the killer could look in the clay for those two bullets easy enough… cool, calculating bastard,” Kilmartin murmured.
Minogue looked around the glade. It was easily fifty paces from the nearest path. A silencer would have done it handily. What the hell had Fine been doing here? Sitting reading a book? Had he come in here with the murderer, an acquaintance?
“All these bits of bushes and leaves and things here, signs that the killer tried to cover him up. Fine was shot here, fell there.” Boylan’s arm swept down slowly, finally. “Got two here in the neck. He was rolled here in under the bushes and hidden. Someone dug out the two slugs then, I’d say.”
“This is where he was shot,” Minogue repeated.
“No signs he was dragged in here, sir. He walked in.”
Minogue thought for several moments. “A detector here… on the way?”
“There is,” Boylan answered. “The third slug might be around.”
Minogue was irritated by the ‘slug’, less because it belonged on American television than because it sounded crude and blunt.
“How’d he get Fine down on to the beach, then?” asked Kilmartin. “We’re talking about a ‘they’ now, aren’t we?”
“More to the point,” Keating said, unconscious of any impertinence, “why?”
Kilmartin turned to the voices coming in from the path: four forensics, two of them carrying fat briefcases, the others lugging stakes and plastic shelters. One of the latter two unloaded nylon cord and orange stakes from a plastic bag.
“What time was this oul‘ wan out with the dog?” asked Kilmartin.
“Half-five, sir. Just before her tea. She said it sounded like someone slapping something off a tree trunk; like a whip, she said, or a piece of rope against the bark,” Keating replied.
That’d be a silencer for sure, Minogue pondered. A hollow crack, a thud.
“She doesn’t remember how many she heard exactly. Two or three, with a few seconds between one and then the other or others.”A few. “ She thought it was youngsters farting about in the woods. Her dog barked and ran into the bushes, barked and barked, and she had to call it back several times. She put the lead on him and went off home and thought no more about it.”
Close to eighteen hours before the discovery of Fine’s body, Minogue thought.
“Planned?” Kilmartin squinted at him.
“There’s the question, all right. I don’t rightly know.”
“A hell of a difference between being planned and being systematic,” Kilmartin growled. Minogue liked to believe then that what he heard in Kilmartin’s voice was disgust at how Paul Fine had been murdered.
“The elements of clumsiness and a definite hint of expertise as well… I don’t understand it. On the one hand he had the neck to hang around and recover the bullets. He may even have picked high-velocity bullets so he could get them after. How did he get his hands on a handgun and a silencer, not to speak of the ammunition? I don’t like the cut of this stuff: I keep on having these visions of diplomatic bags. Not in our league at all, at all. Something else, too, that I don’t much understand is, why the effort to recover the bullets unless he believed we had a chance to trace the weapon from the bullets?”
“Maybe he plans to hold on to the gun, or has to give it back to whoever he got it from, clean as he can,” Kilmartin suggested.
“We don’t even know if it was an automatic,” murmured Minogue.
“I’ll tell you this: if he was such a cowboy as to stay and get his bullets back, you can be damn sure he picked up any casings if it was an automatic. We can’t afford to say no to that,” warned Kilmartin.
“I know. But identifying the gun loomed big enough in the killer’s mind for him to stay around and tidy up for fear…”
“Get up the yard, Matt. We never get a ballistic match on a third of the firearms we recover for commission- of-crime weapons. If it was the Provos renting out guns to a freelance, they’d move the gun around afterwards. We’d never get to look at it, you can bet your bottom dollar,” said Kilmartin, interrupting Minogue’s speculation.
Kilmartin held his palm out and looked up at the greyed sky. Minogue saw a leaf shiver as a raindrop landed on it.
“For the love of Jases! Lads, lads,” Kilmartin turned to the men in the clearing. “It’ll be pissing now in a minute, can ye get a bit of shelter up quick?”
The detective wielding the cord nodded.
The rain hit Minogue and Kilmartin full before they were half-way back to the car. They shuffled under a chestnut tree. Minogue noting the brown edges on the leaves. Already, and it only the middle of September? The rain whispered through the undergrowth, creeping around the two men. A sparrow flitted by with a hoarse twitter.
“Whatever Fine was doing here, it must have taken a couple of people to carry him down to the beach. That has to be a quarter of a mile,” said Kilmartin.
“Clumsy, you’re saying,” Minogue suggested vacantly. The rain pleased him, that he should be marooned under a tree.
“Someone with enough nerve and training and motive to shoot Fine. He shoots Fine and then the panic sets in. It happens to anyone, no matter how expert, I can tell you. He tries to cover up the body. He’s in a hurry to get out of there. Off he runs. But later on he says to himself that maybe he should move the-”
“Or someone else says to him that the body can’t be left there,” said Kilmartin.
“Fair enough. It might even be a different fella or group who moves the body. I can take on the idea of a conspiracy then. But why can’t the body be left up on the Hill?”
“Too easy to find?”
“Maybe so, but-”
“People are always walking their dogs up there or taking their moths up there for a bit of you-know-what,” said Kilmartin.
“The oul‘ wan on Sunday evening didn’t have the nerve to go into the bushes after the dog,” Kilmartin continued.
“But why would the killer care if the body was found up there?” Minogue tried again.
“Jases, I don’t know. Yet, I mean. Maybe he didn’t want Fine found at all. So he goes back after dark and drags him down to where they can sling him into the water and hope the tide carries him out. High tide was eleven o’clock Sunday night, so the tide was on the way out at midnight until two o’clock in the morning. Maybe he knew that.”
“‘They’, ‘he’. I’d like to settle on one or the other. Try this one.” Minogue looked up toward the flickering leaves overhead. “He or they decided that Paul Fine mustn’t be found up there because he’d have been seen by other people up on the Hill before he was killed. Say he’s up walking around the park, he was to meet someone. Naturally we’d be appealing for any possible witnesses who were also up on the Hill taking the air that afternoon. What if he was with someone else, a someone who lured him into that spot where he was shot? Say the person he was with who did the killing?”
“Go on, so,” Kilmartin muttered.
“It fits so far, doesn’t it? The killer could have been close to Paul, so it could have been someone he knew or trusted. Now the killer doesn’t want us to find a Sean Citizen who can tell us he saw Paul Fine walking around with someone who looks like X. But if Sean Citizen sees us on the telly asking for anyone who might have seen Paul Fine whose body was washed up on the beach, he’d say to himself that he was up on the Hill, not on the beach, so what would he know?”
“They don’t want us knowing who Fine was with, the someone who might have killed him?”
“Or helped to kill him, Jimmy. The trouble is the intent, clear intent. Leave aside the motivation for a minute. The killer brought a gun, a handgun, and not to pick daisies with it. He or his cronies intended to kill Paul Fine. But he hadn’t planned on how to dispose of the body. So it was incomplete, the planning. That’s what bothers me. It was inopportune for them, time and place. Something must have happened to make the killing necessary.”
“What if the murderer is a real expert entirely? He could have been waiting his chance a long time and just picked Killiney Hill,” Kilmartin protested.
