The City of Strangers (4 page)

As the three men left the bar, conversation among the customers resumed, as if they had never been there.

*

It was two days later that John Cavendish, sitting in the coffee bar across from the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, reading
The
New York Times
,
saw an item at the bottom of page seven. A man’s body had been pulled out of the Hudson River. He had been identified from papers in his pocket as Donal Redmond, an Irishman who had only just arrived in New York; he had worked on the French Line boat, the
Normandie
, as a steward. It was believed that he had fallen into the Hudson from the ship, docked at Pier 17, when drunk.

It seemed that the captain’s source had dried up now anyway. There would be no more IRA ciphers. He had to hope that they had enough to find out what was going on, and he had to hope that Kate O’Donnell’s sister Niamh could give him what he needed most of all, the key to break the code, because no one was getting anywhere with deciphering the stuff in Dublin. He had hoped to get a bit more out of Donal Redmond though. He was disappointed; but probably not as disappointed as Donal had been himself.

Garda Sergeant Stefan Gillespie was walking slowly down the stairs in the stone farmhouse below Kilranelagh. He was tired. The first ewes were lambing; he had been out in the haggard field behind the hay barn with his father till five in the morning, and now it was only eight. The smell of new life and morning frost was still in his nostrils; the clothes he’d lain down in were spattered with blood and urine, stiff with the grease from the ewes’ fleeces. Four twins, two singles, and only one born dead, strangled by its umbilical cord before he could get his hand in to turn it. There was a frail, dark triplet the ewe would have no milk for, to be reared for a time by the kitchen stove.

He had only been half asleep as the telephone started to ring. If his father was in bed and his mother was in the kitchen, it might ring till he answered it. It sat on a shelf by the front door, still looking very new, its black Bakelite shining; it had been there for almost a year now and it was polished more than it was used. It rang rarely enough that when it did Helena Gillespie would emerge from the kitchen and look at it for a few seconds, with an air of mild trepidation that she had not yet quite shaken off, before picking it up and speaking into it, slowly, carefully and loudly. She was coming out of the kitchen now, drying her hands on a tea towel. She smiled as Stefan arrived at the phone at the same time she did, and turned to go back to the breakfast she was cooking.

Tom Gillespie, Stefan’s nine-year-old son had got up from the breakfast table and was peering out. ‘Who is it, Oma?’ His grandmother shrugged. ‘It’ll be for your father. It always is.’ And it was. Superintendent Riordan was calling from the Garda barracks in Baltinglass.

‘You’re to go up to Dublin, Sergeant. They want you at headquarters as soon as you can get there. There’s no point coming in here. You’ll need to shift if you’re going to catch the train.’ Riordan was oddly formal. He would normally have called his station sergeant by his name, but since the message he had just received came from the Commissioner, this was a standing-up sort of phone call. There was also a hint of irritation in his voice; he didn’t like passing on a message from the Garda Commissioner to one of his officers when no one had had the courtesy to explain anything at all to him.

‘What’s all this about?’ asked Stefan.

‘If you don’t know, I’m sure I don’t.’

‘Well, I haven’t got the faintest idea, sir.’ Stefan smiled; he heard the irritation now; the ‘sir’ might help. He looked down at the clothes he was in. No one expected him in at the station today. ‘I’d better put a clean shirt on.’

‘The Commissioner wants you at eleven, so don’t piss about.’

The phone went down at the other end before Sergeant Gillespie could ask any more questions. Stefan walked into the kitchen, puzzled. Tom was eating his bacon and egg slowly, peering across the plate at the book he was reading,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Once he had grasped that the call was what most calls were at Kilranelagh, for his father, just another message, summons, query, instruction from the Garda station, he had lost interest. Helena was about to put another plate of bacon and egg on the table. Stefan reached out and picked up some bacon with his fingers and popped it in his mouth. That would have to do for breakfast.

Her lips tightened as she looked at his clothes.

‘Jesus, could you not have taken those off when you came in?’

He winked at Tom; Tom laughed.

‘Do you like making work for me, Stefan?’

‘You know I do, Ma!’

She turned back to the stove with a puff of irritation and a smile.

He leant across her and took another piece of bacon.

‘Have we got no plates now?’

‘Sorry, I haven’t got time.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve to be in Dublin. I’ll only just get the train.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. They want to see me at Garda HQ. They didn’t tell Gerry Riordan what it was about. I could see the expression on his face coming down the phone line at me!’ He laughed again, grabbing an apple from the bowl on the sideboard. He looked down at the lamb, sleeping in a cardboard box by the stove. ‘And don’t forget her, will you Tom?’

‘I won’t,’ his son nodded, still reading, not looking up.

He ran upstairs a lot faster than he’d come down. He wasn’t tired now. In a place where not much happened, anything happening was an event.

In the farmyard David Gillespie was driving a cow and a calf into the loose box next to the barn. Stefan took the bicycle that was leaning against the wall by the front door and cycled out round his father and the cow and calf; the cow stopped, bellowing darkly, and nudging her wobbling calf away.

‘I don’t know what time I’ll be back, Pa. I’ve to go to Dublin.’

His father nodded and tapped the cow’s backside.

‘Your Ma said.’

‘Ned Broy wants to see me. And pronto, apparently!’

‘What have you done?’ said David with a wry smile.

‘He’ll be worried about the sheep stealing again, I’d say, Pa.’ He rode out of the farmyard, down to the road.

His father watched him for a while, remembering the years that had passed since his son was last called to Garda Headquarters. At the end of all that Stefan had left his job as a detective in Dublin, and had come back to Baltinglass to work as a uniformed sergeant in the small West Wicklow town. It had been his own choice, driven as much as anything else by the responsibility he felt to his own son. Tom was only five then, living with his grandparents on the farm, seeing his father once a week, sometimes less. The four years that had passed since then had been happy ones for the most part, but in a family where emotions were sometimes as deeply hidden as they were deeply felt, David Gillespie knew that what his son gave to that happiness came at a price.

It wasn’t a price Stefan begrudged, but it was still a price. His life had been on hold. There were things that weren’t easy; there were corners where the comfortable contentment the Garda sergeant showed his Wicklow neighbours was less than comfortable. He lived in a place he loved, with the people he loved. It was what he had felt he had to do; it was not all he was.

For Stefan’s mother it was simple enough; all that was missing was a woman, not to take the place of her son’s now six-years-dead wife, Maeve, but to fill the empty places.

David Gillespie knew it went further than that. A long time ago he had put his own life on hold, for very different reasons, and he had come back to the farm above Baltinglass to give himself the space to breathe. He had breathed the air that came down from the mountains very deeply, and like his son he loved it, but it was a narrower life than he had wanted, with all its gifts. David had found a way to calm what was restless and dissatisfied in himself; perhaps he had nowhere else to go. But he recognised the same restlessness in his son; he recognised that it went deeper too.

He looked round the farmyard for a moment, then up at the hills that surrounded it, Keadeen, Kilranelagh, Baltinglass Hill. It was a great deal, but it would not be enough, not the way it had been for him, even if Stefan had persuaded himself it could be. David Gillespie shrugged, and turned back to the suspicious cow and her calf, driving them into the loose box.

Inevitably some of the same thoughts came into Stefan’s head as he cycled through Baltinglass’s Main Street and along Mill Street to the station, but it was easier to think about the present than the past. As he sat on the train following the River Slaney north towards Naas and Dublin, he looked out of the window and thought how little what he’d been doing in recent weeks could interest the brass in the Phoenix Park. He smiled. Sheep stealing really was about as serious as it got.

There was the new Dance Hall Act, of course, which required all dances to be licensed in light of the moral dangers the Church felt were inherent in dancing. A spate of unpopular raids was taking Stefan into the courthouse in Baltinglass on a weekly basis now. Yesterday he’d been giving evidence against the Secretary of the Dunlavin Bicycling Association and the Rathvilly Association Football Club. Admittedly the Dance Hall Act was causing considerable anger among the unmarried guards in Baltinglass who, when they weren’t raiding the dances, were dancing at them.

Then there was the pen of in-lamb ewes he was pursuing, that had disappeared from Paddy Kelly’s farm on Spynans Hill in February. Christy Hannity had bought them from Paddy at a farm sale and swore blind the old man had put them back on to the mountain while he was in the pub. It wasn’t the first time Paddy Kelly had played this trick and got away with it. All he had to say now was that mountain sheep had their own ways and Christy was too drunk to remember what he’d done with them.

And there were two days wasted on James MacDonald who had assaulted the Water Bailiff, Cathal Patterson, after refusing to give up a salmon found in his possession by the Slaney. He claimed the salmon was a trout, which he had since eaten. As for the Water Bailiff’s nose, didn’t he break it himself, tripping over a dead cat as he was walking out of Sheridan’s Bar?

It was hard to push the past out of the way altogether as Stefan walked from Kingsbridge Station through the Phoenix Park to the long, low stone building that was part eighteenth-century army barracks and part Irish country house. Nothing very much had happened in the last four years; most of what had, had happened to his son. He had no problem with that; it was why he had left CID, why he had left Dublin, why he went home. But the thought of how easily and how completely he had left behind the job he had always wanted, since the day he joined the Gardaí, had never struck him as starkly before as it did in the few moments he spent waiting outside Ned Broy’s office.

It hadn’t only been about Tom of course. He had also left because it suited everybody, the Garda Commissioner included. He had been involved in investigating two murders that in the end nobody wanted investigated too publicly. There had been justice of a kind, finally, but it had been a rough justice that the Irish state didn’t want to know about.

For a time it had been easiest for Detective Sergeant Gillespie to become plain Sergeant Gillespie in a country police station. No one had really meant him to stay there so long. He hadn’t intended that himself. It just happened, because that was what was best for Tom. Now, as Stefan sat in Ned Broy’s office again, he could feel an awkwardness in the Garda Commissioner. Sergeant Gillespie’s submerging in a backwater had not been what he had intended either.

Whatever was urgent, the Commissioner’s opening words weren’t.

‘So, how’s West Wicklow?’

‘Quiet enough, sir.’

‘You’re keeping Gerry Riordan in check, I hope.’

‘Well, mostly he does what he’s told.’

The Commissioner smiled. There was a moment’s silence.

‘You’ve been there a long time.’

‘Four years doesn’t seem so long. Time goes fast enough.’

‘Bollocks, you’re not old enough to say that yet.’

Stefan laughed. They were only words, but the Commissioner was looking at him quizzically now, remembering what had happened before.

‘Your father’s well? And your lad?’

The Commissioner had a good memory at least.

‘We’re all grand.’

‘And you’re happy down the country?’

‘Happy enough, sir.’ Stefan was aware that the polite remarks, whatever was about to follow, meant nothing to Broy, but it was the first time anyone had asked him such a direct question about his job, and by extension his life. The answer he gave was the answer any Irishman would give to such a question; an answer that could mean anything from despair to exultation, and everything in between. He was aware that he was avoiding a direct answer, not for the Garda Commissioner’s sake, but for his own.

‘A woman is missing.’

Broy suddenly stood up and moved slowly towards the window that looked out on to the Phoenix Park. The trees were still bare. Spring wasn’t far away now, but it still felt like winter.

‘There is every reason to believe she’s dead, and that she was killed.’ He turned back from the window. ‘The fact that she’s missing is the only thing that’s been in the newspapers so far. We can keep it like that for a little longer. And it’s helpful that we do, for various reasons. She is a Mrs Leticia Harris, with a house in Herbert Place.’

‘I think I did read something about it, sir.’

‘The evidence from the house, along with Mrs Harris’s car,’ continued the Commissioner, ‘indicates that she was the object of a very brutal attack in her home. Her car, however, was found in the grounds of a house close to Shankill, by the sea in Corbawn Lane. It’s clear she had been in the car, or her body had. At the moment we believe she was killed at the house in Herbert Place, or at least that she was dead by the time she reached Corbawn Lane, where the body was probably taken from the car and thrown into the sea. What the tides have done with her is anybody’s guess at this point.’