by John Brady
Detective Garda Seamus Hoey was indeed as capable as Kilmartin had told Minogue-even more capable than Kilmartin thought. Kilmartin used him as a feather in his cap (how shrewd Jimmy Kilmartin was to have held on to Hoey when he had arrived as a trainee) but Shea Hoey knew to fit Kilmartin’s measures. He gave every sign of being calmly diligent. At home, in his bachelor life in the flat he had in Sandymount, Minogue could guess at a Hoey who might even play a piano for pleasure, who should marry and make someone happy.
Minogue’s gaze fled to Eilis when Hoey looked over, aware that Minogue had been looking at him. Kilmartin had that knack of spotting talents, all right. Eilis was permitted to be offhand. Her cool but unaffected Garboisms hid the fact that she was brainy, not merely distant. Eilis’ eccentricities were part of the price which intelligence paid in a world gone mad with convention and system, Minogue believed. Her job was to conduct the symphony of inquiries, meetings and reports which formed the day-to-day business of the Investigation Section.
When the mandarins in the Department of Justice decided that the Investigation Section should also deal with other serious crime, Kilmartin had stood his ground. Why not a proper paid-up Emergency Response Unit system? A Special Task Force with regular armed teams on patrol in Dublin? More resources to the Hold Up Squad? With conniving, alliances and bull-headed shrewdness, Kilmartin had helped effect all these. There was little that Kilmartin would not do to follow his passion to keep what had been called the Murder Squad together as a separate unit, if not in name then in function.
Nonetheless, Jimmy Kilmartin was not unaware of Chief Supers and Assistant Commissioners grumbling that their respective divisions should shortly have enough trained personnel for murder investigations and that they’d be needing Dublin-based expertise infrequently. This was so because Gardai circulated through the Investigation Section as trainees, learning the trade and returning to their divisions. Kilmartin had been canny enough to spot trainee talent and thus promptly appropriate detectives like Seamus Hoey, a brawny and sometimes moody Galwegian who had been stationed in Athlone, the most boring town in Ireland. Hoey soaked up information like a sponge and listened to everything. Kilmartin and Minogue had learned to be alert when Hoey began his sentences with the roundabout bashfulness of: “Well, you may think this is a bit odd of me to be bringing this up here and now but…”
Detective Garda Keating was more obviously methodical and he liked to bear the cross of filtering through enormous amounts of data. Keating was so enamoured of the new age that he had bought an expensive computer for his own use and had taught himself many things in his spare time at home. He had unwisely mentioned his purchase to Eilis in one of their almost sibling squabbles. Keating, a bachelor younger and less understanding than Hoey, had some vague notion that Eilis was to be fenced with because she was unmarried and not unattractive.
“A computer, is it,” Minogue remembered Eilis saying. “Can’t you go out and throw yourself at girls and disport yourself like a normal buck and not be sitting at one of those things getting a humpy back and a low sperm count with the radiation?”
Keating liked to be given impossible tasks with large amounts of information to immerse himself in: Photofit and Identikit features, car registration plates, clothing manufacturers’ weaves of synthetic materials, bank account transactions from ten years ago-all brought a frown to his features until he was actually in the search and enjoying the impossibility of his task away from superiors who expected him to admit it would be easy for him.
Minogue saw that Hoey had not shaved, and he guessed that he had kipped down for part of the night on a couch in the First Aid room on the ground floor. Hoey had his feet up and was smoking. If this was co-ordinating a task force of policemen, Minogue wanted to be thus trained.
“Well, Shea. You heard there may be another out in Bray?”
“Yep. The Killer phoned a minute ago to say it’s 90 per cent sure it’s a murder. The fire was started with petrol sprinkled inside the car, he thinks. Or the firemen in Bray think so.”
The Killer was Kilmartin. Minogue had heard that his own nickname, very infrequently applied because it had never caught, was Moonie.
“Have we anything from the men posted at the beaches?”
“No. There was one oul‘ lad complaining about teenagers interfering with one another and drinking Johnny-jump-up on the beach all summer. Nothing at all off Killiney beach proper. I’ve heard nothing from Killiney Hill Park, the site, either. They hit a few bits of metal with the detector but all they have is hairpins and bits of things. How do you like that for news?”
“And Paul Fine’s tapes?”
Hoey picked up a page with a handwritten list inscribed on it. He handed it to Minogue.
“Keating has three fellas now doing the videos and the cassettes again. He’s out in Fine’s flat himself, fighting off pots of tea from her nibs, Miss Connolly. I think maybe we were fibbing about him looking like Charlton Heston in the Moses film. Maybe she expected him to arrive out in one of those short little skirts the men used to wear then. I’m going by the pictures from the Catechism, do you remember?”
“Will I ever forget?” Minogue murmured the stock answer as he looked down the list. Interviews with politicians about the upcoming Ard Fheis, the party-in-government’s convention. There was almost one hour with members of the Irish-Arab Society. There were no interviews with Arab students. A ten-minute telephone interview with a David Thornbury, chairman of Middle Eastern Studies at Sussex University. Scatty interviews, taken on the hoof apparently, with bus drivers and conductors in Dublin about what they thought of the forthcoming strike. A half-hour with a self-help group of former psychiatric patients in Limerick. That’d be what Fitzgerald called his fairy stories, the good news.
“Thirteen hours in total. There’re no interviews with any of those Arab lads Gallagher was interested in after he saw Fine’s index. It looks like they were on the level about not knowing Fine. He must have been just starting out, getting names like we keep on being told. Still and all, he must have done some research or reading up on his topics, though, because… remember the newspaper references on his index of topics and stories?”
Minogue nodded.
“He must have made notes. Keating might find ‘em out in the flat. Or Murtagh, in his desk over in RTE…”
“Did we have any call-ins from the radio and telly appeal last night?”
“Let me see. I think there were three or four only last night and… upwards of ten so far today. We’ve followed up on seven of them altogether. There was a fella worked the ticket office in the train station out in Dalkey on Sunday. He thinks it might have been Fine that came through the turnstile, he says, but he’s not so sure. He saw the photos that were dropped off at all the stations. It was his missus that phoned us up; he didn’t think it was worth bothering about because he was dithering. The rest are people to do with places along the coast. Walking on the beach on Sunday evening, some of them. Fella in Bulloch harbour saw a boat going out late that night. Nothing yet.”
“So we still can’t place Paul Fine after he left his flat Sunday morning,” Minogue said gloomily.
“Not yet, sir. One of the callers-called in last night about eleven-asked for ‘the Investigating Officer’. Switchboard gave out your name but when we couldn’t give you to him on a plate he put down the phone.”
“What about those other tapes, those video-tapes from the flat? What’s on them?”
“Right,” said Hoey, swinging his feet off the desk. “I nearly forgot. They’re all off the telly. RTE programmes too, current affairs and news. Bore the arse off you, it would. The economy, unemployment… discussions off talk-shows with bigwigs out of different parties. There are-hold on, I’ll get the sheet four segments on the last Ard Fheis, last year’s, with the Chief whipping up the party faithful and promising the world.”
Minogue could imagine the scene on the video. Ireland’s Taoiseach, the Prime Minister, the Chief with his devious
hawk face to match his manner and his past-a buccaneer Nero-taking the applause of sycophants.
“I watched some of them myself last night,” Hoey continued. “Had a bit of a laugh, I can tell you. There was one good one actually; maybe I shouldn’t say good one. Do you remember that series, last year, on the security situation?”
Minogue did. Having met Mickey Fitzgerald since, he could imagine Fitzgerald’s hand in such a series, even though it was on the television. A memo had been circulated right to each Garda and clerical worker in the Force after that series. The memo cautioned them that information and opinions about security and policing were not to be given out to members of the Press or the public. The programmes had made much of leaks from disgruntled Gardai doing Border duty and oblique grumbles that the Army felt ill-equipped to detect and deal with incursions by British army units into the South.
“Well, you had the Minister for this and the Minister for that, the Opposition shouting blue murder and the rest of it. Maybe Fine was trying to resurrect the issue again-that’s what the media do, isn’t it? Keep things on the boil and come back to heat up the same issues if they’re in danger of cooling down too much.”
“I suppose,” replied Minogue. “Still nothing on video to do with Arabs or students?”
“No, sir. I had a fella go to the archives in RTE. He’s to see if Fine was looking through any material to do with his stories. I found out they keep records of requests, you see.”
“Good for you. It’s as well one of us is wide-awake, Shea,” murmured Minogue.
Minogue perused his copy of the autopsy report from the State Pathologist’s office. Entry wound was consistent with impact and penetration by a high-velocity bullet. Gun could have been discharged up to two feet from the head…
Minogue then tried reading between the lines of the appended comments from the ballistics section of the Technical Bureau. The commentary seemed to have a strained, reluctant tone. Minogue wondered if this was an elaborate way of saying they had nothing with which to direct the investigation from a forensic viewpoint here. Most probably a. 38 or. 30, 32 calibre. What was that in the metric again? Minogue flicked the page and consulted the small box-chart for conversion:. 38 was 9mm, 30 was 7. 62mm, 32 was 7. 65. The bullets were almost certainly of fully jacketed construction. For the bullet to penetrate two bone barriers, it would in all likelihood have had to be round-nosed as well. There was no mention of metal traces from the bullet’s passage. Whoever wrote the ballistics report would have looked at the pathology report first anyway. No fragments of the casing which could have pinpointed a manufacturer. The Continentals tended to favour brass or even copper jackets, the Yanks went for steel or cupronickel, Minogue recalled vaguely.
Fully jacketed round-nose bullets: high velocity, high energy but low stopping power because of the penetration. Minogue wondered what Thatcher Scale meant in the report: the Iron Lady herself? For penetration of two cranial bone barriers, the bullets had to have a Thatcher value of at least fifty…
The echo of a flitting notion scratched at Minogue’s mind again. An attribution of deadly expertise, of intent, had crept into even the bland prose of the ballistics report-a report which had been cautious from the start because it was only a commentary on the pathology work: ballistics had had neither weapon nor ammunition to examine. It was a gun for working up close, not a cannon. It was very rare to find calibres larger than. 38s bothering with fully jacketed ammunition. Those handguns were designed with stopping power in mind, their bullets chosen to leave their mark, to gouge, to dredge, to flatten… to damage quickly.
Minogue shivered. He turned the page and looked below the conversion table. A hand-drawn box followed, with a summary of ammunition in use by Gardai and the Army. The Army used 7. 65mm for their sub-machine guns, but not of high-velocity manufacture. The Garda Special Branch units and squads had access to and training in machine pistols which used 9mm ammunition, a fit with the Walther PPK automatics which had rapidly gained favour over the last decade as Gardai used firearms more. The report noted that it was likely that both Army and Gardai held some stocks of high-velocity ammunition which could be used with a handgun… but such rounds would almost certainly be employed for evaluation and comparison purposes, in a restricted environment such as laboratory testing.
Great, thought Minogue darkly as his eyes wavered down over the point-form conclusions again. Barrel-length of a handgun had to be at least four and one half inches to effect high-velocity at all… He retrieved a ruler from his drawer and added two inches to the barrel. You could still carry an automatic handily enough in your jacket pocket… A reminder that automatics were much easier to secure good silencers on.
There were the more punctilious conclusions then, the writer of the report smug about showing command of his material… There were several licensed copies of the popular parabellum designs like SIG-Petters, Walthers and Berettas, but there were also over a dozen known unlicensed copies of perennials such as Walther PPKs and. 38s being mass-manufactured in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia… Consideration should be given to the large numbers of Soviet Tokarevs (formerly Mauser 7. 63 pistols) in circulation since unrest in the Middle East had become more widespread after 1967. Tokarevs were arguably the automatic pistol best suited to use with high-velocity ammunition… Diplomatic bag, Minogue’s gargoyle muttered within: this was an assassin’s gun.
Minogue snorted with exasperation. He laid the sheaf of papers back in a wire-mesh tray on his desk. He would phone Gallagher within the hour if the same Gallagher hadn’t phoned by then to tell him what the yield was from the Special Branch files. There had to be somebody close to Paul Fine, Minogue’s thoughts protested, someone to whom he chatted, or at least mentioned what he was planning for the weekend. He stood up from the desk. All the tables and desks in the squadroom were occupied and two blackboards on wheels had appeared overnight. One was used for schedules of assignments, the other was mostly blank, with entries for what they knew of the last days and hours of Paul Fine.
Minogue looked at the faces of the dozen policemen on the task force. He recognized more than half of those in the room. The ones he knew were detectives from the Central Detective Unit, rafted over from the Puzzle Palace. Kilmartin had ordered detectives drafted in on the case to squeeze into the squadroom yesterday evening to listen to Hoey. Twice as many ordinary Gardai, mostly from stations in the Dublin Metropolitan South Divisions, would receive their instructions in turn from the policemen who had attended this meeting. With the discovery of the murder site away from the beach, Minogue would now have to make a new media appeal to persons who had been taking the air on Killiney Hill on Sunday. Two full days ago…
Hoey was on the telephone now. Even Eilis looked busy as she rattled on a typewriter. A short detective with a gaucho moustache (Minogue wondered how lax the codes were becoming, as he saw an incarnation of a Venetian boatman in the detective’s face) stopped by Ellis’ desk. He held out a video-cassette to her but she nodded toward Hoey. The detective stood by Hoey’s desk until Hoey put down the phone.
After a brief conversation, Hoey smiled. The detective said something else and Hoey laughed outright. He took the tape and removed it from its case. The gaucho Venetian (Minogue thought he remembered him as a Sullivan) shrugged, smiled again, and walked away. Hoey noticed Minogue sitting on the edge of his desk, and ambled over.
“You look like you’re ready for Honolulu.”
Minogue shook himself out of his reverie. “Uh. Like yourself. I’d like to be sitting in Montparnasse with an espresso burning a hole in the table in front of me. Here, Shea, why don’t you go out yourself and get yourself a bite? A cup of tea or something.”
“I might, at that. We’re at the hump, I suppose,” Hoey answered.
Minogue nodded his assent. ‘The hump’ was Hoey’s word for the doldrums which inevitably afflicted investigators as they moved beyond the beginnings of a difficult investigation. Minogue had heard Kilmartin call it ‘the fuckin
’ Sahara stage’. One evening in a pub he had gone through the plot and events of The Lost Patrol, a favourite film of his because it starred Victor Maclachlen, as a way of illustrating the trials of a murder investigation. Minogue had forgotten what Kilmartin had likened the unseen snipers of the desert to, by way of comparison with the course of an investigation, but the memory of the whole had stayed with him.
Any murder that wasn’t committed by a friend or relative of the victim, any murder that had no witnesses, was difficult. After the initial flow of information, the setting up of assignments and statements, the piecing together of a picture of the victim, came the lull. In this lull occurred the really dogged police work. Sometimes this Sargasso-sea stage lasted for months.
“Plenty of time before anything breaks, I suppose,” Hoey added wearily. “Maybe I’ll go and watch that video again. They missed a bit the first time around. A few minutes of something sandwiched into another clip. It might have been there from the time the tape was used for something else, though, because it starts suddenly and ends suddenly.”
“Anything of interest?”
“It could have been Fine on the gossip trail. Remember Fitz said it was Fine’s turn to go through the laundry basket, to see what shenanigans our elected representatives had been up to.”
“The same Mickey Fitzgerald calls it accountability, if I recall,” said Minogue.
“Hah. The Ard Fheis is coming up, so maybe they were in a hurry to find some dirt on anybody. There’s a bit of an interview with what’s-his-name, Gorman, on Meet the Press. You know that programme that does be on after ordinary people go to bed? Fifteen minutes before they shut down for the night, fellas off the newspapers poking at different politicians every week. Gorman was on; ‘the Man in the Wings’ they call him. They were trying to bait him about who’d step into the Chief’s shoes.”
