Peeler (19 page)

He asked Connolly if he could get the murder book for the prostitute Janey Plunkett and, to his surprise, the man reached under the table and took it out. It was in a brown cardboard folder. Thin for a murder book. It seemed to sum up a young and wasted life. Connolly opened it and took out a police photo of a young girl. Dark, unwashed hair, acne scars. Tired, childish brown eyes that seemed to register disbelief at the harshness of the world. O’Keefe thought of another question.

‘And your Janey Plunkett, was it possible she knew Connors as well? Could Connors have been the swell booking her for the private parties you spoke of?’

Connolly thought about it. ‘No way of telling. I’ve no doubt she was touting for the Shinners as well as for me. A girl in her position would have had to. At the same time, some of these IRA fellas are fierce puritanical about matters carnal. Country lads a lot of them. Wouldn’t know a fanny from a hole in the hedge and fear it all the same. The Volunteers can be rough on the whores unless there’s information or money to be had from them. Working girls have become great ones for Republican Bonds and donations to the IRA arms fund, so it goes in the lanes and knocking shops.’

The door to the pub opened again. Still smiling, Connolly moved for the Colt. He saw it was young Denis and opted instead for his whiskey glass. ‘Denis, my boy. It’s more like a lemon you’re looking every time I see you.’

The boy smiled and opened a clenched fist holding a wad of notes and coins. ‘Bastard came in at sixteen, I’m telling you sir. By a bloody mile, he did. Here’s your winnings.’

Connolly grinned and mussed the boy’s hair. He then dipped into the lad’s hand and withdrew most of the smaller notes and coins, leaving a pound note. An Auxie’s
per diem
, O’Keefe thought, and a fortune for the young cornerboy.

‘That’s yours, Denis. Buy the mother something nice, Young Lemon. She deserves it she does, rearing the likes of you.’

The boy grinned. ‘I’ll be fucked if I’d buy her a tin button, sir. I’m going back to the bookies!’ The boy turned and ran out of the pub.

‘I’ve a gift for education, I do.’

‘Any chance you could educate us further?’ O’Keefe asked, smiling.

‘My mission in life, son. And what further wisdom can I provide you with?’

‘The address of the brothel Janey Plunkett worked in.’

Connolly smiled and winked. ‘An honour and a pleasure, lads. An honour and a pleasure.’

***

They left the car on the South Mall, within walking distance of the city centre area known as the Marsh. Had they driven the Ford into the warren of narrow, tenement-lined lanes, they would have been spotted for who they were in seconds and word would have drummed down the alley telegraph faster than rumours of free drink.

Leaving the bright main street chorus of rattling, bell-ringing tramcars and hawking newspaper boys, for the back lane sounds of clopping dray horses hauling beer barrels and coal, the streets they now entered were filled with the smells of rotting refuse, of boiling cabbage, coal smoke and horse piss. Crumbling tenements braced the narrow lanes, families of ten to a room not uncommon. Faded grey laundry flapped gently in the wind, hanging from lines strung across the street to windows in buildings opposite. Gangs of barefoot children played, oblivious to the deprivation in which they lived. Shawlies, old women of indeterminate age, sat on stoops beckoning passers-by, selling matches, cigarettes, religious pictures and bawdy postcards.

O’Keefe kept his right hand on his Webley inside his trenchcoat. His briefcase dangled from his left. Like any old travelling salesman or debt collector he hoped, knowing he looked like nothing of the sort.

Light was fading and they spread themselves on either side of the street as they walked, pacing each other, front and behind. They passed a British army recruiting poster with an illustration of a Tommy standing watch in front of the pyramids of Egypt. The legend read ‘Join the Army and See the World’. Underneath this, someone had scrawled ‘Join the RIC and See the Next!’

The gas lamps on the lane, O’Keefe noticed, had been shot out, most likely by the rebels, eager to embrace night’s darkness as their own. The house they were looking for was in the middle of a terrace of four redbrick Georgians. The other three were occupied O’Keefe knew, without having to enter them, by innumerable families sleeping head to toe in mould-coated pallet beds. The people of the Marsh were hard working and poor, men daily breaking their backs on the docks while their children starved and coughed in cold, damp flats, skin red raw from lice, bedbugs and fleas, eaten from the inside by consumption.

‘Will I send one of the boys round the back, then?’

O’Keefe considered Mathew-Pare’s offer and decided against it – too dangerous to have a man standing on his own in an alley as night fell.

‘No, I don’t think yer man’ll scarper. What’s he to be afraid of, sure? He’s a businessman. He’ll know well how to deal with the likes of us.’

The brothel was called Madam Grace’s, but Connolly had told them that Grace had died of the Spanish flu two years before. According to the Branch man, a whoremaster named Noonan ran the shop now, without any of the titular grace the house’s former madam had brought to her place of business. Times had changed, O’Keefe thought. Things were harder now, faster. A quick coin more important than form or style.

They mounted the steps and pressed the bell. O’Keefe leaned out over the iron railing and tried to look into the front window. Thick red curtains obscured his view. Below street level and underneath the steps where they were standing were a basement entrance and another window also obscured by crimson curtains. A moment later they heard the sound of heavy boots from inside.

‘Sounds a right carthorse,’ said Mathew-Pare’s man, Eakins. Keane looked to O’Keefe for permission to smile. Eakins hadn’t spoken much so far and had gone about the day in a display of professional boredom. Now there was a light in his eyes and what O’Keefe took to be a smile of anticipation on his face. O’Keefe figured the man knew his way around knocking shops.

The door opened. No carthorse. A bull.
Mr Eakins
, O’Keefe thought,
meet your match
. The man who greeted them was well over six feet tall and packed with muscle. His chest had the dimensions of a Guinness keg and his nose appeared to have been broken more than once. He wore braces over a cotton vest, holding up expensive, chequered woollen breeches. He held the door half-open, blinking in the fading daylight and recognising in an instant that the men in front of him were police. ‘We’ve already paid you shower. Now fuck off and don’t be greedy.’ He tried to shut the door.

Eakins slipped past O’Keefe with surprising agility for a big man, wedging a brogue between the door and the frame to prevent it from closing. ‘Now hang on a minute, mate.’ He smiled like a drunken punter. ‘We’re only looking for a nice roll.’ He gave the door a shove, catching the doorman off balance.

‘I fucking told you …’ Rage flashed on the doorman’s face and he let go of the door to swing a punch at Eakins. His fist was halfway to its destination when Eakins landed his free foot in the man’s groin, doubling him over as though someone had jerked him forward with a rope. Starkson stepped past O’Keefe, taking as he did a short, lead-weighted leather club from his overcoat pocket. The door swung wide and O’Keefe watched Eakins sidestep the doorman – still doubled up and gasping for air – and grab his wrist, twisting it up and behind his back. The doorman grunted and stumbled forward. Starkson clubbed him on the back of the head and the man dropped heavily to the floor.

Mathew-Pare smiled at O’Keefe. ‘Don’t like cheek, my lads. Can’t abide it.’

O’Keefe had rarely seen violence so swiftly and professionally delivered, though he thought it was probably excessive. They might have pumped the big man later for information his boss wouldn’t give them. As they entered the brothel, Starkson was using the doorman’s braces to tie his hands behind his back. There wasn’t a trick those two fellas didn’t know, O’Keefe thought.

The front hallway of Madam Grace’s was painted red. A cheap and dusty chandelier hung from the ceiling, casting a dull glow. Mirrors on both sides of the entry hall cast their reflections back at them, filling the entryway with suited men. In front of them a stairway led to the upper floors, and to its side the hallway continued, ending at an open door that led down another set of stairs to what O’Keefe assumed to be the kitchen. Mathew-Pare made his way to a set of double doors just across from the stairway and found a large salon with a piano, a small bar, comfortable stuffed chairs and sofas. The room was empty and dark, smelling of stale perfume and tobacco. O’Keefe started upstairs. He was halfway up when a voice greeted him from the top.

‘I see you lads have met Tadhg. Fat fucking use he is to me.’

The whoremonger was dressed in a billowing white shirt that was gathered tight to his body by a satin, bright-red waistcoat that matched the predominant colour of his house and his trade. He was consumptively thin, with long, black, oiled hair. His trousers were tapered tight at the ankles and his boots shone black. His accent was Dublin. This wasn’t unusual. Jackeens made good pimps. The city exported them throughout the Empire. Some of O’Keefe’s fellow Dubliners were proud of the fact.

‘The dozy bastard must’ve told yis I made your wages last week,’ the pimp continued.

O’Keefe resumed climbing the stairs. ‘We’re not here for your payoff, Noonan. We want to ask you some questions.’ He reached the top and the man stood politely aside, gesturing to a room at the end of another short hallway.

‘My office, Constable.’

‘Sergeant.’

‘Sergeant, of course.’ There was an amused pout on the pimp’s face. O’Keefe was tempted to shut down the smile with his fist, but the urge passed.

As Noonan led them down the hall, a girl in her late teens emerged from one of the bedrooms, carrying a chamberpot covered with a dishtowel. Noticing the men in the hallway, the girl said, ‘Bit early for knocking now, isn’t it, Davey?’ The girl looked as though she had been sleeping, dressed in a pale-pink, silky morning gown fastened around her waist. O’Keefe could see the outline of her full breasts and the nub of her nipples through the thin material. Her face bore the warm red imprint of a pillow and her mass of black ringlets was flattened on one side. The effect of her recent waking made her appear younger and more vulnerable than she would look, he thought, when she was made up and touting for custom. O’Keefe wondered at what age she’d started whoring and gave her another five years before her price dropped and her life would begin its slow slide towards the dark, damp of Queenstown harbour or the quays. Only the youngest, the prettiest or most uniquely talented girls kept rooms in houses like these. The rest used the lanes and backstreets, cowsheds or rooms rented from war widows, who didn’t mind the noise and who needed the money.

On impulse, O’Keefe stopped her, taking the photograph of Deirdre Costelloe from inside his coat pocket and holding it out to her. ‘Do you recognise this girl, Miss?’

She studied the photograph – a shot of Deirdre’s head and shoulders that O’Keefe had taken the previous evening after the undertaker Casey had done his work.

O’Keefe watched her as she examined the photo. A flare of recognition in her eyes? No. More likely horror, O’Keefe decided, when she realised she was looking at a dead girl. She handed the photograph back to O’Keefe without comment and continued on down the hall. Noonan watched her go, the pimp’s eyes following her figure on the stairs like a dairyman appraising a prize heifer.

Noonan’s office held an oversized desk and a sofa covered in discarded clothing. It somehow reminded O’Keefe of Councillor Ryan’s office. Everybody wanted to be seen as the big man, he thought – a man’s desk a mark of his importance. Noonan sat behind it and indicated the chair in front for O’Keefe, who declined and walked around to the pimp’s side of the desk, leaning in over his shoulder, crowding him. Keane, Mathew-Pare and his two men came into the room too, closing the door behind them. Normally, O’Keefe wouldn’t have so many men in a room when he was questioning someone. It distracted the person being interrogated when O’Keefe needed their attention focused solely on him. This time, however, he didn’t mind. The pimp might not need a going over like his doorman, but a bit of a frightener never hurt any whoremaster he had dealt with in the past. He took another photo, from his briefcase this time, and leaned in closer over the pimp, inhaling the pungent odour of hair oil, mingled with the scent of cologne and sour sweat. Stale sweat, O’Keefe noted, rather than the reek of fear. The man was used to Peelers. He wasn’t scared. Not yet anyway.

He dropped the photo of Deirdre Costelloe on the desk in front of him. It was a crime scene shot, her injuries clear to see, her pose as sad and pornographic as when he had first found her. ‘Mr Noonan?’ O’Keefe waited for a reaction.

‘Call me Davey, Sergeant. Everybody does.’ He looked back over his shoulder. Then he picked up the photograph and let out a low whistle. ‘The things,’ he said, ‘some lads get up to.’

‘Lads like yerself, Mr Noonan?’

‘Tsk, tsk, Sergeant. Too obvious by half. If yis thought I done this, yis wouldn’t be asking me questions here now, would yeh? Yis would’ve hauled me into the Victoria barracks and had the clamps on me monkey nuts by now, yis would.’ He smiled.

‘What makes you think I won’t put you on that desk and stomp all over your monkey nuts right now?’

‘Because yis know I didn’t do this, but think I might have something to give yis on it. Really now, I’d expect more from our constabulary. Are you new to the job? I’d heard they were dropping standards, wha’?’

O’Keefe ignored him. He sensed Starkson smiling from where he was lounging on the sofa in the corner, having shoved the soiled laundry to the floor. It occurred to him that Starkson and his bull-necked partner Eakins probably spent most of their working lives lounging on sofas in offices, just being there as a reminder to people of what could happen if they didn’t give Mathew-Pare what he wanted.