ecology but a Trojan Horse for godless communism to turn the Irish on their heads. Minogue had not felt the need to fence with Gallagher on that issue of surveillance of Eco-Al, to ask what exactly the Branch’s ‘good reason to believe’ or ‘substantial links’ meant as regards Eco-Al’s being a stalking-horse for the Bolshevist hordes.
Hoey returned to the blackboard. He seemed antic to Minogue, who didn’t know why. The term demonstrative did not fit Shea Hoey but there he was, rapping a forefinger on the board like a teacher.
“So we know that Paul Fine did not bump into any gunmen, political or just over-the-wall thugs, in the course of his journalistic work. It looks like he didn’t get the opportunity to rub such parties the wrong way at all,” Hoey repeated. “Such that they might want to be after shooting him.”
The room was now sweaty and airless. Yawns were spreading around the room, followed by stretches.
“… nothing we’ve discovered yet in his personal life so far,” Hoey went on. He paused and pointed to the cluster of names around Paul Fine’s.
“His wife, his ex-wife, is an English girl. She’s the same religion as he is. They parted and she’s living beyond in London. No disputes there, except she didn’t want to live in Dublin and that was that. No rows with his brother or sister… Two years in college, then London… then he got married, stayed on in London, didn’t like it… Into RTE when he came back to Dublin.”
“Do we have all his bits of paper and what-have-you?” asked a young detective. Minogue recognized the face of the blow-in from the Central Detective Unit. Doyle? Yes, Doyle.
“For his work? Yep,” Hoey replied. “In so far as we have gone through his belongings at work and in his flat.”
“Was he carrying anything with him when he left his flat Sunday morning?” Doyle asked.
“The landlady, a Miss Connolly, didn’t see anything. He may have had some little pocketbook or a notebook.”
“Tape-recorders,” Doyle said. “Don’t them journalist types carry them around?”
Minogue liked Doyle’s persistence. Jimmy Doyle, was it? No, Kevin… Danny?
“We haven’t found one yet. And you’re right, he would probably have had some class of a recording device, too,” Hoey allowed.
“But aren’t they full of themselves with those things, word-processors, these days?” asked Doyle.
“Computers?” said Kilmartin.
“No disks or diskettes,” said Hoey cautiously. “And he didn’t have a computer.”
That seemed to stay Doyle’s speculation. Hoey waited for a rejoinder. Hearing none, he turned to the board where a time line had been drawn to represent the last few days of Paul Fine’s life. An asterisk stood beside 5–5: 30 p. m. Sunday, followed by a question mark in brackets. Hoey cleared his throat and began at the top of the board. Minogue’s eyes stayed fixed on the asterisk while he listened wearily.
“Excuse me now for interrupting again,” Doyle said. “I have this mental block about this man’s work, the journalism thing. I know it’s radio and all that, but doesn’t every journalist have to know about computers and the like, these days? That’s how the newspapers are done now: I saw it on the telly. You even have correspondents sending their stuff in on telephone lines, off their own little computers. Surely to God RTE has something like that?”
“Phone ‘em up then, like a good man,” said Kilmartin, interrupting with an irritable scratch of his head.
Hoey began again after Doyle had gone to find a phone in some privacy. Minogue’s eyes returned involuntarily to the asterisk, the probable time of Paul Fine’s death. There was still no entry for the last Saturday of his life. Mickey Fitz had called Paul Fine the equivalent of a lapsed Catholic. He’d hardly have been at home observing his Sabbath, so.
Minogue’s mind slipped free of its moorings again. Paul Fine, the son of a prominent Irishman, an Irishman who was also a Jew. A Jew who practised his religion, a son who did not. Friction. A man who was a legal scholar, an authority with a mountain of accomplishments behind him: a son who seemed unsettled, who hadn’t found his own path. Paul Fine’s brother was a dentist in London, his sister a research scientist. Minogue imagined the talk around the Fines’ tea-table. Would Paul have recoiled when his father would mention how Paul’s sister had made an important breakthrough in her work, or how Paul’s brother had had to move to bigger offices because his practice was getting so large?
A mood of irony settled on Minogue then as he realized that Paul Fine had wanted to return to Dublin, maybe at the risk of his own marriage, while his brother and sister, successes, had left. Did Dublin beckon to those who would be failures elsewhere?
Doyle reappeared toward the end of Hoey’s description of what clues could come out of the murder site.
“There,” he said in the pause which Hoey made for him, “I knew they had to have something there. I don’t watch the telly for nothing, you know. RTE has a big computer that the staff can use.” He glanced at his notebook. “It’s called a Newstar computer. It’s wired up to a cable from an international Press Agency. The fella I was talking to says that not many of the staff bother to use that part of it but it might be that Fine did use it for typing stuff up. People have their own bits of the computer, like their own filing cabinet on board the contraption.”
“Is there anything under Fine’s name on it?” Kilmartin asked.
“Wouldn’t tell me. ‘Need an authority to do that,’ says he to me. I told him I was a Guard and he could call Harcourt Street and find out, but no go. Users have their own codes anyway, like their own little keys to their locker.”
“So there could be some of Fine’s stuff on this computer, stuff we haven’t seen,” Minogue joined in.
“Could be, sir,” Doyle replied. “Why don’t you send me over there with a bit of something to wave at them so as I can find out?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Four o’clock brought Minogue beyond temptation and he fled to Bewley’s Cafe. He was through the door and fumbling for his car keys when he heard Kilmartin calling behind him. He pretended not to hear him over the traffic but Kilmartin outpaced the slowing Minogue. Minogue wanted to be alone in noisy and contented solitude, in the ruck which made up Bewley’s, but he didn’t want Kilmartin, stricken with a heart attack from running, on his conscience.
Minogue was in a bad enough humour for not having thought of other places Fine might have stored his work. He had phoned Fitzgerald, hoping to short-cut Doyle’s work by finding out whether Paul Fine did use the computer. Fitzgerald had told him that he didn’t know and Minogue had had to believe him.
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” wheezed Kilmartin, falling into step with Minogue. “Jases, you’re out of there like a blue-arsed fly. Take your time, man dear. I know where you’re off to, anyway.”
“How so?” said Minogue.
“I asked Her Nibs,” said Kilmartin, referring to the Delphic Eilis.
“‘His honour is making a bee-line for Bewley’s,’ says she, ‘by the look in his eye.’ Wait till I tell you-I just heard that Ryan woman was released without bail. She’s home with her children.”
Minogue didn’t believe Kilmartin at first.
“I swear to God. She was charged with manslaughter, given her dinner and put out on to the street. That’s not the half of it. There was a crowd of Women’s Action heavies with her, having a hooley and dancing in the street. Bedlam. They took her back to the farm, bejases, and there’s a crowd of them staying to help her with the farm work and make sure nobody comes around that might blackguard her.”
Kilmartin began to laugh. It was the laugh of a Hollywood castaway gone mad from thirst in the Sahara, Minogue believed.
“It’s a bloody commune on the farm. WAMmers milking the pigs and feeding grain to the dog. A pack of lesbians in a commune, a revolution. They might declare a republic and what would we do then? Ha ha,” Kilmartin continued. Unbidden, he sat heavily into the passenger seat.
While Minogue piloted sourly down the quays, Kilmartin repeated bits of his news and views all the way to George’s Street. The newspaper headlines on a stand by the entrance to Bewley’s cut him short. He stopped and grasped Minogue’s arm. Minogue looked to the papers for more about Marguerite Ryan, the new heroine of Ireland.
