sunny, dusty place.
“He said he’d like to try Canada. A lot of his friends from school went there. But he admitted that even there he’d probably still want out. Back to Dublin.”
“So you kept in touch with him when you came back here?” asked Minogue.
“Yup. Let’s get down to basics here now. For a while we thought there might be something for us. Together, I mean. For starters, I’m a shiksa.”
“A what?”
“A Gentile. A non-Jewish woman. A non-starter for marriage prospects. Well it didn’t work out, as you probably can guess. Paul was on the rebound from Lily. He was very hurt, very guilty. Lily is a tough piece of work. Tough but fair. He always said she was right to stick with her career, that he had agreed to try London, that her job was more important. No, it didn’t take with us and we knew it wouldn’t. We took the unusual step of staying friends. I actually got even more… fond of him. Me and my mother stuff. I wanted to help him, I think. That was two years ago.”
Did she know anything about Paul’s work in RTE, Minogue asked. Very little. He liked RTE but said that some of the other people there were hatchet-men. Meaning? Too keen for any story, ones with dirt, vendettas with the church and politicians. She didn’t mind that one bit, she said: it was about time. Had he mentioned what stories he was working on recently? No. What did he do at weekends? Another few seconds’ scrutiny of Minogue this time. Visited his parents sometimes, met her for dinner if she was in town. A film, a concert. Sometimes went away for a weekend to bed and breakfast it in Galway or Mayo. He liked the west.
“Didn’t he have school-friends or pals he went to university with? Wouldn’t they stick together socially?” Kilmartin risked.
“ ‘They?’ ” she asked acidly. “You mean Jews?”
Kilmartin blinked. Minogue heard his feet moving under the table.
“Paul Fine was a Dubliner. That’s not to lay claim to anything glamorous, I know, but maybe that was part of what I saw in him, my mothery business. The difference between him and my hus-my ex-husband-was that my ex expected me to mother him when he wanted it. Paul didn’t. If I don’t bowl men over and intimidate them, I seem to mother them to death. Paul didn’t fit so well. I think he slipped through the cracks here and there. Some people might call that backing away, but I wouldn’t. He wanted to escape a few things, not in a cowardly way though… I know he didn’t attend synagogue. His friends? I don’t know. They moved away. I’m talking about educated people, doctors and accountants and dentists and engineers. To the States and Canada, London. Paul stayed. That’s all. I suppose it was stubbornness and being one of the oldest Jewish families in Ireland. I’m sure that counted for something.”
Kilmartin asked about Paul’s Left-wing aspirations. Her face showed she was mastering the temptation to cut at Kilmartin again.
“It was an intellectual commitment. He was caught in a lot of ways. For example, he could agree intellectually about Begin and the Right wing in Israel being racists themselves. But you felt that if you pressed him, he’d want to say or feel something else. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“I think I do,” Minogue said.
“Maybe it was being Dublin more than, or as much as, being a Jew too. Ideologues don’t do very well in this city. There’s that saving grace of scepticism, isn’t there?” she said morosely. “So Left wing and Right wing is diluted here, maybe even dissolved. The tribal stuff predates it, the territorial bit too.”
She seemed to gather herself in a frown of concentration. “What I mean is that nobody that I remember pressed him or took him on as regards his opinions. You can tell your Special Branch pals that Paul was very uncomfortable with extremists.”
She glared at Minogue. Her anger fell away across her face then, as speculation and remembrance took over.
“One doesn’t argue the toss with an Irish Jew, you see,” she said resignedly. “And I think he knew that people would never bite him for his opinions the way we bite one another here. Yes, it is a ‘we’ and a ‘they’, isn’t it?”
“Strangers in a strange land,” Minogue murmured. He didn’t care that Kilmartin would take umbrage at his fraternizing with the enemy she had proved she was with her sarcastic remarks.
Mary McCutcheon blinked. Ash fell from her cigarette. “He used to say that too. As a sort of a joke. Where did you hear it?”
“I heard his father use the expression the other day,” replied Minogue. No one spoke then. Minogue mustered some energy to draw himself out of the swell of pity he felt approaching.
“Tell us, Mary, if you can, any conversations you had with Paul about the Middle East or Arabs. Any connections he drew between the Middle East and Ireland, say. Did he know any Arabs or the like here?”
Mary McCutcheon did nothing to ease Minogue’s discomfort at the vagueness of his fishing expedition. She smiled, as though disbelieving the claims of a suitor.
“Right now I can remember nothing. Nothing,” she replied slowly.
Kilmartin mimicked speaking slowly into a microphone and left to check in with Hoey on the radio.
“ I’d go for a dose of tea,” Minogue said. “How about yourself then?”
Her gaze told him that she had slipped into another domain, behind a curtain which the steady vein of cigarette smoke seemed to mark. She chewed distractedly on her thumbnail, the cigarette but inches away in the clasped hands she was now holding to her mouth.
Kilmartin was back before Minogue had settled down to the pot of tea. He motioned Minogue away from the table.
“Leave the tea and cakes routine now. They’re after turning up something in Killiney,” said Kilmartin.
“On the beach, is it?”
“No, up the hill in the park. An oul‘ wan phoned in this morning and said she heard something there on Sunday evening. You know Killiney Hill, the park and everything, don’t you?”
Minogue did. Hundreds of acres of park, woods and bushes stretched from Dalkey Hill across to Killiney Hill and then down into the village of Killiney. Parts of the park were precipitous and densely wooded, almost alpine. Minogue remembered tripping over courting couples in glades when he had strolled on the Hill previously.
“A bit wild, yes,” he said.
Minogue drove through the older part of the city, the Liberties, and joined the traffic swirling around Stephen’s Green. He dropped Mary McCutcheon at the top of Grafton Street.
“Can we reach you at work if you’re not at the other number?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she replied listlessly.
Her face was showing that blankness which Minogue recognized as the first tentative and dull comprehension that someone she knew and was close to was dead. He did not like leaving her on the street corner with the crowds of shoppers with their busyness and smiles to hammer home her shock.
“It’s all right. I’m going to the office now,” she rebuffed his stillborn words.
As neither Minogue nor Kilmartin had a handset, they became lost in Killiney Hill Park. Minogue strayed from the path and was rewarded by the sight of a uniformed Garda standing against a tree having a clandestine smoke. The Garda directed them to a small clearing. Keating and Boylan, from the Technical Bureau, were standing to the edge of the clearing. A man wearing white cotton gloves was squatting under brambles to one side.
“There’s a sample gone already, sir,” said Keating.
“Was there a lot of blood?” Kilmartin asked.
“A goodly amount soaked in here,” Boylan said. “There are signs that someone dug into the ground here looking for something. It wasn’t any animal either, it was someone looking for a particular thing.” Boylan pointed to the dark maroon patches which showed under the brambles. “A penknife or a stick or something, see?”
Kilmartin tiptoed a few steps in. The forensic expert obliged with a long white-gloved finger. He reminded Minogue of a magician or a Parisian waiter.
“Looking for the bullets, hah?” Kilmartin whispered close to Minogue’s ear.
“He must be an expert, then. He checked to see if they went through and then scuffled around to get them back,” said Keating.
“It’s unlikely that the shot in the head was done with Fine being obliging enough to lie down. So the killer wouldn’t be so damn perfect about that first one. Sure enough, if Fine got the other two after falling dead already,
