'You'd never know now, sir. It has the look of it.'
Kilmartin lapsed into silence. Connors had learned to wait. Two youngsters with skinhead cuts appeared on Connors' side of the car. The two laughed and tapped on the glass. Connors glanced at Kilmartin before rolling down the window.
'How fast does it go?' asked one of them. 'A hundred? Do you have a gun? Aren't you a detective? Show us how the radio works. Any bulletproof glass? Give us a bit of the siren.'
Kilmartin, a giant to the two and a man who was out of short trousers in Ballina, County Mayo, some forty years earlier, shifted his weight in the passenger seat.
'Who's your man?' said one of the youngsters, eying Kilmartin.
'I'm Kojak. The wheelman here is Danno. Book 'em, Danno. Murder one.' Kilmartin said.
The youngsters began laughing again. Connors pulled away from the kerb. Kilmartin wasn't as sour as he looked.
'The telly is a divil, isn't it Connors?'
'The kids are nice though. You'd never imagine them turning turk on you in a few years,' said Connors.
'God, haven't you the black heart in you today. Arra, you'll be all right. Sure isn't it Friday?'
Connors grinned again. 'My Ma told me that people in parts of Dublin eat their young, so she did,' Connors said.
'God knows now she might be right,' agreed Kilmartin. He thought about putting on his seat-belt but decided he'd have too much trouble reaching in for his cigarettes.
'Any messages?'
'None, sir.'
'Off to Pearse Street. We'll talk to the lads on the spot.'
'What was the name of the student?' Connors asked.
'A fella by the name of Jarlath Walsh. Jarlath Walsh.'
Kilmartin spent no more than twenty minutes listening to the reports from the two Gardai in Pearse Street station. Kilmartin had worked out of Pearse Street and he hated the building. It gave him the willies. It was old and grimy and cramped. Plenty of action there though, too much. A rough start for a Guard just out of the training college in Templemore. He'd be on the beat right in the middle of Dublin. Kilmartin hated it the day he stepped in the door those many years ago. He had hoped to be posted to a fair-sized town in the West, to be near his folks. He had lived and raised a family in Dublin, however.
He told Connors not to make any notes. It might discourage candour and memory. It would look impertinent too. These two Gardai were well senior to Connors though not in rank. They sat on the wooden chairs poking into their notebooks, their sky-blue shirts making Kilmartin think of Spain.
'About fourteen minutes after nine, sir,' one of them was saying. No, no rocks nearby. The body was lying on its back. The forensic team was there at half past ten. Yes, there were some marks in the clay around the body, like shoeprints, dug in at the heel, sort of. That'd be that woman, Brosnahan, leaping around like a madwoman, Kilmartin thought. Shouldn't be so hard on her. Twigs broken and bent back, yes. Nothing in his hands. Sure it was a he straight away? Yes, the lower part of the face was intact. A bit of a moustache. A white plastic supermarket bag, they'd be for the notes and books. Why did a student have to use that as a school-bag? Trinity College students not able to afford school-bags? Four hundred years of Anglo-Irish privilege walled up in the place and a student couldn't afford a bag for his books?
Kilmartin noticed a growing sense of pessimism leaking into his chest. It wasn't a run of the mill one, one of those unglamorous family squabbles that ended in a death with the whole thing more or less wrapped up in twenty-four hours. The public wouldn't be much thrilled to find out how petty the causes were for most murders. No, they wanted the headlines, a bit of sex involved, a name they knew, maybe an international link. This was shaping up to be none of these, it seemed. More like a lunatic on the loose or some panicky young fella on drugs. Twenty years of age, a student.
The two men had stopped talking and, along with Connors, were looking at Kilmartin.
'Thank you, gentlemen. Will you please give your notebooks to the desk sergeant for safe keeping. I'll be requiring them at a later date perhaps.'
The two Gardai stood up and left the room without a word.
'How's the old enemy, Connors?'
'Half past four, sir.'
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Kilmartin thought, the traffic would be like the chariot race in Ben Hur.
'Tempus fugit. Off to the Castle. You can leave me there.'
A photocopy of a handwritten Forensic Bureau report lay in a wire 'In' basket on Kilmartin's desk. Under these pages he found a crisp envelope conjaining fourteen black and white photographs and nine smaller Polaroid colour snapshots. Kilmartin had given up trying to get used to the luridly colourful violence he found on the snapshots. Somehow he still expected holiday scenes, people with pink eyeballs at parties.
As he looked through the photographs his pessimism drifted into a stoic pragmatism which was to attend his reading of the draft report. Nothing doing in the boy's bag, save the peculiarity of the bag itself for carrying lecture notes. A train ticket from Dun Laoghaire, bits of things that made up a life. A proper hanky (fresh cotton), six pounds and change, glasses, keys, a watch. Snaps of the site looked like wild Borneo. The body was neater than it could have been; a little care in arranging things?
Walsh, Jarlath Walsh. Student. Kilmartin ruminated for several minutes. It would be late this evening before he'd have copies of statements and a who's-who around the life, now gone but reborn in print in a fattening Garda file, of Mr Jarlath Walsh.
Kilmartin phoned the desk. As the detective answered, Kilmartin languidly wrote down the names of the one detective and four uniformed Gardai who were interviewing Walsh's tutor and his pals in the college. It had fallen to the detective to go to Walsh's parents.
'And have Delaney telephone me at home by eleven tonight, like a good man.'
Kilmartin looked through the photographs again. There wasn't much blood on or around the head. Dragged? Carried? The flash had been a little close and the skin seemed to glow with a luminescence which made the gaping mouth all the more odd. Kilmartin noted the tips of the upper teeth showing. His gaze roved to the slight opening between the eyelids, the deceptive sign of life. The forehead was darkened and misshapen, flattened.
An acidy space in his stomach widened. That would be his conscience. Kilmartin became exasperated, but he couldn't settle on a reason for it. 'Out with it,' he said aloud. Well, sure who else would be able for this one? Shag it. He wrote Minogue's name in his notebook, ripped out the page and stapled it to the reports. Shite, no staples. Rather than sit in Dublin's Friday evening traffic, Kilmartin extricated a poor quality cigar from the back of his desk. He eased his buttocks onto one side and allowed himself a fart, a breezer they called them as children. The fart was in some respects less offensive than the cigar. The world at bay, Kilmartin's stoicism eased a little. Trusting his own mistrust, Kilmartin decided he would give his squad until Monday, but he would call Minogue before then. Kilmartin drew on the cigar. Not for the first time, he tried to understand why he wanted Minogue in on this and why that prospect made him nervous.
Because he felt that Minogue was owed something? Maybe he, Kilmartin, was superstitious and wouldn't admit it to himself.
Kilmartin blew a ring across the desk. It was over a year now since the British Ambassador had been blown to smithereens outside the residence in Stepaside. Somehow Minogue had avoided the same fate, by feet, by seconds. Freakish but hardly magical, no.
Even before that, Kilmartin had been conscious of currents in Minogue which marked him apart. Kilmartin believed that his unease with Minogue was the key to Minogue's rank, rather the lack of it. Minogue doubtlessly made his superiors a bit nervous, the same way he made Kilmartin weigh his words or put on the facade of casual conversation. A circumspect man, Minogue, some powerful imminence in him. He was rumoured to have a terrific sense of humour.
Some months after Minogue came back on duty, Kilmartin wondered if Minogue had snapped maybe, or had become depressed. Minogue had not been publicly outraged, he hadn't sought vengeance. He hadn't relentlessly questioned his hospital room visitors about the investigation. Minogue seemed to have liked the lying in bed, the long afternoons reading in the hospital. His tall frame humping the sheets up, his head resting on a farmer's hand, his other hand holding a book. Minogue didn't shave for weeks. His wife, Kathleen, didn't fuss him.
