The City of Strangers (6 page)

Dessie stopped as the staircase turned to the right, on to the landing, where the repeated pattern of the carpet stretched left and right along the corridor, between the gloomy, embossed walls and the grey-painted doors. It was lighter here though. A window gave on to Herbert Place below. Dessie was slightly breathless. A larger, elliptical chalk circle spread out on to the landing from the top stair; the bloodstains were clearer here.

‘She must have been carried out the bedroom. But the body was put down here a moment. There’s more blood on the walls up there, and on the pictures.’ Dessie gestured to the left, along the corridor, where several more prints and photographs hung at odd angles. ‘Either he put her down or he dropped her.’

Stefan looked. Dessie walked on past two closed doors.

The third door was open. Through it was a big bedroom as cluttered and claustrophobic as the hall and the landing. There were clear signs of a struggle: smashed ornaments, pictures knocked off the walls, a broken chair, a table on its side, sheets and blankets pulled across the big bed on to the floor. But where the smell in the hallway and on the landing was of polish and dust and years of airlessness, the smell here was of smoke and burnt wood; not strong but acrid and sharp.

Dessie took out a packet of Sweet Afton and lit a cigarette. Stefan walked into the centre of the room. There were two small rugs, though it was clear the rest of the floor had been covered until recently too. The floorboards were grimy with age but they had only been varnished at the edges of the room. A carpet must have covered the area in front of the bed, though it wasn’t there now. Close to the bottom of the bed the floorboards were blacker than elsewhere, charred. Stefan looked at the black patch and bent down. He rubbed something that was like charcoal on to his fingers.

‘Just in time, I’d say.’

Dessie nodded. ‘When the maid came in there was an electric fire on. It must have been going full pelt for a couple of days. The boards were starting to burn underneath. If she hadn’t come back when she did the place would have gone up so. She threw a bucket of water over it.’ He laughed and drew in some more smoke. ‘She fused the whole house, but it did the trick.’

‘So do you think it was deliberate? Starting a fire?’

‘I’d say not,’ replied Dessie. ‘There’d have to be better ways to do that. No, this was where she was killed and there was a lot of blood. Someone tried to clean it up. There’s soap mixed with the blood. The story is he put the fire on to dry the floor, then left. But as he never came back –’

Stefan was still looking down at the floor.

‘What happened to the carpet?’

‘The State Pathologist took some of the rugs and the bedclothes, but the carpet had gone already. Your man must have had it. It would have been soaked looking at what’s round the room. Maybe he brought it with him. Maybe he wrapped the body in it. There’s not a lot of blood in the car. She was on the back seat, so she must have been covered in something anyway.’

‘So with all this blood – she was stabbed? Is there a weapon?’

‘I’ll show you where the axe was. We’ll go out the back way.’

The garden that led down to the mews at the back of the house in Herbert Place was neatly kept, but it was bare and grey. Squares of grass and small, dark rhododendrons; tightly clipped bushes took up the flower beds. When the spring came there would be few enough flowers to give colour. Dessie pointed out several chalk-marked stains on the stone paved path that led to the two-storey mews; a little more blood to mark where the body had been half-dragged and half-carried from the house.

They walked through a door into the gutted stables that had once housed the family’s horses, and now smelt of the leaked engine oil that stained the stone floor. There were a couple of bicycles, some garden tools, a workbench full of spanners and wrenches, rusty and cobwebbed. Against one wall was a pile of cut turf, with sticks for the fires stacked beside it. Dessie stood by the turf and kicked at it.

‘There was a small hatchet here, under a pile of turf. There’s a gardener comes in now and again. He uses it for splitting wood for a bit of kindling. So it was kept in the garage. It had a good wash but there was still blood on it. They think it was maybe hot water, so instead of the blood running away it coagulated. They reckon it must be what killed her though.’

He walked across the empty garage to the double doors.

‘Mrs Harris’s car was kept in here. So he must have brought the body in, then shoved her on to the back seat. Bit tight in a Baby Austin. Timings aren’t very clear. Only one sighting of the car. It was probably dark when he left.’

Detective Sergeant MacMahon opened one of the doors.

‘Evening, night?’ asked Stefan as they walked out into the lane that ran behind Herbert Place. It was almost empty, as it must have been then.

‘Not late. Seven, maybe eight o’clock.’

Two boys were walking slowly along the lane towards Mount Street. Stefan Gillespie watched them for a moment as Dessie lit another cigarette. They were ten or eleven, one of them dragging a cart behind him, the base of an old pram, stacked with broken boxes and cardboard.

He recognised the boys’ slow, patient walk from the years he had spent tramping the streets of Dublin as a guard. There were thousands of children just like them. He recognised the odd combination of resignation and anticipation in the way they moved, their eyes alert for any piece of wood, anything that would burn, anything that would keep a fire going in the tenement where there was never any money for coal or turf, or anything else. He recognised the grey clothes drained of any colour they might once have had, too big on one boy, too small on the other, that had been handed down more times than anyone could remember. He knew the damp, dark, rotten, infested houses that Éamon de Valera’s new Ireland had still not touched, and he knew the cold, crowded room in one of those houses that the boys would live in.

Suddenly one of them darted across the lane with a shout to grab the prize of half of an orange box. They were laughing. And after the blood and the well-heeled claustrophobia of the house where Leticia Harris had been hacked to death, their laughter was a reassuring sound. Stefan smiled, turning back to Dessie.

‘So where is she?’

Sergeant MacMahon shrugged, drawing on his Sweet Afton.

‘We’ve got a sweepstake going at the Castle. They reckon it was high tide when the old lady was thrown in the sea. My money’s on Scotland.’

Corbawn Lane was a long, straight road that led from the village of Shankill to the sea. There were dark hedges and closely planted trees on both sides of the lane; the trees reached up and arched across the road almost the whole length, sometimes meeting in the middle. Even with the trees not yet in leaf, the straight line of the lane created the effect of a tunnel out of the skeleton branches.

Eight miles south of Dublin, Shankill was a place of small farms and country houses, just beyond the reach of the city’s slowly spreading suburbia. Around the village clusters of new bungalows payed homage to a still very English idea of what it was to live near the sea, but they were also a statement that the city had its eye on Shankill’s fields and estates. Yet Corbawn Lane was still a long way from Dublin. Every so often a break in one of the long hedges announced that somewhere among the trees there was a big house: Dorney Court, Lisnalurg, Clarebeg, then across the bridge over the railway, Llanmawr, Eaton Brae, and then, where the lane finally ended, hard against the sea and the small cliff beyond, the turning to the right, past the last lodge, into the last house called Clifton.

Several cars were parked in front of the house, among them the Austin that Dessie MacMahon had driven down from Herbert Place.

It was a grey house; the grey stucco beneath the grey-black roof was grubbily spotted with algae and lichen in various shades of grey, and at the corners of the house it was starting to crumble away. The house itself was empty; it had been empty for a long time. The big downstairs windows that looked out over the garden to the sea were covered by boards that had themselves become grey and stained over the years; upstairs the curtains were closed.

The gardens that led across the lawn to a row of trees and the sea were controlled rather than cared for; someone came to cut the grass and stop the borders going wild but that was all.

Stefan Gillespie and Dessie MacMahon stood at the far side of the garden where a thick hedge separated it from the low cliffs and the sea beyond. The hedge was smashed and broken; the grass around it was muddy and churned; there were the deep ruts of car tyres that had been spinning and spinning aimlessly there.

‘I told you about the Baby Austin Mrs Harris drove. She’d only had it three months. It was her pride and joy apparently. She seems to have spent most of those three months driving it around Dublin. And this is where they found it, jammed into the hedge right here. The night she disappeared a friend of hers saw the car coming out of Herbert Place and turning on to Baggot Street. The woman thinks it was Owen Harris who was driving it.’

‘So he brought it here? With the body in the back?’ said Stefan.

‘It’s hard to see it any other way. He had to get rid of it. He must have decided the sea was his best bet. It wasn’t such a daft idea either. She hasn’t been found. Whether he was trying to get the car into the sea as well –’

They both looked up for a moment. There was the drone of an aircraft overhead. A small plane was following the coast, northwards towards Dublin. Across the garden hedge where the cliff dropped down to the beach below, uniformed guards were walking along at the water’s edge, their eyes fixed on the sand and rock; offshore there were two small boats. The beach had been searched and re-searched, but every day it was searched again with the tides in case the sea gave anything up.

‘We’re up and down the whole east coast,’ said Dessie, ‘from Wexford right up to the North. They’re looking in Wales, Scotland, the Lancashire coast. Not a sign of her.’

‘It’s going to be hard work keeping all that quiet, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a missing woman, that’s all anybody’s saying.’

‘So why here?’ asked Stefan.

‘It was the family house. Where Harris lived when he was a lad, before the old man and the old lady went their ways. They’d been living apart for years. The father still owns it. So the assumption is Owen Harris knew it, that’s the long and the short of it. And he knew it was empty.’

‘And he tried to drive straight through the hedge?’

‘That wasn’t such a good idea. It’s some hedge. And he got it stuck. It went through so far, but it couldn’t get any further. Then the wheels started to spin and it wouldn’t move at all. He couldn’t go forward and he couldn’t back out. So the story is he got her out of the car and dragged her through the hedge. He pulled her, carried her, whatever he did, and he got her down on to the rocks. Then he shoved her off. It was high tide. Whether that was luck or he knew – I guess he’ll tell us that himself, eventually. It did the job. The problem was the car. Nothing was going to move it. Or get the blood off the back seat. He had no choice. He just left it here and he went home …’

‘Where’s the car now?’

‘It’s in the garage at Dublin Castle. They’ve had a good go at it, the State Pathologist and the rest. It’s given us more blood and it makes it hard to argue Owen Harris wasn’t here. Not that he seems to have gone to great lengths to hide that. He stopped a car at the top of Corbawn Lane by the AA box and asked the feller for a ride into town. He got dropped in Ballsbridge.’

‘Jesus, what the hell did he look like by then?’ Stefan shook his head.

‘Let’s say he made an impression. It was a couple, a man and a woman. I think when he walked out in front of the car they were too scared not to give him a lift. He told them he was an Englishman from Tunbridge Wells, on holiday. They had no idea what he’d done of course, but I think they were relieved to reach Ballsbridge in one piece. The conversation was a bit one-sided, but they said he apologised for the Norman invasion, the Famine, the Act of Union, the Black and Tans, and the Economic War, and said he hoped political developments would bring a new dawn in Anglo-Irish relations.’ Dessie laughed. ‘For some reason “new dawn” did stick.’

Stefan was laughing too.

Sergeant MacMahon took out a cigarette, cupping his hands to light it.

‘So does anyone know what it was all about?’

‘Apart from the fact that the mother and son were both barking?’

‘And were they?’ asked Stefan.

‘They were always fighting the peace out, according to the maid anyway. Mrs Harris was a great one for throwing the delft across the room.’

‘Just an ordinary Irish family then.’

‘Well, there was definitely something wrong upstairs,’ said Dessie. ‘She’d come out of a convalescent home six weeks ago. She’d been in there a month. For the rest, according to Doctor Harris. Superintendent Gregory likes to refer to him as the “estranged” husband. They were all a bit strange if you ask me. Anyway, the doctor says she was very highly strung. Fragile nerves. She needed rests like that quite a lot. This time it was after she’d broken into the old fella’s house and stolen a canteen of cutlery. She locked herself in her bedroom with it for three days.’

‘When did the marriage break up?’

‘They hadn’t lived together since Owen Harris was seven. That’s when they were all here. The old man’s in Pembroke Road now. He owns the house in Herbert Place too. She didn’t have any money. He kept the both of them.’

‘So Owen Harris had a row with his mammy and killed her?’ Stefan frowned. ‘And that’s it. What did she do, throw one plate too many at him?’

‘Maybe we’ll find out when we get him back,’ replied Sergeant MacMahon. ‘The maid says they were rowing about money. He wanted some and she wouldn’t give it to him. It was to do with this theatre tour in America, the Gate. The actors had to stump up their own fares. So that’s what he needed it for.’

‘And she wasn’t having it?’

‘There wasn’t a lot of spare money about. She lived on what her husband gave her. He wouldn’t be a man to throw it about, so they say.’