Nonetheless, Jimmy Kilmartin was not unaware of Chief Supers and Assistant Commissioners grumbling that their respective divisions should shortly have enough trained personnel for murder investigations and that they’d be needing Dublin-based expertise infrequently. This was so because Gardai circulated through the Investigation Section as trainees, learning the trade and returning to their divisions. Kilmartin had been canny enough to spot trainee talent and thus promptly appropriate detectives like Seamus Hoey, a brawny and sometimes moody Galwegian who had been stationed in Athlone, the most boring town in Ireland. Hoey soaked up information like a sponge and listened to everything. Kilmartin and Minogue had learned to be alert when Hoey began his sentences with the roundabout bashfulness of: “Well, you may think this is a bit odd of me to be bringing this up here and now but…”
Detective Garda Keating was more obviously methodical and he liked to bear the cross of filtering through enormous amounts of data. Keating was so enamoured of the new age that he had bought an expensive computer for his own use and had taught himself many things in his spare time at home. He had unwisely mentioned his purchase to Eilis in one of their almost sibling squabbles. Keating, a bachelor younger and less understanding than Hoey, had some vague notion that Eilis was to be fenced with because she was unmarried and not unattractive.
“A computer, is it,” Minogue remembered Eilis saying. “Can’t you go out and throw yourself at girls and disport yourself like a normal buck and not be sitting at one of those things getting a humpy back and a low sperm count with the radiation?”
Keating liked to be given impossible tasks with large amounts of information to immerse himself in: Photofit and Identikit features, car registration plates, clothing manufacturers’ weaves of synthetic materials, bank account transactions from ten years ago-all brought a frown to his features until he was actually in the search and enjoying the impossibility of his task away from superiors who expected him to admit it would be easy for him.
Minogue saw that Hoey had not shaved, and he guessed that he had kipped down for part of the night on a couch in the First Aid room on the ground floor. Hoey had his feet up and was smoking. If this was co-ordinating a task force of policemen, Minogue wanted to be thus trained.
“Well, Shea. You heard there may be another out in Bray?”
“Yep. The Killer phoned a minute ago to say it’s 90 per cent sure it’s a murder. The fire was started with petrol sprinkled inside the car, he thinks. Or the firemen in Bray think so.”
The Killer was Kilmartin. Minogue had heard that his own nickname, very infrequently applied because it had never caught, was Moonie.
“Have we anything from the men posted at the beaches?”
“No. There was one oul‘ lad complaining about teenagers interfering with one another and drinking Johnny- jump-up on the beach all summer. Nothing at all off Killiney beach proper. I’ve heard nothing from Killiney Hill Park, the site, either. They hit a few bits of metal with the detector but all they have is hairpins and bits of things. How do you like that for news?”
“And Paul Fine’s tapes?”
Hoey picked up a page with a handwritten list inscribed on it. He handed it to Minogue.
“Keating has three fellas now doing the videos and the cassettes again. He’s out in Fine’s flat himself, fighting off pots of tea from her nibs, Miss Connolly. I think maybe we were fibbing about him looking like Charlton Heston in the Moses film. Maybe she expected him to arrive out in one of those short little skirts the men used to wear then. I’m going by the pictures from the Catechism, do you remember?”
“Will I ever forget?” Minogue murmured the stock answer as he looked down the list. Interviews with politicians about the upcoming Ard Fheis, the party-in-government’s convention. There was almost one hour with members of the Irish-Arab Society. There were no interviews with Arab students. A ten-minute telephone interview with a David Thornbury, chairman of Middle Eastern Studies at Sussex University. Scatty interviews, taken on the hoof apparently, with bus drivers and conductors in Dublin about what they thought of the forthcoming strike. A half-hour with a self-help group of former psychiatric patients in Limerick. That’d be what Fitzgerald called his fairy stories, the good news.
“Thirteen hours in total. There’re no interviews with any of those Arab lads Gallagher was interested in after he saw Fine’s index. It looks like they were on the level about not knowing Fine. He must have been just starting out, getting names like we keep on being told. Still and all, he must have done some research or reading up on his topics, though, because… remember the newspaper references on his index of topics and stories?”
Minogue nodded.
“He must have made notes. Keating might find ‘em out in the flat. Or Murtagh, in his desk over in RTE…”
“Did we have any call-ins from the radio and telly appeal last night?”
“Let me see. I think there were three or four only last night and… upwards of ten so far today. We’ve followed up on seven of them altogether. There was a fella worked the ticket office in the train station out in Dalkey on Sunday. He thinks it might have been Fine that came through the turnstile, he says, but he’s not so sure. He saw the photos that were dropped off at all the stations. It was his missus that phoned us up; he didn’t think it was worth bothering about because he was dithering. The rest are people to do with places along the coast. Walking on the beach on Sunday evening, some of them. Fella in Bulloch harbour saw a boat going out late that night. Nothing yet.”
“So we still can’t place Paul Fine after he left his flat Sunday morning,” Minogue said gloomily.
“Not yet, sir. One of the callers-called in last night about eleven-asked for ‘the Investigating Officer’. Switchboard gave out your name but when we couldn’t give you to him on a plate he put down the phone.”
“What about those other tapes, those video-tapes from the flat? What’s on them?”
“Right,” said Hoey, swinging his feet off the desk. “I nearly forgot. They’re all off the telly. RTE programmes too, current affairs and news. Bore the arse off you, it would. The economy, unemployment… discussions off talk- shows with bigwigs out of different parties. There are-hold on, I’ll get the sheet four segments on the last Ard Fheis, last year’s, with the Chief whipping up the party faithful and promising the world.”
Minogue could imagine the scene on the video. Ireland’s Taoiseach, the Prime Minister, the Chief with his devious hawk face to match his manner and his past-a buccaneer Nero-taking the applause of sycophants.
“I watched some of them myself last night,” Hoey continued. “Had a bit of a laugh, I can tell you. There was one good one actually; maybe I shouldn’t say good one. Do you remember that series, last year, on the security situation?”
Minogue did. Having met Mickey Fitzgerald since, he could imagine Fitzgerald’s hand in such a series, even though it was on the television. A memo had been circulated right to each Garda and clerical worker in the Force after that series. The memo cautioned them that information and opinions about security and policing were not to be given out to members of the Press or the public. The programmes had made much of leaks from disgruntled Gardai doing Border duty and oblique grumbles that the Army felt ill-equipped to detect and deal with incursions by British army units into the South.
“Well, you had the Minister for this and the Minister for that, the Opposition shouting blue murder and the rest of it. Maybe Fine was trying to resurrect the issue again-that’s what the media do, isn’t it? Keep things on the boil and come back to heat up the same issues if they’re in danger of cooling down too much.”
“I suppose,” replied Minogue. “Still nothing on video to do with Arabs or students?”
“No, sir. I had a fella go to the archives in RTE. He’s to see if Fine was looking through any material to do with his stories. I found out they keep records of requests, you see.”
“Good for you. It’s as well one of us is wide-awake, Shea,” murmured Minogue.
Minogue perused his copy of the autopsy report from the State Pathologist’s office. Entry wound was consistent with impact and penetration by a high-velocity bullet. Gun could have been discharged up to two feet from the head…
Minogue then tried reading between the lines of the appended comments from the ballistics section of the Technical Bureau. The commentary seemed to have a strained, reluctant tone. Minogue wondered if this was an elaborate way of saying they had nothing with which to direct the investigation from a forensic viewpoint here. Most probably a. 38 or. 30, 32 calibre. What was that in the metric again? Minogue flicked the page and consulted the small box-chart for conversion:. 38 was 9mm, 30 was 7. 62mm, 32 was 7. 65. The bullets were almost certainly of fully jacketed construction. For the bullet to penetrate two bone barriers, it would in all likelihood have had to be round-nosed as well. There was no mention of metal traces from the bullet’s passage. Whoever wrote the ballistics
