The Eloquence of the Dead
Conor Brady
Acknowledgements
After learning of Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow’s investigations in A June of Ordinary Murders, innumerable friends and readers came forward with ideas about how a policeman’s conflicted role in 1880s Dublin might be further developed. Indeed, there were suggestions as to how he might secure his coveted promotion. There was even advice about his love life.
Some of this has made its way into The Eloquence of the Dead. I am very thankful. And I am thankful to everyone who has found Swallow’s adventures and vicissitudes sufficiently engaging to have come back to read more.
I am grateful again to Eoin Purcell and the team at New Island Books for their encouragement and enthusiasm. Justin Corfield has been a challenging and meticulous editor. Who else would have known that from 1884, the London Underground Station at Tower Hill wasn’t actually called Tower Hill? Gráinne Killeen did tremendous work on publicity for A June of Ordinary Murders and I know she has similar plans for Joe Swallow’s second flight.
I would also like to acknowledge the many wonderful organisers and enthusiasts behind the arts and literary events that now so enrich life around Ireland. I was flattered and delighted to have been invited to so many of these over the past 18 months to read or to talk about Joe Swallow and the murky nineteenth-century world of Dublin Castle’s G-Division.
Finally, I would like as ever to acknowledge the love and forbearance of my family while I have been time-travelling back to Victorian Dublin. Their patience and support have been untiring, and I am both fortunate and thankful.
Conor Brady
Dublin
September 2013
Epilogue
The pawn shop on the corner of Lamb Alley and Cornmarket remained closed. The windows at street level had been boarded up after a couple had been broken by late-night revellers. The constable who had been on special post there since the murder had been reallocated to beat duties.
There was word that a butcher from The Coombe was interested in putting in a new shop when the courts would have wound up the estate of the late Ambrose Pollock. For the present, though, the pawn shop remained eerily vacant, the boarded windows staring sightlessly at the twin churches of St Audeon across the street.
Swallow finished in Exchange Court just after 9 o’clock. He exited the detective office and turned past the City Hall for Castle Street. It was cold and dark. Soon it would be November.
Earlier, ‘Duck’ Boyle had visited him at the crime sergeants’ office.
‘Me last day here, Swalla’. I kem to shake yer hand and wish ye well before I go.’
Boyle had assembled his books and personal files in two large bundles that he placed on the desk beside the main door.
‘I’m startin’ in Rathmines on Monday. Ye’ll be very welcome anytime yer in th’area. Of course, I’ll be a busy man out there.’
Swallow answered with calculated ambiguity.
‘Oh, as ever.’
‘Everythin’s in order in me own office. All reports up to date.’
He dropped a brown envelope on the desk in front of Swallow.
‘You might want to have a squint at that yerself. The top copy’s gone to the chief. But I slipped in an extra carbon so that copy you have there doesn’t exist… officially, that is.’
Swallow reached out for the envelope.
‘Ah, don’t bother readin’ it till I’m gone,’ Boyle said. ‘It’s th’ official report into that shootin’ over at Greenberg’s. The conclusion is that th’ officer in question acted properly. No case t’answer. In fact, I’m sayin’ he should be commended.’
Swallow offered to help him carry the books and files to the main steps, where an open car waited.
Boyle stepped up to the car.
‘An’ of course, I hear the word is that yer goin’ to have a bit o’ good news yerself soon. “Detective Inspector Joseph Swalla”. It has a good ring to it.’
When Boyle had departed, Swallow returned to the office and closed down his own paperwork. Exchange Court would not be greatly diminished in its operational capacities by the departure of ‘Duck’ Boyle.
He reached the corner of Werburgh Street, where he would generally turn to make for Heytesbury Street and his rented house. On this day, though, he crossed the street under the shadow of Christ Church. He made his way along High Street and Cornmarket. The change of direction had been instinctive rather than rational. He was unsure what he was going to do. He refused even to think about it. After St Audeon’s, he quickened his pace.
Someone said his name and bade him good night on Thomas Street. He recognised the beard and then the brown Franciscan habit.
‘And where might you be going at this hour of the night, Sergeant?’ Friar Lawrence asked. The tone was genial, solicitous.
‘To tell you the truth, Father, I’m not entirely sure.’
The elderly friar chuckled.
‘Ah, I’d say you’re going in the right direction anyway.’
He pushed through the frosted glass doors of Grant’s, breathing in the warm, smoky air of the select bar. The house was busy. There was noisy conversation and laughter coming from the snugs. A junior barman that he did not recognise was serving from behind the counter. At the end of the bar, Maria was talking to Tom, the senior man. He walked over to her.
Tom tactfully stepped away and busied himself rearranging glasses on the worktop behind the bar.
At first, Maria had looked startled. Then she smiled cautiously.
‘Joe. It’s a surprise to see you here… It’s a nice surprise… that’s what I mean.’
‘It’s nice to be here too.’
‘Will you have… something?’
‘No thanks… not here… not in the bar, that is. But you said if I ever needed supper or a late meal….’
‘Why yes, would you like to come up to the parlour?’
They made for the stairs that led to the first floor. Rain had started to spatter against the windows fronting onto Thomas Street. He breathed in the familiar scents of wood and furniture polish, cooking from Carrie’s kitchen, wine and porter and turf fires.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I’d like that very much.’
-The End-
Prologue
In the morning, she knew, the officials and the clerks would come. They would arrive at the house, perched on their rattling traps and half-bred horses. In her mind’s eye she could see them, advancing past the now abandoned gate lodge and along the avenue.
They would gather in typical disorder around the sweep of the granite steps outside. The bolder ones would stare insolently through the windows. Some of them would already show the signs of drink.
There would be rain. She had known since girlhood how to interpret every combination of cloud and wind and light that came across the mountains from the west to Mount Gessel.
She could sense it with the softening of the air, a faint tang of salt and oil and dampness. It would be the penetrating, grey rain that could roll in off the Atlantic in any season and settle on the Galway countryside like a blanket.
They would mill about the forecourt, stoat-like, strutting their little authority. They would affect politeness, deference. They would nod obsequiously, as they had to generations of Gessels. They would call her ‘Yer Ladyship,’ or ‘Lady Margaret,’ as in the past, but now in a tone that conveyed their new confidence and their contempt.
Some of the tenants, impatient to be masters of their acres, would probably come too, muttering in their Gaelic, cursing her and her kind. And it would be made legal. She would be gone. The deeds of transfer were drawn up. The last boundary maps were signed off. The cheque was in the solicitor’s office in the town.
It was her late husband’s cousin, Richard Gessel, who had finally persuaded her to get out. Sir Richard was a rising star, she had been told, in Prime Minister Salisbury’s staff, and he had the inside track on things.
‘Lord Salisbury’s government are agreed that the way to pacify Ireland is to give it back to the Irish, field by field, farm by farm,’ he had told her when he visited Mount Gessel in the springtime.
‘If you sign up early you’ll very likely get the best price. And if we’re put out of government, a new administration might not be as generous to the Irish landlords,’ he warned.
She would step out the front door at 10 o’clock, and she would surrender the key to the solicitor’s clerk. At precisely the same hour, in the town, another clerk would cross the street from the lawyer’s office and deposit the government cheque with the local agent of the Bank of Ireland. In two days, the money would be safely in her account in London.
Christ, she would be glad to be out of it.
If the early generations of Gessels lived well out of the place, she had seen little of it. After her husband’s death, all she could remember was misery, bills, pressure from creditors and battles with rot and damp to keep the house from falling down.
Nobody could say that she had not done her bit. Or that the Gessels had been bad landlords. Forty years ago, when the Great Famine, as they were now calling it in the newspapers, devastated the countryside, did they not do their best for the people? A great cauldron of soup was made ready every day in the yard. She had helped prepare it herself, and taken charge of its distribution to the starving, silent wretches who staggered in from the fields and the roadways to have its nourishment.
They had dropped some rents in the bad years when others had refused to do so. In Mayo and Roscommon, she knew, some landlords had actually raised them. In the end, of course, when there were no rents coming in, there had to be evictions. Most of the families had gone to America, as far as she knew. No doubt, they were better off there.
It would be a relief to have money; to be able to pay her way; to meet old friends without worrying about the cost of lunch; to be able to travel, perhaps to Switzerland, for sun or to take the mountain air; to end her time, perhaps in a good hotel on the Sussex Coast or even in the south of France.
She walked through the rooms for what would be the last time. Some of the best furniture had been sold to stave off creditors, but there were still a few good paintings in the gallery. Most of the silver, marked with the Gessel family arms, was still in the dining-room. There were the display cases of ancient coins brought back from Italy and Greece by her late husband’s grand uncle. Now these would go too, to be auctioned or sold by the government agent before the house was boarded up or torn down.
Margaret Gessel was beyond caring.
Six months ago, the Land Leaguers or some of their friends had burned the stables. The screaming of the horses as they perished in their stalls had pierced the granite walls of the house. The following night, the constables on protection duty outside had shot and wounded two locals – would-be incendiaries, they said – at the back of the house.
The District Inspector implored her to go to Galway to stay at a hotel for a while in order to let things settle. He had instructions from his superiors, who had in turn been contacted by Sir Richard at the Prime Minister’s office in London, to afford her maximum protection. But, he explained, there was only so much he could do with the limited manpower at his disposal.
When a fellow landowner told her in the hotel dining-room that he was going to take up the scheme put forward by Lord Salisbury’s government, she decided it was time to follow Richard’s advice. The next day, she ordered her solicitor to negotiate a deal for the sale of Mount Gessel under the new tenant-purchase programme.
She went into the empty ballroom. One of the few happy memories she had of the house was of parties here. Now there were only ghosts. The chandeliers were long gone; the mirrors carried off to be auctioned. The fire mantle of polished Carrara marble was blocked with timber against the winter draughts.
She crossed to one of the bay windows and drew down the steel bar from the heavy wooden shutters. The first of the rain was falling, light drops against the glass, but there was sufficient moonlight to see the sweep of the estate across the fields.
Out there on the open sward, Gessel ancestors had drilled their militiamen before leading them off to fight Bonaparte, in Spain and at Waterloo. In happier times, the East Galway hunt would meet on the forecourt between the house and the meadow. For a moment, she believed she could still hear the jingle of harness, laughter, the yelping of the hounds as they moved out along the avenue.
She could make out the dim sheen of the lake, where generations of Gessel children had skated on the winter ice or swum in the heat of summer. She followed the curve of the avenue along which her husband had brought her as a young bride to become the new – and the last – mistress of the house. He had died young, a long time ago. Nobody around the district seemed to remember him any more. Sometimes now she even had difficulty in trying to recall his face.
It was more than 20 years since their son, the only child of their union, had driven away down the same avenue. She could see the boy still, turning to wave as he left for India, travelling to a forgotten war from which he never returned.
Beyond the boundary wall, towards the village, she could see the faint outline of the parish church that the Gessel family had endowed after they were granted the land by William and Mary almost two centuries ago.
She could still hear the drone of successive preachers as she sat, bored, in the front pew, reading and rereading the memorial plaques on the walls, proclaiming the gallantry of long dead Gessel soldiers and the virtues of their mothers, wives and sisters.
The ground over there by the churchyard was latticed with Gessel bones; fathers, mothers, soldiers, farmers, maiden aunts and strange uncles, babies that failed to thrive, grandparents who lived to ripe old age, children who fell victim to mishap or disease, young wives who died in childbirth.
To hell with them all, she thought bitterly. They all had their time, and they were better times than hers. She was leaving them to a country gone to savagery and disorder, where property could neither be maintained nor made safe, where demagogues and agitators ruled public life, encouraged by a subversive press and tolerated by a spineless government.
Now the rain was spattering on the window, obscuring any view. To hell with them, to hell with the crumbling house, the interminably demanding land, the devious, brutal people, the whole cursed place. She had held on at Mount Gessel for longer than anyone could have reasonably demanded. Everyone of substance, everyone she knew, from the Shannon to the sea, was cutting their losses and getting out.
To hell with Ireland.
THE ELOQUENCE OF THE DEAD
First published 2013
by New Island
2 Brookside
Dundrum Road
Dublin 14
www.newisland.ie
Copyright © Conor Brady, 2013
The author has asserted his moral rights.
PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-299-7
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-300-0
MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84840-301-7
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.
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 29TH, 1887
ONE
News of the murder of Ambrose Pollock at his pawn shop on Lamb Alley travelled swiftly through the Liberties.
His killing especially alarmed the shopkeepers and dealers. But there was nobody in Dublin of whom it could be said that they mourned him. And if ever he had a friend or anyone to speak warmly of him, nobody could remember who that might have been.
It was the brutal and mysterious circumstances in which he died that impacted mostly on the public consciousness, causing fear and anxiety to spread abroad in the city over the dry, shortening days of late September.
The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir David Harrel, did not attempt to deny that the murder of the pawnbroker and furniture dealer should have come to light sooner.
When the Assistant Under-Secretary for Security at the Castle, Howard Smith Berry, sought an explanation for the delay, the head of the detective office at Exchange Court, John Mallon, insisted that there had been nothing in the intelligence reports to suggest the imminence of any unusual criminal activity.
But Smith Berry’s personal security advisor, Major Nigel Kelly, was not persuaded. The word around the Castle was that the irascible ex-soldier from Belfast had given warnings about the laxity of the police in general, and the detective branch in particular.
Earlier, when the city Medical Examiner, Dr Harry Lafeyre, was called up to examine the body, its state of decomposition told him that the man had been dead for many days.
That the crime of murder could remain so long undetected on the flank of the Liberties, a stone’s throw from gates of Dublin Castle itself, was a serious failure of policing at a time when the administration desperately needed to show that it had the upper hand against crime and disorder.
The significance of various recent occurrences at Pollock’s only became apparent after Sergeant Stephen Doolan from Kevin Street police station had forced the back door of the shop earlier that morning.
The pawn shop and furniture dealer’s frontage faced across Cornmarket to the two churches, located side by side, both named in honour of St Audoen.
Dubliners were untroubled by this oddity of double nomenclature. One was Roman Catholic. The other, the older, was Church of Ireland. It was only fair, citizens argued reasonably, for both religious traditions to keep a partial claim on the peripatetic little Norman saint who had protected the city’s walls since the reign of King John.
Neighbours and customers reckoned that Ambrose Pollock was probably 60. His sister Phoebe with whom he operated the business was younger, perhaps 40. One side of the premises was occupied by a warehouse in which were stored the furniture that Ambrose bought and sold. In the trade, it was said that anything good that came into Pollock’s was sold on to the more lucrative London markets.
Brother and sister lived on two floors above the pawn shop. The greater volume of Pollock’s pawn business was drawn from the maze of poor streets, courts and alleys that stretched away towards The Coombe and the great, sprawling workhouse known as the South Dublin Union. But with the reputation of never refusing to make an offer on goods, however little that offer might be, it drew trade from across most of the poor, miserable areas of the city.
Phoebe dealt with customers in the pawn shop from behind a brass grille, while Ambrose monitored transactions though a half-frosted window from the back office. If he thought that she required direction on the price of any item brought in for pawn, he would rap sharply on the glass, then she would leave the counter and retreat to the back office to have his decision. It was Ambrose who determined charges, values and prices.
A grimy window with three pawnbroker’s spheres suspended overhead advertised Pollock’s to those with business on the main thoroughfare. But the entrance to the shop was around the corner on Lamb Alley.
Thus, while the pawn shop had a high visibility on the bustling commercial street, the entrance on the laneway enabled customers to come and go discreetly.
This was supposed to place a particular obligation upon patrolling constables of the A-Division. Officers walking the beats that touched on Cornmarket or High Street were to proceed through Lamb Alley to satisfy themselves that the premises of the pawnbrokers was secure. They were to note any unusual persons that might be encountered in the vicinity and to record anything that was irregular.
It was to emerge in the aftermath of Ambrose Pollock’s murder that these requirements had been allowed to fall into desuetude. Careless beat men no longer diverted into the alley, preferring to shorten their tour by continuing directly through Cornmarket. In reality, the premises were rarely checked. No intelligence was gathered on persons coming to it or going from it. Had it been otherwise, it is likely that the pawnbroker’s brutal murder would have been discovered more quickly.
A few days earlier, a young constable had just ascended the Forty Steps from the Liffey embankment to the curtilage wall of the older St Audoen’s. As he reached the street, he saw a closed car turning into Lamb Alley. It bore the trade livery of Findlater’s, Dublin’s most select grocers and wine merchants.
The policeman’s curiosity was aroused. None of the residents of Lamb Alley or its environs would be in the way of ordering their provisions from Findlater’s.
He crossed High Street, and turned into the alley. The deliveryman had drawn his vehicle to a halt outside the pawn shop entrance. The constable saw the driver’s helper open the doors of the car and drag an open basket to the tailboard. He balanced it briefly to adjust his grip and then hauled it through Pollock’s door.
The constable stepped across the alley and grinned up at the driver.
‘Things must be bad when the gentry are poppin’ their groceries into the pawn shop.’
The man laughed.
‘Ah, you’ve the wrong end of it. It’s an order from the woman of the house. Mind you, she must be plannin’ a good dinner and a fair sup of refreshment too.’
He winked, and raised his hand to his mouth, mimicking a drinking gesture.
The helper exited the shop and resumed his seat on the car. The deliveryman flicked the reins and moved off.
The policeman knew that Phoebe Pollock was not a woman who would send for expensive food and drink to be delivered to her door. Perhaps it was stolen property. Perhaps he had let the Findlater’s car depart too quickly. He pushed Pollock’s door and stepped into the shop.
Phoebe sat behind the counter as usual.
‘Is everythin’ all right, Ma’am?’
Phoebe Pollock smiled. The constable thought that when she smiled he could see the remnants of a once attractive woman. Behind her, in the back office, he could see her brother’s head and shoulders outlined through the frosted glass.
‘Why wouldn’t it be, Constable?’
‘I saw some unusual deliveries just comin’ in the door. You were expectin’ them?’
‘That was just some groceries I needed.’ She gestured airily at the shelves and display cabinets around her. ‘Everything here is grand, as you can see for yourself.’
The policeman returned to his beat. Why should he worry if people decided to spend their money in shops that charged double the prices they might pay in their own neighbourhood?
Later, at the station canteen, he joked about the incident. But he did not report it in the occurrence book. It was a negligence that was to cost him a reprimand and a deduction from pay.
On the following Wednesday, just before midnight, another more experienced beat officer had an unusual encounter a short distance from the pawn shop.
Some policemen disliked the beat section past the gates of old St Audeon’s. It was said that the place was haunted by a long-dead vicar whose malevolent ghost disliked human company. It was also a favourite dumping spot for nightsoil from the nearby tenements, where a dry privy might be shared by up to 100 people. The shit stank in the summer, and oozed across the pavement in the wet of winter.
So the constable had crossed High Street to take up an observation point in a shop door.
A slight, respectably dressed woman was crossing the street, picking her way over the cobbles. Even allowing for the uneven surface, her step seemed unsteady.
When she reached the pavement, he recognised Phoebe Pollock. She seemed to sway slightly on her feet as he approached.
‘Good night, Miss Pollock.’
In the street light, he could see that she was focusing with difficulty. She made a little shuffling step and put one hand out to the lamppost for support. The constable realised that Phoebe Pollock was drunk.
‘The footpath there is terrible broken and uneven,’ he said tactfully. ‘You’ll be makin’ for home, Miss. Sure, I’ll walk down that way with you.’
She reeked of alcohol, but she produced a key from her bag and after some fumbling managed to find the keyhole. She muttered a thank you and made her way inside. The policeman retreated to the corner of Lamb Alley, and watched the house until he saw a faint glow illuminate one of the upper rooms.
Later, he entered the incident in the occurrence book, noting Phoebe Pollock’s name and address and the time of their encounter.
Sergeant Stephen Doolan saw the entry the following morning when he went through the night patrol reports in the sergeants’ office. He crossed the corridor to the day room, where the morning shift of constables was preparing to parade.
‘Who’s on the first beat through High Street and Cornmarket?’
‘That’s me, Skipper,’ a constable put his hand up. ‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Get along up to Pollock’s. As soon as they open the door, go in and have a word to make sure everything is all right. One of the lads on the night shift found Phoebe Pollock the worse for wear out on the street at midnight.’
Every policeman knew the Pollock’s reputation as eccentrics who kept to themselves, but some older people in the district recalled when Phoebe was a pretty young woman, full of life, with many friends in the neighbouring houses and streets of Dublin’s Liberties.
There were chuckles and hoots across the parade room.
‘Jesus, she must have robbed the shop to be out spendin’ money on drink.’
‘Ould Ambrose wouldn’t approve. That fella has his first communion money – if he ever made a first communion.’
‘Sure them two is as tight as a frog’s hole. And that’s watertight.’
Later, the constable positioned himself at the junction of Lamb Alley and Cornmarket. Ordinarily, he knew, the shop would open between 9 o’clock and 9.30. But the hour came and went. At 10 o’clock, when the officer tried the door, he found it still locked. He walked back to peer through the window facing Cornmarket, but he could see no movement inside. At 10.30, when there was still no sign of life, he decided it was time to report to Kevin Street.
Twenty minutes later, Doolan took two men in from their beats and borrowed a ladder and a crowbar from the hardware shop on High Street. One of the beat men leaned the ladder against the back wall of Pollock’s. With an agility that belied his bulk, the bearded sergeant climbed over and dropped down into the small yard. The constable followed.
When the back door resisted the impact of their combined weight, Doolan jemmied the crowbar between the lock and the receiver, then he pulled hard on the metal bar. The wood splintered above and below the lock. They shouldered their way through.
They were hit by the unmistakable, cloying smell of death. Doolan drew a handkerchief from his pocket and clamped it across his mouth and nose.
It was only a few paces to the shop floor. There was no sign of Phoebe Pollock, but Doolan noticed that the high stool on which she was usually perched was now lying sideways on the floor.
His square of flannel did nothing to alleviate the smell. As he crossed to the counter with its brass railing, he could see Ambrose Pollock’s outline through the half-frosted glass window, seated as usual in the back office. The pawnbroker was in his customary chair with his back to the door, his head inclined at a slight angle towards the desk with its ledgers and account books.
But Ambrose Pollock was not at work. The back of his head was a dark mess. Shards of broken skull protruded through matted grey hair. When Doolan walked around the desk, he saw that the face and hands were a mottled black. A pool of crusted bodily fluid, agitated by the wriggling and heaving of white maggots, gathered where the dead man’s feet rested on the boards.
Doolan retreated across the shop to where the door exited to Lamb Alley and flung it open. He half-gagged, drawing the clean, fresh air from the street deep into his lungs.
The startled constable waiting in the alley placed a concerned hand on the senior man’s heaving shoulder.
‘Are y’all right, Sergeant? What’s after happenin’?’
‘Go down to Exchange Court and tell them to have the G-men up here fast. And get them to send for Doctor Lafeyre. There’s been murder done.’
TWO
Joe Swallow deeply resented the fact that he had to wheel and deal over the duty rosters to get the free time for his painting class.
Regulations stipulated that leave was ‘subject to the exigencies of the service.’ With the G-Division fully stretched in surveillance and protection duties since Queen Victoria’s jubilee in the summer, there was little or no flexibility in the application of the rules.
The jubilee had passed off without serious incident, in spite of rumours and threats. It had been all that the authorities had wished it to be. A celebration of Britain’s might and majesty, of industry and progress, of military power and civic enlightement. A full one quarter of the globe was marked out in red, ruled over now for half a century by this small, rather plump little woman as Queen and Empress.
Ireland, however, remained the troublesome child of the worldwide British family. Even though the government had pumped money into schools, infirmaries, harbours and roads in the aftermath of the famine, the Irish were not content. The tenants on the farms, led by the one-armed agitator, Michael Davitt, were making impossible demands. Reduced rents, security of tenure and now outright ownership of the land. Each night brought reports of burnings, shootings and attacks from over the country. Meanwhile, the charismatic Charles Stewart Parnell was driving the campaign for Irish Home Rule, effectively aiming to separate Ireland from the Kingdom.
The police had intelligence about dynamiters and assassins, poised to strike as the actual jubilee celebrations took place in June. But a combination of harassment and skilful use of the Coercion Act by the police forces ensured that Dublin remained a relatively safe enclave in a country racked by agitation.
The plainclothes elite of the Dublin Metropolitan Police were housed at Exchange Court, huddled in against the dark, northern flank of Dublin Castle. The G-men dealt with both ‘special’ or political crime and ‘ordinary’ crime. They provided armed protection for the key officials in the Castle administration, the Chief Secretary, the Under-Secretary and their senior aides. They were also the administration’s eyes and ears, watching over the activities of the myriad groups and individuals across the city that might constitute a threat to security.
‘A half day to go to a feckin’ paintin’ class? Are ye serious, Swalla’?’
Detective Inspector Maurice ‘Duck’ Boyle was master of the Exchange Court rosters. Every week he contrived to skive a full day off police work proper, retreating to the warmth of the inspectors’ office to labour over the production of a duty timetable for the G-Division.
He threw his pencil on the desk in exasperation.
‘The city’s plagued be Fenians, land grabbers and dynamiters. There’s so-called intellectuals and fellas talkin’ t’each other in feckin’ Gaelic so we won’t understand them. There’s a new crowd of throublemakers now settin’ up some sort o’ spiritual debatin’ club.’
He leaned back in his chair and joined his hands across his corpulent belly.
‘Apart from that there’s the fuckin’ criminals. Scuts, gougers, knackers. The Vanucchi gang is out robbin’ houses in Donnybrook. And you want time to go to a paintin’ class. Jesus, how am I supposed to cover that?’
‘I don’t want you to cover anything,’ Swallow answered testily. ‘Just give me the bloody Thursday half day and put me down for the night shifts. It’s a fair bargain.’
It was more than fair, he knew. Every night G-Division was stretched, watching meetings and gatherings across the city. There was any number of extremists out to break with England. There were land leaguers trying to mobilise action against the big estates. Demagogues harangued crowds at street corners and in halls. American–Irish veterans from the Civil War delivered inflammatory orations at public meetings, promising dollars and guns.
‘You need all the men you can get for the night shifts,’ he told Boyle. ‘I’ll do more than my share if you fix me up for the half day like I’m asking.’
He ended up taking on five consecutive nights on the escort and protection detail.
Senior Castle officials were under twenty-four-hour guard since the assassination five years previously in the Phoenix Park of the Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish and the Under-Secretary, Henry Burke, by the Invincibles.
Swallow had been part of the investigating team that tracked down five of the extremists. He watched them hang at Kilmainham for their crime.
On a human level and as fellow Irishmen he felt pity for them, pathetic, misused pawns, sacrificed by men who were clever enough to keep their distance when there was killing to be done.
He understood their convoluted motivation too, after long nights of conversation with the condemned men in their cells at Kilmainham jail. There was no love of England in his childhood home in County Kildare. His own grandfather had joined the pikemen in the rising of ’98. But violence was futile, he believed. More had been achieved for Ireland by the pacifist emancipator, Daniel O’Connell, he reckoned, than by all the hotheads who had led others to their doom in half-cracked plots and rebellions.
The threat level against the senior figures in the administration was as high as ever. The Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had earned the soubriquet of ‘Bloody Balfour’ for his strong law-and-order policies. The new Under-Secretary, Joseph West Ridgeway, lately arrived from military command in Afghanistan, was equally deemed a hate figure by the extremists.
G-men were also assigned to provide protection for the Irish parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. Swallow disliked the detail, but it was a means to an end.
The early hours with Parnell usually passed quickly. The acclaimed leader of Irish nationalism would be on the move each evening, attending official functions and public events. But once he returned to his house at Fitzwilliam Square, the night was tedious. Swallow and the other armed detective on the detail kept watch through the long hours from the shadow of the park’s overhanging trees.
Officially, the G-men were on protection duty. But it was well understood that the detail was simultaneously a surveillance.
The G-men had learned to interpret the movements of the household, noting and recording arrivals and departures. Parnell’s political lieutenants often stayed late, and were sometimes accommodated in the house. So too, the G-men noted, did Mrs Katharine O’Shea, the wife of Captain Willie O’Shea, formerly Member of Parliament for Clare. The fact that Parnell and Mrs O’Shea had been lovers for several years was common knowledge among the G-men.
At the end of the shift, the details recorded in the G-men’s notebooks would be copied into the intelligence register at Exchange Court. Swallow was uncomfortable with the espionage. As an Irishman, he recognised Parnell as the greatest leader of his country since Daniel O’Connell, but it added to his tally of hours worked just the same.
It had been Lily Grant’s idea that he should enrol in the water-colours class that she ran at the Metropolitan School of Art on Thursdays when her teaching schedule at Alexandra College left her free.
Her suggestion had been floated in happier days; before Swallow’s relationship with her older sister, Maria Walsh, had cooled. He had since vacated his lodgings above Maria’s public house on Thomas Street where his romance with his one-time landlady had developed.
If anyone had asked him if he loved Maria he would have said yes. But even that surprised him still. Until he knew her, love had never really flowered in his badly ordered life, defined initially by excess of alcohol and later by job ambition. She had helped him to find self-respect, to accept that he was valued not just as an efficient police officer but as a man. But in spite of that, when the time had come to make a full commitment, he had baulked.
Yes, he could say he loved Maria. With equal certainty he could say that he disliked her sister.
The two sisters were as unalike in character as chalk and cheese. Grant’s public house had come down for three generations through the female line. As the elder daughter, it was natural that Maria would take over the business. But it also suited her sociable, outgoing temperament. Lily was born to thrive in the starchy, formal atmosphere of a college for young ladies.
‘You have a natural talent with the brush. But you’re still lost in some basic techniques, an amateur really,’ she had told him haughtily.
But her distain and his dislike for her did not deter him from enrolling in her class. At forty, he had been a late starter, even though he had been a constant sketcher in his childhood in rural Kildare. He had discovered pleasure and satisfaction in his new pastime while growing more disillusioned in his job.
He acknowledged grudgingly that she was right about his techniques. He was clumsy in mixing primary pigments, and he invariably saturated the paper when he tried to apply a wash.
The unhappy parting with Maria put further strain on relations between teacher and student. There was the added complication that Lily Grant was engaged to Swallow’s friend, Harry Lafeyre, the Dublin City Medical Examiner. He did not envy Harry Lafeyre the prospect of a life with Lily Grant.
With typical brashness, she had addressed the issues head-on.
‘The fact that you and Maria have gone your separate ways is no reason why you shouldn’t persevere with your painting,’ she told him. ‘If you enrol for my course, we’ll just have to rise above any unpleasantness that may persist.’
Shortly after Stephen Doolan had broken through the back door of the pawn shop on Lamb Alley to discover the body of Ambrose Pollock, Swallow was in Lily’s class, dipping his brush in and out of his palette to finish a Dublin Bay seascape
Katherine Greenberg had been painting beside him since the start of the class. The young Jewish woman was probably the most talented member of the group, Swallow reckoned. Now the class was finishing. She rose from her easel, moved behind him and looked over his shoulder.
‘You have a lovely view of Howth Head there, Mr Swallow. And you have the cloud cap in a wonderfully deep blue.’
He was unwilling to admit that the nimbo stratus he had created over Dublin bay was the random outcome of mixing too much indigo with insufficient water.
‘That’s what I like about the sea,’ he answered. ‘It changes all the time. So you can paint it in any colour you want.’
He hoped he sounded convincing.
He glanced at Katherine’s easel. She had completed her still life; red and green fruit in a silver bowl with a fluted decanter standing beside it. She had depicted the two vessels on a brocaded cloth, falling in heavy folds from a tabletop. The backdrop showed a furnished room with a high mantle in black marble.
‘That’s very good. Is it from the imagination or did you set up the scene?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t rely on my imagination,’ she laughed. ‘It wouldn’t retain the detail. So I set up the model at home. I borrowed the bowl and the jug from the shop and I stole the fruit from the housekeeper.’
Ephram Greenberg’s shop on Capel Street was one of the city’s best known dealerships in antique silver and gold. The Greenbergs had traded there in precious metals, rare coins, fine paintings and classical statuary for decades.
‘You’d be best not to tell me about any crimes you’ve committed, Miss Greenberg’ he said cryptically. ‘I’d be in trouble with your father if it turned out that I hadn’t taken appropriate action against a thief.’
‘I think I can get away with a couple of apples,’ she laughed again. ‘He relies on me a lot to run the business now. He never really got his strength or his spirit back after my mother died.’
Swallow knew the Greenbergs since his days as a young beat constable at the Bridewell.
Katherine had her mother’s dark features and hair, deep brown eyes and a slight tendency to weight. Unusually for a Jewish girl in the Dublin community, Swallow knew, she had not married. Swallow reckoned that she was probably around thirty by now.
‘Yes, I know they were a very united couple.’
‘Mind you, he wouldn’t take it well if I forgot to put the silver back where I found it. They’re both George III, you know, Irish, very rare,’ she said jokingly.
For a brief moment she dropped a hand, lightly touching Swallow’s shoulder as she pointed to the bowl and decanter in her picture.
Lily Grant saw the touch as she came across the classroom. Her sharp eyes ran over the pictures set up on the semi-circle of easels. She stopped beside them.
‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything.’
The edge to her voice was sufficient to convey her disapproval of their bantering.
‘I’m going to see Mrs Walsh – Maria – for lunch,’ she told Swallow. ‘You’d be welcome to join us, if you like.’
He picked up the tone. It irked him that Lily should presume to intervene in his conversation with Katherine.
‘Actually, you did interrupt. I had asked Miss Greenberg how she had composed the scene for her still life.’
Lily gave a little sniff.
‘I see.’
‘As to lunch, thank you, but no,’ he told her. ‘I’ll have to make do with the canteen at the Castle.’
He knew that even though Lily was under no illusions as to how he felt about her, she wanted a restoration of good relations between himself and her elder sister.
Maria had put in five years of widowhood before he had come into her life. Over time, their relationship developed. First, there was friendship, then physical intimacy. Swallow had not led a sheltered life in that respect. Twenty years as a policeman in the city had put him in the way of female comfort more often than he wanted to remember. He could still recall the perfumes of the whore-houses where he had roistered in his alcohol-fuelled student days. But with Maria it had been unlike anything he had known heretofore. He felt a part of her, drawn in completely into a union of the flesh and the spirit that he had never known before.
Soon there was talk of a future together. But when Swallow felt that Maria was pressuring him to a decision, he hesitated.
Matters had come to a head during the investigation of the Chapelizod Gate murders earlier in the year. He had unwittingly placed the two sisters in danger. Maria had been implacably angry. Against a backdrop of tension and recrimination, he had vacated his lodgings at Grant’s. For more than a month now he had rented a small house at Heytesbury Street, off the South Circular Road, with his sister Harriet.
He told himself that he had stepped back, not walked away. The relationship was not dead. Maria had made no attempt to rent the room to anyone else after he left. He came to visit the bar a couple of times since then, but he made no attempt to stay. She made no effort to persuade him to do so.
For a moment, he thought that Lily was going to retaliate. Instead, she smiled coldly.
‘Maria asked if you and Harriet would be free to come to dinner on Sunday. Harry and I will be there. Maybe Harriet might like to bring a friend as well. I gather she has a widening social circle.’
He was not ready yet to engage in any serious discussion with Maria. But Sunday dinner accompanied by his sister might be as good a way as any to break the ice. Maria and Harriet got on well. He sometimes believed that Maria’s relationship with his sister was warmer than it was with her own.
‘I don’t expect to be working,’ he said without enthusiasm. ‘So I’ll be there. Please extend my thanks.’
Lily eyed Katherine. ‘You’ll understand, Miss Greenberg, that Mr Swallow and my sister, Mrs Walsh, are close friends.’
The message was clear. There was to be no dallying with a man who was still in Maria’s life, however tentatively. But Katherine Greenberg was not to be put down so easily. The dark eyes flashed in annoyance.
‘And you’ll understand, Miss Grant, that Mr Swallow and I have known each other since my childhood.’
Lily smiled with exaggerated sweetness and turned to leave the classroom.
‘Well, Miss Greenberg, I had no idea. That must have been such a very long time ago.’
THREE
Although he estimated that the pawnbroker had been dead for at least a week, Dr Henry Lafeyre could say with reasonable certainty what had killed him.
‘Broken like an egg,’ he told Detective Inspector ‘Duck’ Boyle after a brief examination of the back of Ambrose Pollock’s skull. A two-pound iron weight on the floor, stippled with dried blood, seemed a likely candidate as the murder weapon.
‘He was hit where he sat.’ Lafeyre pointed to the blood-splashed papers on the desk. ‘You can see the spattering there.’
Two lengths of rope encircled the dead man’s chest, fixing him to the back of the chair. The wrists were tied in front with a thin rope. Another was looped and knotted around the ankles. Anyone looking through the frosted glass from the shop would have seen Ambrose Pollock in his usual sitting position with his ledgers and account books.
Boyle was the senior officer on duty at Exchange Court when the breathless constable dispatched by Stephen Doolan turned in to make his report.
It was unwelcome news. ‘Duck’ Boyle had brought the avoidance of crime work to an art form. On this occasion, he had no option but to respond. He sighed and put down the sheaf of duty rosters on which he had been happily idling.
‘Swann… Feore,’ he barked at two young G-men ploughing through their own paperwork at their desks.
‘On ye’er pins. There’s a murder above at Lamb Alley.’
Paradoxically, the corpulent Boyle was glad of the fresh late September air after the dankness of the detective office. G-men invariably grumbled that they were housed in the unhealthiest part of the Castle. The complaint was not unfounded, and it was reflected in a high incidence of respiratory illnesses among the detectives.
‘Duck’ Boyle had earned his soubriquet from the curious, waddling gait that caused his posterior to swing from side to side as he walked. But he kept up with Swann and Feore, covering the quarter mile along Lord Edward Street and past Christ Church to Lamb Alley in what he saw as a respectable ten minutes.
Assailed by the odours from inside the pawn shop, he had waited outside for the arrival of the Medical Examiner and the police photographer.
Dr Harry Lafeyre caught the stink the moment he stepped out of his brougham carriage. He took the stopper from a small bottle of scented salts, put it to his nose and inhaled deeply. Then he handed it to Boyle.
‘Have a sniff of that, Inspector. You won’t imagine you’re in a rose garden, but it’ll help.’
Curious onlookers had gathered from the nearby tenement houses and street stalls. Shawled women and ragged children. Idle men in worn-out clothes and old, broken boots. Any excitement was welcome in lives lived out in crowded tenements with poor nutrition and primitive sanitation. They were being kept at a distance from the entrance by half a dozen constables. Lafeyre heard his own name being spoken as someone in the crowd identified him.
Stephen Doolan met him at the door.
‘One man dead in there, Doctor. Ambrose Pollock. He’s the owner. The sister who runs the place with him is gone missing. We’ve searched from top to bottom.’
Boyle and Doolan led him to the back office.
Even at midday, the light was dim, just sufficient for Lafeyre to take in the essentials of the scene. After a visual examination of the body, he gestured to the bloodied iron weight on the floor close to the dead man’s feet.
‘That would have done the deed easily enough, without needing too much force.’
‘And light enough to be wielded by a woman,’ Doolan observed. ‘But the woman isn’t here. She’s away, isn’t she?’
He had checked for any signs of a forced entry on the ground floor. When he found none, he opened two of the windows facing into the yard in an effort to vent the odour.
Then he went through every room, moving upward floor by floor. The smell was fractionally diluted as he climbed higher, but he kept his handkerchief clamped over his nose and mouth.