look for it.’ Patsy says his eyes were huge and he looked like he was very hot or something. That was enough for Patsy and he left the man to it. His ma did a good job of telling him to keep away from quare fellas that acted friendly.”
“Trying to find the bullets, or casings from an automatic. That spells out a careful, expert type of assailant,” said Minogue. He felt the excitement now as a band around his chest.
“How quick were the shots?” Kilmartin asked.
“Can’t get him on that, sir. Could as easily have been a revolver.”
Minogue found that he was staring intently at the back of a chair.
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Keating hoarsely.
“Does the time fit too?”
Keating nodded vigorously. “The end of the day, sir. The last job of the day for the Scouts. They were on the bus back to Dun Laoghaire about three-quarters of an hour later. It was half-five, a little later.”
“All right,” said Kilmartin calmly. “Who is this man?”
“He’s a cop, sir. That’s what Patsy O’Malley said.”
Keating’s stare switched from Minogue to Hoey and back again to Kilmartin. Everyone in the room was very still. Minogue had the impression that people were holding their breath.
“How does he know?” Kilmartin asked softly.
“‘Looked like a cop.’ I asked him what that looked like and he says: ‘Looks like you.’ His ma wasn’t thrilled about that class of remark and told him to mind his manners. ‘The man looked like a rozzer,’ Patsy says again. And he meant it. I ended up reassuring his ma that I didn’t mind what the boy called Guards, that he sounded truthful and that he was a good, smart lad. You know how people can spot a Guard quick, even if we dressed like the Queen of Sheba? Kids too. He wasn’t saying it to get a dig at me, I’m sure. I plugged him several times about skin colour. Very definite no. Consistently.”
Keating paused and glanced around to savour the tension.
“Local,” Kilmartin murmured.
“Go on,” Minogue prompted.
“Right. The man was tall, had short hair and he wore a jacket. Clean-shaven and ‘not too old’. Older than me but not as old as Patsy’s Da, who’s forty-four. There was nothing special about him except that he looked scared. Patsy put that down to him being caught up to mischief. Patsy says he didn’t see the girlfriend.”
Even Kilmartin smiled. “Jases, I hope he joins up the Gardai when he’s eighteen, that lad,” he said. “But listen: absolutely certain on the complexion, can I call it? Definitely not what the boy would know of Middle Eastern?”
“No. Patsy was sure about that. An ordinary-looking fella, but he didn’t look all there on account of Patsy finding him up to no good.”
“Did he hear the dog or see that woman at all?”
“He doesn’t remember exactly but he saw an oul’ wan and a poodle somewhere around at the time. Doesn’t know if it was before or after he went in and he isn’t sure where exactly. She was putting a lead on the dog, he remembers that.”
“There it is,” said Hoey slowly. “The woman said she put the lead on because the dog wanted to go back into the bushes.”
“But she didn’t report seeing a Boy Scout,” Kilmartin cautioned. “The boy saw nothing of Fine?”
“No. He stayed back, he told me, because the fella was acting a bit odd. Didn’t see any body or notice any blood.”
Minogue recalled his visit to the clearing with Kilmartin. It had been choked with high grass, with brambles and weeds. It was possible that even six feet away a child would not have seen blood on the grass.
“Didn’t he say anything to Fahy, the General or whatever they call them?”
“No, he didn’t. He was mitching, you see. He knew that Fahy was only trying to kill time before they got the bus home. ‘Animal tracks!’ says Patsy. ‘Sure there’s only birds and the odd mouse up that hill.’ And Fahy didn’t get the boys to follow up on what other groups had found, either. Some of them found birds’ nests and wanted to bring the troop over to look, but Fahy lowered the boom on that idea. It seems that our Patsy is wise to grown-up trickery. He said nothing about it to anyone.”
Of course, thought Minogue. Had the intrepid Patsy mentioned stumbling across a quare fella in the bushes, the full weight of adult worries and injunctions would have fallen upon him as anger and probably as punishment. Didn’t I tell you not to go off on your own like that? Weren’t you supposed to be helping your friend on a project? You could have fallen over a cliff and we wouldn’t have known
…
The mountaineer Patsy O’Malley, ranging far and wide over the vast jungle of Killiney Hill, happy and content, would have learned long ago to protect his freedom with silence. Minogue heard an echo of his own story then, of how he tried to deny the risks he wanted now that he had woken up to life. Maybe the explorer Patsy muttered the same to himself: Ah, they’d only be worrying if I told them everything…
“Now,” said Minogue. “What I need to know is this…”
Hoey beat him to the line.
“Where was Brian Kelly on Sunday afternoon?” he said.
A cornered Kilmartin was not a happy Kilmartin, but Minogue was forceful. Minogue was ready to insist, even to cite his authority to run the case.
“We can’t just initiate this on the basis of what this little gangster said to Keating, Matt.”
Initiate, Minogue repeated within. Kilmartin was on the defensive, retreating into formal bureaucratic vocabulary.
“It’s strong, Jimmy.”
“He’s a ten-year-old boy who could be a bit of an imp too. Who’s to say he didn’t create a bit from what he heard on the news or what he heard adults talking about?”
“He saw the woman with the dog, the woman who put us wise to the murder site.”
“Of course I’m not denying things the boy said,” Kilmartin agreed wearily. “I’m playing the Devil’s advocate. Look at what you’re asking, for the love of God. The boy may have an overheated imagination, that’s all.”
“I think we should broaden the thing, Jimmy.” Minogue renewed the attack. “Look: we’re not focusing on finding a fella rafted in from the Middle East-if this boy is twenty-four carat. You with me?”
Kilmartin raised his hands in mock-surrender. “I know, I know,” he said. ’Fair enough. But we still need to put these students through the mill. One of them should know about what’s beginning to look like a campaign. Yes, call it a campaign. There’s a church after being bombed, bejases. There are armed Gardai outside people’s houses as we speak. Just because we might begin to think whoever killed Paul Fine need not be a foreigner… Think on that.”
“I’m not saying ease off on that,” Minogue protested. “And I have no problem thinking a local assassin or gunman has been hired or ordered to kill Paul Fine on behalf of this Palestinian organization. But let Pat Gallagher and company steam away at that. What we need to do is take a long hard look at a connection that’s staring us in the face: Paul Fine was researching something that Brian Kelly knew about. What are we waiting for?”
Kilmartin pushed back in his chair and began examining his knuckles. Then he surveyed his desk-top. “Lookit, all I’m saying is give me some bullet-proof grounds for this search you’re proposing. It’d be a mammoth thing entirely.”
“All I need from you is advice about short-cuts, Jimmy,” said Minogue.
“You want a lot more than that, man dear,” said Kilmartin.
“It’s not just the boy-look at the other facts. Shot three times. Bullets recovered. High-velocity bullets, fired from a powerful handgun. It’s logical to suspect that the bullets were chosen so they’d go through a body. Access to a gun, access to the ammunition: it was someone who is familiar with, or had training in, weapons. Brian Kelly had none of these features. He certainly didn’t look like a cop in my eye, anyway. It’s hardly a case of Kelly doing the murder and then getting a fit of remorse and phoning me. The way Paul Fine was murdered doesn’t indicate a killer who’d opt for much remorse. The someone seems to have been worried that the gun or the bullets could have been traced-the bullets especially. Who’d care about them if the Technical Bureau hadn’t a hope in hell of finding the gun?”
“I know, I know, you told me already: ‘Because the gun might be traceable.’ This is what’s giving me grief:
