John Brady - Kaddish in Dublin

“It’s a tall order, I know, but the matter could be urgent in the extreme.”

Minogue took the phone and listened. A bus or a lorry passed close to where Gallagher was making his call.

“Sergeant Gallagher? Matt Minogue. Yes, yes, and how are things with you, now? I’m running an investigation on this murder of the judge’s son, Paul Fine. Did you know about it, a possible connection with some Palestinian group or the like here? You did? Oh, the Commissioner’s office, were they?”

Minogue listened to Gallagher while Hoey leaned against the door-frame, his arms folded. Minogue winked at him and Hoey’s smile broadened. It was seldom that Gardai, even the crime ordinary detectives from the Central Detective Unit in the Castle, could twist arms with the Branch. Such was the guile within Minogue’s Trojan Horse of charm-and no small store of charm it was, in an island where charm was a currency both inflated and squandered-that he had made an informal liaison with Special Branch officers to crack the Combs case.

“Is that a fact…? Well, you know how it is when they get a fire lit under them. Lookit, are you a Gallagher from Gweedore? You are? From Falcarragh, go on, are you? God, there are terrific hurling athletes being bred in that little Eden, amn’t I right? Well, I’m in a considerable hurry with this information and I have to be in the RTE studios within the hour… Is there any chance you could sit in on a meeting here say, five or so? Yep, our HQ’s in John’s Road. Good man, so.”

Minogue took Miss Connolly’s key to Fine’s flat before he left.

“Essential it remain undisturbed until we go through the effects in detail, Miss Connolly. Now if you remember anything which perhaps you hadn’t thought of in your chat with the Garda or myself here, phone this number immediately, if you please.” Minogue handed her a card which said ‘ Investigation Section’. “Be it ever so small, it may still be important. There’ll be a policeman by with this key, probably in the morning. Be sure and ask for his identification if you’re in any doubt. A youngish fella, Detective Officer Keating, and he’ll be making a detailed examination of Mr. Fine’s effects. He looks a bit like… how would you describe him, Shea?”

“He’s a bit like that fella, what do you call him… Redford. Robert Redford,” Hoey said earnestly. “Did you ever hear of?”

“The film star?” Miss Connolly asked.

“That’s the one,” Hoey concluded without a trace of humour.

Hoey bought fish and chips in Ringsend village, and they ate them while driving out on the Coast Road. Hoey turned up through Sandymount and landed on the Merrion Road within sight of the television mast which marked RTE but two miles away.

“Little enough in the flat, so,” said Hoey.

“I didn’t find what I was looking for in the line of pads of paper and appointment books. I’m hoping his desk has more of that class of stuff,” Minogue replied. “Plus there are those tapes. God knows how many hours of stuff is on them. He might have kept memos on tape.”

“No word-processor or magic computer in the flat,” Hoey added. “I thought they all had them now. Anyone in touch with his wife, his ex-wife? She’s in London, isn’t she?”

“Justice Fine said he’d have to phone her,” Minogue replied slowly. “But I was just wondering to myself… how to hell we can get started on this.”

“Motives, you mean?”

“Yep. I can’t see the killer. I just can’t. We need something a lot more direct than some phone call from a group of I-don’t-know-whats. Any iijit can make a telephone call. Did you get the text of what was said?”

“ ‘ This is the voice of Free Palestine. We are the League for Solidarity with the Palestinian People’… hold on, what did they… Oh yes: ‘ Let the world take note.’ No- hold on a minute, they mentioned Fine at the end… ‘ no spy or aggressor who works against the cause of Palestinian freedom and justice is safe from retributing. Fine has paid the price. ’ Some mouthful, that.”

The ‘freedom and justice’ soured Minogue more than most cliches.

“But, just for the sake of argument,” said Hoey, “don’t fanatics get very het-up if one of their members sorts out his head and leaves them? Say if Fine was a Leftie back in university, but now he meets his old cronies, Palestinian sympathizers even, and antagonizes them with common sense?”

“Go on,” said Minogue.

“Well, Fine might have rubbed shoulders with radicals back then, maybe stayed in touch with them. Say he meets up with some of them again and says he’d like a contact to someone who knows anything about links between, I don’t know, Libya and the IRA… So they look him up and down, thinking to themselves, well this Fine boy is gone very, let’s say middle-class-”

“Bourgeois.”

“That too. And the nerve of him, coming back and trying to mine them for touchy info that could land them in trouble,” Hoey continued.

“And being as they are very put-out about bourgeois backsliders, and paranoid by nature…”

“A hothead says that Fine is now an agent of the imperialist running-dog whatever, by way of being a traitor too, I suppose. What do you think?”

“I have little enough insight into the paranoid mind, but you may have something. When did they call the Press?”

“Close on half-ten.”

Half-ten, Minogue echoed within. Last seen by Miss Connolly on Sunday morning. No more than twenty-four hours in the water.

“How do tides work, Shea? I mean, if you threw something or somebody into the water, would it be washed up in the same place it was thrown in, if the tide was coming in, like?”

“I haven’t a clue. I believe that a tide will do different things depending on the lie of the land around the coast. It’s a shocking complicated business.”

Hoey turned off Nutley Avenue and into RTE.

“Do you know what, though?” Hoey murmured. “Aside from this crap about ‘working against the cause’ or whatever-I mean to say, that’s a mystery until we find out more about what Fine was up to that might have rubbed someone the wrong way-I wonder why they didn’t call until the Monday morning, and him being murdered already on the Sunday? Maybe they had some crooked reason, I don’t know. Do you think they knew the body would be washed up?”

“You have me there,” Minogue replied.

Beyond the barrier and the security guard at the entrance to Radio Telifis Eireann, Minogue phoned to confirm a five o’clock pow-wow on the Fine murder. As the murder appeared to have been committed in Dublin, the State Pathologist could autopsy the body. Minogue had not seen a coroner out on Killiney strand before he and Kilmartin had left for the hotel. They might not have bothered to have him come to the scene: gunshot wounds on a body, along with ‘clear signs of wounds from the effects of an explosive detonation’, were at the top of the list for mandatory post-mortem examination. By five o’clock today Minogue would have something from the Technical Bureau’s forensics, those incongruous boiler-suited men who had inched and kneeled their way over the beach. These scenes-of-the-crimes examiners knew of but didn’t much like the name which Minogue most often heard them referred to: bagmen.

Mickey Fitzgerald had to be paged from the security desk which met the visitors to the RTE radio building. Minogue spent the two minutes’ wait gawking at the employees who entered and left the building. Hoey jabbed him in the arm once and nodded toward a duo of stylish men leaving.

“That’s your man, what’s-his-name. Reads the news most days.”

“Him?”

“Yes. The one with the baggy suit that looks like wallpaper.”