John Brady - Kaddish in Dublin

“Like Arabs with headgear?” the Garda asked.

Minogue fixed him with a stare.

“It’s just that we heard there was something to do with Palestine…” The Garda tried to regroup with a careful smile.

“Did she see any letters addressed to him? Don’t worry about her saying she never noticed such things-just probe. She’s not a woman to be missing things, I’m sure.”

Minogue phoned Kathleen after an hour. The last ten minutes he had spent seated on Fine’s bed with Hoey, going over what he had recorded in his notes. He had told Hoey to get hold of Gallagher in Special Branch for late afternoon. They’d be wanting all Gallagher had on possible extremist groups. Hoey was to phone the television station, RTE, and insist on seeing Fitzgerald as soon as possible.

Kathleen answered after two rings. Minogue told her that he’d be late. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to watch Die Nasty on your own.”

Daithi was in the States these five weeks past. Iesult was out on a date with Pat the Brain. Psychology and philosophy lectures over a glass of beer?

“I won’t be able to understand it without you there to take it to pieces for me,” Kathleen replied.

Minogue grinned. “It’ll be gone ten o’clock, I’m sure.”

“Fine and well, Inspector. I heard it on the half-one news, and I might have guessed you’d be in the thick of it. Just don’t be taking too much on yourself.”

Was that a resigned rebuke?

He told her about Fine wanting him on the investigation.

“That’s a great compliment, I suppose. Why you, though?”

“Remember that time in the Jewish Museum, just after it opening up? He was there then and he spotted me, apparently. But tell me,” he interrupted himself by asking his wife of thirty years,“how’s life treating you, anyway? Taking into account it’s a Monday and we’re not in Honolulu or lollygagging on some island in the Mediterranean.”

“True for you. I’m grand anyway. There’s a letter from Daithi, by the way.” The change in her voice, the late attempt at cheerfulness bit sharply at the edge of Minogue’s mind.

“Ah. Anything new with him? Is he behaving himself?”

“He sounds fine. Read it yourself when you get home.”

Minogue replaced the receiver. He looked across at the half-empty bookshelves. Paul Fine had read-or at least collected-books on a wide variety of subjects. One shelf held Quotable Quotes next to a copy of Church and State in Modern Ireland. Hoey had found folders of clippings from British and Irish newspapers as well as a dozen and more cassettes with labels which neither man could make out. They’d be a job for the painstaking Keating. Recordings of interviews? There were seven video-cassettes, again of unknown content, marked only by dates and numbers. No video-cassette recorder, but a colour telly and a Sony radio with shortwave bands. Fine had kept his paraphernalia tidily, even his clothes. One of the two bedrooms was by way of being an office, apparently. Tidy but smelly from ashtrays and closed windows. The whole house was damp. A single picture of Fine’s father (was that his mother too?), himself between them as a teenager, standing by a heap of stones in some sunny place.

His belongings had not been disturbed, by the look of things. A drawer full of odds and ends, from disposable razors to a photograph of a dog. Had he spent all his nights here? Neither Minogue nor Hoey had found any notebook or diary. There had been nothing in the pockets of the light tweedy jacket on the body.

Minogue recalled the Commissioner’s confidences about Paul Fine’s past involvement with fringe groups. Fine’s father had not even hinted at any wild side to his son, but that was natural: the son was dead. No parent would recount the failings of a child to a policeman. Minogue would have to burrow around such boulders before trying to hoist them and get an accurate picture of Paul Fine.

Mary McCutcheon. Fitzgerald from RTF-he had Fitz’s name before. Fitzgerald was an acerbic producer of current affairs programmes for the radio, a man who seemed to be at his happiest when inflaming the Catholic hierarchy enough for them to write a letter to the papers complaining about bias in broadcasting. Minogue seemed to remember Fitzgerald also maddening the Special Branch with a programme on one of their many failures; something about a raid on a farmhouse, waving guns about, without finding a trace of the subversives they were expecting to bag. Was Paul Fine cut from the same cloth as Fitzgerald? Hardly. Fitzgerald and the other hyper-educated apostates on the island would have necessarily gone to Mass and confession, necessarily been beaten by Christian Brothers and necessarily been sickened by the posturings of their politicians before looking for their vengeance. Fitzgerald and company, the bishops and the politicians who doffed their hats to the clerics yet-they were all part of a family squabble. Fine was outside that fold.

Minogue heard Hoey trudging back up the stairs.

“Sergeant Gallagher says McDonald’s in Grafton Street, about three, if that’s all right,” said Hoey cautiously.

Minogue wanted to laugh away the sudden irritation. “You’re not serious.”

“He says to phone him if that doesn’t suit. That’s the Branch for you, staking out their territory. He says he works out of a car most days anyway, but he carries the stuff in his head.”

“What about the Fitzgerald fella, our television guru?”

“His programmes go on the air at five, and he says he needs to be at the controls for some of the live interviews. He’ll be there all afternoon.”

Minogue didn’t know what to do about Gallagher. Would he have to take him in hand already?

“How did you get Gallagher?”

“I phoned Branch HQ here and they radioed him. He phoned from somewhere, to the phone below here, I mean.”

“I see, says the blind man… Well, would you get him for me on the phone, Shea? Tell him I want to talk to him myself.”

The beginnings of a smile pushed at Hoey’s cheeks.

Minogue gathered the video-tapes and cassettes awkwardly under his arm. Keating could go through the folders of clippings. Maybe the bulk of Fine’s work would be in his office in RTE. Closing the door, Minogue hoped that his assumption was not leaking too badly yet: that Paul Fine’s work had had something to do with his death. He did not want to believe that Fine had been singled out as a Jew alone, a cipher for some group, to be murdered for being a Jew. But an Irish Jew… what would that group want with killing him for that? To prove that no Jew the world over was immune from Palestinian wrath, that the Palestinians had allies all over the world? Minogue’s mind lurched into crackpot associations.

He made his way down the stairs. That madman in Libya… a favour in return for guns to the Provos? It could be a message to the State’s judiciary too, the ones who had reluctantly ruled that the Offences Against the State Act, the most powerful and abused legislative weapon against the IRA, was constitutional. Madness. But hadn’t there been several prominent British Jews assassinated in the Seventies? No wonder Jimmy Kilmartin had waved him on with this one, bad ‘cess to him.

The Garda who had been questioning Miss Connolly met Minogue in the hall. “You were right, sir, she doesn’t miss much.”

Hoey reached for the telephone as it rang.

“Run that through a typewriter, like a good man,” Minogue said to the Garda. “And shoot it up to John’s Road for my attention. Investigation Section.”

Hoey held a hand over the receiver and waved it at Minogue.

“Get it hand-delivered before tea-time this evening too, if I can put you to that trouble?”

The Garda hid his resistance well.