That’s odd. Why call then to claim responsibility?”
“Maybe they were going to call that time anyway,” suggested Keating. “We can’t be sure right now that it wasn’t coincidence.”
“The world treats persons who rely on coincidences rather harshly,” said Minogue. “I think they knew that Fine was to be found shortly or had just been found.”
“Couldn’t have anything to do with the oul‘ lad who saw him though,” said Kilmartin. “Seventy-odd years of age. He’s nothing to us at all, at all.”
“Yes, but why call if there’s no body? I mean, if they dumped Paul Fine in the sea so as he might float off and not be found… They must have known that the body would be found. Leave the motive for killing him in the first place: what does it say about the planning that went into the killing? They attempted to make the body disappear, to all intents and purposes. So why would they want to call and claim responsibility for a murder, when they didn’t want the body found?”
“Unless they saw, or knew about, the oul‘ fella finding him Monday morning,” said Kilmartin. He was beginning to enjoy himself, Minogue realized, speculating out loud, prodding discussion. Maybe Jimmy Kilmartin had longed to play second fiddle for a long time so that he could throw ideas around and not have to feel silly if they came to nothing? Or was there a little malice in it, seeing how much Minogue could stay on top of an investigation which looked like it could become an intractable mess?
“Or it means that the body wasn’t dumped that far away from where it was found,” said Keating vaguely. “It could have been pushed in from Killiney beach itself, and the tide didn’t do the job they hoped it would.”
“There’d have been people on that beach until dark,” said Hoey. “They’d have seen any body floating even fifty feet offshore.”
“But the point is,” Minogue tried to recover his thread, “if they had planned this killing and they really wanted to have the body disappear, they could have arranged that. So, the timing of this killing was not of their choosing, I think. It may be that there was no elaborate plan to kill Paul Fine at all.”
The policemen took turns scrutinizing the walls.
“What word from Pat Gallagher on the Ports of Entry lists?” Minogue tried.
“Em, nothing yet,” said Hoey quietly.
“Where’s this Mary McCutcheon one?” asked Kilmartin. “Someone has to know what Fine was at over the weekend.”
“She’s up in Sligo doing a story, sir,” said Hoey. “She’s to come down to Dublin on the train this morning first thing. She only heard about it last night herself. She’s a reporter for the Irish Times.”
“Is she his girlfriend or intended or what?” asked Kilmartin.
Hoey shrugged. “Paul Fine’s Da knew of her but never met her. Mickey Fitzgerald says that she was more or less Paul’s girlfriend. Ten ten, the train schedule says, in Kingsbridge.”
“She’s not a Jew, though,” Kilmartin observed. No one answered him.
“Nobody else know where he was over the weekend? Downey or Fitzgerald out in RTE? This man had no friends, is it?” complained Kilmartin.
“Still looking, sir. He seems to have kept to himself since he came back from London,” said Hoey.
“All right. We’re taking a radio car up to Kingsbridge, meet this Mary McCutcheon. The first thing you hear off anyone at the beach today, contact us. And get a hold of Sergeant Gallagher: try and get him over here by half- eleven, we’ll meet him here. Tell him we’ll be wanting to go through the universities today. Get every name off C3 lists for Republicans and Lefties with any connection-even rumoured- to Arabs or Muslims or Palestinians. Cross- check against students and radicals, look for any match-ups. Even for travels to any part of the Middle East. See if there are any gunmen after being released from Portlaoise prison this last while, any fellas that ever did freelance stuff.”
Minogue paused. “Do we have the manpower this morning, at the beaches and the coastal points?”
“Yes, we do,” Keating answered.
“So how does it feel to be in charge of a hundred Gardai? Didn’t I tell you that Hoey and Keating can do the brunt of it? How will they ever learn if they don’t get to do the real McCoy?”
“Right, Jimmy.”
Kilmartin slammed the door while Minogue extricated himself from behind the wheel. Minogue would not tell Kilmartin that it was he, not Kilmartin or Hoey or Keating, who had to answer finally to Justice Fine and a jittery Commissioner.
The Sligo train was not in yet but it was suggested that it was running on time. Kingsbridge Station would have been a jewel of a building had it been kept up on the inside over the last fifty years. Its Victorian mass had recently drawn film-makers to use parts of it, Minogue remembered. The station lay next to the Liffey within sight of the Phoenix Park. It was not near enough to the city centre for travellers’ comfort, neither was it sure of itself in any age which did not make much of the ceremony of train travel. The quays next to the station were suffused with the sulphurous stink of the Liffey, long an open sewer, and the tangy hop smell of the Guinness brewery. Minogue, climbing out of his sleep even yet, did not welcome the characteristic Dublin stink.
“Are we going to hold a sign up with her name on it, like at the airport?” asked Kilmartin. The noticeboard clicked overhead.
“Is that the Sligo job on the way in?” Kilmartin asked a passing porter.
“Sligo and Donegal,” the porter drawled, content that he was addressing a policeman from the provinces-a culchie-who might not yet know that no trains went to Donegal.
Mary McCutcheon walked straight to the two policemen.
“Are we that obvious?” Kilmartin asked astringently.
“I’m a reporter,” she answered. Minogue introduced himself and Kilmartin, skipping the ranks. She looked like she hadn’t slept and didn’t care that she hadn’t. She smoked, inhaling the smoke deeply as though to still her darting eyes. There was something mannish about her, Minogue believed. Stayed up late, no stranger to a gin and tonic? She wore cord jeans and a blouse which looked like a shirt.
Mary McCutcheon hoisted her bag better on her shoulder and walked between the two men. “It hasn’t sunk in with me yet,” she said to neither of them. “That much I’m sure of.”
Her eyes were yellowed but still intense, with dark-bluish marks under them. Middle thirties, Minogue guessed, glancing at her again. Runs herself hard.
“Thanks for coming down so quickly,” Minogue said. “Will you tell us where you last saw Paul?”
“Last week. Wednesday. We met in Gaffney’s pub about eight.”
“Was it a date, like?”
She smiled grimly up at Kilmartin. “To anyone else it might have been. We’re old friends, put it like that. We work in the same business, more or less.”
It took considerable probing from Minogue to get by Mary McCutcheon’s edges. She seemed to lose her caution when Minogue told her that yes, Paul Fine had been shot to death. She shook herself abruptly once more after that news, when Minogue mentioned who had claimed responsibility in the call to the Press. “I heard that,” she murmured, stabbing her cigarette at the ashtray: they were in the buffet now. “Who or what the hell are they? My first reaction is not to believe it,” she said.
After a challenging look to both men she lapsed into an account of herself and Paul Fine. She was separated from her husband, who still lived in London, just like Paul’s ex-wife Lily.
“We met over there, two peas just out of our pods. There was a crowd used to go to the navvies’ pubs where we could expect to find Irish people. He was trying to sort out what he wanted and I was trying to forget my fella. Hilarious, you’re thinking. What was funny was that we both admitted that we missed Dublin terribly, more than we ever expected. You’ve seen what the city has turned into here: the back-biting and the knocking and the booze and the poverty… all that. This damn town is rotten with journalists and only a few are worth not slamming the door on. Sounds pretty flimsy, doesn’t it? Like a bad cliche-‘You don’t miss the place until you leave it.’ I don’t know.”
She looked around the buffet as if targeting something to comment on.
“Neither of us really knew what it was that dragged us back to this place. I took a drop in pay for the privilege of living here and getting taxed to hell and back again. That’s what seemed funny to us then. We didn’t believe in that emigrant nostalgia shit, but it happened. Dublin. He was Dublin for generations, a Dublin Jew. Me, I’m Wicklow about fifteen years back. Paul had been to Israel and the States.”
Minogue remembered the picture of Paul Fine standing with his parents in front of a pile of stones in some
