Kilmartin emerged from his office. Minogue had seen him coming, a shirted bulk approaching the distorting glass on the squadroom side of his office. Kilmartin stood in the doorway for a moment, lit a cigarette and resumed his prowl. He reminded Minogue of an ill-tempered schoolmaster patrolling rows of cowed pupils. There would be chopping and changing tomorrow as Kilmartin took the bit between his teeth on the Kelly case. Would he snatch Keating for that, too? Kilmartin paused by Minogue and arched his eyebrows.
“Best so far is the librarian fella for Saturday. He can attest to the fact that Paul Fine was well able to work,” said Minogue.
Kilmartin shrugged and moved on, trailing smoke. He fingered an evening newspaper open and blew out a cloud of smoke as he snorted at what he read.
“Fucking yobbos! Legislate them back to work,” he said to the headline. He resumed his leonine prowl, a thick-set Mayo-man shaped like one of the innumerable boulders which were strewn about the desolate bog landscapes of his native county. Perhaps a later Ice Age had deposited him, an obdurate lump, on the streets of Dublin and left him to stalk police offices with his shirt-tail almost completely dislodged from his trousers, a troglodyte, a bog-man who still hated Dublin after thirty years of policing it.
Minogue had found Dublin different. It had been difficult for him not to melt into its gentle decay when he had first arrived in the capital. The last twenty years had shattered the shabby charm of Dublin. The shards poked out now, gashing even the well-to-do who hid in Foxrock estates. Someone had taken the worst office architecture imaginable and mauled the city with it, rooting out people from the city centre and sending them to gulag garden suburbs where crime flourished. So ugly and widespread was this blight, with its dislocation of Dubliners into suburbs, that many, Minogue included, believed that the ruin of Dublin had been a carefully plotted conspiracy.
Kilmartin slowed after his first lap of the squadroom.
“There’ll be people who’ll have to walk to work with this bloody strike, you know. Bananas is what we should be growing here,” he said to no one, passing Hoey’s desk. He stopped abruptly before Minogue.
“Name of Jases, I’m nearly ready to go to this Ard Fheis meself and get up on the shagging podium and give those feckers a piece of my mind. ‘Leadership’: that’d be the sum total of me speech. ‘All we want is what we’re overpaying ye for already: leadership!’ We should declare a national emergency and a war on gobshites. People that are dragging their arses around the place, give them a kick-up in the arse and put them to work. ‘Here’s a shagging job,’ I’d say. ‘It may not be managing director, but it’s a start.’ Get the country back up and running again.”
“We might all end up working in McDonald’s, Jimmy,” said Minogue, goaded beyond silence.
“A howl is what you are. At least it’d be work, wouldn’t it? I don’t care if the Russians open a tank factory here; I’d say great, give us jobs. A fella has to start somewhere. This country was once the most civilized nation in Europe, with our monks and our books and our poets and our schools and everything-while the mobs beyond in Britain were still painting their faces and lathering the shite out of one another with sticks and stones. Look at us now for the love of Jases. The best-educated young people in Europe, probably the world, and no jobs. As for this European Community stunt, the United States of Europe and that class of bullshit-here, did I tell you this one? If you’re an Irishman and you’re going into the toilet, and you’re an Irishman and you’re coming out of the toilet, what are you when you’re in the toilet?”
“Can’t imagine, James,” Minogue tried.
“You’re-a-peein’,” said Kilmartin without smiling.
Minogue’s lifetime of listening to his fellow-islanders had included countless editions of Kilmartin’s perorations on the Land of Saints and Scholars in one guise or another.
“I would not care to have had the career of one of those monks and what-have-you,” he baited Kilmartin. “I would have asked to be excused from the hermit business too. Not to speak of the self-flagellation and the chastity bit. I haven’t the heart for one and I haven’t the stomach for the other.”
Kilmartin fixed a sceptical eye on Minogue. Hoey looked up cautiously from under his eyebrows.
“Now that you’re talking about beating yourself up for the greater glory, and all that,” said Kilmartin in an unexpectedly low tone. He leaned down with his hands spread on Minogue’s desk to confide. “Your man, Kelly, the lad toasted out in Bray. He had some class of a chapel and our resident encyclopaedia, Keating, says it looks like Kelly was one of those Opus Dei crowd.”
He leaned further to whisper to Minogue.
“They’re so holy that they beat themselves, he told me. No joking. They’re like the hermit monks, except they don’t run away from the common crowd. But they take sticks to one another and live like the monks in their private lives. Meet them in the street and they’re the same as the next man, hail-fellow-well-met. Maybe our Kelly had had enough of it and the pressure got to him. They have very high morals- and you know where that can lead a man. Oh yes, indeed, I wasn’t codding when I said earlier on to Keating that poor Kelly might still be a suicide. He might have banged his own head a bit, trying to sort himself out, don’t you know.”
Minogue remembered the pictures of Buddhist monks burning in the streets of Saigon.
Kilmartin stood to his full height, stretched and growled. “I’ll be a happier man when I find out why he had your name and our phone number on a sheet of paper in his house.”
CHAPTER TEN
Wednesday morning brought a break in the ceiling of cloud which had muffled the island for a week. The air was fresh again. Clouds so white as to be patently silly-looking to Minogue hung themselves from a sky of Blessed Virgin blue. The good burgher Magritte would have stood at his window for hours today, Minogue believed, so delighted would he have been with a sky like this.
A muzziness from last night’s drinking with Kilmartin (who had dragooned Hoey into the pub too) dissipated quickly after breakfast. The worm in his stomach returned when Minogue turned away from his usual route and headed for Fine’s house. Crowds stood at the bus stops still, some thumbing. Most cars were full. There were swarms of bicycles on the road. Minogue skirted the beginnings of traffic jams, reversing out of one road near Ranelagh to avoid a bottleneck and found himself at Fine’s street sooner than he had wanted. Any time would be too soon, he realized.
He parked in front of a light-blue Nissan Bluebird. The passenger had already stepped out on to the footpath and was staring at Minogue. Minogue couldn’t see the man’s hands. His back tingled. The driver, a man with a crew cut and a small mouth, already had his door open.
“Minogue, Technical Bureau. The Murder Squad, lads.”
The driver nodded. Minogue raised a hand to the red-haired detective on the footpath who was now rearranging his jacket and from the corner of his eye saw a lightly built man peering around the hedge two houses down. The driver spoke into a microphone pinned to his shirt and the man down the street withdrew into a garden.
Heavy and sweet smells drifted out from the gardens nearby. A wrought-iron gate to the side of the Fines’ house clanked open and Johnny Cohen trudged toward the main gates where the policemen were standing. Minogue pocketed his photocard and took several steps. Cohen nodded curtly. His gaze searched Minogue’s face.
“Morning to you, Mr. Cohen,” Minogue tried. “I trust I’m not calling too early on the Fines?”
Cohen squinted hard at Minogue. “He may be gone already,” he said slowly. “Or he may be catching up on last night. Were you there yourself later on, then?”