“Listen,” Kilmartin said in a milder tone. “Listen, listen, the cat’s pissin‘. Where, where, under the chair… What I’m saying still fits because people walking around the park would remember seeing an Arab lad. He’d stand out, complexion-wise, can’t you see? If Fine came out to meet the Arab here and it was the Arab that killed him, then he’d be terrible keen to get the body away to hell from where a witness might place the Arab with poor Fine.”
Minogue nodded, hoping to give Kilmartin the impression of a sage considering worthy comment. The air was cooler after the rain and the ground was yielding up rich scents from the undergrowth. They walked quickly back to the park gate.
Minogue saw the rain out over the sea now, a grey curtain moving off beyond Killiney Bay.
Kilmartin phoned the Squad office. Eilis gave a little whinny of amusement when he announced himself.
“There’s telepathy for you now,” she murmured. Kilmartin heard her shuffle papers. “Wait a minute,” she added. “Right,” she said then and spoke as though recording private thoughts from a diary. She told Kilmartin that Gardai had found remains in the back seat of a burned-out car outside the town of Bray. Bray was eight miles south of where Kilmartin now stood.
“Shite,” said Kilmartin.
“Pardon?” Eilis asked archly.
“When?” Kilmartin grunted.
“The car was set on fire yesterday evening. The brigade took their time. It’s a dump kind of place. Vandals, they thought. They towed it away after the fire, not knowing, and left it in the yard by the station. Someone had a good look in this morning and decided it was a body, not a bit of the back seat down on the floor of the car.”
“Do they know who it is, at all?”
“No they don’t. The car was an inferno entirely when the brigade arrived.”
“God never closes one door except he slams another,” Kilmartin grumbled and turned to Minogue. Minogue was studying the patterns of the clouds as they swept over Killiney Hill. “Here, you. You’ll have to do without the benefit of my companionship on the Fine case for the moment at least,” he declared to Minogue. “Bad luck comes in pairs.”
“Tell them I’ll go myself for starters, Eilis,” Kilmartin said finally. “Give me some directions. It’ll take me a half an hour from here, I’d say.”
Minogue drove Kilmartin down to Killiney Station. “You can arrive in style on the train again,” he said.
“That’ll impress them no end,” Kilmartin said grimly. “Do you know what I’m going to tell you? Bray is one town I hate the sight of. A town full of knackers and hurdy-gurdy men. Chancers. I’ll beg a lift back later on in the day.”
Kilmartin left a curse on Bray and its inhabitants dangling in the air as he entered the ticket office.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Daithi Minogue’s letter almost cost the State purse dearly in Merrion Road, where Minogue came within inches of hitting the car ahead. He had been practising phrases for putting in his letter to Daithi. None satisfied him. ‘ It’s not for me to…’ ‘Your mother and I would like to think that…’ ‘Although it may not seem quite apparent to you now…’
The brake lights on the bus were grimy and Minogue’s tyres howled to within six inches of them. Three youngsters turned around in the back seat and laughed at him. He thought of urging Daithi to take time to think things over. Maybe, Kathleen had suggested, he should send clippings from the papers to show that there were plenty of engineering jobs available here in Ireland. Daithi might repeat his protest that there was no point to working here because the income tax got you in the neck.
But there are good jobs, Daithi… Bribery of sorts. The boy didn’t want to be here.
How odd, bitterly amusing nearly, to hear a boy of Daithi’s age complain about the state of the country. Was he using that as a way to criticize his own family? Minogue began to believe that he should have headed off this problem years ago when he had first noticed the challenge from Daithi. He should have tried to stand up for Ireland then. It had to be more than that, though: the boy wanted attention from him, answers. Did Daithi like his parents too much to be able to get angry with them?
Attention, answers, someone to defend the island. Minogue couldn’t do that and not feel foolish. It might have been better to have been stricter with him, to have had prescriptions and advice, to have been the paterfamilias more. How had Minogue come adrift from the role which other men his age found so satisfying and so natural and so damned easy? Little to offer Daithi now, beyond some assurance that he could not put in words. The Oedipus stuff is rubbish, he thought. Were parents supposed to resist their children so much? It wouldn’t be any help to tell Daithi to trust his own experience. The boy was but twenty-three now. Did he want to be summoned, scolded perhaps, worried over? These were signs of love apparently. These were things parents were supposed to do?
Detective Garda Seamus Hoey was indeed as capable as Kilmartin had told Minogue-even more capable than Kilmartin thought. Kilmartin used him as a feather in his cap (how shrewd Jimmy Kilmartin was to have held on to Hoey when he had arrived as a trainee) but Shea Hoey knew to fit Kilmartin’s measures. He gave every sign of being calmly diligent. At home, in his bachelor life in the flat he had in Sandymount, Minogue could guess at a Hoey who might even play a piano for pleasure, who should marry and make someone happy.
Minogue’s gaze fled to Eilis when Hoey looked over, aware that Minogue had been looking at him. Kilmartin had that knack of spotting talents, all right. Eilis was permitted to be offhand. Her cool but unaffected Garboisms hid the fact that she was brainy, not merely distant. Eilis’ eccentricities were part of the price which intelligence paid in a world gone mad with convention and system, Minogue believed. Her job was to conduct the symphony of inquiries, meetings and reports which formed the day-to-day business of the Investigation Section.
When the mandarins in the Department of Justice decided that the Investigation Section should also deal with other serious crime, Kilmartin had stood his ground. Why not a proper paid-up Emergency Response Unit system? A Special Task Force with regular armed teams on patrol in Dublin? More resources to the Hold Up Squad? With conniving, alliances and bull-headed shrewdness, Kilmartin had helped effect all these. There was little that Kilmartin would not do to follow his passion to keep what had been called the Murder Squad together as a separate unit, if not in name then in function.
Nonetheless, Jimmy Kilmartin was not unaware of Chief Supers and Assistant Commissioners grumbling that their respective divisions should shortly have enough trained personnel for murder investigations and that they’d be needing Dublin-based expertise infrequently. This was so because Gardai circulated through the Investigation Section as trainees, learning the trade and returning to their divisions. Kilmartin had been canny enough to spot trainee talent and thus promptly appropriate detectives like Seamus Hoey, a brawny and sometimes moody Galwegian who had been stationed in Athlone, the most boring town in Ireland. Hoey soaked up information like a sponge and listened to everything. Kilmartin and Minogue had learned to be alert when Hoey began his sentences with the roundabout bashfulness of: “Well, you may think this is a bit odd of me to be bringing this up here and now but…”
Detective Garda Keating was more obviously methodical and he liked to bear the cross of filtering through enormous amounts of data. Keating was so enamoured of the new age that he had bought an expensive computer for his own use and had taught himself many things in his spare time at home. He had unwisely mentioned his purchase to Eilis in one of their almost sibling squabbles. Keating, a bachelor younger and less understanding than Hoey, had some vague notion that Eilis was to be fenced with because she was unmarried and not unattractive.