Kaddish in Dublin imm-3

by John Brady

  Even Kilmartin smiled. “Jases, I hope he joins up the Gardai when he’s eighteen, that lad,” he said. “But listen: absolutely certain on the complexion, can I call it? Definitely not what the boy would know of Middle Eastern?”

  “No. Patsy was sure about that. An ordinary-looking fella, but he didn’t look all there on account of Patsy finding him up to no good.”

  “Did he hear the dog or see that woman at all?”

  “He doesn’t remember exactly but he saw an oul’ wan and a poodle somewhere around at the time. Doesn’t know if it was before or after he went in and he isn’t sure where exactly. She was putting a lead on the dog, he remembers that.”

  “There it is,” said Hoey slowly. “The woman said she put the lead on because the dog wanted to go back into the bushes.”

  “But she didn’t report seeing a Boy Scout,” Kilmartin cautioned. “The boy saw nothing of Fine?”

  “No. He stayed back, he told me, because the fella was acting a bit odd. Didn’t see any body or notice any blood.”

  Minogue recalled his visit to the clearing with Kilmartin. It had been choked with high grass, with brambles and weeds. It was possible that even six feet away a child would not have seen blood on the grass.

  “Didn’t he say anything to Fahy, the General or whatever they call them?”

  “No, he didn’t. He was mitching, you see. He knew that Fahy was only trying to kill time before they got the bus home. ‘Animal tracks!’ says Patsy. ‘Sure there’s only birds and the odd mouse up that hill.’ And Fahy didn’t get the boys to follow up on what other groups had found, either. Some of them found birds’ nests and wanted to bring the troop over to look, but Fahy lowered the boom on that idea. It seems that our Patsy is wise to grown-up trickery. He said nothing about it to anyone.”

  Of course, thought Minogue. Had the intrepid Patsy mentioned stumbling across a quare fella in the bushes, the full weight of adult worries and injunctions would have fallen upon him as anger and probably as punishment. Didn’t I tell you not to go off on your own like that? Weren’t you supposed to be helping your friend on a project? You could have fallen over a cliff and we wouldn’t have known

  …

  The mountaineer Patsy O’Malley, ranging far and wide over the vast jungle of Killiney Hill, happy and content, would have learned long ago to protect his freedom with silence. Minogue heard an echo of his own story then, of how he tried to deny the risks he wanted now that he had woken up to life. Maybe the explorer Patsy muttered the same to himself: Ah, they’d only be worrying if I told them everything…

  “Now,” said Minogue. “What I need to know is this…”

  Hoey beat him to the line.

  “Where was Brian Kelly on Sunday afternoon?” he said.

  A cornered Kilmartin was not a happy Kilmartin, but Minogue was forceful. Minogue was ready to insist, even to cite his authority to run the case.

  “We can’t just initiate this on the basis of what this little gangster said to Keating, Matt.”

  Initiate, Minogue repeated within. Kilmartin was on the defensive, retreating into formal bureaucratic vocabulary.

  “It’s strong, Jimmy.”

  “He’s a ten-year-old boy who could be a bit of an imp too. Who’s to say he didn’t create a bit from what he heard on the news or what he heard adults talking about?”

  “He saw the woman with the dog, the woman who put us wise to the murder site.”

  “Of course I’m not denying things the boy said,” Kilmartin agreed wearily. “I’m playing the Devil’s advocate. Look at what you’re asking, for the love of God. The boy may have an overheated imagination, that’s all.”

  “I think we should broaden the thing, Jimmy.” Minogue renewed the attack. “Look: we’re not focusing on finding a fella rafted in from the Middle East-if this boy is twenty-four carat. You with me?”

  Kilmartin raised his hands in mock-surrender. “I know, I know,” he said. ’Fair enough. But we still need to put these students through the mill. One of them should know about what’s beginning to look like a campaign. Yes, call it a campaign. There’s a church after being bombed, bejases. There are armed Gardai outside people’s houses as we speak. Just because we might begin to think whoever killed Paul Fine need not be a foreigner… Think on that.”

  “I’m not saying ease off on that,” Minogue protested. “And I have no problem thinking a local assassin or gunman has been hired or ordered to kill Paul Fine on behalf of this Palestinian organization. But let Pat Gallagher and company steam away at that. What we need to do is take a long hard look at a connection that’s staring us in the face: Paul Fine was researching something that Brian Kelly knew about. What are we waiting for?”

  Kilmartin pushed back in his chair and began examining his knuckles. Then he surveyed his desk-top. “Lookit, all I’m saying is give me some bullet-proof grounds for this search you’re proposing. It’d be a mammoth thing entirely.”

  “All I need from you is advice about short-cuts, Jimmy,” said Minogue.

  “You want a lot more than that, man dear,” said Kilmartin.

  “It’s not just the boy-look at the other facts. Shot three times. Bullets recovered. High-velocity bullets, fired from a powerful handgun. It’s logical to suspect that the bullets were chosen so they’d go through a body. Access to a gun, access to the ammunition: it was someone who is familiar with, or had training in, weapons. Brian Kelly had none of these features. He certainly didn’t look like a cop in my eye, anyway. It’s hardly a case of Kelly doing the murder and then getting a fit of remorse and phoning me. The way Paul Fine was murdered doesn’t indicate a killer who’d opt for much remorse. The someone seems to have been worried that the gun or the bullets could have been traced-the bullets especially. Who’d care about them if the Technical Bureau hadn’t a hope in hell of finding the gun?”

  “I know, I know, you told me already: ‘Because the gun might be traceable.’ This is what’s giving me grief: that fact doesn’t automatically incriminate the Gardai. You saw yourself that the ballistics comments said we don’t use that class of ammunition, for one thing.”

  “He could have used a Garda gun and got his hands on high-velocity stuff himself,” argued Minogue.

  “But where’s the key motive behind all this, I ask? It doesn’t hang together very well. Do you know what you’re saying? Fine didn’t have any friends, or enemies for that matter, that we know of in the Gardai. And why would he, sure?” said Kilmartin.

  “But someone could have borrowed or loaned out the gun for the murder and then had to replace it.”

  “But why, how?”

  “If I knew that I’d have the murderer awaiting trial and I’d be at home with me feet up.”

  Kilmartin drew a deep breath and sighed as he let it out slowly.

  “Like I said to you, Matt, I’m only the Devil’s advocate, as I said, keeping you honest,” he repeated.

  “Well seeing as you’re primed for that role, you’d better hear the rest that I’m thinking, then. I still can’t fathom this business about the timing of the phone call to the paper on Monday morning, half an hour after the citizen finds the body washed up.”

  Kilmartin looked warily at Minogue’s sceptical face. “Ah Jases, not that again-”

  “Hold your horses a minute, Jimmy. If we had to make our living on coincidences in a murder case, we’d have starved to death a long time ago. What if the killer knew that the body was discovered, and decided it was time to phone up and spin a yarn to buy himself time?”

  Kilmartin didn’t react as Minogue had expected. He let his eyes out of focus and joined his fingers to make a church-and-steeple which he placed under his nose. Minogue sensed victory. “How did he know when to phone?” asked the glaze-eyed Kilmartin from behind the finger construction.

  “He could have been near the beach and found out. Remember the hotel, and the waiter saying that a barman had seen the Garda cars congregating there?”

  Kilmartin nodded n
on-committally, eyes still away on an alternative world.

  “Anyone around the place might have done the same thing-gone down to see the commotion and seen that the body had not washed out to sea.”

  “Fair enough,” said Kilmartin calmly. “We’ve caught killers because they returned to the site at some point afterwards. I can go along with that.”

  Minogue wondered if Kilmartin was buying time, humouring him while he awaited the arrival of the men in the white coats.

  “I wasn’t getting at that, actually. I was thinking of something a little different from an eye-witness at the beach.”

  “You were, were you?” said Kilmartin in a somnambulistic monotone.

  “I was thinking that perhaps a member of the Gardai alerted someone to the discovery of the body. Thereupon this someone decided to phone the paper and try to confound us. It may be that our killer is a member of the Gardai.”

  “Aha. I see.”

  “Yes,” Minogue went on tentatively. “So somewhere between the beach and us here in the squadroom, a Garda found out that Paul Fine’s body was on Killiney strand and this Garda told someone else. Or else the Garda himself phoned the paper.”

  “To confuse us,” Kilmartin said tonelessly.

  “To confuse us,” Minogue repeated. “Yes.”

  “A Garda.”

  “A Garda,” Minogue agreed. Kilmartin was still locked into his reverie so that Minogue felt he might be conversing with a person in a trance.

  “A Garda took a Garda firearm and shot Fine in the head three times last Sunday afternoon?”

  “A Garda may have been involved in the shooting of Paul Fine on Sunday afternoon,” Minogue qualified.

  “Why would one of our colleagues do that, now?”

  “I haven’t a clue, Jimmy.”

  “You haven’t a clue,” Kilmartin repeated woodenly. He blinked and regained this world, looking blankly at Minogue.

  “I’m willing to defend it, Jimmy. After all, I’m the one with the flag in his hand for this.”

  Kilmartin gave no obvious sign that he read Minogue’s defensiveness as insubordination.

  “So you’ll want an accounting for use of firearms within the Gardai in Dublin, at least?”

  “That’s what I’m going for, yes. Oh, and the Army too,” said Minogue.

  “The Army,” echoed Kilmartin quietly.

  “The Army. Our Army,” agreed Minogue cautiously.

  “Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb?”

  “That’s right, Jimmy. In for a penny, in for a pound. What do you say?”

  Kilmartin looked at his nails.

  “Oh, I’m in too. I just wanted to hear how you’d explain turning two extremely large bureaucracies on their bloody heads.”

  Minogue smiled with the relief.

  “Just this, though,” continued Kilmartin. “One of us has to phone God Almighty and tell him how you reached this decision.”

  “Good,” Minogue agreed. “I’ll do it, so. I want to be sure that the checks are not apparent at all. There must be a way of accounting for firearms and ammunition without the whole Garda Siochana getting to know about it.”

  Minogue, leaving, heard a strange Americanism from the subdued Kilmartin.

  “Have a nice day, Matt.”

  Minogue ate a scrambled-egg sandwich in between gulps of what the restaurant called consomme soup. He was to meet the Garda Commissioner at half-past one. Kilmartin had agreed with him that, for the moment, the fewer people on the task force who knew about this part of the investigation, the better. Hoey was let in on it, as Minogue wanted him along to the meeting in Garda HQ in the Phoenix Park. Hoey was also the funnel through which all the information coming in from the field on the Fine murder case had flowed.

  After Minogue had telephoned the Assistant Commissioner he had waited at his desk to play out the bet he had placed with himself. It had taken the Commissioner less than five minutes to phone Kilmartin. The same Kilmartin must have expected the reaction because his door remained closed. Minogue mentally pocketed his own bet. Kilmartin had emerged from his office with a name written on a sheet of foolscap, had handed it to Minogue and asked him if he had ever met Major-General Seamus O’Tuaime. Minogue had not. Then Minogue would make his acquaintance in the company of the Garda Commissioner. Kilmartin had left the foolscap dangling from Minogue’s hand. This was Kilmartin’s way of letting him know that he was on his own, Minogue understood.

  Minogue checked his clothes for drops of soup. He stood from the chair and flicked at his shirt and jacket to dislodge any globs of scrambled egg which might have hidden themselves in folds while he had been seated. He had been wondering how much he could withhold from O’Tuaime, especially.

  “You look like you’re thrilled skinny at the prospect of this meeting. If you don’t mind me saying so,” said Hoey.

  “I don’t mind you saying so. Army uniforms make me jittery. I must have been an anarchist in me last incarnation.”

  “I wish we were more like the coppers on the Continent. They can grow their hair and wear their own clobber a lot of the time in Germany,” Hoey opined dreamily. “A bit of glamour’d be all right.”

  He should have driven home to Kilmartin the point that the real common element was Opus Dei. No, Kilmartin would have insisted on something more demonstrably tangible if he, Kilmartin, had had to use it as an explanation for Minogue’s plan. Minogue began to believe that Kilmartin’s diffidence about the plan was his way of leaving Minogue to await the outcome of this meeting more or less alone. Right, Matt Minogue, he might as well have said, you say you’re in charge here so off you go. Was it that childhood fear of authority which had filtered through to the adult Kilmartin as an excessive sense of accountability toward his own superiors now-another cardinal Irish trait, the constant fear of rebuke?

  “So it’s really top-secret then,” said Hoey.

  “That’s the way all right,” replied Minogue. “If we’re to get anywhere.”

  He could avoid telling the Commissioner and O’Tuaime that he suspected an Opus Dei dimension by simply calling it a possible conspiracy. God help him if O’Tuaime asked what motives he could conceivably impute to a conspiracy to murder a radio journalist who happened to be a Jew.

  Hoey looked with distaste across the table as the waitress swept the plates away. “That was an ugly little sandwich I had. I hope I don’t puke on account of it.”

  “It would reflect poorly if you were to be sick during this meeting, Shea. After it, perhaps, that might be all right: during it would be a no-no.”

  Hoey drove. They waited five minutes at the lights by Christchurch before getting their chance to turn down to the quays and the north side of the Liffey. Minogue knew they could have gone down Thomas Street but he wanted to borrow a little time. Younger people were holding out their thumbs for lifts. The middle-aged and the elderly stood mutely by the bus stops, with faintly puzzled and embarrassed expressions. Too shy to be so forward as to solicit a lift off a stranger, they hoped drivers would stop and offer. Minogue saw several cars pull over to the kerbs and pick up people. With an acid expansion somewhere in his innards, one which was not due solely to the dinner he had tolerated, he noted that the cars which were stopping were older cars, well-used. Big Japanese and German cars sped by the crowds, fighting for ever-shrinking patches of roadways between the ever-lengthening bottlenecks at the traffic lights. He tried not to come out with a cynical remark when he saw that Hoey too had noticed this income-based philanthropy.

  “You never know,” Hoey observed. “A bit of this self-help might be just the thing to get the place going again. Maybe we don’t need the buses at all.”

  Self-help, Minogue heard, thinking of the tricks of grammar: in these days of the Thatcherite gospel, the number of Audis and Cressidas and Mercedes suggested that some citizens had helped themselves a great deal.

  Once across the Liffey, the traffic thinned. Hoey steered deftly around vehicles and turned down the qua
y toward Islandbridge and the Phoenix Park beyond. Facades along the quays were for the most part ruined or crumbling. Those which still stood had been transformed into hucksters’ shops, headed by oversized plastic signs. Quick tenancies for fly-by-night businesses had left blocked-up windows and boarded doors. The decay was an animate presence hanging over the oily filth of the Liffey at low tide. What could have been an elegant promenade with people living on the banks of Anna Livia was now a series of grimy shattered roadways and empty lots. The blue sky made it look worse, Minogue considered, as the brighter light showed up the mounds of rubble piled in the doorways, the broken railings, the frameless, gaping windows on the upper stories.

  “That’s where they do their bit, Fianna Eireann,” said Hoey as they passed Collins Barracks. They were closing on Islandbridge now. In calling the Army by its official title, as inheritors of the mantle of the Fianna, a legendary band of warriors who had roamed ancient Ireland, Hoey did not need to make the jibe more pointed.

  The Barracks, inherited from the British, was a series of grim stone buildings, suggesting a prison more than Army quarters. There were several Land Rovers and Army lorries parked behind the railings.

  “And Gorman cooing in their ears, saying that the government can find the money for more equipment, no matter what the cost.”

  “Did he say that?” asked Minogue.

  “They love him, I hear,” replied Hoey.

  O’Tuaime, Minogue thought. The name suggested a man who obviously preferred to use Irish as his official language. Would he have the other trappings too? Be a devout Catholic for God and Ireland? Minogue began again to wonder why Kilmartin had not seemed interested in coming to this meeting.

  The Commissioner had Tynan, one of the Garda’s Deputy Commissioners, beside him. Tynan was in charge of B Section at Garda HQ in the Park. Amongst other things, B Section held personal files on every Garda officer. The two of them seemed to have been chatting amiably to O’Tuaime, and, ushered in, Minogue felt that his arrival was an intrusion on polite company. God Almighty had an effusive greeting for him. Minogue could not decide which of the three uniformed men was giving off the smell of old-fashioned shaving soap. It brought back for an instant the scent of his own father’s skin, Sundays on the way to Mass. He guessed it was O’Tuaime, a florid-faced but boyish-looking career Army General in his early fifties.