“None other. There’s a body lying out on the beach in Killiney. Washed up a half an hour ago. Dalkey station called about it. They have men there now.”
“Are they sure it’s not somebody sunbathing, now?” Kilmartin winked. He shot a stage glance at the grey sky over the rooftops outside his window.
Eilis blinked once and met Minogue’s eyes for a moment.“It seems unlikely. The person in question was shot in the head several times.”
At Minogue’s suggestion, Kilmartin had Detective Seamus Hoey drop them at Pearse Station. Shea Hoey showed no sign of surprise at being told to drive out to Killiney and meet the two officers there.
The regular, clean, fast service on the new Dublin Area Rapid Transit-the DART-trains still surprised and pleased Dubliners. Its efficiency silenced all but the irredeemable cynics, those inhabitants of the city who enjoyed Dublin the more for being able to find daily reminders of its chaos and decrepitude. Kilmartin had brought a posse of comments aboard the train.
“There’s no name for it though, is there?”
“For what?”
“Killing your husband. ‘Husbandicide’?”
“Try patriarchicide,” Minogue observed. The train hummed out from Ballsbridge Station. “Iesult reminds me about patriarchy every now and then. She’s a feminist.”
“Mmmm.” Kilmartin rubbed his nose.
“She frightens the daylights out of me half the time. I don’t know what she’ll do next.”
“Is she still with that odd fella?”
“Pat the Brain? She is still keen on him. I must say, I like him. He’s a droll character.”
Kilmartin grunted and looked out the window. The bay, a leaden sheet spread out to Howth, drew suddenly next to the railway line. Dublin Bay was darker than the sky, itself seamless and low.
“She admitted to sharpening the kitchen knife the day before too,” Kilmartin observed.
Minogue turned from the window. Kilmartin’s face was slack, eyes glassily fixed on the horizon. He too had been hypnotized by the sea. The tide brought ripples and gentle swells obliquely by the train. Minogue felt confused, pleased to be confused, by the motion of the train. What was it about trains that made a body feel removed from the local world?
“Look, Jimmy. She may not have consciously prepared for any crime. It may have been unthinkable, don’t you see, so another side to her took over.”
“Mad, you mean. She can’t plead that.”
Minogue refused to be drawn.
“She woke up in the middle of the night and she went to the kitchen, got the knife and… Bob’s your uncle. I hope she doesn’t claim she was in a trance or something. She must have been wide awake and calculating to stick him in the heart first time. You know how it is with an amateur-they’ll break a half dozen ribs before they get near the heart. But your man was asleep so she could find her spot and… Of course she might be used to killing farm animals or that, I suppose.”
Minogue imagined the deed. Ryan still in his clothes passed out, drunk, on the bed. Snoring probably. Marguerite Ryan can’t sleep. Something wakes her up… A knife in her strong, capable hands, she plunges it-
“Then thirty-six more for good measure,” Kilmartin murmured. “Seven or eight of those alone would have killed him, too. A tough piece of work, Mrs. Ryan.”
Kilmartin turned to Minogue as the train pulled into Seapoint Station. “Plenty of muscle on her after doing all the work on the farm, I’ll bet. And Ryan in the pub all day swallowing pints. Ha ha.”
Minogue did not think it wise to let Kilmartin in on the fact that Marguerite Ryan was a heroine in the Minogue household. Even Kathleen had sided with their daughter while Minogue tried to finish his breakfast faster that he might escape further wrath. He felt more than uneasy being held answerable for patriarchy Irish-style, as Iesult put it.
“Ah, but did you read the letters to the papers? Jesus wept. People putting pen to paper and saying she should be given the farm and not even charged with manslaughter. Sent back to her children and her house as if nothing had happened,” Kilmartin added in an aggrieved tone. He did not take his gaze away from the window.
Neither man spoke further until the train doors opened in Dalkey. A youth with a hair cut which reminded Minogue of a Mohican, but with wires trailing from both ears, slouched into the train. He sized up the two policemen, sneering a little, Minogue believed, and flopped as if shot into a seat. He twitched occasionally as he lay there and played chords with gusto on an imaginary guitar.
“Frankenstein,” Kilmartin muttered as they stepped on to the platform in Killiney. “Ask him if he can spell haircut.”
Minogue and Kilmartin trudged up the steps to the pedestrian bridge which led from the station to the beach. They paused on the bridge and saw again the orange markers, the dozen or so men standing near the plastic tarp. The orange seemed to be the only colour abroad that day amid the greys of beach and sea and sky. The beach was too soft to allow the Garda cars to drive out on to the sand.
“Never came to a murder site on a train before. Feels sort of classy, I must say,” declared Kilmartin. He looked to his watch. “Twenty minutes only. Gob, that’s fantastic entirely.”
Minogue nodded. The two laboured across a stony part of the beach. Kilmartin started with the two Gardai from Dalkey Station; Minogue went to the body. A light breeze was coming in off the water. Sea-smells, the soft lick of the water on sand. A district detective greeted Minogue by name but it took Minogue two tries to remember his surname.
“Gerry. Gerry Sweeny. Now I have it. Who’s this victim here, Gerry?”
“We don’t know yet. He has clothes on but there’s nothing in his pockets,” replied Sweeny. He hunkered down beside Minogue and drew the heavy plastic back from the face.
Minogue held his breath and let his eyes out of focus. The sound of the sea filled the air around him. He looked to Sweeny’s face and found that he too was grimacing. With a great effort Minogue looked to the face again. The wound over the left eyebrow had to be an exit wound: it was too large, too ragged to be otherwise. The dead man’s skin reminded Minogue of a fish. The gaping hole was now a lilac, blubbery flower on the man’s forehead. At least the seawater had washed him clean.
“There’s two on this side by the ear,” Sweeny mumbled. “They came out the neck on your side.”
Minogue didn’t want to push the ear back to see. “What?”
“This side, Inspector, there’s two distinct gunshot wounds here. As well as the one in the back of the head. Hard to miss that one, I’m telling you.”
Sweeny rose. His shoes crunched pebbly sand underfoot. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. Minogue stayed on his hunkers, already putting up that shield between his own shock and fear and the body which had been a living person. Still, he felt that alertness and dim excitement come to him as his horror gave way. He made a conscious effort to relax his eyes and let them wander about the body.
“Well,” he whispered. “I’ll stake money that this is a secondary site. I wonder how far away from here he was actually shot, though…”
“Beg your pardon, sir?” said Sweeny, swallowing.
Minogue didn’t answer. Already his trained eye was looking for ligature marks. He allowed his gaze to move slowly from place to place on the exposed skin. The abrasions looked postmortem, he thought. He took out a pencil and poked it under the dead man’s shirt, lifted the shirt-tail slowly, and immediately spotted the edge of a lividity which he guessed discoloured the back of the body completely. Minogue breathed out slowly through pursed lips.
“Ow,” said Sweeny.
“You’re telling me,” Minogue whispered. “He was lying somewhere for a while. That’s a start, I suppose.”
“But he’s not long in the water, I’m thinking,” said Sweeny.
Minogue nodded. He had seen no marbling on the neck at all. Easing the pencil out from under the flap of shirt, he replaced the plastic over the body, and felt the first currents of discouragement move in on his thoughts. Whatever physical transfers had occurred between the victim and the killer at the murder scene, he thought, had most likely been washed and scraped away by the sea.
“Wasn’t bound or anything when he was found?” Minogue heard himself ask.
