The City of Shadows (13 page)

‘You think you're a clever sort of man, don't you, Gillespie?'

‘I'm trying to keep my temper, Father Carey.'

‘Protestant bibles, several Protestant bibles, in English and German. This German one, I presume, is Luther's.' The priest spoke the name as if he was referring to a pornographer. ‘The catechism asks a question of the faithful: What should a Christian do who is given a bible by Protestants or by the agents of Protestants? The answer is that it is to be rejected with disgust, because it is forbidden by the Church. If taken inadvertently, it must be burnt immediately or handed to a priest so that he can dispose of it safely.'

‘I know burning books is the coming thing in Europe, but I don't think it's Ireland's way yet. I'm sorry. Tom starts school next September, as we agreed. That's all there is to say.' He had had enough. He wanted to bring the conversation back to the reason the priest was there and put an end to it.

‘I won't be leaving it at this. It won't do, Sergeant.'

‘This is my parents' house. It's my home, my son's home. Please go.'

‘You don't understand your position.'

‘What?'

The priest's eyes roamed round the room again. Wasn't it obvious?

‘Am I supposed to see an acceptable home for a Catholic child here?'

‘I've asked you to go.'

‘The child is already motherless, the idea that he should grow up surrounded by all – all this …'

Stefan's determination to hold his temper was failing. He stepped forward. He would make the curate leave. The expression of grave concern on Carey's face turned quite abruptly to a smile. It was the smile of a man more pleased with the job he has done than he expected to be. Briefly his smug, angular features reminded Stefan of the self-satisfied, knowing face of Hugo Keller; here was another man who knew he was untouchable. Stefan had the same desire to wipe away that smile. And the priest could read it. He held Stefan's gaze, almost challenging him to go further; one step further would do it. But the moment was gone. And the priest could read that too.

‘Watch that temper, Sergeant. You're not in the Garda barracks now.'

Father Carey picked up the black fedora that sat on the table beside the books. He stepped round Stefan with a curt, businesslike nod, and left.

For a moment Stefan didn't move. He turned to the window and looked out. The black figure strode through the farmyard, across the cobbles to the road, the fedora, slightly too small, perched on his head. All of a sudden, out from the barn, low to the ground, came something else black, with a flash of white round the collar. The sheepdog aimed itself at the priest, barking furiously. She wasn't going to bite but he didn't know that. He turned and kicked out. The dog changed direction effortlessly; now she was behind him, snarling and yapping. The curate's very black and very polished boot kicked again. The dog slithered back on her legs. As the boot touched down it landed in a pat of watery dung. Father Carey cursed. He looked up to see Stefan watching from the window. He turned towards the road angrily and walked on, faster than before, conscious of the dog slinking along behind him, no longer barking, her teeth bared, her lips curled in snarling, silent disdain. The sheepdog didn't like the priest very much either; but unlike Stefan Gillespie she had nothing at all to fear from him.

*

Above the farm, higher up on the bare slopes of Kilranelagh Hill, was a graveyard. It was a wild place, full of tumbled stones and brambles and tussocks of thick, uncut grass. The only sounds there were the wind and the rooks and the screech of the foxes at night. It had been a cemetery as long as anybody could remember. When the mountain townlands were full of people and the churches in the valleys were not their churches, this was where the dead came. There was no church here of any denomination, though there was a place of worship. Where the graveyard disappeared, almost unnoticed, into the surrounding gorse, there were two great stones that had marked the way out of this life for three, four, five thousand years. Now there was a neat and lovingly tended Catholic cemetery above the river in Baltinglass, but this was where Maeve Gillespie had once told Stefan she wanted to be buried. Neither of them could have known in that idle conversation, one day on the slopes of the mountain, that the time for her burial would come so soon.

She had loved the farm from the first time he brought her home to meet his mother and father. She was the one who said they'd live at the farm below Kilranelagh, when he had only thought of a house in the suburbs of Dublin. And when she was gone, with such brutal and aching suddenness, he knew it was where she would have wanted Tom to be. He couldn't live on his own in Dublin with his father. It felt right that he was here. Or if it wasn't right it was the best Stefan Gillespie could do. The future was uncertain. Two years on from Maeve's death he still felt he was unable to see beyond the next week. For now, the farm was where his son was safe and happy. Tom's happiness was all that mattered. And Maeve was safe too, here among the tumbled stones and the raggedy tufts of grass on Kilranelagh Hill.

Husband and son stood over the grave. Someone had left a single white lily a few days earlier. The dead were closer here than they were in Dublin. Neighbours did not forget. Tom clasped his hands tightly together and talked to his mother. There was a prayer, but when that was said he opened his eyes and whispered all the small, important happenings of his week, and gave her yet another description of the tricycle in Clery's window. As they walked back down the hill to the farm the rain that had been threatening all afternoon began to fall. They ran all the way, but by the time they burst into the warm kitchen they were drenched to the skin. They sat by the open range drinking tea and eating Weinrouk's white bread, with butter and plum jam, before Stefan went out to the barn with David to milk the cows. When they came back in his mother was in the sitting room, packing books into boxes. ‘They'll come to no harm in the attic, will they?'

That night Stefan Gillespie didn't sleep very easily. The rain lashed hard against the roof all night. He lay in the small bed across from Tom, listening to his son's slow, contented breathing. Tom could start school after Christmas. The books could go into the attic. All they had to do was let Father Carey have his way. Tom would be all right. But the day had taken Stefan to some strange places. In some way all the dissatisfaction and unease he felt about his own life was being stirred up, all the things he'd locked away behind what he simply had to get on with; the Gardaí, the money he needed to earn, the support he had to give his parents, and Tom, always Tom. Yet, when he fell asleep it wasn't any of that he was thinking about. As his eyes closed it was the dark-haired woman, Hannah Rosen, who filled his mind.

The room was at the rear of the terraced house in Lennox Street, looking out over a small yard and the backs of another row of houses. There was a neat pile of cardboard boxes, stacked on the floor. Two suitcases sat on the bare-mattressed bed. The bookshelves were empty, as were the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. There was no sense that anything was being thrown out, but everything had been put away. It was part of a process Stefan knew too well himself. For a long time after Maeve died her clothes simply stayed in the bedroom where they were. He cleared the dressing table, but only by putting brushes and combs and bottles of make-up into the drawers. Then one day he had to do more. He packed everything into boxes and old suitcases and carried it into the attic at Kilranelagh. It was all still there, but he knew he would have to take the boxes and the cases down soon. He would take out the few things he wanted to keep; the rest would go. There was a time. That time would eventually come for Susan Field's father too.

Stefan didn't know what he was looking for; something real or just something to give him more sense of who this woman was. He opened a cardboard box and saw the things he expected to see; brushes and bracelets, brooches, powder, make-up. There were clothes that gave off the faint, stale smell of old scent. There were books. There was an album with photographs. He was struck by the photograph of a man and a woman with three small girls; they were feeding swans by the Grand Canal. One of them was Susan. He turned to see her father standing in the doorway, his hands clasped tightly in front of him. Brian Field didn't really want to watch all this.

‘You can wait downstairs, Mr Field. I won't disturb anything.'

The small, nervous man, grey-haired, grey-skinned, nodded and went away, relieved that he wasn't needed. Stefan looked back at the photograph album. He found a picture of two girls in school uniform, twelve or thirteen, their arms round each other, laughing. Behind them were the blurred bars of a cage. It looked like Dublin Zoo. He easily recognised Hannah Rosen beside Susan Field.

Half an hour later Stefan came downstairs. He had found nothing that helped him. Mr Field was sitting in an armchair in the cluttered front room, looking out through the net curtains at nothing. He stood up. It was clear that the detective's arrival had made him uncomfortable. He moved in front of the fire, standing with his hands clasped tightly behind his back now. He didn't want the conversation that Hannah Rosen's stubbornness was forcing on him. His daughter's disappearance was in a box and he had closed the lid as far as he could. He knew Hannah thought Susan was dead, but he still didn't believe that himself. Shame played a part in it. He felt shame for his daughter, as well as grief and loss. He couldn't bring himself to contemplate Hannah's dark, insistent questioning. He didn't want to go there with her. There was enough shame to explain why his daughter might have run away.

When Brian Field's father, Abraham Breitfeld, arrived in Dublin from Kiev in 1896, via Warsaw, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Manchester, he had worked as a peddler, tramping the roads of South Dublin, Wicklow, Carlow, and Wexford. After three years he opened a grocer's shop in Clanbrassil Street. He moved his wife and his children from a tenement in Malpas Street to a flat over the shop. Two years later he bought the terraced house in Lennox Street, just north of the Grand Canal, in the part of Portobello that became known as Little Jerusalem. It was the first year of the twentieth century, the year of Queen Victoria's last visit to Ireland, and the year Abraham Breitfeld became Abraham Field. He had brought with him from Russia a view of the world that adapted very easily to his new home. The English were the Russians, the Irish were the Jews; Queen Victoria was the Czar. He was immediately a staunch nationalist. Though his English was never very good, his children could not only speak it perfectly before they went to school, they could even read Irish, when the Irish friends they played with in the street could barely understand a word of it.

Brian Field still lived in his father's house. His children had grown up in it and his wife had died in it. When his friends made the move over the Grand Canal to leafy Harold's Cross and Terenure, he stayed where he was. The business was sold now and his life was devoted to something else. He was the cantor at the Adelaide Road Synagogue. His children were grown up; Judith was dead. He had a daughter in New York, a daughter in London, and had long known that when Susan left he would be an old man on his own. There would be no woman to light the Shabbat candles in the house in Lennox Street any more. In recent years Susan had done it, but more often than not she hadn't been there. Now she was gone altogether. He still had the memory of the noisy family at the table. It was a painful memory. It wasn't a long walk to shul; that was what had come to matter. It was only when he sang in the synagogue that he didn't feel old.

Absence was in Jewish blood in the same way it was in the blood of the Irish. People were always going. That's how it was. His father's brothers and sisters were in Poland and Germany and England and South Africa and America; they had left their parents in Russia and never seen them again. Mr Field had always known Susan would go, sooner or later, like her sisters, to Palestine perhaps. That was why she wanted a degree, so that she could teach there. He'd never been comfortable with the young Zionists she used to bring home. He enjoyed the arguments, but there was too much socialism and communism flying around for his taste. He didn't really notice when she stopped bringing anybody home at all. He was too busy at the synagogue.

‘There's nothing more I can tell you, Mr Gillespie.'

‘She has a sister in London.'

‘Yes, in Finchley.'

‘Would she have contacted her?'

‘Susan's nearly ten years younger. Rachel has a family now.' It wasn't an answer; it was empty evasion. It was a man trying not to think.

‘What does she say about it?'

‘We just don't know, Sergeant, none of us know.'

‘She must think something.'

‘I went to the police again, when Rachel came over, but there was nothing more to find out. Susan was living her own life. She lived in the house, but we hardly saw each other. Sometimes she was here, sometimes she wasn't. I know she was very unsettled. I should have talked to her, I know I should. Rachel felt the only thing we could do was wait –'

Stefan took a small photograph of Susan Field from his pocket. He had found it upstairs in one of the boxes. It was a head-and-shoulder shot, taken not long ago. Her hair was cut short; she wore a dark, tailored jacket.

‘Can I borrow this? I'll get a copy made.'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘I will do my best to find out what happened to Susan, Mr Field. Would you mind if Hannah Rosen looked through her things? She might see something I can't see. She knew Susan. If there was anything out of place –'

The cantor nodded, but there was really no hope in his tired eyes, only growing resignation. He had already waited too long to look for anything now, let alone hope.