A June of Ordinary Murders (39 page)

Swallow decided he did not particularly like Mother Mary Catherine, but he felt that she was probably telling the truth. He reached into his pocket and placed a copy of the photograph of ‘Chapelizod Gate Woman' face downward on the table.

‘I would like to show you a photograph that you may find upsetting. It is a likeness that has been constructed by scientific methods, and we believe it is a representation of what the dead woman at the Chapelizod Gate would have looked like in life. Would you be willing to look at it for me and tell us if it bears a resemblance to Mrs Thomas?'

The Mother Prioress did not hesitate.

‘Certainly I will.'

Swallow turned the photograph over and placed it in front of the nun.

If she found the picture in any way shocking, she displayed no such emotion. She considered it for a moment.

‘Yes, Mr Swallow, it is a disturbing image. It is not by any means perfect, but I would recognise Mrs Thomas's features from it. She had rather prominent eyes. I felt they might have indicated some illness or condition.'

Swallow replaced the photograph in his pocket.

‘Thank you. You're correct about her eyes. The medical examiner has ascertained that she was afflicted with a number of small cysts. May I ask where their belongings are? I assume they had some luggage or baggage with them when they came?'

The Mother Prioress hesitated. ‘Yes … they had one bag, I believe, a sort of portmanteau. But I'm … I'm not sure it's right to interfere with their private things.'

‘It may help us to trace their family, if they have any. And it could give us important clues in trying to find out who killed them.'

‘I … I don't know.'

‘If I have to, I'll get a warrant,' Swallow said sharply. ‘I'm entitled by law to secure any evidence that may be material to my investigation. They died violent deaths, and they will not be coming back here for their belongings, I assure you.'

After a moment she stood. ‘Very well. If you'll follow me please, I'll take you to the guest-house.'

She led them down a corridor along polished wooden floors under hanging pictures of saints. Two young sisters gliding towards them stood to one side, their eyes cast downward. Exiting through a heavy oak door, they crossed a paved quadrangle to a two-storey building that might once have been a store or a coach-house.

The Mother Prioress unlocked a panelled door and showed them into a sparsely furnished room with bare wooden boards and a narrow gothic window set high in the wall. A small table stood between two iron-framed beds. There was a wardrobe, two straight chairs and a large black crucifix on the wall.

A brown leather portmanteau stood on the floor at the end of one of the beds. Mossop hauled it onto the bed and flicked the two locks to open it.

They emptied it item by item. Women's underclothing, a cheap brush and comb set, two shirts and a woollen jerkin that would have fitted the boy, a bottle of hair lotion, two flannel towels, a box of patent face powder, two bristle toothbrushes and a small tin of chalk paste. Then, at the bottom of the bag, a small leather satchel tied with a frayed blue ribbon.

Swallow untied the ribbon and opened the satchel on the bed.

There was a stylised leaflet with the words of the Lord's Prayer, such as might be hung over a child's bed or in a nursery. There was a photograph of a child of about 4 or 5 years, obviously taken in a professional studio somewhere. Swallow saw a booklet on the attractions of the Blackpool seafront. At the bottom of the satchel he found a post office savings bank book with the name ‘Mrs L. Thomas' on the cover.

Swallow flicked the book open. A balance of just over £10 showed on the final page. Not much of a treasure trove, he thought quietly.

A white envelope lay under the post office book. It was stamped at the general post office, Dublin, and addressed to ‘Mrs L. Thomas, 37 Clarence Street, Liverpool.' He opened the envelope and withdrew the single sheet of handwritten notepaper. The sender's address and the date were written in a good hand across the top.

143 Francis Street, Dublin

June 10th 1887

It was an address that Swallow recognised instantly. He had been there on Saturday evening at Ces Downes's wake.

He read the letter.

My Dear Daughter Louise,

I am very poorly these days and my time is short and you must come now to claim what is meant for you and for the boy. I very much want to see you and him. You will be safe with the sisters of St Brigid's at Chapelizod, which is not far from Dublin, and I have arranged this with the nuns at Wavertree. You should disguise yourself so nobody will know you when you come here. You would be in great danger if you did not do so. Come to me here as soon as you are safe at St Brigid's.

Your loving mother,

Cecilia Downes

THIRTY-TWO

At the same hour that Swallow and Mossop opened their conversation with Mother Mary Catherine at St Brigid's Abbey, Detective Chief Superintendent John Mallon, head of the G Division, left Dublin Castle's Lower Yard to walk the 100 yards to the office of the Assistant Under-Secretary for Security, Mr Howard Smith Berry.

John Mallon was angry.

Arriving at his office at 8 o'clock, he had scanned the operations and crime reports, starting with the latest developments in security and surveillance.

First he reviewed the allocation of G Division's strength for the coming 48 hours. Since Sunday's incident at the Royal Hibernian Academy he had ordered that the Security Secretary and Alderman Thomas Fitzpatrick should have an armed escort of G-men at any time they moved in public.

The Security Secretary's schedule showed that he would be safely in the Castle for most of the next two days, but Fitzpatrick had a series of engagements where he might be exposed to danger. On Sunday afternoon, for example, he would attend the special Jubilee regatta at Kingstown. The G Division's manpower would be stretched to its limits, he reckoned, but the safety of key public figures had to be paramount in the days running up to the royal visit.

Later in the morning he would speak on the telephone with his counterpart in the Special Irish Branch of the London Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard. Rumours of a ‘Jubilee plot' against the royal family persisted even though the date of the Jubilee proper had come and gone without major incident. There were intelligence reports of powerful explosives being taken down through England to an unknown destination. Senior figures in the Fenian movement were reported to be meeting in Manchester. Every scrap of information coming into the police information network had to be shared and evaluated.

Mallon noted with satisfaction that the two men held in connection with the attack on the Assistant Under-Secretary and Alderman Fitzpatrick at the Royal Hibernian Academy on Sunday evening had been identified, questioned and processed.

With similar satisfaction he read that the obsequies for Pisspot Ces Downes had passed off uneventfully, apart from the demise in the Meath Hospital of a middling-level criminal called Thomas McKnight. Although McKnight had supposedly been the victim of an assault, it appeared from the post mortem conducted by Henry Lafeyre that his injuries were relatively superficial and that his death was due to heart seizure.

He puzzled briefly over a report that Charlie Vanucchi, whom he knew to be one of Ces Downes's senior lieutenants, had been detained at Exchange Court, suspected of some involvement in the death of McKnight. But since Vanucchi had been released without charge, he assumed it had amounted to nothing of consequence.

He read the update on the Chapelizod Gate murders with the sinking sense that the investigation was going nowhere. Dr Lafeyre's application of a new identification technique from Germany had not brought any evident breakthrough. The discovery of the cross-channel tickets, indicating that the dead woman and child had travelled from Holyhead, had not yielded the names of the victims. Without identification, Mallon knew, any investigative trail would go cold, and the chances of solving the crime would rapidly diminish.

It had been a typically mixed bag of good news and bad; the sort that John Mallon could handle with equanimity and a sense of having control of events. But his composure was swiftly dissipated when he opened the green file marked ‘Murder of Sarah Hannin at Portobello.'

It contained a single sheet of official G-Division notepaper bearing a grammatically incomplete sentence.

‘
File transferred Office of Assistant Under-Secretary for Security on instruction Major Kelly.
'

The single sheet was signed, ‘
Maurice Boyle, Detective Inspector. June 22nd 1887.
'

Mallon felt his temples begin to throb.

The transfer of a file to Smith Berry's office was not without precedent. It happened sometimes with politically sensitive cases. But where it had occurred in the past it was always on the basis of a direct communication between the Assistant Under-Secretary and Mallon himself. It was unprecedented that it would be done on the say-so of a blow-in like Kelly, and without the express agreement of the head of the G Division.

It was doubly unprecedented that such a file would be referred to him a full two days after the transfer had been effected.

He strode to the door and roared to his clerk to send for Detective Inspector Boyle. When the sweating inspector hurried in 5 minutes later Mallon did not invite him to sit. He slammed his closed fist down on the green file so that everything on the table shook.

Boyle had never seen Mallon in such a fury.

‘Why in Hell's name, Boyle, do I read on a Friday morning that a murder file has been diverted from G Division, under your bloody signature, to the Under-Secretary's Office on the previous Wednesday?'

Boyle knew he was trapped. He had broken the one rule that Mallon insisted upon: that he was never to be left exposed with lack of knowledge on a serious case in the hands of the G Division; that any development, no matter how small, must be communicated to him instantly, day or night, whether in his office or in his house. He would generally stand over any decision by a subordinate, even one that turned out to be wrong or ill-judged, as long as he had been kept in the picture as it developed.

‘I'm sorry, Sir,' Boyle stammered. ‘I … I assumed you'd have been in communication with the Assistant Under-Secretary's office. The paperwork just got delayed a bit, what with the Jubilee, the three murder cases and the men out on duty for the Downes funeral. I'm truly sorry, Sir.'

Boyle was dissembling. Mallon knew that he was trying to play him off against the officials in the Upper Yard who would have the final say in any police promotion or advancement. In all probability, he reckoned, Boyle had been sworn to silence by Kelly or Smith Berry while they reviewed the file quietly themselves over the two days.

‘You're a bloody fool, Boyle, and a schemer.' He spat out the words.

‘You're unreliable, treacherous, disloyal and worst of all, you're incompetent! I don't know how you got into the bloody job at all, much less into G Division. You're a disgrace to your rank! Get out.'

Having vented his anger on Duck Boyle, Mallon sent a short note to Smith Berry seeking an urgent meeting. A reply came back in 10 minutes, returned by the same constable whom Mallon had sent to deliver the request. The Assistant Under-Secretary for Security would be available to see the head of the G Division at 3 o'clock at his office.

It was a short walk from the Metropolitan Police office in the Lower Yard to the Georgian block that housed the offices of the Under-Secretary and his senior assistants. But the distance that separated the lowly city police from the powerful bureaucrats with their despatch boxes, frock coats and top hats was not to be measured in yards. Mallon was entering a realm where his rank counted for little. It was a place in which he might, in certain circumstances, have a degree of influence, but in reality no independent power.

Smith Berry's office was in the block adjoining the State Apartments. It looked out on to the Upper Yard itself, towards the Justice Gate facing Cork Hill and Castle Street. The Assistant Under-Secretary, in customary morning dress, sat at his desk between two tall windows that reached almost to the ceiling. He rose to shake Mallon's hand and gestured to him to sit opposite.

‘I imagine you have something important to report, Detective Chief Superintendent,' he said without preamble.

‘Not so much to report, Sir,' Mallon said evenly, ‘as to ask your views and, of course, to have your guidance.'

He straightened in the chair. ‘Sir, I'm concerned that an investigation – a murder investigation – has been taken from the jurisdiction of my department and transferred elsewhere, without explanation and without the customary procedures being adhered to.'

Smith Berry looked up as if surprised. ‘Ah, you mean the woman who was taken from the canal at Portobello on Monday afternoon?'

‘Yes, Sir. It's the case of Sarah Hannin. It was being investigated by Detective Sergeant Swallow, whom you will recall you congratulated when you came to my department earlier this week. I'm mystified as to why anybody should feel that he – and I – cannot pursue the matter to a conclusion.'

A smile of what might have appeared as sympathy came across Smith Berry's features.

‘I'm sure I understand, Mr Mallon. And I regret that the normal formalities could not have been applied in this case. Yes, the investigation has been taken over by the officers working directly from this office, under the command of Major Kelly.'

He paused as if seeking the right words.

‘There was – is – some urgency about the matter, you understand. And it appears that Detective Sergeant Swallow and…' he glanced at some papers on his desk, ‘this … Detective Feore … behaved with a good deal less than absolute courtesy and discretion when they visited Alderman Fitzpatrick's home on Monday afternoon.'