ready?”
“I am, I suppose,” said Minogue, glad to have some of Hoey’s vigour carry him.
“Number one: the body is moved in an effort to have it disappear entirely-wash it out to sea. Why? Because clues somewhere along the line may incriminate the killer?”
“But the bullets, Shea. Someone went to the trouble of recovering the bullets, even to first picking the types of bullets that could be recovered after going through the victim. I don’t see any clues staring me in the face at all either.”
“But that might have been the clean-up crowd, the ones who might have carried the body away later. Number two: the body was moved so as to block the investigation in the sense of delaying it or allowing time for leads to run cold. Witnesses who may have seen something, events in Fine’s life that might shed light on the murder. The killer may have wanted time to get out of the country. That’s why we have to follow the Palestinian thread whether we like it or not.”
“OK, Shea. But still and all, Gallagher knows his stuff, we have to admit that. The Branch don’t show any of the names on the list as having left the country in a hurry recently, either.”
“I know Gallagher is on the ball, and they’d not hold back on something like this. But there’s always the possibility of completely new people on the scene. Even the students who have been harmless for years: one of them might be a sleeper. They have worse memories than we have, I hear. They’ll carry on a feud or the like to a hundred generations. Maybe that’s what Fine found out, that there was some cell which had gone undetected here and was just waiting for the order to do something when the time was right. Maybe we should be looking at a bigger picture, to see if there were any forthcoming events or visits in the offing. Diplomatic things, ambassadors, I don’t know. They might have been waiting to get a crack at an American bigwig, knowing that they come here often enough with the Irish-American connection.”
Minogue thought about what Hoey was suggesting.
“I’m going to raise that with Gallagher, Shea. That’s something we’ll have to look at if we’re blocked still by the end of the week.”
Hoey looked gratified.
“Number three: he or they don’t want the victim’s last hours connected with Killiney Hill for another reason. Let’s assume the killer knows we make public appeals for help in the murder investigations. We’d want to be knowing what Paul Fine was doing there, wouldn’t we? Maybe he went there to meet someone.”
“So if he met up with someone, a citizen’d call us and tell us that Paul Fine was with someone in the park. And the someone is the one who killed him. We discussed that one already.”
“Yes. It may be a little tatty at the moment but we can’t be assuming that murderers have a genius intelligence just because we can’t put the bits together this very moment,” said Hoey with his palms upturned, looking in appeal to Minogue.
“They make their slips, we make our living,” Minogue said, repeating one of Kilmartin’s favourite maxims, one which he liked to quote at discouraging moments.
“If the killer and the cleaner-upper were two different parties, there could have been a squabble afoot, too,” said Hoey. “A real fanatic is tired of waiting for action and he gets carried away before his cohorts can stop him. Independent action. I know we talked about it before, but it seems to be creeping back even stronger. Fine may have met whoever killed him that afternoon. He may even have walked around with the killer for a while. Like we said from the start, if the killer is one of those Arab students he’d have been mighty conspicuous. People would remember him with Fine.”
Minogue wished that the phone would ring and Gallagher would announce that he had a strong suspect in custody. He wished he could land in on top of a suspect and give him an aggressive interrogation, in shifts with someone like Kilmartin. Bully him. Anything was better than sitting here, empty. He wished he were not thinking about what the Fines were living through at this minute. He wished that he were not thinking that the body which had floated in and scuffed lightly on the beach at the water’s edge on Monday might have been Daithi. Foolish to be thinking this, illogical. But still… Schadenfreude, that ugly truth about us humans: at least it wasn’t my son that was murdered, no, not mine. It was Billy Fine’s boy and I’m sorry for him but it wasn’t my son that they opened up to see how he had died and if there were still the bullets… Death. Sincere regrets, my heart goes out to you; but always happening to someone else, please.
Kilmartin emerged from his office. Minogue had seen him coming, a shirted bulk approaching the distorting glass on the squadroom side of his office. Kilmartin stood in the doorway for a moment, lit a cigarette and resumed his prowl. He reminded Minogue of an ill-tempered schoolmaster patrolling rows of cowed pupils. There would be chopping and changing tomorrow as Kilmartin took the bit between his teeth on the Kelly case. Would he snatch Keating for that, too? Kilmartin paused by Minogue and arched his eyebrows.
“Best so far is the librarian fella for Saturday. He can attest to the fact that Paul Fine was well able to work,” said Minogue.
Kilmartin shrugged and moved on, trailing smoke. He fingered an evening newspaper open and blew out a cloud of smoke as he snorted at what he read.
“Fucking yobbos! Legislate them back to work,” he said to the headline. He resumed his leonine prowl, a thick-set Mayo-man shaped like one of the innumerable boulders which were strewn about the desolate bog landscapes of his native county. Perhaps a later Ice Age had deposited him, an obdurate lump, on the streets of Dublin and left him to stalk police offices with his shirt-tail almost completely dislodged from his trousers, a troglodyte, a bog-man who still hated Dublin after thirty years of policing it.
Minogue had found Dublin different. It had been difficult for him not to melt into its gentle decay when he had first arrived in the capital. The last twenty years had shattered the shabby charm of Dublin. The shards poked out now, gashing even the well-to-do who hid in Foxrock estates. Someone had taken the worst office architecture imaginable and mauled the city with it, rooting out people from the city centre and sending them to gulag garden suburbs where crime flourished. So ugly and widespread was this blight, with its dislocation of Dubliners into suburbs, that many, Minogue included, believed that the ruin of Dublin had been a carefully plotted conspiracy.
Kilmartin slowed after his first lap of the squadroom.
“There’ll be people who’ll have to walk to work with this bloody strike, you know. Bananas is what we should be growing here,” he said to no one, passing Hoey’s desk. He stopped abruptly before Minogue.
“Name of Jases, I’m nearly ready to go to this Ard Fheis meself and get up on the shagging podium and give those feckers a piece of my mind. ‘Leadership’: that’d be the sum total of me speech. ‘All we want is what we’re overpaying ye for already: leadership!’ We should declare a national emergency and a war on gobshites. People that are dragging their arses around the place, give them a kick-up in the arse and put them to work. ‘Here’s a shagging job,’ I’d say. ‘It may not be managing director, but it’s a start.’ Get the country back up and running again.”
“We might all end up working in McDonald’s, Jimmy,” said Minogue, goaded beyond silence.
“A howl is what you are. At least it’d be work, wouldn’t it? I don’t care if the Russians open a tank factory here; I’d say great, give us jobs. A fella has to start somewhere. This country was once the most civilized nation in Europe, with our monks and our books and our poets and our schools and everything-while the mobs beyond in Britain were still painting their faces and lathering the shite out of one another with sticks and stones. Look at us now for the love of Jases. The best-educated young people in Europe, probably the world, and no jobs. As for this European Community stunt, the United States of Europe and that class of bullshit-here, did I tell you this one? If you’re an Irishman and you’re going into the toilet, and you’re an Irishman and you’re coming out of the toilet, what are you when you’re in the toilet?”
“Can’t imagine, James,” Minogue tried.
“You’re-a-peein’,” said Kilmartin without smiling.
Minogue’s lifetime of listening to his fellow-islanders had included countless editions of Kilmartin’s perorations on the Land of Saints and Scholars in one guise or another.
“I would not care to have had the career of one of those monks and what-have-you,” he baited Kilmartin. “I would have asked to be excused from the hermit business too. Not to speak of the self-flagellation and the chastity bit. I haven’t the heart for one and I haven’t the stomach for the other.”
Kilmartin fixed a sceptical eye on Minogue. Hoey looked up cautiously from under his eyebrows.
“Now that you’re talking about beating yourself up for the greater glory, and all that,” said Kilmartin in an unexpectedly low tone. He leaned down with his hands spread on Minogue’s desk to confide. “Your man, Kelly, the lad toasted out in Bray. He had some class of a chapel and our resident encyclopaedia, Keating, says it looks like
