The waiter laid the teapot on the table. Kilmartin flipped the lid, looking for the tea-bag.

“I took it out,” said the waiter. He turned and sailed back to the bar.

“ Plus ca change, Jimmy…”

“I heard that Gorman would like to get out from under the Chief and get things going,” Kilmartin rejoined.

Minogue remembered Gorman, the Minister for Defence, fervidly denying rumours that he was anything but 110 per cent loyal to the Chief and the Party. To Minogue, the Chief looked like a crooked Caesar in profile. The Party Whip meant precisely that in Irish politics: the Chief had a tribe, not a political party.

“See him on the telly the other night, telling the reporters about rumours started up by the media? Ha ha, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, that Gorman,” Kilmartin concluded.

“I understand that Gorman hasn’t a brain in his head at all, at all,” Minogue offered mildly. He saw Hoey stepping around a table next to the entrance to the lounge. Kilmartin looked up from his ministrations with the tea as a man with the face of a Toby jug followed Hoey into the lounge.

“Jases,” Kilmartin said. “Not Hynes.”

Shorty Hynes was a reporter for one of the two Dublin evening papers. He was a prodigious drinker, a gregarious and disarming character well known in the pubs and clubs of the city. Hynes could not wholly conceal the fact that he was as tenacious as a badger with a bone between his teeth. Hynes specialized in lurid descriptions of murders and violent crimes, wringing out the most minute and morbid details to gratify the tastes of the citizenry of Dublin and the island generally. Kilmartin had had Hynes barred from the headquarters of the Murder Squad after a spat between them. Hynes had been speechifying that the people had a right to know. Like any speechifier, Kilmartin did not take to competition in this line and he had told Hynes that, generally speaking, ‘the people’ were iijits. Hynes did not dispute this fact but still argued their right to be privy to details of a murder investigation. His insistence on this point had landed him out in the street. Still, Hynes had not taken it badly, and Kilmartin and he maintained a relationship which occasionally bordered on the civil. Hoey’s tight lips suggested that Hynes had refused to be put off looking for Kilmartin on the beach.