“That’s the way all right,” replied Minogue. “If we’re to get anywhere.”
He could avoid telling the Commissioner and O’Tuaime that he suspected an Opus Dei dimension by simply calling it a possible conspiracy. God help him if O’Tuaime asked what motives he could conceivably impute to a conspiracy to murder a radio journalist who happened to be a Jew.
Hoey looked with distaste across the table as the waitress swept the plates away. “That was an ugly little sandwich I had. I hope I don’t puke on account of it.”
“It would reflect poorly if you were to be sick during this meeting, Shea. After it, perhaps, that might be all right: during it would be a no-no.”
Hoey drove. They waited five minutes at the lights by Christchurch before getting their chance to turn down to the quays and the north side of the Liffey. Minogue knew they could have gone down Thomas Street but he wanted to borrow a little time. Younger people were holding out their thumbs for lifts. The middle-aged and the elderly stood mutely by the bus stops, with faintly puzzled and embarrassed expressions. Too shy to be so forward as to solicit a lift off a stranger, they hoped drivers would stop and offer. Minogue saw several cars pull over to the kerbs and pick up people. With an acid expansion somewhere in his innards, one which was not due solely to the dinner he had tolerated, he noted that the cars which were stopping were older cars, well-used. Big Japanese and German cars sped by the crowds, fighting for ever-shrinking patches of roadways between the ever-lengthening bottlenecks at the traffic lights. He tried not to come out with a cynical remark when he saw that Hoey too had noticed this income-based philanthropy.
“You never know,” Hoey observed. “A bit of this self-help might be just the thing to get the place going again. Maybe we don’t need the buses at all.”
Self-help, Minogue heard, thinking of the tricks of grammar: in these days of the Thatcherite gospel, the number of Audis and Cressidas and Mercedes suggested that some citizens had helped themselves a great deal.
Once across the Liffey, the traffic thinned. Hoey steered deftly around vehicles and turned down the quay toward Islandbridge and the Phoenix Park beyond. Facades along the quays were for the most part ruined or crumbling. Those which still stood had been transformed into hucksters’ shops, headed by oversized plastic signs. Quick tenancies for fly-by-night businesses had left blocked-up windows and boarded doors. The decay was an animate presence hanging over the oily filth of the Liffey at low tide. What could have been an elegant promenade with people living on the banks of Anna Livia was now a series of grimy shattered roadways and empty lots. The blue sky made it look worse, Minogue considered, as the brighter light showed up the mounds of rubble piled in the doorways, the broken railings, the frameless, gaping windows on the upper stories.
“That’s where they do their bit, Fianna Eireann,” said Hoey as they passed Collins Barracks. They were closing on Islandbridge now. In calling the Army by its official title, as inheritors of the mantle of the Fianna, a legendary band of warriors who had roamed ancient Ireland, Hoey did not need to make the jibe more pointed.
The Barracks, inherited from the British, was a series of grim stone buildings, suggesting a prison more than Army quarters. There were several Land Rovers and Army lorries parked behind the railings.
“And Gorman cooing in their ears, saying that the government can find the money for more equipment, no matter what the cost.”
“Did he say that?” asked Minogue.
“They love him, I hear,” replied Hoey.
O’Tuaime, Minogue thought. The name suggested a man who obviously preferred to use Irish as his official language. Would he have the other trappings too? Be a devout Catholic for God and Ireland? Minogue began again to wonder why Kilmartin had not seemed interested in coming to this meeting.
The Commissioner had Tynan, one of the Garda’s Deputy Commissioners, beside him. Tynan was in charge of B Section at Garda HQ in the Park. Amongst other things, B Section held personal files on every Garda officer. The two of them seemed to have been chatting amiably to O’Tuaime, and, ushered in, Minogue felt that his arrival was an intrusion on polite company. God Almighty had an effusive greeting for him. Minogue could not decide which of the three uniformed men was giving off the smell of old-fashioned shaving soap. It brought back for an instant the scent of his own father’s skin, Sundays on the way to Mass. He guessed it was O’Tuaime, a florid-faced but boyish- looking career Army General in his early fifties.
O’Tuaime had the clear eyes of a man who spent time outdoors and he was almost entirely bald. He shook Minogue’s hand and greeted him in Irish. His hat lay on an oak table next to a window which overlooked a small grove of deciduous trees, and it somehow amused Minogue to think that this General’s hat might have a life of its own… might be an awkward item which had to be placed on the head at a correct angle, something which earned a soldier a dressing-down if it were not in place as it should be… something which could so easily make one look silly when it blew off or dislodged as one got out of a car… Would his wife stand in the hallway every morning, holding the hat for him?
“It’s not often I have the pleasure of seeing officers at work in our Garda Siochana,” O’Tuaime said in Irish.
Minogue could not think of the Irish for glamorous. “Please God I can make it look showy, then,” he replied in Irish, drawing a polite smile in return.
“The matter we’re here for is delicate in the extreme. In relation to the need for confidentiality,” he went on in English.
“We’ve already acquainted the Major-General with the case you’re working on,” said the Commissioner encouragingly.
Minogue looked momentarily at his feet so that when crossing his legs, as he now wanted to do, he’d not inadvertently kick any furniture. He looked up again, ready to begin, and saw Tynan’s limpid gaze on him. Minogue didn’t mind Tynan; in fact he had rather liked what he had heard of Tynan’s dry humour during the Christmas and retirement parties over the years. He interpreted Tynan’s watery look to mean that he, Inspector Minogue, had better make it good. Hoey’s shoes squeaked as he drew his feet together. Minogue went straight to details.
“It’s not just the expertise and knowledge of firearms alone which suggests that we have to explore these avenues. It’s also a question of access to the hardware, in particular the ammunition chosen… I’m accepting that for the killer to recover the spent bullets, there had to be planning and premeditation regarding his choice of ammunition. The man was no iijit.”
“Or the woman,” said O’Tuaime. Cork, Minogue guessed from O’Tuaime’s first words to him in English.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Woman, Inspector. The killer. In these days of women’s lib, we have to give fair treatment to the girls and the boys.”
“Aha,” the Commissioner interrupted. “That’s the truth, Joe, and well we know it, don’t we?”
He turned to Minogue with a broad smile. “We were just discussing the Ryan business, Matt. The women are getting to be as tough as the men, hah. I said a minute before you arrived that the Army could do with the likes of Mrs. Ryan and the WAMmers. They’d put the fear of God into any aggressors, hah.”
So O’Tuaime was interested in the Ryan murder, Minogue mused. Were these men, these nabobs in uniform, having the same dreams that an army of vengeful women was creeping through the fields at night, with bread- knives between their molars, eyes gleaming with hatred? Tynan’s face shared but the smallest fraction of the joke which O’Tuaime and the Commissioner were enjoying. Minogue exchanged a quick glance with Tynan, and found the same baleful gaze, verging on irony, was fixed on him.
“Our equivalent of the Gurkhas,” said O’Tuaime. The Commissioner slapped his knee with merriment. O’Tuaime rubbed his nose and gave a little snort of what could have been laughter.
“Of course, the killer may have had access to the murder weapon through a friend or a colleague in the Army or in a branch of the Gardai,” Minogue went on.
“With all due respect to your good work in these difficult circumstances,” O’Tuaime said as he nodded toward the Commissioner, “and not to put too fine a point on this issue, but the country is full of guns.”
“And a very sorry state of affairs it is,” said the Commissioner hastily. “Lowers the threshold for violent crime. Very pernicious.”
Perhaps God Almighty was practising parts of a speech he planned to deliver soon, a more cynical Minogue considered.
“A road once entered upon, impossible to leave,” added O’Tuaime in Irish.
Minogue counted to five before continuing. “In any event I need to explore the issues as soon as possible,” he
