John Brady - Unholy Ground

The lights changed and Kenyon strode purposively into the park. He crossed Carriage Drive. When he caught sight of the Dell restaurant, he was both relieved and immediately anxious to realise that he had made his decision. No matter what Murray would say here, Kenyon knew that he had to defend his suspicions about Combs. He'd have to brief Hugh Robertson, the Director of his section, before lunchtime. Better to squirm through that meeting, even if the Director General himself was there, rather than have this blow up in his own face. Kenyon also realised that he was hoping for a sign that would grant an instant logic and credibility to his suspicions. There was but the slimmest chance of winnowing anything like that from the man he had arranged to meet in the restaurant, one Alistair Murray.

Kilmartin's secretary, Eilis, greeted Minogue.

"I have it all waiting for you. And there's preliminary on Mr Combs, too."

"Aren't you great, Eilis?"

"It has been said, all right," Eilis answered in the exacting grammar of her native tongue, Irish. "Things are very efficient here now, don't you know? Now, Detective Keating phoned to say he's in Stepaside station with two detectives from the station. They want to interview three men at the station, and they're going to pick them up directly. Tip from an interview with a barman. Barman was on duty in Fox's pub Saturday night. Mr Combs was there, he says."

"Three men?"

"Three brothers by the name of Mulvaney, and they live in a place I never heard of before. Barnacullia. Up under Two Rock Mountain. These brothers are well known to police in Stepaside, being as they have criminal records. They say there may be difficulties getting the co-operation of these brothers."

She began unwrapping a packet of Gitanes. Minogue had known Eilis for some years. She was a single woman of thirty-eight or so, from the Dingle peninsula, who had tired of teaching Irish to fellow civil servants. The language had been a sacred cow in the public service, because it had held the bizarre status of co-equal with English as an official language of the state. Eilis had had enough of civil servants and teachers using Irish simply to get promotion, and one morning, stone cold sober, she unburdened herself of a life's rich gleaning of insults, all in her native tongue. While some of her baroque curses were narrowly local to her native County Kerry, she managed to touch most of the important taboos in her minute's fluency. It was one of her better students who deciphered some of her imprecations. Eilis was oddly satisfied to have taught him so well. After all, the one who reported her was a Dublin hooligan.

The civil service had a heart, however, and it listened to Eilis's uncle, a strong Party man who represented Kerry in the Dail, a man with formidable tribal connections. Civil servants who had gone mad, "had trouble with their nerves."

"lost interest" or fell into any other nineteenth-century category which described people who were cracked, were often found work. One of these legion of disaffected public servants was well known to Minogue. He routinely saw the former Higher Executive Officer in the Revenue Commissioners-now a messenger-happily shouting his way around the streets, barking mad and refusing to take the pills which were supposed to render him subdued like other mortals.

Eilis was also a relative of Kilmartin's wife, Maura, but that alone was not enough for her to be taken on in so demanding a job as the police, not to speak of the Technical Bureau. A reluctant Kilmartin persuaded Eilis to take an intelligence and aptitude test, just as the Americans did, in the hopes of thereby demonstrating to his wife that he had tried his best to find something for Eilis but that, alas, she "couldn't function."

Eilis, who knew nothing of the shapes and questions which made up such tests, scored one hundred and seventy-four on an IQ test. She demonstrated a frightening ability in her deductive faculties, excellent creative thinking and indicated that she would have made a formidable jurist. Eilis now occupied a desk next to Kilmartin's office, chain-smoking and keeping track of anything that walked, crawled, ran or was telecommunicated to the section. Minogue had read in her the abandon of one who had found the world to be mildly entertaining. This was an attitude which others construed as arrogance and contrariness, never stopping themselves to recognize a tragic sense because they could not know such things and be themselves again.

"I think that means," she paused to inhale more smoke, "that they're tricksters of some sort, I suppose. Do you follow?"

"I expect you're right. Have you the number of the station handy?"

Eilis drawled out the telephone number.

"Safe home, your honour," she added in Irish. He detected no humour.

Murray was groomed like a mannequin, right down to the cuff-links. Few things about a man's clothes show up the parvenu as easily as cuff-links, Kenyon believed.

"One Colombian coffee-nothing less, mind you," Murray said to the waiter. "And yourself, James?"

"Tea will do."

"You'll have read the Combs' material, James?" Murray began.

"Yes, I did."

"We can readily agree then, I'm sure, that we both know the background here. Even the ancient history," Murray said.

"Have you read up the material lately?" Kenyon asked.

"Really, James. You know quite well I did. But I sense that your evaluation may be different."

"There's the matter of his murder," Kenyon continued. "He was found Sunday evening, it seems."

"The police don't have a suspect, that I know."

"Who would want to kill Combs?"

Murray adjusted his shoulders inside his jacket.

"The Foreign Office would like to know, too. Even if Combs was small change. Very minor capacity. We'll find out from the police soon enough, I'm sure."

Kenyon made a conscious effort to keep the irritation out of his voice. Was it already time to tell Murray that he had not asked for a meeting to be showered with gratuitous non sequiturs? The waiter's return gave Kenyon time to figure out a new approach.

"Tell me, Alistair," Kenyon began, "what did you make of Combs' grumblings when he first started sending material over?"

Murray smiled wanly as he stirred his coffee.

"Oh those, yes. Well, that was over two years ago, of course. Combs obviously didn't like to be asked to live there, that was pretty clear, um?"

Kenyon nodded as he doctored his own tea.

"You see, our Second Secretary in the Dublin embassy at the time… well, he wasn't as experienced as we would have liked for this kind of work. All in all, a bit of a damp squib."

"You mean that Combs' threats were not taken seriously?"

Murray arched his eyebrows as he drew the cup down from his lips again.

"They were hardly threats, for heaven's sake. He grumbled about being there. I've been there on a few wet winter days myself and to be candid, I'd be grumbling, too. Dull enough work, too, I imagine."

"The embassy memo says the police suspect robbery."

"Um," Murray nodded and affected a consideration of Kenyon's interruption.

"What we had there with Mr Combs, James, what we had… we had an old man who was hitting the bottle rather hard for a long number of years. Prone to grudges, willful misinterpretations. Quite paranoid, too.

Now match that with the Second Sec we had there at the time, his local link-a chappie fresh out of Oxbridge, who probably spent his weekends reading spy books…"

Murray's faint smile trailed off into a look of indulgent regret. Kenyon said nothing. He waited for Murray to replace the dangling cup on its saucer. Murray's gaze swept over the view of the Serpentine before returning to Kenyon.

"What you get are melodramatic memos on the wire. Combs tried to put the wind up the boy and succeeded. Well, we didn't play Combs' game, as you can see from your hours in the Registry yesterday."