Kathleen answered after two rings. Minogue told her that he’d be late. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to watch Die Nasty on your own.”

Daithi was in the States these five weeks past. Iesult was out on a date with Pat the Brain. Psychology and philosophy lectures over a glass of beer?

“I won’t be able to understand it without you there to take it to pieces for me,” Kathleen replied.

Minogue grinned. “It’ll be gone ten o’clock, I’m sure.”

“Fine and well, Inspector. I heard it on the half-one news, and I might have guessed you’d be in the thick of it. Just don’t be taking too much on yourself.”

Was that a resigned rebuke?

He told her about Fine wanting him on the investigation.

“That’s a great compliment, I suppose. Why you, though?”

“Remember that time in the Jewish Museum, just after it opening up? He was there then and he spotted me, apparently. But tell me,” he interrupted himself by asking his wife of thirty years,“how’s life treating you, anyway? Taking into account it’s a Monday and we’re not in Honolulu or lollygagging on some island in the Mediterranean.”

“True for you. I’m grand anyway. There’s a letter from Daithi, by the way.” The change in her voice, the late attempt at cheerfulness bit sharply at the edge of Minogue’s mind.

“Ah. Anything new with him? Is he behaving himself?”

“He sounds fine. Read it yourself when you get home.”

Minogue replaced the receiver. He looked across at the half-empty bookshelves. Paul Fine had read-or at least collected-books on a wide variety of subjects. One shelf held Quotable Quotes next to a copy of Church and State in Modern Ireland. Hoey had found folders of clippings from British and Irish newspapers as well as a dozen and more cassettes with labels which neither man could make out.