A June of Ordinary Murders (6 page)

There was an impatient murmur and Swallow heard a swear word. He knew that no journalist ever got any useful information about anything from the Commissioner's office. His invocation of higher authority was a formula to cover his own back.

‘First, there's no question of anybody being let up there. There's a dead man and a young boy in the copse. We don't know who they are and we don't know what happened to them. I can tell you the man is probably in his twenties, maybe a bit more. The boy could be 8 or 9 years old.'

‘Is it true they're completely unrecognisable?' The question came from Andrew Dunlop,
The Irish Times
's man. Swallow knew Dunlop for a solid, if persistent, news reporter.

‘The bodies aren't a pleasant sight, but I'm confident we'll establish who they are,' Swallow said.

‘Who found them and when?'

It was the
Evening Telegraph
's reporter, Simon Sweeney.

Always fashionably dressed and well groomed, Sweeney was more polished and better spoken than most of his press colleagues. Swallow had heard that he was the product of an expensive private education and had graduated from Trinity College. Had he not known the young reporter's avocation he might have taken him for a solicitor or a bank official.

Swallow detailed the sequence of communication from when the park-keeper's dog had led his master to the copse in the early hours. The journalist jotted the details in his notebook.

‘Have you established the cause of death, Sergeant?'
The Irish Times
's man asked.

‘That's a matter for Dr Lafeyre, the medical examiner, to determine. At this time we don't know.'

‘You don't seem to know very much at all, do you?' The tone was sarcastic and hostile and it was more of a comment than a question. It came from Irving, the correspondent for the
London Daily Sketch.
Swallow and he had clashed many times in the past.

‘That's sometimes how crime investigations work, Mr Irving,' Swallow replied evenly. ‘We're in the very early stages of this one. As I said, I'm confident we'll know a lot more as we go on.'

Irving sneered. ‘You were just as confident about the Elizabeth Logan murder. Were you not, Mr Swallow?'

Swallow felt himself flush. Elizabeth Logan was a prostitute whose body had been found on Sandymount Strand a year previously. The early identification of a suspect had proven to be ill-founded. Swallow knew that his handling of the case had not been the high point of his career.

His face registered the surge of irritation. Sweeney shot a warning look at his colleague.

‘Leave it alone, Irving,' he hissed, jabbing his pencil towards Swallow.

‘It does sound as if you've got nothing much to go on at this stage, Sergeant,' Sweeney said sharply. ‘Why would anyone shoot a man and a child? Isn't that most unusual? Maybe it was a robbery?'

Swallow seemed to hesitate, as if considering something that had just occurred to him.

‘Every murder case is unusual, Mr Sweeney. And no, I don't have any idea about motive at this stage. It would be helpful if any of your valued readers were aware of a man and a young boy gone missing. If that were to be so, the detective office at Exchange Court would be glad to hear from them.'

Sweeney sighed with irritation.

‘Is that all we get for being out here at this hour of the morning?'

‘I didn't ask you to be here at all, Mr Sweeney,' Swallow snapped. ‘And I've been here myself from an even earlier hour.'

He forced himself to what he hoped was a smile. ‘Now, gentlemen, if you don't mind, I have my work to do and I imagine that you have printing deadlines to meet.'

Half an hour later, when the pressmen had departed, the ambulance crew went into the copse with two canvas stretchers and took the bodies to Lafeyre's morgue at Marlborough Street.

A constable from Kilmainham had taken the plaster casts from the wheel-marks and hoof-marks on the dirt track and would bring them to the detective office. The police photographer had already departed.

Doolan's parties of constables, under Detectives Mick Feore and Tom Swift, were continuing their door-to-door inquiries.

Swallow knew there was little more that could be done to further the investigation on the site. Two constables would remain on duty at the copse to deter sightseers and to preserve the scene in case further examination might prove necessary once Harry Lafeyre's examination had been concluded.

He walked back to Pat Mossop, who was finishing his notes in the murder book.

‘Set up a crime conference for 11 o'clock in the morning at Exchange Court. And notify the City Coroner that we have two deaths by misadventure, an unknown man and a male child. Advise him that when we have causes of death confirmed by Dr Lafeyre we'll be asking him to set up an inquest.'

He queried Lafeyre.

‘When can I expect to have the post-mortem reports?'

‘I've got patients at Harcourt Street until about 5 o'clock, but I'll try to get working on them this evening. I'll have something by tomorrow morning. Say 9 o'clock. Once I've got that completed you'll be able to notify the City Coroner to get a jury together for the inquest.'

Almost a full day would be gone, Swallow reckoned. The bureaucracy of violent death moved at its own pace. But there was little point in protesting. Harry Lafeyre had a practice to look after. He had to earn a living too.

Mossop read Swallow's mind.

The Book Man tried to be positive, as was his wont, in the guise of humour.

‘Ah, I know what you're thinking, Boss. But sure, jam tomorrow is better than no jam at all?'

FOUR

When Swallow reached Exchange Court the parade room was empty. All available G-men were engaged on crime investigation or on surveillance, monitoring individuals around the city who might be intent on mischief in the days leading up to the Jubilee.

Two young men hurried out of the detective office as he arrived. They brushed past him, talking in loud, angry tones. Swallow caught the whiff of alcohol.

An overzealous constable had taken them into custody outside a public house on Nassau Street, where he heard them attempt a drunken rendition of
The Minstrel Boy.
They might be Fenian agents from America, he thought. It turned out they were two Canadian students from Trinity College, celebrating examination results.

The duty sergeant was taking a statement from a commercial traveller from Antwerp who had been relieved of his wallet, his watch and his trade samples during a night's socialising. He remembered meeting a young lady in Grafton Street sometime before midnight, but he had no clear recollection of how he had ended up in ‘Monto,' the city's red-light district on the other side of the river.

Officially, the G-Division detective office was in Dublin Castle. But this was an administrative conceit. Exchange Court was a blind, sunless alley on the northern flank of the Castle proper. Incongruously, its nearest neighbour was a pet shop, specialising in exotic species where the alley abutted onto Dame Street.

Swallow was glad to be out of the glare of the sun, even if the grimy corridors of the detective office were airless.

A couple of G-men queried him as he made his way to the crime sergeants' room that he shared with four other officers of his own rank. The grim news from the Chapelizod Gate had travelled quickly. Violence and sometimes murder were not unknown in Dublin, but even the hard men of the G Division were shocked by the reports coming in from the crime scene.

His first task was to brief his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent John Mallon.

John Mallon was at the height of his reputation. The G Division's chief was reputedly more influential than the head of the force, Commissioner David Harral. It was said that Chief Secretary Balfour considered him more important to the success of government policy in Ireland than the Security Secretary – or the Assistant Under-Secretary for Security, to give him his official title.

His work on the Cavendish and Burke murders had put his reputation beyond argument. Now aged 55, he had the option of retirement on a full and generous pension. But it was clear that Mallon preferred to hold to his career and his place at the centre of the country's security apparatus.

His masters in the Dublin Castle administration wanted to hold on to Mallon too. It was understood in administrative circles that he would probably go beyond his present grade of Detective Chief Superintendent to the Commissioner ranks. In the order of things at Dublin Castle, that sort of progression for the son of a poor Catholic farmer from County Armagh would be without precedent.

Each day and night brought Mallon's office a tally of shootings and burnings from around the country. There were confrontations between the constabulary and the tenantry at public meetings. Burnings of landlords' properties were reported nightly. Judges, magistrates and landlords were under constant threat and could operate only under armed protection. The Royal Irish Constabulary itself was stretched to breaking point and required reinforcement from the military in many areas.

The action in the land war was on the farms and in the rural areas, but it was planned and directed by men who lived and worked in the city. While the rural police and magistracy were the administration's front-line defence against the agitation; they too were directed from the city; from Dublin Castle, to be precise.

Balfour privately acknowledged that four decades after the ravages of the Great Famine, the lot of the Irish smallholders was still indefensible. In England and Wales the poorest farmers and their families lived securely in the ownership of their properties. In Ireland, by contrast, families still worked the land without security of tenure, while struggling to pay high rents to English landlords or their Irish agents.

The potential fusing together of the land campaign with a renewed demand for Home Rule was a constant threat. It was the Westminster government's worst nightmare.

Shortly after the murders of Cavendish and Burke, Parnell had founded the Irish National League to advance both aims, and for a time he and Davitt had made common cause. Although Parnell denied it vigorously, the constant threat of Fenian violence lay behind both demands. Much to the relief of the authorities, however, Parnell had more recently stepped back from the alliance.

The new Chief Secretary's approach was two-pronged. He pushed legislation through Parliament giving the police and the courts sweeping new powers to counter terrorism and to break the League's ‘Plan of Campaign.'

The ‘Plan' was reducing many of the once-powerful landlords to penury. At the same time, Balfour wanted to accelerate the purchase of land by the tenant farmers. His policy was to achieve this with a scheme of generous loans and grants.

But the processes of reform were slow. If it was to contain the threat of social and political breakdown, the administration desperately needed quality intelligence with which to direct its police forces and its legal machinery. And John Mallon was the master of intelligence gathering.

The clerk in Mallon's outer office was shocked at what he had already heard of Swallow's business during the morning.

‘The chief was expecting you, Sergeant. Jesus, it sounds like a terrible affair at the Chapelizod Gate. Do you know what it's all about?'

‘A bad business but it's early days,' Swallow said non-committedly. He had learned that the one person to whom he should not drop information was his boss's clerk. It was rarely passed on without some inaccuracy or distortion.

‘He's not here,' the clerk explained. ‘He's been called to a meeting with the Chief Secretary. He got the report you sent earlier from Kilmainham. He said you're to complete whatever you have now and leave it here for him. We'll get it to him before he finishes this evening or we'll send it across to his house later.'

Swallow was familiar with Mallon's procedures. If an urgent crime report was ready he wanted it delivered to wherever he might be, whether on duty or otherwise.

In earlier years, the Castle's messengers were frequent callers at Mallon's home on the North Circular Road. But since his promotion to head of the G Division, he and his family had the privilege of being accommodated in a house in the Lower Yard of the Castle. A few steps across the Yard and Mallon could be back in the office at any hour, day or night. Urgent information or documents could be in his hands literally within a minute of their arrival at Exchange Court.

Swallow retreated to the crime sergeants' office. He spent two hours trawling through the files of the official police publication,
Hue and Cry,
to see if any incidents or reports might indicate some connection with the double murder. Then he went through the missing-persons file and the daily report on goods deposited in the city's pawn shops. Nothing out of the ordinary suggested itself.

Late in the afternoon he began to put together his report of the day's events on a battered Remington typewriter. It was one of the DMP's acquisitions from the brief expansion of its resources in the aftermath of the Cavendish and Burke murders.

He had taught himself to use the machine. He enjoyed the sharp action and counteraction between key, hammer and paper. He saw it as a mechanical evolution from the process of creating images on a pad with the point of a lead pencil.

He made four copies, interleaving the foolscap sheets with carbon paper. One would go to the Detective Chief Superintendent's office, one would go into Pat Mossop's murder book, one would be circulated at the crime conference in the morning and one was for his own use.

By the time he finished, the heat had abated and it was evening. He had been on continuous duty for 21 hours without rest. He was tired and frustrated with no investigative results to show for his efforts.

He left the detective office shortly after 7 o'clock for Maria Walsh's. He turned out of Exchange Court to pass the Cork Hill Gate of the Castle where the statue of blind Justice topped the archway with her back to the city – a directional bias that was the subject of much sarcasm among Dubliners.