photocopies of the notes which the policemen on telephone work had made. Some had still to be typed. Thirteen calls in all, with officers dispatched to get statements on seven. Minogue lost his concentration again.
Strangers in a strange land… Fine had used the phrase with an unmistakable irony. It might have been true for those Jewish families who had fled Russia and Lithuania to come to Ireland after the Tsar’s May Laws in eighteen-eighty-something, Minogue guessed as he tried to recall more from his visit to the Jewish Museum and his own reading. Fine must have meant it ironically. The Fines had been here for nearly 200 years; Justice Fine was a Supreme Court judge…
Paul Fine had never wanted to leave Dublin, it seemed. It was his city. Married to a Dublinwoman, Minogue had cracked some of the code which might explain Dubliners’ attachment to their shabby capital. Maybe needing to return to Dublin had cost Paul Fine his marriage? His father didn’t know the names of any of Paul’s friends beyond his schooldays, and several of these had emigrated. He knew Mary McCutcheon and Paul’s boss, whom he misnamed as Fitzpatrick. Had all Paul’s school-friends, the friends he’d met at temple as a youngster, the friends he’d spent summer holidays with-had they all emigrated? Or had he wanted some breathing space after returning from London, and avoided them? A lapsed Jew, like a lapsed Catholic, Mickey Fitz had said. In other words, there was no such thing: once in, never out. It was in your marrow, in your dreams, even fifty years after you had renounced it. Only a fool could think his life was being run by what his thoughts suggested to him on a fine sunny day. Gallagher, phone Gallagher.
Minogue was switched three times before he heard Gallagher.
“Yes, I have a tentative list of, let’s call them sympathizers. Irish, I mean. I have thirty-eight.” He sounded pleased with himself, Minogue believed. “I pulled in even the marginal ones. There are others, of course, members of associations we don’t monitor because they’re harmless.”
Minogue jumped in with both feet. “Will the Special Branch be wanting to conduct their own interviews themselves, Pat?”
“Oh I’d say there’d be interest in that here, all right. We work through our own contacts here, you probably know. On the inside, you see,” Gallagher added awkwardly. “The Chief Super knows about my assignment here and…”
Minogue remembered that Chief Superintendent Farrell of the Special Branch was rumoured to model himself after J. Edgar Hoover. The Branch was his personal army against subversives and criminals, and no one would tell him how to do his business.
“I’ll ask to clear it, then, so that Branch officers can follow up on your list and we don’t be tripping over one another,” said Minogue.
Minogue liked to think that he noticed the relief in Gallagher’s voice after that. Gallagher would not miss the hint either, Minogue was sure. When the Press release went out this evening, few would pause to wonder what the phrase ‘joint Murder Squad and Special Branch task force’ meant-beyond apparent co-operation, that was.
Kilmartin was back at his office minutes before two o’clock. Spotting Minogue, he wavered in his path and walked toward him. “Honest to God,” said Kilmartin, looking over his shoulder, “there’s a mountain of paper inside on my desk. I don’t doubt but that I’ll have a pain in me head like the kick off a horse if I have to read all that today. Did you have your dinner?”
“I had a bowl of soup and a sandwich,” Minogue replied.
“That’s what I should have had meself, I’m telling you. I ate something in a pub in Bray and bejases I still don’t know what it might have been. Steak and kidney something. Came out of a tin with a snap of Lassie on it, I bet. The heartburn is bad after that. Bray is the back of the neck.”
“What’s the story in Bray, then?”
“There’s someone burned to a crisp in the back of a Volkswagen Golf. Looks like a man, but I wouldn’t bet too much on that. The fire was so hot that bits of the damn car went and melted themselves. Metal, I mean. How do you like that?”
Minogue was tempted to reply that he didn’t think it was so hot.
Arrayed around the squadroom at half-past two Minogue counted eighteen policemen. Gallagher sat with an untidy-looking Special Branch colleague. The room was soon full of smoke. The typewriters were silent. Two detectives were sharing a joke. Hoey was back in time and Minogue let him have his head. Hoey asked to hear from the scenes-of-crime examiners first.
The blood had tested positive as Paul Fine’s type. No bullets had been found on the site. An area of forty by forty metres square had been examined so far. A dragnet of the beach had produced nothing pertinent to the murder. The detective remarked that a prophylactic had been found on the beach, and Minogue did not twig what he meant until he looked up to see several policemen smiling.
Three interviews with citizens responding to the media appeals were still in progress. The remainder had elicited no direct knowledge of anything to do with the murder. The best information to date had been the call from the woman which had led to the murder site.
These not unexpected results still moved Kilmartin to some testy rhetoric. “Why did these busybodies phone up then, I ask you? Have they nothing better to be doing?”
“All is not lost,” Hoey replied sententiously. “There is one fella, a ticket man at Dalkey Station, the one whose wife phoned up. He says he’s no more than fifty-fifty sure he saw Fine coming through the turnstile some time Sunday. Just after dinner-time, he thinks. Not very solid at all.”
“Alone?” Hoey asked.
“Yes. Seeing as he must have gotten on the train, if it was Fine who was there in Dalkey Station, we’ll get in touch with the men who were on shifts on Sunday at the train stations. We have the snapshots in all stations now, anyway.”
“Is there anything worth holding our breaths over with these calls that are going on at the moment?” Minogue asked.
“Maybe one of them, sir. He’s having a bit of trouble remembering his times on account of him having a few jars on Sunday night. He went to the beach, not actually on to the beach, but into the car-park after he came out of a pub in Ballybrack. He was courting his moth in a car. He says she was driving, if you don’t mind.”
“Maybe he’s the boyo who left the frenchies on the beach,” Kilmartin said.
“That’s a good one,” the detective lied. “Fact is he took the trouble to phone. I think that the public in general is very taken aback with this. That the victim was shot three times in the head and him being a, you know, a Jew. This fella anyway, he phoned us before he realized he didn’t really have anything of substance to offer us. He said there were two other cars parked in the car-park, maybe three. Up to the same trick-acting, maybe. But there was one car there before he came and still there after he left. He was sure there was nobody in the car while he was there. That’s as much as we got out of him.”
“Type, age… colour?” said Kilmartin.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Ye’ll be ready for calls tonight to do with the site out on Killiney Hill instead?” asked Minogue.
“To be sure.”
Hoey read a precis of the autopsy. He pointed to the blackboards then and worked his way through the questions which several of the policemen put to him.
“Are these all the stories Fine was working on?” one asked him earnestly.
“All we know of so far. See this one here, the one on the Arab students? He didn’t get that far on this, not to the stage of interviewing the students he had on a list. He’d read up on some material associated with this work he had planned. Look over at the items here listed from one of his indexes… Video-cassettes on stories he was supposed to cover or dig up. This list here… that’s of the audio-cassettes we found.”
Hoey nodded to Keating. Keating stood, moved to the blackboards and talked his way methodically down the lists.
“… So far, going through the stuff in his desk, there’s nothing standing out. He kept paper files on these stories and he had odds and ends in another general file. Clippings he did himself, a note about some programmes done before. We’re still going through programmes he put material together for in the past year, to see if he made himself any enemies. The nearest we’ve come is a story on a fertilizer plant polluting part of the River Barrow. He was on to that story first and it went down very well. That means the Press took up his story and used his report after it came on the radio. Fine was interested in what-do-you-call-it, ecology…”
Eco-Al, Minogue remembered-Paul Fine’s involvement in what the Special Branch had decided was not merely
