“We can come back-”
“Stay put now,” Fine said, looking beyond them to the window. Minogue feared the worst but Fine did not pounce.
“I’ll look into the matter of how my wife got to hear of this from the neighbour and not from the Gardai some other time. I expect there’s some reason, some excuse,” Fine said. “I had a call from the Garda Commissioner five minutes before you came. I’ll take the matter up with him. It’s nothing for you, for you personally, to feel awkward about.”
“Your Worship, I might as well-”
“It’ll be better if you call me Mr. Fine.”
“Mr. Fine,” Minogue began again,“I’ll give you as much as I know, as much as we know, if you want to hear it.”
“I do, in as much as I need to hear it sooner or later,” Fine replied.
“Your son was shot three times. Where he was shot suggests some kind of a punishment killing, an execution. There are no signs that he was otherwise abused before he died. It’s very likely that he died instantly. From what our forensic technicians tell us, and this is in the absence of the State Pathologist’s work yet to be done, Paul was shot at very close range.”
“He was shot in the head,” Fine said, as though addressing nobody. Minogue’s stomach coiled with the anguish. He heard Hoey draw a breath and hold it as he perched on the edge of the chair.
“Yes, he was,” Minogue replied hoarsely.
Fine blinked several times. His eyes looked out on nothing local to the room or the men in it. Minogue believed that he saw Fine grow smaller, become a different man in that minute’s silence. Hoey’s jittery animal eyes darted to the ceiling when the cries sounded upstairs again. Footsteps skipped quickly down a staircase. A bearded man in his middle years opened the door, glanced at the two policemen and gestured to Fine. Fine left the room. Minogue noted the skullcap, the yarmulka, as the bearded man turned and drew the door closed behind Fine.
Hoey blew his breath out between tight lips. “Jesus, I hate this. I really hate this. I’m not cut out for this at all. Christ, I’d give anything to be out of here this second. I’m not up to it.”
The doors opened and Fine returned. The bearded man followed him and laid a tray on a set of nesting tables. Minogue busied himself making unnecessary way for the arrival of the coffee, the better to allow Fine to take out his hanky and wipe away the tears. Hoey had noticed too and he co-operated by standing up and fussing about awkwardly.
“Ah, that’s too kind of you now, Mr. Fine. Our tongues were just hanging out for the want of a bit of something in this line. We’ll have this down and be out of your way in a flash,” Minogue said. He looked up at the bearded man, seeing a face perhaps familiar.
“You may know Johnny Cohen here, Inspector. He’s a cantor up at the temple in Orwell Road,” Fine sighed as he dabbed his eyes.
Minogue stood and shook hands with Cohen.
“Johnny is a relation of my wife, Rosalie. His wife, Carol, is upstairs with her, along with Rabbi Silverman. I expect there’ll be a gaggle of people descending on the house any minute so let’s get started,” Fine said, sitting heavily into an armchair.
Minogue sat down gingerly, anxious not to spill any coffee into the saucer. He felt an odd relief at Fine’s words. Fine had a Dublin accent, soft and nearly ironical, so unlike the contorted blends which Minogue heard regularly in the suburbs. A real Dubliner, a Jew, one of the great legal minds on the island, and he still used expressions like ‘a gaggle’. Fine’s face now seemed bigger, open.
“You know,” Fine said slowly, the cup next to his lip as he stared out the window, “Johnny and I, the first thing we said when he came to the house an hour ago.”
Cohen paused by the door at the mention of his name.
“If I recall, it was Johnny actually got the words out first.‘I hope and pray that Paul is not dead because he is a Jew,’ you said, Johnny.”
Fine’s eyes stayed fixed and vacant while he sipped at the coffee. Cohen’s head dropped and Minogue could see the eyelashes batting rapidly. Hoey’s body seemed to scream as Minogue noticed him squirm. Cohen looked to Minogue’s eyes once as he closed the door. Minogue had to break the contact and stare down at his cup, his mind raging with shame and helplessness.
“I hope the same, Mr. Fine,” Minogue said to his cup.
Minogue thought about Hoey’s question before he slammed the car door.
“Peculiar because he’s so ordinary? What did you expect, Shea?” he asked.
Hoey shrugged and started the engine. Minogue took his notebook and flicked through the pages.
Paul had been born on 12 July 1956. Fine even remembered the time: a Thursday morning around three. Fine had last seen his son on Friday, in the restaurant of the Art Gallery in Merrion Square. Who would make the formal identification of the body, he had asked. If he was up to it himself, Minogue had replied, they could bring Justice Fine to the hospital now. Fine had said that he couldn’t go then, not before his wife’s sister showed up at the house.
“Your handwriting is gone as bad as mine,” Minogue murmured. “But go on: what did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Something different, I suppose.”
Minogue remembered his own pleasant bewilderment when he had first visited the Jewish Museum. An older man who had been sitting at a desk had looked up at Minogue as he entered and asked him if he had been to the Museum before. Minogue replied that he had not. The man rose from his seat, introduced himself as Stanley Davis-he was called Stan- and led Minogue on a tour of the synagogue. Where Minogue had expected the rich accents of Eastern Europe or the Middle East, he heard only the practised diffident stoicism, the tones of men ever ready to disabuse a non-Dubliner of any presumptions about Dublin. He heard in Davis’s voice something else too, an easy mix of earnestness and resignation.
Stan had pointed out his son in several of the photographs housed in the folders which he had been working on when Minogue arrived. The son at sports events, the son at garden parties (did people still have them?), the son rigged out in tennis gear and shaking hands with a tennis star. No detail of genealogy escaped Stan Davis and he had a story to go with every face in the albums. Where was Stan’s son now? Oh, he had done very well in the insurance, and he had up and gone to London. Stan’s wife had died two years ago. Stan didn’t want to take up the son’s offer of his own flat in London yet, he said, but he didn’t look at Minogue as he said it. He wanted to see the Museum off the ground before he left. That’d be his legacy if he did leave, Stan had said. Minogue remembered Stan Davis’s wan face, a man in his seventies but with the clear and grave countenance of a child looking at him as if to say: Well, that’s my story and what do you think?
Minogue continued glossing over Hoey’s notes. Hoey lit a cigarette. The coffee had killed Minogue’s incipient appetite, leaving him with a smouldering space in his belly. Fine had anticipated the questions and the details which the detectives sought. He had left the room twice during the interview, both times to answer the phone. He took the first call before the lumbering Johnny Cohen had made it down the stairs at a run. Cohen had pounced on the second ring with the second call.
“He must have had a row with Paul somewhere along the line,” Hoey murmured. “And they sort of kept their distance, if you follow me.”
“Um. I remember the way he mentioned about Paul dropping out of the uni after two years, all right,” Minogue agreed.
“Not to say there would have been bad blood or that class of thing. God, no. Just the usual family thing,” Hoey emphasized. Minogue heard the caution behind Hoey’s qualification: he was giving himself, not the Fines, the benefit of any doubt as to whether Jews were also mired in ‘the usual family thing’.
“I mean to say, look at the other two children in that family,” Hoey continued. “One a dentist, the daughter some type of a research scientist. Careers and families, the whole bit.”