“You’ll have to pick up an X-ray from the Pathologist’s. They did ‘em this afternoon. There’s a fella looking through Kelly’s house for receipts. Now phone here the minute you get a match off the dentist’s charts.”
As Keating was leaving, Eilis was moving from desk to desk with small bundles of photocopies. She tendered Minogue’s share into his hand. They were copies of statements from members of the public who had telephoned the help-line in answer to last night’s media appeals. Hoey, his copies in his hand at the blackboards, wrote in the sighting at Dalkey train station on Sunday. So the ticket man was sticking by it now, enough to sign a statement on it, Minogue thought. Paul Fine’s last Sunday now had two placings before the asterisk and the question mark next to it. There was still no writing under the Saturday.
Kathleen said that she had heard the appeal on the half-five radio news.
“Killiney Hill Park,” she said. “That’s creepy, I’m telling you. I always liked going for a stroll there. It’ll be a while before I’ll be wanting to walk around that spot again.”
Minogue told her that he didn’t know what time he’d be home tonight. There could be another investigation being launched. It was up to Kilmartin to put a team together for that but he might be foraging for experienced detectives who were working with Minogue at the moment. That could mean that her husband might be taking over the Fine case directly, without Shea Hoey there to direct traffic for him.
“You are coming home some time tonight, I take it?” said Kathleen. “At least you’re not relying on the buses. There are some walkouts already. Aren’t they divils entirely?”
“It may be late enough, but I’ll be home all right,” replied Minogue. He did not sound as decisive as he had wanted to.
Claustrophobia seized him as he looked around the squad-room. His thoughts ran to the Fines: what would they be doing now, a day and a half after their son had drifted in off the sea? Gone. Murdered. Never to see again. Can’t shake his hand, can’t look at him across the table and share a joke. He should at least phone Justice Fine and tell him how the investigation was going. Sooner or later he’d have to interview the Fines again, this time to get in touch with another son, a son with whom a father and mother had had differences. The stuff of family life: arguments, bickering, friction. The Paul Fine who was hidden under the biography Minogue had built so far.
Loss swooped low, a vulture, in Minogue’s chest. It never got easier; it seemed at times like this that it only got harder. What could parents know of their adult children? Were someone to ask Minogue for a description of Daithi Minogue, how much would he forget to say, how would he choose the blocks to build the picture?
Seven o’clock. Minogue had been caught in the rain on his way back from his tea in George’s Street. The taste of rashers and eggs was thick on his tongue after he had run the last hundred yards.
Kilmartin was holding court in his office. Hoey was back, shaved, and Keating was leaning in Kilmartin’s doorway. Doyle had returned from RTE. He sat opposite Kilmartin, with a cohort, a prematurely bald detective whom Minogue recognized as one seconded from the Central Detective Unit for the Fine murder.
“Just the man we want,” said Kilmartin. “Listen to these lads here.”
Minogue collected two yellow phone messages from his desk as he passed. One was from Gallagher, the other from his daughter Iesult. Prompted by Kilmartin, Doyle began.
“Paul Fine used the mainframe computer in RTE for typing and storing some of his work. I met two people who confirmed that; they personally saw him typing away on a terminal. I had them look into his files under his name and there was nothing. Not a sausage. I asked them where it was all gone and they didn’t know. Maybe he’d cleared off his stuff a few days ago. Then I found out they have a back-up memory for the stuff they hold on the computer. It’s in case the computer takes a fit or runs amok on account of a power shortage. I asked them to look at this tape back-up and see if there was something of Fine’s on it. It took them a while and a good bit of grumbling because they had to free up the computer so as they could run the tape back to it.”
“Wait for it,” said Kilmartin. Minogue recognized that quickening in Kilmartin, the darting eyes. A happier man, now, in his bloodhound incarnation.
“Your man didn’t understand it at first. The tapes, I mean. They’re all buggered up,” said Doyle. “Gobbledegook.”
“You mean erased when they shouldn’t have been?”
“He thinks that someone must have run a bulk eraser over the week’s tapes and that’s what turned them into mush. They started straightaway to make a new back-up. I was a hero for finding out their back-up was rubbish.”
“Could it have been accidental?” asked Hoey.
“It has happened before, he told me. But it’s unlikely that it was accidental. The staff who are in that area are wised up to the computer now.”
“Would it require some kind of expertise to wipe the things like that?” Minogue asked.
“No,” said Doyle reluctantly. “A bulk eraser is just a little thing that you wave over the tapes to remove the data. It’s very quick. And there were plenty of opportunities for a lot of people. It would only take a few seconds.”
“Do you mean that we can’t get a reliable access list for this facility from them, one we could start with and work up some suspects?” Hoey asked.
Doyle shook his head.
Kilmartin cleared his throat. “So much for that enterprising work. Yours truly here,” he nodded toward Keating still hanging out of the doorway, “he finally got a list of things that Fine wanted dug up by their library.”
“ ‘Information systems’, if you don’t mind,” said Keating in a tony South Dublin accent. “He asked for searches of British and Irish newspapers over the past five years. For mention of Ireland in speeches by Arab heads of state. Interception of IRA arms from places other than the US. Coverage of conferences concerning Arabs and Palestinians in Britain and Ireland; publications arising from those conferences…” Keating turned a page and scanned the topics. “Last of all, last Friday afternoon, he put in a request for newspaper, radio and television articles on one Fintan Gorman. Going back for five years.”
“The Minister for Defence?” asked Hoey.
“The very man. Fabulous Fintan Gorman,” echoed Kilmartin.
“Well. It looks like we had all of those interests already itemized, or we were aware that he was working on them. Did he decide on Gorman because of the work Fitzgerald gave him, the scandal beat?”
“I don’t know,” Keating replied. “I’m still trying to get in touch with Fitzgerald to see if he knew that Fine wanted to do a piece on Fabulous Fintan. He’s left RTE and he’s not at home.”
“Where did he get the name of Fabulous Fintan, anyway?” Hoey asked.
“This is the man who knows how to solve all our ills,” Minogue replied. “The name came from some row in the Dail when the Opposition called something he was talking about a fable.”
“I can see Fitz telling Fine to pick on Gorman because he’s a bit too clean-looking and deserves a good vetting,” Hoey murmured.
“To be sure,” Kilmartin snorted, “that’s your media mob for you. They go for the dirt and they aim for the biggest scandal they can find. Amn’t I right? ‘Go for the most upright-looking politician and drag him down into the muck,’ is the order of the day there, I’m telling you.”
“Not that yours is a partisan view or anything like that,” Minogue couldn’t resist saying.
“Absolutely not,” Kilmartin replied hastily. “I don’t mind what party the man belongs to. I just think that he should get a fair crack of the whip and not have them hyenas snapping at his heels. I ask you! Looking to see if he ever had a drink or had his maulers on the wrong diddies once in his life. I mean to say, we’re all human. That pack of shites out in RTE-over-educated malcontents. They love to show the shots of a Garda defending himself at a demonstration but they never show the gurriers in the crowd provoking us. Lefties. Wife-swapping and cavorting about. As if they didn’t do it themselves. Anyway, let’s not get bogged down at this point.”