Minogue chose Keating to work through the tally of calls logged to the Murder Squad’s help-line so far. With a copy of that call they could play it back to an acquaintance of Kelly. If it was identified… Minogue’s brain tumbled down mental stairs.
He would have liked to have the nerve to take one of Kilmartin’s cigarettes, so fierce was the pleasure and resolution which Kilmartin seemed to be drawing out of them now. Minogue still felt left behind in the excitement which had taken visible hold of the others. He finally waved in a passing Hoey and Hoey tried to sort it out for him.
“I know it’s not certain,” Hoey said. “But why would he have the number at all? You said you remember being told about the call, Keating telling you-a man phoned, asked who was in charge of the Fine case and wanted to talk to you. You alone, right?”
“Right.”
“So if and when we find out it was Kelly, there’s an obvious connection between two murders.”
“But Kelly is a senior civil servant, not a Palestinian or a local gangster. Maybe he was just out in Killiney on Sunday, an ordinary citizen. Maybe he knew Paul Fine somehow.”
“Why would he only want to talk to you, so?” said Hoey conclusively as he drifted away from Minogue’s desk.
Gallagher phoned Minogue ten minutes after Minogue called Special Branch HQ. Gallagher was co-ordinating the interviews with the people on the list he had drawn up himself. Minogue extricated his copy of the list and placed an X beside five of the thirty-eight names.
“They’re the ones you’re finished with,” said Minogue.
“And they’re not in the running. We’re still with the rest of them. There’s only three that we haven’t got a hold of yet.”
Minogue glanced down at the names he had marked with an O. Xs and Os, hit and miss. “How do you feel about second interviews with those Arab students before the weekend?”
Gallagher didn’t reply directly. “It could be done, if need be.”
“Nobody so far knows this group this League for the…?”
“They admit to reading it in the papers reporting on the murder. That’s all.”
“Well, sooner or later, Pat…” Minogue concluded.
“Later, I’d say,” Gallagher replied.
Minogue had nearly ten minutes of vacillating about calling the Fines that night or the next before Hoey waved the phone at him. It was the direct line to the Murder Squad offices, usually marshalled by Eilis. Minogue slid into Eilis’ seat.
“Not the Church, Not the State, Women must decide their fate,” said the woman’s voice.
“I know the air, I’m not sure of the words, though. Or the singer,” Minogue said.
“It’s the voice of sisterhood everywhere,” came the reply.
“Are you actually a paid-up member of the Women’s Action Movement now?”
“No, I’m not. But that doesn’t mean I sit idly by.”
“Sorry, I forgot to phone you back. I don’t blame you giving me a speech. Where are you?”
“I’m at home. That’s great about Marguerite Ryan, what do you think?”
“How do you know this phone isn’t being tapped by my superiors here and that I won’t be out on my ear over what I say to that leading question?”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Da. I think it’s great anyway. I hope they drop the manslaughter charge, too,” Iesult said. “And let her get on with her life.”
“Uh,” Minogue said. Iesult paused. Minogue could see her sprawled in the hall, on the floor most likely.
“When are you going on your holidays anyway?”
Minogue wondered what his daughter was working around to asking. “Now you’re talking. A grand idea. I had been thinking of driving across with the ferry to France or something.”
“You’re a howl. Does Ma know you’re planning this caravanserai, or will you just mention it the morning you’re going?”
“Your mother likes surprises. Not the kind that your generation deals out, let me add. Something like I think you have in mind to tell me…”
“Get up the yard, Da. Why would you-?”
“You’re a bit amateurish at this still. Remember that your father is a Clareman with powers of divination and tricks galore. If you were phoning me just to chew the fat or discuss the weather, I’d be more than happy anyway. I have ready answers and a fund of inconsequential chat. For example: I was rained on unmercifully, and me coming back after me tea in a restaurant. I’m still soggy.”
“Soggy? That’s an age thing. Poor man, Ma said you had to work late again.”
“It’s murder, so it is.”
“And at your age, too. What age are you now?”
“Go ’way with you. I wish you could see me now because I’m turning the other cheek after that slur about me age. I want you to know that parents do in fact survive their children’s lack of consideration, you know.”
“Your age? Ah, go on. Look at Yves Montand. Clint Eastwood…”
“Peter Ustinov?”
“Liz Taylor. They’re all getting on… No, I phoned you on a whim. I was thinking of going to Clare for the weekend.”
“God be praised. A daughter awakening to her inheritance. Are you sure you won’t be frightened by the accents down there? It gets very dark at night, you know. There are mighty strange people in Clare.”
“Understatement of the century. Ballyvaughan, I was thinking.”
“And you want pointers from me, is it?”
“No, I don’t. I was just mentioning it. There’s a crowd going to rent one of the Irish Cottages there.”
Minogue was swayed alternately by what the ‘crowd’ suggested, and his scorn for Irish Cottages. Drawn by a synthetic version of a rural past, Dubliners along with Germans and Dutch and Yanks were booking thatched cottages in Ballyvaughan to savour a quaint past conveniently new. Too full of peasant blood to listen to urbanite guff about peasant virtues, Minogue had no answers to the men he had met in the pubs of Clare over the years defending these Irish Disneylands as ‘creating employment’ and ‘bringing the tourists’. He had realized, with little remorse, that he was, in certain respects, a snob.
“A crowd”: said unconcernedly, but heavy with something. Drunken students, up late, farting about and making iijits of themselves in this ersatz Arcadia-his daughter in the middle of this? Her boyfriend, Pat the Brain, a man of revolutionary theories and humour which carried his ideas easily beyond cant: a dangerous, clever, likeable boy who was mad about Iesult.
“How quaint. Folksy even,” said Minogue at last. He upbraided himself instantly when he heard the sneer in his voice. If Iesult wanted to be involved with Pat the Brain any way she liked, she could do it and nothing would prevent her. When Minogue tried to think of his daughter and sex a numbness and a fog took hold of his brain. Traces of different memories: himself and Kathleen, urgent and whispering to one another, heat and damp bodies, the unnameable arching over the small sadness later. A feeling that couldn’t be accommodated at all. Lying there in the summers with the breeze stirring the curtains wondering how many other couples were making love now. Was there something to the petite mort? And why was it all right for Kathleen and Matt, and not all right for Iesult, a woman herself?
So great was their alarming and vigilant love for Iesult as an infant, a child who had been born unexpectedly, that Minogue and Kathleen always worried that they had spoiled her. An Iesult who had dug in her heels as an infant; a daughter who had miraculously ended desert years after the Minogues’ first child, Eamonn, had died in his sleep.
Minogue had had more dreams about Eamonn these last few years, especially since his own greeting from death when the bomb had gone off under the British Ambassador’s car a hundred yards ahead of Minogue. Recovering in hospital, Minogue had discovered that he could safely relinquish much of what had been his former life. Without effort, and with the sense of an untroubled and even humorous presence which could only be his own self, he realized, waking up from a long sleep, Minogue had started a new life. His new religion was made up of things divorced before: a cup of coffee in Bewley’s where he could be surrounded by people of every ilk; Kathleen’s mannerisms when she was pleased about something; a walk on the endless stone pier of Dun Laoghaire-when you
