report would have looked at the pathology report first anyway. No fragments of the casing which could have pinpointed a manufacturer. The Continentals tended to favour brass or even copper jackets, the Yanks went for steel or cupronickel, Minogue recalled vaguely.
Fully jacketed round-nose bullets: high velocity, high energy but low stopping power because of the penetration. Minogue wondered what Thatcher Scale meant in the report: the Iron Lady herself? For penetration of two cranial bone barriers, the bullets had to have a Thatcher value of at least fifty…
The echo of a flitting notion scratched at Minogue’s mind again. An attribution of deadly expertise, of intent, had crept into even the bland prose of the ballistics report-a report which had been cautious from the start because it was only a commentary on the pathology work: ballistics had had neither weapon nor ammunition to examine. It was a gun for working up close, not a cannon. It was very rare to find calibres larger than. 38s bothering with fully jacketed ammunition. Those handguns were designed with stopping power in mind, their bullets chosen to leave their mark, to gouge, to dredge, to flatten… to damage quickly.
Minogue shivered. He turned the page and looked below the conversion table. A hand-drawn box followed, with a summary of ammunition in use by Gardai and the Army. The Army used 7. 65mm for their sub-machine guns, but not of high-velocity manufacture. The Garda Special Branch units and squads had access to and training in machine pistols which used 9mm ammunition, a fit with the Walther PPK automatics which had rapidly gained favour over the last decade as Gardai used firearms more. The report noted that it was likely that both Army and Gardai held some stocks of high-velocity ammunition which could be used with a handgun… but such rounds would almost certainly be employed for evaluation and comparison purposes, in a restricted environment such as laboratory testing.
Great, thought Minogue darkly as his eyes wavered down over the point-form conclusions again. Barrel-length of a handgun had to be at least four and one half inches to effect high-velocity at all… He retrieved a ruler from his drawer and added two inches to the barrel. You could still carry an automatic handily enough in your jacket pocket… A reminder that automatics were much easier to secure good silencers on.
There were the more punctilious conclusions then, the writer of the report smug about showing command of his material… There were several licensed copies of the popular parabellum designs like SIG-Petters, Walthers and Berettas, but there were also over a dozen known unlicensed copies of perennials such as Walther PPKs and. 38s being mass-manufactured in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia… Consideration should be given to the large numbers of Soviet Tokarevs (formerly Mauser 7. 63 pistols) in circulation since unrest in the Middle East had become more widespread after 1967. Tokarevs were arguably the automatic pistol best suited to use with high- velocity ammunition… Diplomatic bag, Minogue’s gargoyle muttered within: this was an assassin’s gun.
Minogue snorted with exasperation. He laid the sheaf of papers back in a wire-mesh tray on his desk. He would phone Gallagher within the hour if the same Gallagher hadn’t phoned by then to tell him what the yield was from the Special Branch files. There had to be somebody close to Paul Fine, Minogue’s thoughts protested, someone to whom he chatted, or at least mentioned what he was planning for the weekend. He stood up from the desk. All the tables and desks in the squadroom were occupied and two blackboards on wheels had appeared overnight. One was used for schedules of assignments, the other was mostly blank, with entries for what they knew of the last days and hours of Paul Fine.
Minogue looked at the faces of the dozen policemen on the task force. He recognized more than half of those in the room. The ones he knew were detectives from the Central Detective Unit, rafted over from the Puzzle Palace. Kilmartin had ordered detectives drafted in on the case to squeeze into the squadroom yesterday evening to listen to Hoey. Twice as many ordinary Gardai, mostly from stations in the Dublin Metropolitan South Divisions, would receive their instructions in turn from the policemen who had attended this meeting. With the discovery of the murder site away from the beach, Minogue would now have to make a new media appeal to persons who had been taking the air on Killiney Hill on Sunday. Two full days ago…
Hoey was on the telephone now. Even Eilis looked busy as she rattled on a typewriter. A short detective with a gaucho moustache (Minogue wondered how lax the codes were becoming, as he saw an incarnation of a Venetian boatman in the detective’s face) stopped by Ellis’ desk. He held out a video-cassette to her but she nodded toward Hoey. The detective stood by Hoey’s desk until Hoey put down the phone.
After a brief conversation, Hoey smiled. The detective said something else and Hoey laughed outright. He took the tape and removed it from its case. The gaucho Venetian (Minogue thought he remembered him as a Sullivan) shrugged, smiled again, and walked away. Hoey noticed Minogue sitting on the edge of his desk, and ambled over.
“You look like you’re ready for Honolulu.”
Minogue shook himself out of his reverie. “Uh. Like yourself. I’d like to be sitting in Montparnasse with an espresso burning a hole in the table in front of me. Here, Shea, why don’t you go out yourself and get yourself a bite? A cup of tea or something.”
“I might, at that. We’re at the hump, I suppose,” Hoey answered.
Minogue nodded his assent. ‘The hump’ was Hoey’s word for the doldrums which inevitably afflicted investigators as they moved beyond the beginnings of a difficult investigation. Minogue had heard Kilmartin call it ‘the fuckin’ Sahara stage’. One evening in a pub he had gone through the plot and events of The Lost Patrol, a favourite film of his because it starred Victor Maclachlen, as a way of illustrating the trials of a murder investigation. Minogue had forgotten what Kilmartin had likened the unseen snipers of the desert to, by way of comparison with the course of an investigation, but the memory of the whole had stayed with him.
Any murder that wasn’t committed by a friend or relative of the victim, any murder that had no witnesses, was difficult. After the initial flow of information, the setting up of assignments and statements, the piecing together of a picture of the victim, came the lull. In this lull occurred the really dogged police work. Sometimes this Sargasso-sea stage lasted for months.
“Plenty of time before anything breaks, I suppose,” Hoey added wearily. “Maybe I’ll go and watch that video again. They missed a bit the first time around. A few minutes of something sandwiched into another clip. It might have been there from the time the tape was used for something else, though, because it starts suddenly and ends suddenly.”
“Anything of interest?”
“It could have been Fine on the gossip trail. Remember Fitz said it was Fine’s turn to go through the laundry basket, to see what shenanigans our elected representatives had been up to.”
“The same Mickey Fitzgerald calls it accountability, if I recall,” said Minogue.
“Hah. The Ard Fheis is coming up, so maybe they were in a hurry to find some dirt on anybody. There’s a bit of an interview with what’s-his-name, Gorman, on Meet the Press. You know that programme that does be on after ordinary people go to bed? Fifteen minutes before they shut down for the night, fellas off the newspapers poking at different politicians every week. Gorman was on; ‘the Man in the Wings’ they call him. They were trying to bait him about who’d step into the Chief’s shoes.”
“As if the same Chief is ever going to let go his grip,” said Minogue. Hoey smiled wanly at the uncharacteristic vitriol in Minogue’s tone.
“Exactly. Everyone over the age of six months knows that Gorman’d love to wake up one morning and find himself running the country.‘Ireland in the new age’ and ‘new economic realities’, that’s his line, isn’t it?”
“You know a lot more than I do about him. The brain goes dead on me as regards that stuff. I can’t tell one of them from the other when they talk like that. All I know is that he was shuffled into Defence last year, a new Minister.”
“Ah sure, it’s only the fact that Gorman is a distant relation on my mother’s side. He’s Galway, is Gorman. A lot of people at home think he’s the cat’s pyjamas entirely. He’s off the farm but he lectured in economics at the university. Speaks French, but knows how to handle a hurley stick and even swallow pints, I heard. But don’t think the Chief doesn’t know about Gorman. They have to be sort of civil to one another. Gorman is on the tape saying something about ‘unquestioned allegiance’ to the Chief. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Maybe Fine was going to interview Gorman, and he wanted to be able to quote him from that television show…”
Minogue decided to leave Hoey to his cynical pleasures with the tape. He’d have to be thinking of a dinner himself soon. He looked to the blackboards again. The conference and assessment was set for half-two today: that’d be to give God Almighty time to conjure up a weighty Press release for the tea-time news on the telly. Minogue turned away from the cacophony of phones and typewriters, settled himself in his chair, and tried the Pathologist’s report again. His eyes followed the print but took in nothing beyond an odd word. He turned to the
