Kaddish in Dublin imm-3

by John Brady

  “Wait for it,” said Kilmartin. Minogue recognized that quickening in Kilmartin, the darting eyes. A happier man, now, in his bloodhound incarnation.

  “Your man didn’t understand it at first. The tapes, I mean. They’re all buggered up,” said Doyle. “Gobbledegook.”

  “You mean erased when they shouldn’t have been?”

  “He thinks that someone must have run a bulk eraser over the week’s tapes and that’s what turned them into mush. They started straightaway to make a new back-up. I was a hero for finding out their back-up was rubbish.”

  “Could it have been accidental?” asked Hoey.

  “It has happened before, he told me. But it’s unlikely that it was accidental. The staff who are in that area are wised up to the computer now.”

  “Would it require some kind of expertise to wipe the things like that?” Minogue asked.

  “No,” said Doyle reluctantly. “A bulk eraser is just a little thing that you wave over the tapes to remove the data. It’s very quick. And there were plenty of opportunities for a lot of people. It would only take a few seconds.”

  “Do you mean that we can’t get a reliable access list for this facility from them, one we could start with and work up some suspects?” Hoey asked.

  Doyle shook his head.

  Kilmartin cleared his throat. “So much for that enterprising work. Yours truly here,” he nodded toward Keating still hanging out of the doorway, “he finally got a list of things that Fine wanted dug up by their library.”

  “ ‘Information systems’, if you don’t mind,” said Keating in a tony South Dublin accent. “He asked for searches of British and Irish newspapers over the past five years. For mention of Ireland in speeches by Arab heads of state. Interception of IRA arms from places other than the US. Coverage of conferences concerning Arabs and Palestinians in Britain and Ireland; publications arising from those conferences…” Keating turned a page and scanned the topics. “Last of all, last Friday afternoon, he put in a request for newspaper, radio and television articles on one Fintan Gorman. Going back for five years.”

  “The Minister for Defence?” asked Hoey.

  “The very man. Fabulous Fintan Gorman,” echoed Kilmartin.

  “Well. It looks like we had all of those interests already itemized, or we were aware that he was working on them. Did he decide on Gorman because of the work Fitzgerald gave him, the scandal beat?”

  “I don’t know,” Keating replied. “I’m still trying to get in touch with Fitzgerald to see if he knew that Fine wanted to do a piece on Fabulous Fintan. He’s left RTE and he’s not at home.”

  “Where did he get the name of Fabulous Fintan, anyway?” Hoey asked.

  “This is the man who knows how to solve all our ills,” Minogue replied. “The name came from some row in the Dail when the Opposition called something he was talking about a fable.”

  “I can see Fitz telling Fine to pick on Gorman because he’s a bit too clean-looking and deserves a good vetting,” Hoey murmured.

  “To be sure,” Kilmartin snorted, “that’s your media mob for you. They go for the dirt and they aim for the biggest scandal they can find. Amn’t I right? ‘Go for the most upright-looking politician and drag him down into the muck,’ is the order of the day there, I’m telling you.”

  “Not that yours is a partisan view or anything like that,” Minogue couldn’t resist saying.

  “Absolutely not,” Kilmartin replied hastily. “I don’t mind what party the man belongs to. I just think that he should get a fair crack of the whip and not have them hyenas snapping at his heels. I ask you! Looking to see if he ever had a drink or had his maulers on the wrong diddies once in his life. I mean to say, we’re all human. That pack of shites out in RTE-over-educated malcontents. They love to show the shots of a Garda defending himself at a demonstration but they never show the gurriers in the crowd provoking us. Lefties. Wife-swapping and cavorting about. As if they didn’t do it themselves. Anyway, let’s not get bogged down at this point.”

  “Right,” said Hoey. “A bit better news may be just around the corner for us. After the new appeal this evening a fella phoned us-not twenty minutes ago-to say that he saw Paul Fine on Saturday. He remembers Fine’s name only. Guess where he works?”

  “Radio Telifis Eireann,” Minogue tried.

  “Good try but no. The National Library above in Kildare Street.”

  “Paul Fine was in the National Library some time on Saturday.” Minogue declared the question.

  “Yep. We should be able to place him for a good part of the Saturday, during the day anyway. Things are coming together a bit better now, hah?” said Kilmartin as he sat back in his chair.

  Minogue did not want to be uncharitable but the gargoyle within was off the leash already. Jimmy Kilmartin had come from a meeting with the Commissioner anxious for any apparent loosening in the investigation. He would read much into the National Library business.

  “There’s two lads gone out to this man’s house and we’ll have a statement out of him before the evening is out. Then there are the slips which Fine filled in to get books in the Library,” Kilmartin pointed out contentedly.

  “So Paul Fine worked on Saturdays too,” Minogue speculated aloud. “They mustn’t have had what he wanted in RTE, so he went to the National Library instead?”

  “That looks like it so far,” replied Kilmartin.

  Was this why Kilmartin and the others were keen at this hour of the day, the gargoyle asked Minogue.

  “Now here’s the most interesting thing entirely, the one we’ve been holding back,” said Kilmartin cagily. “We have a match based on the dental work for that poor divil out in Bray. It was Kelly in the car all right, but the Pathologist’s report will be saying that Kelly may have been walloped in the head before the fire. There are signs of a very small hairline fracture, but he’s not sure about it. It may have been the heat of the fire and his head boiling-but the bone around it is not pressed out enough, he thinks. Kelly could have been knocked out, maybe even badly injured, and shoved into the back of the car. The car was set alight and Bob’s your uncle, it was a ball of fire inside of a minute.”

  Minogue decided that it was indeed time to sit down.

  “Meanwhile, back at the ranch,” Kilmartin continued. “Kelly’s brother is a priest. We got him to go into Kelly’s house with us, up in Leopardstown. Naturally the brother is very upset. Kelly was a very good-living man, he says. And sure enough, there’s some class of a chapel in the house. One of the bedrooms is like a monk’s cell, I’m telling you. ‘For prayer and contemplation,’ the brother says.”

  “There are odd people in Leopardstown, I always knew that,” Minogue murmured. He was thinking of Kelly’s body being consumed in the inferno, the head expl-Ughhh. Christ.

  “Odd isn’t the half of it. Our help-line number from the radio and telly appeals was on a scrap of paper by the phone.” Kilmartin leaned forward over his desk, his eyes hooded, and delivered the surprise. Minogue suddenly realized that Kilmartin had probably done this performance for the policemen already. They were all looking at Minogue now.

  “Do you know whose name was also on this scrap of paper, but misspelled?”

  “Go on,” said Minogue, prickly alert now. “Make my day.”

  “M-I-N-O-G-H. That’s how he spelled it. Definitely out of touch with surnames from the County of Clare, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Minogue chose Keating to work through the tally of calls logged to the Murder Squad’s help-line so far. With a copy of that call they could play it back to an acquaintance of Kelly. If it was identified… Minogue’s brain tumbled down mental stairs.

  He would have liked to have the nerve to take one of Kilmartin’s cigarettes, so fierce was the pleasure and resolution which Kilmartin seemed to be drawing out of them now. Minogue still felt left behind in the excitement which had taken visible hold of the others. He finally waved in a passing Hoey and Hoey tried to
sort it out for him.

  “I know it’s not certain,” Hoey said. “But why would he have the number at all? You said you remember being told about the call, Keating telling you-a man phoned, asked who was in charge of the Fine case and wanted to talk to you. You alone, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So if and when we find out it was Kelly, there’s an obvious connection between two murders.”

  “But Kelly is a senior civil servant, not a Palestinian or a local gangster. Maybe he was just out in Killiney on Sunday, an ordinary citizen. Maybe he knew Paul Fine somehow.”

  “Why would he only want to talk to you, so?” said Hoey conclusively as he drifted away from Minogue’s desk.

  Gallagher phoned Minogue ten minutes after Minogue called Special Branch HQ. Gallagher was co-ordinating the interviews with the people on the list he had drawn up himself. Minogue extricated his copy of the list and placed an X beside five of the thirty-eight names.

  “They’re the ones you’re finished with,” said Minogue.

  “And they’re not in the running. We’re still with the rest of them. There’s only three that we haven’t got a hold of yet.”

  Minogue glanced down at the names he had marked with an O. Xs and Os, hit and miss. “How do you feel about second interviews with those Arab students before the weekend?”

  Gallagher didn’t reply directly. “It could be done, if need be.”

  “Nobody so far knows this group this League for the…?”

  “They admit to reading it in the papers reporting on the murder. That’s all.”

  “Well, sooner or later, Pat…” Minogue concluded.

  “Later, I’d say,” Gallagher replied.

  Minogue had nearly ten minutes of vacillating about calling the Fines that night or the next before Hoey waved the phone at him. It was the direct line to the Murder Squad offices, usually marshalled by Eilis. Minogue slid into Eilis’ seat.

  “Not the Church, Not the State, Women must decide their fate,” said the woman’s voice.

  “I know the air, I’m not sure of the words, though. Or the singer,” Minogue said.

  “It’s the voice of sisterhood everywhere,” came the reply.

  “Are you actually a paid-up member of the Women’s Action Movement now?”

  “No, I’m not. But that doesn’t mean I sit idly by.”

  “Sorry, I forgot to phone you back. I don’t blame you giving me a speech. Where are you?”

  “I’m at home. That’s great about Marguerite Ryan, what do you think?”

  “How do you know this phone isn’t being tapped by my superiors here and that I won’t be out on my ear over what I say to that leading question?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Da. I think it’s great anyway. I hope they drop the manslaughter charge, too,” Iesult said. “And let her get on with her life.”

  “Uh,” Minogue said. Iesult paused. Minogue could see her sprawled in the hall, on the floor most likely.

  “When are you going on your holidays anyway?”

  Minogue wondered what his daughter was working around to asking. “Now you’re talking. A grand idea. I had been thinking of driving across with the ferry to France or something.”

  “You’re a howl. Does Ma know you’re planning this caravanserai, or will you just mention it the morning you’re going?”

  “Your mother likes surprises. Not the kind that your generation deals out, let me add. Something like I think you have in mind to tell me…”

  “Get up the yard, Da. Why would you-?”

  “You’re a bit amateurish at this still. Remember that your father is a Clareman with powers of divination and tricks galore. If you were phoning me just to chew the fat or discuss the weather, I’d be more than happy anyway. I have ready answers and a fund of inconsequential chat. For example: I was rained on unmercifully, and me coming back after me tea in a restaurant. I’m still soggy.”

  “Soggy? That’s an age thing. Poor man, Ma said you had to work late again.”

  “It’s murder, so it is.”

  “And at your age, too. What age are you now?”

  “Go ’way with you. I wish you could see me now because I’m turning the other cheek after that slur about me age. I want you to know that parents do in fact survive their children’s lack of consideration, you know.”

  “Your age? Ah, go on. Look at Yves Montand. Clint Eastwood…”

  “Peter Ustinov?”

  “Liz Taylor. They’re all getting on… No, I phoned you on a whim. I was thinking of going to Clare for the weekend.”

  “God be praised. A daughter awakening to her inheritance. Are you sure you won’t be frightened by the accents down there? It gets very dark at night, you know. There are mighty strange people in Clare.”

  “Understatement of the century. Ballyvaughan, I was thinking.”

  “And you want pointers from me, is it?”

  “No, I don’t. I was just mentioning it. There’s a crowd going to rent one of the Irish Cottages there.”

  Minogue was swayed alternately by what the ‘crowd’ suggested, and his scorn for Irish Cottages. Drawn by a synthetic version of a rural past, Dubliners along with Germans and Dutch and Yanks were booking thatched cottages in Ballyvaughan to savour a quaint past conveniently new. Too full of peasant blood to listen to urbanite guff about peasant virtues, Minogue had no answers to the men he had met in the pubs of Clare over the years defending these Irish Disneylands as ‘creating employment’ and ‘bringing the tourists’. He had realized, with little remorse, that he was, in certain respects, a snob.

  “A crowd”: said unconcernedly, but heavy with something. Drunken students, up late, farting about and making iijits of themselves in this ersatz Arcadia-his daughter in the middle of this? Her boyfriend, Pat the Brain, a man of revolutionary theories and humour which carried his ideas easily beyond cant: a dangerous, clever, likeable boy who was mad about Iesult.

  “How quaint. Folksy even,” said Minogue at last. He upbraided himself instantly when he heard the sneer in his voice. If Iesult wanted to be involved with Pat the Brain any way she liked, she could do it and nothing would prevent her. When Minogue tried to think of his daughter and sex a numbness and a fog took hold of his brain. Traces of different memories: himself and Kathleen, urgent and whispering to one another, heat and damp bodies, the unnameable arching over the small sadness later. A feeling that couldn’t be accommodated at all. Lying there in the summers with the breeze stirring the curtains wondering how many other couples were making love now. Was there something to the petite mort? And why was it all right for Kathleen and Matt, and not all right for Iesult, a woman herself?

  So great was their alarming and vigilant love for Iesult as an infant, a child who had been born unexpectedly, that Minogue and Kathleen always worried that they had spoiled her. An Iesult who had dug in her heels as an infant; a daughter who had miraculously ended desert years after the Minogues’ first child, Eamonn, had died in his sleep.

  Minogue had had more dreams about Eamonn these last few years, especially since his own greeting from death when the bomb had gone off under the British Ambassador’s car a hundred yards ahead of Minogue. Recovering in hospital, Minogue had discovered that he could safely relinquish much of what had been his former life. Without effort, and with the sense of an untroubled and even humorous presence which could only be his own self, he realized, waking up from a long sleep, Minogue had started a new life. His new religion was made up of things divorced before: a cup of coffee in Bewley’s where he could be surrounded by people of every ilk; Kathleen’s mannerisms when she was pleased about something; a walk on the endless stone pier of Dun Laoghaire-when you were out so far along the walk that you believed it was no longer a pier but that you were surrounded by the sea-with night sneaking in over sea-water that lapped and kissed the stones in the gloom.

  Dug in her heels: the same unwieldy gift as her father. Kathleen’s part of Iesult was the more civilizing, Minogue was sur
e.

  “It’s not quaint, Da. It’s the only place we could get. Everywhere else is booked out, even at this time of year.”

  “Fair enough. I understand it’s terrible popular with all classes of persons.”

  He heard her drumming something on the hall table. She had something else in mind. He would have to draw her out.

  “Is your mother home?”

  “No, she’s not. She’s over at Costigan’s. They have a video-machine there and they rented Gone With The Wind.”

  Minogue laughed this time. “Declare to God, your mother must have seen that a dozen times. She’s gone dotty.”

  “I’ll tell her you said that, so.”

  Minogue pounced. “When you’re telling her about going away for the weekend, like?”

  “I haven’t told her yet. You know how she is.”

  Minogue firmed up. “You mean you haven’t asked her yet. Yes, I do know how she is: that’s why I married her. I may be a bit gone in the head but your mother is very much in touch,” he said.

  “Too much sometimes,” said Iesult.

  “You want me to intercede for you because your mother suspects a dirty weekend but I’m more ‘progressive’. Am I getting warm?”

  “Well, you’re always standing up for Daithi when he does something iijity,” Iesult said petulantly.

  “Oh, that man should be getting himself tangled up as a go-between, and him slaving away at the office…”

  “Stop it, Da. Be serious for a minute. You know Ma. I wouldn’t want her worrying or looking at Pat like he was a roaring divil. Pat’s very responsible. He’s actually quite conservative behind all the Marxist stuff, but don’t tell him I said that, do you hear?”

  “I’m getting leery about this ‘don’t tell so-and-so this’. Your mother and yourself should talk man-to-man about this.”