by John Brady
“Are you gentlemen involved below?” the waiter asked them.
Minogue and Kilmartin had walked back up the beach and into the lounge of the one hotel opposite the station. The beach and its events were out of sight to the two policemen seated as they were by a picture window. Kilmartin had eaten most of the chicken sandwiches and downed a pot of tea. The sea air, he claimed as he stifled a belch, wasn’t it great? Minogue was working on a second Bewley’s coffee.
“If we’re not now, we will be,” Kilmartin replied. “Did you make this tea with bags or with real tea leaves?”
“Bags.”
Minogue refused more coffee which the hotel offered black, to be doctored with cold milk by the customer. He far preferred his Bewley’s coffee in situ, in a Bewley’s Oriental Restaurant, complete with scalded milk, a sticky bun to play hell with his dentures and a deafening noise of plates and loud conversation.
“Terrible business. Never happened since I started at this place. That’s fifteen year ago next November,” the waiter observed. He too had been immobilized by the sea, Minogue noticed. The sea looked tranquil from here. The waiter stood over the two policemen, his tray against his chest, gazing vacantly out the window. Minogue wondered if everyone near the sea looked as if they had been summoned by a hypnotist.
“Tell us, do you work here every day?” Kilmartin asked.
“Weekdays three till half-eleven. I do a Saturday or Sunday if they’re short. I don’t have to. We have the union now, thanks be to God,” the waiter replied slowly from his trance.
“Thanks be to James Connolly and Jim Larkin, you mean,” Kilmartin said.
“And that Marx fella too,” Minogue added.
“Hah,” said the waiter. The humour had broken the sea-spell. He looked to Minogue and then to Kilmartin. “I heard the poor man was after being shot.”
“Who told you that?”
“Danny the barman. He seen the commotion with the Garda cars and he went over. Before the man was covered up, too. A terrible gruesome sight, says Danny. What’s the country coming to, do you know what I mean?”
Minogue recognized the futility of a reasonable question asked in an unreasonable environment. He offered an honest appraisal. “An unnerving maturity, I’d say.”
“What?” asked the waiter.
“Is there more tea?” asked Kilmartin.
The waiter drifted away through the empty lounge, drumming on his tray. Kilmartin stretched out his legs and reached for his cigarettes. After blowing out the match with a cloud of smoke he tapped his finger on his watch.
“Look at that, would you. Hoey’s still in the bloody traffic, I’d swear.”
“He may be down on the strand. Detained or looking things over,” said Minogue. “The traffic doesn’t be that bad this hour of the day.”
Kilmartin coughed. “Boys oh boys, if the buses and the trains go on strike there’ll be convulsions as regards the same shagging traffic. There’s rumblings on that score too. We might as well stay home if there’s a bloody strike, I’m telling you. I wish they’d legislate that crowd back to work. Just once, anyway,” he said.
“Aha. So you’re not really a follower of Marx,” Minogue noted, as though he hadn’t known Kilmartin for twenty and more years. “Half my crowd at home have turned sharply to the left. I feel the breeze by times myself.”
“It’s that Pat Muldoon, your daughter’s fella, if you ask me.” Kilmartin’s tone took on an ominous, schoolmasterish tone. “As for the busmen, I say we let the Army come in and either drive the bloody buses or use Army lorries. Remember when they used to do that?” asked the philosopher-king.
“I do. Don’t you think that seeing Army lorries and uniforms on the streets here would make us look like the banana republic we are rapidly becoming?” an indelicate Minogue advanced.
Kilmartin laughed without sparing a smile. “Jokes aside, there are plenty of people in the country who wouldn’t mind seeing the unions get a rap on the knuckles. Maybe having Army lads on the streets would improve general morale.”
“Getting the trains to run on time, is it? Then maybe we should take over the Isle of Man and call them the Malvinas.”
“Fine and well for you to be laughing about it, Matt. I’ll tell you this and I’ll tell you no more.” Kilmartin leaned closer to Minogue to shield his wisdom from the returning waiter. “There’s men well up the ladder, well above us little pissers,” he whispered, “men who’d like to put the unions and their Leftie hangabouts to work and get the country back into the civilized world. Leadership is what we need, let me tell you. All you have is ad-hoc-itis, floating fluff until election time.”
Minogue did not care to listen to the remarks of high-ranking policemen which Kilmartin might have overheard at the boozy conferences he liked to attend. He believed their political vagaries to be less antic than threatening. “I tend more toward the hang-about position rather than the alternative,” he murmured.
Kilmartin grunted. “Tell you what. If there was a new party introduced tomorrow morning and it wasn’t full of lunatics, there’d be plenty of people’d come out of the woods and support it. Every dog and divil is ready for a change. What do you think?”
The waiter laid the teapot on the table. Kilmartin flipped the lid, looking for the tea-bag.
“I took it out,” said the waiter. He turned and sailed back to the bar.
“ Plus ca change, Jimmy…”
“I heard that Gorman would like to get out from under the Chief and get things going,” Kilmartin rejoined.
Minogue remembered Gorman, the Minister for Defence, fervidly denying rumours that he was anything but 110 per cent loyal to the Chief and the Party. To Minogue, the Chief looked like a crooked Caesar in profile. The Party Whip meant precisely that in Irish politics: the Chief had a tribe, not a political party.
“See him on the telly the other night, telling the reporters about rumours started up by the media? Ha ha, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, that Gorman,” Kilmartin concluded.
“I understand that Gorman hasn’t a brain in his head at all, at all,” Minogue offered mildly. He saw Hoey stepping around a table next to the entrance to the lounge. Kilmartin looked up from his ministrations with the tea as a man with the face of a Toby jug followed Hoey into the lounge.
“Jases,” Kilmartin said. “Not Hynes.”
Shorty Hynes was a reporter for one of the two Dublin evening papers. He was a prodigious drinker, a gregarious and disarming character well known in the pubs and clubs of the city. Hynes could not wholly conceal the fact that he was as tenacious as a badger with a bone between his teeth. Hynes specialized in lurid descriptions of murders and violent crimes, wringing out the most minute and morbid details to gratify the tastes of the citizenry of Dublin and the island generally. Kilmartin had had Hynes barred from the headquarters of the Murder Squad after a spat between them. Hynes had been speechifying that the people had a right to know. Like any speechifier, Kilmartin did not take to competition in this line and he had told Hynes that, generally speaking, ‘the people’ were iijits. Hynes did not dispute this fact but still argued their right to be privy to details of a murder investigation. His insistence on this point had landed him out in the street. Still, Hynes had not taken it badly, and Kilmartin and he maintained a relationship which occasionally bordered on the civil. Hoey’s tight lips suggested that Hynes had refused to be put off looking for Kilmartin on the beach.
“Ha ha, men,” Hynes shouted, rolling his bonhomie across the room ahead of him. “The very men I was looking for. I was told that yous were at the scene but minutes before I arrived.”
Kilmartin glanced at Hoey.
“Are we just in time to have a nice little pick-me-up?” Hynes beamed.
“A kick-me-out-on-me-arse, you mean,” muttered Kilmartin.
“Landlord, landlord!” Hynes cried spiritedly. The waiter reappeared, looking more the ascetic monastery novitiate than before. Hynes ordered a Johnnie Walker and flipped a fing
er at the three policemen.
“No drink here,” Kilmartin declared.
Hynes shrugged and sat down, his hands on his knees.
“A few words, Chief Inspector, for attribution? And Sergeant- whoops, Inspector Minogue… fresh and well you’re looking,” the reporter smiled again.
“We were sitting down here discussing how nice it is to be nearer to retirement, Mr. Hynes,” Kilmartin drawled. “To have able and expert policemen in the Technical Bureau to go over the ground for us. To be looking forward not to be straining to be polite to certain members of the public, to certain organs in society.”
“Which organs, now?” Hynes guyed.
“Arra, don’t be offering me occasions of sin now, Mr. Hynes, if you don’t mind. My colleague here has a refined sensibility. I meant the media, specifically the press. There were times when journalists didn’t run berserk with the smell of blood to titillate their readers.”
Minogue doubted that the bibulous Hynes had sought Kilmartin out merely to torment him. The reporter must have heard less than he wanted down on the strand.
“What’s with your man down on the beach?” Hynes asked brightly.
“Apparently the man is dead, Mr. Hynes.”
“Ah, but the world and his mother know that, men. But sure that’s only the beginning, isn’t it?”
“Mr. Hynes, I’m going to be briefed as soon as there’s an officer comes here to brief me. There’s more than enough expertise and feet plodding over the scene below. You’ll doubtless have heard as much, and perhaps more, down there as you’ll hear from me,” said Kilmartin.
Minogue met Hoey’s eyes. Hoey looked to heaven.
“I thought as much,” said Hynes. He lit a cigarette from the butt of another and ground out the expended one slowly as though choking a hen. Minogue began calculating: he has a cigarette in his gob the minute he wakes up. Seven o’clock, say. A cigarette in his gob all day, then, so an average of five every hour if he takes them easy… up until the pubs close. Seventeen hours at…
Hynes was squinting up through a thread of smoke at Kilmartin, his fingers holding the butt pressed into the ashtray. “But my readers would still like your reactions.” He spoke around the cigarette.
“To what?”
Minogue liked Kilmartin’s pose. He even looked aloof, leaning back in his chair across from Hynes, as if trying to keep him at a distance.
“Someone phoned his paper, sir,” Hoey interrupted.
“Garda communications lagging behind the Press, is it? We passed it on to your crowd a half-hour ago,” said Hynes.
Kilmartin blinked.
“Your reaction to the murder of Billy Fine’s son,” Hynes added.
“Chief Justice Fine?” Minogue asked. The waiter laid a double Scotch languidly in front of Hynes.
“None other,” the reporter replied earnestly. He looked over his glass at Hoey and winked.
“Someone phoned the Irish Press claiming responsibility, sir. We couldn’t get through to you, what with the train and everything. I got it on the radio, but the Guards on the beach don’t know yet,” Hoey said quietly.
So it is a paramilitary thing, Minogue thought. But Fine?
“Paul Fine,” Hynes said.
“Who called and said they’d done it?”
“Are you ready for this one?” Hynes said, flourishing his glass. “The League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” He downed another gulp of Scotch.
Kilmartin stood up and motioned to Hoey, who followed him out to the foyer of the hotel. Minogue did not get up immediately, preferring to leave Kilmartin to vent his unjust anger on a tardy Hoey in private.
“I never heard of that mob, did you?” said Hynes, his eyes a glaze of wily smugness. He swallowed more whisky and slipped a notebook out of his pocket.
“Maybe you can have your say instead of Kilmartin, now,” he continued. “Give him time to find his feet.” Try as he might, Minogue did not detect any sneer on Hynes’s ruddy face.
“When he finds them he may plant one of them on your arse, I’d say,” Minogue offered.
“Oh, comical entirely. Is it my fault that the newspaper values its correspondent enough to put a space-age phone in his car? You’re well known for your ways, yourself, Ser-Inspector Minogue,” Hynes replied without trying to hide the ambiguity now. “But this isn’t a home-grown effort, with the mention of Palestine, is it?” he probed.
Minogue extemporized by saying nothing.
“And I don’t mean just that the man’s daddy is a Justice in the Supreme Court.”
Hynes finished the Scotch and looked down the glass at Minogue.
“The Fines are Jews, Inspector dear. One of our own, to be sure, but Jews nonetheless.”
CHAPTER TWO
Minogue’s thoughts kept returning to Hynes’s ‘nonetheless’ while Hoey drove back into Dublin. Instead of going back to the beach with Kilmartin, Minogue was now on his way to Justice Fine’s home in Rathgar. He was very nervous but too agitated to stay annoyed at Kilmartin. It was not so much that he resented being stuck with going to Fine’s house; what galled him was Jimmy Kilmartin’s method of inducing him to go with Hoey.
Kilmartin had heard from Hoey that Fine had been in his chambers when he was told about the murder of his son. No policemen had been to the house yet. Minogue had seen and heard the old Kilmartin then, the gritty Mayo giant who had been lost to the cattle-dealing or horse-racing profession in becoming a policeman; the Kilmartin who still defied the tailors of Dublin to encase him in suits which lessened the comic incongruity of city garb for him. When Jimmy Kilmartin had been recuperating after an operation, Minogue believed he had discerned a more thoughtful Chief Inspector, but the cajolery and cattle-fair persuasion now seemed to have returned in full force. “That bloody snake Hynes in there knew before we did, for the love of Jases,” Kilmartin had grumbled. “We’ll nearly have to be thanking him for not notifying next of kin before we get our hands on a case. I don’t like looking like an iijit.”
Uncharitably, Minogue wondered if the Chief Inspector was fretting less about the dead man’s next of kin than about Hynes making him look flat-footed. It was more likely that Kilmartin’s agitation had ballooned at the realization that he would be dealing with one of the leading members of the Irish judiciary. If Justice Fine were to but raise a ripple on his forehead about this investigation, Kilmartin might expect that ripple to be a tidal wave of disapproval by the time it reached him.
Kilmartin used a radio patch to phone from Hoey’s car. Fine was home by then, he found out, so Mrs. Fine knew now. It was at this stage that Minogue had had the first snare tripped on him, by his own agency in part. He had mentioned to Kilmartin that he knew Justice Fine peripherally. Kilmartin lost his choke-hold on the microphone as he waited for a message from dispatch and squinted at him. Minogue knew then that there was something afoot. He believed that had he looked closer he might have seen the horns sprout from Kilmartin’s calculating temples.
“How peripherally, Matt?”
“Um. I was in the Jewish Museum several months ago and I saw him there. Very peripheral entirely.”
“ ‘The Jewish Museum’? In Dublin, Ireland? Europe? Go away out of that, there’s no such place. Sure there’s hardly a Jew in the country,” declared Kilmartin.
“You might not see it as you drive by. It’s also a synagogue too, by times. It’s of part a terrace row of houses in up near the canal. A galloping horse would miss it.”
“Go on, anyway,” said the galloping horse.
“Visitors sign their name in a book by the door. There he was, sitting there, reading the paper. I recognized him. Very ordinary-looking fella.”
“No robes?” tried Kilmartin.
“They don’t sleep in them, Jimmy. It’s only Special Branch men and defrocked Jesuits sleep in their clothes.”
“That’s it, then?”
“Well. He said something to me as I was signing the book.”
“What?”
“He didn’t look up from the paper, that’s what made me laugh. ‘And how’s tricks with the bold Inspector Minogue this fine day?’ he said.”
“Go on with you, he did not.” Kilmartin’s jaw slackened. Hoey was staring too.
“I was surprised, to say the least of it. I signed me name anyway and I asked him if we had met. He said no. I asked him how he knew me so, and he said my name came up in a dinner conversation, in connection with that Combs thing.”
“Ho ho, bejases and I’d say it came up all right.” Kilmartin shook his head. “And you minding the shop for me. Wanting to give External Affairs and every other public servant on the island heartburn, bad luck to you.”
“All I wanted was to get them to drop their immunity for Embassy staff so we could interview some of them.”
“And all the tea in China. So he knew you were a bit of a…” Kilmartin rubbed his chin.
“A crank?”
“Did I say that? Did I even think that? I was going to say ‘topnotch Garda officer’.”
The former Jimmy Kilmartin was indeed back. There was that challenging sincerity on his face, daring Minogue to suspect that he was being buttered up.
“Fine’s on the committee that runs the Museum,” said Minogue.
“So you’d know the man to say hello to and pass the time of day with,” Kilmartin burrowed.
Minogue had paused then, while Kilmartin spoke into the radio, knowing the battle was lost but wanting to let discomfort settle on Kilmartin too.
“You’re not going to be asking me to pass the time of day with him, though, are you, Jimmy?”
Hoey was through Terenure now. Fine’s house was but minutes away.
Paul Fine had been married until two years ago. His ex-wife was English and she remained in London. ‘ One of our own to be sure, but a Jew nonetheless.’ Did that ‘nonetheless’ sum up the fact of being a Jew in any place but Israel? Kilmartin would definitely be worried by the mention of ’Palestinian‘. A question still hung around the edges of Minogue’s thoughts: how had the telephone call from this group come within an hour of the body’s being discovered? Had the group planned to phone anyway, knowing that he’d be found? Yes, Kilmartin would not like this mention of Palestinian one bit.
