“But they can’t say where the body would have been put into the water. It could have been Coliemore Harbour or even the Forty Foot bathing spot. Even off Killiney Beach itself.”
“ ‘Not a steady speed in the nearer offshore currents, speed of drift inshore is indeterminate except for a probable rate of between one and five knots depending on the coastline,’ ” Minogue quoted.
“Sooner or later we should set up a dummy and try to match the conditions,” said Hoey.
Minogue made no reply. He was thinking of Paul Fine’s body adrift, the brine dissipating the blood and rinsing the wounds. Water closing over the head, the body sometimes underwater completely. Had someone gazing out on the water early on Monday not seen the gently bobbing body; had they not wondered?
“I must say,” Minogue whispered. “I’m damned if I can understand why someone needed to put the body into the sea.”
He held his hands up before rubbing his eyes.
“I know, I know. We talked about it. And then we talked about it some more.”
Minogue paused and massaged his eyes with his knuckles.
“You and me and Jimmy and the scenes-of-the-crime lads,” he said. “The idea of getting rid of the body to buy time-dirtying the motive, dirtying the trail. And the fact that the murder site can’t have been so well planned in advance. I know. But still…”
“What?” from a distracted Hoey.
Minogue took away his hands, blinked and shook his head.
“Why was he in the sea? If it’s a professional killer, this doesn’t fit with carrying a body anywhere. No way in the wide world. Pat Gallagher knows that too, I’ll bet. If we’re chasing an imported experienced killer, we have the situation of a killer not familiar with the terrain here, who kills his victim and moves off, rapid like. No messing about. It’s a lot of trouble to come back after dark, if that’s what we’re assuming, and carry a grown man to the shore.”
“Angle for it being more than the one man,” Hoey began. “In the disposal of the body, anyway. Say the killer is a pro. He does his job and confirms it by phone. The person he phones has a fit; says the body has to be moved, hidden.”
“Panic, you mean? But we keep on running up against that, Shea: why try to conceal the body when the call to the damn newspaper is a run at some kind of publicity. Can’t deny that.”
“Right. OK. The shooting itself might have been carried out coolly enough. But even the killer’d have the jitters, training or no training.”
“Training, you say,” Minogue said remotely. “There’d be no lack of familiarity with guns as regards people from the Middle East. Not to speak of our own crop of cowboys here.”
Hoey nodded agreement and hoisted his feet on to the desk. Minogue stared at Hoey’s shoes. They looked enormous from this angle, at least size thirteens.
“I think I know what you’re getting at,” said Hoey. “You’re thinking the killer and the carrier-awayer are distinct parties, aren’t you? The killer tells someone what he’s done and they’re the ones who do the panicking and decide that the body has to be moved. And we’re trying to pin the local connection to the killer if it’s a professional assassin thing. I know what you’re saying.”
“All right so,” said Minogue. “But I don’t follow why the body has to be moved at all. Still banging me head over that one.”
He looked at Hoey and wondered again if it was not time to return to smoking after fifteen years of irreproachable lungs. Hoey sat up in the chair as if being challenged.
“Let’s go through it again, then. Get it out of the running. Scientific and methodical, like. Are you ready?”
“I am, I suppose,” said Minogue, glad to have some of Hoey’s vigour carry him.
“Number one: the body is moved in an effort to have it disappear entirely-wash it out to sea. Why? Because clues somewhere along the line may incriminate the killer?”
“But the bullets, Shea. Someone went to the trouble of recovering the bullets, even to first picking the types of bullets that could be recovered after going through the victim. I don’t see any clues staring me in the face at all either.”
“But that might have been the clean-up crowd, the ones who might have carried the body away later. Number two: the body was moved so as to block the investigation in the sense of delaying it or allowing time for leads to run cold. Witnesses who may have seen something, events in Fine’s life that might shed light on the murder. The killer may have wanted time to get out of the country. That’s why we have to follow the Palestinian thread whether we like it or not.”
“OK, Shea. But still and all, Gallagher knows his stuff, we have to admit that. The Branch don’t show any of the names on the list as having left the country in a hurry recently, either.”
“I know Gallagher is on the ball, and they’d not hold back on something like this. But there’s always the possibility of completely new people on the scene. Even the students who have been harmless for years: one of them might be a sleeper. They have worse memories than we have, I hear. They’ll carry on a feud or the like to a hundred generations. Maybe that’s what Fine found out, that there was some cell which had gone undetected here and was just waiting for the order to do something when the time was right. Maybe we should be looking at a bigger picture, to see if there were any forthcoming events or visits in the offing. Diplomatic things, ambassadors, I don’t know. They might have been waiting to get a crack at an American bigwig, knowing that they come here often enough with the Irish-American connection.”
Minogue thought about what Hoey was suggesting.
“I’m going to raise that with Gallagher, Shea. That’s something we’ll have to look at if we’re blocked still by the end of the week.”
Hoey looked gratified.
“Number three: he or they don’t want the victim’s last hours connected with Killiney Hill for another reason. Let’s assume the killer knows we make public appeals for help in the murder investigations. We’d want to be knowing what Paul Fine was doing there, wouldn’t we? Maybe he went there to meet someone.”
“So if he met up with someone, a citizen’d call us and tell us that Paul Fine was with someone in the park. And the someone is the one who killed him. We discussed that one already.”
“Yes. It may be a little tatty at the moment but we can’t be assuming that murderers have a genius intelligence just because we can’t put the bits together this very moment,” said Hoey with his palms upturned, looking in appeal to Minogue.
“They make their slips, we make our living,” Minogue said, repeating one of Kilmartin’s favourite maxims, one which he liked to quote at discouraging moments.
“If the killer and the cleaner-upper were two different parties, there could have been a squabble afoot, too,” said Hoey. “A real fanatic is tired of waiting for action and he gets carried away before his cohorts can stop him. Independent action. I know we talked about it before, but it seems to be creeping back even stronger. Fine may have met whoever killed him that afternoon. He may even have walked around with the killer for a while. Like we said from the start, if the killer is one of those Arab students he’d have been mighty conspicuous. People would remember him with Fine.”
Minogue wished that the phone would ring and Gallagher would announce that he had a strong suspect in custody. He wished he could land in on top of a suspect and give him an aggressive interrogation, in shifts with someone like Kilmartin. Bully him. Anything was better than sitting here, empty. He wished he were not thinking about what the Fines were living through at this minute. He wished that he were not thinking that the body which had floated in and scuffed lightly on the beach at the water’s edge on Monday might have been Daithi. Foolish to be thinking this, illogical. But still… Schadenfreude, that ugly truth about us humans: at least it wasn’t my son that was murdered, no, not mine. It was Billy Fine’s boy and I’m sorry for him but it wasn’t my son that they opened up to see how he had died and if there were still the bullets… Death. Sincere regrets, my heart goes out to you; but always happening to someone else, please.