“With Julia and David it was different,” said Rosalie. “They knew early on they’d want to be moving eventually, seeing the world. With the youngest you never know. They say the youngest feels responsible for the parents. And then, who knows, maybe we wanted to hold on to him a bit longer…”
Minogue concentrated on part of the pattern on his cup as Rosalie Fine wept. Her husband wept also, sitting upright, clutching his wife’s hand until the hands were a jumble of whitened knuckles. A minute passed. The phone trilled once in the hall before they heard Cohen’s bass tones. Then the voice stopped. Cohen opened the door.
“Rose, it’s Canada,” he said. “If you’re up to it.”
Rosalie Fine drew in a breath, stood and walked to the door. Fine yawned deep into his palm.
“She has a sister in Toronto,” he murmured.
“I won’t burden you any longer,” said Minogue. “I must get on top of these developments and I don’t want to be hanging on your phone.”
Fine didn’t seem to have heard him. He rubbed at an eyebrow. “I thought we were exempt, you might say,” he murmured as he looked at the window. “Irishmen, the same as yourself. Oh but certainly there’s the root in Israel. You know, I must say that the years have me circling back to what I was born into. Being Jews, I mean, having a spiritual homeland. It’s no religious fervour. I’m less ‘Irish’ than I was ten years ago. Than I was yesterday, I must say too. Aliyah looms closer. It would not be a hardship on us.”
“I don’t follow you there, the last bit,” said Minogue.
“ Aliyah? We’ve given some thought to emigrating to Israel. Keep that under your hat. I’m a public figure the minute I walk out the door here. I’ll tell them when I’m ready to retire and not before. Sure, they only gave me the job last year, and me the youngest on the bench.”
Fine turned from the window and stared at the policeman. “Look, you don’t need to squirm here,” Fine said. “I didn’t expect you to come here spouting answers. You have to work out what happened at the Museum, same as myself.”
Minogue hesitated before deciding to tell Fine. “There’s something which came up late last night and again this morning,” he said in little more than a whisper. “Something that the Commissioner would not have known to tell you at tea-time yesterday. This may prove important. Please don’t read much into it yet until it becomes more substantial. We understand now that Paul may have been researching a group, a topic, which in turn may be linked to the death of a young man very recently.”
Fine blinked.
“He may have mentioned this to you? Opus Dei.”
Fine shook his head slowly.
“Not a word to me,” he murmured. “But you can’t be in earnest. I heard of them before. They’re a Catholic organization, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are.”
“To do with lay people, though, religious-minded.”
“I believe you have it in a nutshell,” said Minogue. “I’m awaiting a summary of what Opus Dei is, in Ireland anyway. Paul undertook to read up on them, but we can find no trace of notes he might have made. There was no mention of this until a citizen called last night, a man who works in the National Library. Paul was working there in the Library one day, researching this Opus Dei organization. There are several puzzling things about this. Opus Dei is not an extremist organization in the sense that they’d ever have anything to do with violence. And we don’t understand why Paul didn’t do his research in RTE, or discuss the topic with the people he worked with there. Then there’s the lack of notes. One might suppose that he was making his first pass over the subject reading the books on Friday, so he’d only commit things to paper later on…”
Minogue paused but Fine said nothing.
“I’m not suggesting there’s anything sinister or conclusive to this. And of course last night’s outrage-”
“Friday,” Fine interrupted then. “I met Paul Friday for dinner.”
“Did he say anything which strikes you as odd, connected with what I’ve just told you? Was he excited about anything?”
Fine frowned and ran a fingertip around his lips.
“No, no. He made a face at something though, something that came up in conversation. The journalism tended to make him a bit cynical, I think. Some of the hoi polloi were in the Gallery for lunch too, some TDs and Ministerial Sees. The luminaries gather there, usually toward the end of the week, to gab and gossip about one another. I recognized a few of them and of course it does them no harm to doff their hats to Mr. Justice Fine. Paul thought it was a bit rich. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths,’ he said, if I remember. Yes. Not like him to be cynical really. That may be more due to working with Mickey Fitzgerald and company. I know that Paul didn’t much like digging into the more gritty types of exposes that Fitz and the others like to blow up. Paul said something about the Ard Fheis coming up next week, some comment about: ‘They’ll all be at one another’s throats soon.’ Always the way, a cynic would answer, I suppose.”
“You didn’t ask him what he meant?”
“No. I assumed he meant that the Ard Fheis would be planning some strategies for the election. They’re always a bit of a circus.”
“I suppose,” said Minogue. He made for the door. “If you can spare me the time later, could I draw you more towards Paul’s personal life? I may be asking awkward questions as to any enmities with family and relations but I believe you’ll know that I have only a policeman’s interest… Could I arrange a time if I phone you later?”
Fine let his breath out and nodded slowly. He sat in the couch again and let himself slump. Minogue thanked Billy Fine and rose to leave. He nodded to Rosalie Fine in the hall. A woman sat next to her, crying. Minogue was seized again by furious, inchoate shame.
Through the door and descending the steps, he was grateful to be out in the air again, breathing deeply and trying to loosen the tension in his shoulders. He nodded at the detectives in the surveillance car and headed down the footpath toward his car.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Minogue sat in the car for a minute before turning on the ignition. The familiar smells of the interior, cooked up stronger by the sunshine, rose around him; sparrows squabbled in the hedges. Kilmartin was nosing into the Opus Dei business. A possible witness, even though it was a child, from the murder site. Minogue had a dim sense of things moving now, gathering momentum, and for the first time in several days he felt excited. The excitement jarred against the anger he still nursed at Cohen’s springing the news on him.
The sun’s glare off the bonnet of the car moved Minogue at last and he drove off toward Islandbridge. Forty minutes later he had managed to cover three miles. He had turned the engine off but the fan was still running as it worked to cool the engine. The traffic had not moved for five minutes. Cyclists, many more than Minogue saw on ordinary workdays, swarmed around the jams, skittering over the kerbs and plainly enjoying themselves. Some motorists stood outside their cars, leaning elbows on their roofs. Pedestrians barely hid their smirks and they walked jauntily. Now that the weather was fine for the first day of the strike, the city had a holiday air.
Minogue counted to a hundred. Seeing no move ahead he started the engine and worked the car half-way on to the footpath. He wrote a note which he then placed on the dashboard as he stepped out to join the flow of pedestrians: ‘ Direct any tickets or tow fees to CDU, Investigation Section do C. Insp. J. Kilmartin’. Within a hundred yards of his abandoned car, Minogue was loping along, the motion of his freed body releasing him but slightly from the gloom which he had carried with him from Fine’s. He found a working phone booth and told Eilis that he had been shanghaied by traffic but that he’d be in the office within twenty minutes. The shabby streets, the chaos and inertia, this sullen greying town now oppressed him. He began walking faster.