“Miss Connolly has keys for the flat upstairs, sir,” one Guard said, rising from the table.
Minogue declined tea, and took the keys.
“When was Mr. Fine here last?”
“Let me see. This being a Monday… It would have been Sunday morning. Late morning. I was doing a bit in the garden there, and I saw him come out. About eleven o’clock.”
“In the morning?”
“Oh yes. We all go to bed early here, we do. The whole street does be as quiet as a graveyard at nine o’clock at night.”
“Sure it was him?”
“Certain, I am. A very nice man, Mr. Fine. I’m still not able to believe it. Lovely young man. Of course I knew he was a Jew, seeing as I see the mention of his father in the papers and so on. Lovely family, I’m sure.”
Minogue staved off his discomfort. He was less irritated than nervous at people telling him that Paul Fine was a Jew.
“Did Mr. Fine speak to you at all recently?”
“Oh, precious little. ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good evening’. Very much kept to himself and always polite.”
“Any chat with him at all?”
One of the Gardai started in on another piece of sponge cake. Minogue didn’t care that they were all seated around the table listening. She might say something different to them and that would be good for starters.
“Nothing. I’m alone here, you see. I never married, as I was saying to the lads here,” she smiled wanly toward the two Gardai. “But I don’t like to be putting conversation on people. If I met him at all, it’d be: ‘How’s it going, Miss Connolly?’ and ‘Grand weather’. Oh a lovely young man.”
She looked entreatingly at all the policemen and shook her head.
“Any visitors, Miss Connolly?”
“Let me think… Very, very occasional… very odd…”
“Do you mean odd visitors, is it?”
“A very odd time, I meant. It was only people he’d arranged to come and visit, I’m sure. There was one fella, I remember his face, used to call by sometimes. Familiar-looking, a fella with a beard. They’d sit in the garden of a nice day. Have a little wine and all that,” she said with an air of casual insight. ‘Having a little wine and all that’ might constitute glamour or bohemian living in these latitudes, Minogue guessed.
“A fella with a beard?”
“Matter of fact I saw him on the telly once. Fitzpat-”
“Fitzgerald?”
“That’s it. He’s a bigwig in RTE,” said Miss Connolly, referring to the head office of the Irish radio and television stations. “But he’s a bit of an atheist too, I believe. I brought them out tea once and I was introduced. Mr. Fine said that Mr. Fitzgerald was his boss and he was trying to soften him up for a bit more pay. A nice sense of humour, I’d say. Terribly nice lad… There were a few others too, all in the same line of business, I’m sure. You know how you can tell, what with the trendy clothes. Have a cup of tea or a bottle of stout maybe. I’d hear them upstairs, but never late at night, never.”
“Did you ever meet his girlfriend?”
“No, I didn’t,” she replied. “Sure you wouldn’t like more tea?”
Minogue glanced at the two Gardai whose car was blocking the driveway outside. One had crumbs in the folds of his uniform. A nice easy few hours’ work holding Fine’s place until the glamorous blades from the Murder Squad came by. Minogue gestured for the younger Guard to step out of the kitchen.
“We’re going up to his flat now. Go over what she remembers again, would you? How long he had been here, any irregularities? Did he ever come home drunk, was he ever having rows that she knows of? Arguments with people on the phone? Did he ever tell her anything about his work or personal life? Any strangers on the terrace this last while, callers looking for Fine?”
“Like Arabs with headgear?” the Garda asked.
Minogue fixed him with a stare.
“It’s just that we heard there was something to do with Palestine…” The Garda tried to regroup with a careful smile.
“Did she see any letters addressed to him? Don’t worry about her saying she never noticed such things-just probe. She’s not a woman to be missing things, I’m sure.”
Minogue phoned Kathleen after an hour. The last ten minutes he had spent seated on Fine’s bed with Hoey, going over what he had recorded in his notes. He had told Hoey to get hold of Gallagher in Special Branch for late afternoon. They’d be wanting all Gallagher had on possible extremist groups. Hoey was to phone the television station, RTE, and insist on seeing Fitzgerald as soon as possible.
Kathleen answered after two rings. Minogue told her that he’d be late. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to watch Die Nasty on your own.”
Daithi was in the States these five weeks past. Iesult was out on a date with Pat the Brain. Psychology and philosophy lectures over a glass of beer?
“I won’t be able to understand it without you there to take it to pieces for me,” Kathleen replied.
Minogue grinned. “It’ll be gone ten o’clock, I’m sure.”
“Fine and well, Inspector. I heard it on the half-one news, and I might have guessed you’d be in the thick of it. Just don’t be taking too much on yourself.”
Was that a resigned rebuke?
He told her about Fine wanting him on the investigation.
“That’s a great compliment, I suppose. Why you, though?”
“Remember that time in the Jewish Museum, just after it opening up? He was there then and he spotted me, apparently. But tell me,” he interrupted himself by asking his wife of thirty years,“how’s life treating you, anyway? Taking into account it’s a Monday and we’re not in Honolulu or lollygagging on some island in the Mediterranean.”
“True for you. I’m grand anyway. There’s a letter from Daithi, by the way.” The change in her voice, the late attempt at cheerfulness bit sharply at the edge of Minogue’s mind.
“Ah. Anything new with him? Is he behaving himself?”
“He sounds fine. Read it yourself when you get home.”
Minogue replaced the receiver. He looked across at the half-empty bookshelves. Paul Fine had read-or at least collected-books on a wide variety of subjects. One shelf held Quotable Quotes next to a copy of Church and State in Modern Ireland. Hoey had found folders of clippings from British and Irish newspapers as well as a dozen and more cassettes with labels which neither man could make out. They’d be a job for the painstaking Keating. Recordings of interviews? There were seven video-cassettes, again of unknown content, marked only by dates and numbers. No video-cassette recorder, but a colour telly and a Sony radio with shortwave bands. Fine had kept his paraphernalia tidily, even his clothes. One of the two bedrooms was by way of being an office, apparently. Tidy but smelly from ashtrays and closed windows. The whole house was damp. A single picture of Fine’s father (was that his mother too?), himself between them as a teenager, standing by a heap of stones in some sunny place.
His belongings had not been disturbed, by the look of things. A drawer full of odds and ends, from disposable razors to a photograph of a dog. Had he spent all his nights here? Neither Minogue nor Hoey had found any notebook or diary. There had been nothing in the pockets of the light tweedy jacket on the body.
Minogue recalled the Commissioner’s confidences about Paul Fine’s past involvement with fringe groups. Fine’s father had not even hinted at any wild side to his son, but that was natural: the son was dead. No parent would recount the failings of a child to a policeman. Minogue would have to burrow around such boulders before trying to hoist them and get an accurate picture of Paul Fine.
Mary McCutcheon. Fitzgerald from RTF-he had Fitz’s name before. Fitzgerald was an acerbic producer of current affairs programmes for the radio, a man who seemed to be at his happiest when inflaming the Catholic hierarchy enough for them to write a letter to the papers complaining about bias in broadcasting. Minogue seemed to remember Fitzgerald also maddening the Special Branch with a programme on one of their many failures; something about a raid on a farmhouse, waving guns about, without finding a trace of the subversives they were expecting to bag. Was Paul Fine cut from the same cloth as Fitzgerald? Hardly. Fitzgerald and the other hyper- educated apostates on the island would have necessarily gone to Mass and confession, necessarily been beaten by
