Four o’clock brought Minogue beyond temptation and he fled to Bewley’s Cafe. He was through the door and fumbling for his car keys when he heard Kilmartin calling behind him. He pretended not to hear him over the traffic but Kilmartin outpaced the slowing Minogue. Minogue wanted to be alone in noisy and contented solitude, in the ruck which made up Bewley’s, but he didn’t want Kilmartin, stricken with a heart attack from running, on his conscience.
Minogue was in a bad enough humour for not having thought of other places Fine might have stored his work. He had phoned Fitzgerald, hoping to short-cut Doyle’s work by finding out whether Paul Fine did use the computer. Fitzgerald had told him that he didn’t know and Minogue had had to believe him.
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” wheezed Kilmartin, falling into step with Minogue. “Jases, you’re out of there like a blue-arsed fly. Take your time, man dear. I know where you’re off to, anyway.”
“How so?” said Minogue.
“I asked Her Nibs,” said Kilmartin, referring to the Delphic Eilis.
“‘His honour is making a bee-line for Bewley’s,’ says she, ‘by the look in his eye.’ Wait till I tell you-I just heard that Ryan woman was released without bail. She’s home with her children.”
Minogue didn’t believe Kilmartin at first.
“I swear to God. She was charged with manslaughter, given her dinner and put out on to the street. That’s not the half of it. There was a crowd of Women’s Action heavies with her, having a hooley and dancing in the street. Bedlam. They took her back to the farm, bejases, and there’s a crowd of them staying to help her with the farm work and make sure nobody comes around that might blackguard her.”
Kilmartin began to laugh. It was the laugh of a Hollywood castaway gone mad from thirst in the Sahara, Minogue believed.
“It’s a bloody commune on the farm. WAMmers milking the pigs and feeding grain to the dog. A pack of lesbians in a commune, a revolution. They might declare a republic and what would we do then? Ha ha,” Kilmartin continued. Unbidden, he sat heavily into the passenger seat.
While Minogue piloted sourly down the quays, Kilmartin repeated bits of his news and views all the way to George’s Street. The newspaper headlines on a stand by the entrance to Bewley’s cut him short. He stopped and grasped Minogue’s arm. Minogue looked to the papers for more about Marguerite Ryan, the new heroine of Ireland.
“Look at that, would you,” Kilmartin hissed. “The busmen are going on strike. Isn’t that the last straw entirely?”
Minogue did not think so. He carried his large white coffee to a table near the window. Normally he would have tried to avoid this rather moribund branch of Bewley’s by loping on down to Westmoreland Street, another five minutes away. With Kilmartin in tow he had decided to cut his losses. Kilmartin sat down opposite. He could not stop shaking his head every few minutes when he returned to the subject of Marguerite Ryan. Minogue wondered if that was how erotic obsessions showed themselves.
“She’s actually getting away with murder. We did all the paperwork and sewed it up tight. The next thing you know is the Director of Public Prosecutions throws out the murder charge and… Maybe we ought to phone up and tell them she gave him one stab for every year of his mortal life.”
“Let the hair sit, Jimmy,” said Minogue acidly. “It’s not proof of premeditation. Stress can drive a body to episodic madness. That’s the be-all and end-all of it for me.”
Kilmartin was agog at Minogue’s dismissal.
“The urge might have been so strong that she couldn’t stop herself. Possessed,” Minogue added.
“The assessment says she’s the full shilling, Matt. There’s nothing about temporary insanity. Didn’t I read some rubbish in the papers about the WAMmers saying it has to do with a woman’s monthlies?”
The coffee had boosted Minogue into sarcasm.
“Anybody do a psychiatric assessment of Frances Xavier Ryan?”
Kilmartin made a face and sipped at his coffee.
“As for the premenstrual syndrome, I haven’t had it myself,” Minogue added. “I do be feeling sorry enough for myself when I have a little headache, even. Menstruation is no lark, I understand.”
Minogue enjoyed Kilmartin’s shock as he noted a face turning from the next table. Kilmartin bowed lower over the table and whispered like a schoolboy whose blasphemy might be overheard: “You mean to say that if your wife or mine gave either of us a clout one day and then said it wasn’t her fault on account of her you-know-what, that’d be fine and well by you?”
“It may be that I actually deserve a clout every now and then. It’s to your own head you should be looking, Jimmy.”
“Thanks very much.”
“Let me say this: Marguerite Ryan is no Tipperary Joan of Arc, but sooner or later she might have had to defend her life with that husband the way he was. Maybe she was the victim of a crime we paid no attention to.”
Minogue hid behind his coffee cup then. He expected Kilmartin to send a taunt his way about being bossed around by Kathleen and Iesult at home, now that Daithi was in the States. Kilmartin changed the subject instead.
“I say we sack the busmen and be done with it. People are fed up with them hooligans dictating to the public and causing hardship to everyone just because they want a few bob. They’re robbing us blind with the fares anyway.”
“ ‘ Sic transit… ’,” murmured Minogue.
“You’re telling me,” said Kilmartin quickly.
“Are you going to run for election on it?”
“Easy for you to laugh. I was half tempted several times to do something in politics: I couldn’t do much worse than the shaggers and shoneens we have now. Leadership is what we badly need if the country is to get going again,” declared the statesman Kilmartin.
Going where, Minogue wondered.
“Someone new, but someone who knows the ropes and won’t be tricked into siding with the old crowd. Someone with enough smarts not to be dragged into the pubs and the clubs and the old rigmarole. Are you with me?”
“I am indeed. Do you have anyone in mind?”
“There’s the fly in the ointment, Matt,” Kilmartin said earnestly. “I can’t see anyone on the scene right now. It breaks my heart to see the government gearing up for the Ard Fheis with the Chief and his cronies working up to an election after they’ve wasted some money on their constituencies. It’s a machine at work, not democracy, isn’t it?”
“You’re quite right.”
Kilmartin looked around the restaurant as though to glean more pleasant topics to raise with Minogue. Minogue’s thoughts drifted toward Paul Fine. Fine had been assigned to work on digging up dirt on these office-holders which even Kilmartin had consigned to the large domain of yobbos and chancers. It was an assignment which Paul Fine hadn’t been thrilled about. Was it because he was by birth estranged from the tribal in-fighting which Irishmen like Kilmartin revelled in?
“What about that Gorman, would he be to your liking?” Minogue asked Kilmartin.
“There’s an interesting one. Mind you he’s part and parcel of what has the country going to pot now. That’s not to say that he’s a completely lost cause, though. Maura at home was telling me the other day that Gorman is by no means a yes-man. He’s a good Minister, if you toe the line and keep up with him. It’s not an easy bed to lie in, being a Minister for Defence and you not being forty years of age, you know. But Gorman’s popular and he’s been to school, too. Still and all, if he’s anybody worth thinking about why is he with that crowd of hill-and-dale robbers that’re running the country into the ground right now?”
“Maybe he didn’t want to be a voice in the wilderness,” said Minogue coyly.
“Could be. I don’t know if he has the belly in him for real leadership though. When it comes down to the wire he’ll be lining up at the trough with the rest of them-wait’ll you see. The Chief has his hatchet-men out all the time listening to see who might be getting too popular or who might be getting ideas of stepping out of line. They’d give Gorman the chop-very rapid like-if they found he was slipping the leash on the Chief.”
“For a man who doesn’t like the current government, you know a lot about them.”
“Ah go on, I don’t know more than the next man. You know yourself that the fella who’s belly-aching about this or that party is the fella who’ll vote for them come the election. ’Tis the bane of our existence here, voting for personalities…”
Minogue marvelled privately at what Kilmartin had just said. Even Jimmy Kilmartin, middle age on him like a volcanic crust, was displaying that enduring paradox of cynicism and hope, that cardinal Irishism that Minogue had learned late he could not escape himself: professing to be aloof while sitting on an overwhelming desire.
“Do you hear me at all?” Kilmartin was saying. “When we find out who was in the car in Bray, we won’t be sitting here running the world. We’ll be earning our pay these next few days, I can tell you.”
Hoey put Doyle on hold and walked over to Minogue’s desk.
“Doyle, sir. He nosed around with the computer thing in RTE. Something interesting, do you want to listen in?”
Minogue pressed the flashing yellow button while Hoey returned to his extension.
“Minogue here now. Shea Hoey says you are inside a computer or something.”
“I went to Fine’s office, that big room with all the desks, and I asked a man called Downey if Fine made much use of the computer for his work. Some people use the computer for word-processing and what they call internal mail. Downey says yep, that Fine used to use the computer. Journalists file stories on them. There’s a room with eight terminals in it for the staff to use them as they wish. Some bigwigs have terminals all to themselves. Anyway. Paul Fine has used the computer in the past, to type up reports. He had a user number and a password like the others. The idea is that you do your bit of whatever on the computer and then you save it. There’s a print room, too, and you can go and collect your stuff, depending on whether it’s your turn on it or whether the printers are taken up.”
“Did you get into the computer and look?”
“That’s what I was saying to Shea, sir. There were no items in Fine’s file on the computer. I got the manager of the Information Services to get the password and get in. Downey thought it was a bit odd that there was nothing because he was always slagging Fine about using the computer instead of his own brain. I was told they scrub the files every now and then but they give you lots of warning to save your files or to let them know they’re still active.”
“Is there any other way to check and see for stuff he may have had in his files there? Stuff he had a while ago?”
“I asked him that. There is. They do tape back-ups every day in case there’s a power loss. The computer does the taping automatically every evening. Some of the stuff they keep, like payroll, in case they find there was a mistake later on. They always keep a week’s worth of everything on the computer but only selected stuff stays on tape for longer than that. He’s gone to find the tapes for me now.”
“To all intents and purposes a person working under his own password would not have people looking over his shoulder, would he?” Hoey asked.
“God, yous’re very devious. Matter of fact I asked him that: who would know other people’s passwords, like,” Doyle replied. “He told me that it was no big secret with passwords at all. He keeps the passwords in his files but it’s not a question of anybody knowing another person’s password after snooping around for it in his filing cabinet. It’s that the passwords are quite easy to figure out. Often it’s a bit of someone’s name. He knows that some users even loan out their passwords to others so they can work on the same material.”
“Are there other ways to eavesdrop, so to speak?” Minogue broke in.
“There are, apparently,” said Doyle. “If you know another person’s password there’s a way to look at what he’s doing if he’s working on the computer at the time.”
“Phone us when you get through that tape thing, so,” said Minogue. “And dazzle us with more of that verve and acuity.”
Eilis turned from emptying her second ashtray of the day. She looked from the becalmed Hoey still cradling the phone idly to the semi-reclining Minogue who was also mulling over Doyle’s discoveries.
“Verve and acuity,” she said as she lit up a Gitane. “There’s no knowing what a person will hear from parties working around here. It’d make a girl think twice.”
Kilmartin emerged from his office, scratching his ear and looking for Minogue.
“Time for evening prayer,” Kilmartin said with a leaden irony.
Minogue flipped a folder on his desk and uncovered his summary for Kilmartin to feed the Commissioner with.
“There’s a little something to add to this and bring it up to the minute,” Minogue murmured. “Doyle went out to RTE and chased up something on the computer there. Paul Fine used the computer but there’s nothing in his file. Doyle’s working up a copy of what might have been on the computer in Fine’s name a while ago.”
“Fair enough,” said Kilmartin vacantly as he read down the page. “That’s all from the Gardai on the beaches today?” he asked, looking down to Minogue.
“The best we have is from callers-in, I’m afraid. That woman who put us on to the site. The lad with his girlfriend in the carpark late Sunday night, we’re stuck with him… he still can’t put a make on the cars he saw.”
Kilmartin couldn’t hide his disappointment. “Jases, that’s not much. With seventy-odd men?”
Minogue shrugged. “Don’t forget the better parts. There’s the ticket man who can tentatively place Paul Fine in Dalkey Station around one o’clock. He might have gotten out of a train with time to spare and walked up over Dalkey Hill to Killiney Hill Park. It’s a nice little jaunt.”
Minogue watched Kilmartin’s head wave slightly from side to side as he went down the page again. “And remember the appeal tonight will be on Killiney Hill, not the beach. I put Gallagher’s plans in point form because I don’t know any more than what you see. Thirty-eight names, he told me. It’ll take time. Not something we can rush him with,” Minogue added.
Kilmartin nodded distractedly and yawned. He slapped the file folder against his thigh.
“I didn’t even want to be thinking about this fella who was toasted out beyond in Bray. The remains are in poor shape but we have an engine block number. A Volkswagen. I was to get a phone call a half an hour ago.”
Kilmartin had been gone ten minutes when Eilis directed a call to Minogue. The car in Bray had belonged to one Brian Kelly, thirty four, of Leopardstown Gardens, civil servant. Mr. Kelly was a Principal Officer in the Department of Finance. He was unmarried. He was not answering his phone. Gardai from Cabinteely were at the house. Mr. Kelly had a brother a priest in Finglas. His parents lived in County Carlow. Had any effects been left intact for identification after the fire? A watch with an expanding strap was partially intact. Clothing had been burned off completely. Remains of a leather wallet, melted plastic (probably bank cards), some change on the floor of the car.
Minogue asked for the details again. This time he wrote them down. It was a matter of ferreting out his dentist’s name to light on an X-ray identification. Minogue saw five o’clock looking back down off the wall at him. He watched Keating about to begin typing from his notebook.
“How would you like to be Jimmy Kilmartin for a while?” he asked Keating.
“I wouldn’t mind the pay and the perks,” Keating answered cautiously. “I was just about to type up me summary of Fine’s office stuff.”
Minogue headed Keating off at the pass. “Is there anything that’d change what we’re at now? Diaries or notebooks?”
“No,” said Keating as he flicked his notebook shut.
“We will most likely have to set up a team for another case, that’s what I’m getting at.”
“The man out in Bray?”
“Yes. It may well be this man here,” Minogue replied, handing Keating the sheet.
“You’ll have to pick up an X-ray from the Pathologist’s. They did ‘em this afternoon. There’s a fella looking through Kelly’s house for receipts. Now phone here the minute you get a match off the dentist’s charts.”
As Keating was leaving, Eilis was moving from desk to desk with small bundles of photocopies. She tendered Minogue’s share into his hand. They were copies of statements from members of the public who had telephoned the help-line in answer to last night’s media appeals. Hoey, his copies in his hand at the blackboards, wrote in the sighting at Dalkey train station on Sunday. So the ticket man was sticking by it now, enough to sign a statement on it, Minogue thought. Paul Fine’s last Sunday now had two placings before the asterisk and the question mark next to it. There was still no writing under the Saturday.
Kathleen said that she had heard the appeal on the half-five radio news.
“Killiney Hill Park,” she said. “That’s creepy, I’m telling you. I always liked going for a stroll there. It’ll be a while before I’ll be wanting to walk around that spot again.”
Minogue told her that he didn’t know what time he’d be home tonight. There could be another investigation being launched. It was up to Kilmartin to put a team together for that but he might be foraging for experienced detectives who were working with Minogue at the moment. That could mean that her husband might be taking over the Fine case directly, without Shea Hoey there to direct traffic for him.
“You are coming home some time tonight, I take it?” said Kathleen. “At least you’re not relying on the buses. There are some walkouts already. Aren’t they divils entirely?”
“It may be late enough, but I’ll be home all right,” replied Minogue. He did not sound as decisive as he had wanted to.
Claustrophobia seized him as he looked around the squad-room. His thoughts ran to the Fines: what would they be doing now, a day and a half after their son had drifted in off the sea? Gone. Murdered. Never to see again. Can’t shake his hand, can’t look at him across the table and share a joke. He should at least phone Justice Fine and tell him how the investigation was going. Sooner or later he’d have to interview the Fines again, this time to get in touch with another son, a son with whom a father and mother had had differences. The stuff of family life: arguments, bickering, friction. The Paul Fine who was hidden under the biography Minogue had built so far.
Loss swooped low, a vulture, in Minogue’s chest. It never got easier; it seemed at times like this that it only got harder. What could parents know of their adult children? Were someone to ask Minogue for a description of Daithi Minogue, how much would he forget to say, how would he choose the blocks to build the picture?
Seven o’clock. Minogue had been caught in the rain on his way back from his tea in George’s Street. The taste of rashers and eggs was thick on his tongue after he had run the last hundred yards.
Kilmartin was holding court in his office. Hoey was back, shaved, and Keating was leaning in Kilmartin’s doorway. Doyle had returned from RTE. He sat opposite Kilmartin, with a cohort, a prematurely bald detective whom Minogue recognized as one seconded from the Central Detective Unit for the Fine murder.
“Just the man we want,” said Kilmartin. “Listen to these lads here.”
Minogue collected two yellow phone messages from his desk as he passed. One was from Gallagher, the other from his daughter Iesult. Prompted by Kilmartin, Doyle began.
“Paul Fine used the mainframe computer in RTE for typing and storing some of his work. I met two people who confirmed that; they personally saw him typing away on a terminal. I had them look into his files under his name and there was nothing. Not a sausage. I asked them where it was all gone and they didn’t know. Maybe he’d cleared off his stuff a few days ago. Then I found out they have a back-up memory for the stuff they hold on the computer. It’s in case the computer takes a fit or runs amok on account of a power shortage. I asked them to look at this tape back-up and see if there was something of Fine’s on it. It took them a while and a good bit of grumbling because they had to free up the computer so as they could run the tape back to it.”
“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?”