They’d be a job for the painstaking Keating. Recordings of interviews? There were seven video-cassettes, again of unknown content, marked only by dates and numbers. No video-cassette recorder, but a colour telly and a Sony radio with shortwave bands. Fine had kept his paraphernalia tidily, even his clothes. One of the two bedrooms was by way of being an office, apparently. Tidy but smelly from ashtrays and closed windows. The whole house was damp. A single picture of Fine’s father (was that his mother too?), himself between them as a teenager, standing by a heap of stones in some sunny place.

His belongings had not been disturbed, by the look of things. A drawer full of odds and ends, from disposable razors to a photograph of a dog. Had he spent all his nights here? Neither Minogue nor Hoey had found any notebook or diary. There had been nothing in the pockets of the light tweedy jacket on the body.

Minogue recalled the Commissioner’s confidences about Paul Fine’s past involvement with fringe groups. Fine’s father had not even hinted at any wild side to his son, but that was natural: the son was dead. No parent would recount the failings of a child to a policeman. Minogue would have to burrow around such boulders before trying to hoist them and get an accurate picture of Paul Fine.

Mary McCutcheon. Fitzgerald from RTF-he had Fitz’s name before. Fitzgerald was an acerbic producer of current affairs programmes for the radio, a man who seemed to be at his happiest when inflaming the Catholic hierarchy enough for them to write a letter to the papers complaining about bias in broadcasting. Minogue seemed to remember Fitzgerald also maddening the Special Branch with a programme on one of their many failures; something about a raid on a farmhouse, waving guns about, without finding a trace of the subversives they were expecting to bag.