“Being watched? By his pals in Opus Dei?”
“Yes. If Kelly had knowledge of, or had participated in, Paul Fine’s murder, and that murder was connected to Opus Dei…”
Kilmartin was giving the embossed ceiling his careful consideration. Minogue licked his fingers before taking out his hanky.
“If we could only place the pair of them together,” Kilmartin muttered. “That’d be the bee’s knees. Then I’d feel a lot easier in myself about taking a flying tackle at this Opus Dei mob.”
Suddenly Kilmartin looked down from the ornate ceiling and fixed Minogue with a stare. “I know what you’re thinking, you know,” he said.
Minogue feigned fright. “I had a fear as a child that adults could read my thoughts,” he said. “Being the sinner I was, I had a lot to keep secret…”
“You’re thinking that Jimmy Kilmartin is afraid to go nose-to-nose with something to do with the Church, aren’t you?”
“I might be.”
“You’re thinking to yourself that Opus Dei is really a crowd of religious lunatics and they deserve a good house-cleaning, but that Jimmy Kilmartin doesn’t want to get his wrists slapped by someone wearing a priest’s collar.”
“The thought had-”
“Feckin‘ sure it had, and well I know it. Well I’ve just thought of something that’ll do the trick nicely for us, without us having to ask Heher for the time of day. Are you ready for this? A time-honoured Irish method.”
“Prayer? Abstinence? The rhythm method?”
Kilmartin glowered. “I can’t get over this. You really are full of dirt today. I don’t understand it. It ill becomes you.”
Minogue smiled at the reprimand which sounded like a hectoring parent or a teacher.
“I’m on the rebound from those two clean and bright specimens, Jimmy. Go easy on me, I don’t meet such angels every day.”
“We could look around for an informer. Now.” Kilmartin’s face shone with the anticipation of praise.
“You mean we should find ourselves a former Opus Dei man and get an insider’s view of the outfit?”
Kilmartin nodded, smiling expectantly, but Minogue’s gargoyle had broken loose after the coffee.
“Only a Mayo-man would come up with an idea like that,” he said maliciously.
Kilmartin sat up with a start. “What do you mean by that comment? There was never an informer born in Co. Mayo. Didn’t we take the brunt of the Black and Tans and join up Humbert’s Frenchmen in ‘98 and… What does Mayo have to do with the suggestion?”
Minogue was up and scampering to the door. He was unaccountably happy, even in the knowledge that this last quarter of an hour might have been merely an oasis in a day when he’d fall back into brooding about the Fines, about their son, about his own. He saw the closely cropped woman who had tried to add six minutes to Kilmartin’s life look up from her paperback treatise at the two heavy, middle-aged policemen hurrying out of the restaurant.
“And as for Clare people, they didn’t know what shoes and socks were until the first plane landed in Shannon,” he heard Kilmartin in pursuit behind. “And as for sports…”
Minogue winked at the grave face of the woman as he fled. She did not acknowledge his efforts. Perhaps it was not part of her view of the world that two clumsy policemen should be willingly making iijits of themselves.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“The chiseller’s name is Patsy O’Malley,” said Keating. “He’s a godsend, I can tell you. You should have heard him.”
“That good?” said Hoey, visibly excited.
Keating widened his eyes and nodded once slowly for effect. “Patsy is ten and a bit. His mother says he only comes into the house to sleep. He’s a wild man entirely. If he’s not down the end of the pier fishing, he’s building forts and hunting boars and tigers in the woods.”
“He’s in a Boy Scout troop?”
“He is. There was a mob of them up on Killiney Hill last Sunday, all afternoon. They had a picnic up there, then they had little jobs to do like collecting different leaves off the trees and finding out what different types of rock and stones there are there. Eleven boys and a scoutmaster, a man by the name of Fahy. I haven’t been in touch with him yet.”
Keating looked down to his notebook.
“It started when Patsy didn’t want to go to bed last night. His ma says he’s a holy terror when it comes to the bed. He managed to stay up and not be noticed until the news was on. We had our plug about the site up on Killiney Hill and Patsy says-this is his ma’s version of it-‘I was there on Sunday, I know that place.’ She didn’t pay a whole lot of notice to that because that reminded her that he was still up. He’s a bit of a head-case with his yarns and everything. She asked him later and him going to bed. Himself and another boy were told to go and look for animal signs and to rendezvous with the troop back up on top of the Hill so as they could tell the troop what they’d found. Part of their job was to keep an eye on the time and to be able to lead the troop back to any spot they’d found interesting.”
“We ought to give the Russians fair warning that the country is full of Davy Crocketts and wild mountaineers,” said Hoey as Keating paused.
“So his ma heard him giving directions as to how to get to the place he saw on the telly and she gave up on him. She thought he was romancing all the details so he could stay up all night talking to her. I got him to tell me how to get to that part of the Hill and he was right in the general area. He didn’t know north and south and that; it was more ‘go down these steps’ and ’there’s a funny tree with a branch sticking out‘. So his ma packed him off to bed and she had a little think about it. She decided to phone and that’s how it started. I’ll tell ye what, lads, this Patsy O’Malley is a ticket. He’s his own boss at ten years of age.”
“Inspector by the age of twenty,” Hoey tried.
Keating flicked forward in his notebook. “Here’s the gist of what he saw.”
For a moment Minogue imagined the O’Malley household, with the oversized Keating and a Garda by his side sitting in the kitchen with the boy, glad to be excused from school, and a mother both nervous and proud of her ten-year-old woodsman.
“He split up with his pal because the pal was an iijit. They stuck him with the pal for a day so the pal’d learn something from Patsy. Patsy didn’t buy that so he told the pal to shag off somewhere and he’d meet up with him before they had to join the troop again. The pal went off and had a Golly bar on the sly, in a shop in Killiney village. Patsy knows all the paths and the hidey-holes around the Hill and he went off up the path on one of his excursions. He said there does be courting couples up this part of the Hill sometimes and he does have a bit of fun with them.”
“I can imagine the fun he means,” said Kilmartin dryly.
“He thought he heard someone breaking sticks,” Keating went on, looking around at the detectives. Minogue thought of the woman walking the dog: branches breaking, she had thought: the dog nosing into the bushes and barking. A silencer on the pistol?
“Naturally Patsy goes in to see what carry-on there is; if there’s some blackguarding going on, well he might be interested. He saw this man down on his knees, poking away at the ground with a penknife-”
“He has the body rolled in under the bushes by then,” Kilmartin interrupted.
Keating nodded, licking his lips. “And digging at the ground. The man sees him and stands up all of a sudden. Patsy says the man looked very upset about something, like he was frightened.”
“No gun?” said Kilmartin quickly.
“No. They stood there looking at one another for a minute and Patsy sees that this fella is shook. The man is trying to look normal, smiling a bit, but Patsy is not fooled. The man says: ‘I’ve lost something here so I have to
