was pinned to the partition in front of the desk with postcards and cartoons next to it. There were several receipts and credit-card flimsies in the drawer, none less than a week old, and pens, pencils and biros in profusion. Minogue noted the Access card number to check for attempted uses since Fine’s death, and found a slip of paper with two names on it. He was able to read one of the names directly: H. All. The other looked like Khatib. Sounded Arabic, too. Surnames? He copied them.
Minogue pocketed the copybooks and flattened them in the inside pocket of his jacket. He handed the two card indexes to Hoey who promptly stuffed one in each pocket.
Minogue locked the desk. He found Fitzgerald with his head encased in headphones the size of polite teacups behind the glass wall of a studio.
“I’m holding on to the key,” said Minogue. “It’s out of your hands for the moment, but thanks very much for acting promptly and securing what may be valuable clues. It may prove useful, I don’t know. There’ll be a detective back to go through the stuff properly. Phone me if you have something, would you? Questions, recollections, anything you hear. Complaints too, if you want.”
Fitzgerald nodded without removing the apparatus. As Minogue turned away, Fitzgerald beckoned to him and he pried one of the headphones away from his ear.
“Do you have anything to do with the Ryan business down in Tipperary?”
“I did,” replied Minogue.
“We’re going to be having a WAMmer here for a live interview about twenty after. Do you know of the Women’s Action Movement?”
Minogue nodded but didn’t take the bait. “I’d better make haste then,” he murmured.
“Aha, I see. I just wanted a detail cleared up. Someone suggested it to me last night and it stuck in my head. You know how everyone has an opinion on this-whether it should be considered murder and all that?”
“All we do is give our evidence to our department up in the Park. They process it, file evidence, word it and then they throw it to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP lays the charges on behalf of the State.”
“OK. I know for a fact that this woman from WAM is going to be talking about the case being a psychological watershed.”
Minogue thought of incontinence. “What’s a psychological watershed when it’s at home?”
“The Ryan woman killing that husband of hers, fighting back. All the claims about wife abuse in holy Ireland. The line you’ll hear this evening will be about a revolution in Irish life, women not taking it any more from Church or State or husband.”
Minogue fixed on Fitzgerald’s ‘line’. Everything was a ‘line’ in this racket, then. Minogue knew the fascination which the Ryan case seemed to hold for many people all over the country and he was suspicious of it. Jimmy Kilmartin himself, that distant look in his eye, was that a portent of ‘a psychological watershed’?
“It’s the whole bit about the strong woman figure in the Irish psyche, I was told last night. That’s what strikes a chord with everyone,” Fitzgerald continued. “So tell me, do the Gardai recognize any significance in how Fran Ryan was killed?”
“He was stabbed to death with a kitchen knife,” Minogue replied cautiously. “Not on any altar of sacrifice or anything. No incantations or signs painted on the wall…”
“Yes, but how many times?”
“Ah, I bet you know yourself, Mr. Fitzgerald.”
“Thirty-seven, am I right?”
“You are,” replied Minogue.
“So yous don’t see any significance or ritual thing about that?”
“To do with where the planets were, is it?” Minogue tried.
“No. Fran Ryan was thirty-seven when he died.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Minogue and Hoey were five minutes late for the meeting. Minogue guessed Gallagher for the one who looked like a graduate student, subtly raffish and smart, mustachioed and clad in denim. Kilmartin was whispering with a sergeant whom Minogue recognized as a forensic technician who was always trying to organize golf tournaments which were a cover for lengthy booze-ups.
He walked to Gallagher and introduced himself. Gallagher’s accent was the faintly interrogative earnestness of Donegal.
“You don’t mind guiding these fellas here through your stuff too, do you?” asked Minogue as he glanced around the room. “We’re all off the Squad here. Keating. That’s Shea Hoey there I came in with. The world and his mother knows Jimmy Kilmartin, I’ll bet: ‘The Killer’ himself. The one he’s talking to has a preliminary from the scene and we’re waiting for anything from the autopsy. It’s early days yet with the pathology, though, so we shouldn’t be expecting anything proper until later this evening.”
Gallagher stroked his moustache. “I can give you the broad picture, but this League crowd… I might as well tell you now, I never heard of them.”
“Well, tell us about the overall situation, then, will you?” He felt drowsy. Now.
Kilmartin lumbered over as Minogue took his seat. “You have a green light,” he confided. “God Almighty was on the blower to me an hour ago. ‘Results!’ says he. You know what that means: steam-roller. The pressure is on, man.”
Kilmartin glanced quickly in Gallagher’s direction. “If that Gallagher drags his heels or sulks a bit, I’d bite him,” he said slowly.
Gallagher stood and nodded at Minogue.
“We’ll start, so,” said Minogue.
Minogue drew several circles around ‘9mm’. He drew squares around ‘. 30,’ ‘. 32- 7. 62, ’7. 65 mm‘.
“Whatever calibre it was, the gun was fired from between one and two feet away. Few particles in the scalp, a radius of nearly four inches. Very little scorching within that area. Em…” The assistant to the State Pathologist was reading from handwritten notes in a binder. “The first shot killed him. Instantly. A subsequent shot took a piece of vertebra here. A shot to the neck blew out the artery. The blood loss has to be a consequence of how the body lay after the shooting.”
He turned to the overhead projector and used his pencil to home in on a point on the diagram. To Minogue he looked like a younger Vincent Price. The upward glow from the apparatus high-lighted his face and the smoke being drawn like a silk scarf toward the fan beneath the projector. The smell of hot plastic and cigarette smoke mixed with the odour of stale clothes-his own? he wondered-had made Minogue sleepy. He looked to the probable height of the killer, an estimate of the angle of entry for the first shot. Fine was five foot ten in his socks, the angle no more than thirty degrees before the bullet went slightly awry. The one who fired the gun had to be no smaller than five foot eight… if he or she was standing in ordinary shoes, on a spot level with Fine. Sitting, though? If Fine had been sitting down? Minogue’s mind reeled.
“How about him being shot as he sat down?” Hoey said.
The assistant turned to the projector again and waved his pencil over shaded areas on the figure.
“We can’t tell from the bruising here if-do you see those bruisings there over the forehead? Well the drawing, I mean, obviously-he banged his head after being shot and falling to the ground. In a chair, say, he’d pitch roughly forward, then to one side when his upper body’d meet with his knees and… it’d take us a while to suggest probabilities. One thing worthy of mention, as I was saying earlier, was the degree of bruising. With the possible exception of that bruise near the hairline, the bruises were occasioned after death. None is severe and that is important.”
Occasioned. I like that verb, thought Minogue.
“It’s safe to say that the victim was not intentionally clobbered or abused at all. The motion of the water and the nature of the materials on the water’s edge accounts for the abrading and slight bruising which forms nearly all of what we’re talking about.”
Tides, thought Minogue. Time and tide wait for no man. Time of death (he remembered the feeble attempt at humour on that: ‘Ah now lads, no miracles, please’) was between eighteen and twenty-four hours of the time of
