“Your Eminence,” said Minogue. Burke nodded as he shook hands briefly. He looked a lot different off the telly, Minogue thought. Maybe it was the light in here. Or the knobs under the telly to adjust the tint and the-Time to get a new one, Kathleen says, what with the scratchy bit at the bottom of the screen now-
The curtains were dark green and they had been drawn across what could be full-length windows behind the desk. The office was probably thirty feet square, Minogue estimated: there might even be room in here for the Archbishop to have posed for that WAM poster with his foot on the necks of the oppressed women of Ireland. ‘ Not the Church, Not the State, Women must control their…’ One wall was taken up with bookcases, whose glass doors reflected the fancy candelabra lights which dangled from the embossed ceiling. There were two hardbacked chairs drawn up on the policemen’s side of the desk. A coffee-table stood chairless by the marble fireplace to their right. Business, Minogue knew, otherwise we’d be sitting there at that table by the fire that was probably never lit.
Tynan waited for the Archbishop to sit before he took his chair. Minogue followed suit and stole another glance at Burke. The face fleshy but not unhealthy: tired, anyway. Fifty-four, fifty-five? His mauve shirt was that of an Archbishop. He had piled a series of file folders and one thick book to one side of the desk, leaving plenty of room for the photograph of John Paul II high on the altar in the Phoenix Park with his congregation of over a million of the country’s 3? million souls gathered about in the grass. It might have been taken in the middle of his ‘Young people of Ireland’ speech. Minogue could not classify the smell here in the room yet: it was not pipe tobacco, it was more a medicinal smell. Cough drops?
Burke settled himself and looked to Minogue. “You’re a principal officer in investigating Brian Kelly’s death?”
“I’m not, Your Eminence. I’m merely part of the permanent staff in the Technical Bureau. You’d probably know my department as the Murder Squad.”
“I hope I don’t get to know it all that well,” said Burke humourlessly.
“I spoke with Father Heher this morning,” said Minogue.
“Yes, that I know,” said Burke. He looked to the closed door behind the two policemen as though to gather inspiration from it. “You’d be the Inspector Minogue who is investigating the murder of Billy Fine’s son, Paul Fine, wouldn’t you?”
“I am that, Your Eminence.”
“Tell me then, Inspector: why do you think he, Billy Fine, asked you to do the job? Do you have some expertise? Before you give me your answer, I should save you the trouble of asking me how I know this-we meet occasionally in the course of our jobs, Billy and I. Yes,” Burke raised both hands off the desk and used them as wands to indicate around the room, “jobs. This is a job as well as a vocation. I am a bureaucrat as well as a shepherd. This is my office. I’ve met the Fines and many others in the Jewish community in Ireland over the years. My heart goes out to Billy and Rosalie: they are the best that Ireland could hope for in respect of their learning and culture and religion. Billy Fine has the soul of a poet, a writer buried behind those robes. Rosalie Fine is one of the most cultured women I have met in my life. I went to see Billy on Monday night late after I heard the news, and passed on our prayers to them. He asked me then if I knew you. I didn’t.”
Minogue realised that his nervousness was going now. Something was taking its place, a tension, a feeling of some stretching.
“Your question, Your Eminence… I’m not sure. It may be a sentimental thing when all is said and done, to be honest with you. I had met Justice Fine in the Jewish Museum here just after it opened. I believe he knew something of my career background in the Murder Squad.”
“Modest of you, Inspector. Billy Fine seems to have a lot of faith in you. Tell me, are the policemen who do your line of work very different men from those we see helping the schoolchildren across the street?”
Minogue didn’t know whether the talk was toying. “Yes, Your Eminence, I believe that we are.”
“The job requires a certain flair,” Tynan said quietly.
“Flair? Are you very tough, you Gardai here on this work?” asked Burke.
“I don’t think so, Your Eminence. We’re the same as the next man in the street. I can say that my colleagues have a very strong sense of fairness. We try and deal with what people do to other people as best we can. I don’t understand certain things about people even after I see them through a trial.”
“Not an elite that’s used to getting what it wants quickly?”
“I feel very un-elite at the best of times,” replied Minogue. “I go home most evenings to my wife. We have two grown children. We read and watch a little bit of telly and do a bit of gardening if the rain holds off and the slugs don’t attack the cabbage. Sometimes we go on a holiday.”
“Billy Fine said he wanted you. He is no fool.”
“I’m flattered, Your Eminence. I’ll help him out as well as I can, but I work for the State also.”
Burke lolled back in his chair. Minogue heard him breathe out slowly as he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his thumbs.
“Anyway, what are we here for? Brian Kelly and Opus Dei. Is that the menu you’d like, John?”
Tynan nodded. “We’d be obliged for your help.”
“They told you you’d have to apply to Rome to release the membership rolls, I suppose? You didn’t want a list of all the membership in Ireland, did you? You had a sideline interest.”
Minogue cleared his throat. Yes, that’s what the smell was: cough drops. “Brian Kelly’s friends and associates in the organization,” he said. “We’d be wanting to interview them. Perhaps the deceased was anxious, under some pressure.”
“You mean that it’s not certain that Brian Kelly didn’t take his own life?”
“Not entirely at all, Your Eminence. His is in a category of ‘suspected foul play’. It’s likely that we’ll want to investigate the death as soon as we have gleaned all the information we can from a forensic investigation of the remains. I expect that Brian’s death will be a murder investigation by midday tomorrow.”
“It’s a question of what the books call Forensic Pathology, Frank,” said Tynan mildly. “The body was very badly burned.”
Burke rubbed his eyes again. “But the gist of what you were wanting this morning was something else, wasn’t it, though?” he said laboriously, as though to a duller student.
Minogue’s chest was tight with alertness. Something was forming in his mind, quicker now, but he could not make out the contours.
“If I might know which members of Opus Dei are in the Gardai or the Army,” he said.
“And why?”
“There are clues to suggest that Paul Fine’s murder may have involved a person who is both an expert in firearms and had access to same. The murderer went to a lot of trouble to remove evidence from the murder site. It’s also apparent that the phone call to the newspaper blaming it on Palestinians may have been a hoax.”
Burke glared at Minogue with reddened, rheumy eyes. “Do you know anything about Opus Dei, Inspector? You, John,” he turned to Tynan, “you know a bit.”
“Little enough, Your Eminence. I believe that they are not directly accountable to their local dioceses, the local church hierarchy, I mean. They don’t advertise themselves. Naturally one has to be very devout to join-”
“And make no mistake about that,” Burke interrupted. His vehemence startled Minogue. “It’s not that they’re not accountable. They work within their own structure, parallel to our own diocesan work. We’re all pulling in the same direction, you know. The Church is involved as a social agency in a huge number of projects, Inspector. God comes to us in Tallaght, in Clondalkin where boys and girls sniff glue from bags in ditches; God is in the employment office where there are men who haven’t found work in ten years; God is meals-on-wheels to old people that our consumer society has no more time for. Commitment. Values. Altruism. Service. We’re all after the same goals: to serve God by serving our fellow-men and women in this world.”
Burke pointed a finger at the ceiling. “We’re after the will to carry things through, to resist the blandishments of the style of living we seem to have such appetites for now. You won’t shock me to tell me we’re not the Island of Saints and Scholars, but let me tell you this. The will to persevere amidst Ireland’s social upheavals is not the exclusive preserve of the well-intentioned. There is a will to do evil too. Our will is allied to and founded upon values we all hold dear, in the Church, in Irish history as a whole and it’s allied to the commitment that Irish people have shown throughout our history.”
Saints and scholars, like Kilmartin’s dreams. Was everybody in this damn country always ready to deliver a speech at the drop of a hat, Minogue wondered. Perhaps there was some threat in Minogue to which people responded by speechifying. Out of the corner of his eye he knew that Tynan was sitting still, but that it was not a
