by John Brady
“As if the same Chief is ever going to let go his grip,” said Minogue. Hoey smiled wanly at the uncharacteristic vitriol in Minogue’s tone.
“Exactly. Everyone over the age of six months knows that Gorman’d love to wake up one morning and find himself running the country.‘Ireland in the new age’ and ‘new economic realities’, that’s his line, isn’t it?”
“You know a lot more than I do about him. The brain goes dead on me as regards that stuff. I can’t tell one of them from the other when they talk like that. All I know is that he was shuffled into Defence last year, a new Minister.”
“Ah sure, it’s only the fact that Gorman is a distant relation on my mother’s side. He’s Galway, is Gorman. A lot of people at home think he’s the cat’s pyjamas entirely. He’s off the farm but he lectured in economics at the university. Speaks French, but knows how to handle a hurley stick and even swallow pints, I heard. But don’t think the Chief doesn’t know about Gorman. They have to be sort of civil to one another. Gorman is on the tape saying something about ‘unquestioned allegiance’ to the Chief. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Maybe Fine was going to interview Gorman, and he wanted to be able to quote him from that television show…”
Minogue decided to leave Hoey to his cynical pleasures with the tape. He’d have to be thinking of a dinner himself soon. He looked to the blackboards again. The conference and assessment was set for half-two today: that’d be to give God Almighty time to conjure up a weighty Press release for the tea-time news on the telly. Minogue turned away from the cacophony of phones and typewriters, settled himself in his chair, and tried the Pathologist’s report again. His eyes followed the print but took in nothing beyond an odd word. He turned to the photocopies of the notes which the policemen on telephone work had made. Some had still to be typed. Thirteen calls in all, with officers dispatched to get statements on seven. Minogue lost his concentration again.
Strangers in a strange land… Fine had used the phrase with an unmistakable irony. It might have been true for those Jewish families who had fled Russia and Lithuania to come to Ireland after the Tsar’s May Laws in eighteen-eighty-something, Minogue guessed as he tried to recall more from his visit to the Jewish Museum and his own reading. Fine must have meant it ironically. The Fines had been here for nearly 200 years; Justice Fine was a Supreme Court judge…
Paul Fine had never wanted to leave Dublin, it seemed. It was his city. Married to a Dublinwoman, Minogue had cracked some of the code which might explain Dubliners’ attachment to their shabby capital. Maybe needing to return to Dublin had cost Paul Fine his marriage? His father didn’t know the names of any of Paul’s friends beyond his schooldays, and several of these had emigrated. He knew Mary McCutcheon and Paul’s boss, whom he misnamed as Fitzpatrick. Had all Paul’s school-friends, the friends he’d met at temple as a youngster, the friends he’d spent summer holidays with-had they all emigrated? Or had he wanted some breathing space after returning from London, and avoided them? A lapsed Jew, like a lapsed Catholic, Mickey Fitz had said. In other words, there was no such thing: once in, never out. It was in your marrow, in your dreams, even fifty years after you had renounced it. Only a fool could think his life was being run by what his thoughts suggested to him on a fine sunny day. Gallagher, phone Gallagher.
Minogue was switched three times before he heard Gallagher.
“Yes, I have a tentative list of, let’s call them sympathizers. Irish, I mean. I have thirty-eight.” He sounded pleased with himself, Minogue believed. “I pulled in even the marginal ones. There are others, of course, members of associations we don’t monitor because they’re harmless.”
Minogue jumped in with both feet. “Will the Special Branch be wanting to conduct their own interviews themselves, Pat?”
“Oh I’d say there’d be interest in that here, all right. We work through our own contacts here, you probably know. On the inside, you see,” Gallagher added awkwardly. “The Chief Super knows about my assignment here and…”
Minogue remembered that Chief Superintendent Farrell of the Special Branch was rumoured to model himself after J. Edgar Hoover. The Branch was his personal army against subversives and criminals, and no one would tell him how to do his business.
“I’ll ask to clear it, then, so that Branch officers can follow up on your list and we don’t be tripping over one another,” said Minogue.
Minogue liked to think that he noticed the relief in Gallagher’s voice after that. Gallagher would not miss the hint either, Minogue was sure. When the Press release went out this evening, few would pause to wonder what the phrase ‘joint Murder Squad and Special Branch task force’ meant-beyond apparent co-operation, that was.
Kilmartin was back at his office minutes before two o’clock. Spotting Minogue, he wavered in his path and walked toward him. “Honest to God,” said Kilmartin, looking over his shoulder, “there’s a mountain of paper inside on my desk. I don’t doubt but that I’ll have a pain in me head like the kick off a horse if I have to read all that today. Did you have your dinner?”
“I had a bowl of soup and a sandwich,” Minogue replied.
“That’s what I should have had meself, I’m telling you. I ate something in a pub in Bray and bejases I still don’t know what it might have been. Steak and kidney something. Came out of a tin with a snap of Lassie on it, I bet. The heartburn is bad after that. Bray is the back of the neck.”
“What’s the story in Bray, then?”
“There’s someone burned to a crisp in the back of a Volkswagen Golf. Looks like a man, but I wouldn’t bet too much on that. The fire was so hot that bits of the damn car went and melted themselves. Metal, I mean. How do you like that?”
Minogue was tempted to reply that he didn’t think it was so hot.
Arrayed around the squadroom at half-past two Minogue counted eighteen policemen. Gallagher sat with an untidy-looking Special Branch colleague. The room was soon full of smoke. The typewriters were silent. Two detectives were sharing a joke. Hoey was back in time and Minogue let him have his head. Hoey asked to hear from the scenes-of-crime examiners first.
The blood had tested positive as Paul Fine’s type. No bullets had been found on the site. An area of forty by forty metres square had been examined so far. A dragnet of the beach had produced nothing pertinent to the murder. The detective remarked that a prophylactic had been found on the beach, and Minogue did not twig what he meant until he looked up to see several policemen smiling.
Three interviews with citizens responding to the media appeals were still in progress. The remainder had elicited no direct knowledge of anything to do with the murder. The best information to date had been the call from the woman which had led to the murder site.
These not unexpected results still moved Kilmartin to some testy rhetoric. “Why did these busybodies phone up then, I ask you? Have they nothing better to be doing?”
“All is not lost,” Hoey replied sententiously. “There is one fella, a ticket man at Dalkey Station, the one whose wife phoned up. He says he’s no more than fifty-fifty sure he saw Fine coming through the turnstile some time Sunday. Just after dinner-time, he thinks. Not very solid at all.”
“Alone?” Hoey asked.
“Yes. Seeing as he must have gotten on the train, if it was Fine who was there in Dalkey Station, we’ll get in touch with the men who were on shifts on Sunday at the train stations. We have the snapshots in all stations now, anyway.”
“Is there anything worth holding our breaths over with these calls that are going on at the moment?” Minogue asked.
“Maybe one of them, sir. He’s having a bit of trouble remembering his times on account of him having a few jars on Sunday night. He went to the beach, not actually on to the beach, but into the car-park after he came out of a pub in Ballybrack. He was courting his moth in a car. He says she was driving, if you don’t mind.”
“Maybe he’s the boyo who left the frenchies on the beach,” Kilmartin said.
�
��That’s a good one,” the detective lied. “Fact is he took the trouble to phone. I think that the public in general is very taken aback with this. That the victim was shot three times in the head and him being a, you know, a Jew. This fella anyway, he phoned us before he realized he didn’t really have anything of substance to offer us. He said there were two other cars parked in the car-park, maybe three. Up to the same trick-acting, maybe. But there was one car there before he came and still there after he left. He was sure there was nobody in the car while he was there. That’s as much as we got out of him.”
“Type, age… colour?” said Kilmartin.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Ye’ll be ready for calls tonight to do with the site out on Killiney Hill instead?” asked Minogue.
“To be sure.”
Hoey read a precis of the autopsy. He pointed to the blackboards then and worked his way through the questions which several of the policemen put to him.
“Are these all the stories Fine was working on?” one asked him earnestly.
“All we know of so far. See this one here, the one on the Arab students? He didn’t get that far on this, not to the stage of interviewing the students he had on a list. He’d read up on some material associated with this work he had planned. Look over at the items here listed from one of his indexes… Video-cassettes on stories he was supposed to cover or dig up. This list here… that’s of the audio-cassettes we found.”
Hoey nodded to Keating. Keating stood, moved to the blackboards and talked his way methodically down the lists.
“… So far, going through the stuff in his desk, there’s nothing standing out. He kept paper files on these stories and he had odds and ends in another general file. Clippings he did himself, a note about some programmes done before. We’re still going through programmes he put material together for in the past year, to see if he made himself any enemies. The nearest we’ve come is a story on a fertilizer plant polluting part of the River Barrow. He was on to that story first and it went down very well. That means the Press took up his story and used his report after it came on the radio. Fine was interested in what-do-you-call-it, ecology…”
Eco-Al, Minogue remembered-Paul Fine’s involvement in what the Special Branch had decided was not merely ecology but a Trojan Horse for godless communism to turn the Irish on their heads. Minogue had not felt the need to fence with Gallagher on that issue of surveillance of Eco-Al, to ask what exactly the Branch’s ‘good reason to believe’ or ‘substantial links’ meant as regards Eco-Al’s being a stalking-horse for the Bolshevist hordes.
Hoey returned to the blackboard. He seemed antic to Minogue, who didn’t know why. The term demonstrative did not fit Shea Hoey but there he was, rapping a forefinger on the board like a teacher.
“So we know that Paul Fine did not bump into any gunmen, political or just over-the-wall thugs, in the course of his journalistic work. It looks like he didn’t get the opportunity to rub such parties the wrong way at all,” Hoey repeated. “Such that they might want to be after shooting him.”
The room was now sweaty and airless. Yawns were spreading around the room, followed by stretches.
“… nothing we’ve discovered yet in his personal life so far,” Hoey went on. He paused and pointed to the cluster of names around Paul Fine’s.
“His wife, his ex-wife, is an English girl. She’s the same religion as he is. They parted and she’s living beyond in London. No disputes there, except she didn’t want to live in Dublin and that was that. No rows with his brother or sister… Two years in college, then London… then he got married, stayed on in London, didn’t like it… Into RTE when he came back to Dublin.”
“Do we have all his bits of paper and what-have-you?” asked a young detective. Minogue recognized the face of the blow-in from the Central Detective Unit. Doyle? Yes, Doyle.
“For his work? Yep,” Hoey replied. “In so far as we have gone through his belongings at work and in his flat.”
“Was he carrying anything with him when he left his flat Sunday morning?” Doyle asked.
“The landlady, a Miss Connolly, didn’t see anything. He may have had some little pocketbook or a notebook.”
“Tape-recorders,” Doyle said. “Don’t them journalist types carry them around?”
Minogue liked Doyle’s persistence. Jimmy Doyle, was it? No, Kevin… Danny?
“We haven’t found one yet. And you’re right, he would probably have had some class of a recording device, too,” Hoey allowed.
“But aren’t they full of themselves with those things, word-processors, these days?” asked Doyle.
“Computers?” said Kilmartin.
“No disks or diskettes,” said Hoey cautiously. “And he didn’t have a computer.”
That seemed to stay Doyle’s speculation. Hoey waited for a rejoinder. Hearing none, he turned to the board where a time line had been drawn to represent the last few days of Paul Fine’s life. An asterisk stood beside 5–5: 30 p. m. Sunday, followed by a question mark in brackets. Hoey cleared his throat and began at the top of the board. Minogue’s eyes stayed fixed on the asterisk while he listened wearily.
“Excuse me now for interrupting again,” Doyle said. “I have this mental block about this man’s work, the journalism thing. I know it’s radio and all that, but doesn’t every journalist have to know about computers and the like, these days? That’s how the newspapers are done now: I saw it on the telly. You even have correspondents sending their stuff in on telephone lines, off their own little computers. Surely to God RTE has something like that?”
“Phone ‘em up then, like a good man,” said Kilmartin, interrupting with an irritable scratch of his head.
Hoey began again after Doyle had gone to find a phone in some privacy. Minogue’s eyes returned involuntarily to the asterisk, the probable time of Paul Fine’s death. There was still no entry for the last Saturday of his life. Mickey Fitz had called Paul Fine the equivalent of a lapsed Catholic. He’d hardly have been at home observing his Sabbath, so.
Minogue’s mind slipped free of its moorings again. Paul Fine, the son of a prominent Irishman, an Irishman who was also a Jew. A Jew who practised his religion, a son who did not. Friction. A man who was a legal scholar, an authority with a mountain of accomplishments behind him: a son who seemed unsettled, who hadn’t found his own path. Paul Fine’s brother was a dentist in London, his sister a research scientist. Minogue imagined the talk around the Fines’ tea-table. Would Paul have recoiled when his father would mention how Paul’s sister had made an important breakthrough in her work, or how Paul’s brother had had to move to bigger offices because his practice was getting so large?
A mood of irony settled on Minogue then as he realized that Paul Fine had wanted to return to Dublin, maybe at the risk of his own marriage, while his brother and sister, successes, had left. Did Dublin beckon to those who would be failures elsewhere?
Doyle reappeared toward the end of Hoey’s description of what clues could come out of the murder site.
“There,” he said in the pause which Hoey made for him, “I knew they had to have something there. I don’t watch the telly for nothing, you know. RTE has a big computer that the staff can use.” He glanced at his notebook. “It’s called a Newstar computer. It’s wired up to a cable from an international Press Agency. The fella I was talking to says that not many of the staff bother to use that part of it but it might be that Fine did use it for typing stuff up. People have their own bits of the computer, like their own filing cabinet on board the contraption.”
“Is there anything under Fine’s name on it?” Kilmartin asked.
“Wouldn’t tell me. ‘Need an authority to do that,’ says he to me. I told him I was a Guard and he could call Harcourt Street and find out, but no go. Users have their own codes anyway, like their own little keys to their locker.”
“So there could be some of Fine’s stuff on this computer, stuff we haven’t seen,” Minogue joined in.
“Cou
ld be, sir,” Doyle replied. “Why don’t you send me over there with a bit of something to wave at them so as I can find out?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Four o’clock brought Minogue beyond temptation and he fled to Bewley’s Cafe. He was through the door and fumbling for his car keys when he heard Kilmartin calling behind him. He pretended not to hear him over the traffic but Kilmartin outpaced the slowing Minogue. Minogue wanted to be alone in noisy and contented solitude, in the ruck which made up Bewley’s, but he didn’t want Kilmartin, stricken with a heart attack from running, on his conscience.
Minogue was in a bad enough humour for not having thought of other places Fine might have stored his work. He had phoned Fitzgerald, hoping to short-cut Doyle’s work by finding out whether Paul Fine did use the computer. Fitzgerald had told him that he didn’t know and Minogue had had to believe him.
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” wheezed Kilmartin, falling into step with Minogue. “Jases, you’re out of there like a blue-arsed fly. Take your time, man dear. I know where you’re off to, anyway.”
“How so?” said Minogue.
“I asked Her Nibs,” said Kilmartin, referring to the Delphic Eilis.
“‘His honour is making a bee-line for Bewley’s,’ says she, ‘by the look in his eye.’ Wait till I tell you-I just heard that Ryan woman was released without bail. She’s home with her children.”
Minogue didn’t believe Kilmartin at first.
“I swear to God. She was charged with manslaughter, given her dinner and put out on to the street. That’s not the half of it. There was a crowd of Women’s Action heavies with her, having a hooley and dancing in the street. Bedlam. They took her back to the farm, bejases, and there’s a crowd of them staying to help her with the farm work and make sure nobody comes around that might blackguard her.”
Kilmartin began to laugh. It was the laugh of a Hollywood castaway gone mad from thirst in the Sahara, Minogue believed.