Gallagher stroked his moustache. “I can give you the broad picture, but this League crowd… I might as well tell you now, I never heard of them.”
“Well, tell us about the overall situation, then, will you?” He felt drowsy. Now.
Kilmartin lumbered over as Minogue took his seat. “You have a green light,” he confided. “God Almighty was on the blower to me an hour ago. ‘Results!’ says he. You know what that means: steam-roller. The pressure is on, man.”
Kilmartin glanced quickly in Gallagher’s direction. “If that Gallagher drags his heels or sulks a bit, I’d bite him,” he said slowly.
Gallagher stood and nodded at Minogue.
“We’ll start, so,” said Minogue.
Minogue drew several circles around ‘9mm’. He drew squares around ‘. 30,’ ‘. 32- 7. 62, ’7. 65 mm‘.
“Whatever calibre it was, the gun was fired from between one and two feet away. Few particles in the scalp, a radius of nearly four inches. Very little scorching within that area. Em…” The assistant to the State Pathologist was reading from handwritten notes in a binder. “The first shot killed him. Instantly. A subsequent shot took a piece of vertebra here. A shot to the neck blew out the artery. The blood loss has to be a consequence of how the body lay after the shooting.”
He turned to the overhead projector and used his pencil to home in on a point on the diagram. To Minogue he looked like a younger Vincent Price. The upward glow from the apparatus high-lighted his face and the smoke being drawn like a silk scarf toward the fan beneath the projector. The smell of hot plastic and cigarette smoke mixed with the odour of stale clothes-his own? he wondered-had made Minogue sleepy. He looked to the probable height of the killer, an estimate of the angle of entry for the first shot. Fine was five foot ten in his socks, the angle no more than thirty degrees before the bullet went slightly awry. The one who fired the gun had to be no smaller than five foot eight… if he or she was standing in ordinary shoes, on a spot level with Fine. Sitting, though? If Fine had been sitting down? Minogue’s mind reeled.
“How about him being shot as he sat down?” Hoey said.
The assistant turned to the projector again and waved his pencil over shaded areas on the figure.
“We can’t tell from the bruising here if-do you see those bruisings there over the forehead? Well the drawing, I mean, obviously-he banged his head after being shot and falling to the ground. In a chair, say, he’d pitch roughly forward, then to one side when his upper body’d meet with his knees and… it’d take us a while to suggest probabilities. One thing worthy of mention, as I was saying earlier, was the degree of bruising. With the possible exception of that bruise near the hairline, the bruises were occasioned after death. None is severe and that is important.”
Occasioned. I like that verb, thought Minogue.
“It’s safe to say that the victim was not intentionally clobbered or abused at all. The motion of the water and the nature of the materials on the water’s edge accounts for the abrading and slight bruising which forms nearly all of what we’re talking about.”
Tides, thought Minogue. Time and tide wait for no man. Time of death (he remembered the feeble attempt at humour on that: ‘Ah now lads, no miracles, please’) was between eighteen and twenty-four hours of the time of discovery. The body, cruciform, drifting in the darkness as the moon drew and released tides around the island.
Kilmartin flicked the Venetian blinds open and Minogue rubbed his eyes in the glare. Gallagher waited until the assistant had left and his audience was all commissioned Gardai. He began with the file which the Special Branch had maintained on Paul Fine. With a sense of decisive deliberation, Gallagher said the file was inactive. The last entry had been three years previously.
“What status was Fine’s file?” asked Minogue.
“Status?” Gallagher resisted.
“Was he regarded as a high priority?”
Gallagher didn’t reply immediately. Minogue caught sight of the mild warning in Kilmartin’s glance. Fine and well to bite Gallagher if he was surly, but not in front of other policemen.
“Er, no. Fine was a student in Trinity College for two years, studying Political Science. His name came to our attention a few months after he started college when he appeared on a membership list for a certain organization, one we routinely keep track of,” Gallagher lisped, without looking up from the sheet he had drawn out of his jacket.
“Hardly the Legion of Mary, ha, lads?” said Kilmartin. The policemen grinned obligingly.
“You may know the organization,” Gallagher rode in on Kilmartin’s attempt to head off awkwardness. “Eco-Al. Let me give you a sketch on this group. Eco is just eco, the way it sounds. It can mean economy and ecology. Al is for alliance. Say it quick and it sounds like ‘equal’. All intentionally clever. We have reason to believe that Eco-Al got some funding from unusual sources on the Continent. There’s common stuff between Eco-Al and other movements: the Green Party, CND in Britain, Greenham Common women, Animal Rights movements. Take it as understood that Eco-Al has received money from an organization in Paris called Accord International. It’s by way of being a quartermaster for cash which is thought to originate in Eastern Europe and probably the Soviet Union. There is no doubt in the wide world that Eco-Al has been infiltrated by persons with other priorities, secret or
otherwise, including Trotskyite groups and ex-members of RS.”
“RS?” asked Kilmartin. “If you say that quick, it’s ”arse“, isn’t it?”
Even Gallagher laughed at that.
“Not intentional this time, but you might be on to something there. I’ll pass it along.”
More laughs.
“Revolutionary Struggle. They’re nearly all students. The ones that aren’t are hangers-on who want to get off with rich girls who have fallen in love with the proletariat. They’re not all the ideologues and screamers they look. One of ‘em turned up at a post-office robbery last year in Castlebar with an assault rifle under his armpit. He’s number two on our list since. We think he’s in Amsterdam. Anyway…”
“Any cross-over between this mob and the IRA?” asked Kilmartin.
“No,” answered Gallagher. “That Eco-Al thing fell in on itself in fact, whatever about in name. You couldn’t keep a coalition like that together in Ireland. It was a hothouse thing. All that’s left of Eco-Al is a small group of university graduates who meet over pints and write letters to the paper about acid rain and the state of the nation’s water resources.”
“Right enough, I know that crowd,” said Kilmartin. “They let their children run around with no nappies. Want to give fish and sheep the vote and outlaw flush toilets and motor-cars.”
“Let’s get back to the other business,” said Minogue, struggling against a sluggish afternoon mind. “Palestinians and their sympathizers.”
Gallagher stretched his arms and began fiddling with a pencil. Minogue deduced that Gallagher was restive at having to explain basics to crime ordinary detectives. Hoity-toity Special Branch: Supermen with their own liturgy.
“The Palestinian thing is not a cut-and-dried affair in Ireland. It’s an odd business. Palestinians find common cause with Republicans here. Then there’s a lot of people saying that Irish nationalism has so much in common with Zionism and that results in support for Israel.”
“So you’re telling us that it’s confused.”
“No. A good rule of thumb here is that Lefties here tend to stick to the Palestinian side. You and I know that IRA personnel have trained and travelled and received munitions from various places in the Middle East.”