A June of Ordinary Murders (2 page)

He had been to this place before. Five years earlier the copse was one of dozens of locations in the park he had searched with colleagues investigating the murders of Ireland's two most senior government officials, Chief Secretary Lord Cavendish and Under-Secretary Burke, by members of the extremist group, the ‘Invincibles.'

The driver dragged on the reins and slowed the vehicle to a halt 20 yards from the group. Swallow and the two constables dismounted and strode across the grass. He recognised the bearded sergeant as Stephen Doolan, with whom he had worked before. He introduced himself for the benefit of the others.

‘Detective Sergeant Swallow, G Division. Where are they?'

‘In the trees,' Doolan nodded towards the copse. ‘The park-keeper found them around an hour and a half ago, a man and a child – a boy.'

The copse had been planted a century previously by the park architects so that it formed a bower or primitive pergola. From where he stood, Swallow could see a contoured shape under a grey blanket between the trunks of two giant beeches.

‘I've kept everyone a way back from the scene since we got here, including the priest,' Doolan said, gesturing towards the civilians. ‘What might have happened before that, I don't know.'

Swallow grunted in approval. Not every uniformed DMP sergeant knew or cared enough about crime investigation to preserve a scene properly, but the veteran Doolan knew his business. Swallow and he went back a long way.

They walked the few yards to the copse. The sun had started to filter through the branches of the high beech, dappling the ground underfoot. Swallow saw that there was not just one, but two blankets.

He dropped to his haunches by the trunk of one of the trees. Doolan brought his bulk down on one knee and grasped the nearer blanket.

‘D'you want to see the man or the child first?'

‘Let's see the man.'

Swallow was unsure why he felt it might be easier that way. Perhaps he wanted to put off what he knew would be the more unpalatable sight. He indicated the covered shape on the ground, and Doolan lifted the grey blanket.

The body appeared to be that of a slightly built man, clothed in a dark jacket and trousers with an off-white shirt. It lay on its back, what remained of the face turned to the morning sky.

Swallow instinctively removed his hat as a gesture of respect.

The features had been terribly mutilated. The eyes were sockets of red turning to black. The skin, from the jawline to the forehead and from one ear to the other, was marked with a series of gashes. Only bloodied gristle remained of the nose. There was a full head of dark brown hair, cut short. Swallow reckoned him to be young, maybe in his twenties.

Doolan folded the blanket and dropped to one knee. ‘You wouldn't see many as bad as that,' he said softly.

Swallow concurred silently. More than 20 years as a city policeman had inured him to sights of death and injury. Momentarily, he was reminded of a scene from his days in uniform where a young inmate had put her face in a mincing machine at the kitchens of the Richmond Asylum.

He had taught himself to isolate his emotions at times like this. His technique involved not thinking of what lay before him as an individual human being who had been breathing, eating, drinking or perhaps making love just a few hours previously. That would come later when they would have a name and an identity, humanising this broken thing on the ground.

What was important for now was detail. He drew out his notebook and pencil and started to record what he saw.

The left arm was flung out to the side at an angle of 45 degrees, the right arm folded across the chest.

The clothing was not noticeably disturbed. The jacket and trousers were clean and seemed in good repair. An off-white cotton shirt, buttoned to the neck but collarless, was spattered with blood. Seven or eight feet from the head a black, soft-brimmed hat lay upturned on the ground.

On the left side of the forehead, just below the hairline, there was a clear, circular hole, the size of a small coin. It formed the apex of an acute triangle with its base at the two craters where the eyes had once been. Swallow drew an oval to represent the face on the open page of the notebook and marked the location of the wound in relation to the eye cavities.

He moved close to the corpse and squatted so that he could examine the clothing by touch. He felt the fabric of the jacket between his thumb and forefinger. It was relatively new, but of indifferent quality.

When he touched his fingers against the corpse's right hand it was cold and solid.

He moved to the feet of the corpse and squatted again. The boots showed wear, but they had been neatly patched in two places on the uppers. He drew two outlines in the notebook and marked the location of the patches on each one.

Doolan rose to his full height and moved to where the other blanket was draped across a smaller form a couple of feet away.

‘This won't be easy either,' Doolan said. He lifted the second blanket to reveal a small, huddled form, lying in the foetal position on its right side with bare legs drawn up towards the stomach. The boy was perhaps 8 or 9 years old. His hands were clasped together in front of him with the fingers interlocked. The head was turned upward across the left shoulder, so Swallow could see the same destruction of the face, just as with the adult lying nearby.

The eyes were all but gone under the open lids. In their place were two small caverns of bloodied space. On the pale forehead, above where the left eye should have been, the same circular wound penetrated through flesh and bone to reveal brain matter within the skull. The dark hair, cut short, looked healthy and glossy. The child's mouth was open with the gums visible as if he were still screaming in the shock tremor that marked the end of his life.

A scene from his childhood years in the County Kildare countryside swam into his mind.

A man ploughing the land near Swallow's home at Newcroft had uncovered what appeared to be human bones. At first, he thought they were the remains of famine victims, perhaps a family that had starved or died of exposure or disease. When the priest was called he told the farmer that he had stumbled on a prehistoric burial chamber. People travelled long distances to see it as the news spread.

Swallow's father had taken him by the hand across the fields to gaze down at the yellow-grey bones in the pit. One of the smaller skeletons was crouched in the same foetal position as the dead child he was now looking at.

A few days later, men came from the new museum in Dublin and took the bones away in a wooden box. They stopped at the Swallow family pub, Newcroft House, before taking the open car that brought them to the train at the town of Kildare. While they were drinking, one of the men from the museum told his father that the skeletons were 4,000 years old.

He got to his feet. ‘Have we any identification at all, Stephen?'

‘Nothing. I went through the pockets. There's no wallet, no watch, no rings on any of the fingers, no letters. Not even a tram ticket. Nothing in the lad's pockets either.'

Swallow pointed to the circular wound on the forehead. ‘What do you make of that? And the same mark on the child?'

Doolan scratched his chin through his dark beard as if seeking inspiration. ‘They're surely bullet wounds. But there should be exit wounds too. And I can't see any.'

Swallow moved back to squat beside the body again. He went through the pockets of the trousers and jacket. Doolan was right. There was nothing.

‘Do you think the park-keeper might have lifted a wallet or a watch? Or anyone else?'

Doolan shook his head. ‘I can't say it didn't happen. The park-keeper's fairly shaken himself, though. He lives down in the village in Chapelizod. He says it was the dog that brought him over here, barking and yelping.'

Swallow reached to the adult corpse's left arm from where it lay across the grass. The hand was surprisingly small. There were no signs of physical labour.

Swallow concentrated on the two bodies, trying to study the features. Father and son, perhaps? The destruction of the faces made it difficult to measure likeness.

‘What time were they found?'

‘The park-keeper turned up at the police station in Chapelizod about 5.30 or so. They sent for the priest and they telegraphed to the Commissioner's office at Dublin Castle. The message was relayed on to me at Kilmainham. I sent one of my lads to notify the G Division.'

The police chain of communication was slow and cumbersome. The Dublin Metropolitan Police area stretched well beyond the city proper, encompassing the great space of the Phoenix Park and many of the villages and hamlets on its periphery. Nearly all of the big DMP stations were linked by a communications system known as the ABC Telegraph. Only a few of the larger stations were connected to the new telephone system that was in the early stages of installation across the city.

Outside of the Metropolitan District, policing was the responsibility of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Arguably the most effective communications link between the two forces was the fact that their respective headquarters' offices were located in proximity to each other in the Lower Yard at Dublin Castle.

‘Do we know any reason why the park-keeper was out so early?'

Doolan shrugged. ‘He says he was watching for a couple of stray dogs that've been giving trouble. We haven't any report of that but we can check it. He might have been planning on bringing home a few rabbits or even a deer. He wouldn't usually start work until 8 o'clock.'

Swallow cursed silently. Close on two hours had been lost, part of which he had spent in the detective office at Exchange Court, shuffling useless paperwork to bring him to the end of his night shift. It was time that might have seen the disappearance of valuable clues, or enabled a perpetrator to get far away from the scene of the crime.

With more than 20 years in plain clothes, Swallow was one of the G Division's most experienced serious crime investigators. There had scarcely been a murder or suspicious death in the city during the past decade to which he had not been assigned. That the Dublin Metropolitan Police had been able to claim the highest rate of crime detection of any urban area in Britain and Ireland was in some considerable part attributable to the skills of Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow.

When three of the ‘Invincibles' went to the gallows for the murders of Lord Cavendish and Mr Burke, Swallow got a commendation. His boss, the legendary Detective Superintendent John Mallon, had been promoted. Some of Swallow's colleagues told him that he should have done better out of the case himself, maybe with promotion to inspector. Swallow thought so too. In fact he was bloody sure of it. He had seen others promoted having achieved much less. It was not easy to avoid feeling bitter.

And he could have done without this situation, he told himself. He had got through his week of night duty without a major crime being reported. A couple of years ago that would have been a disappointment. He would have relished the thrill of a new case, the challenge of the unknown, the satisfaction of putting the pieces of a puzzle together to see it emerge finally as a coherent picture.

This time he had been looking forward to his two leave-days. He would have slept late in the mornings and then maybe spent the warm June afternoons with his board and colours, painting at Sandycove Harbour or by the rocks at Scotsman's Bay, behind Kingstown. He liked seascapes for the way they constantly changed, even as he worked. It meant that nobody could say he had got the wrong colour in the sky or that he had exaggerated the height of the waves.

For as long as he could remember he had been a sketcher, scratching away with a pencil stump as a boy, drawing dogs or birds or the outline of a hill or the detail of a building. In the budding stages of his romantic involvement with Maria Walsh, she had introduced him to her younger sister, Lily Grant, who was a teacher of art at Alexandra College. She encouraged him to experiment with watercolours and offered to guide him in his early efforts. He still liked to sketch, but there was something especially pleasurable in working the colour washes in and around the pencil outlines.

Even his immediate plan for the day was forfeit now. He had arranged to collect his sister at the college in Blackrock in the afternoon, when her examination would be finished. They would walk the length of the sea road to Kingstown and she would tell him about the examination paper in the morning and how she had got on.

Then he would take her to afternoon tea at Mr Gresham's Marine Hotel, looking down over the harbour, busy with yachts and ships and with passengers getting on and off the mail packets.

Swallow took his role as an older brother seriously. Harriet had hardly known her father. After he died, her brother had filled much of the void in her childhood world. He was her security, her counsellor and her confidant.

When she had been offered a place at teacher training college a year ago it had signalled a problem. It meant she would leave her mother to operate the public house and grocery store at Newcroft. Running the business was a hard task for a widow, dependent on hired help.

An obvious solution might be for Swallow to go home to run the place. After more than 20 years' service with the police he was eligible for a decent pension. A detective sergeant's pay was more than adequate for a single man. He had made some modest investments and savings too: a few shares in the tram companies and the new Dublin gas company, and a small accumulation of cash in a savings account in a Dame Street bank.

There was the complication of his relationship with Maria Walsh. He was a single man. She was an attractive widow with her well-established public house that she had inherited from her family in Thomas Street, just 15 minutes' walk from the Castle. There was the age gap between them. He was fit and strong for his 42 years. She was looking at 30. Without planning it, their lives had become enmeshed.

But Swallow was not of a mind to abandon the life to which he had become accustomed in order to return to rural Kildare or even to become Maria Walsh's partner in running her business. At least it was not what he wanted to do just yet.