A June of Ordinary Murders (7 page)

He passed Christ Church, crossing the corner of Nicholas Street into High Street and on to Cornmarket. It seemed as if every tenement family had come out to breathe the evening air on the steps and pavements. Humid though it was outside, it was doubtless healthier than inside where a score of people might inhabit a couple of rooms. The odours of unwashed bodies, rancid food and human waste, smells never absent from the poor streets of Dublin, hung heavily in the air.

On the steps of a tenement house where High Street merged into Thomas Street, a knot of people had gathered around a young man who was slowly reading aloud from a copy of the
Evening Mail.

From the rapt attention of the group and the expressions on their faces, Swallow knew that the young man was relaying the details of the morning's horrors from the Chapelizod Gate. He saw a woman bless herself and heard another mutter, ‘Jesus, have mercy on them…'

Maria Walsh's public house stood on Thomas Street. It faced the Church of St Catherine that locals pointed out as the execution place of Robert Emmet in 1803. Tradition in the family had it that Maria's great grandfather had witnessed the young revolutionary's end.

A narrow alley ran beside the house. He let himself in by the side door giving onto the alley and climbed the back stairs that led to the living quarters. Notionally, Swallow was the tenant of a sizeable room on the first floor with a window looking out to the street. He had use of the parlour and his meals, when his duty hours permitted, were served in the dining room by Maria Walsh's housekeeper, Carrie, or by the day maid.

The relationship between Joe Swallow and Maria Walsh had developed slowly and was still ambiguous.

She had been married at 20 and widowed at 25. Her merchant sailor husband, William Walsh, lost when his ship went down with all hands off the Welsh coast on a January night in 1882, was still a presence in the house when she rented the room to Swallow two years later.

An oilskin deck coat hung in the return hallway. A scale model of a three-masted clipper ship stood on the mantle shelf in the dining room. Occasionally an opened drawer would yield a tobacco tin or a navigation chart. And she kept her married name, reverting to her maiden name, Grant, only for legal purposes concerned with the running of the public house.

It was not that Maria particularly needed the money. The public house into which she had been born and which she inherited from her mother did good business. And it was her home. The name over the door, ‘M & M Grant and Son' referred to her long-deceased grandfather and great grandfather. But the emptiness and the silence at night when the last of the customers had gone were painful. And there was always a vulnerability about a house without a man, even a lodger.

When Swallow answered her advertisement offering accommodation in the
Freeman's Journal
he did not reveal that he was a policeman, only that he worked ‘in an office near Dame Street.' She learned of his occupation six months later when an off-duty constable from the D Division station at the Bridewell recognised him in the bar one evening. The constable nodded the briefest of salutations and fled to find a hostelry where he might drink without finding himself under the eye of a G-Division detective sergeant.

For more than a year the widow and the bachelor policeman were wary. Relations were amiable but always formal. The irregularity of his duty rosters and her hours of attendance at the bar meant that meals were rarely taken together. When it happened that they could converse over a meal it was ‘Mrs Walsh' and ‘Mr Swallow.'

But gradually the barriers came down. The turning point had been the night that a drunken attendant from the nearby St Patrick's Hospital for the Mentally Ill had made a lewd remark to Maria within Swallow's hearing in the bar. The policeman first asked him to apologise, and then to leave. When the man struck out, Swallow put him in an arm lock and threw him into the street.

Later, he and Maria talked long into the night in the parlour upstairs. The house had fallen gradually quiet as the young apprentice barman finished clearing up downstairs before retiring to his room at the back of the house.

He told her of the other life he might have had as a doctor, were it not for the excesses of alcohol. She opened up about herself. The Grants had educated their daughters to a high standard for young women in their time and circumstances, with a finishing year in a convent school near Bordeaux. She had developed tastes in reading – Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charles Dickens and an Irish woman writer that Swallow had never heard of, Maria Edgeworth. She played the piano well. Taking over the running of Grant's had been an inherited duty that she felt she owed to her family.

They heard Tess, the maid, climb to her space on the top floor under the attic. A little later the thump of a closing door told them that Carrie, Maria's housekeeper and cook, had turned in for the night too.

When the house was quite still, Maria took him to her room and to the big bed with its crisp linen sheets and deep pillows where she had slept alone for almost three years.

After that night, his own rented bedroom was maintained as a genteel fiction. The day maid changed the unused sheets at intervals and filled the pitcher that stood on the sideboard with fresh water each night. From time to time, Swallow would use the room for a quiet nap or to change his clothes when he came off duty. Occasionally, if he had worked through the night and if it was close to her rising hour, he would sleep there for fear of waking Maria.

Swallow knew the relationship could go a long way, even to marriage, if that was what he wanted. But he hesitated to commit. Sometimes he felt that the impulses that caused him to squander the potential of a medical career would also prevent him from making a success of a permanent relationship. The arrangement with Maria was at once convenient and uneasy.

By now, he knew she would be downstairs, ready to supervise the night's business, moving regularly to and fro between the public bar and the select bar and looking in occasionally at the snugs where the women came in twos and threes for their glass of port wine or bottle of stout.

M & M Grant and Son was a respectable establishment. The sign saying ‘Select Bar' meant what it said. The tinkers and hawkers and beggars, of whom there was a multitude in and around Thomas Street, knew that there was no welcome for them there. The clientele at Grant's comprised skilled Liberties tradesmen, clerks, brewery men, honest labourers and employees from the South Dublin Union workhouse. Sometimes there were young doctors from St Patrick's Hospital or lively students from the Metropolitan School of Art, which was located just down the street.

The clientele liked Maria. Her uniform for work was invariably a severe black or dark grey dress with high, ruffed collars and buttoned cuffs. She wore her blonde hair drawn in a French coil at the back, setting off her high cheekbones and bright blue eyes.

She knew all of the regular clients by name. As befitted her status as licensee and proprietress she did not serve drink or clear empties from the bar or tabletops. She did not handle money in the bar. She did not deal with spillages or broken glasses. All of these tasks were the responsibility of the barmen. Maria Walsh was a dignified, watchful presence in a well-run establishment where patrons and staff alike expected to be treated with courtesy and politeness.

Later, Swallow would go downstairs and fall into his role as Mrs Walsh's collaborator, clearing the bar of stragglers and then, in the privacy of the upstairs parlour, helping her to count the day's takings. It was highly irregular, of course, for an officer of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, much less a detective sergeant of G Division. But then, there was nothing that was regular in the relationship between Joe Swallow and Maria Walsh, widow and licensed publican.

But first, he would sleep. He went to the big bedroom at the back of the house. It was quiet and cool, in contrast to the warmth of the evening outside. He took off his boots and his suit, sweaty after the long day. He unbuckled the shoulder-holster with the heavy DMP-issue Webley Bulldog revolver.

Then he dropped into the big double bed and closed his eyes. When he slept, he dreamed. He was with his father, walking across the fields to stare at the grey bones of people who had died 4,000 years ago. But when they got to the place where the farmer's plough had opened the burial chamber, the body nearest the edge of the pit had the face of a young boy with no eyes.

FIVE

When Charlie Vanucchi and Vinny Cussen pinned the black crepe with Ces Downes's death-notice on the door, the word was whispered through the streets and the courts and in the public houses on Francis Street.

It spread to other public houses and into the tenements in Meath Street, Thomas Street, the Coombe, in Patrick Street, in James's Street and in Pimlico.

Then it travelled along the narrow streets around the
Dubh Linn,
or ‘Dark Pool,' where the Vikings once moored their longboats, and from which the city had taken its name.

Within the hour the death of Ces Downes was known in Smithfield and Stoneybatter across the river and in the alleys and courts where the prostitutes plied their trade, around Mecklenburgh Street and Montgomery Street and the Gloucester Diamond. A little later the news was in most of the small village communities that ringed the city, Irishtown, Ringsend, Drumcondra, Dolphin's Barn and Inchicore.

The constable who had been placed where Francis Street meets the Coombe to watch Ces Downes's house left his post and marched at the double to his station at Kevin Street to report the putting out of the mourning crepe.

The sergeant at Kevin Street telephoned it to the night inspector at the DMP headquarters in the Lower Yard of Dublin Castle. He considered it of sufficient import, in turn, to send a short, written note to the Commissioner's personal office to be read in the morning.

Then he used the ABC – the force's internal telegraph system – to notify the shift sergeants in the other DMP divisions, out as far as the F Division at Kingstown.

Within a quarter of an hour the news had reached the offices of the
Freeman's Journal
and
The Irish Times.
The night shift on duty at the Fire Station at Winetavern Street heard of it. So did the cab drivers waiting with their cars for hire outside the fashionable hotels, the Shelbourne, the Imperial and the Royal Hibernian.

The Canon of the parish Church of Saint Nicholas of Myra on Francis Street heard it as he sat to his supper of Boyne salmon. He interrupted his dining to despatch a servant with a note to inform His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Walsh, at his home on Rutland Square.

The sentries at Marlborough, Richmond, Royal and Beggar's Bush barracks knew it. The coal-stokers tending the furnaces at the Alliance and Dublin Gas Company beside Sir John Rogerson's Quay heard it. When the fishermen came into Ringsend on the high tide just before midnight, they heard it from the women waiting to gut and box the night's catch.

Joe Swallow heard it when he came down from the back bedroom to help clear the bar in Grant's for Maria Walsh, shortly after 11 o'clock. He had slept for perhaps two hours after which he had washed, shaved and put on a fresh white shirt and collar. At some point while he slept he had become aware of the bedroom door opening and closing. He knew it was Maria checking that he had come home.

The sleep was not long enough to refresh him fully, and his dream of burial pits and a dead boy left him disquieted. But he examined himself in the mirror and reckoned that he was fit to be seen.

He sensed a different atmosphere from usual as he entered the bar, now smoky and muggy, towards the end of business in the hot summer's night. The clientele knew to a man that he was a ‘Peeler,' a ‘Bobby,' a ‘
polisman.
' And they knew that he had been at work for the day on what was undoubtedly one of the most shocking crimes of recent years in Dublin city.

He had many times experienced this sensation of being apart. When he came from a bloody crime scene or from immersing himself in a situation where violence or evil were involved, it was as if he carried some of it with him. It seemed to cut him off. People could sense it on him. He could sense it himself. It set up an invisible, intangible barrier between him and other people, even in a crowded room.

Perhaps the pitch of the talk was quieter than usual, the eyes more watchful. Somewhere across the house he heard his name whispered. Maria stood near the bar, surveying the room and supervising the two young barmen working the taps to draw the last few pints of the night.

Pride of place on the wall behind the bar had been accorded to one of Swallow's watercolours. It was a view of the river at Islandbridge, one of his earliest efforts. Every time he looked at it now he saw a naive reduction of blue water and green foliage. But Maria said she liked it, and she had it professionally framed.

Now she glanced warily at Swallow. She sensed the changed atmosphere of the evening too. He nodded a muted, almost invisible response. They had developed this silent sign language for the hours when the bar was open and filled with customers.

An old Dublin Militia sergeant, toothless and crooked, tried his luck for a free drink before the bar closed, tugging at Swallow's sleeve as he passed by.

‘Th' oul wan, Downes, is gone. Ah, but she led yiz a merry dance before goin' to the Devil this night. Isn't that right, Sor?'

‘Aye, I heard all right that she's gone.'

There was no good reason for Swallow's lie, beyond a policeman's instinctive inclination to maintain an advantage. The old soldier hobbled after him as he went towards the bar. He lifted the hinged top and stepped into the serving area.

Swallow felt a twinge of guilt at stealing the pensioner's bit of news.

‘You'll have one on the house for her.' He poured a half whiskey into a tumbler and pushed it across the counter to the militia man.