Kelly’s house and killed him there. The day your son was found.”
“Thus the peculiar timing of this fake call from the Palestinian outfit to the newspaper.”
“Gibney wanted to buy time as well as dirty up the motive. The Ard Fheis was only a week away then. There was the chance that your son would not be found at all-that’s why Gibney went to the trouble of putting him in the sea, I think.”
Fine’s eyes wandered past Minogue and slipped out of focus.
“Yes,” Minogue went on, “we have yet to get anything definitive from Gibney’s cohorts and it may be that he didn’t disclose to them what he was up to. It looks like he found some pretext to lure Paul out to Killiney. He might have used Brian Kelly’s name to set it up. Wily, organized-I think he had them all mesmerized. Leadership is an odd business. But Gibney’s associates are beginning to let slip that Gibney was obsessed with the way the country was being governed. Half of it is hindsight, I’m sure, patching up recollections to fit what has transpired. It’s possible that Gibney dithered over killing Brian Kelly. He may have thought or hoped that Kelly could be frightened off or brought back into the fold…”
“Had a row with Mr. Kelly prior to murdering him, perhaps?” said Fine. Minogue shrugged.
“What I still can’t get around is the fact that Gibney had such an effect,” said Fine. “How could he influence educated people to go along with this sort of thing? They were ready, before the weekend, to gun down the union man who’s leading the strike, weren’t they?”
“That’s what’s coming out, all right,” said Minogue. “They had a plan to cause as much chaos as they needed to.”
Fine turned up the collar of his anorak.
“The ground-work was done years ago,” Minogue said. “Not directly, of course. But the whole process took its toll, that’s how Gibney was able to persuade all those people: the fella out in Radio Telifis Eireann to monitor what Paul did on the computer and then wipe it out when we came looking for Paul’s stuff; those civil servants; Gorman, even. They had been readied years ago.”
“You’re talking about something I can’t comment on, you know,” said Fine. “I know piety and fervour in very different forms when they’re planted on to politics. That’s why I’ll be keeping my comments to myself when we’re in Israel.”
The drizzle was turning to rain now. Kathleen rubbed the window inside.
“The charges will stick, you know,” Minogue said. “We’ll get them all on conspiracy, if not accessory to.”
“It was hardly a conspiracy at all,” said Fine in a resigned tone. “ They were simply afraid of Gibney after a while, by the sound of things. I suppose we have Archbishop Burke to thank for getting to these people before they did worse.”
“And whoever it was who broke ranks and made that confession,” said Minogue.
Fine stepped over the ditch and climbed up toward the road. Minogue walked around the driver’s side. The rain was drumming on the roof now.
“Has the Commissioner kept you up on the evidence as it comes in?”
“The whole bit,” said Fine. He seemed to Minogue to be concentrating on the rain as it hopped off the roof.
“Yes. Court martials, the investigation tribunals in the Gardai-I believe the panel appointed by the Civil Service Commission is like the Inquisition all over again. Nobody has asked my opinion on the whole business yet, do you know that? It’s as if they’re going at it so ferociously to prove something.”
“It may be the guilt. Atonement.”
Fine took a lingering look back up into the rain and the gloom. Night was coming in with the rain clouds over the bog.
“For Paul too, for not knowing him as well as I could have. I don’t think he’d like to see us run out of Ireland by this. Do you know what finally decided me, though? I remembered this afternoon. It was something Johnny Cohen said to me afterwards. We all carry a spare yarmulka or two in our fobs at funerals, so as Gentiles can wear them. Johnny was complaining that he had run out of them and he had borrowed every spare one he could find, but that there’d be people in the burial-ground without a covering over them. Catastrophe in Johnny’s mind, of course. There were that many at the funeral. We were very glad of that.”
Again the image of the funeral circled in Minogue’s head. From a distance he heard his own voice, odd in the gathering, dripping gloom. “Not a part of the world or a season that a man could afford to be without some class of a covering over his head, is it?”
Minogue opened the door of the Fiat.
“Hop in there like a good man and introduce yourself. We’ll be down off this place before the night.”
