'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
