“Go on,” said Minogue.

“Well, Fine might have rubbed shoulders with radicals back then, maybe stayed in touch with them. Say he meets up with some of them again and says he’d like a contact to someone who knows anything about links between, I don’t know, Libya and the IRA… So they look him up and down, thinking to themselves, well this Fine boy is gone very, let’s say middle-class-”

“Bourgeois.”

“That too. And the nerve of him, coming back and trying to mine them for touchy info that could land them in trouble,” Hoey continued.

“And being as they are very put-out about bourgeois backsliders, and paranoid by nature…”

“A hothead says that Fine is now an agent of the imperialist running-dog whatever, by way of being a traitor too, I suppose. What do you think?”

“I have little enough insight into the paranoid mind, but you may have something. When did they call the Press?”

“Close on half-ten.”

Half-ten, Minogue echoed within. Last seen by Miss Connolly on Sunday morning. No more than twenty-four hours in the water.

“How do tides work, Shea? I mean, if you threw something or somebody into the water, would it be washed up in the same place it was thrown in, if the tide was coming in, like?”

“I haven’t a clue. I believe that a tide will do different things depending on the lie of the land around the coast. It’s a shocking complicated business.”

Hoey turned off Nutley Avenue and into RTE.

“Do you know what, though?” Hoey murmured. “Aside from this crap about ‘working against the cause’ or whatever-I mean to say, that’s a mystery until we find out more about what Fine was up to that might have rubbed someone the wrong way-I wonder why they didn’t call until the Monday morning, and him being murdered already on the Sunday? Maybe they had some crooked reason, I don’t know. Do you think they knew the body would be washed up?”