“No, sir. There’s no marks on the wrists. It’s an execution, isn’t it?”
Minogue kept his gaze on the sea.
“Tell you the truth, I don’t feel up to checking the body proper this minute now,” Sweeny whispered. “I’ll leave it for yous professionals on the Squad.”
“Thanks,” said Minogue.
A doctor, to judge by the BMW he had left moored next to the squad cars, was walking down the beach toward the body. He was youngish, earnest and grim, swinging his bag as he hurried with a Garda in tow. Minogue didn’t recognize either man. He stood and looked inland. Cliffs: the steep hill of Killiney above, a few feet short of the official status of mountain. The sky felt close, almost malicious.
A van drew slowly on to the beach. Seeing he could go no further, the driver reversed toward the squad cars. Minogue knew one of the scenes-of-the-crime policemen who stepped out of the van and began donning boiler- suits. Kilmartin left the group of policemen and began walking toward the van. Minogue found it impossible to remember the dead man’s face. His concentration had been stolen by the wounds, and he wondered what kind of a gun or a bullet had caused that. Three shots at least. Revenge? For what? How had the body turned up here? A pair of seagulls scratched the dull mid-morning with their screaming overhead.
Kilmartin was standing next to him now. “All right,” he grunted. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Let’s go, Matty.”
Kilmartin scrutinized the pebbles and sand next to his feet before he knelt down heavily and turned back the plastic.
“Are you gentlemen involved below?” the waiter asked them.
Minogue and Kilmartin had walked back up the beach and into the lounge of the one hotel opposite the station. The beach and its events were out of sight to the two policemen seated as they were by a picture window. Kilmartin had eaten most of the chicken sandwiches and downed a pot of tea. The sea air, he claimed as he stifled a belch, wasn’t it great? Minogue was working on a second Bewley’s coffee.
“If we’re not now, we will be,” Kilmartin replied. “Did you make this tea with bags or with real tea leaves?”
“Bags.”
Minogue refused more coffee which the hotel offered black, to be doctored with cold milk by the customer. He far preferred his Bewley’s coffee in situ, in a Bewley’s Oriental Restaurant, complete with scalded milk, a sticky bun to play hell with his dentures and a deafening noise of plates and loud conversation.
“Terrible business. Never happened since I started at this place. That’s fifteen year ago next November,” the waiter observed. He too had been immobilized by the sea, Minogue noticed. The sea looked tranquil from here. The waiter stood over the two policemen, his tray against his chest, gazing vacantly out the window. Minogue wondered if everyone near the sea looked as if they had been summoned by a hypnotist.
“Tell us, do you work here every day?” Kilmartin asked.
“Weekdays three till half-eleven. I do a Saturday or Sunday if they’re short. I don’t have to. We have the union now, thanks be to God,” the waiter replied slowly from his trance.
“Thanks be to James Connolly and Jim Larkin, you mean,” Kilmartin said.
“And that Marx fella too,” Minogue added.
“Hah,” said the waiter. The humour had broken the sea-spell. He looked to Minogue and then to Kilmartin. “I heard the poor man was after being shot.”
“Who told you that?”
“Danny the barman. He seen the commotion with the Garda cars and he went over. Before the man was covered up, too. A terrible gruesome sight, says Danny. What’s the country coming to, do you know what I mean?”
Minogue recognized the futility of a reasonable question asked in an unreasonable environment. He offered an honest appraisal. “An unnerving maturity, I’d say.”
“What?” asked the waiter.
“Is there more tea?” asked Kilmartin.
The waiter drifted away through the empty lounge, drumming on his tray. Kilmartin stretched out his legs and reached for his cigarettes. After blowing out the match with a cloud of smoke he tapped his finger on his watch.
“Look at that, would you. Hoey’s still in the bloody traffic, I’d swear.”
“He may be down on the strand. Detained or looking things over,” said Minogue. “The traffic doesn’t be that bad this hour of the day.”
Kilmartin coughed. “Boys oh boys, if the buses and the trains go on strike there’ll be convulsions as regards the same shagging traffic. There’s rumblings on that score too. We might as well stay home if there’s a bloody strike, I’m telling you. I wish they’d legislate that crowd back to work. Just once, anyway,” he said.
“Aha. So you’re not really a follower of Marx,” Minogue noted, as though he hadn’t known Kilmartin for twenty and more years. “Half my crowd at home have turned sharply to the left. I feel the breeze by times myself.”
“It’s that Pat Muldoon, your daughter’s fella, if you ask me.” Kilmartin’s tone took on an ominous, schoolmasterish tone. “As for the busmen, I say we let the Army come in and either drive the bloody buses or use Army lorries. Remember when they used to do that?” asked the philosopher-king.
“I do. Don’t you think that seeing Army lorries and uniforms on the streets here would make us look like the banana republic we are rapidly becoming?” an indelicate Minogue advanced.
Kilmartin laughed without sparing a smile. “Jokes aside, there are plenty of people in the country who wouldn’t mind seeing the unions get a rap on the knuckles. Maybe having Army lads on the streets would improve general morale.”
“Getting the trains to run on time, is it? Then maybe we should take over the Isle of Man and call them the Malvinas.”
“Fine and well for you to be laughing about it, Matt. I’ll tell you this and I’ll tell you no more.” Kilmartin leaned closer to Minogue to shield his wisdom from the returning waiter. “There’s men well up the ladder, well above us little pissers,” he whispered, “men who’d like to put the unions and their Leftie hangabouts to work and get the country back into the civilized world. Leadership is what we need, let me tell you. All you have is ad-hoc-itis, floating fluff until election time.”
Minogue did not care to listen to the remarks of high-ranking policemen which Kilmartin might have overheard at the boozy conferences he liked to attend. He believed their political vagaries to be less antic than threatening. “I tend more toward the hang-about position rather than the alternative,” he murmured.
Kilmartin grunted. “Tell you what. If there was a new party introduced tomorrow morning and it wasn’t full of lunatics, there’d be plenty of people’d come out of the woods and support it. Every dog and divil is ready for a change. What do you think?”
The waiter laid the teapot on the table. Kilmartin flipped the lid, looking for the tea-bag.
“I took it out,” said the waiter. He turned and sailed back to the bar.
“ Plus ca change, Jimmy…”
“I heard that Gorman would like to get out from under the Chief and get things going,” Kilmartin rejoined.
Minogue remembered Gorman, the Minister for Defence, fervidly denying rumours that he was anything but 110 per cent loyal to the Chief and the Party. To Minogue, the Chief looked like a crooked Caesar in profile. The Party Whip meant precisely that in Irish politics: the Chief had a tribe, not a political party.
“See him on the telly the other night, telling the reporters about rumours started up by the media? Ha ha, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, that Gorman,” Kilmartin concluded.
“I understand that Gorman hasn’t a brain in his head at all, at all,” Minogue offered mildly. He saw Hoey stepping around a table next to the entrance to the lounge. Kilmartin looked up from his ministrations with the tea as a man with the face of a Toby jug followed Hoey into the lounge.
“Jases,” Kilmartin said. “Not Hynes.”
Shorty Hynes was a reporter for one of the two Dublin evening papers. He was a prodigious drinker, a gregarious and disarming character well known in the pubs and clubs of the city. Hynes could not wholly conceal the fact that he was as tenacious as a badger with a bone between his teeth. Hynes specialized in lurid descriptions of murders and violent crimes, wringing out the most minute and morbid details to gratify the tastes of the citizenry of
