. He said there were two other cars parked in the car-park, maybe three. Up to the same trick-acting, maybe. But there was one car there before he came and still there after he left. He was sure there was nobody in the car while he was there. That’s as much as we got out of him.”
“Type, age… colour?” said Kilmartin.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Ye’ll be ready for calls tonight to do with the site out on Killiney Hill instead?” asked Minogue.
“To be sure.”
Hoey read a precis of the autopsy. He pointed to the blackboards then and worked his way through the questions which several of the policemen put to him.
“Are these all the stories Fine was working on?” one asked him earnestly.
“All we know of so far. See this one here, the one on the Arab students? He didn’t get that far on this, not to the stage of interviewing the students he had on a list. He’d read up on some material associated with this work he had planned. Look over at the items here listed from one of his indexes… Video-cassettes on stories he was supposed to cover or dig up. This list here… that’s of the audio-cassettes we found.”
Hoey nodded to Keating. Keating stood, moved to the blackboards and talked his way methodically down the lists.
“… So far, going through the stuff in his desk, there’s nothing standing out. He kept paper files on these stories and he had odds and ends in another general file. Clippings he did himself, a note about some programmes done before. We’re still going through programmes he put material together for in the past year, to see if he made himself any enemies. The nearest we’ve come is a story on a fertilizer plant polluting part of the River Barrow. He was on to that story first and it went down very well. That means the Press took up his story and used his report after it came on the radio. Fine was interested in what-do-you-call-it, ecology…”
Eco-Al, Minogue remembered-Paul Fine’s involvement in what the Special Branch had decided was not merely ecology but a Trojan Horse for godless communism to turn the Irish on their heads. Minogue had not felt the need to fence with Gallagher on that issue of surveillance of Eco-Al, to ask what exactly the Branch’s ‘good reason to believe’ or ‘substantial links’ meant as regards Eco-Al’s being a stalking-horse for the Bolshevist hordes.
Hoey returned to the blackboard. He seemed antic to Minogue, who didn’t know why. The term demonstrative did not fit Shea Hoey but there he was, rapping a forefinger on the board like a teacher.
“So we know that Paul Fine did not bump into any gunmen, political or just over-the-wall thugs, in the course of his journalistic work. It looks like he didn’t get the opportunity to rub such parties the wrong way at all,” Hoey repeated. “Such that they might want to be after shooting him.”
The room was now sweaty and airless. Yawns were spreading around the room, followed by stretches.
“… nothing we’ve discovered yet in his personal life so far,” Hoey went on. He paused and pointed to the cluster of names around Paul Fine’s.
“His wife, his ex-wife, is an English girl. She’s the same religion as he is. They parted and she’s living beyond in London. No disputes there, except she didn’t want to live in Dublin and that was that. No rows with his brother or sister… Two years in college, then London… then he got married, stayed on in London, didn’t like it… Into RTE when he came back to Dublin.”
“Do we have all his bits of paper and what-have-you?” asked a young detective. Minogue recognized the face of the blow-in from the Central Detective Unit. Doyle? Yes, Doyle.
“For his work? Yep,” Hoey replied. “In so far as we have gone through his belongings at work and in his flat.”
“Was he carrying anything with him when he left his flat Sunday morning?” Doyle asked.
“The landlady, a Miss Connolly, didn’t see anything. He may have had some little pocketbook or a notebook.”
“Tape-recorders,” Doyle said. “Don’t them journalist types carry them around?”
Minogue liked Doyle’s persistence. Jimmy Doyle, was it? No, Kevin… Danny?
“We haven’t found one yet. And you’re right, he would probably have had some class of a recording device, too,” Hoey allowed.
“But aren’t they full of themselves with those things, word-processors, these days?” asked Doyle.
“Computers?” said Kilmartin.
“No disks or diskettes,” said Hoey cautiously. “And he didn’t have a computer.”
That seemed to stay Doyle’s speculation. Hoey waited for a rejoinder. Hearing none, he turned to the board where a time line had been drawn to represent the last few days of Paul Fine’s life. An asterisk stood beside 5–5: 30 p. m. Sunday, followed by a question mark in brackets. Hoey cleared his throat and began at the top of the board. Minogue’s eyes stayed fixed on the asterisk while he listened wearily.
“Excuse me now for interrupting again,” Doyle said. “I have this mental block about this man’s work, the journalism thing. I know it’s radio and all that, but doesn’t every journalist have to know about computers and the like, these days? That’s how the newspapers are done now: I saw it on the telly. You even have correspondents sending their stuff in on telephone lines, off their own little computers. Surely to God RTE has something like that?”
“Phone ‘em up then, like a good man,” said Kilmartin, interrupting with an irritable scratch of his head.
Hoey began again after Doyle had gone to find a phone in some privacy. Minogue’s eyes returned involuntarily to the asterisk, the probable time of Paul Fine’s death. There was still no entry for the last Saturday of his life. Mickey Fitz had called Paul Fine the equivalent of a lapsed Catholic. He’d hardly have been at home observing his Sabbath, so.
Minogue’s mind slipped free of its moorings again. Paul Fine, the son of a prominent Irishman, an Irishman who was also a Jew. A Jew who practised his religion, a son who did not. Friction. A man who was a legal scholar, an authority with a mountain of accomplishments behind him: a son who seemed unsettled, who hadn’t found his own path. Paul Fine’s brother was a dentist in London, his sister a research scientist. Minogue imagined the talk around the Fines’ tea-table. Would Paul have recoiled when his father would mention how Paul’s sister had made an important breakthrough in her work, or how Paul’s brother had had to move to bigger offices because his practice was getting so large?
A mood of irony settled on Minogue then as he realized that Paul Fine had wanted to return to Dublin, maybe at the risk of his own marriage, while his brother and sister, successes, had left. Did Dublin beckon to those who would be failures elsewhere?
Doyle reappeared toward the end of Hoey’s description of what clues could come out of the murder site.
“There,” he said in the pause which Hoey made for him, “I knew they had to have something there. I don’t watch the telly for nothing, you know. RTE has a big computer that the staff can use.” He glanced at his notebook. “It’s called a Newstar computer. It’s wired up to a cable from an international Press Agency. The fella I was talking to says that not many of the staff bother to use that part of it but it might be that Fine did use it for typing stuff up. People have their own bits of the computer, like their own filing cabinet on board the contraption.”
“Is there anything under Fine’s name on it?” Kilmartin asked.
“Wouldn’t tell me. ‘Need an authority to do that,’ says he to me. I told him I was a Guard and he could call Harcourt Street and find out, but no go. Users have their own codes anyway, like their own little keys to their locker.”
“So there could be some of Fine’s stuff on this computer, stuff we haven’t seen,” Minogue joined in.
“Could be, sir,” Doyle replied. “Why don’t you send me over there with a bit of something to wave at them so as I can find out?”