A June of Ordinary Murders (4 page)

There were differing versions of how ‘Pisspot' Ces – Cecilia Downes – had got her nickname. One was that she kept a porcelain pot brimming with sovereigns hidden in a secret room at the top of the three-storey house in Francis Street. Another was that when she drank porter she did so from a circular, two-handled vessel that looked as if it had been designed for sanitary purposes.

Many years before, Joe Swallow had heard what he believed to be the more accurate account of it. His source was Stephen Doolan who was then working in plain clothes from the DMP station at College Street.

Swallow and Doolan had spent a fruitless week trying to recover a haul of silver plate taken in broad daylight from a judge's house on St Stephen's Green. The word around the city was that ‘Pisspot' Ces had already found a buyer for it in Manchester. Now they had taken two high stools in front of a pair of pints in Mulligan's public house, behind the DMP station.

The two policemen were in gloomy mood, anticipating the censure that would descend upon them from on high for their failure to restore His Lordship's plate.

‘She's as hardened and vicious a criminal as you'll meet, that one,' Doolan said, as he squared up to his pint of Guinness's porter. ‘And she has an eye for good silver.'

He raised the tumbler to his lips and downed a third of his pint.

‘That's what she started with – silver. Did you know that?'

He ran the back of his hand across his mouth, drawing the frothy trace of the porter off the bristles of his moustache. ‘As I heard it from one of the old-timers in College Street, she was only a young one at the time. She went to service in a big house in Merrion Square, I think it was. The housekeeper found a clutch of silver spoons hidden away under a petticoat. When she saw the set of spoons neatly wrapped away she told her she was calling the police.'

He shook his head gravely.

‘That was where she made the mistake – the housekeeper, that is. Ces Downes drew up a cast-iron chamber-pot from under the bed and battered her with it across the skull a dozen times. That woman never walked or talked properly afterwards.'

Doolan raised his glass again.

‘I heard that from one of the men that took Ces Downes to the Bridwell, still shouting that if she had a chance, she'd finish the ould bitch off. But you know, the extraordinary thing is that she was never charged for it. She could have been done at the very least for assault and battery, maybe even attempted murder. You won't find any of it in the records at the Dublin Criminal Registry.'

Whether the tale was true or not, it had gained acceptance in the world of Dublin crime. It became another thread in the mystery that was ‘Pisspot' Ces Downes.

Even in the closing days of her life, nobody in authority could have put their hands on any documentation to confirm where Ces was born or what her name had been before she married her late husband, Tommy ‘The Cutter' Byrne.

Searches by successive investigators over the years in the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages had yielded nothing. Trawls through the post office and the savings banks, facilitated by co-operative officials, found no trace of her supposed crime-funded fortune. There was nothing of use in her file in the Dublin Criminal Registry, the DMP's vast repository of information held at Dublin Castle on those who came to their notice during the investigation of crime.

A decade previously, after her husband had died of consumption, she paid cash down for what had once been the home of a prosperous wool-merchant on Francis Street.

The once-elegant town house was within the hearing of the bells of the city's two cathedrals: Christ Church and St Patrick's. It became the headquarters of Ces Downes's criminal operations. The fine reception rooms became dormitories for travelling criminals. The spacious kitchens and pantries became storehouses for junk and stolen property. The Italianate plasterwork on the ceilings crumbled. What had once been a showpiece of Georgian architecture and workmanship degenerated into a squalid doss-house.

A wisecracking G-man remarked perceptively that Pisspot Ces and her house on Francis Street deteriorated together. Never abstemious, she drank heavily and steadily after Tommy's death. The sharp, strong features turned to sagging flesh. The once-glossy hair that she wore curling to her shoulders gradually turned from black to a yellow-grey.

Ces Downes kept the top floor of the mansion as her citadel, sharing it with two Staffordshire fighting dogs that reputedly slept one at each side of her bed at night. Few of her criminal foot-soldiers had access to the top floor. Only her most trusted lieutenants ever got beyond the landing. When she saw visitors on business it was in a dilapidated, dirty room at street level that had once been the wool-merchant's counting office.

As Ces Downes's criminal enterprises consolidated, upwards of half a dozen young men – her ‘lads,' as she referred to them – operated as her muscle.

Two of them in particular, Vinny Cussen and Charlie Vanucchi, were toughened criminals. Cussen was squat and red-haired with a physique like a small horse. Vanucchi's tall frame and sallow, dark looks betokened his Neapolitan forebears, who had come to Dublin as street pedlars three generations previously.

There were rumours that Ces had children. Some of the G-Division detectives had picked up a whisper that she had a son who was one of the top criminals in Liverpool. A young woman who came to visit her once at Francis Street was spoken of as being her daughter. Somebody else said she was Ces's fence – a receiver of stolen goods – in London. But she would neither deny nor confirm any of it on the many occasions when she was interviewed in connection with one crime or another.

Nor was it easy to say how or why Pisspot Ces Downes had emerged as one of the acknowledged principals of Dublin's criminal underworld during the 1870s and 1880s. Some policemen believed there was a clue in the bail records of the Dublin Magistrates Courts. While it was impossible to find any trace of her in any other official register, the books there showed that she had begun to offer herself as a bail-bondsman at some time at the beginning of that period.

Bail was difficult in the Dublin courts for a suspected criminal accused of housebreaking or robbery or picking pockets. Victorian Dublin, in common with every other major city of the United Kingdom, placed a premium on the protection of property. The city's policing and courts system reflected that. But bail in some circumstances might be a possibility if someone was willing to put up a heavy bond. Ces Downes seemed to have the funds to do so.

She had no convictions for violence, but it was generally believed that a Belfast criminal who was found with his throat cut on Usher's Island had died at Ces Downes's own hand. His error, it seems, was thinking that he could undercut Downes and supply cheap, bootleg whiskey to certain public houses on the Dublin quays.

And it was known that when a small-time fence across the river in Mary Street refused to pay Vinny Cussen the agreed value of a collection of stolen watches, Ces Downes ordered that he be brought over to Francis Street for some persuasion. He was never seen alive again. Tentative identification of a battered corpse taken from the river at Islandbridge a month later indicated his likely violent end.

She seemed to have influence in unlikely places. It was known that when a drunken doctor had refused treatment to a sick woman at the Long Lane Dispensary, Ces Downes somehow arranged it so that she was admitted as a patient at Dr Steevens' Hospital. The woman even got a sulky apology from the dispensary.

She had the reputation of being able to persuade certain landlords to hold off from raising rents or evicting certain tenants who were in her favour and who were having difficulty meeting their bills. It was said, although never proven, that she had influence with lawyers and even with some judges.

Over the years she built a network of operators from the poverty-stricken classes that inhabited the courts and alleyways and tenements of Dublin city. Ces Downes was a protector, a fixer, a money lender and a counsellor as well as being a woman who was personally capable of extreme violence.

G Division knew that her criminal interests ran virtually the entire gamut of the underside of Dublin life. She received stolen property. She operated rings of ‘dippers' – young girls who picked pockets in the streets or at race meetings. She funded pitch and toss schools. She staked cash for the illicit distilling of alcohol. Although it could never be established that she was directly involved in prostitution, she readily went bail for girls from the red-light districts around Montgomery Street or in the courts and alleys off Grafton Street whenever the DMP felt it was necessary, for appearances' sake, to make some arrests.

If Ces Downes had connections to any of the ‘politicals,' the Land Leaguers, the Fenians, the Invincibles or any of the splinter groups, G Division rarely found any traces of them. She stayed clear of the well-known figures who claimed to be pursuing the interests of the worker or the small farmer or advancing the cause of patriotic nationalism.

But the G-men often found that there was cross-membership down the ranks between the ordinary criminal and the politicals. Housebreakers, robbers, prostitutes, receivers, pickpockets and miscreants of various types would frequently invoke political motivation when arrested or charged. Sometimes, in Swallow's experience, the claims were genuine. Often they were expedient, or a desperate attempt when caught red-handed to do a deal as an informant with a G-man.

Estimates of Ces's age put her somewhere in her forties. But the heart disease that slowly drained the strength from her body had turned her yellow and gaunt and seemed to shrink her frame. Since the early springtime she had grown visibly more frail each week, and from the early summer she had not been able to spend more than an hour or two of any day on her feet.

In more recent years, as she had gradually succumbed to the illness that finally ended her life, she had devolved much of the running of her organisation to her two lieutenants – Vinny Cussen and Charlie Vanucchi.

The question now was which of these two potential heirs would take her place. Both were brutal men. Their victims included people who could not pay their debts to Ces Downes's criminal empire, troublesome publicans and potential witnesses in court cases. Some of those who crossed Cussen and Vanucchi disappeared, like the fence from Mary Street who refused to pay for the stolen watches, and were never seen again. Others ended up in hospital or badly mutilated.

Charlie Vanucchi ran as many as a dozen burglary and housebreaking teams simultaneously. It was said that Charlie could accurately describe the interior and layout of every fine house and business premises between the two canals that circle Dublin city centre.

Vinny Cussen's reputation was largely built on poteen. He bought, transported, and when necessary manufactured the cheap, potent whiskey that his gangs supplied to public houses at a fraction of the cost of regular, bonded alcohol that was subject to excise tax.

Each of them regarded the other with the deepest hatred and suspicion.

As long as Ces Downes was in charge, they suffered each other in the confined world of Dublin criminality. But with her dead, would that uneasy co-existence be sustained? Most observers felt not. One man or the other would surely emerge as top dog, and it was unlikely that it would happen without a struggle.

Other questions followed. Would her successor operate according to the rules that she had dictated during her lifetime, or would the criminal network which she led try to extend beyond its traditional businesses and into new districts? Would the transition to a new leadership be peaceful, or would there be a bloodletting as a new order was established?

Pisspot Ces Downes had entered the last days of her life as the calendar turned to June. May had been seasonably warm, but June was to prove memorable for the extraordinarily high temperatures of its days and for the cloying humidity of its nights. Over the days and nights that she lay in her sick-room, at the front of her house in Francis Street, the more the conversations in the streets and courts and alleyways seemed to bespeak the uncertainties in what lay ahead.

Unidentified visitors sometimes came at night to Francis Street and were admitted on her instruction to her third-floor citadel. Invariably the visitors' features were hidden by unseasonal scarves and headgear. None took more than a few minutes with her. The exceptions were a friar from the Franciscan Church at Merchants' Quay and two black-robed nuns who spent an hour by her bedside one afternoon and then slipped out into the street.

The gathering heat and the bad air of the June days hurried her end. She would have no doctors. She dulled the pain with laudanum in brandy until she was no longer able to swallow. The ‘lads' were by her bedside as she breathed her last.

On the evening that Ces Downes died, Charlie Vanucchi and Vinny Cussen came together to the front door of the house in Francis Street. Together, in a rare show of unity, they pinned the black crepe and the notice on the door, announcing her passing, shortly after 8 o'clock.

THREE

By 11 o'clock, when Dr Henry Lafeyre, the Dublin medical examiner, reached the copse of trees inside the Chapelizod Gate, the morning sun was climbing over the city. Untrammelled even by a single cloud, it had cleared the small hills that flank the bay to the south – Dalkey and Killiney. Then it set its course behind the dead volcanic peak of the Sugarloaf, past Two Rock and Three Rock. At midday it would burn steadily in a diamond sky above Djouce Mountain.

Joe Swallow worked productively and easily with Harry Lafeyre. Sometimes Swallow thought that, although he was ten years the senior of the medical examiner, the two men saw something of themselves in each other's life story.

Lafeyre, the forensic examiner and physician, had served for three years as Medical Officer with the Cape Colony Mounted Police in southern Africa. He was ‘a copper with a stethoscope,' as he humorously recalled it.