He shuddered as he changed gear for the first traffic lights on the outskirts of Bray. His armpits prickled. He couldn’t remember getting this far, just following the rush-hour traffic south on the Bray Rd. His face felt swollen with the sweat. He crunched third gear, missing the gate. The car felt strange to him still. Could the drivers next to him imagine what he had been going through, what he was still going through? He had found the shell casings, scrabbling in the grass and briars; he had rolled the body into the bushes. A dog barking somewhere, rustling in the foliage. People used this park, of course they did. Not of his choosing at all. Panic had burst like a flare in his chest, leaving every part of his body aching. Dog barking again, breaking the tremendous weight of silence of a warm autumn afternoon. Dull echoes of the thumps as he had fired still pulsed in his mind. Then looking up and seeing the child watching him. Luck? Paralysed, beyond any thought or action. Couldn’t touch the child. A boy dressed up in his Boy Scout uniform, stick in hand: there had to be more of these youngsters nearby. He remembered trying to smile at the boy but something was shouting inside his head, knowing he couldn’t control his facial muscles. The boy had moved off. Luck?
He accelerated with the green light and turned down toward the wasteland of rubble which girdled this corner of the town. He passed a metal foundry, long abandoned, where teenagers drank and pelted bottles against the few remaining walls, where bonfires scarred and blackened the stones, where rats scurried in the dock-weeds and scattered bricks and rubbish. It was tea-time, the lanes were deserted. Rusting hulks of cars stood in the nettles, by mounds of rubble. He eased the car over bricks and burst plastic bags full of refuse and steered toward a roofless building. Small shapes moved around the debris. The tyres spun as he worked the car over a concrete parapet where steel rails were still embedded. More car wrecks, many burned too.
Seize the chance, just go through with it. That’s how war is. War? He swore at the burn of confusion and anger which erupted around his heart. Struggling with a dead man down a hill in the hopes he’d never be found; nauseous with loathing and disgust and weariness, embracing the stubborn body of a man he had killed as though it were a penance. Cursing and praying, nearly in tears, stumbling with his load while everyone slept. Dark night of the soul, he had wondered later. The life of one man for the greater cause. One man-it was as though another voice had said that aloud next to him in the car. Panic and rage made a tremor race up his back. He cast a glance toward the covered body. Now it was two.
He stopped the car and switched off the engine. When he tried to move he found that he couldn’t. He bowed his head and prayed but the hands on the wheel remained as fists, tight and tighter as he struggled. Lucky, he thought again with savage irony. Lucky because he was still sane enough to get this far.
He checked his watch again. He imagined the body moving, rising, casting off the blanket, going for his throat. Less than an hour ago he had killed the other man who now lay huddled across the seat. The man had shouted once but the bar had thudded into the side of his turning head before he got his arm up. Hit him again, this time on his knees, putting him out. The film of yellow light had seemed to pulse and brighten as he had stood over the man, listening to the deep breaths whistling in his nose. He had fumbled the cord out of his pocket, finished him. Desperate then, feeling this could not be real, he had heard himself sob as he tightened the cord, his hands cramping with the strain until he let go at last. A blob of blood had issued from the man’s ear.
He had watched the street then, but no one had passed. He had opened the garage door, driven in the car, and swung the door down again. It had taken him ten minutes to wrap the body, drag it to the car and bundle it into the back seat. Then he had gone through the kitchen, cleaned the blood from the lino and latched the door. After that, he had driven away with his cargo, out into the beginnings of the evening rush-hour traffic toward the comfortable suburbs of Dublin’s south side…
He skirted the buildings and debris carefully, stopping to look back at the car. This needn’t have happened, he knew. He might have had an option, some hope of avoiding it, if that journalist hadn’t drifted in on the tide. He choked off the remorse with anger and looked about the site. Joyriders set fire to the cars they stole around here, he had heard. Beer cans lay heaped beside half-melted plastic cider bottles. He listened to the clacking of the suburban train, the DART, in the distance. The nearest houses were almost a quarter mile off. He looked back at the car again. People’d see smoke but the most they might do would be call the fire brigade. Even at that, the petrol would have done its work. Couldn’t wait, anyway.
He uncapped the petrol and doused the upholstery. The petrol soaked the blanket and began dripping on to the floor. He let the string into the can and drew it out slowly, looped one end around to the underside of the front seat and tied the other end to the top of a reinforcing bar which stuck out obliquely from the rubble nearby. Before lighting the cigarette he squeezed the string to make sure it was moist enough. Then he cupped clay and dirt into a small mound under the string. Slowly he plugged the cigarette into the clay. He left an inch between the smoking tip and the string. Four, five minutes, he thought. When he stood, the scene seemed to gather itself around him, crushing him. He felt his stomach stir with nausea. Dizzy, too, he breathed in deeply and rubbed his eyes hard. A funeral pyre, he thought, or a sacrifice. He forced himself to utter a short prayer. Through the fear and the unbelieving, as he heard his own heart beat loud, he knew that he had held fast. As grotesque as this was, as clumsy as it was, he had been lucky-blessed, perhaps-and he had held fast. He jogged across the acres of rubble and the derelict shells of factories, and headed for the train station.
The briefing ground on. Minogue could feel the bafflement, the tiredness of the detectives hanging in the air. While he waited for a pause in Gallagher’s delivery he watched a detective yawn.
“Will you run up a list of likelies from what ye know about extremists here who are interested in matters Middle Eastern?” Minogue asked finally. “Students and citizens not necessarily affiliated with Republicans here too?” he added.
Gallagher blinked and studied the table-top.
“I can put the request through the Palace in the Park to cover you,” Minogue said. He could think of no less ominous way to remind Gallagher that the request could have the Garda Commissioner’s scrawl on the end of it after going through his office in Garda HQ in Phoenix Park.
“Ah no, it’s not that,” Gallagher said awkwardly. “I know we have to get the lead out, and free up personnel and info if ye want it. I was just thinking ahead, trying to figure an easy way. We don’t have the files cross-indexed, you see. We go by names, we go by organizations. Then we have files from the Aliens Office for resident foreigners. I can run up a list, all right, but it’ll take time…”
“And the Ports of Entry data, to follow up on an in-and-out killer from abroad?” Minogue probed gently.
“To be sure,” Gallagher replied quickly.
Somebody’s belly rumbled, Kilmartin’s. “Jases! Did you hear that war-cry, lads? I could eat the cheeks off a Jesuit’s arse through the confessional grille.”
Whether planned or not, Kilmartin’s grumble loosened the tension which Minogue had felt settling after he had made his request for Branch material.
“How many students are we talking about?” asked Kilmartin.
“Students from the Middle East? I don’t know for sure. There are upwards of 200 Lebanese students here. I only know that because I heard it the other day. The Lebanese are very keen on university education. I don’t know what religion the Lebanese here are, even. I’d bet a lot of them are Maronites, Christians.”
“Libya. Syria. Places with big Muslim populations.”
“Iraq too? Do you want to know about Iran?”
Kilmartin looked exasperated enough for Gallagher to skip any answer.
“Here’s a rough guess then: 450. That’s a generous estimate. Included in that are militants and ordinary people who don’t beat any drums. You might find a PLO member and then you might find a member of the Irish- Arab society-both ends of the spectrum.”
“Right so,” said Minogue. “Let’s get on to specifics with this League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People, then.”
Gallagher sat back in his chair and tugged at his moustache. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything on them. I never heard of them-and I’m the expert,” Gallagher shrugged. “Are you sure you got the name right- the girl on the switchboard, I mean.”
“Shite,” said Kilmartin.
It was seven o’clock.
“Sandwiches?” asked Minogue.
“Hamburgers and chips,” Keating said.
Minogue caved in. “Let’s give ourselves a few minutes before we get down to brass tacks as to what we’re going to do here,” he murmured. He asked Hoey to copy the names from Fine’s index cards on to the blackboard.
