The City of Shadows (4 page)

‘Your woman's a looker. You wouldn't blame the feller who wanted to give her a go.'

It would have been an exaggeration to say that the fat policeman had read his sergeant's mind. It wasn't even close. But it was still a lot closer than Stefan was comfortable with.

‘We'll give it a few minutes, Dessie.'

‘I need a piss first.' Garda MacMahon opened the car door and squeezed out, dropping his cigarette end in the gutter with the other nine. He walked quickly through a gate into the square, in search of a concealing tree. Sergeant Gillespie got out of the car himself and took a welcome breath of air. He was taller than his colleague and thinner, quite a lot thinner, and where Dessie was balding he had a mop of thick, brown hair that was shapeless rather than long, as if he didn't remember to get it cut very often, which he didn't. He looked younger than his twenty-eight years and people often assumed he was the garda rather than the sergeant. He put on his hat. It was colder than he'd thought. He stood looking towards the house. The dark-skinned woman was making him uneasy. It wasn't a job he'd feel good about at the best of times, but it was more than that. He felt like getting back into the Austin and driving away. He pushed the thought from his mind. At least he wouldn't have to sit there all afternoon with Dessie and his family rows and the smoke from another packet of Sweet Afton. Detective Garda MacMahon came back from the square, still buttoning up his fly.

The two policemen walked to the house. Stefan mounted the steps and rapped on the door. After a moment, he knocked again. It opened a crack. A middle-aged woman in spotless nurse's uniform looked out at him.

‘Yes?' It was supposed to be a question, but as yesses go it meant something much more like ‘no'.

‘We'd like to speak to Mr Keller.' He took off his hat.

‘He's not in just now.'

‘We can wait.'

‘He's not here. And he sees no one without an appointment.'

‘Then I'd like to make an appointment. Now would be fine.'

Detective Sergeant Gillespie took his warrant card from his pocket and held it up. The woman's first instinct was to slam the door in his face, but Dessie MacMahon had anticipated her. With surprising speed for his size he moved forward, past his sergeant, and put a foot and a portion of his not inconsiderable torso against the fast-closing door. He applied his weight in the opposite direction to the nurse, pushing her and the door firmly back into the hall. He had slammed her against the wall quite hard, but even as the two policemen walked into the house she had recovered her breath sufficiently for her furious and now panicking voice to fill the echoing hallway.

‘Hugo! Doctor Keller!'

‘You think he might be back then?' said Dessie, grinning.

A door at the far end of the long hall opened. A small, rather avuncular man stood with the light behind him, peering through the thick lenses of his glasses as if he couldn't really make out who was there. But if there was concern beneath that puzzled look it was well hidden. There was already a half smile on his face, even as Detective Sergeant Gillespie started to walk towards him. He knew what the two men were. He had absorbed that information and accepted it. He was not a man who bothered about the inevitable. He didn't move as the detective approached him; instead his smile broadened. Stefan had only seen Keller at a distance before, going in and out of the house. He was always well dressed; today was no exception. Even though he was in shirtsleeves, the shirt was gleaming white; the yellow bow tie was perfectly tied; the braces had a floral pattern that was bright, almost loud, yet expensively tasteful; the suit trousers had knife-sharp creases; and his black shoes were spotlessly clean. By now Keller's benign smile was irritating the detective. It was altogether too pleasant to be anything other than extremely unpleasant. Wherever it came from the effect was to make him want to wipe the smile off the man's face with his fist. But even as that thought flashed through his mind he had an unsettling picture of Keller getting up from the floor and wiping the blood from his mouth, with the smile still there, broader and more unctuous than ever.

‘Hugo Keller,' said Stefan flatly.

‘Doctor Keller.' The German accent was stronger than he had expected. But he knew German accents. Austria, probably Vienna.

‘It's Mr Keller I think.'

‘My doctorate is from the University of Graz. You may not know it, but it's the second oldest university in Austria. Doctor Keller is correct.'

‘In Wien hat jeder streunende Hund ein Doktorat, aber sie sind noch immer Hunde, nicht Ärzte, Herr Keller.' He stressed ‘Herr'. It was true. In Vienna every dog in the streets had a doctorate in something. They were still dogs, not doctors. The smile wavered on Keller's lips. This wasn't quite the Dublin detective he had anticipated. Contempt might not be so wise.

‘I am Detective Sergeant Gillespie. I will be conducting a search of your premises. I believe you have instruments here that have been used to procure miscarriages, contrary to Section 58 of the Offences against the Persons Act, and I believe you are, even now, engaged in procuring a miscarriage for a woman. You will be taken into custody, Mr Keller.'

‘Naturally, Sergeant. I'll get my jacket.'

He turned back into the room. Stefan followed. He passed an open door on his right, a small office full of books and files. He paused, looking in, registering it. The nurse had composed herself now. She brushed back her hair and walked past him into the office. Unlike her employer the look on her face was familiar; it was fear. He watched her as she sat at the desk.

‘Please don't try to leave,' he said quietly.

‘Why should I?' Despite the fear, this was her territory.

He carried on into the back drawing room of the house. It was a startling change after the dark corridor, with its stained wallpaper and blackened ceiling. The room was bright and clean and looked as if it had been transported there directly from an expensive private clinic. But while Stefan took this in his attention was fixed on the dark-haired woman he had watched enter the house. She stood in the window, framed by the sunlight that had momentarily broken through the grey December clouds. It shone through her hair in a gauze-like haze. For a second the startling brightness made him blink. And then it was gone. She was looking straight at him. Now, more closely, he saw there was indeed neither fear nor shame in her dark eyes. There was anger, and it seemed to be directed at him.

‘If you'd wait in the hall, Mr Keller.' He didn't look round.

‘I'm sorry, my dear.' Keller smiled a slightly different smile at the woman. It was kinder and more reassuring than the one he had for Garda sergeants. He picked up his jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on. ‘I don't know if you heard any of that, outside in the hall. This gentleman is a policeman, a detective. My advice would be to say nothing, but that's entirely up to you of course. You need offer no explanation for why you are in this room, as he well knows.' He walked to the door. There was a mirror on the wall and he stopped to straighten his bow tie. Stefan Gillespie hardly noticed him go out. His eyes were still on the woman at the window.

‘Can you tell me who you are, Miss?'

She shook her head, but only in irritable and frustrated disbelief.

‘You couldn't have done this on another day, could you?'

He just looked. Nothing at all about this woman was right.

‘How long has this man been doing this, procuring miscarriages, whatever it is you call it? How many years? It's just what I needed, you and your great policeman's boots stomping in before I'd even got started!'

‘I need your name. I'm sure you know why I'm here.'

The woman gazed at him and shook her head again. All at once the anger was gone. He saw something else in her eyes now. It was a mixture of contempt and suspicion. She looked at him as if he was the one in the wrong.

‘No, I don't know why you're here. I think I'll reserve my judgement on that, Sergeant. In the meantime I shall take Mr Keller's advice about keeping my mouth shut. You may be his best friend. So I shall say nothing.'

*

Pearse Street Garda station was the main police station for the South City, built for the old Dublin Metropolitan Police in 1915, the year before Padraig Pearse was executed after the Easter Rising, when the road was still Great Brunswick Street. It took up the corner of Townsend Street, looking towards Trinity College, a grey, austere building that echoed the Scottish-castle style of architecture popular with insurance companies, all chiselled stone and mullioned windows. The DMP was only a memory now, except for two small corbels supporting the arch over the main entrance; the sour faces of a DMP officer and a helmeted constable still looked down in disapproval. As stations went it wasn't a bad place to work. The offices upstairs were brighter and cleaner than most of Dublin's Garda stations, but downstairs the cells smelt like they always smelt – of stale sweat and urine and tobacco.

Stefan Gillespie sat in a room on the ground floor, close enough to the stairs for the odour of the cells to hover in the air. A bare table separated him from the dark-haired woman. The room was bare too, lit by a naked bulb. There was a window high in one wall, no more than a foot square, the glass painted over with the remains of what once must have been whitewash. She had still given him no information and no explanation. She denied nothing, admitted nothing, said nothing. He didn't even know her name. She returned his gaze with quiet self-assurance. He was the one who kept looking away to scribble something he didn't need to scribble on the sheet of white paper in front of him. She was beginning to make him feel she was the one running this.

‘You're from Dublin, thereabouts anyway. The leafier parts I'd say.'

She didn't answer.

‘You've clearly been out of the country though.'

‘An accent and a suntan, I can see you're nobody's fool.'

She didn't need to smile to make him feel foolish.

‘Do you realise how much trouble you're in?'

‘As a matter of fact I don't.'

‘I can see you're an intelligent woman. You're not what I expected.'

He knew those last words were another mistake.

‘You were expecting some sort of idiot, were you?'

‘That's not what I meant. '

‘Idiot enough to be pregnant. Well, how idiotic can a woman get?'

‘Sooner or later you're going to tell me who you are. You know that as well as I do. The only thing that can help you in this situation is to cooperate with us as fully as possible. It's Mr Keller we want, not you.'

‘I'm sure even he knows you've got him. What do you need me for?'

She reached across to the packet of cigarettes on the table. They were Stefan's. She hesitated, looking at him. He shrugged. She took one and put it between her lips. He pulled the lighter out from his pocket and flicked it, then stretched over and lit the cigarette with what he hoped was an appropriately reassuring smile. But if he thought the woman's silence was about to end with this small act of human contact he was mistaken.

‘Thank you.'

She drew on the cigarette, then shook her head.

‘I can't do what I went there to do. And that's your fault. I'm not sure where that leaves me. Well, apart from being stuck here in a police station with you. That's all I've got suddenly. I want to see what happens next.'

‘What happens? This is about a life, a life that would have ended this afternoon. It's about God knows how many other lives that have ended in that back room.' He was speaking the words he was supposed to speak now, but he knew they didn't sound like his own. He knew too that this clever, unfathomable woman would understand that immediately. And she did.

‘Yes, it is about a life. I know that already. I wish I didn't.'

Stefan saw something else in the woman's face now. It was sadness, a deep and uncertain sadness. He also saw that it had nothing at all to do with why they were here. Whatever she was talking about it wasn't the conversation he had just felt obliged to start. The interview was still going nowhere. He was not controlling this. She was. The words ‘stuck-up bitch' were in his head. He'd had enough. He got up, pushing the cigarettes at her.

‘I'll leave you the fags. It'll be a long night.' He went. Let her stew.

As he left the room he found himself smiling unexpectedly. He remembered another time he had walked away from a conversation with a woman and thought the same thing – ‘stuck-up bitch'. It was nearly six years ago. A pub in Nassau Street. Maeve. Seven months later he'd married her. And now she had been dead for nearly two years. One year, nine months, eight days. He had thought about that night in Nassau Street a thousand times in those months, waking and sleeping. He had relived it as he had relived every moment of their lives together. But he had never smiled about it in quite the same way before. It wasn't that the woman from Merrion Square reminded him of Maeve. Perhaps she reminded him of something about himself he had forgotten. Instead of feeling angry she made him want to laugh. These thoughts came at him out of nowhere. He pushed them away. He saw Dessie MacMahon walking towards him, with a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea.

‘Has Keller phoned his solicitor?' he asked.

Dessie nodded, taking a bite of the sandwich.

‘But he's still not saying anything?'

‘No. He's very polite about it though.'

‘Is the solicitor on his way?'

‘He didn't say.'

‘Stick him in a cell for the night and see how polite he is about that.'

Garda MacMahon took another bite of the sandwich.

‘What about the nurse?' said Stefan.

‘She's still giving out, but it's the same story. Nothing to say.'

‘The evidence is all in Merrion Square. I don't understand how Keller thinks he can explain that away by keeping his mouth shut and grinning.'