“That too. And the nerve of him, coming back and trying to mine them for touchy info that could land them in trouble,” Hoey continued.
“And being as they are very put-out about bourgeois backsliders, and paranoid by nature…”
“A hothead says that Fine is now an agent of the imperialist running-dog whatever, by way of being a traitor too, I suppose. What do you think?”
“I have little enough insight into the paranoid mind, but you may have something. When did they call the Press?”
“Close on half-ten.”
Half-ten, Minogue echoed within. Last seen by Miss Connolly on Sunday morning. No more than twenty-four hours in the water.
“How do tides work, Shea? I mean, if you threw something or somebody into the water, would it be washed up in the same place it was thrown in, if the tide was coming in, like?”
“I haven’t a clue. I believe that a tide will do different things depending on the lie of the land around the coast. It’s a shocking complicated business.”
Hoey turned off Nutley Avenue and into RTE.
“Do you know what, though?” Hoey murmured. “Aside from this crap about ‘working against the cause’ or whatever-I mean to say, that’s a mystery until we find out more about what Fine was up to that might have rubbed someone the wrong way-I wonder why they didn’t call until the Monday morning, and him being murdered already on the Sunday? Maybe they had some crooked reason, I don’t know. Do you think they knew the body would be washed up?”
“You have me there,” Minogue replied.
Beyond the barrier and the security guard at the entrance to Radio Telifis Eireann, Minogue phoned to confirm a five o’clock pow-wow on the Fine murder. As the murder appeared to have been committed in Dublin, the State Pathologist could autopsy the body. Minogue had not seen a coroner out on Killiney strand before he and Kilmartin had left for the hotel. They might not have bothered to have him come to the scene: gunshot wounds on a body, along with ‘clear signs of wounds from the effects of an explosive detonation’, were at the top of the list for mandatory post-mortem examination. By five o’clock today Minogue would have something from the Technical Bureau’s forensics, those incongruous boiler-suited men who had inched and kneeled their way over the beach. These scenes-of-the-crimes examiners knew of but didn’t much like the name which Minogue most often heard them referred to: bagmen.
Mickey Fitzgerald had to be paged from the security desk which met the visitors to the RTE radio building. Minogue spent the two minutes’ wait gawking at the employees who entered and left the building. Hoey jabbed him in the arm once and nodded toward a duo of stylish men leaving.
“That’s your man, what’s-his-name. Reads the news most days.”
“Him?”
“Yes. The one with the baggy suit that looks like wallpaper.”
“The up-to-the-minute Italian suit that costs three hundred quid, you mean. Sinnott?”
“Yep.”
Fitzgerald was a tall, skinny man with a beard. A few strands of grey stretched out to the fringe which almost touched the rim of his wire spectacle frames. Minogue thought of John Lennon. Fitzgerald shook Minogue’s hand.
“I know you,” he said and turned to Hoey.
“Detective Officer Seamus Hoey, also of the Investigation Section,” said Minogue.
“Ah, what a relief it is,” Fitzgerald said without any evident humour. “At least yous’re not part of An Craobhinn Aoibhinn.”
Minogue rather liked the caustic sarcasm. This nickname for the Special Branch had little to do with the mythical ‘Sweet Branch’, the fount of turn-of-the-century irredentist poetry with the mists of the Celtic Revival swirling about it.
“Were you expecting a bust of some type, Mr. Fitzgerald?” Minogue probed.
“We police ourselves here, lads,” Fitzgerald replied with more cynicism than coyness this time.
Minogue did not take up the bait. He would be no match for Fitzgerald as he, Fitz, presumably knew every in and out of the Broadcasting Act. A section of this act forbade RTE from airing interviews with members of proscribed organizations. Successive Irish governments had consistently subscribed to the notion that what didn’t appear on television could not exist in the minds of television viewers.
On this issue, executives in RTE were uncertain how to react. They were partly flattered by the implication that television was such a powerful medium of communication; they also took it for granted that, unlike the US, their Irish fellow-citizens knew there was life outside television. Rather than have a Minister slap an order on the service over any particular item, therefore, RTE had undertaken to keep its censorship in-house.
Fitzgerald led the two policemen through the building and toward the current affairs workroom. His department consisted of a huge room held in by walls of glass. Minogue decided not to make a comment about glass houses. The room was sectioned off by cloth-covered room dividers and desks stood in cosy spaces created by the high squares of orange and blue. It was all very modern, very dynamic, Minogue believed.
Less than half the desks they passed were occupied. A cluster of people sat at and around one desk, smoking and talking in low tones. They fell silent and looked to the policemen as they passed. Typewriters clacked at a distance. A radio was playing reggae music. Posters extolled visits to Madrid and an exhibition of Escher drawings which had come and gone at a Dublin gallery six years previously.
Fitzgerald stopped by one desk.
“That’s Paul’s. I put all his stuff in the drawers and that vertical cabinet there and I locked them. That was yesterday when I heard the news.”
He looked blankly to Minogue who was aware of the group still staring at them.
“And you have the keys?”
“I have. I swept his stuff off the desk and stuffed it all into his drawers and cabinet. The newsroom heard it first and a fella came over to us. We were terribly shocked here, just couldn’t believe it. Even with my expert knowledge of police procedure from watching the telly, it took me ten minutes to get my head together and fix up his desk. Hardly anyone here locks their desks. I turned the keys and put ‘em in me pocket.”
“Good man. I’ll be wanting to look at this stuff later, Mr. Fitzgerald,” said Minogue.
“And I’ll be wanting a list and a receipt detailing anything you take,” Fitzgerald replied.
Minogue looked back to the silent group and met their gaze for several seconds.
“I have me own private cell over here,” said Fitzgerald.
Seated in Fitzgerald’s office, Minogue took in the furnishings while Fitzgerald phoned for Brendan Downey. When Downey appeared, Minogue recognized him for one of the group huddled about the desk outside.
“What did Paul Fine do here, as regards his job?” Minogue asked then.
“He was a reporter/researcher: that’s his job description. He’d be one of eight people who works for the producer, i.e. me. He was a journalist and a reporter. Basically he would have called himself a journalist. He had been on the afternoon programme-”
“Day by Day?”
“Good for you, Inspector. We squeeze in segments of between five and ten minutes’ live time. It’s a magazine format that takes us to news-time on this channel.”
“To the Angelus, you mean,” said Minogue.
It was hard to tell what went on behind the beard, Minogue realized, but he believed that he saw Fitzgerald’s amusement push his glasses up slightly. Fitzgerald had made no secret of his opinions on institutions like the Catholic church. Minogue struggled to recall when it was that several bishops had jointly written an open letter to the newspapers, complaining about a sinister anti-clerical undertone to many current affairs programmes on RTE radio. To the credit of the Director General, he had asked them for proof. In a religion which regards the notion of ‘proof’ as an upstart provincial relative to horned heresy-stigmata, moving and bleeding statues excepted-this was an impertinence. Fitzgerald, a tenacious weed, still held his job.
“True for you. Sort of sets the tone for the news, wouldn’t you say?” said Fitzgerald.
Minogue almost smiled. Fitzgerald was no more than forty. He’d have allies, a common passion, support now. Minogue could remember the dull bells of the Angelus broadcast forty years ago in that pious, somnolent Ireland,
