Kaddish in Dublin imm-3

by John Brady

  “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 Christian Brothers and necessarily been sickened by the posturings of their politicians before looking for their vengeance. Fitzgerald and company, the bishops and the politicians who doffed their hats to the clerics yet-they were all part of a family squabble. Fine was outside that fold.

  Minogue heard Hoey trudging back up the stairs.

  “Sergeant Gallagher says McDonald’s in Grafton Street, about three, if that’s all right,” said Hoey cautiously.

  Minogue wanted to laugh away the sudden irritation. “You’re not serious.”

  “He says to phone him if that doesn’t suit. That’s the Branch for you, staking out their territory. He says he works out of a car most days anyway, but he carries the stuff in his head.”

  “What about the Fitzgerald fella, our television guru?”

  “His programmes go on the air at five, and he says he needs to be at the controls for some of the live interviews. He’ll be there all afternoon.”

  Minogue didn’t know what to do about Gallagher. Would he have to take him in hand already?

  “How did you get Gallagher?”

  “I phoned Branch HQ here and they radioed him. He phoned from somewhere, to the phone below here, I mean.”

  “I see, says the blind man… Well, would you get him for me on the phone, Shea? Tell him I want to talk to him myself.”

  The beginnings of a smile pushed at Hoey’s cheeks.

  Minogue gathered the video-tapes and cassettes awkwardly under his arm. Keating could go through the folders of clippings. Maybe the bulk of Fine’s work would be in his office in RTE. Closing the door, Minogue hoped that his assumption was not leaking too badly yet: that Paul Fine’s work had had something to do with his death. He did not want to believe that Fine had been singled out as a Jew alone, a cipher for some group, to be murdered for being a Jew. But an Irish Jew… what would that group want with killing him for that? To prove that no Jew the world over was immune from Palestinian wrath, that the Palestinians had allies all over the world? Minogue’s mind lurched into crackpot associations.

  He made his way down the stairs. That madman in Libya… a favour in return for guns to the Provos? It could be a message to the State’s judiciary too, the ones who had reluctantly ruled that the Offences Against the State Act, the most powerful and abused legislative weapon against the IRA, was constitutional. Madness. But hadn’t there been several prominent British Jews assassinated in the Seventies? No wonder Jimmy Kilmartin had waved him on with this one, bad ‘cess to him.

  The Garda who had been questioning Miss Connolly met Minogue in the hall. “You were right, sir, she doesn’t miss much.”

  Hoey reached for the telephone as it rang.

  “Run that through a typewriter, like a good man,” Minogue said to the Garda. “And shoot it up to John’s Road for my attention. Investigation Section.”

  Hoey held a hand over the receiver and waved it at Minogue.

  “Get it hand-delivered before tea-time this evening too, if I can put you to that trouble?”

  The Garda hid his resistance well.

  “It’s a tall order, I know, but the matter could be urgent in the extreme.”

  Minogue took the phone and listened. A bus or a lorry passed close to where Gallagher was making his call.

  “Sergeant Gallagher? Matt Minogue. Yes, yes, and how are things with you, now? I’m running an investigation on this murder of the judge’s son, Paul Fine. Did you know about it, a possible connection with some Palestinian group or the like here? You did? Oh, the Commissioner’s office, were they?”

  Minogue listened to Gallagher while Hoey leaned against the door-frame, his arms folded. Minogue winked at him and Hoey’s smile broadened. It was seldom that Gardai, even the crime ordinary detectives from the Central Detective Unit in the Castle, could twist arms with the Branch. Such was the guile within Minogue’s Trojan Horse of charm-and no small store of charm it was, in an island where charm was a currency both inflated and squandered-that he had made an informal liaison with Special Branch officers to crack the Combs case.

  “Is that a fact…? Well, you know how it is when they get a fire lit under them. Lookit, are you a Gallagher from Gweedore? You are? From Falcarragh, go on, are you? God, there are terrific hurling athletes being bred in that little Eden, amn’t I right? Well, I’m in a considerable hurry with this information and I have to be in the RTE studios within the hour… Is there any chance you could sit in on a meeting here say, five or so? Yep, our HQ’s in John’s Road. Good man, so.”

  Minogue took Miss Connolly’s key to Fine’s flat before he left.

  “Essential it remain undisturbed until we go through the effects in detail, Miss Connolly. Now if you remember anything which perhaps you hadn’t thought of in your chat with the Garda or myself here, phone this number immediately, if you please.” Minogue handed her a card which said ‘ Investigation Section’. “Be it ever so small, it may still be important. There’ll be a policeman by with this key, probably in the morning. Be sure and ask for his identification if you’re in any doubt. A youngish fella, Detective Officer Keating, and he’ll be making a detailed examination of Mr. Fine’s effects. He looks a bit like… how would you describe him, Shea?”

  “He’s a bit like that fella, what do you call him… Redford. Robert Redford,” Hoey said earnestly. “Did you ever hear of?”

  “The film star?” Miss Connolly asked.

  “That’s the one,” Hoey concluded without a trace of humour.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hoey bought fish and chips in Ringsend village, and they ate them while driving out on the
Coast Road. Hoey turned up through Sandymount and landed on the Merrion Road within sight of the television mast which marked RTE but two miles away.

  “Little enough in the flat, so,” said Hoey.

  “I didn’t find what I was looking for in the line of pads of paper and appointment books. I’m hoping his desk has more of that class of stuff,” Minogue replied. “Plus there are those tapes. God knows how many hours of stuff is on them. He might have kept memos on tape.”

  “No word-processor or magic computer in the flat,” Hoey added. “I thought they all had them now. Anyone in touch with his wife, his ex-wife? She’s in London, isn’t she?”

  “Justice Fine said he’d have to phone her,” Minogue replied slowly. “But I was just wondering to myself… how to hell we can get started on this.”

  “Motives, you mean?”

  “Yep. I can’t see the killer. I just can’t. We need something a lot more direct than some phone call from a group of I-don’t-know-whats. Any iijit can make a telephone call. Did you get the text of what was said?”

  “ ‘ This is the voice of Free Palestine. We are the League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People’… hold on, what did they… Oh yes: ‘ Let the world take note.’ No- hold on a minute, they mentioned Fine at the end… ‘ no spy or aggressor who works against the cause of Palestinian freedom and justice is safe from retributing. Fine has paid the price. ’ Some mouthful, that.”

  The ‘freedom and justice’ soured Minogue more than most cliches.

  “But, just for the sake of argument,” said Hoey, “don’t fanatics get very het-up if one of their members sorts out his head and leaves them? Say if Fine was a Leftie back in university, but now he meets his old cronies, Palestinian sympathizers even, and antagonizes them with common sense?”

  “Go on,” said Minogue.

  “Well, Fine might have rubbed shoulders with radicals back then, maybe stayed in touch with them. Say he meets up with some of them again and says he’d like a contact to someone who knows anything about links between, I don’t know, Libya and the IRA… So they look him up and down, thinking to themselves, well this Fine boy is gone very, let’s say middle-class-”

  “Bourgeois.”

  “That too. And the nerve of him, coming back and trying to mine them for touchy info that could land them in trouble,” Hoey continued.

  “And being as they are very put-out about bourgeois backsliders, and paranoid by nature…”

  “A hothead says that Fine is now an agent of the imperialist running-dog whatever, by way of being a traitor too, I suppose. What do you think?”

  “I have little enough insight into the paranoid mind, but you may have something. When did they call the Press?”

  “Close on half-ten.”

  Half-ten, Minogue echoed within. Last seen by Miss Connolly on Sunday morning. No more than twenty-four hours in the water.

  “How do tides work, Shea? I mean, if you threw something or somebody into the water, would it be washed up in the same place it was thrown in, if the tide was coming in, like?”

  “I haven’t a clue. I believe that a tide will do different things depending on the lie of the land around the coast. It’s a shocking complicated business.”

  Hoey turned off Nutley Avenue and into RTE.

  “Do you know what, though?” Hoey murmured. “Aside from this crap about ‘working against the cause’ or whatever-I mean to say, that’s a mystery until we find out more about what Fine was up to that might have rubbed someone the wrong way-I wonder why they didn’t call until the Monday morning, and him being murdered already on the Sunday? Maybe they had some crooked reason, I don’t know. Do you think they knew the body would be washed up?”

  “You have me there,” Minogue replied.

  Beyond the barrier and the security guard at the entrance to Radio Telifis Eireann, Minogue phoned to confirm a five o’clock pow-wow on the Fine murder. As the murder appeared to have been committed in Dublin, the State Pathologist could autopsy the body. Minogue had not seen a coroner out on Killiney strand before he and Kilmartin had left for the hotel. They might not have bothered to have him come to the scene: gunshot wounds on a body, along with ‘clear signs of wounds from the effects of an explosive detonation’, were at the top of the list for mandatory post-mortem examination. By five o’clock today Minogue would have something from the Technical Bureau’s forensics, those incongruous boiler-suited men who had inched and kneeled their way over the beach. These scenes-of-the-crimes examiners knew of but didn’t much like the name which Minogue most often heard them referred to: bagmen.

  Mickey Fitzgerald had to be paged from the security desk which met the visitors to the RTE radio building. Minogue spent the two minutes’ wait gawking at the employees who entered and left the building. Hoey jabbed him in the arm once and nodded toward a duo of stylish men leaving.

  “That’s your man, what’s-his-name. Reads the news most days.”

  “Him?”

  “Yes. The one with the baggy suit that looks like wallpaper.”

  “The up-to-the-minute Italian suit that costs three hundred quid, you mean. Sinnott?”

  “Yep.”

  Fitzgerald was a tall, skinny man with a beard. A few strands of grey stretched out to the fringe which almost touched the rim of his wire spectacle frames. Minogue thought of John Lennon. Fitzgerald shook Minogue’s hand.

  “I know you,” he said and turned to Hoey.

  “Detective Officer Seamus Hoey, also of the Investigation Section,” said Minogue.

  “Ah, what a relief it is,” Fitzgerald said without any evident humour. “At least yous’re not part of An Craobhinn Aoibhinn.”

  Minogue rather liked the caustic sarcasm. This nickname for the Special Branch had little to do with the mythical ‘Sweet Branch’, the fount of turn-of-the-century irredentist poetry with the mists of the Celtic Revival swirling about it.

  “Were you expecting a bust of some type, Mr. Fitzgerald?” Minogue probed.

  “We police ourselves here, lads,” Fitzgerald replied with more cynicism than coyness this time.

  Minogue did not take up the bait. He would be no match for Fitzgerald as he, Fitz, presumably knew every in and out of the Broadcasting Act. A section of this act forbade RTE from airing interviews with members of proscribed organizations. Successive Irish governments had consistently subscribed to the notion that what didn’t appear on television could not exist in the minds of television viewers.

  On this issue, executives in RTE were uncertain how to react. They were partly flattered by the implication that television was such a powerful medium of communication; they also took it for granted that, unlike the US, their Irish fellow-citizens knew there was life outside television. Rather than have a Minister slap an order on the service over any particular item, therefore, RTE had undertaken to keep its censorship in-house.

  Fitzgerald led the two policemen through the building and toward the current affairs workroom. His department consisted of a huge room held in by walls of glass. Minogue decided not to make a comment about glass houses. The room was sectioned off by cloth-covered room dividers and desks stood in cosy spaces created by the high squares of orange and blue. It was all very modern, very dynamic, Minogue believed.

  Less than half the desks they passed were occupied. A cluster of people sat at and around one desk, smoking and talking in low tones. They fell silent and looked to the policemen as they passed. Typewriters clacked at a distance. A radio was playing reggae music. Posters extolled visits to Madrid and an exhibition of Escher drawings which had come and gone at a Dublin gallery six years previously.

  Fitzgerald stopped by one desk.

  “That’s Paul’s. I put all his stuff in the drawers and that vertical cabinet there and I locked them. That was yesterday when I heard the news.”

  He looked blankly to Minogue who was aware of the group still staring at them.

  “And you have the keys?”

  “I have. I swept his
stuff off the desk and stuffed it all into his drawers and cabinet. The newsroom heard it first and a fella came over to us. We were terribly shocked here, just couldn’t believe it. Even with my expert knowledge of police procedure from watching the telly, it took me ten minutes to get my head together and fix up his desk. Hardly anyone here locks their desks. I turned the keys and put ‘em in me pocket.”

  “Good man. I’ll be wanting to look at this stuff later, Mr. Fitzgerald,” said Minogue.

  “And I’ll be wanting a list and a receipt detailing anything you take,” Fitzgerald replied.

  Minogue looked back to the silent group and met their gaze for several seconds.

  “I have me own private cell over here,” said Fitzgerald.

  Seated in Fitzgerald’s office, Minogue took in the furnishings while Fitzgerald phoned for Brendan Downey. When Downey appeared, Minogue recognized him for one of the group huddled about the desk outside.

  “What did Paul Fine do here, as regards his job?” Minogue asked then.

  “He was a reporter/researcher: that’s his job description. He’d be one of eight people who works for the producer, i.e. me. He was a journalist and a reporter. Basically he would have called himself a journalist. He had been on the afternoon programme-”

  “Day by Day?”

  “Good for you, Inspector. We squeeze in segments of between five and ten minutes’ live time. It’s a magazine format that takes us to news-time on this channel.”

  “To the Angelus, you mean,” said Minogue.

  It was hard to tell what went on behind the beard, Minogue realized, but he believed that he saw Fitzgerald’s amusement push his glasses up slightly. Fitzgerald had made no secret of his opinions on institutions like the Catholic church. Minogue struggled to recall when it was that several bishops had jointly written an open letter to the newspapers, complaining about a sinister anti-clerical undertone to many current affairs programmes on RTE radio. To the credit of the Director General, he had asked them for proof. In a religion which regards the notion of ‘proof’ as an upstart provincial relative to horned heresy-stigmata, moving and bleeding statues excepted-this was an impertinence. Fitzgerald, a tenacious weed, still held his job.