The Convictions of John Delahunt (22 page)

Sibthorpe was alone in the room, sitting at his desk and reading the statement that I had just furnished to Farrell. He pointed to a seat.

I shifted in the chair until I was comfortable. I had become weary of people regarding me sternly during pregnant pauses. While Sibthorpe did so, I looked over his shoulder and out of the window.

‘It’s not up to agents to decide how much a piece of information is worth.’

The fire had made the small room disagreeably warm. I unbuttoned my coat and looked at the cross affixed to the wall above his head. Perhaps Sibthorpe was Catholic.

He didn’t seem bothered that my eye wandered. ‘When you know something that might be of use to the Department you report it straight away.’

His chair didn’t sit directly beneath the cross. From my point of view he was half a foot to the right of centre. I looked up at it, and then down at him again. His disregard for the alignment made him seem less daunting.

I said the last time I did just that, and lost out.

‘The situation with Craddock was different.’ He set aside my statement. ‘For the most part, we don’t stint or quibble. You should know, Delahunt, that we look after our agents well.’

I said I didn’t know that.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I don’t know that. The only other agents I’ve met were Holt and Devereaux.’

He held up a hand. Did I mean the ones who carted a dead body from my house?

I ignored him. ‘One of whom is missing; and the other, I’m quite sure, is dead.’ I met his eye directly. ‘I didn’t report that murder either.’

Across the street, the worker on the roof finished his task. He held out the brush by its handle and let it drop. It skittered down the face of the dome and landed in a rain-gutter. Sibthorpe had taken up a pen and began writing a note at the end of my statement.

‘Have it your own way, Delahunt.’ He said because of my actions, my anonymity could not be protected in this case. I would have to accompany the police and identify Cooney myself. If the tinker lived beyond the city limits, as I claimed, then the Irish Constabulary force would make the arrest. He glanced at me. ‘And they don’t suffer fools gladly.’ When it went to trial, I would be confined in the Castle for the duration of the proceedings as the Crown’s chief witness. I would testify and be cross-examined. He finished writing and fixed the lid on his fountain pen. It was going to lessen my effectiveness as an agent. ‘Newspapers will give your name and address and describe your appearance.’

I nearly said that it was about time I received some recognition, but stopped myself.

He said the constabulary would be in touch. With that he rose from his seat, walked to the door and held it open. ‘You may go.’

His eyes fixed on me as I passed him by.

The head constable stood in the centre of the itinerants’ clearing and waved for me to approach.

He shouldn’t have called out my name.

I stood beside the sergeant near the encampment gate and said to him, ‘I could just identify Cooney from here.’

He put his hand on my elbow and led me forward. I walked towards the tinkers, who stood in a line, except for the beaten man who sat in the middle. Cooney, second from last, was the only one not to eye my approach. I walked beyond the cordon of policemen and their circle of torches to stand beside the head constable.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Which one is it?’

I hesitated. Cooney stood with his head bowed and his hands in his pockets. What if I pointed him out and he wasn’t convicted?

My gaze swept over the others. As it passed over each man they looked away, and I realized they were more afraid of me than I was of them. I went to the first man and stopped within arm’s length. There was no peril. It was like stepping to a point just beyond the reach of a tethered dog. I then walked along the line and studied each man in turn. The first two had pinched faces and days-old growth of beards. They wore long underclothes and looked at me with bloodshot eyes. I stared at them both for several seconds, and was gratified to see anxiety creep into their faces.

None of these men was honest. They were each guilty of something, and they had no idea which one of them was to be picked out, or for what reason. The third man was the one who’d been beaten. He sat on the cold ground with his head slumped forward. He didn’t even resemble Cooney in stature. Still, I told the head constable I needed to see his features. One of the policemen stepped forward, grabbed the tinker by the hair and yanked his head back so his face was pointed at mine. The man’s eyes rolled backwards and his jaw hung slack. I looked at him for a moment, then shook my head. As the policeman released his grip he pushed his hand forward, causing the tinker’s chin to hit his own chest.

I stepped in front of Cooney. He was half a head taller than me. His red sideburns had grown out and his nose bent to the left from an old injury. He knew why I was here; perhaps he recognized me from the pub. I made a motion as if I was going to continue on and look at the last man in line, but then I stopped. I lifted my hand, with index finger extended and thumb held up, like a child mimicking a duelling pistol, and pointed it into Cooney’s face.

‘That’s the man.’

The head constable said, ‘Search his house,’ and three officers broke off to go towards Cooney’s hovel. The commander followed them, and motioned for me to come along.

The shack was a simple lean-to. A tree trunk spanned two supports to form the apex of a roof. A wattle of timber and sheet metal was stacked against the frame to create a rough triangular structure, and the gaps were plugged by muddy thatch. A door that had come from some other building was pushed open and the policemen entered.

The interior was dark, smoky and smelled like an animal pen. Two of the policemen had torches, which provided ample light. Fern fronds and hay covered the ground, kicked aside in places to reveal the dark earth below. Flimsy pieces of furniture were dotted about. Cooney’s wife stood at the far end of the enclosure, now with an infant in her arms. She was expecting another. A filthy mattress on the floor lay beneath a tangle of blankets. The child’s cot sat next to their bedding, an elegant piece of furniture made of delicately turned wood. Each of the white spindles had moulded features of tiny seahorses painted in gold.

The police began their search. They pulled open drawers and turned over chairs. Pieces of crockery lined a shelf on one of the walls. A policeman picked up each cup to peer within. Once he saw a cup was empty he simply let it drop from his hand, and several broke on the ground. In one of the drawers there were old pieces of cutlery. All the knives were examined against the light of a torch. A knife handle with a concealed blade was discovered and set aside to be taken as evidence. They also found his work-apron among a bundle of clothes. Dark stains were visible on its surface so they kept that as well.

Cooney’s wife watched without apparent emotion as their meagre possessions were ransacked. The blankets on the bed were pulled up and shaken out. The mattress was turned over and the ground beneath examined. I pointed out that no one had yet searched inside the cot. I looked at the woman’s face to see if my observation would elicit a reaction, but she remained impassive.

The head constable went to the baby’s crib and took out the covers. He let each one unfurl, then folded them neatly on the side-rail. A cushion was wedged between the bars at the bottom. He lifted that up and felt underneath.

‘Bring the torch closer.’

He took the cushion out and set it aside. A leather pouch was sitting in the cradle. I could already see it was not the one worn by Domenico, but the policemen could not know that. The head constable lifted it, hefted it for a moment, then called for a man to cup his hands.

He loosened the string at the top of the pouch and carefully tipped out the contents. The torch was lowered. The commander sifted through the coins with a long index finger. They were mostly coppers, a few shillings and one guinea. I had hoped that some of the documents that Domenico said he’d kept in his purse would appear. But why would Cooney keep hold of such items in the midst of a murder hunt?

The head constable said, ‘Wait.’ With his thumb and forefinger he rummaged in the loose change and extracted a small coin. He held it up to the light and we all gathered around to look. The unfamiliar images struck in the brown metal were not of this kingdom. In tiny letters around the edge it said, ‘1 soldo’. Cooney must not have noticed it, or else could not bring himself to throw money away, even if it was Italian.

The head constable examined the coin close to one eye as if he was an avid collector. He then looked at me. ‘It seems, Mr Delahunt, that you were right after all.’

I tried to look solemn. ‘I’m just glad the culprit has been caught.’

Notice arrived for Cooney’s trial in late January. The crown prosecutor, Mr Monahan QC, sent me a summons in Grenville Street saying I would have to attend Dublin Castle the day before the trial commenced, and be confined there for the duration of the proceedings – the letter made clear that every comfort would be provided for. I looked upon it as a pleasant retreat from the tenements.

Things had returned to normal in the weeks following Domenico’s death. Some diplomacy was required with Helen to atone for my dishonesty in the days following the murder. She asked why I didn’t trust her enough to tell her what I knew about Cooney. I said that sometimes it was best not to know things, especially when dealing with Sibthorpe’s department.

As anticipated, she was mollified by the knowledge that sixty pounds would be earned if Cooney were prosecuted. We returned to our routine within the household, and otherwise it was an entirely uneventful start to the year – except that Helen gave up on her notion to become a writer.

During Christmas week she began to hear back from publishing houses to which she’d sent samples of her work. Each response was negative. At first, Helen accepted the rejection letters philosophically. After all, she had sent away to more than a dozen publishers and periodicals, and these were just the first to respond. She carefully read the comments made by the editors for hints on how she might improve. For the most part the advice was generic: to keep trying, to concentrate on character, to use more concise language.

During the first weeks of the year she began to feel more slighted by the rebuffs. She would agonize about opening letters, but would still refuse to allow me to do so. I would watch as she eventually plucked up the courage to break the seal and unfold the envelope. When there was no reaction after she read the first few lines, I knew the news was bad once again. One time she tossed a letter aside. ‘They didn’t even read it.’

She spent less time at her writing desk, rose later in the day and invariably opened a bottle of wine before the sun went down. Money became scarce again, and I began to take more care with how much fuel I put on the fire. If Cooney escaped conviction, we would have a problem.

I recall one of the rejection letters was particularly unforgiving. Helen opened it on a cold morning in mid-January while she sat at her desk. I busied myself setting the fire. She spent longer poring over the contents than usual. When the fire finally took, I looked back to see her head bowed. I went to stand beside her and put my hand on her shoulder, which felt gaunt beneath the woollen shawl. She didn’t move. I picked up the missive from where it lay beside her elbow.

In quite kindly terms the publisher methodically set out why Helen’s writing was not close to the required standard: muddled verb tenses, unclear pronoun references, mixed metaphors and clichés, sweeping generalizations, banal characters, wooden dialogue. He completely dissected her entire writing style. It took me a few minutes to read through the whole thing. It was a particularly well-written critique.

As I read the rejection letter, Helen rummaged beneath the desk. When I finished, I looked up to see her kneeling beside the fire. She held all the pages of the manuscript that she’d been writing for more than six months, a great wad of ruffled yellow pages with spidery lettering, inkblots and strikethroughs. Without ceremony, she dumped the entire sheaf on to the flames, which threatened to smother, rather than feed the fire. The sheets at the bottom caught light and the whole manuscript started to smoulder. Helen picked up a poker and began to stoke the pages as if she was about to prepare dinner.

‘What are you doing?’

I hurried to her side and pulled the poker from her hand. The sheaf had blackened at the edges but was mostly intact. I put my hand into the billowing grey smoke and dragged it out on to the hearthstone. About a dozen pages were already ablaze and I had to leave those on the coals. Some of the rescued pages continued to smoke and burn. I picked them up and blew at them. Their charred edges flared briefly in the gust, but soon extinguished. Dark fragments detached from the sheaf in flurries.

Helen stared at me. She seemed so small, kneeling and hunched over with her hands held in her lap. She had seen her husband refuse to allow her dream to go up in smoke, and a hint of a smile appeared on her face.

I just didn’t want her to burn it all at once. There was enough tinder in the pages to last until spring. But I noted her reaction. ‘You’ve worked too hard at this.’

She took the sheaf from my hands, her fingers caressing mine, and straightened the pages against the floor. She brought them back to the desk and placed them in the bottom drawer. Then she swept the charred scraps of paper from the fireplace. Finally, she knelt back down at my side and kissed me.

Throughout Cooney’s trial I stayed in a room on the top floor of the Ship Street army barracks just inside the Castle grounds. It was slightly smaller than our room in Grenville Street but with a much higher ceiling. Whitewashed stone surrounded a large, ancient-looking fireplace that sat beneath an oak mantel. A four-poster bed without a canopy took up one corner. A table and chairs stood between two sash windows that looked out into a narrow courtyard. Directly opposite was a nondescript building, identified to me as the army ordnance office. Just visible beyond that and to the left was one side of the viceregal state apartments. I had ample time to consider the view during the four days in which I was confined.