A June of Ordinary Murders (5 page)

Swallow would have been a doctor rather than a detective sergeant in the Dublin Metropolitan Police had he not drunk his way through two years of medical school, ‘pissing away hard-earned savings from the family business,' as his father, in his final illness, had put it bitterly.

Brought together in the common purpose of solving crime in Dublin city over the past three years, a working relationship had developed into a mutually respectful sense of ease and even friendship.

There was another connection too. Harry Lafeyre had recently become engaged to Lily Grant, who was a teacher of art at Alexandra College, a city school for the education of young Protestant ladies. Lily was the younger sister of Maria Walsh, Swallow's landlady at Thomas Street.

‘I suppose that makes us potential in-laws, except there isn't any law in it,' Lafeyre had quipped to Swallow when it transpired that the two Grant sisters had come to occupy places of significance in their respective lives.

Lafeyre's brougham carriage, driven by his general assistant, a dour young man named Scollan, trundled across the track and rolled to a stop beside the DMP car that had brought Swallow and Doolan back from their breakfast at the Kilmainham Station mess hall.

It had been a good breakfast. Once he got the aroma of frying bacon in his nostrils, Swallow had set aside his Catholic reservations about eating meat on Fridays. He recalled a comforting formula from his school catechism offering a dispensation in circumstances where meat might already have been prepared, perhaps by ill-informed or well-meaning Protestants. He allowed himself to imagine that the description might fit the mess cook.

He had telegraphed a preliminary report from Kilmainham to the Castle. By the time he and Doolan returned to the crime scene, three G-Division detectives had arrived from the day-shift at Exchange Court. Two of these, Tom Swift and Mick Feore, were now leading door-to-door inquiries in the houses on the park side of Chapelizod village.

The third, Pat Mossop, was seated in his shirtsleeves on the step of the side-car. Mossop was a ‘Book Man.' Now he sat, filling in details in the big foolscap pages of the murder book, his slight frame perspiring through his white shirt.

When he could get him, Pat Mossop was Swallow's first choice in the role of Book Man. Appointing the Book Man was a key task for an investigator leading a serious criminal inquiry. He was the meticulous recorder of every detail and each scrap of information that came in. He was the one who would be expected to see connections or patterns in the material collected by the men on the ground. He had to have the ability to remember everything and forget nothing.

Swallow reckoned that Pat Mossop was probably the best Book Man in the G Division. It was in his training. He had been a clerk in a Belfast mill before joining the police and he brought the disciplines of modern industrial practices with him. Swallow sometimes worried about Mossop's health. He met the height requirement for the police, but he was thin as a broom handle. Was there an illness or a disability in childhood? Swallow wondered but he never felt it right to ask.

Notwithstanding his delicate physique, Mossop was energetic. He was as organised in his personal life as in his police work. Still in his thirties, he lived with a cheerful wife and four lively children in rooms over a poulterer's in Aungier Street. But over and above his competence in record keeping, Swallow liked him for his irrepressible optimism. Sometimes, especially in the fallow stages of an investigation, it was what kept a G-man going.

A Dublin Fire Brigade ambulance was drawn up next to the police side-car. The photographer had set up his heavy field-camera on its tripod and had taken close-up pictures of the bodies.

When the medical examiner had finished, the ambulance crew would take the remains to the City Morgue at Marlborough Street, but for now the two attendants sat shirt-sleeved against the trunk of a massive beech. The ambulance horses stood tethered beside them, men and beasts sharing the tree's shade.

‘I'm sorry it's taken me a while,' Lafeyre apologised. ‘I had an early patient with an acute appendix in the surgery. Once I got her down to Mercer's Hospital I got here as quickly as I could.'

Swallow knew that Lafeyre had to attend to his private practice as well in order to make a living. The post of medical examiner for Dublin was a part-time one, and Lafeyre ran his main practice from the house at Harcourt Street that he had bought with savings from his African tour.

The authorities provided him with a small office in the Lower Yard at Dublin Castle, close to the Army Medical Office, while he used the facilities at the Marlborough Street morgue for post-mortem examinations. He moved constantly between the three locations.

He hefted his examination bag from inside the brougham. ‘The message said it's a dead man and a child.'

‘Don't worry about your timing, Doctor. We didn't have any other great plans for the day,' Stephen Doolan said with an attempt at black humour. ‘When you see what's above there in the trees you'll understand why.'

Swallow saw Doolan's eyes suddenly fix in alertness. The uniformed sergeant nodded to a point somewhere over Harry Lafeyre's shoulder.

‘You take the doctor over to the scene, Joe, and I'll deal with these gentlemen here.'

Swallow followed Doolan's gaze to where two Ringsend cars, Dublin's inexpensive equivalent of the hackney cab, were clattering along the Acres Road from the direction of Chesterfield Avenue.

Even at this distance he could recognise some of the pressmen. The news had obviously reached the
Freeman's Journal,
the
Evening Telegraph,
and
The Irish Times.
In all, the two Ringsend cars seemed to be carrying seven or eight pressmen.

‘You go ahead,' Doolan said. ‘I'll slow these fellows in their gallop.'

The sergeant walked forward to meet the coming cars, right hand raised to arrest their approach. Doolan was good at that sort of thing, Swallow reflected. With the added height of the police helmet over his bearded features, he was an impressive 6 feet and 9 inches. Even a car load of news-hungry reporters would hesitate to challenge his authority.

‘A policeman mightn't need a lot of brains in every situation,' Doolan liked to quip, ‘but he needs a certain amount of
altitude.
'

Swallow, Mossop and Lafeyre strode to the copse of trees.

Now it was Swallow's turn to lift the grey blanket from the adult body between the beeches. The heat of the morning had accelerated the processes of decomposition and the skin, waxen white earlier, was beginning to tinge with faint green and blue. Swallow could see that armies of small woodland insects had gathered where blood had spattered on the mossy earth. Some had already begun to explore the corpse. Buzzing summer flies began to land on the face and skull when the blanket was lifted.

Lafeyre surveyed the destruction to the face and skull. He squatted silently beside the body and reached out to touch the right arm, replicating Swallow's test of some hours previously. This time the arm moved a little.

‘Rigor mortis is passing,' he said. ‘Allowing for the warmth of the day, I'd estimate he's dead perhaps 12 hours. Say about 10 o'clock last night, give or take an hour.'

Pat Mossop's pencil scratched the details in the murder book.

Lafeyre got to his feet and nodded to the smaller form under the second blanket.

‘That's the boy, I assume.'

Swallow lifted the second blanket. Lafeyre squatted again and pushed at the small, clasped hands with his forefinger. The tones of the skin had deepened in places to a bluish mottle. The hands moved a little in response to the examiner's pressure. Lafeyre put his right hand under the child's head, raising it sufficiently to see the back of the skull.

‘Grim bloody work by somebody,' he said after an interval. He turned back to Swallow.

‘How much have you learned? Any idea what happened?'

Doolan's searching constables had found wheel-marks and hoof-marks leading along the track from Chesterfield Avenue and ending perhaps 10 yards from the edge of the copse. From there, they led across the grassy verge towards the Chapelizod Gate. A carriage had arrived from the direction of the city and then left through the gate. Beyond that, the searches had yielded nothing so far.

‘Not really. And no scrap of identification. If there were any valuables like a watch or a purse they're gone. We're taking plaster casts of a set of wheel-marks and hoof-marks. It looks like a sizeable carriage but it was drawn by just one horse.'

Swallow gestured to the woodland floor around them.

‘The ground here under the trees is too dry to get anything like decent footprints. They're doing house-to-house inquiries now in the village and the cottages, but we've no witnesses so far. We've interviewed the park-keeper but I don't think he's involved.'

Lafeyre grimaced. ‘Not much that's helpful in any of that.'

‘Nothing. What do you make of it?' Swallow nodded towards the bodies.

‘Someone did a hacking job on the faces. I'll need to get them to the morgue to have a look with the microscope. I should be able to tell you what might have been used. But it looks like a knife, maybe 5 or 6 inches of blade and none too sharp.'

He pointed to the circular wound on the man's left temple.

‘At a good guess, that's our cause of death. The same for the child, I'd say. There's been little enough bleeding, as you can see. There aren't any defensive wounds on the hands either. So I'd hazard that the mutilation on the faces was done post mortem – for which small mercy you might be grateful. Have you looked at the wounds?'

Swallow nodded. ‘They look like bullet entries. But there aren't any exit wounds.'

Lafeyre drew a brass-rimmed magnifying glass from his bag and leaned forward across the body, scrutinising the blackened cavity on the man's forehead.

‘It's impossible to say. There's probably a slug in there, perhaps from a very low-velocity weapon. I won't know until I can do a probe later.'

He dropped the glass into the bag and got to his feet again. He turned his back to where Doolan and the other uniformed police were standing, some 20 or 30 yards back. He dropped his voice.

‘How're you going to handle this with our friends of the press?' He jerked a thumb towards where Doolan stood with the reporters.

‘I haven't much to tell them. This isn't your run-of-the-mill brawl. We've no witnesses. No motive. No weapon. We don't even know who they are, for God's sake.'

‘Well you're going to have to present yourself as knowing more than you do,' Lafeyre said quietly.

The sound of raised voices drifted across the grass. Swallow turned to see Doolan raise his arms as if entreating the reporters to be patient. Two or three constables had moved to position themselves beside their sergeant as if anticipating an attempt by the pressmen to sweep past him to the crime scene.

Swallow knew what Harry Lafeyre was worried about. Most of the Dublin press had developed a taste for the outrageous and the bloodthirsty. It had been stimulated by the brutal knifings of Cavendish and Burke five years previously. Three months later it had been reinforced by the massacre of five members of one family – the Joyces – in the remote Maamtrasna district of Connemara.

The newspapers were filled with daily accounts of shootings, burnings and rioting across rural Ireland as a desperate but now inflamed tenantry fought the landlords and their agents for control of their farms with the police caught in the middle.

The beleaguered Dublin Castle administration had determined to break the Irish National Land League, inspired by the charismatic, one-armed Michael Davitt from County Mayo. When key nationalist members of the Westminster Parliament initiated what became known as the ‘Plan of Campaign,' many of Davitt's supporters took it as a prompt to adopt stronger methods of direct action.

The ‘Plan' was effectively a powerful rent boycott, targeted on key landlords. The Government declared it a ‘criminal conspiracy.' Police and troops were sent in to break it. The tenants and smallholders resisted.

At the same time, the Castle sought to undermine the ‘Home Rule' movement. Driving for Irish political independence, it was championed by the Wicklow landowner and leader of the Irish Party at Westminster, Charles Stewart Parnell.

A ‘Home Rule' Bill for Ireland, sponsored by Prime Minister Gladstone, had been defeated two years previously, leading to the downfall of the Liberal Government. But Parnell had not abandoned the struggle, and the authorities knew that when the circumstances were opportune there would be a renewed push to challenge the writ of the Westminster Parliament.

A case like this would offer a newsworthy if ghastly variation on the nightly toll being reported from the countryside. The Dublin police had largely escaped the criticisms being levelled against the RIC. But a case of extreme violence like this would be ideal fodder for newspapers seeking to outdo each other in their sense of outrage.

Swallow strode out of the copse to the group of reporters. Seeing him approach, they turned their focus from Doolan. They were already shouting questions before he reached them.

‘Who's the dead man, Joe?'

‘How old is the child?'

‘We've been told it's a brutal case. Is it true?'

‘Have you any clues at this stage?'

‘Can we come up to have a look?'

Swallow placed himself beside Doolan and raised his hands to still the cacophony.

‘I can't answer everyone at the same time … if you'd please be quiet, I'll tell you what I can. I can't say much to you that you can attribute officially to the police. If you want the official position on anything, you know where the Commissioner's office is in the Lower Castle Yard.'