A June of Ordinary Murders (32 page)

‘I don't agree, Inspector,' he said simply.

‘Let me hear no more o' this nonsense, Swalla'. Get on and do yer own job. There's no signs o' spectacular success in that department, I gather. And in future let me get on wid mine.'

Exchange Court was facing into a busy day. Many of the criminals and hangers-on who had congregated around the Liberties for Ces Downes's funeral had not yet dispersed back to their usual haunts. The Vanucchi and Cussen factions were still ensconced in various dives and public houses around the city. The threat of further violence between them had not abated. The G Division would have to keep a careful eye on them for a while yet.

It would be another day of long hours on the job for the men on Boyle's duty roster. In twos and threes, he told off the morning detail and then turned to Swallow.

‘Now Swalla,' how do you intend to justify yer existence for the day?'

Swallow put his sheaf of documents on Boyle's desk.

‘I've got to run the conference on the Chapelizod Gate murders,' he said. ‘We've already had a meeting earlier on the Sarah Hannin case and I need the warrant. You'll recall I did the paperwork on Monday, so if you'll countersign it I can send it to the Chief Superintendent for endorsement.'

Boyle grinned.

‘Well, yer a very smart fellow, Swalla', but ye think I came down in the last shower a' rain, I suppose.'

He tapped Swallow's papers.

‘Ye think I don't know whose house this is, Swalla'? Ye think I'm a fool that'd let the paperwork past me desk widdout checkin' the details?'

He pushed the file across the table.

‘Take that away outta here, Swalla'. If you think I'm goin' to ask the chief super for a warrant to let you tear into Alderman Fitzpatrick's house, you must be even thicker than I thought ye were. Yer makin' no progress on three murders! It's not just one, but three murders! An' yer best idea is to charge into Mr Fitzpatrick's house wid a warrant.'

He pointed to the door.

‘You should a' been out on the street, me man, and doin' some old-fashioned detective work. You should a' been findin' out who this woman was involved wid. That's where th'answer lies. It usually does. And you should be doin' yer job widdout tryin' to make yerself notorious.'

Swallow could hold back no longer. His exasperation boiled over.

‘You're a coward and a fool, Boyle. You know damned well that if it was anyone else's house we'd have been in there on Monday like a cavalry charge. But you're so bloody frightened of annoying the nobs in the Upper Yard that you're willing to jeopardise a murder investigation. It's not a bloody housebreaking, you know. There's a woman lying dead down there in the morgue.'

Boyle's face turned a shade of scarlet, his eyes bulging. He shouted back angrily.

‘Don't you dare speak to your superior in that tone, Swalla'! An' don't try to lecture me on crime investigation. You're livin' on an outdated reputation. Ye haven't made wan inch a' progress on the Chapelizod Gate murders. For the love o' Jesus, you haven't even established who the poor creatures were. Now, I'm tellin' ye once again, I'm not forwardin' the warrant application to Chief Mallon.'

The room had fallen silent. Feore and Mossop stood open-mouthed by the door.

Swallow had regained his composure.

‘Very well, Inspector,' he said icily. ‘You won't progress the application for the warrant. Just tell me one thing. Who told you the house belongs to Thomas Fitzpatrick and to keep our hands off? Because I know too bloody well that you didn't find it out on your own. You can hardly read your own bloody pocket-watch.'

Boyle leaped to his feet. He waved a fist in Swallow's face.

‘Ye can count yerself lucky, Swalla', that I'm not a violent man. Ye'd be lucky not to be lyin' stretched on the floor there and facin' a disciplinary charge when ye kem 'round. Now, let me tell ye somethin' else, Mr Swalla'.'

He drew a sheet from his file.

‘This is a letter signed be the Commissioner an hour ago. You're to be taken off the investigation into the death of this Hannin woman. There was a serious complaint about yer manners and yer methods – intrudin' and threatenin' at Alderman Fitzpatrick's house on Monday. You're taken off the case, Swalla – yerself and Feore. This investigation is to be handled by special detectives workin' out of the office of the Under-Secretary, Mr Smith Berry, in liaison wid meself.'

He turned on his heel and strode from the room, slamming the heavy door behind him.

Swallow gathered the papers he had laid out on the desk and replaced them in his own file.

That Boyle was acting under instructions was certain. He might have gleaned his information about Sarah Hannin's place of employment from the morning newspapers, except that he had never seen Boyle read a newspaper before. The word had come from somewhere on high that the Fitzpatrick house was to be left alone.

Swallow had encountered some of Smith Berry's men. He had no high opinion of their crime-solving capacities. The majority were English or Scottish, usually with a background in Scotland Yard's Special Irish Branch. They specialised in surveillance and political work. They lacked what policemen referred to as ‘local knowledge.' The likelihood of their making any significant progress on the Sarah Hannin murder would be negligible, he reckoned. Moreover, it was clear that there were things the authorities did not want brought to light in a regular police investigation.

One half of his brain told him to walk away from it and to leave it to them. The other half boiled with resentment at being treated as a passive instrument of the Upper Yard's agenda.

As his anger cooled the sense of resentment grew. Then it turned to a cold determination. He went back to his desk and took one of the sheets of headed notepaper that he had purloined earlier from Rankin's desk at the Board of Educational Charities.

He slipped it into the Remington and typed three short paragraphs. He sealed the letter in an official envelope with the Crown's symbol of the Lion and the Unicorn. He addressed it to ‘Mr Richard Pomeroy, Guardian, Greenhills House, near Maryborough, Queen's County,' then he put it in the outgoing mail tray.

TWENTY-SIX

The mood was marginally less gloomy than two days previously when the team assembled at 11 o'clock for the crime conference on the Chapelizod Gate murders.

Pat Mossop had circulated the news of the possible sighting of the woman and boy at Chester railway station. If the railway policeman's identification was correct, it reinforced the supposition that they had crossed from Wales on Wednesday and spent one or two nights in Dublin before meeting their fate.

The Dublin address given by the woman, though, was evidently a fiction. Mossop had checked the street directories and made inquiries with the Station Sergeants at the Bridewell and Store Street stations. By definition these were veteran officers who knew every inch of their districts. There was no house or building, no church or memorial anywhere near Abbey Street named for St Brigid.

Stephen Doolan's men had checked all the guest-houses, lodgings and doss-houses in the A Division, from St Stephen's Green to the river, and as far out as the villages of Kilmainham and Inchicore, for any sightings of a missing man and child – or a woman and child. Policemen in the other divisions had been making the same checks as they went about their beats.

Nothing had turned up. But there was progress of sorts on two other items.

Constable Culliton, who had taken the casts of the wheel-marks left on the grass by the Chapelizod Gate, had been back to Hutton's, the carriage-makers in The Coombe.

‘They're certain on the wheel width,' he told the conference. ‘It's unusual – 6 foot 7 inches exactly from outer rim to outer rim. Hutton's say that's the axle width of one of their clarence cars. It's a special, a big car – a sort of a double brougham. They say they made about 50 of them over the past 20 years or so.'

Stephen Doolan nodded thoughtfully. ‘We could manage a check on 50 cars if we had the names of owners – and if we had a fair bit of time. It might be possible to place the vehicle on the night of the killing. Do Hutton's keep records of owners?'

Culliton looked doubtful.

‘They might have some. I checked that. But they say it would be a lot of work to go through them all, so they're not keen. And anyway, these cars are often sold on to new owners. Hutton's wouldn't necessarily know who has them now if they've changed hands.'

Doolan snorted. ‘I'll get over there this morning. They'll be a bit speedier with their paperwork by the time I'm finished with 'em.'

He opened his notebook.

‘We got the clothing that the woman was wearing across to one of the Jewish tailors in Capel Street. They know their stuff those fellows. He confirmed that it's English cloth. But as he makes the point, where would you get any Irish cloth nowadays outside of an exhibition or maybe in Connemara or some blasted bog?

‘He picked them right down to the seams and found everything in order. No broken threads or tears, no rents. No hidden pockets. And there's no damage to the clothing that might suggest the wearer was in a struggle or anything.'

Swallow nodded. ‘It's worth putting in some time tracing these clarence cars.' In his heart he believed it would probably be a waste of effort.

There was one other possible line of inquiry that might be worth airing.

‘I got a word that Vinny Cussen had men out last week watching the streets and the trams for a particular woman,' he said. ‘I don't know why, or who they were looking for. It might be nothing of significance, but keep your ears open, especially if you run across any of his footsoldiers.'

‘Could we not just take Cussen in and … persuade him to tell us a little more?' Doolan ventured.

‘Maybe it'll come to that, Stephen,' Swallow said. ‘But I'd prefer to have more hard information to work with before we do anything like that.'

There were nods and murmurs around the room.

‘Do we have anything else?' Swallow asked. ‘No report of a missing boy anywhere in the city?'

‘Nothing,' Doolan said. ‘There was a young lad gone missing about a month ago out on the Bull Island. The RIC think he got taken out to sea by a fast tide while he was collecting cockles. There hasn't been any sign of a body, but the tides could have taken him out of the bay. There's no other missing persons reports that might fit.'

Pat Mossop pointed to some sheets of paper inserted in his book.

‘I've got the description of the victims written up, Boss. They're ready to go out to all the English forces when you've read it.'

Swallow had still not told the team about Harry Lafeyre's attempt at a facial reconstruction using Professor Hiss's methods. He preferred to see the results for himself first.

‘Maybe we'll just wait a while on that,' he said. ‘It's early days and there are telegraph costs involved. Mr Mallon would have to approve.'

There was little more that could be done. Doolan would revisit Hutton's the coach-makers, and hopefully that would accelerate the process of identifying the owners of the clarence cars they had made and supplied over the years. In the meantime, the house-to-house inquiries would go on, even though every policeman knew that with each passing day the likelihood of any positive result would diminish.

When the uniformed officers had left, Swallow sat with Pat Mossop in the crime sergeants' office, sifting yet again through the pages of generally useless information that had been accumulated in the murder book.

Shortly before noon, a constable from the B-Division station at College Street came to the public office at Exchange Court with a small, brown, cardboard box. It was tied with string, closed with a wax police seal and addressed to Detective Sergeant Swallow. Swallow guessed it contained the lady's bag, which had been found by the cab driver at Baggot Street Bridge.

Strictly speaking, it was no longer his business. The Sarah Hannin murder inquiry was now under the authority of the Assistant Under-Secretary for Security and his team of out-of-town agents in the Upper Castle Yard. But the word had obviously not reached College Street that Swallow was off the case, and so the evidence had been forwarded to him.

If he were to follow procedure he should simply forward the package to the Security Secretary's office, but Swallow was not in a mood to respect procedure. He opened the box and took out the small, black, velvet bag. The metal clasp was already showing corrosion from the elements. It was a factory-made accessory such as might be bought inexpensively in a ‘monster store.' But it was relatively new, with no wear apparent, beyond the slight corrosion on the clasp.

Sarah Hannin had bought it recently, Swallow thought. Indifferent quality notwithstanding, it would have been a costly item on a housemaid's meagre wage. Or perhaps it was given to her? Or maybe it was stolen? After all, Sarah Hannin's friend, Hetty Connors, was a thief.

He upturned the bag and tugged at the lining, turning it inside out. It was empty.

He saw a small, white label stitched into the seam. He took it between thumb and forefinger to read it.

‘WATKINS OF LIVERPOOL'

Swallow felt a mild frisson of excitement. Was there a slim connection here? It was likely that the victims at Chapelizod Gate had come from Liverpool. And here was a lady's bag from a Liverpool shop. Was it just coincidence that Liverpool seemed to be coming up in both cases? New possibilities began to form in his head. Until now there had been no evidential reasons to suspect a possible connection between the murders at Chapelizod Gate and the death of Sarah Hannin. But were there not some similarities?

Both women victims, killed within days of each other, were of much the same age. Both were killed, in all probability, during the hours of darkness. Neither of them had any evidence of identification. Sarah Hannin had been identified, it seemed, by the simple coincidence of her body being recognised as it was taken from the water. Was it possible that both could be linked, however tenuously, to Liverpool?