“She’s not a Jew, though,” Kilmartin observed. No one answered him.
“Nobody else know where he was over the weekend? Downey or Fitzgerald out in RTE? This man had no friends, is it?” complained Kilmartin.
“Still looking, sir. He seems to have kept to himself since he came back from London,” said Hoey.
“All right. We’re taking a radio car up to Kingsbridge, meet this Mary McCutcheon. The first thing you hear off anyone at the beach today, contact us. And get a hold of Sergeant Gallagher: try and get him over here by half-eleven, we’ll meet him here. Tell him we’ll be wanting to go through the universities today. Get every name off C3 lists for Republicans and Lefties with any connection-even rumoured- to Arabs or Muslims or Palestinians. Cross-check against students and radicals, look for any match-ups. Even for travels to any part of the Middle East. See if there are any gunmen after being released from Portlaoise prison this last while, any fellas that ever did freelance stuff.”
Minogue paused. “Do we have the manpower this morning, at the beaches and the coastal points?”
“Yes, we do,” Keating answered.
“So how does it feel to be in charge of a hundred Gardai? Didn’t I tell you that Hoey and Keating can do the brunt of it? How will they ever learn if they don’t get to do the real McCoy?”
“Right, Jimmy.”
Kilmartin slammed the door while Minogue extricated himself from behind the wheel. Minogue would not tell Kilmartin that it was he, not Kilmartin or Hoey or Keating, who had to answer finally to Justice Fine and a jittery Commissioner.
The Sligo train was not in yet but it was suggested that it was running on time. Kingsbridge Station would have been a jewel of a building had it been kept up on the inside over the last fifty years. Its Victorian mass had recently drawn film-makers to use parts of it, Minogue remembered. The station lay next to the Liffey within sight of the Phoenix Park. It was not near enough to the city centre for travellers’ comfort, neither was it sure of itself in any age which did not make much of the ceremony of train travel. The quays next to the station were suffused with the sulphurous stink of the Liffey, long an open sewer, and the tangy hop smell of the Guinness brewery. Minogue, climbing out of his sleep even yet, did not welcome the characteristic Dublin stink.
“Are we going to hold a sign up with her name on it, like at the airport?” asked Kilmartin. The noticeboard clicked overhead.
“Is that the Sligo job on the way in?” Kilmartin asked a passing porter.
“Sligo and Donegal,” the porter drawled, content that he was addressing a policeman from the provinces-a culchie-who might not yet know that no trains went to Donegal.
Mary McCutcheon walked straight to the two policemen.
“Are we that obvious?” Kilmartin asked astringently.
“I’m a reporter,” she answered. Minogue introduced himself and Kilmartin, skipping the ranks. She looked like she hadn’t slept and didn’t care that she hadn’t. She smoked, inhaling the smoke deeply as though to still her darting eyes. There was something mannish about her, Minogue believed. Stayed up late, no stranger to a gin and tonic? She wore cord jeans and a blouse which looked like a shirt.
Mary McCutcheon hoisted her bag better on her shoulder and walked between the two men. “It hasn’t sunk in with me yet,” she said to neither of them. “That much I’m sure of.”
Her eyes were yellowed but still intense, with dark-bluish marks under them. Middle thirties, Minogue guessed, glancing at her again. Runs herself hard.
“Thanks for coming down so quickly,” Minogue said. “Will you tell us where you last saw Paul?”
“Last week. Wednesday. We met in Gaffney’s pub about eight.”
“Was it a date, like?”
She smiled grimly up at Kilmartin. “To anyone else it might have been. We’re old friends, put it like that. We work in the same business, more or less.”
It took considerable probing from Minogue to get by Mary McCutcheon’s edges. She seemed to lose her caution when Minogue told her that yes, Paul Fine had been shot to death. She shook herself abruptly once more after that news, when Minogue mentioned who had claimed responsibility in the call to the Press. “I heard that,” she murmured, stabbing her cigarette at the ashtray: they were in the buffet now. “Who or what the hell are they? My first reaction is not to believe it,” she said.
After a challenging look to both men she lapsed into an account of herself and Paul Fine. She was separated from her husband, who still lived in London, just like Paul’s ex-wife Lily.
“We met over there, two peas just out of our pods. There was a crowd used to go to the navvies’ pubs where we could expect to find Irish people. He was trying to sort out what he wanted and I was trying to forget my fella. Hilarious, you’re thinking. What was funny was that we both admitted that we missed Dublin terribly, more than we ever expected. You’ve seen what the city has turned into here: the back-biting and the knocking and the booze and the poverty… all that. This damn town is rotten with journalists and only a few are worth not slamming the door on. Sounds pretty flimsy, doesn’t it? Like a bad cliche-‘You don’t miss the place until you leave it.’ I don’t know.”
She looked around the buffet as if targeting something to comment on.
“Neither of us really knew what it was that dragged us back to this place. I took a drop in pay for the privilege of living here and getting taxed to hell and back again. That’s what seemed funny to us then. We didn’t believe in that emigrant nostalgia shit, but it happened. Dublin. He was Dublin for generations, a Dublin Jew. Me, I’m Wicklow about fifteen years back. Paul had been to Israel and the States.”
Minogue remembered the picture of Paul Fine standing with his parents in front of a pile of stones in some sunny, dusty place.
“He said he’d like to try Canada. A lot of his friends from school went there. But he admitted that even there he’d probably still want out. Back to Dublin.”
“So you kept in touch with him when you came back here?” asked Minogue.
“Yup. Let’s get down to basics here now. For a while we thought there might be something for us. Together, I mean. For starters, I’m a shiksa.”
“A what?”
“A Gentile. A non-Jewish woman. A non-starter for marriage prospects. Well it didn’t work out, as you probably can guess. Paul was on the rebound from Lily. He was very hurt, very guilty. Lily is a tough piece of work. Tough but fair. He always said she was right to stick with her career, that he had agreed to try London, that her job was more important. No, it didn’t take with us and we knew it wouldn’t. We took the unusual step of staying friends. I actually got even more… fond of him. Me and my mother stuff. I wanted to help him, I think. That was two years ago.”
Did she know anything about Paul’s work in RTE, Minogue asked. Very little. He liked RTE but said that some of the other people there were hatchet-men. Meaning? Too keen for any story, ones with dirt, vendettas with the church and politicians. She didn’t mind that one bit, she said: it was about time. Had he mentioned what stories he was working on recently? No. What did he do at weekends? Another few seconds’ scrutiny of Minogue this time. Visited his parents sometimes, met her for dinner if she was in town. A film, a concert. Sometimes went away for a weekend to bed and breakfast it in Galway or Mayo. He liked the west.
“Didn’t he have school-friends or pals he went to university with? Wouldn’t they stick together socially?” Kilmartin risked.
“ ‘They?’ ” she asked acidly. “You mean Jews?”
Kilmartin blinked. Minogue heard his feet moving under the table.
“Paul Fine was a Dubliner. That’s not to lay claim to anything glamorous, I know, but maybe that was part of what I saw in him, my mothery business. The difference between him and my hus-my ex-husband-was that my ex expected me to mother him when he wanted it. Paul didn’t. If I don’t bowl men over and intimidate them, I seem to mother them to death. Paul didn’t fit so well. I think he slipped through the cracks here and there. Some people might call that backing away, but I wouldn’t. He wanted to escape a few things, not in a cowardly way though… I know he didn’t attend synagogue. His friends? I don’t know. They moved away. I’m talking about educated people, doctors and accountants and dentists and engineers. To the States and Canada, London. Paul stayed. That’s all. I suppose it was stubbornness and being one of the oldest Jewish families in Ireland. I’m sure that counted for something.”