by John Brady
Minogue did not wish to provoke trouble beyond amusement by noting aloud that Kilmartin’s amour courtois politesse had gone the way of the cigarette, and about time too.
“Judo or something, Jimmy. You never know. Smoking is a vice, anyway.”
Kilmartin’s eyelids narrowed in a glittering contempt. “The niff of her hairy armpits is more of a health hazard as far as I’m concerned. Let’s get back to those two Holy Joes above in Churchtown Road.”
“All right,” said Minogue, bolstered by the first of the coffee. “Not a mention from them of Paul Fine, not a hint: that’s the most significant thing that I got out of it.”
“Until Drumm asked us how the phone call was taped, like?”
“Right. I think they were genuinely ignorant about it. Drumm turned a bit white at the gills. I don’t like them sitting on a possible membership list, though.”
“I think you got the message across to them pretty well there. They might work on excommunicating you.”
“Too late, Jimmy, I’m the white elephant that fled the circus a long time ago. I had the feeling that Heher was daring me to slap a court order on the organization, knowing damn well I couldn’t get one. Even if I could, they could bog me down by giving me a phone number in Rome and telling me to learn Italian very rapid.”
“Heher and Drumm,” murmured Kilmartin, now in the grip of the coffee. “Sounds like a tobacconist’s shop.”
“Or a sexual disorder,” said Minogue. “Out of Krafft-Ebing.”
“Kraft what? Margarine?”
“Interesting idea,” said Minogue mimicking Heher. “Margarine on the wane. No. Krafft-Ebing wrote a compendium of human sexual behaviour. Heavy emphasis on disorders.”
“Do you know,” Kilmartin said earnestly as he leaned forward, “you seem to have a dirty mind. I hope to God I’m not due for this mental fit that has your brain fried up like an egg. All this talk about sex and the Ryan woman butchering her husband-middle-age crazy, the Yanks call it. With all due respect, you were cracked enough to start out with.”
“Jimmy, I’ve been thinking. Maybe the Women’s Action Movement had put something in the coffee here that has us dancing in our heads and being rude to priests.”
“Very shagging funny. Do you see me laughing?”
“After all, things are only getting going. First it’s Fran Ryan done in by his wife. Maybe there’s a secret signal like a dog whistle over the radio that signals women to go out and get the kitchen knife and — ”
“Mad. You’re barking mad. I don’t doubt but that you’ll be running up and down O’Connell Street on all fours in a minute, waving your mickey and biting people and lathering at the mouth.”
“Remember the thirty-seven, James Kilmartin,” Minogue intoned in the most lugubrious West Clare-Transylvanian accent he could muster. “Your number vill be fifty-four-”
“Fifty-three until 7 October, if it’s all the same to you. Stop acting the bollocks. There might be someone in here who knows us. Control yourself.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Listen. They didn’t make any bones about saying it was Kelly’s voice on the tape? No funny stuff there?”
“Right,” said Minogue emphatically, launching himself into the bun. “That went a long way toward deciding me too. No humming and hawing. I’m pretty sure they were on the level.”
“So what we have out of this is…” Kilmartin extended his fingers and held the first, “… one, their assistance in tracking down whoever might have been with Kelly this last while. Heher maintains that Kelly didn’t come to him for ‘guidance’, but he may have gone to someone else if he wanted advice. Two, the names of his acquaintances that had anything to do with Opus Dei. Drumm used to be pally with Kelly up until Kelly left the house last, when was it…?”
“February last year. Over a year and a half ago,” said Minogue. “I think we could press more on the business of Kelly being demoted or whatever they call it. Remember? Kelly’s commitment changing a bit. ‘Such that his work and status better suited the rank of Associate,’ said Heher. That’s a roundabout way of saying that Brian Kelly had had it with that mob. To my way of thinking, they wouldn’t be too happy about losing him from their top rank. Those Numerary fellas seem to be dug in deep and I had the impression that it was a one-way street. They have to have spent years studying, they have to be professionally trained and then devote loads of time to Opus Dei…”
“They don’t kill backsliders, Matt. They were giving him a breather to see if he’d renew his what-you-me-call-it, his vocation.”
Minogue tripped on ‘renew’. Renewal, meaningful, communicate, relationship, interaction, share… He detested the hijacking of these words. What made it worse was that the Church was devious enough to turn to the new religions of pop-psychology to dress up its own vocabulary of salvation. Minogue had been disappointed and then amused to realize that he preferred the Catholic Church to remain flinty and regal, robed majestically in baroque and gilt authoritarianism. He wanted the triumphant church of his youth. His pantheism had been thrust upon him, but that older Church would have been the easier to deny, he mused wistfully, though he’d have missed the panoply. With guitar-wielding priests and personable smilers like Heher and Drumm, Minogue was suspicious. Self-actualization and meaningful communication were all right for Americans. Wouldn’t wash in Ireland.
“I didn’t like the hint about suicide, even if it was oblique. It felt like they were trying to cut him loose and take no responsibility for him now that he might embarrass them,” said Minogue. “All the yapping about pressure and stress of modern society: since when did we have a modern society? As though to say,‘Poor Brian, if only he had stayed with his brothers in Opus Dei, he’d have been all right.’ ”
Kilmartin stirred his coffee. “You can’t deny it though. We’ll never get a definitive from the post-mortem saying that Kelly was bashed on the head,” he said conclusively. “It’s us being pushy because Kelly might have been connected to Fine.”
“Come on, now,” said Minogue. “I never in all my life saw such a suicide. Even if that crack in the skull is due to the heat and so on. A man empties petrol in his car and sits in the back seat without making a move? We know it’s murder.”
He returned to his coffee and bun. He would have liked a second cup but did not wish to press Kilmartin to any more complicity in what Kilmartin regarded as truancy here in Bewley’s.
“Here’s how I see it,” Kilmartin began slowly. “We keep the Fine case to ourselves when we’re taking statements from Kelly’s friends and associates. Say absolutely nothing. Be all ears for even the slightest hint of anything any of them say about Fine being murdered. The ones who give any sign of a connection to Fine are the ones we can turn inside out, right?”
“Yep. Leave it for them to trip over and incriminate themselves.”
“And we’ll hold on to the supposition that Kelly did try to contact or meet with Fine,” said Kilmartin with the slow speech of a bargainer. “Remember, we can’t dismiss the idea that Kelly might have been involved in Fine’s death too and got cold feet afterwards, so that his pals got to him before he decided to spill the beans.”
“But how would they know that he was ready to spill the beans? How would they know he phoned up looking for me, for example?”
“Jases, not so many questions, I’m not a fortune-teller. Save it for this evening when we have the meeting.”
“We could assume that Kelly was being watched, or believed he was being watched. That would account for a few things, like why he went to meet Fine on Killiney Hill last Sunday instead of meeting him in a handier place… Maybe if Paul Fine was told by Kelly to keep something under his hat for the time being… the need for secrecy, do you get what I’m at?”
“Being watched? By his pals in Opus Dei?”
“Yes. If Kelly had knowledge of, or had participated in, Paul Fine’s murder, and that murder was connected to Opus Dei…”
Kilmartin was giving the embossed ceiling his careful consideration. Minogue licked his fingers before taking out his hanky.
“If we could only place the pair of them together,” Kilmartin muttered. “That’d be the bee’s knees. Then I’d feel a lot easier in myself about taking a flying tackle at this Opus Dei mob.”
Suddenly Kilmartin looked down from the ornate ceiling and fixed Minogue with a stare. “I know what you’re thinking, you know,” he said.
Minogue feigned fright. “I had a fear as a child that adults could read my thoughts,” he said. “Being the sinner I was, I had a lot to keep secret…”
“You’re thinking that Jimmy Kilmartin is afraid to go nose-to-nose with something to do with the Church, aren’t you?”
“I might be.”
“You’re thinking to yourself that Opus Dei is really a crowd of religious lunatics and they deserve a good house-cleaning, but that Jimmy Kilmartin doesn’t want to get his wrists slapped by someone wearing a priest’s collar.”
“The thought had-”
“Feckin‘ sure it had, and well I know it. Well I’ve just thought of something that’ll do the trick nicely for us, without us having to ask Heher for the time of day. Are you ready for this? A time-honoured Irish method.”
“Prayer? Abstinence? The rhythm method?”
Kilmartin glowered. “I can’t get over this. You really are full of dirt today. I don’t understand it. It ill becomes you.”
Minogue smiled at the reprimand which sounded like a hectoring parent or a teacher.
“I’m on the rebound from those two clean and bright specimens, Jimmy. Go easy on me, I don’t meet such angels every day.”
“We could look around for an informer. Now.” Kilmartin’s face shone with the anticipation of praise.
“You mean we should find ourselves a former Opus Dei man and get an insider’s view of the outfit?”
Kilmartin nodded, smiling expectantly, but Minogue’s gargoyle had broken loose after the coffee.
“Only a Mayo-man would come up with an idea like that,” he said maliciously.
Kilmartin sat up with a start. “What do you mean by that comment? There was never an informer born in Co. Mayo. Didn’t we take the brunt of the Black and Tans and join up Humbert’s Frenchmen in ‘98 and… What does Mayo have to do with the suggestion?”
Minogue was up and scampering to the door. He was unaccountably happy, even in the knowledge that this last quarter of an hour might have been merely an oasis in a day when he’d fall back into brooding about the Fines, about their son, about his own. He saw the closely cropped woman who had tried to add six minutes to Kilmartin’s life look up from her paperback treatise at the two heavy, middle-aged policemen hurrying out of the restaurant.
“And as for Clare people, they didn’t know what shoes and socks were until the first plane landed in Shannon,” he heard Kilmartin in pursuit behind. “And as for sports…”
Minogue winked at the grave face of the woman as he fled. She did not acknowledge his efforts. Perhaps it was not part of her view of the world that two clumsy policemen should be willingly making iijits of themselves.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“The chiseller’s name is Patsy O’Malley,” said Keating. “He’s a godsend, I can tell you. You should have heard him.”
“That good?” said Hoey, visibly excited.
Keating widened his eyes and nodded once slowly for effect. “Patsy is ten and a bit. His mother says he only comes into the house to sleep. He’s a wild man entirely. If he’s not down the end of the pier fishing, he’s building forts and hunting boars and tigers in the woods.”
“He’s in a Boy Scout troop?”
“He is. There was a mob of them up on Killiney Hill last Sunday, all afternoon. They had a picnic up there, then they had little jobs to do like collecting different leaves off the trees and finding out what different types of rock and stones there are there. Eleven boys and a scoutmaster, a man by the name of Fahy. I haven’t been in touch with him yet.”
Keating looked down to his notebook.
“It started when Patsy didn’t want to go to bed last night. His ma says he’s a holy terror when it comes to the bed. He managed to stay up and not be noticed until the news was on. We had our plug about the site up on Killiney Hill and Patsy says-this is his ma’s version of it-‘I was there on Sunday, I know that place.’ She didn’t pay a whole lot of notice to that because that reminded her that he was still up. He’s a bit of a head-case with his yarns and everything. She asked him later and him going to bed. Himself and another boy were told to go and look for animal signs and to rendezvous with the troop back up on top of the Hill so as they could tell the troop what they’d found. Part of their job was to keep an eye on the time and to be able to lead the troop back to any spot they’d found interesting.”
“We ought to give the Russians fair warning that the country is full of Davy Crocketts and wild mountaineers,” said Hoey as Keating paused.
“So his ma heard him giving directions as to how to get to the place he saw on the telly and she gave up on him. She thought he was romancing all the details so he could stay up all night talking to her. I got him to tell me how to get to that part of the Hill and he was right in the general area. He didn’t know north and south and that; it was more ‘go down these steps’ and ’there’s a funny tree with a branch sticking out‘. So his ma packed him off to bed and she had a little think about it. She decided to phone and that’s how it started. I’ll tell ye what, lads, this Patsy O’Malley is a ticket. He’s his own boss at ten years of age.”
“Inspector by the age of twenty,” Hoey tried.
Keating flicked forward in his notebook. “Here’s the gist of what he saw.”
For a moment Minogue imagined the O’Malley household, with the oversized Keating and a Garda by his side sitting in the kitchen with the boy, glad to be excused from school, and a mother both nervous and proud of her ten-year-old woodsman.
“He split up with his pal because the pal was an iijit. They stuck him with the pal for a day so the pal’d learn something from Patsy. Patsy didn’t buy that so he told the pal to shag off somewhere and he’d meet up with him before they had to join the troop again. The pal went off and had a Golly bar on the sly, in a shop in Killiney village. Patsy knows all the paths and the hidey-holes around the Hill and he went off up the path on one of his excursions. He said there does be courting couples up this part of the Hill sometimes and he does have a bit of fun with them.”
“I can imagine the fun he means,” said Kilmartin dryly.
“He thought he heard someone breaking sticks,” Keating went on, looking around at the detectives. Minogue thought of the woman walking the dog: branches breaking, she had thought: the dog nosing into the bushes and barking. A silencer on the pistol?
“Naturally Patsy goes in to see what carry-on there is; if there’s some blackguarding going on, well he might be interested. He saw this man down on his knees, poking away at the ground with a penknife-”
“He has the body rolled in under the bushes by then,” Kilmartin interrupted.
Keating nodded, licking his lips. “And digging at the ground. The man sees him and stands up all of a sudden. Patsy says the man looked very upset about something, like he was frightened.”
“No gun?” said Kilmartin quickly.
“No. They stood there looking at one another for a minute and Patsy sees that this fella is shook. The man is trying to look normal, smiling a bit, but Patsy is not fooled. The man says: ‘I’ve lost something here so I have to look for it.’ Patsy says his eyes were huge and he looked like he was very hot or something. That was enough for Patsy and he left the man to it. His ma did a good job of telling him to keep away from quare fellas that acted friendly.”
“Trying to find the bullets, or casings from an automatic. That spells out a careful, expert type of assailant,” said Minogue. He felt the excitement now as a band around his chest.
“Ho
w quick were the shots?” Kilmartin asked.
“Can’t get him on that, sir. Could as easily have been a revolver.”
Minogue found that he was staring intently at the back of a chair.
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Keating hoarsely.
“Does the time fit too?”
Keating nodded vigorously. “The end of the day, sir. The last job of the day for the Scouts. They were on the bus back to Dun Laoghaire about three-quarters of an hour later. It was half-five, a little later.”
“All right,” said Kilmartin calmly. “Who is this man?”
“He’s a cop, sir. That’s what Patsy O’Malley said.”
Keating’s stare switched from Minogue to Hoey and back again to Kilmartin. Everyone in the room was very still. Minogue had the impression that people were holding their breath.
“How does he know?” Kilmartin asked softly.
“‘Looked like a cop.’ I asked him what that looked like and he says: ‘Looks like you.’ His ma wasn’t thrilled about that class of remark and told him to mind his manners. ‘The man looked like a rozzer,’ Patsy says again. And he meant it. I ended up reassuring his ma that I didn’t mind what the boy called Guards, that he sounded truthful and that he was a good, smart lad. You know how people can spot a Guard quick, even if we dressed like the Queen of Sheba? Kids too. He wasn’t saying it to get a dig at me, I’m sure. I plugged him several times about skin colour. Very definite no. Consistently.”
Keating paused and glanced around to savour the tension.
“Local,” Kilmartin murmured.
“Go on,” Minogue prompted.
“Right. The man was tall, had short hair and he wore a jacket. Clean-shaven and ‘not too old’. Older than me but not as old as Patsy’s Da, who’s forty-four. There was nothing special about him except that he looked scared. Patsy put that down to him being caught up to mischief. Patsy says he didn’t see the girlfriend.”