Christian Brothers and necessarily been sickened by the posturings of their politicians before looking for their vengeance. Fitzgerald and company, the bishops and the politicians who doffed their hats to the clerics yet-they were all part of a family squabble. Fine was outside that fold.
Minogue heard Hoey trudging back up the stairs.
“Sergeant Gallagher says McDonald’s in Grafton Street, about three, if that’s all right,” said Hoey cautiously.
Minogue wanted to laugh away the sudden irritation. “You’re not serious.”
“He says to phone him if that doesn’t suit. That’s the Branch for you, staking out their territory. He says he works out of a car most days anyway, but he carries the stuff in his head.”
“What about the Fitzgerald fella, our television guru?”
“His programmes go on the air at five, and he says he needs to be at the controls for some of the live interviews. He’ll be there all afternoon.”
Minogue didn’t know what to do about Gallagher. Would he have to take him in hand already?
“How did you get Gallagher?”
“I phoned Branch HQ here and they radioed him. He phoned from somewhere, to the phone below here, I mean.”
“I see, says the blind man… Well, would you get him for me on the phone, Shea? Tell him I want to talk to him myself.”
The beginnings of a smile pushed at Hoey’s cheeks.
Minogue gathered the video-tapes and cassettes awkwardly under his arm. Keating could go through the folders of clippings. Maybe the bulk of Fine’s work would be in his office in RTE. Closing the door, Minogue hoped that his assumption was not leaking too badly yet: that Paul Fine’s work had had something to do with his death. He did not want to believe that Fine had been singled out as a Jew alone, a cipher for some group, to be murdered for being a Jew. But an Irish Jew… what would that group want with killing him for that? To prove that no Jew the world over was immune from Palestinian wrath, that the Palestinians had allies all over the world? Minogue’s mind lurched into crackpot associations.
He made his way down the stairs. That madman in Libya… a favour in return for guns to the Provos? It could be a message to the State’s judiciary too, the ones who had reluctantly ruled that the Offences Against the State Act, the most powerful and abused legislative weapon against the IRA, was constitutional. Madness. But hadn’t there been several prominent British Jews assassinated in the Seventies? No wonder Jimmy Kilmartin had waved him on with this one, bad ‘cess to him.
The Garda who had been questioning Miss Connolly met Minogue in the hall. “You were right, sir, she doesn’t miss much.”
Hoey reached for the telephone as it rang.
“Run that through a typewriter, like a good man,” Minogue said to the Garda. “And shoot it up to John’s Road for my attention. Investigation Section.”
Hoey held a hand over the receiver and waved it at Minogue.
“Get it hand-delivered before tea-time this evening too, if I can put you to that trouble?”
The Garda hid his resistance well.
“It’s a tall order, I know, but the matter could be urgent in the extreme.”
Minogue took the phone and listened. A bus or a lorry passed close to where Gallagher was making his call.
“Sergeant Gallagher? Matt Minogue. Yes, yes, and how are things with you, now? I’m running an investigation on this murder of the judge’s son, Paul Fine. Did you know about it, a possible connection with some Palestinian group or the like here? You did? Oh, the Commissioner’s office, were they?”
Minogue listened to Gallagher while Hoey leaned against the door-frame, his arms folded. Minogue winked at him and Hoey’s smile broadened. It was seldom that Gardai, even the crime ordinary detectives from the Central Detective Unit in the Castle, could twist arms with the Branch. Such was the guile within Minogue’s Trojan Horse of charm-and no small store of charm it was, in an island where charm was a currency both inflated and squandered- that he had made an informal liaison with Special Branch officers to crack the Combs case.
“Is that a fact…? Well, you know how it is when they get a fire lit under them. Lookit, are you a Gallagher from Gweedore? You are? From Falcarragh, go on, are you? God, there are terrific hurling athletes being bred in that little Eden, amn’t I right? Well, I’m in a considerable hurry with this information and I have to be in the RTE studios within the hour… Is there any chance you could sit in on a meeting here say, five or so? Yep, our HQ’s in John’s Road. Good man, so.”
Minogue took Miss Connolly’s key to Fine’s flat before he left.
“Essential it remain undisturbed until we go through the effects in detail, Miss Connolly. Now if you remember anything which perhaps you hadn’t thought of in your chat with the Garda or myself here, phone this number immediately, if you please.” Minogue handed her a card which said ‘ Investigation Section’. “Be it ever so small, it may still be important. There’ll be a policeman by with this key, probably in the morning. Be sure and ask for his identification if you’re in any doubt. A youngish fella, Detective Officer Keating, and he’ll be making a detailed examination of Mr. Fine’s effects. He looks a bit like… how would you describe him, Shea?”
“He’s a bit like that fella, what do you call him… Redford. Robert Redford,” Hoey said earnestly. “Did you ever hear of?”
“The film star?” Miss Connolly asked.
“That’s the one,” Hoey concluded without a trace of humour.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hoey bought fish and chips in Ringsend village, and they ate them while driving out on the Coast Road. Hoey turned up through Sandymount and landed on the Merrion Road within sight of the television mast which marked RTE but two miles away.
“Little enough in the flat, so,” said Hoey.
“I didn’t find what I was looking for in the line of pads of paper and appointment books. I’m hoping his desk has more of that class of stuff,” Minogue replied. “Plus there are those tapes. God knows how many hours of stuff is on them. He might have kept memos on tape.”
“No word-processor or magic computer in the flat,” Hoey added. “I thought they all had them now. Anyone in touch with his wife, his ex-wife? She’s in London, isn’t she?”
“Justice Fine said he’d have to phone her,” Minogue replied slowly. “But I was just wondering to myself… how to hell we can get started on this.”
“Motives, you mean?”
“Yep. I can’t see the killer. I just can’t. We need something a lot more direct than some phone call from a group of I-don’t-know-whats. Any iijit can make a telephone call. Did you get the text of what was said?”
“ ‘ This is the voice of Free Palestine. We are the League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People’… hold on, what did they… Oh yes: ‘ Let the world take note.’ No- hold on a minute, they mentioned Fine at the end… ‘ no spy or aggressor who works against the cause of Palestinian freedom and justice is safe from retributing. Fine has paid the price. ’ Some mouthful, that.”
The ‘freedom and justice’ soured Minogue more than most cliches.
“But, just for the sake of argument,” said Hoey, “don’t fanatics get very het-up if one of their members sorts out his head and leaves them? Say if Fine was a Leftie back in university, but now he meets his old cronies, Palestinian sympathizers even, and antagonizes them with common sense?”
“Go on,” said Minogue.
“Well, Fine might have rubbed shoulders with radicals back then, maybe stayed in touch with them. Say he meets up with some of them again and says he’d like a contact to someone who knows anything about links between, I don’t know, Libya and the IRA… So they look him up and down, thinking to themselves, well this Fine boy is gone very, let’s say middle-class-”
“Bourgeois.”
