A Hunt in Winter E-Book

Conor Brady

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Joe Swallow, newly promoted to detective inspector, is back, and life looks to be taking a turn for the better. But his new-found peace will soon be chaotically upturned, with far-reaching consequences. In Dublin, a series of violent attacks against women leads to an outbreak of panic and fear, and things on the home front are about to change in an unexpected way. In London, Charles Stewart Parnell tirelessly pursues the Irish cause for Home Rule. While the British are eager to discredit the Irish parliamentary leader and to quash the growing movement towards independence, Swallow's conflicted loyalties pull him in different directions. Swallow has no choice but to traverse this volatile political scene, while his continuing hunt for a terrifying killer takes him across Europe in pursuit. Conor Brady brings Victorian Dublin vividly to life in the third thrilling installment of the bestselling Joe Swallow series.

Leseprobe

Praise forA June of Ordinary Murders

‘A vivid and crafty whodunit … Fans of mysteries that capture the flavour of the past will hope that Swallow has a long literary life.’–Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

‘Brady’s powerful first mystery novel is evocative of the period. The many aspects of life in 19th-century Dublin are cleverly woven through a baffling mystery.’– Kirkus Reviews

‘Swallow is an increasingly interesting protagonist who is left to face the realities of his professional future and his closest personal relationship; readers will want to see more of him.’– Booklist

‘Making his mystery debut, formerIrish Timeseditor Brady presents a fascinating and in-depth historical peek at crime solving in a bygone era when it took more than a few keystrokes and a phone call to catch a perp. Swallow is a complicated, earnest hero with just enough flaws to make him endearingly sympathetic.’– Library Journal

‘Conor Brady’s debut novel is a slice of history about Dublin, Ireland, and the Dublin Metropolitan police, intertwined with a first-rate murder mystery, and peopled by characters both complex and realistic.’– NY Journal of Books

‘Like all great historical fiction,A June of Ordinary Murdersstuns us into fresh recognition of a period we thought we knew – and as if that weren’t enough, hides all of its meticulous research inside a superbly engaging mystery. Get in on the ground floor. Conor Brady is the real deal.’– Charles Finch, bestselling author ofThe Laws of Murder

‘Brady weaves a police procedural that does full justice to the complex nature of the social, political and criminal labyrinth that was Dublin in the summer of 1887. He paints a vivid picture of the city … Swallow himself is very much in the mould of the classic fictional policeman, a man ostensibly dedicated to upholding law and order and seeking out justice …’– The Irish Times

‘As in the best crime fiction, the city itself is here a kind of character – and it’s a Dublin we haven’t seen a great deal of in recent fiction … An absorbing read, cleanly written, beautifully structured and thrillingly vivid … Brady has done an excellent job of conjuring the febrile atmosphere of the city as it lurches and stumbles its way towards the War of Independence.’– Sunday Business Post

‘Delivers a thrilling sense of the familiar, lit with the profane … the pace raises the novel above the period pastiche.’– Sunday Independent

‘Brady handles the political atmosphere of the time with aplomb.A June Of Ordinary Murderspulsates with a vivid sense of a country on edge as the land wars rage and preparations get under way for a royal visit.’– Irish Independent

Praise forThe Eloquence of the Dead

‘In Brady’s stellar second whodunit set in Victorian Dublin … the astute Swallow is a particularly well-rounded lead, and he’s matched with a complex, but logical, page-turner of a plot.’ –Publishers Weekly

‘The second case for the talented, complicated Swallow again spins a fine mystery out of political corruption in 1880s Dublin.’ –Kirkus Reviews

‘If intricate plotting and journalistic descriptions of time and place pique your fancy, Brady is your man.’ – Historical Novel Society

‘He has given us a compelling and memorable central character in the shape of Detective Swallow … If the RTÉ drama department are looking for something to fill aLove/Hate-sized hole in next year’s schedule, they could do worse than look at the continuing development, and adventures, of Detective Joe Swallow.’ –Irish Independent

‘Swallow, a keen amateur painter, brings a sharp eye to bear on his surroundings, which in turn allows Brady to give us a vivid account of late Victorian Dublin in all its squalid glory. The result is a very satisfying police procedural/mystery and an equally fine historical novel.’ –The Irish Times

A HUNT IN WINTER

A HUNT IN WINTER

Conor Brady

A HUNT IN WINTER

First published in 2016 by

New Island Books

16 Priory Hall Office Park

Stillorgan

County Dublin

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Conor Brady, 2016

The Author asserts his moral rights in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-528-8

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-529-5

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-84840-530-1

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my beloved Ann,

I shall face the stars and greet you there.

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As with its two predecessor volumes, chronicling the life and times of Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow (now promoted to detective inspector), the backdrop toA Hunt in Winteris drawn from social and political conditions in 1880s Dublin. And as withA June of Ordinary Murders(2012) andThe Eloquence of the Dead(2013), the narrative blends fact with fiction, while real life characters of the era mingle with others of my own creation. It is hardly necessary to state thatA Hunt in Winteris a novel, not a history book.

I would like to acknowledge the many readers who have furnished me with additional information on some of the locations, institutions and individuals that feature here as they did in the earlier books. The store of local history of late-nineteenth-century Dublin appears to grow incrementally, as does that of Irish policing history.

As with the first two Joe Swallow books, I would like to acknowledge the support and professionalism of the team at New Island Books, in particular Dan Bolger and Justin Corfield, in bringing A Hunt in Winter to fruition. In an interval in my life during which circumstances made it difficult to write creatively, Dan was patient and indulgent. Justin was, as ever, a scrupulous, exacting and supportive editor.

I would also like to acknowledge the support and enthusiasm of my literary agent, Maria White, who has succeeded in bringing the Swallow books to a wider readership abroad, arranging North American publication with Minotaur Books, an associate imprint of St Martin’s Press, New York.

– Conor Brady

Dublin, September 2016

Dublin

Friday November 2nd, 1888

PROLOGUE

The girl clutched her shawl tightly around her shoulders against the night chill. But once she had crossed the Portobello Bridge to the Rathmines Road the walkway was firm and reassuring. The smooth surface helped to ease the discomfort in her leg. The rate-payers of the new affluent suburbs to the south of the city could afford good roads, which contrasted with the broken, uneven pavements within the old City Corporation area.

The ground here is hollow and low. When the wind is still and the night is moist, the mist that rises from the Grand Canal lingers and thickens. Tonight it had quite overwhelmed the gas lamps’ feeble efforts at illumination. But she knew her route well. She could see the faint glow from the Portobello Cavalry Barracks that lay beyond Blackberry Lane, where she lived. To her left she could faintly make out the darkened bulk of the Roman Catholic Church of St Mary Immaculate.

There was no sound of any other person on the footpath, but she was accustomed to the silence of the road at this late hour. The public houses that she had passed on Camden Street and South Richmond Street had been noisy and filled with loud-voiced men and women bawling and shouting. Out here it was as quiet as the countryside. A new terrace of lawn-fronted red-brick houses was hidden across the road in the fog. The southern side, along which she now made her way, was still bounded by meadow fields.

She sensed the pressure of the cold air pushing behind her a moment before she heard the hissing of the steam tram on its outward run from the city. When she glanced over her shoulder she saw it forming out of the mist behind her, its bull’s-eye lamps deploying a meagre illumination over the cobbles. She caught a momentary glimpse of passengers in the dimly lit interior. Men with hats, huddled in overcoats, drawn in tight against the November air. Two or three tired-looking women, probably making their way back to the houses where they worked in service. It would be the last tram from the city for the night. She heard the church clock strike the half-hour after eleven as the vehicle disappeared into mist.

There was no street light where Blackberry Lane rose from the fields to meet the road, but she knew the bramble hedges that grew at the place where she would turn. She could make her way blindfolded to the cottage at the end of the rutted laneway. Even in the darkness, she knew how to navigate the cart tracks, ankle-deep with rainwater. She knew how to avoid the thorns and the nettles on either side. She could not afford to destroy her boots or muddy her waitress uniform.

Perhaps ten yards up the lane, she knew, a wooden gate gave entry to the meadow field. The children of Blackberry Lane were in and out through it, winter and summer, tolerated by the farmer who accepted the futility of trying to keep them out in the first place. Now it was invisible, obscured by the mist. But she knew that something was wrong when she heard the scrape of its iron bolt being drawn back.

She had walked the lane many times in darkness. She was not frightened by its night sounds. Foxes, rats, badgers, sometimes a wandering cow pushing its head through the bramble. But she knew that none of these creatures could draw a gate bolt. She froze, straining to see through the fog.

The first blow came out of the darkness, taking her across the mouth and nose. It was solid and hard, not a fist or a hand. She felt teeth splinter in her mouth. The second blow came to the side of her head, setting off an explosion of red and yellow stars behind her eyes. Immediately she felt the warm blood flowing into her mouth and down her face. She tried to scream, but the sound caught in her throat. Her legs buckled and she pitched forwards, face downwards, into the mud.

Now the man was on her from behind. One hand came around her cheek and clamped across her mouth. The other pushed a rough rope down over her head and around her neck. The noose bit deep into her skin, and she heard him grunt as he dragged her towards where the gateway opened to the field. Once in there, she knew, it would be hopeless. She gasped for breath, scrabbling at the hand clamped across her mouth, but he was too strong and his grip too tight.

She felt mud and stones against her face as she tried to clutch at the reedy grass on the laneway’s edge. Then, a foot or two from where she knew the gate opened into the meadow, her hand found a jagged stone, perhaps the size of an apple. She fastened her fingers around it, pushed herself upwards as best she could and swung the stone with all her strength. She felt it connect with his head, and the hand across her mouth flew away. She heard him scream in pain. The rope slackened as he fell back. She drew in air, rolling, squirming away into the thorny ditch.

Now she found herself in a space of earth where the brambles had thinned. Perhaps a fox’s run or a badger trail. She tried to undo the rope that was still knotted around her neck, but her fingers were slippery with the blood from her head and face. Somewhere in the laneway she heard a shouted call. Then another. Men’s voices. Running footsteps in the fog. She started to feel a shivering warmth that travelled from her legs and then ran upwards through her body. She felt a weightlessness. Her hiding place seemed to darken, and there were no more sounds.

Saturday November 3rd, 1888

ONE

Swallow disliked Saturdays. Most policemen felt that way, he reckoned. Perhaps more precisely, Swallow disliked the day that followed Friday night. Friday was payday for those citizens of Dublin fortunate enough to have employment, however poorly rewarded it might be. By late Friday night a sizeable proportion of men’s meagre wages would be on the way back to the breweries and distilleries—Arthur Guinness, John Jameson and John Power. There was always trouble on Friday nights: street fights, brawls in public houses, misadventures of every variety, with broken bodies in the hospitals and sometimes dead ones in the mortuary.

Because the Dublin Magistrates’ Courts did not sit on Saturdays, the police cells were invariably filled to capacity. And with the growing trend for businesses to give employees a half-day off on Saturday afternoon, it was often impossible to advance police inquiries after noontime. Many commercial offices closed for the afternoon. Schools closed at noon, releasing their charges to engage in whatever mischief might present itself. Invariably, the latter part of the day was forfeit.

Swallow’s strategy to offset Saturday’s adversities was to start the day earlier. The morning crime conference at Exchange Court, the headquarters of G-Division at Dublin Castle, was ordinarily timed for nine o’clock. The night’s crime tallies would be set out and the day’s tasks allocated. But on Saturdays he brought it forward to half past eight. That way he could ensure that all available detectives were at their posts or out on their inquiries for the full duration of the morning.

Since his promotion to detective inspector, Swallow had sharpened up procedures at Exchange Court. His predecessor, Maurice (‘Duck’) Boyle, since elevated to superintendent and posted to take charge of the E-district, headquartered in leafy Rathmines, had been notoriously lazy and undemanding. Swallow, on the other hand, insisted on punctuality and a strict adherence to procedure. Report-writing had to be accurate, clear and up-to-date. Cash drawn for informants had to be accounted for in full and not frittered away on unnamed and often fictitious informants in public houses. There was grumbling from some, but the greater number among the G-men, as the detectives short-handed their designation, supported his approach.

The bedroom on the top floor above M & M Grant’s public house on Thomas Street, in the old city quarter known as the Liberties, was cold when he woke. He looked past Maria’s sleeping form beside him to the window and saw that the glass was fern-patterned with the first frost of winter. He rose, then washed and shaved quietly across the corridor in the room which, for the sake of decorum, was always referred to as ‘Mr Swallow’s room’. As far as outward appearances were concerned, the young, widowed Mrs Walsh and the detective inspector were simply landlady and tenant. Maria’s servants knew differently, of course, as did many of the patrons of M & M Grant’s, Maria’s public house below. So too did most of Swallow’s senior colleagues in G-Division, even though it was against police regulations to board on licensed premises, much less to share a bed with the licensee.

The servants observed the fiction of attending to the tenant’s room in accordance with respectability and convention. Each morning Swallow would leave his soiled clothing in the linen basket in his room to be collected for laundering later in the day by Tess, Maria’s housemaid. Every evening Tess carefully laid out a clean collar and shirt at the foot of the bed and changed the water in the glazed pitcher on the washstand.

It required concentration to work with the razor, soap and cold water in the dim morning light. Although most of the G-men followed the fashion of the time with moustaches or beards, Swallow preferred to go clean-shaven. It made him look younger than his forty-three years, he reckoned. Maria said she thought so too.

The morning darkness had not fully dissipated when he stepped out into Thomas Street through the side door that gave private access to the living quarters above the public house.

At St Catherine’s Church, where the rebel Robert Emmet had been executed after the abortive insurrection of 1803, he saw that the November frost had whitened the classical pediment and the black roof slates. He passed the Municipal Art School where on Thursday afternoons, duty permitting, he indulged his sole diversion from police work in the painting class led by Maria’s sister, Lily. Then he crossed High Street and Corn Market before flanking Christ Church Cathedral towards the Castle.

The streets were quiet. Dubliners were neither early to bed nor early risers. The city’s trams did not stir until eight o’clock, when they started from their depots. Shops did not open their doors until half past nine. Many professional men considered it unseemly to be at their rooms before ten. The only sign of life at this hour was a uniformed constable, motionless and solid, surveying the silent thoroughfare from Lamb Alley.

He caught the tang of hops from Guinness’s brewery at St James’s Gate, and a couple of hundred yards farther on the husky smell of barley wafted in the air from Power’s distillery on John’s Lane. It was telling, he sometimes reflected, that while other cities might smell of coal or food or human sweat, Dublin smelled primarily of alcoholic drink in the making.

He quickened his pace so that he would be at his desk by eight o’clock to review the night’s crime reports from the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s seven divisions. Any serious business, he knew, would very likely come from A, B, C or D, which served the city within the canals. E-Division and F-Division, covering the affluent suburbs to the south as far as Dalkey, rarely saw much crime or outrage.

Swallow was more at ease living back in the Liberties. During the previous year he rented a small house near Portobello, sharing it with his sister, Harriet. It suited her because it was close to the school in which she taught on the South Circular Road. But at the start of the new school year, and with his promotion confirmed, he had returned to live with Maria over Grant’s.

The public house had come down in the female line, but it kept the name of Maria’s grandfather Michael, who ran the business with his brother, Matthew. When Maria married Thomas Walsh in 1882 she saw no need to change it. The marriage had been happy but tragically short. Thomas drowned with his fellow crew members when the small cargo ship of which he was first officer went down in a gale off the Welsh coast five years later.

From Grant’s, it was just a ten-minute walk to the detective office at Exchange Court, beside the City Hall. On a sharp, clear morning like this the exercise was stimulating. It loosened the muscles and cleared the head for the tasks of the day. He listed them mentally as he walked. At least those he could predict. Nobody could guess what the night’s crime reports might bring in.

G-Division’s fifty-odd detectives investigated crime across the city, and were also the administration’s first and principal bulwark against political subversion. Their responsibilities ran from protecting the chief men who governed Ireland for the Crown to keeping watch on Fenians, Land Leaguers and the ever-multiplying groups that wanted, for one reason or another, to overthrow the established order.

The uniformed men who patrolled the divisions were unarmed, indistinguishable to all intents and purposes from the helmeted bobbies of any other city of the United Kingdom. But in addition to the standard police accoutrements of baton, whistle and handcuffs, every man of G-Division carried a .44 Webley Bulldog revolver.

Swallow considered what the day might bring. There was to be a public rally at the Mansion House in the afternoon. It would be addressed by the founder of the Land League, the charismatic one-armed militant Michael Davitt. Davitt was a powerful orator and would always draw a crowd. It would require half a dozen G-men, spread across the great Round Room of the Mansion House, to record the presence of suspected persons and to take down an account of what was said from the platform.

The leader of the Irish Party at Westminster, Charles Stewart Parnell, was travelling from London and would arrive at Kingstown on the four o’clock mailboat. Two G-men would be on hand. Officially they would be on protection duty, but there would be as much surveillance and intelligence-gathering involved as protecting Parnell from possible threats. They would carefully record who accompanied him, who greeted him at Kingstown and where they went.

The government’s principal civil servant for Ireland, Chief Secretary Sir Arthur Balfour, and his wife would be attending a luncheon at the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge. The ultra-loyal RDS was the least likely location for trouble, but since the murders five years previously in the Phoenix Park of the chief secretary’s predecessor in office, Sir Frederick Cavendish, along with his under-secretary, no chances could be taken. The protection detail would require the presence in concealment of two armed detectives and a sergeant.

Three G-men were engaged in watching the movements of two Irish-American gentlemen staying at the Imperial Hotel. The word from a helpful porter was that they were former Union Army officers with guns to sell. So far their principal focus appeared to be on drinking whiskey and making passes at the barmaids, but they had left word with the porter that they were expecting visitors. G-men would be required to take shifts sitting in the hotel bar, watching for someone to make a rendezvous.

Swallow also needed two men to operate the public office and the cells at Exchange Court. That should leave him with a paltry strength of three or four to cope with whatever the crime reports might bring in.

The moment he stepped into Exchange Court he knew from the face of the young G-man at the public counter that things were not good.

‘Bad story out in the E, sir.’ He jerked his head towards the stairs. ‘Sergeant Mossop’s above. He’s just ahead of you.’ Pat Mossop had been duty sergeant for the night shift that had just ended. Swallow took the stairs to the crime office two at a time.

Mossop, recently promoted to detective sergeant, was hunched at his desk. Detective Johnny Vizzard, newly arrived in G-Division on promotion from uniform, was perched beside him, his fingers poised over the typewriter. Mossop looked tired, as he always did now. A year ago the diminutive Belfast man had taken a bullet in the upper torso as G-men closed on an armed suspect on Ormond Quay. Strictly speaking, Pat Mossop should have been dead. Had his colleagues not got him swiftly to the infirmary on Jervis Street, he would have been.

‘Something big, Pat?’

‘Big enough, boss. E-district. Rathmines Road. A bad assault. Could be more than that. I thought I’d have the report done before you came in.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m just back with the lads from the Baggot Street Hospital. A young girl was attacked in Blackberry Lane off the Rathmines Road some time towards midnight. She’s in a bad state. The doctor says she mightn’t come through it.’

‘How much do we know?’

‘A fair bit. But there’s no idea yet who might have done it or why.’ He flipped his official notebook open. ‘Aged eighteen, name of Alice Flannery, lives with her mother and a gaggle of brothers and sisters in a cottage at the end of the laneway. The mother’s widowed, makes a few bob as a cleaner at the big church on the Rathmines Road. Seems Alice helps her on the cleaning job, but mostly she works as a waitress at the New Vienna restaurant down in South Great George’s Street.’

Swallow knew the New Vienna. It was a short walk from the Castle.

‘What do we know of her movements last night?’

‘She left the New Vienna to walk home around quarter past eleven after they’d cleaned up and shut for the night. Sometime before midnight a couple of cavalrymen tried to use the lane to slip into the barracks after lights. They heard a commotion and literally stumbled across her.’

‘Robbery? She’d have likely been paid her wages, finishing up on Friday?’

‘Maybe. She had no money on her when she was got to the hospital. No bag or anything. But it was so damned dark her things could be anywhere around the laneway.’

‘What’re the injuries?’

‘No sexual attack, though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the motive. Her skull is badly fractured on the right side. Nose broken. Cheek-bone broken on the other side. Doctor reckons about six teeth splintered. Mouth and lips lacerated. There’s what looks like a bad rope burn or something such on the neck. Lots of scratches and cuts. It looks as if she got away into the brambles and then crawled out again. The doctor says she was beaten with a blunt weapon, maybe a heavy bar or a club of some kind. She’s lost a lot of blood.’

‘Is she conscious? Could she tell you anything?’

‘Not a lot that’s coherent. They put her under with a good dose of laudanum. The doctor was afraid that her heart would fail. Johnny took a note of what little she did say.’

Vizzard shrugged. ‘She just said “dark”, “noise” and then “the pain, the pain”. Then she said, “Me uniform’s ruined.” But she won’t be going waitressing again for a long time.’

Swallow drew up a chair.

‘She might have been doing a bit of amateur whoring on the side? Maybe the two soldiers were doing business in the laneway with her? What did they have they to say?’

Mossop grimaced.

‘That was my first thought too. But I don’t think so. They were well soused after a night in McCabe’s tavern. One of them ran out onto the Rathmines Road, roaring for a bobby. There was a beat man, Jack Caviston, at Leinster Road. He judged that the young fella was hysterical. If they’d done it, they wouldn’t have come running for a polisman.’

Swallow knew Caviston. A senior man. Reliable. He silently acknowledged Mossop’s logic.

‘I interviewed them separately,’ Mossop continued. ‘Two young fellas from Yorkshire. They tell the same story: drinking late in the town, they decided to try to slip back to barracks over the back wall. It’s just fifty yards across the field from the end of Blackberry Lane. But I’ve had them jugged in separate cells by their CO in the barracks. Drunkenness, indiscipline, absent without leave. He can hold them as long as we need.’

‘Did they see anyone in the lane?’

‘It was so damned foggy they could hardly see each other. They say they heard the girl scream two or three times, and they say they heard someone running. But they saw nothing. Like I said, one of them literally stumbled over the poor girl.’

‘Who got her to hospital?’

‘Caviston sent one of the young lads to hail a cab at Portobello,’ Mossop resumed. ‘They had no idea who she was until two in the morning, when a young brother turned up at Rathmines Station to say his sister hadn’t come home. They sent him down to Baggot Street and he identified her to Jack Caviston. The mother came down too. We’ve got a couple of G-men there with her.’

‘And Caviston?’

‘He finished his shift at six.’

Swallow knew that with Pat Mossop he didn’t have to ask the next question, but he asked it anyway.

‘The scene’s preserved?’

‘Laneway’s closed off. They put up a barrier with two bobbies. It was too dark for a full search of the ground. The station sergeant at Rathmines says he’ll turn out half a dozen men when we want to start.’

In the day room below, Swallow could hear voices and movement as the day shift assembled. The Lower Castle Yard below the windows was filling with a thin morning light.

‘Good work,’ he nodded. ‘I’ll take the conference below and get out to Blackberry Lane myself for the search. Just sit in with me and brief the shift, then go on home and get some sleep. Come back when you’re rested.’

The crime conference was short. Mossop rehearsed what was known about the attack at Blackberry Lane. The rest of the night’s business was routine. Two housebreakings in Kingstown. Some broken windows along Dorset Street. An assault on a publican in Ringsend. Details of each incident would be transmitted after the conference to all DMP stations through the ABC telegraph system. Uniformed men across the city would be on the alert for anything they might encounter that could be related to any of the reported incidents.

‘I’m going out to direct the search at Blackberry Lane,’ Swallow announced when Mossop had finished. I want Mick Feore with me as book man and Martin Shanahan as assistant. Send to Kevin Street for Sergeant Doolan to join us out there. We’ll do a conference here at four o’clock.’

Mick Feore was an experienced crime detective who had worked with Swallow as far back as the Phoenix Park murders in 1882. Martin Shanahan had been transferred from uniform duties to assist them. They were part of the team assembled by the legendary Inspector John Mallon that brought five members of the ‘Invincibles’ to the gallows after the assassinations of Britain’s two most senior civil servants.

The role of book man was key in any serious crime investigation. He had to be meticulous in recording every scrap of information. He had to cherish every detail. And he had to have the gift of being able to make connections between what could seem to be unrelated facts or events. Mick Feore was the best book man in G-Division after Pat Mossop, Swallow reckoned. Shanahan was without ambition, but worked conscientiously and loyally under direction.

Stephen Doolan was a veteran of twenty years in service, and the best search organiser Swallow knew in the force. He was in A-Division, based at Kevin Street, but what the G-Division detectives at Exchange Court wanted by way of resources they invariably got.

There was noisy talk as the G-men started to disperse. Swallow noticed a middle-aged constable at the door of the room. He recognised Jack Caviston, the Rathmines beat man who had been called by the young soldiers when Alice Flannery had been found. Swallow surmised that he had slipped into the day room while the conference was in progress.

Caviston saluted. ‘Mornin’, sir.’

‘Bad business you had earlier,’ Swallow said. He could see that the man was exhausted. ‘I thought you’d finished your shift.’

‘I did, sir,’ Caviston seemed uneasy. ‘I was on my way home when I remembered somethin’ strange from the scene. In all that was goin’ on I didn’t say it to Sergeant Mossop or Johnny Vizzard.’ He hesitated. ‘So I thought I’d come back in, knowin’ you’d be doin’ the conference.’

‘Go on,’ Swallow said.

‘It mightn’t be anythin’ at all, but it was somethin’ I think the girl said when I got up to the laneway. The two young lads were strikin’ lucifers to give a bit o’ light, so I could see she was in a terrible state, covered in blood. I asked her what her name was, but she didn’t answer. I said “Who done this, love?” Then she started to shake and a couple of words came out.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said, “I didn’t.” She repeated it. “I didn’t.” That’s what she said, sir.’

TWO

Swallow did not spend much time thinking about the mysteries of religion. But as a Roman Catholic policeman in a force where his co-religionists rarely made it to senior rank, he thought a lot about its influence. Had he been born into the Protestant faith, he reckoned, he would have enrolled in the Trinity College medical school rather than that of the Catholic University on Cecilia Street. Cecilia Street was his undoing. It all seemed a long time ago now, before he had joined the police.

Trinity medicals were no saints. Their exploits in taverns across the city and in particular in the red-light district around Montgomery Street—‘Monto’, to knowledgeable Dubliners—were notorious. But perhaps, he reasoned, had he enrolled to study among those of a different religious background he might have been more concerned to put up a show of better behaviour. He might have been careful, more cautious.

He might not so readily have succumbed to the delights of the alehouses, as he did, within days of enrolment in Cecilia Street. His fellow students there were not angels either, but most of them seemed to know when to stop carousing and start putting in the bookwork that was necessary to pass their examinations.

Swallow’s inability to identify that point had cost him his hoped-for medical career. And his three years of roistering dissipated the hard-earned money his parents had put aside for it. If blasting away their savings was bad, then shattering their hopes and ambitions was infinitely worse. When his father succumbed to a brain haemorrhage while working in the family bar at Suncroft in rural Kildare on an August evening, Swallow knew that his child’s betrayal, as he saw it, had played some part in it.

It had taken years for his mother to forgive him. She had been if anything more ambitious than her husband for her only son. An uneasy peace had eventually been brokered by his younger sister, Harriet, but the bond between mother and son was never the same again. Had he offered to return to Suncroft to help her run the business it might have laid the foundations for a fuller reconciliation, but it was not something that either of them wanted.

He saw himself with three choices after repeatedly failing his examinations: America, Australia or the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Somewhat to his surprise, he managed to control his drinking in order to complete the police educational examination. And he succeeded in masking his drinking habits from the examining surgeon at the Kevin Street depot. His drinking was long in check. He could take alcohol, often quite a lot of it, but it did not control him as before. He took drink—and he liked having it, mellow Tullamore whiskey, porter from Guinness’s, good red wine from France—but drink did not take him.

Yet he was under no illusions about his prospects. The bulk of the DMP’s rank and file were Roman Catholics. They were country lads, sons of farmers, tradesmen or, as in his own case, small publicans or shopkeepers. Almost all of the top ranks of the force were preserved for Protestants and Freemasons. In the uniformed ranks, he might get to be a sergeant or inspector at best. When he transferred to G-Division he knew his chances of advancement were reduced further, although paradoxically the chief superintendent of G-Division, John Mallon, was a Roman Catholic. But Mallon, the son of a small Catholic farmer from near Crossmaglen in County Armagh, with an outstandingly successful record in the service of the Crown, was the exception that proved the rule. One or two Catholics had gone through to superintendent rank in the aftermath of the 1867 Fenian rising when the authorities came to a greater appreciation of the loyalty of the Irish police forces. But the majority of those in command of the divisions were members of the Church of Ireland.

Sometimes Swallow thought he had been born too soon. The late Cardinal Cullen, Catholic Primate of All Ireland, had denounced the new ‘Queen’s Colleges’, established in 1850, as ‘Godless institutions’, so the Englishman John Henry Cardinal Newman established the new ‘Catholic University’ in Dublin. It had proven itself an effective vehicle for the social and economic advancement of young men whose faith or political inclinations were incompatible with the Protestant ethos at Trinity College. Catholics were beginning to make it to the higher levels in business and in the professions. There were even a few Catholic judges now. And the Catholic hierarchy was finding new ways of demonstrating its growing power, even with the country gripped in political turmoil and violence.

Little more than a generation after Daniel O’Connell had secured emancipation, and with the Great Famine within living memory, the Catholic bishops were putting up cathedral-scale buildings, right in the faces of the Protestant classes that still led commerce, business and the administration.

He had spent some time in the summer trying to do a panoramic sketch of the city skyline, using the Castle’s Bedford Tower as a viewing point. It had been a not-very-successful project for the course he attended weekly at the Municipal School of Art. It dawned on him that outside the immediate city centre all the significant landmarks on both sides of the river were new Roman Catholic domes and spires. The great copper dome of the Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, dominated the Rathmines Road. Its Corinthian columns and high pediment, studded with golden lettering and topped with statues of Mary, St Patrick and St Laurence O’Toole, loomed out onto the thoroughfare. It embodied the new confidence and wealth of middle-class, Catholic Ireland.

The magnificence of the church contrasted sharply with the living conditions of its parishioners in Blackberry Lane, just 100 paces away from its gates, facing onto the Rathmines Road. As the police side-car came to the scene, Swallow tried to visualise the widow Flannery and her young daughter cleaning and polishing the altar rails and the pews under the magnificent dome. When he and Mick Feore descended from the side-car, the morning light had strengthened to show the open sewer running down the middle of the lane and the rotten green of the cottages’ thatched roofs. Somewhere on the air he got the scent of animal waste. Not the customary smell of horse droppings on city streets. More pungent. Pigs, he guessed. He was grateful for the coldness of the morning. In any warmth the stench would be unbearable.

A second open car clattered up behind them, the horse snorting and steaming from its exertions. It was the police photographic technician with his assistant. The two men climbed down from the car and started to lift the cumbersome camera equipment to the ground.

The uniformed sergeant guarding the crime scene saluted and led him into the laneway. Swallow’s first thought was to reprimand him. G-men were never saluted in public as a precaution against identification. But he let it pass. The man had probably been there all night.

‘Just a few steps up here, sir.’

He gestured to the ground. The bloodstains were dark brown, almost dry in the morning air. The muddy ground showed a jigsaw of footprints. Three, maybe four men’s boots or shoes, and the distinctive smaller imprints probably made by the victim. To his right Swallow could see an indentation in the brambles. A little farther on, he saw the gate leading to the meadow. The metal bolt was undone. Beyond the gate the grass was white with hoar frost.

‘Mornin’, Joe. Mornin’, Mick.’

Sergeant Stephen Doolan came up the lane followed by half a dozen E-Division constables from Rathmines. Each man was equipped with a long, wooden-shafted pike. Swallow surmised the implements were army issue from the cavalry barracks.

He nodded.

‘You know the story here, Stephen?’

Doolan nodded. ‘Yes, I caught up with it on the routes before I left Kevin Street.’

The ‘routes’, or ‘routines’, were the crime reports that circulated to all city police stations on the ABC telegraph from DMP headquarters in the Castle’s Lower Yard.

‘That’s where he waited.’ Swallow pointed to the gate. ‘Probably got away through the field when the two soldier-boys arrived. So when you’ve done the laneway you’ll have to search the field too, end to end. There’s no winter growth so the grass is short. If he’s left anything to be found it won’t be difficult.’

Doolan deployed his men on both sides of the laneway, starting from the intersection with the main roadway. They moved slowly along the poor thoroughfare, eyes scanning the grass and mud, probing the brambles with their long pikes. Within less than a minute a searcher had located a small handbag off the track beside the gate. The cheap imitation velvet was damp, but the metal clasp was secure. When Doolan opened it he counted five shilling coins—a waitress’s Friday pay.

‘Have a look at this, skipper.’

A constable by the gate tapped with his foot at a heavy wooden stake lying in the grass. Measuring perhaps four feet and sharpened at one end, it might have come from a farm fence or enclosure. Half of its length was spattered with darkened blood.

‘Don’t touch it until the photographic technician has taken pictures,’ Doolan ordered. ‘We’ll want pictures of the lane itself, the gateway and those footprints too.’

He turned to Feore.

‘Get the plaster kit from the car. I want casts of all the footmarks once the photographs are taken.’

The scene was telling Swallow little so far. The assailant might have known the gateway to the meadow as a place of concealment. Or he might have just come upon it. The bloodied stake might have been brought to the scene as a weapon, or it might simply have been a convenience. The fact that the girl’s bag and her wages were still at the scene suggested that the motive was not robbery. But equally it was possible that the attacker had been unable to locate them in the dark.

The photographer had got his tripod up and was busy at his work when a third open car drew to a halt at the end of the laneway. The constable-driver came down from his seat to assist the uniformed passenger to the ground. It was ‘Duck’ Boyle, Swallow’s former superior at Exchange Court, lately promoted to superintendent and placed in command of the E-Division. ‘Duck’ Boyle’s generously cut uniform with its silver braid was moderately effective in disguising its wearer’s advanced corpulence, but it could not remedy the distinctive waddle that had earned him his nickname among his former colleagues at G-Division.

Regulations required that the divisional superintendent should attend personally at the scenes of serious crimes. Swallow was not surprised by Boyle’s arrival, but he knew from the expression on the fat superintendent’s face that this was more than a routine compliance with regulation.

‘Good mornin’, Inspector Swalla’. ’ Boyle greeted him formally for the benefit of the constables and sergeants gathered around. He took Swallow conspiratorially by the arm and walked him a few paces to the edge of the lane. ‘I’m afraid that things have taken a turn for the worse,’ Boyle intoned solemnly. ‘The victim o’ this outrage, Miss Alice Flannery, died at the Baggot Street Hospital at 9.15 this mornin’. Ye’re dealin’ now with a murder.’