by John Brady
Minogue remembered Kilmartin’s jibes from the previous night. Before they had knocked off for the night, Kilmartin had showed a shrinking Hoey the black-and-white photos of a curled, black mass. It was unrecognizable as the body it was supposed to be, except through the foreknowledge which Kilmartin’s expression of grim indulgence brought. ‘Trial by fire. Burnt offerings,’ the blasphemous Kilmartin had muttered as he had laid snap after snap of what had been Brian Kelly on Hoey’s desk like a ghastly game of cards.
“And try and get a hold of stuff and roll it out for me and Jim Kilmartin,” Minogue finished. “And find out what Gallagher and company make of the bombing. Stay put by the phone. I’ll get to you within the hour.”
Minogue held the receiver while he broke the connection. Phone Gallagher himself? Kilmartin? Drop the interview here and head for the Squad HQ, try and get into the driving seat as the information came in? The phone rang under his stretched fingers.
“Yes,” Minogue said, not yet back in the present. A man with a northern accent asked if Justice Fine was available. Minogue recognized the voice from somewhere.
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Sean O’Duill from Armagh.”
Cohen was already through the kitchen door and he took the receiver from Minogue. Fine emerged, carrying a tray. Minogue trudged after him into the front room.
“John Cohen, Your Eminence,” he heard Cohen say. “Very glad of your support… I’ll pass it on to him.”
Fine paused, tray in hand, listening to Cohen. He laid the tray down.
“Look after yourself,” he said to Minogue.
Minogue sat down in an armchair. Cohen came in yawning. Through the closing door Minogue heard Fine’s voice now, resigned and gentle. “Yes, Sean, we do. We keep on asking ourselves if this is really happening. Shock, yes…”
Cohen closed the door and sat opposite Minogue. The two men remained silent, one staring contemplatively at the tray, the other, a bewildered, middle-aged Clareman, anxious and distracted.
Rosalie Fine, a compact, stocky woman, entered the room noiselessly. Small patches of colour had gathered high on her cheeks. Her eyes were clear hazel, but they seemed out of focus to Minogue. He rose. She held the limp sleeves of her cardigan as she sat. Billy Fine came in after her and sat next to her on the couch, taking one of her hands in his.
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” Minogue said quietly. The words were thick and clumsy in his mouth and they ran back in his mind to taunt him. Rosalie Fine looked at him but Minogue felt she was not seeing him. Different people, these are. His embarrassment flared again. These people didn’t use a countryman’s stilted words. He dithered with the coffee, grateful for the strong sweet mixture.
“I was just about to apprise your husband of the investigation so far.” He paused to look at Fine. “But I’m far from sure now if this is the time-”
“There’s no time,” she interrupted. “There’s never any proper time. There’s no time that’s right…”
“With all the people coming to the house,” Minogue murmured, trying to recover.
“And last night’s…?” she paused, stuck for words, and looked directly at Minogue. Minogue took a quick sip of coffee. He heard Fine’s breath exhaled quickly.
“I wanted to reassure you that we’re casting the net wide. We have the expertise and the tools at hand to track down the suspects. And the will,” Minogue added slowly, returning Rosalie Fine’s distracted gaze. “The Special Branch has already conducted an extensive search for extremists who might be even remotely connected with Arab or Islamic causes. We’re still not ignoring the possibility of third-party involvement.”
“You mean the IRA?” said Fine.
“And groups on the Continent who have links with the IRA,” Minogue replied.
Fine nodded. The gesture seemed to wake Rosalie Fine from her detachment. “You don’t sound very confident about this,” she said abruptly. “We’ve been hearing these assurances from your Commissioner. I wonder if we’re not being reassured a bit too much.”
“Rose means that she’d sooner know the truth,” said Fine. “Same as myself.”
Minogue took a deep breath. He found that Rosalie Fine was still looking at him.
“This group that phoned the paper is not known to the Gardai. We’ve interviewed a large number of possible suspects already. Now, in the light of what happened last night, we might well be dealing with something involving more than just your own tragedy. I mean, not that…” Minogue felt his face redden and prickle.
Then Rosalie Fine spoke as though she had just entered the room. “Billy told me that you were in our Museum in Walworth Road.”
Minogue nodded. A faint alarm buzzed behind his thoughts.
“What did you think of it?” she asked. She might be making polite conversation with someone she had just bumped into in the street, Minogue saw. Was this the distraction that grief brings?
“I enjoyed myself,” he said. “All new to me. I’m County Clare, you see. Transplanted. I was taken to the altar by a Dublin-woman and I’ve been here since. It’s a tough calling. Our two at home would put the heart crossways in you.”
Rosalie Fine’s face took on a slightly indulgent cast, with a trace of irony plain in her eyes.
“I’d say you’re well able for them,” she murmured. Fine seemed glad to let down his load for a moment too. He leaned forward and placed his cup on the table. Rosalie Fines’ eyes slid out of focus again.
“I was talking to Lily,” she murmured in a different voice. “Last night, she phoned… Paul met Lily here on a holiday. She’s a cousin of the Greens. Greens the booksellers. Lily is a Londoner, of course. We were happy when Paul fell for her. A nice family and she wasn’t your traditional type to stay home and all that. Very modern and Paul liked that, he needed that. She was into the journalism herself, just starting into television.”
“Well he went to London with her but he couldn’t stand it.‘Exile’ he called it.”
“Lily had every right to say no to living here in Dublin,” Billy Fine took up the conversation. “And to be blunt,” he glanced at his wife before resuming, “they were bitter parting. Lily is a very strong personality, very confident. Of course you’d assume that Paul was the opposite, the one who gave way more…”
“With Julia and David it was different,” said Rosalie. “They knew early on they’d want to be moving eventually, seeing the world. With the youngest you never know. They say the youngest feels responsible for the parents. And then, who knows, maybe we wanted to hold on to him a bit longer…”
Minogue concentrated on part of the pattern on his cup as Rosalie Fine wept. Her husband wept also, sitting upright, clutching his wife’s hand until the hands were a jumble of whitened knuckles. A minute passed. The phone trilled once in the hall before they heard Cohen’s bass tones. Then the voice stopped. Cohen opened the door.
“Rose, it’s Canada,” he said. “If you’re up to it.”
Rosalie Fine drew in a breath, stood and walked to the door. Fine yawned deep into his palm.
“She has a sister in Toronto,” he murmured.
“I won’t burden you any longer,” said Minogue. “I must get on top of these developments and I don’t want to be hanging on your phone.”
Fine didn’t seem to have heard him. He rubbed at an eyebrow. “I thought we were exempt, you might say,” he murmured as he looked at the window. “Irishmen, the same as yourself. Oh but certainly there’s the root in Israel. You know, I must say that the years have me circling back to what I was born into. Being Jews, I mean, having a spiritual homeland. It’s no religious fervour. I’m less ‘Irish’ than I was ten years ago. Than I was yesterday, I must say too. Aliyah looms closer. It would not be a hardship on us.”
“I don’t follow you there, the last bit,” said Minogue.
“ Aliyah? We’ve given some thought to emigrating to Israel. Keep that under your hat. I’m a public figure the minute I walk out the door h
ere. I’ll tell them when I’m ready to retire and not before. Sure, they only gave me the job last year, and me the youngest on the bench.”
Fine turned from the window and stared at the policeman. “Look, you don’t need to squirm here,” Fine said. “I didn’t expect you to come here spouting answers. You have to work out what happened at the Museum, same as myself.”
Minogue hesitated before deciding to tell Fine. “There’s something which came up late last night and again this morning,” he said in little more than a whisper. “Something that the Commissioner would not have known to tell you at tea-time yesterday. This may prove important. Please don’t read much into it yet until it becomes more substantial. We understand now that Paul may have been researching a group, a topic, which in turn may be linked to the death of a young man very recently.”
Fine blinked.
“He may have mentioned this to you? Opus Dei.”
Fine shook his head slowly.
“Not a word to me,” he murmured. “But you can’t be in earnest. I heard of them before. They’re a Catholic organization, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are.”
“To do with lay people, though, religious-minded.”
“I believe you have it in a nutshell,” said Minogue. “I’m awaiting a summary of what Opus Dei is, in Ireland anyway. Paul undertook to read up on them, but we can find no trace of notes he might have made. There was no mention of this until a citizen called last night, a man who works in the National Library. Paul was working there in the Library one day, researching this Opus Dei organization. There are several puzzling things about this. Opus Dei is not an extremist organization in the sense that they’d ever have anything to do with violence. And we don’t understand why Paul didn’t do his research in RTE, or discuss the topic with the people he worked with there. Then there’s the lack of notes. One might suppose that he was making his first pass over the subject reading the books on Friday, so he’d only commit things to paper later on…”
Minogue paused but Fine said nothing.
“I’m not suggesting there’s anything sinister or conclusive to this. And of course last night’s outrage-”
“Friday,” Fine interrupted then. “I met Paul Friday for dinner.”
“Did he say anything which strikes you as odd, connected with what I’ve just told you? Was he excited about anything?”
Fine frowned and ran a fingertip around his lips.
“No, no. He made a face at something though, something that came up in conversation. The journalism tended to make him a bit cynical, I think. Some of the hoi polloi were in the Gallery for lunch too, some TDs and Ministerial Sees. The luminaries gather there, usually toward the end of the week, to gab and gossip about one another. I recognized a few of them and of course it does them no harm to doff their hats to Mr. Justice Fine. Paul thought it was a bit rich. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths,’ he said, if I remember. Yes. Not like him to be cynical really. That may be more due to working with Mickey Fitzgerald and company. I know that Paul didn’t much like digging into the more gritty types of exposes that Fitz and the others like to blow up. Paul said something about the Ard Fheis coming up next week, some comment about: ‘They’ll all be at one another’s throats soon.’ Always the way, a cynic would answer, I suppose.”
“You didn’t ask him what he meant?”
“No. I assumed he meant that the Ard Fheis would be planning some strategies for the election. They’re always a bit of a circus.”
“I suppose,” said Minogue. He made for the door. “If you can spare me the time later, could I draw you more towards Paul’s personal life? I may be asking awkward questions as to any enmities with family and relations but I believe you’ll know that I have only a policeman’s interest… Could I arrange a time if I phone you later?”
Fine let his breath out and nodded slowly. He sat in the couch again and let himself slump. Minogue thanked Billy Fine and rose to leave. He nodded to Rosalie Fine in the hall. A woman sat next to her, crying. Minogue was seized again by furious, inchoate shame.
Through the door and descending the steps, he was grateful to be out in the air again, breathing deeply and trying to loosen the tension in his shoulders. He nodded at the detectives in the surveillance car and headed down the footpath toward his car.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Minogue sat in the car for a minute before turning on the ignition. The familiar smells of the interior, cooked up stronger by the sunshine, rose around him; sparrows squabbled in the hedges. Kilmartin was nosing into the Opus Dei business. A possible witness, even though it was a child, from the murder site. Minogue had a dim sense of things moving now, gathering momentum, and for the first time in several days he felt excited. The excitement jarred against the anger he still nursed at Cohen’s springing the news on him.
The sun’s glare off the bonnet of the car moved Minogue at last and he drove off toward Islandbridge. Forty minutes later he had managed to cover three miles. He had turned the engine off but the fan was still running as it worked to cool the engine. The traffic had not moved for five minutes. Cyclists, many more than Minogue saw on ordinary workdays, swarmed around the jams, skittering over the kerbs and plainly enjoying themselves. Some motorists stood outside their cars, leaning elbows on their roofs. Pedestrians barely hid their smirks and they walked jauntily. Now that the weather was fine for the first day of the strike, the city had a holiday air.
Minogue counted to a hundred. Seeing no move ahead he started the engine and worked the car half-way on to the footpath. He wrote a note which he then placed on the dashboard as he stepped out to join the flow of pedestrians: ‘ Direct any tickets or tow fees to CDU, Investigation Section do C. Insp. J. Kilmartin’. Within a hundred yards of his abandoned car, Minogue was loping along, the motion of his freed body releasing him but slightly from the gloom which he had carried with him from Fine’s. He found a working phone booth and told Eilis that he had been shanghaied by traffic but that he’d be in the office within twenty minutes. The shabby streets, the chaos and inertia, this sullen greying town now oppressed him. He began walking faster.
Minogue breezed by Eilis and glanced at the policemen’s faces which turned to him. Hoey followed him into Kilmartin’s office.
“I’m after coming from the Fines,” Minogue muttered.
“How is it with them?” inquired Kilmartin.
“They’d be a lot less upset if they had their son’s body,” Minogue snapped. “Jews try to bury their dead as soon as they can. It’s damned important to them and I wish there was something I could do. As for me, don’t ask. I’m fit to be tied. What the hell happened last night?”
“One thing at a time, bucko,” Kilmartin snapped back. “PM stipulates a minimum of three days, and well you know it. How would it be if we handed over the remains and then wanted them back for a test we forgot later on?”
“A word in someone’s ear,” Minogue said acidly, glaring at memos on Kilmartin’s desk.
“I’ll look into the matter,” Kilmartin said slowly.
“To hell and damnation with looking into it, Jamesy,” said Minogue. “The point is this: what can we tell Mr. and Mrs. Fine now?”
Minogue turned to Hoey before Kilmartin could frame an answer. “Shea: what about this child, this Boy Scout fella? Is there anything to hope for?”
“Keating’s talking to him. Hasn’t phoned in yet.”
“Give me what you have on this fire-bombing then. Or do I have to go out and buy a bloody newspaper to find out what’s going on, at all? I feel I’ve been away for a week and I don’t know a damn thing that’s happening.”
“One witness heard the thing go off. Another witness heard a car tearing away down around the corner toward the city centre. She thinks she heard footsteps running fast before that.”
“And one in the car, no doubt,” Kilmartin slipped in.
“What’s Gallagher say?” Minogue asked impatiently. “Is this a planned thing, a campaign? Wh
at are we looking at here? Come on, Shea, feed me.”
Hoey blinked several times. “I phoned Gallagher: he has detailed a team to pick up a lot of the mob off the lists he drew up for us with the murder. Even ones he has already interviewed. Says the bombing and the murder were hardly the same people. No call to claim responsibility, he kept saying.”
“He has all the manpower he needs,” said Kilmartin. “We’d do well to leave Gallagher to his own devices on this. His crowd can do the fretting about what might happen next, if this is some campaign about I-don’t-know-what.”
“Anti-Semitic terror?” Minogue glared up from the desk-top at Kilmartin.
Kilmartin didn’t rise to the bait. “Lookit, God Almighty was on the phone not ten minutes ago, reminding us to do what we know best and to leave the other matter with the Branch. They have armed detectives outside people’s homes and all, already.”
“You mean to tell me he’s saying or hoping there’s no connection between last night and Paul Fine’s murder?” Minogue barracked.
“Don’t jump the gun, damn you,” Kilmartin snarled. “You’re in here with a mouth on you, bejases, and you’ll know no government. It’s all team-work, can’t you see? Gallagher’s helping us out and we’re helping him. He’s taking a lot of the weight, too. Of course he’s not an iijit about whether there’s links or not. Don’t you start getting foxy with me about it, man. Like it or not, we fall in line with an overall strategy. He said and did nothing to impede us.”
“Are we losing staff on the head of this, then?” Minogue shot back. “The staff we were given for the murder?”
Kilmartin looked at Hoey, then swivelled his gaze full on to Minogue. “You’re losing your marbles, by the sounds of things.” Still staring at Minogue, he said to Hoey: “You didn’t hear that, Detective Garda Hoey, did you?”
Hoey shuffled.
“Share and share alike,” Kilmartin drawled in a slow, ominous monotone which Minogue registered as one of his early-warning systems. “We work with them; they’re our mates; they have the goods; we need them. If they ask us for breakfast in bed, we’ll give it to them and we won’t throw it at them. They’re doing nearly all the interviewing. Don’t be rearing up on me because of it. Are you sure you’re not a bit too close to the boy’s family to stay cool on the matter?”
