A June of Ordinary Murders (17 page)

She waved a hand at the others. ‘My brother is famous you know,' she said.

O'Donnell raised his wineglass mockingly to Swallow and Maria. ‘Oh yes, we know all about the great Sergeant Swallow, doing England's work in Dublin Castle.'

Swallow saw Maria's face flush in anger. Harriet looked momentarily embarrassed but said nothing.

O'Donnell took a noisy gulp from his glass. Swallow realised that the young man was more than slightly drunk. He decided it was best to laugh off the clumsy attempt at provocation.

Swallow grinned. ‘Well, Mr O'Donnell, we all have to earn a living. Even if in my case it's not a particularly good one.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't say that. There's a long tradition attaching to your kind, Sergeant Swallow, of selling their country for 30 pieces of silver.'

The insult was delivered with a leer. Now Swallow flushed too. He retaliated.

‘I'd be interested to know what it is you do yourself for a living, Mr O'Donnell. It isn't a whole lot, I'd say.'

Without waiting for an answer, he turned to Harriet.

‘Maybe it would be best if we went to the other room to talk about family matters for a few moments and then you can rejoin your friends?'

‘Oh, I'm not sure … Seamus wants to make a protest about Fitzpatrick and the Assistant Under-Secretary.'

Swallow's sense of danger activated. ‘He wants to do what?'

‘There's going to be a protest about Irish art being exploited for England's empire.'

At that moment, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Smith Berry started to cross the room, preceded by the official who had greeted them at the main door.

The group made its way to a dais from which the Alderman would speak. As Fitzpatrick mounted the steps, Swallow realised that half a dozen young men had emerged from the crowd to form a semicircle around the low platform.

Fitzpatrick smiled, and raised one hand to acknowledge the audience. With the other he went to draw his script from an inside pocket. The hum of conversation around the room dropped.

On cue, two of the young men sprinted up the steps. One made to grab Fitzpatrick's script, but the older man's reflexes were surprisingly fast and he fended off his attacker with a palmed hand.

The second young man threw himself forward, using his body weight to propel Fitzpatrick towards the edge of the platform. An Academy official went to pull the assailant away, but a third man who had leaped to the platform felled the official with a fist to the side of the head.

Fitzpatrick was agile. He recovered his balance and stepped nimbly to the floor. Two or three Academy staff members immediately formed a protective phalanx around him.

‘Get out of the room now,' Swallow told Maria. ‘Go outside and wait for me. There's trouble here.'

As she moved away, he saw O'Donnell climb the steps of the dais. He turned to face the audience, arms outstretched dramatically.

‘You have no reason to celebrate British art or the Jubilee of the British Queen!' he shouted. ‘The British Queen and British art should be kept in Britain and out of Ireland. We want Irish art that reflects Ireland's character. Let Thomas Fitzpatrick support Irish art if he wants to.'

The other young men who had gathered around the dais began to chant in unison.

‘Down with British art. We want Irish culture for the Irish people.'

‘No British Queen while the Irish are denied their farms.'

The felled Academy official was on his feet now. He aimed a retaliatory blow at the young man who had hit him. He fell forward, knocking hard against the Security Secretary who staggered against the side of the platform.

Swallow pushed forward through the crowd and placed himself in front of the Security Secretary. A booted foot cracked against his ankle and he fell forward into the melee.

Something solid hit his wrist. He saw a hand reach past him as if grabbing towards Smith Berry and he punched hard and upwards towards where he estimated its owner's head should be. A shock ran the length of his arm as his fist connected with an unseen face.

Then strong fingers closed around his throat from behind. He struck backwards with his elbow but failed to connect. The clamp around his throat tightened. His lungs sought air but there was nothing. He felt himself weakening.

Suddenly, the pressure eased. He squirmed and turned to see Simon Sweeney with a headlock on the man who had been throttling him. The journalist pushed the man to the floor and then brought his cane down hard across his face. Swallow saw blood spurt from his assailant's mouth and nose.

Another man lunged at Smith Berry. Swallow got to his feet and threw his right arm around the attacker's neck and seized his left arm at the wrist. He shoved it high up the man's back and heard a gratifying shriek of pain.

There was a sharp whistle-blast. Swallow saw uniforms and realised that the constables from the street had arrived. Two of them placed themselves in front of the Security Secretary. Another helped Thomas Fitzpatrick to his feet, assisted by Sweeney. Between them the constables and the journalist half pushed, half pulled the two men from the ruck and out the door to safety.

Swallow realised that his prisoner was James O'Donnell.

One of the constables, who was struggling to hold O'Donnell's friend, Horan, shouted, ‘Gun! This fella has a gun!'

The constable grasped his prisoner's wrist. Swallow could see that Horan was trying to pull a revolver clear of his jacket pocket with his other hand.

Another policeman saw the butt of the weapon and went to wrestle it from him. There was a deafening bang as a shot discharged into the floor.

The constable holding Horan hit him hard with his fist on the back of the head. He sank to the ground, the gun clattering to the floor beside him. The officer grabbed the weapon and handed it to Swallow.

Swallow recognised it as a
Reichsrevolver,
Prussian army issue. He broke it open. All six chambers were loaded.

Another constable snapped handcuffs onto Horan and then ran his hands over O'Donnell's clothing.

‘This fella's clear now. There's nothing else here.' He closed another set of handcuffs around O'Donnell's wrists.

The room was filling with uniforms. Two or three of Swallow's immediate colleagues from G Division had arrived as well.

He was breathless from the struggle on the floor. Darts of pain shot along his right leg, but there was no difficulty putting his weight on it. It would be bruised and sore, but there was nothing broken, he reckoned.

He realised thankfully that Harriet too had disappeared. He turned to a uniformed sergeant.

‘We need a car to take these two fellows to Exchange Court. Arrange for them to go in separate cells in the Lower Yard. We have a lot of questions to ask them.'

O'Donnell glared defiantly, his hands cuffed behind his back. ‘You can ask all the questions you want, Swallow. As Irishmen we defy your so-called authority.'

Swallow fought hard to maintain his self-control.

‘I'm not sure you understand how much trouble you're in, Mr O'Donnell,' he said as evenly as he could.

He pointed to Horan. ‘You're engaged in a common enterprise with your friend here. That gun might just as easily have been in your pocket as far as the law is concerned.'

O'Donnell leered again. ‘So what about your sister then, is she in trouble too? Or will her brother the G-man look after her?'

Swallow wanted to hit him. Instead, he forced a cold smile.

‘We don't need to talk about my sister now, Mr O'Donnell. We're going to spend a long time talking to you. If you have any brains at all, and I'd say there's a serious doubt about that, you'll need to start using them.'

Monday June 20th, 1887

TWELVE

The two Grand Canal bargemen had been at work an hour before dawn, feeding coal and slag into the plate-iron burner under the steam engine until it rumbled and hissed at an even, steady pace.

Monday saw the sixth day of the heatwave.

They cast off from their berth in the Grand Canal Dock before 5 o'clock and nosed their squat, graceless vessel into the first lock as the sun rose. The first light caught the headlands that define Dublin Bay: Killiney, Dalkey and Howth. Then it spread across Kingstown, Blackrock and Sandymount Strand, touching the roofs and windows of the coastal houses.

The stopman at the tiller saw it catch the rooftops along Clanwilliam Place as the master opened the valve to engage the single-stroke engine that would power them on their voyage to the middle of Ireland. Theirs was the first barge of the day, bound with a cargo of Yorkshire malt for Shannon Harbour.

At four miles an hour – if the locks operated well – they would be at Tullamore by nightfall. That was a pleasing prospect. The public houses by the harbour had a welcome for bargemen with money in their pockets. There was music with fiddles and squeezeboxes and dancing and some not-too-particular women in one or two of the taverns around the town. If they failed to make good time, it would be the misery of Phillipstown for the night, a grey little place that no bargeman had anything good to say about.

A person walking the line of the Grand Canal from the Dock to the hotel at Portobello will scarcely notice the rise in the ground. It is a distance of about two miles from where the canal joins the estuary of the Liffey and the ascent is no more than 60 feet above sea level. But the climb means that a vessel's upward progress along this stretch of waterway is dependent upon the navigation of no fewer than six locks.

First, the lower gates open outward and the barge nudges forward into the lifting chamber. Then the gates swing shut behind and the forward gates are winched open to allow the rising water to flood into the chamber, taking the barge to the level of the next section of the canal.

It is a skilled task both for the boatmen and the lock-keeper. If the forward gates are opened too quickly, the force of the flow can turn a vessel so that it wedges transversely between the granite walls of the lock. The bow must be kept forward, using tiller and gaff and, if the winds are high, securing the craft with heavy-duty ropes. A careless bargeman, or a lock-keeper who is too hasty, courts catastrophe.

Neither the master nor the stopman nor any of the lock-keepers that morning were other than conscientious about their tasks. They were careful, watchful and methodical. The uncommon heat of recent days had created the inevitable hazard of young children swimming, diving and jumping in the canal. It was only at the sixth lock, at Portobello, that the stopman at the tiller took his eyes off his forward task and turned his back to a morning breeze that was more imagined than real in order to put a match to the pipe he had filled a while earlier.

As he dropped the spent match in the canal, his eye caught something dark below him in the water by the tiller blade. He leaned backward across the safety rail and peered down into the murkiness. Then he raised his hand and shouted against the thud of the engine and the roar of the water tumbling into the lock.

‘Lads … hold on … there's somethin' down here…'

Neither the master nor the lock-keeper heard him the first time.

The stopman pounded the barge's metal hull with a steel-tipped gaff and roared.

‘Stop th' engine and shut the bloody gates! There's a body!'

His companion put the boiler lever to the neutral position and stepped back along the deck, impatience and irritation on his face.

‘What's the problem, Dickie? We're makin' slow enough ground as it is.'

‘I'm tellin' ye, there's a body, a woman I think, caught down by the tiller blade. Stop th'engine!.'

The master, in turn, grasped the safety rail and craned his head down towards the green surface of the canal. He too saw the red of the woman's clothing refracted through the water and the flow of her dark hair, streaming out behind the tiller blade.

Drowned bodies are no novelty to bargemen. His groan was the frustration of knowing that the schedule of the day was lost.

‘Ah Jaysus, fuck it … fuck it … how did she get there?'

He stepped back to the engine house and angrily rammed the shutoff valve home, killing the power. The lock-keeper, measuring the scene with an experienced eye, hauled to reverse the greased wheel that drove the levers on the gates, shutting the water flow.

Morning birdsong filled the vacuum created by the silencing of the engine and the stopping up of the waterfall.

They used the berthage ropes and the gaffs to move the barge back out of the sixth lock and ran the ropes to an elm tree along the grassy bank. Here, a man could get down to the water level in safety even though he might risk a partial wetting in the reeds.

As the senior man, it fell to the master to don the India-rubber waders supplied by the company and to splash out through the shallows. He pushed the gaff before him to probe the water under the tiller blade. The gaff's hook caught the woman's clothing in the second thrust and he hauled heavily on the long, birch staff.

The body came away from the tiller blade, leaving a half-petticoat showing a dull, ragged red in the water. The others grasped the staff behind the master and between them they drew the weight in through the reeds to the canal's earthen bank.

It was not yet 7 o'clock. There were no passers-by, and the only sounds were the lapping of the canal water and the birdsong. They saw that the woman was young, in her twenties. Her long, dark hair was matted with sedge and weed. The face and the head were badly marked with blue and black abrasions that might have come, the men knew, from the turning of the tiller blade or the impact of the granite walls in any of the six locks they had traversed in the past hour.

They both saw that the skull above the left temple was badly gashed. The skin peeled back in a V-shaped flap, upwards across the forehead, showing white bone, splintered and broken.