by John Brady
“Right now I can remember nothing. Nothing,” she replied slowly.
Kilmartin mimicked speaking slowly into a microphone and left to check in with Hoey on the radio.
“ I’d go for a dose of tea,” Minogue said. “How about yourself then?”
Her gaze told him that she had slipped into another domain, behind a curtain which the steady vein of cigarette smoke seemed to mark. She chewed distractedly on her thumbnail, the cigarette but inches away in the clasped hands she was now holding to her mouth.
Kilmartin was back before Minogue had settled down to the pot of tea. He motioned Minogue away from the table.
“Leave the tea and cakes routine now. They’re after turning up something in Killiney,” said Kilmartin.
“On the beach, is it?”
“No, up the hill in the park. An oul‘ wan phoned in this morning and said she heard something there on Sunday evening. You know Killiney Hill, the park and everything, don’t you?”
Minogue did. Hundreds of acres of park, woods and bushes stretched from Dalkey Hill across to Killiney Hill and then down into the village of Killiney. Parts of the park were precipitous and densely wooded, almost alpine. Minogue remembered tripping over courting couples in glades when he had strolled on the Hill previously.
“A bit wild, yes,” he said.
Minogue drove through the older part of the city, the Liberties, and joined the traffic swirling around Stephen’s Green. He dropped Mary McCutcheon at the top of Grafton Street.
“Can we reach you at work if you’re not at the other number?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she replied listlessly.
Her face was showing that blankness which Minogue recognized as the first tentative and dull comprehension that someone she knew and was close to was dead. He did not like leaving her on the street corner with the crowds of shoppers with their busyness and smiles to hammer home her shock.
“It’s all right. I’m going to the office now,” she rebuffed his stillborn words.
As neither Minogue nor Kilmartin had a handset, they became lost in Killiney Hill Park. Minogue strayed from the path and was rewarded by the sight of a uniformed Garda standing against a tree having a clandestine smoke. The Garda directed them to a small clearing. Keating and Boylan, from the Technical Bureau, were standing to the edge of the clearing. A man wearing white cotton gloves was squatting under brambles to one side.
“There’s a sample gone already, sir,” said Keating.
“Was there a lot of blood?” Kilmartin asked.
“A goodly amount soaked in here,” Boylan said. “There are signs that someone dug into the ground here looking for something. It wasn’t any animal either, it was someone looking for a particular thing.” Boylan pointed to the dark maroon patches which showed under the brambles. “A penknife or a stick or something, see?”
Kilmartin tiptoed a few steps in. The forensic expert obliged with a long white-gloved finger. He reminded Minogue of a magician or a Parisian waiter.
“Looking for the bullets, hah?” Kilmartin whispered close to Minogue’s ear.
“He must be an expert, then. He checked to see if they went through and then scuffled around to get them back,” said Keating.
“It’s unlikely that the shot in the head was done with Fine being obliging enough to lie down. So the killer wouldn’t be so damn perfect about that first one. Sure enough, if Fine got the other two after falling dead already, the killer could look in the clay for those two bullets easy enough… cool, calculating bastard,” Kilmartin murmured.
Minogue looked around the glade. It was easily fifty paces from the nearest path. A silencer would have done it handily. What the hell had Fine been doing here? Sitting reading a book? Had he come in here with the murderer, an acquaintance?
“All these bits of bushes and leaves and things here, signs that the killer tried to cover him up. Fine was shot here, fell there.” Boylan’s arm swept down slowly, finally. “Got two here in the neck. He was rolled here in under the bushes and hidden. Someone dug out the two slugs then, I’d say.”
“This is where he was shot,” Minogue repeated.
“No signs he was dragged in here, sir. He walked in.”
Minogue thought for several moments. “A detector here… on the way?”
“There is,” Boylan answered. “The third slug might be around.”
Minogue was irritated by the ‘slug’, less because it belonged on American television than because it sounded crude and blunt.
“How’d he get Fine down on to the beach, then?” asked Kilmartin. “We’re talking about a ‘they’ now, aren’t we?”
“More to the point,” Keating said, unconscious of any impertinence, “why?”
Kilmartin turned to the voices coming in from the path: four forensics, two of them carrying fat briefcases, the others lugging stakes and plastic shelters. One of the latter two unloaded nylon cord and orange stakes from a plastic bag.
“What time was this oul‘ wan out with the dog?” asked Kilmartin.
“Half-five, sir. Just before her tea. She said it sounded like someone slapping something off a tree trunk; like a whip, she said, or a piece of rope against the bark,” Keating replied.
That’d be a silencer for sure, Minogue pondered. A hollow crack, a thud.
“She doesn’t remember how many she heard exactly. Two or three, with a few seconds between one and then the other or others.”A few. “ She thought it was youngsters farting about in the woods. Her dog barked and ran into the bushes, barked and barked, and she had to call it back several times. She put the lead on him and went off home and thought no more about it.”
Close to eighteen hours before the discovery of Fine’s body, Minogue thought.
“Planned?” Kilmartin squinted at him.
“There’s the question, all right. I don’t rightly know.”
“A hell of a difference between being planned and being systematic,” Kilmartin growled. Minogue liked to believe then that what he heard in Kilmartin’s voice was disgust at how Paul Fine had been murdered.
“The elements of clumsiness and a definite hint of expertise as well… I don’t understand it. On the one hand he had the neck to hang around and recover the bullets. He may even have picked high-velocity bullets so he could get them after. How did he get his hands on a handgun and a silencer, not to speak of the ammunition? I don’t like the cut of this stuff: I keep on having these visions of diplomatic bags. Not in our league at all, at all. Something else, too, that I don’t much understand is, why the effort to recover the bullets unless he believed we had a chance to trace the weapon from the bullets?”
“Maybe he plans to hold on to the gun, or has to give it back to whoever he got it from, clean as he can,” Kilmartin suggested.
“We don’t even know if it was an automatic,” murmured Minogue.
“I’ll tell you this: if he was such a cowboy as to stay and get his bullets back, you can be damn sure he picked up any casings if it was an automatic. We can’t afford to say no to that,” warned Kilmartin.
“I know. But identifying the gun loomed big enough in the killer’s mind for him to stay around and tidy up for fear…”
“Get up the yard, Matt. We never get a ballistic match on a third of the firearms we recover for commission-of-crime weapons. If it was the Provos renting out guns to a freelance, they’d move the gun around afterwards. We’d never get to look at it, you can bet your bottom dollar,” said Kilmartin, interrupting Minogue’s speculation.
Kilmartin held his palm out and looked up at the greyed sky. Minogue saw a leaf shiver as a raindrop landed on it.
“For the love of Jases! Lads, lads,” Kilmartin turned to the men in the clearing. “It’ll be pissing now in a minute, can ye get a bit of shelter up quick?”
The detective wielding the cord nodded.
The rain hit Minogue and Kilmartin full before they were half-way back to the car. They shuffled under a chestnut tree. Minogue noting t
he brown edges on the leaves. Already, and it only the middle of September? The rain whispered through the undergrowth, creeping around the two men. A sparrow flitted by with a hoarse twitter.
“Whatever Fine was doing here, it must have taken a couple of people to carry him down to the beach. That has to be a quarter of a mile,” said Kilmartin.
“Clumsy, you’re saying,” Minogue suggested vacantly. The rain pleased him, that he should be marooned under a tree.
“Someone with enough nerve and training and motive to shoot Fine. He shoots Fine and then the panic sets in. It happens to anyone, no matter how expert, I can tell you. He tries to cover up the body. He’s in a hurry to get out of there. Off he runs. But later on he says to himself that maybe he should move the-”
“Or someone else says to him that the body can’t be left there,” said Kilmartin.
“Fair enough. It might even be a different fella or group who moves the body. I can take on the idea of a conspiracy then. But why can’t the body be left up on the Hill?”
“Too easy to find?”
“Maybe so, but-”
“People are always walking their dogs up there or taking their moths up there for a bit of you-know-what,” said Kilmartin.
“The oul‘ wan on Sunday evening didn’t have the nerve to go into the bushes after the dog,” Kilmartin continued.
“But why would the killer care if the body was found up there?” Minogue tried again.
“Jases, I don’t know. Yet, I mean. Maybe he didn’t want Fine found at all. So he goes back after dark and drags him down to where they can sling him into the water and hope the tide carries him out. High tide was eleven o’clock Sunday night, so the tide was on the way out at midnight until two o’clock in the morning. Maybe he knew that.”
“‘They’, ‘he’. I’d like to settle on one or the other. Try this one.” Minogue looked up toward the flickering leaves overhead. “He or they decided that Paul Fine mustn’t be found up there because he’d have been seen by other people up on the Hill before he was killed. Say he’s up walking around the park, he was to meet someone. Naturally we’d be appealing for any possible witnesses who were also up on the Hill taking the air that afternoon. What if he was with someone else, a someone who lured him into that spot where he was shot? Say the person he was with who did the killing?”
“Go on, so,” Kilmartin muttered.
“It fits so far, doesn’t it? The killer could have been close to Paul, so it could have been someone he knew or trusted. Now the killer doesn’t want us to find a Sean Citizen who can tell us he saw Paul Fine walking around with someone who looks like X. But if Sean Citizen sees us on the telly asking for anyone who might have seen Paul Fine whose body was washed up on the beach, he’d say to himself that he was up on the Hill, not on the beach, so what would he know?”
“They don’t want us knowing who Fine was with, the someone who might have killed him?”
“Or helped to kill him, Jimmy. The trouble is the intent, clear intent. Leave aside the motivation for a minute. The killer brought a gun, a handgun, and not to pick daisies with it. He or his cronies intended to kill Paul Fine. But he hadn’t planned on how to dispose of the body. So it was incomplete, the planning. That’s what bothers me. It was inopportune for them, time and place. Something must have happened to make the killing necessary.”
“What if the murderer is a real expert entirely? He could have been waiting his chance a long time and just picked Killiney Hill,” Kilmartin protested.
The rain was easing. Minogue realized that he had no answer to Kilmartin’s alternative. He could not now distinguish between raindrops and rain-water draining from the leaves overhead.
“You could say that the killer didn’t get the opportunity he was hoping for: the right time and the right place. So he up and did it there, thinking he wouldn’t get his chance again,” Kilmartin said.
“You think Fine was followed, stalked?”
“Now lookit, Matt,” Kilmartin said as he squinted up through the branches. “If it was some crackpot politico, he must have followed Fine around the place.”
“Why follow him all the way out to Killiney on a Sunday afternoon to kill him? Why not shoot him one night when he’s coming home to his flat?”
Kilmartin affected to whistle. “OK, Matt,” he said then. “Let’s take the shagging bull by the horns. Fine may have been killed by someone he met out here, or someone he came out here with. He sets up a meeting with one of these Arab fellas to chat him up for a story he’s going to do for the radio. Maybe it all starts up nice and gentlemanly, but the Libyan or the Palestinian or whatever trick-of-the-loop he is pulls out a shooter and kills Fine. For poking his nose into this business.”
“We’re assuming that Paul Fine found out, or could have found out, that there really is something going on between the Libyans and the IRA, aren’t we? C3 and the Branch don’t think there’s anything to that,” argued Minogue.
Minogue’s reluctance pushed Kilmartin to snappishness. “Don’t be giving me that whipped-pup look, Matt. I’m only throwing ideas around, the same as you do yourself. Keeping our options open, man dear.”
So Kilmartin was gaining some hidden satisfaction from having him head the investigation, Minogue realized. “I’m only doing to you what you did to me with all your notions,” Kilmartin might yet say. “Now how do you like being in charge?” would surely follow quickly on that remark too.
“Listen,” Kilmartin said in a milder tone. “Listen, listen, the cat’s pissin‘. Where, where, under the chair… What I’m saying still fits because people walking around the park would remember seeing an Arab lad. He’d stand out, complexion-wise, can’t you see? If Fine came out to meet the Arab here and it was the Arab that killed him, then he’d be terrible keen to get the body away to hell from where a witness might place the Arab with poor Fine.”
Minogue nodded, hoping to give Kilmartin the impression of a sage considering worthy comment. The air was cooler after the rain and the ground was yielding up rich scents from the undergrowth. They walked quickly back to the park gate.
Minogue saw the rain out over the sea now, a grey curtain moving off beyond Killiney Bay.
Kilmartin phoned the Squad office. Eilis gave a little whinny of amusement when he announced himself.
“There’s telepathy for you now,” she murmured. Kilmartin heard her shuffle papers. “Wait a minute,” she added. “Right,” she said then and spoke as though recording private thoughts from a diary. She told Kilmartin that Gardai had found remains in the back seat of a burned-out car outside the town of Bray. Bray was eight miles south of where Kilmartin now stood.
“Shite,” said Kilmartin.
“Pardon?” Eilis asked archly.
“When?” Kilmartin grunted.
“The car was set on fire yesterday evening. The brigade took their time. It’s a dump kind of place. Vandals, they thought. They towed it away after the fire, not knowing, and left it in the yard by the station. Someone had a good look in this morning and decided it was a body, not a bit of the back seat down on the floor of the car.”
“Do they know who it is, at all?”
“No they don’t. The car was an inferno entirely when the brigade arrived.”
“God never closes one door except he slams another,” Kilmartin grumbled and turned to Minogue. Minogue was studying the patterns of the clouds as they swept over Killiney Hill. “Here, you. You’ll have to do without the benefit of my companionship on the Fine case for the moment at least,” he declared to Minogue. “Bad luck comes in pairs.”
“Tell them I’ll go myself for starters, Eilis,” Kilmartin said finally. “Give me some directions. It’ll take me a half an hour from here, I’d say.”
Minogue drove Kilmartin down to Killiney Station. “You can arrive in style on the train again,” he said.
“That’ll impress them no end,” Kilmartin said grimly. “Do you know what I’m going to tell you? Bray is one town I hate the sig
ht of. A town full of knackers and hurdy-gurdy men. Chancers. I’ll beg a lift back later on in the day.”
Kilmartin left a curse on Bray and its inhabitants dangling in the air as he entered the ticket office.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Daithi Minogue’s letter almost cost the State purse dearly in Merrion Road, where Minogue came within inches of hitting the car ahead. He had been practising phrases for putting in his letter to Daithi. None satisfied him. ‘ It’s not for me to…’ ‘Your mother and I would like to think that…’ ‘Although it may not seem quite apparent to you now…’
The brake lights on the bus were grimy and Minogue’s tyres howled to within six inches of them. Three youngsters turned around in the back seat and laughed at him. He thought of urging Daithi to take time to think things over. Maybe, Kathleen had suggested, he should send clippings from the papers to show that there were plenty of engineering jobs available here in Ireland. Daithi might repeat his protest that there was no point to working here because the income tax got you in the neck.
But there are good jobs, Daithi… Bribery of sorts. The boy didn’t want to be here.
How odd, bitterly amusing nearly, to hear a boy of Daithi’s age complain about the state of the country. Was he using that as a way to criticize his own family? Minogue began to believe that he should have headed off this problem years ago when he had first noticed the challenge from Daithi. He should have tried to stand up for Ireland then. It had to be more than that, though: the boy wanted attention from him, answers. Did Daithi like his parents too much to be able to get angry with them?
Attention, answers, someone to defend the island. Minogue couldn’t do that and not feel foolish. It might have been better to have been stricter with him, to have had prescriptions and advice, to have been the paterfamilias more. How had Minogue come adrift from the role which other men his age found so satisfying and so natural and so damned easy? Little to offer Daithi now, beyond some assurance that he could not put in words. The Oedipus stuff is rubbish, he thought. Were parents supposed to resist their children so much? It wouldn’t be any help to tell Daithi to trust his own experience. The boy was but twenty-three now. Did he want to be summoned, scolded perhaps, worried over? These were signs of love apparently. These were things parents were supposed to do?
