Whoever had held the nylon rope around Combs' neck, whoever had shoved a knee between Combs' shoulder-blades as the life was choked out of him, needn't have been a Hercules. Combs was seventy-three, a decrepit seventy-three. He had thrashed briefly and died. His swollen face and bulging, yellowed eyes greeted Mrs Hartigan, his housekeeper, on Sunday as she was on her way home from evening Mass.
She had walked up to the open door, halloing as she went. Would Mr Combs be wanting dinners during the week or…? No, he wouldn't, she saw then. The kitchen was frosted. She closed her eyes then unbelieving. Mrs Hartigan stood in the doorway, feeling the weight of her own body press gently on her hips, her feet rooted to the floor. Her back ached familiarly, almost a comfort to her now. She wanted to sit down. Birds chortled and fussed in the hedge by the window. The tap dripped slowly, a dull, irregular pat on enamel. The frost was spread over a floor littered with broken crockery, tins and shattered jars, utensils and packages from the cupboards. Through a confusing blend of smells, the kitchen still held that stale bachelor smell she recognised. It was now mixed with the stench of the old man's indignity in death.
The hand resting on the doorhandle was her own, she realised after some time, and this brought her back. She looked out the doorway at the fields beyond. A flock of starlings clouded overhead. The birds landed together under a hedge. Within seconds they were in the air again, swarming. Mrs Hartigan asked herself if this could really be happening. The kitchen like a room unopened for centuries, the dust… but more like snow… white, angel, Christmas, dead… her thoughts ran again: it's like a tomb, for all the world…
Something terrible had happened. She backed away from the door, only then feeling the ice grasp her heart. Is there a murderer here still maybe? Her heart fluttered. She thought of the phone in the hall, beyond the kitchen. Couldn't go in, no. Spots formed and burst slowly in her vision as she dithered by the door. A lark sang high, unseen, at the end of the day. Mrs Hartigan whispered a prayer, asking God to get her down to the end of the lane alive.
That same Sunday evening, Minogue's gaze was drifting down a row of trees lining a narrow country lane. His eyes wandered over the trees to the Dublin Mountains beyond. One straggly, mustard cloud remained over Two Rock Mountain. To the east, over Killiney Bay, the sky had already darkened. The air was very still, waiting for the first stars. Minogue looked for a moon but found none. A necklace of lights blinked under Killiney Hill. Eight miles out into Dublin Bay, the Kish lighthouse beamed foolishly.
The air was full and moist. Scoutch grass bushed out onto the road. Next to a stile built into the wall opposite, nettles and dock plants reached up to the brambles swelling out from the wall. He gazed at the ruins of the church which lay fifty feet beyond his car, the Romanesque arch there, the gravestones choked with grass. Minogue was spending an hour of his Sunday evening sitting at the base of a cross in Tully, County Dublin. The cross, eleven centuries old, was anchored in a massive granite block itself mounted seven feet up off the road on a bulwark of limestone rocks. The stone, warmed from the day, had no sharp edges to it. When Minogue ran his palm across the warm granite, his thoughts let go at last and he found himself ten minutes later, still stroking the stone but wondering why he couldn't see so clearly now.
Before he climbed down, Minogue stood by the cross and stretched. He turned to look at the ring of mountains. The circulation eased in his legs and he turned to back down the steep steps. Descending, he inadvertently laid his hand on dried bird droppings. He thought he heard a bird chortle in the gloom of the brambles to his right. Wasn't that what they called pathetic fallacy? Down now, he wiped his hand on the back of his weekend trousers.
He smiled when he thought of Jimmy Kilmartin, an Inspector in the Gardai and a pal, and how Kilmartin might envy the birds' ways. Starting Monday, Minogue was to stand in for Kilmartin. Jimmy had finally had to have an operation on his bowel; otherwise, as he confided sheepishly to Minogue, he'd be properly banjacksed for the rest of his days. Minogue had resisted telling him that it might be wise to have the operation now rather than be caught between two stools in later years.
For devilment, Minogue drove back toward Cabinteely and the Bray Road. He drove with only his sidelights on. The road from Tully was now a dark green tunnel, wide enough for but one car. There were very few houses on the road. Minogue slowed to look at a horse which surprised him on a bend. The horse stood motionless in a gap made by the gate in the gloom with the western sky behind. Not for the first time in his life, Minogue felt that there could be no better animal than a horse.
Minogue sighed as he turned onto Brennanstown Road. A half-mile from Cabinteely, it was lined with the houses of the fat-bellied country boys who were retiring behind the burglar alarms and the Tudor mansions here, now that they had gutted Dublin with their office blocks and ghettos. Minogue had heard moaning from Gardai in Cabinteely station about needing more staff to handle the telephone calls. The grandees up on the Brennanstown Road were seeing intruders everywhere. They were worried about their houses being violated while they were holidaying in Miami or Nice. Grubby hands fingering the locks on their gates, pawing their Jags, maybe even looking in the window as they watched television. Couldn't the Gardai mount extra patrols in the area? Minogue had retained enough of the folk memory of the Famine from his native County Clare-where families, farming fields of rock, yielded up life and even merriment-to believe these intruders could be ghosts of their dark fathers.
The traffic-lights in Cabinteely were red. As often happened to him in his waking life, Minogue was reluctantly coming out from a minor road onto a busy one. He was obliged to yield, to wait and watch a stream of cars speeding along the highway. He slouched in his seat, wondering. Of an evening at Tully Cross, he had imagined druids with their followers looking out on the present from the darkness gathering under the trees. And what of the O'Tooles and the O'Byrnes who later raided from the hills, snapping at the edges of the English Pale? What would they make of the place now?
Minogue's light turned green and he pulled away from the white line. Tires howled on the road nearby. A crowd of young lads in a BMW deciding at the last minute not to crash a red light. Minogue pulled around them slowly. Three of them, laughing; dressed and coiffed to the nines, rich snots on the way into Dublin, by the cut of them. A cigarette flicked out the window bounced on the roadway, sparking the gloom. Minogue steered his arthritic Fiat onto the new Bray Road. Before he let go of his acid thoughts, he resolved to side with the raiding O'Tooles and the vanquished druids. The gombeen sons could have their BMWs: he would have his pagan stones.
Detective Garda Seamus Hoey telephoned Minogue's home at six fifteen Sunday evening.
"C-O-M-B-S, like you'd comb your hair?" Minogue asked.
"Yes, sir," Hoey replied.
Minogue asked if the scenes-of-the-crime technicians from the Garda Technical Bureau had started the first sweep of the murder-site. Hoey said that they had. The victim's body had already been removed to Loughlinstown Hospital, pending autopsy in James' Hospital. Minogue's eyes followed the pendulum on the heirloom clock hanging in the hall while he listened to Hoey.
During a pause while he heard Hoey turning a page, Minogue said, "Strangled only? Nothing before or after?"
"No, sir. A quick job. No other injuries apparent. Yet."
Minogue waited for Hoey to say more. He heard another page rustle.
"Anything jump out at you, Shea?"
Hoey hesitated before replying. He had been on the Murder Squad for nearly four years, Minogue remembered, but still held the entry rank of Detective Garda. It was said that Shea Hoey didn't care to chase promotion because he had his own way in the hierarchy of the Squad. He had run several investigations, Minogue knew, but Hoey showed no rancor at having Inspector Kilmartin's name go on the press releases and reports.
"No," Hoey said at last. "It's early days yet. The house is a real mess. Soon as we sort out a bit of the stuff scattered around, we might get a move on…"
"Robbery in progress?" Minogue tried.
"Has all the signs."
"Weapon on the site, is there?"
"Not yet located, sir."
"Have you a suspect at hand, Shea?"
"'Fraid not, sir. I'm thinking it has to be local, though. If it's a robbery, like. To know the place was worth doing."
"Give me directions so." Minogue fumbled for a pencil.
Minogue wondered how he had missed any signs of Combs being strangled on that Sunday evening. That wondering was a conceit, he allowed, because Combs' house was near Kilternan. It was close as a crow flies to where Minogue had kept company with his stones, but Kilternan was below the high ground around Tully. Being a daylight rationalist, Minogue knew that he couldn't have expected divinations of what was happening over the hill from where he himself had put the July Saturday away. No stars over Combs' house, no banshee wails, no ghostly luminance.
It was a quarter to eight before Minogue found the house. The floodlights had raised a halo around it against the dark mass of the hills behind. He had driven through Dundrum to Sandyford and followed the signs for the Scalp. The road could now be called the Enniskerry Road. It corkscrewed its way through Stepaside and widened again before it reached Kilternan. The Scalp, a cleft in the hills which marked the border between Counties Dublin and Wicklow, was still three miles from where Minogue finally stopped.
Hoey had told him to take the turn up to Glencullen but to stop off to the right where he'd meet the first bad bend in the road. Combs' house was up the lane there. The hills above Kilternan were forested with spruce and pine, Minogue remembered, and high up over Glencullen, some miles into the mountains, the mountainsides were bog, carpeted with heather and ferns.
He parked between an unmarked police van and a Toyota Corolla squad-car. Twenty yards further up the road was another car, a Renault, illuminated by stalk lamps which Minogue recognised as forensic site equipment. A generator puttered in the near distance. He stopped by the Toyota. Smoke issued from the open window of the squad-car. The yellow interior light showed two Gardai pushed back in their seats.
"Minogue," he said to the two figures in the Toyota. "Off the Murder Squad. Are ye the first shift looking after the site until morning, is it?"
The driver, a young Garda with a puffy face patterned by acne scars, nodded.
"That's us, sir. We're due a relief about eleven."
Minogue stared up at the faintly milky sky behind the mountains before walking slowly toward the Renault. A scenes-of-the-crime technician squatted on the ditch side of the car. His tongue moved slowly across his bottom lip, his eyebrows silver in the lamp's glare. Minogue had forgotten the technician's name.
"Whose car?"
"Victim's," said the technician without looking up from the plastic bags he was sealing. He paused then and squinted up at Minogue, blinking. Widow's peak, bird eyes, Minogue thought: Rogers? McMahon? An old hand anyway.
"Have I safe passage up the lane here, er…?"
"Jim Rogers. Stay to the left of the tape there. Can you see it?"
Minogue drew out a penlight from his jacket pocket. The battery was dead. Rogers turned the lamp toward the laneway. Minogue's eyes followed the taut yellow tape running to the house.
"We've done the lane once. We'll do it proper in the morning. The conditions are bad. Tire treads is all so far. It's all stones around here. Peeping up through the grass even."
Minogue started up the lane. He smelled the heather from the hills. He passed a gap in the hedge, stone posts anchoring a gate. A horse shook its head over the gate at him. Minogue started. The horse moved off. the limit of a rope tethered to the gate.
"Don't be trying to frighten me like that, mister," he muttered after the horse. He stopped and looked back down the lane, his heart still pounding from the fright. The night was heavy and still around him. He wondered if the deadness in the air was here all the time.
Hoey was wearing a polo shirt under his jacket. He raised his eyebrows in greeting. Hoey's face was too long-mark of the Irish-the eyes too gentle, set in ruddy features: farmer's boy, a face peering over stone-walled Galway fields. The stakes and plastic ribbons had been erected all around the house. Minogue heard another generator grumbling out of sight. One of the lamps lit up the whole gable end of the house like a film set. Hoey stood behind Minogue in the doorway, both looking over the whitened destruction of the kitchen.
"Did that stuff help us at all, Shea?"
"The flour, with footprints? No. Some settled on the body. So the killer went on wrecking the place after killing the old man. The bag of flour burst over there against the wall."
"Well. Who's here?"
"There's myself, of course. Pat Keating's inside. Two scenes-of-the-crime lads still upstairs," Hoey replied. "The local station is Stepaside. We have two of their district detectives helping us. They're out on interviews right this very minute."
Minogue nodded and stepped back from the doorway.
"Jimmy Kilmartin says how-do, by the way."
"And how's he doing, then?" Hoey asked.
"He's good, Shea. Up and about in a few days. I might go and see him tonight if I have the time later."
"Great. Great," said Hoey. The enthusiasm was fulsome enough for Minogue to glance over. Keating came around behind them. Minogue looked at the Polaroid dangling from his neck.
"Have the photo men been through already, Pat?" Minogue asked.
"Yes, sir. I've run off about thirty myself. Prior to removal. I got close-ups of the neck marks as well."
"Any tracks or traces close to the house here yet?" Minogue asked.
"Not yet," said Hoey.
"Hmm. How did the killer gain entry?" Minogue asked.
"Your man usually left the back door unlocked, says the housekeeper," Keating answered.
Great. Minogue almost voiced his cynicism aloud. He looked to the outside wall. The house was stone-built, plastered and painted off-white. The windows looked new, and the gutters and the sills were in good condition.
"A few things strike me, though," Hoey began in a meditative tone.
"Fire away, Shea."
"Burglary gone wrong, that's easy enough to think. The old man is out, comes back to the house and interrupts a robbery. The killer might even have put the squeeze on him before killing him, to tell him where any money and so on might be hid. Odd thing is the destruction that carried on after the man was killed. The flour and bits of plates on the body tells us that easy enough. Cool one, the killer. Went around pulling out kitchen cupboards full of stuff."
"Disgusted maybe," Keating interjected. "The old man has no stash, but the killer either doesn't believe him or kills him to cover himself. Maybe a local all right, known by sight to the victim. Real animal work."
Hoey shrugged.
"There's fellas out there will go that far, I can tell you," he said. "Remember that juvenile, Rice, the lad who took a neighbor's housekeeping money and cut her throat to cover himself?"
Minogue remembered, all right. It was just before Keating's time on the Squad. Kilmartin had cursed psychiatrists and social workers for weeks after the diminished capacity ruling. Fintan Rice was a heroin addict at fifteen, a murderer at sixteen, an inmate in a prison psychiatric ward at seventeen. Dublin's Fair City…
"Fit of rage," said Hoey. "Like a ritual thing if the killer is a nutcase entirely."
"Defilement," Minogue muttered.
"Like in a church?" asked Keating.
"Wholesale wrecking of the place after the act. There's the other good angle. An acquaintance of the victim, a row getting out of hand. Maybe a mental case around here and something set him off."
Minogue thought it unlikely. In an explosive rage, nothing so neat as strangling with a rope would have occurred, especially without signs of resistance. His mind skipped erratically. Sex? Bachelor, old bachelor… maybe of the "other" persuasion? Need background. Money? How much was the old man worth? If known to the victim, the killer could have surprised him handily enough… back turned for a moment, the killer has his opportunity. Resources? Rope.
"The string or rope, Shea. That the kind of thing you'd find lying around handy in this man's house?"
"Good one," Hoey allowed. "That's where I go off a bit on tangents. A premeditated murder, a killer with the instrument ready in his pocket or whatever. The victim doesn't look to have been a handyman at all. His housekeeper says he never did repair stuff about the house but had tradesmen do it. We better dig up a solid motive for premeditated, more than a robbery trick…"
"How long did you get with her?" asked Minogue.
"Mrs Hartigan? Three-quarters of an hour, sir. She's a bit out of it."
Keating edged up to the doorway and looked at the carnage in the kitchen again.
"Lunatic," he said.
"Money," Minogue echoed. "Tip-off from someone who knew or thought the old man kept money in the house… Expected to find money and didn't. I wonder about that. Or came with the intentions to kill… You told the Stepaside lads doing the local interviews to look for psychiatric cases around here?"
"Didn't have to. They copped on straightaway. They're on deliverymen, postmen, too. Any repairmen fixing the house. You know, Combs must have been out," Hoey said. "The smashing and breaking would have raised an awful racket. Like I say, there was some stuff under the body, so the job was underway when he came home. Even if it was a solo job, he'd have seen the car lights and known to get out cause the victim was coming home."
"Drove, I suppose," said Minogue. "Hardly out for a walk in the dark. And if the robber saw the old man's car, he wouldn't have started his job at all. Okay, so. Would he have seen the car lights at the end of the lane, where the victim's car was found?"
"Likely, sir," Keating argued. "This is an isolated spot, after all."
"Why didn't the victim drive up the lane and park by the house?"
Hoey shrugged.
"Turning space is a bit tight around the door here, sir… I don't know."
"All right," Minogue sighed, shaking himself out of his speculation. "Enough of this headbanging. Let's start on filling in the blanks on this poor devil. See if we can place him for this past few days. I better start me prowl. Give us that Polaroid, Pat. Just in case." spacebarthing
Minogue entered the house. He tiptoed over the clear plastic sheets which the technicians had spread on the floor. Minogue's steps found a creaking runner as he went up the stairs. There was a strong smell of whiskey, stronger as he ascended the stairs. There was little furniture in the hall, nothing that didn't have a daily utility. A hamper for dirty laundry had been overturned. A coat and umbrella stand had been toppled. The coats scattered on the floor looked like human scarecrow figures to Minogue as he glanced down over the banisters at the carnage below. The landing was narrow and dark, with no natural light but what an open door lent from one of the rooms. The technician walked heavily to the door.
"Is that you, Hoey, ya bollocks?" he said.
Minogue turned as the technician stepped over the threshold and into the landing.
"I'm not Hoey, I'm somebody else," Minogue said.
The stricken technician froze, the horsehair brush dangling from his plastic-gloved fingers.
"Oh, I thought it was — "
Minogue's feet sounded on the polished wooden floor. The smell of whiskey was overpowering now. A skylight had been cut into the roof over this room. Although the room was small, there was a space enough for a drafting table and an easel. Paper had been swept into a heap on the floor. Pencils and small paintbrushes were scattered all over the room. Minogue heard whispering from the hallway. He heard his own name mentioned, and he wasn't at all displeased at the alarm with which it was hissed out.
"Are ye done in here?" Minogue called out.
"Nearly, sir. Nearly," an earnest voice replied. Built-in shelves flanked both sides of the chimney-breast. The fireplace itself had been walled in and covered up by an electric heater. Pieces from the shattered whiskey bottles had reached every corner of the room. Scores of books had been knocked off the shelves, gathering in a heap by an overturned chair. Minogue glanced at some of the titles. Ancient monuments of the Irish countryside, a Spanish-English dictionary, books by Gerald Durrell about animals. A sink had been fitted into the wall next to the window. The walls themselves were covered in drawings. The drawings didn't look showy to Minogue-rather they seemed to be attempts to better draw a subject, pointers to improve the next version.
"Yes, we're all done in here, sir. And then there's daylight tomorrow and-"
"And ye'll be back with a vengeance," said Minogue. He turned to the two faces in the doorway. Grown schoolboy faces awaiting reprimand.
"And excuse the language, if you don't mind, sir. It's just that we know him and we do be slagging him. You know how it is."
Minogue put on his best version of a mollified teacher's face.
"To be sure, lads. Tell me, how long more here tonight?"
"Half an hour about. It's an awful sight, isn't it?"
Minogue nodded and turned to examine the room again. Drawers of clothes had been upended on the floor. He tiptoed around the clothes and stood by the window. It faced east so far as he could tell. He walked closer and looked out. A scattered sprinkle of lights from other houses tucked under the mountains.
There was nothing on the easel. What would be worth painting from this window? He hunkered down by the sheets of drawing paper which had been swept violently to the floor. Straightening one, Minogue felt a tremor of recognition. He stood back and studied the pencil drawing. The work showed practice and mastered technique on what Minogue would have said was a very difficult project. Though these concentric patterns could be found on other ceremonial stones from Ireland's prehistory, Minogue was certain that the stone and patterns in this drawings were from the ruins of Tully church. Minogue's hands remembered the warm, smooth granite of Tully. Succour. Was it that which attracted Combs there?
Minogue had been drawn to Tully and its stones by his sense that it had been built, like so many other churches, on a site of druidic worship. Several fields away was a tumulus, the burial site of a chieftain, which predated the upstart saints Patrick and Bride by a millennium. Less than a mile over the fields was one of the best-preserved dolmens in the country, ranking even with those stark masses of the ridges of The Burren in County Clare.
He flattened out other sketches from the heap of paper. There were charcoal sketches of stones with whorls worked into them, symbols of sun and moon. Beneath the sketches were pencil drawings of a dolmen, the huge menacing boulder on its three stone legs.
"Mr Combs was English?" Minogue called out.
"I believe so, sir," said the technician, a brick-red-faced young man with the beginnings of a porter-belly. He had the heavy blond eyebrows of Norse descendants in County Wexford.
"Yes, sir. They have his passport and everything taken away in the bags, but he was definitely from across the water."
Minogue turned toward the window again. When he didn't hear the two moving, he turned back to them. They couldn't help his puzzlement any more than he could himself.
"Thanks very much, lads."
He prowled the other rooms upstairs. A bedroom that Combs must have used, with the clothes torn off the bed. The mattress had been slashed on both sides. Looking for money in there…? A bathroom with new fixtures. The medicine box had been emptied out, too. Next door was an empty room the size of a box-room. The old man had been economical to the point of asceticism with furnishings. Minogue kept expecting to open a door on a room that would be cluttered with the stuff which should fill houses. There was none. He couldn't decide if the sense of incompleteness here was a sign of transience or a permanent feature of an austere life. If this was it, Minogue thought, then the old man had led a lonely life.
Downstairs again, Minogue spied Hoey sitting on the kitchen doorstep. He was lighting a cigarette. Minogue looked into the kitchen- Almost like snow. Eerie. A fly was trapped between the curtain and the glass. It buzzed noisily, throwing itself against the glass, then rested. The outline on the linoleum tiles was the shape of a body lain on its side with the knees drawn up a bit, arms into the chest. A flash and the motorised ejection whirr of the Polaroid startled Minogue. He had been leaning on the button. Iijit…
The living-room had boasted no knick-knacks, it seemed. Books borrowed from the public library still lay atop a low table, the chaos on the floor all about it. There were no plants in the room, no pictures on the walls. Two ashtrays, both clean: copies of the Irish Times; magazines scattered on the floor. A colour telly with rabbit ears had been toppled, the screen cracked. The gravid atmosphere of the house begin to weigh on Minogue. He sat down on the doorstep next to Hoey.
"Who do we have available as of tomorrow morning, Shea?"
"There's you and me, sir. Pat Keating, of course. The two detectives from Stepaside; I know one of them-Driscoll. There's two Gardai from Stepaside taking statements and feeding them to Driscoll for us. I phoned in to get a crop of likeues off the Criminal Record Office…..
Johnnie Carey is back in court tomorrow again and it might be for most of the week. The pub stabbing back in March. The defence threw a surprise in last Friday and they're rubbing Johnnie hard on how he got the confession. He's lost to us for the week, I'd say."
Hoey drew on the cigarette. Minogue had a sudden lust for a cigarette himself. Keating stepped around the seated policemen.
"Well, the percentages so far," Keating began with a yawn, "tell me he was killed right in the kitchen. I was talking to the lads who went through the kitchen… "
Minogue's attention was taken by the lurid light from the spots flaring against the gable wall. A uniformed Garda walked gingerly by them, nodding.
"… Nothing to suggest a struggle in or near the door. Not dragged in either."
"Heavy class of man anyhow," Hoey added.
"Can we place him at all yet, for the Saturday?" asked Minogue.
"Driscoll and the Stepaside lads are chipping away there, sir," Hoey reminded him. "They know the area. Never knew this Combs, though. A reclam-… a recl-"
"A recluse," Minogue said.
"That's it. A loner. Mrs Hartigan says he took a jar in the pub all right. He wasn't a total hermit."
"In a bit of a state, I suppose. Is she at home now?" Minogue went oh. Hoey flicked open his notebook.
"Here's her number. The house is about half a mile back the road."
Minogue rose and yawned. Hoey stood then. Keating stared off at some point in the darkness beyond the oasis of light. Minogue followed Hoey down the lane. Hoey yawned again as he got into Minogue's Fiat, holding his notebook to his mouth. Keating took the radio-car which he and Hoey had driven out from Dublin.
"So the Killer is back on his feet," Hoey whispered through a yawn. Minogue spied Hoey's embarrassment with a glance. Kilmartin's nickname had slipped out. He smiled faintly at Hoey in the green glow of the dash light. Hoey rubbed his nose and switched on the interior light. He looked through his notes of his interview with Mrs Hartigan. Minogue drove off into the night. Kilmartin, Killer, he mused. Hoey absent-mindedly lit another cigarette. Hardly anyone has nicknames anymore, Minogue realised. What was that a sign of? Progress?
The nickname originated with quips which dated back to the renaming of the Murder Squad. Unlike its like-named counterpart in London, from which the name and the organisational structure had been derived, the Squad's name had gone under to the dictates of more hygienic prose. That prose had drifted in on airwaves and print from the American century which had lain offshore until the late 1950s. Irish people were now expected to rationlise their lives. They should now express opinions about the balance of payments and to use words from the new religion, words like fulfillment, relationship, interaction…
The Murder Squad had emerged from this confusion as the Investigation Section. It formed a branch of the Technical Bureau, itself a branch of the Central Detective Unit. The CDU's new headquarters was based close to the City Centre in Harcourt Square, and CDU detectives rubbed shoulders with the other glamour boys of the Security Section, the Special Branch and the Serious Crime Squad. Austrian-made folding submachine-pistols, souped-up pursuit cars, computerisedradio and telephone links, border shoot-outs… the whole shemozzle, as Kilmartin was wont to remark caustically over a Friday afternoon pint to Minogue. Television policemen, he called them.
The Murder Squad's transfer from the claustrophobia of Dublin Castle had brought it to St John's Road, close to Garda Headquarters in The Phoenix Park. Detectives working on the Murder Squad didn't mind a bit of glamour themselves. When other Gardai would ask them what it was like to work in the Investigation Section, they were told that it was murder, handily consonant with the nickname of the head of the section-the Killer himself, Kilmartin. The conceit around Kilmartin's nickname added to the Squad's reputation as being driven, meticulous and successful.
Less out of delicacy than sympathy, Minogue did not air his view that Jimmy Kilmartin was such a tiger abroad because he was a kitten at home.