by John Brady
Minogue locked the desk. He found Fitzgerald with his head encased in headphones the size of polite teacups behind the glass wall of a studio.
“I’m holding on to the key,” said Minogue. “It’s out of your hands for the moment, but thanks very much for acting promptly and securing what may be valuable clues. It may prove useful, I don’t know. There’ll be a detective back to go through the stuff properly. Phone me if you have something, would you? Questions, recollections, anything you hear. Complaints too, if you want.”
Fitzgerald nodded without removing the apparatus. As Minogue turned away, Fitzgerald beckoned to him and he pried one of the headphones away from his ear.
“Do you have anything to do with the Ryan business down in Tipperary?”
“I did,” replied Minogue.
“We’re going to be having a WAMmer here for a live interview about twenty after. Do you know of the Women’s Action Movement?”
Minogue nodded but didn’t take the bait. “I’d better make haste then,” he murmured.
“Aha, I see. I just wanted a detail cleared up. Someone suggested it to me last night and it stuck in my head. You know how everyone has an opinion on this-whether it should be considered murder and all that?”
“All we do is give our evidence to our department up in the Park. They process it, file evidence, word it and then they throw it to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP lays the charges on behalf of the State.”
“OK. I know for a fact that this woman from WAM is going to be talking about the case being a psychological watershed.”
Minogue thought of incontinence. “What’s a psychological watershed when it’s at home?”
“The Ryan woman killing that husband of hers, fighting back. All the claims about wife abuse in holy Ireland. The line you’ll hear this evening will be about a revolution in Irish life, women not taking it any more from Church or State or husband.”
Minogue fixed on Fitzgerald’s ‘line’. Everything was a ‘line’ in this racket, then. Minogue knew the fascination which the Ryan case seemed to hold for many people all over the country and he was suspicious of it. Jimmy Kilmartin himself, that distant look in his eye, was that a portent of ‘a psychological watershed’?
“It’s the whole bit about the strong woman figure in the Irish psyche, I was told last night. That’s what strikes a chord with everyone,” Fitzgerald continued. “So tell me, do the Gardai recognize any significance in how Fran Ryan was killed?”
“He was stabbed to death with a kitchen knife,” Minogue replied cautiously. “Not on any altar of sacrifice or anything. No incantations or signs painted on the wall…”
“Yes, but how many times?”
“Ah, I bet you know yourself, Mr. Fitzgerald.”
“Thirty-seven, am I right?”
“You are,” replied Minogue.
“So yous don’t see any significance or ritual thing about that?”
“To do with where the planets were, is it?” Minogue tried.
“No. Fran Ryan was thirty-seven when he died.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Minogue and Hoey were five minutes late for the meeting. Minogue guessed Gallagher for the one who looked like a graduate student, subtly raffish and smart, mustachioed and clad in denim. Kilmartin was whispering with a sergeant whom Minogue recognized as a forensic technician who was always trying to organize golf tournaments which were a cover for lengthy booze-ups.
He walked to Gallagher and introduced himself. Gallagher’s accent was the faintly interrogative earnestness of Donegal.
“You don’t mind guiding these fellas here through your stuff too, do you?” asked Minogue as he glanced around the room. “We’re all off the Squad here. Keating. That’s Shea Hoey there I came in with. The world and his mother knows Jimmy Kilmartin, I’ll bet: ‘The Killer’ himself. The one he’s talking to has a preliminary from the scene and we’re waiting for anything from the autopsy. It’s early days yet with the pathology, though, so we shouldn’t be expecting anything proper until later this evening.”
Gallagher stroked his moustache. “I can give you the broad picture, but this League crowd… I might as well tell you now, I never heard of them.”
“Well, tell us about the overall situation, then, will you?” He felt drowsy. Now.
Kilmartin lumbered over as Minogue took his seat. “You have a green light,” he confided. “God Almighty was on the blower to me an hour ago. ‘Results!’ says he. You know what that means: steam-roller. The pressure is on, man.”
Kilmartin glanced quickly in Gallagher’s direction. “If that Gallagher drags his heels or sulks a bit, I’d bite him,” he said slowly.
Gallagher stood and nodded at Minogue.
“We’ll start, so,” said Minogue.
Minogue drew several circles around ‘9mm’. He drew squares around ‘. 30,’ ‘. 32- 7. 62, ’7. 65 mm‘.
“Whatever calibre it was, the gun was fired from between one and two feet away. Few particles in the scalp, a radius of nearly four inches. Very little scorching within that area. Em…” The assistant to the State Pathologist was reading from handwritten notes in a binder. “The first shot killed him. Instantly. A subsequent shot took a piece of vertebra here. A shot to the neck blew out the artery. The blood loss has to be a consequence of how the body lay after the shooting.”
He turned to the overhead projector and used his pencil to home in on a point on the diagram. To Minogue he looked like a younger Vincent Price. The upward glow from the apparatus high-lighted his face and the smoke being drawn like a silk scarf toward the fan beneath the projector. The smell of hot plastic and cigarette smoke mixed with the odour of stale clothes-his own? he wondered-had made Minogue sleepy. He looked to the probable height of the killer, an estimate of the angle of entry for the first shot. Fine was five foot ten in his socks, the angle no more than thirty degrees before the bullet went slightly awry. The one who fired the gun had to be no smaller than five foot eight… if he or she was standing in ordinary shoes, on a spot level with Fine. Sitting, though? If Fine had been sitting down? Minogue’s mind reeled.
“How about him being shot as he sat down?” Hoey said.
The assistant turned to the projector again and waved his pencil over shaded areas on the figure.
“We can’t tell from the bruising here if-do you see those bruisings there over the forehead? Well the drawing, I mean, obviously-he banged his head after being shot and falling to the ground. In a chair, say, he’d pitch roughly forward, then to one side when his upper body’d meet with his knees and… it’d take us a while to suggest probabilities. One thing worthy of mention, as I was saying earlier, was the degree of bruising. With the possible exception of that bruise near the hairline, the bruises were occasioned after death. None is severe and that is important.”
Occasioned. I like that verb, thought Minogue.
“It’s safe to say that the victim was not intentionally clobbered or abused at all. The motion of the water and the nature of the materials on the water’s edge accounts for the abrading and slight bruising which forms nearly all of what we’re talking about.”
Tides, thought Minogue. Time and tide wait for no man. Time of death (he remembered the feeble attempt at humour on that: ‘Ah now lads, no miracles, please’) was between eighteen and twenty-four hours of the time of discovery. The body, cruciform, drifting in the darkness as the moon drew and released tides around the island.
Kilmartin flicked the Venetian blinds open and Minogue rubbed his eyes in the glare. Gallagher waited until the assistant had left and his audience was all commissioned Gardai. He began with the file which the Special Branch had maintained on Paul Fine. With a sense of decisive deliberation, Gallagher said the file was inactive. The last entry had been three years previously.
“What status was Fine’s file?” asked Minogue.
“Status?” Gallagher resisted.
“Was he regarded as a high priority?”
Gallagher d
idn’t reply immediately. Minogue caught sight of the mild warning in Kilmartin’s glance. Fine and well to bite Gallagher if he was surly, but not in front of other policemen.
“Er, no. Fine was a student in Trinity College for two years, studying Political Science. His name came to our attention a few months after he started college when he appeared on a membership list for a certain organization, one we routinely keep track of,” Gallagher lisped, without looking up from the sheet he had drawn out of his jacket.
“Hardly the Legion of Mary, ha, lads?” said Kilmartin. The policemen grinned obligingly.
“You may know the organization,” Gallagher rode in on Kilmartin’s attempt to head off awkwardness. “Eco-Al. Let me give you a sketch on this group. Eco is just eco, the way it sounds. It can mean economy and ecology. Al is for alliance. Say it quick and it sounds like ‘equal’. All intentionally clever. We have reason to believe that Eco-Al got some funding from unusual sources on the Continent. There’s common stuff between Eco-Al and other movements: the Green Party, CND in Britain, Greenham Common women, Animal Rights movements. Take it as understood that Eco-Al has received money from an organization in Paris called Accord International. It’s by way of being a quartermaster for cash which is thought to originate in Eastern Europe and probably the Soviet Union. There is no doubt in the wide world that Eco-Al has been infiltrated by persons with other priorities, secret or
otherwise, including Trotskyite groups and ex-members of RS.”
“RS?” asked Kilmartin. “If you say that quick, it’s ”arse“, isn’t it?”
Even Gallagher laughed at that.
“Not intentional this time, but you might be on to something there. I’ll pass it along.”
More laughs.
“Revolutionary Struggle. They’re nearly all students. The ones that aren’t are hangers-on who want to get off with rich girls who have fallen in love with the proletariat. They’re not all the ideologues and screamers they look. One of ‘em turned up at a post-office robbery last year in Castlebar with an assault rifle under his armpit. He’s number two on our list since. We think he’s in Amsterdam. Anyway…”
“Any cross-over between this mob and the IRA?” asked Kilmartin.
“No,” answered Gallagher. “That Eco-Al thing fell in on itself in fact, whatever about in name. You couldn’t keep a coalition like that together in Ireland. It was a hothouse thing. All that’s left of Eco-Al is a small group of university graduates who meet over pints and write letters to the paper about acid rain and the state of the nation’s water resources.”
“Right enough, I know that crowd,” said Kilmartin. “They let their children run around with no nappies. Want to give fish and sheep the vote and outlaw flush toilets and motor-cars.”
“Let’s get back to the other business,” said Minogue, struggling against a sluggish afternoon mind. “Palestinians and their sympathizers.”
Gallagher stretched his arms and began fiddling with a pencil. Minogue deduced that Gallagher was restive at having to explain basics to crime ordinary detectives. Hoity-toity Special Branch: Supermen with their own liturgy.
“The Palestinian thing is not a cut-and-dried affair in Ireland. It’s an odd business. Palestinians find common cause with Republicans here. Then there’s a lot of people saying that Irish nationalism has so much in common with Zionism and that results in support for Israel.”
“So you’re telling us that it’s confused.”
“No. A good rule of thumb here is that Lefties here tend to stick to the Palestinian side. You and I know that IRA personnel have trained and travelled and received munitions from various places in the Middle East.”
“Wait a minute, Pat,” said Minogue. “Sooner or later we have to consider the possibility of a some quid pro quo thing, a favour done by our local gunmen in return for arms or money.”
“It could well be a Provo loaning out a gun or two,” added Gallagher. “They’re still at the rent-a-gun for bank jobs, I grant you. But,” he paused, “why not take the line of a paid-up contract murder? A professional killer or terrorist, in and out from the Continent or someplace.”
“All right so,” said Minogue, still scrabbling for some hold. “You’ve brought the meeting to that contentious point, Pat. We’re trying to profile a killer. Trying to see him clearly. I’ve given the matter some thought, the possibility of a professional killer being responsible, for whatever motive. I think we can’t be distracted by thinking about some international hit-man or hit-men: that would be discouraging. Let’s plug away with the lines we have. Stay flexible. Even if we are chasing a pro, we need to find the locals who set it up. A pro doesn’t just walk in and pick anyone. What we can try to focus on is some small cell, one fella even, who’s a cross-over between IRA or Left-wing and other groups with strong interests in the Middle Eastern business. Not just in Palestinian matters but militant Muslim groups.”
Gallagher nodded and continued stroking his moustache as if trying to drain something out of it, looking toward the ceiling as he listened.
“But like I said,” Gallagher murmured finally,“if it’s a pro or semi-pro floated in for this, paid for the job and gone already…”
“Shite,” said Kilmartin. “The hell kind of a chance do we have if the killer got a gun and a passport and a fistful of money out of a diplomatic bag and he’s back in Paris or Beirut or whatever?”
Gallagher shrugged. “Then we have our work cut out for us,” he said. He continued mulling over the question and then shook his head slowly.
“We can usually pick names out of our heads for certain jobs. If you said: ‘We’re looking for someone who knocks off post-offices using assault rifles and works with two others and steals four cars for one job, ’ I could reel off three or four names. But right now we can’t point to anyone in or out of the groups we monitor who is fired up enough and savage enough to do this murder. Three shots in the head suggests expertise to me, that’s all I can say. Our militants are a fairly tight family bunch, to tell you the truth. The home-grown real hit-men don’t care a damn for anything outside the IRA-Brit side of things. They wouldn’t do freelance stuff like killing Fine for an Arab cause. Very, very unlikely.”
“Humph,” grunted Kilmartin, shifting himself in his seat. “Don’t forget the call to the newspaper was an Irish accent. Let’s say some foreigner, some fella from the Middle East, did it but had an Irish mate to do the phoning. They’re cut-throats out there in the Middle East, you only have to watch the news to know that.”
“You may have something there,” Gallagher allowed cautiously. “It’d also make it look like there was an organization here, some support for their cause.”
No one spoke for several moments.
Gallagher’s quizzical glance toward Minogue brought him out of his thoughts and he suppressed a yawn. “Yes, Pat. Sorry. Yes. Will you carry on with the student thing now, if you please? Middle Eastern students and groups and what-have-you here in Ireland?”
Chair legs scraped and policemen rearranged themselves while Gallagher prepared his notes again. Minogue lapsed into his chair, retreating within.
He had been lucky, if luck was the word. After the nightmare of carrying the body through the bushes and briars in the early hours of Monday morning, the panic and fear and sweat like a fever gripping him, he had hefted and dragged, rested with then wrestled with the corpse for an hour, getting him down off the damn hill. His body remembered the dank night air off the sea enveloping him like a clammy cloak.
He had seen dead bodies before, plenty of them. Those villagers shredded in the Bekaa Valley, the dust of their pulverized homes still settling on their faces where the flies fed. Never so close, though: close enough to see the head jerk, hair part suddenly as the shot spread shock through the skull, the body drop like a stone, as though thrown to the ground. Had to make certain then, and not think: shoot and hold and shoot again, quickly before you scream yourself. Must watch, too, as the head hopped and the legs twitched.
He shuddered as he changed gear for the first traffic lights on the outskirts of Bray. His armpits prickled. He couldn’t remember getting this far, just following the rush-hour traffic south on the Bray Rd. His face felt swollen with the sweat. He crunched third gear, missing the gate. The car felt strange to him still. Could the drivers next to him imagine what he had been going through, what he was still going through? He had found the shell casings, scrabbling in the grass and briars; he had rolled the body into the bushes. A dog barking somewhere, rustling in the foliage. People used this park, of course they did. Not of his choosing at all. Panic had burst like a flare in his chest, leaving every part of his body aching. Dog barking again, breaking the tremendous weight of silence of a warm autumn afternoon. Dull echoes of the thumps as he had fired still pulsed in his mind. Then looking up and seeing the child watching him. Luck? Paralysed, beyond any thought or action. Couldn’t touch the child. A boy dressed up in his Boy Scout uniform, stick in hand: there had to be more of these youngsters nearby. He remembered trying to smile at the boy but something was shouting inside his head, knowing he couldn’t control his facial muscles. The boy had moved off. Luck?
He accelerated with the green light and turned down toward the wasteland of rubble which girdled this corner of the town. He passed a metal foundry, long abandoned, where teenagers drank and pelted bottles against the few remaining walls, where bonfires scarred and blackened the stones, where rats scurried in the dock-weeds and scattered bricks and rubbish. It was tea-time, the lanes were deserted. Rusting hulks of cars stood in the nettles, by mounds of rubble. He eased the car over bricks and burst plastic bags full of refuse and steered toward a roofless building. Small shapes moved around the debris. The tyres spun as he worked the car over a concrete parapet where steel rails were still embedded. More car wrecks, many burned too.
Seize the chance, just go through with it. That’s how war is. War? He swore at the burn of confusion and anger which erupted around his heart. Struggling with a dead man down a hill in the hopes he’d never be found; nauseous with loathing and disgust and weariness, embracing the stubborn body of a man he had killed as though it were a penance. Cursing and praying, nearly in tears, stumbling with his load while everyone slept. Dark night of the soul, he had wondered later. The life of one man for the greater cause. One man-it was as though another voice had said that aloud next to him in the car. Panic and rage made a tremor race up his back. He cast a glance toward the covered body. Now it was two.