Chapter II

We are the boys of Wexford

Who fought with heart and hand

To burst in twain the galling chain

And free our native land.

Patrick Joseph McCall, “The Boys of Wexford”

A call the next morning sent relief flooding through Brennan. It turned out that Molly would not have to serve up to ten years in prison, or even the full seven days allowable under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. She was less than exuberant that afternoon, though, when she was back in her own home, showered and dressed, with a cup of tea in front of her on the table and BBC Radio chattering away in the background. Any time Brennan had visited his sister in London, BBC was always the soundtrack.

“The fact that I’m out of their jail does not mean I’m out of their sight, Brennan. I can expect to be watched, harassed, interrogated, and God knows what else.”

“Why?”

“They think I know something about this.”

She got up, fetched her handbag, and returned to the table. She withdrew a piece of paper from the bag and placed it in front of Brennan. It was the front page of the April 26, 1989, Daily Telegraph. He read aloud. “Policeman murdered in line of duty. Scotland Yard, officer’s family, in shock.” Brennan felt the breath go out of him. He read the story. “‘Detective Sergeant Richard Heath, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police Service, was shot to death in his police car on Elverton Street yesterday afternoon.’ A police officer murdered. What —”

“Read on.”

Brennan returned to the paper. “Close to the time the shooting occurred, police received a warning call from someone using a code word known to the authorities as a code unique to the IRA, the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The caller warned of several large explosive devices that had been planted at Westminster Abbey. Emergency teams responded and people were cleared from the abbey and the Houses of Parliament …” He looked up at his sister. “Westminster Abbey! Please tell me they have it wrong here.”

“They have it right.”

“No!” Brennan could not contain himself. Even if no lives were lost, this was an unconscionable act. Westminster Abbey was one of the most magnificent Gothic buildings in the world. The great church belonged to the ages. That anyone could even consider destroying it … He snapped back to the present and his sister’s woes. He continued reading. “Scotland Yard is remaining tight-lipped as to whether the two events were connected. ‘We are following several leads in our investigation,’ a Yard press officer said last evening.

“Detective Sergeant Heath was married, the father of two sons. He was an avid cricketer, volunteer rugby coach, and a dedicated member of several charitable organisations. Tributes poured in from fellow officers, people who had volunteered with him …” Brennan looked up at his sister. “You wouldn’t be involved in anything like this, obviously.”

“No.”

“Well then, why are they claiming you were?”

“They seem to believe, or they purport to believe, that I am acquainted with the kind of people who would do this. The thinking, presumably, is that they could intimidate me into giving them information.”

“What led them to believe you would know the kind of people who would do this?”

“It seems that my attitude towards Oliver Cromwell set them off.”

“Cromwell! How could your attitude towards Cromwell land you in prison more than three hundred years after his death?”

“Well, let me tell you about a conference I attended a few weeks ago, where I presented a paper.”

“I’m all ears. But, em, have you got any …”

“I’m all out. My local’s just around the corner. We’ll leave a note for Terry.”

She scribbled a note, “Terry, we’re at Hannigan’s,” and taped it to the outside door of the building. Less than two minutes later they were walking into Hannigan’s bar in the Kilburn High Road. The walls of the bar were dedicated to the sport of hurling; the colours of every Irish county were on display, along with photos of teams and star hurlers.

“Molly, conas atá tú?”

“Tá mé go maith, Seamus.”

The barman had cropped black hair, deep blue eyes, and wore a black shirt. He could have been behind the counter of any bar in Ireland. He put his hand to the Guinness tap and began the pour. “For you, sir?”

“I’ll have a Jameson. Double it for me, would you?”

The man nodded. Didn’t ask about ice.

“Anybody in the back, Seamus?”

“It’s all yours, Molly.”

“Seamus, my brother Brennan.”

The two men greeted each other. When the Jameson had been poured, and the Guinness was settling, Brennan tuned in to a discussion going on beside him at the bar. One man, who sounded as if he might have been from Limerick, was doing his duty to educate a couple of new arrivals about the ways of the world. The world of the London Irish bar.

“You’ll find the Guinness doesn’t travel well, Matty. It’s got a crusty head on it over here. I only drink it from the bottles here in London.”

Seamus appeared to be deaf to this commentary as he commenced the second part of the two-part pour of Molly’s pint.

“And whatever you do,” the Guinness expert said to his pals, “don’t be going up to Mickey McConachy’s bar, expecting anything close to what you’re used to at home. High water rates in that place, if you know what I’m saying.”

“You’re not saying he waters the stuff down! I was going to head up there later to meet my sister.”

“He waters it, or he doesn’t water it, depending on which tap he uses when he has a look at you. If he knows you and likes you, you’ll get the beer or the stout as God meant it to be. Otherwise it’s so watery you might as well be drinking the River Shannon. You see the smiley head on yer man and all the while he’s pouring you a pint of Haitch-Two-O. Go into Mickey McConachy’s drunk and you come out sober.”

“This tastes fine to me,” one of the new fellows said, and the pintman conceded that Hannigan’s would give you a good pint, and Seamus was a fine barman.

When Molly’s pint was properly settled, Seamus pushed the glasses towards them with a smile, and Brennan produced a ten-pound note.

Seamus waved it away. “Later,” he said. “No entrance fee for the Burkes in here.”

Molly laughed. “They know I never walk out without paying my tab. I’m afraid they’d cut me off.”

They thanked the barman and walked to the back, where they found a snug and sat down, screened from view. Brennan lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. Then he lifted his glass, Molly lifted hers, and they said in unison, “Sláinte!” Each of them took a good, sustaining sip.

“Now, Brennan, back to Oliver Cromwell. I’m thinking somebody grassed on me after my presentation at the ‘Lord Protector’ conference.”

“Lord Protector. Right,” Brennan muttered.

“As we know, Cromwell made quite a name for himself during the civil war years here in England. And when it was time to fight Parliament’s enemies in Ireland, it was Cromwell who led the charge. He massacred thousands of people in Drogheda and Wexford and then, back in England, he received his new title. He was named, with cruel irony, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Lord Protector for life. What does it tell you that there is a statue of him at Westminster, outside the Houses of Parliament? True, he was an early parliamentarian. Maybe his admirers were blind to the other things he got up to. We can’t be sure. Anyway, there was a scholarly conference on him, a symposium titled ‘Lord Protector of the Commonwealth: Contemporary and Current Perspectives.’ A highly academic affair, with historians and graduate students presenting papers. As a professor of history at the University of London, with several publications to my credit, I got my name on the list of presenters.”

“Hard to picture you there, Molly.”

“I didn’t submit the title of my essay until I stood up in the packed hall to present it. At that point I announced that my paper was ‘Lord Protector, Me Arse.’”

Brennan let out a roar of appreciative laughter and raised his glass to her.

“And I proceeded to give them the Irish view of the oul murdherin’ bastard!”

“Good girl yourself!”

“Cromwell himself wrote that, at Drogheda, there were three thousand military casualties ‘and many inhabitants.’ Catholic sources at the time of the Restoration said four thousand civilians had been killed. Men, women, and children. As for Wexford, Cromwell admitted to two thousand military and civilian casualties. Survivors in Wexford said only a few men, women, and children managed to get out alive. Then he smashed his way through many of the other towns in Ireland as well, all the while claiming he was doing God’s work against the Catholic Irish, whom he called ‘barbarous wretches.’ He did this under cover of taking revenge for the uprising of 1641. The native Irish did rise and kill many of the Protestant settlers who had taken Irish lands, no question, but Cromwell’s actions were against people who had nothing whatsoever to do with that.

“Then came the clearances. Irish landowners in Ulster, Leinster, and Munster were to be stripped of their lands and sent west to Connacht, leaving the three more fertile provinces for the invaders. And if you didn’t go, you were killed. Hence the phrase ‘To hell or Connacht.’ But it didn’t end there.” His sister was seated across from him in Hannigan’s bar but Brennan could easily picture her in the lecture hall, her presentation becoming more and more fiery as she got herself wound up.

“Now we come to the human trafficking. Thousands more Irish men, women, and children were sent by Cromwell to work as slaves on the tobacco and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Some were sent as indentured servants, who did forced labour for a specified number of years. This had started before the Cromwell period. Others were slaves, pure and simple. Captured, branded, and sold in Barbados. All of them, servants and slaves, were transported on slave ships and flogged if they didn’t do their work or if they got uppity. A new verb was coined at the time: to be barbadoed. Desiring to rid Ireland of unruly Irish males and surplus Irish females, Cromwell found it convenient to support the slave traders operating out of Bristol. And the great Puritan was more than happy to oblige the English plantation owners who expressed a hankering for white women. So I had a section in my paper titled ‘Cromwell as Pimp’ right after ‘Cromwell as Slave Trader.’ Oh, I said my piece, to be sure.”

As his sister gave voice to her feelings about the seventeenth-century atrocities, Brennan noticed that the little English inflections she had picked up during her years here dropped away, and her speech returned to its Dublin roots. Her teenage years in New York had had little effect on her accent, and Brennan had been told the same was true of him.

“How did ‘Lord Protector, Me Arse’ go over with the Cromwell scholars?”

“What could they say? I stayed entirely with facts that are widely agreed upon by reputable historians and gave the conflicting accounts where there is disagreement. They couldn’t dispute me on the facts. But my attitude towards the subject was not well received.”

“A badge of honour, to be on the enemy list of that crowd.”

“And they were academics, people who are supposed to welcome a free exchange of ideas. We all know what a farce that is. You know as well as I do, Brennan, that the herd instinct is alive and well in the ivory towers of independent thought, and woe to anyone who holds a position that is outside the bounds of fashionable opinion.

“But I’ve strayed from the subject of my discourse. Oliver Cromwell. You’ll be interested to hear that there is a Cromwell Association that holds a commemoration every year on September third. But they decided to meet at the statue in April this year, gathering on the anniversary of his birth instead of his death, for whatever reason.”

“And?” His sister said nothing more but picked up her pint and finished it off. “You were going to greet this association and offer them a different perspective on Cromwell’s role in history?”

“Something along those lines.”

“That hardly constitutes an offence against the state. Right, Molly?” Brennan butted his cigarette out in the ashtray.

“Correct.”

“So in order for them to arrest you under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, they must have thought you were more than just an outspoken critic of the bête noire of seventeenth-century Ireland.”

“They must have.”

“Are you a member of an organization banned under the laws of England?”

“I’m not a joiner.”

“Am I to take that as a no?”

“You are. By the way, Brennan, do you know how many organizations are proscribed under the law here?”

“No idea. Heaps of them, I suppose.”

She laughed. “Two.”

“Two banned groups, in a country of fifty million people?”

“Yes. The Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army.”

“I see.”

“Both of these organizations have caused a lot of trouble in this country.”

“No question. I’m just surprised that there are no other troublemakers blacklisted.”

“Well,” she said, “with immigration patterns the way they are, maybe there will be others on the list someday. For now, we’re it.”

“We?”

“Em, not we. Them, the ’RA and the INLA.”

“That kind of talk can get you in trouble, didn’t yez know that?”

“Terry, my darling, it’s so good to see you!” Molly got up and took her brother into her embrace.

“Seamus told me where to find you. I told him I’d have to kneecap him for being an informer.”

“You didn’t!”

“Of course not.”

“Not the sort of thing to say in this place, Ter.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“I mean it.”

“I’ll go back for drinks.”

He returned shortly with pints of Guinness for himself and Molly, and a double Jameson for Brennan. There had been no need to inquire beforehand.

He sat down and raised his glass to his sister. “So, you’ve been sprung, Molly. Are you out on bail or what?”

“No, I’m out. Period.”

“Well, then,” he said, getting up, “you’re sorted, and we can all go home. Coming, Brennan?”

“Oh, I think we can stay on for a few days now that we’ve come all this way.”

“Okay, I’m easy.” He sat down again and drank deeply of his pint.

“But now that I’ve come to the attention of the authorities, now that I’m within their sights,” Molly said, “I can expect to stay within them for the foreseeable future. So you two hooligans will have to behave yourselves.”

“Should I even inquire how you came into their sights in the first place?” Terry asked.

Molly filled him in on her Cromwell rant, the shooting of Detective Sergeant Heath, the explosives planted in Westminster Abbey, and the police suspicion that she might have information pertinent to the investigation.

“They came for you in the middle of the night because you gave a talk against Oliver Cromwell and were going to make a speech in front of his statue?” Terry sounded incredulous. “Has England turned into a police state or what?”

“I’ll have to lead you down a long and twisty road to explain the background here. Do you remember, Brennan, that trip we took to Wexford when we were little?”

Of course he remembered. He was nine years old at the time, Molly nearly eleven. She had not yet acquired the nickname Molly and was known by Máire.

“Was I there?” Terry asked.

“You were, darling,” his sister replied, “but in utero. Mam was pregnant with you when we took the trip. It was the year before we emigrated from Ireland to New York.”

Wexford Town

June 10, 1949

Brennan couldn’t wait. Sure, sure he was loving the tour through the countryside in his da’s 1946 Ford Prefect, gazing out the windows as the bright green fields flashed past him. The fields were divided by white stone walls, and there was the occasional big brown horse grazing and swishing his tail about, and there were loads of sheep. One of the sheep wandered out into the road, and Da had to stop. So did all the other cars. The great woolly creature stared in through the windscreen at the family sitting in the car. Nobody seemed in a hurry to move him out of the way.

Brennan’s little brother Patrick was going mental beside him in the back seat, wiggling and squealing for Mam and Da to let him out. Patrick made a dive to the right, where their sister, Máire, was sitting, but she gave him a little shove and set him back on his arse in the seat. Brennan had seen enough of the wool and the grass, so he opened the book he had on his knees, a book all about the beautiful abbeys in Ireland. Someone had drawn pictures of them in colour and collected them in a book. An abbey was like a castle and a church mixed up together, made of stone with pointy tops and crosses, and his mother had told him about the lovely chanting the monks did. They were on their way to Wexford town, and one of the abbeys in the book was in Wexford. And they were going to see it. If they ever got themselves moving again. Mam had told him it wouldn’t look the way it did in the picture. Well, of course not. Brennan knew it was nearly eight hundred years old.

Patrick squirmed his way underneath the book and sat himself on Brennan’s knee. “Let me see,” he said, and Brennan moved the book out a bit so the little lad could see it better.

Then, before anybody knew it, Patrick banged himself against the door and got it open and he was out of the car. He took himself off at a run and went straight for the sheep. There he was, throwing his arms around the creature and petting and kissing it. Da let out an ungodly roar and said things that would have earned Brennan a smack on the arse if he had even whispered them, and his ma said, “Declan! Your language in front of the children!” This caused the baby on her knee to start wailing. The baby, Francis, was always wailing. Brennan hoped the baby Mam had in her belly would turn out to be less like Fran and more like Pat.

Da got out of the car really fast and grabbed Pat, dug him out of the wool of the sheep, and hauled him back inside the car. Pat wasn’t even scared; he looked as if he had just made the winning goal for the Dubs in the All-Ireland hurling final. Waterford, more like; they beat Dublin last year. Patrick sat there hugging himself and smiling for the rest of the trip, once the sheep moved off and the car moved on.

“How much more do we have to go?” Brennan asked.

“If you’d get your head out of the book about abbeys, you’d have seen the sign that says Wexford is five miles away,” his sister replied.

That made sense so he didn’t put up an argument.

And before he knew it, they were coming into the town. It was on the River Slaney where the river flowed into the ocean. His father told them pirates had been sailing out of Wexford and raiding English ships three hundred years ago. Brennan formed a picture of the sailing ships and their swashbuckling crews in this very harbour. And Da also said this was a rebel town. The boys of Wexford had fought in the Rebellion of 1798, and then other famous men had made speeches here. Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Jim Larkin. As the car made its way along the narrow streets of Wexford, Brennan saw a tall church spire rising above the town, and there was another to the left of it, to the south, he supposed it was. Another tower, shorter and square, reminded him of an Italian church he’d seen in the calendar his family had for last year; Brennan had kept it for the pictures. Then there was a castle! Or part of one anyway. He’d have to make sure he got to see that. And he did, because it turned out to be right next to the abbey.

But wait a minute, what was going on here? This was the abbey, his mam said, but there was no roof on it and no glass in the windows. It was just the pointy walls, open to the air. Brennan was gutted at the sight of it. He cried out — he couldn’t stop himself — “What happened to it? It’s fuckin’ half-destroyed!” He felt he was going to burst into tears.

Nobody thumped him on the side of the head because of his language; it was that dire a sight.

Máire was the same way. He could tell by looking at her face that she was heart-scalded. Brennan hoped she wouldn’t cry because then he might too, might not be able to stop it.

They all walked towards it, Da in the front, Mam with the baby in her arms, Máire and Brennan each holding one of Patrick’s hands. Pat stared up at the place with huge eyes, blue as the sky above their heads. “Somebody’s going to be in the soup for this, right Da?”

And that’s when Brennan felt the anger creeping into himself. “Who did this?” he demanded to know. “And where are all the monks that are supposed to be living here and singing all day long? They can’t stay here now!”

His mam put her arms around him. “I told you, pet, that it wasn’t going to look the way it looked in the drawings.” Well, no, he knew that. Old things looked old. Dirty or a bit crumbling down. But not this! “Some of the abbeys and the churches are even worse, acushla. Some are just heaps of rubble on the ground.”

“Cromwell’s men did this!” Da said. “This and other churches here. And they torched the Franciscan Friary up the hill, burning the brothers and priests to death.” Da’s voice wasn’t loud, but Brennan knew he was in a ferocious temper about this man Cromwell.

Brennan had heard about Cromwell. None of it was good.

†

Forty years later in Hannigan’s bar, Brennan said to his sister, “The sight of the destruction, knowing what had been there, upset me so much I scarpered. Took off at a clip. I got lost in the town, didn’t I? The rest of you had to come looking for me. Found me, I guess.” He laughed and hoisted his glass.

“And then?” his sister prompted him.

“I remember giving out at length to everyone in the car on the way back to Dublin. I went on and on about Cromwell, and commended him to the care of the divil in hell. And Da muttered something, and I asked him what he’d said, and Mam said never mind. But he told us anyway that Cromwell had led an army from England into Ireland and killed thousands of people. And it was all about Cromwell fighting supporters of the deposed king. I didn’t understand why there would be supporters of the king in Ireland. Weren’t we always fighting the British Crown? Didn’t make sense to me, at least at the age of nine.”

“No wonder,” Molly-nee-Máire said. “This phase of our unfortunate history arose out of the civil war in England, between those loyal to King Charles the First and those who supported the Parliament. The parliamentary forces overthrew and executed the king. Meanwhile, over in Ireland, there was an uneasy alliance of Old Irish and Old English Catholics, trying to fight off any more expansion of Protestant power in the country. Sounds strange to us today, but they were royalists, loyal to the king of England, who was king of Ireland as well. They were fooled into thinking a restored monarchy would give them back the freedom to worship as Catholics. They must have been on the drink, if they believed that.”

“Mindless with drink,” Brennan agreed.

“Do you remember anything else about that day, Brennan?” Molly asked. “Sorry to be leaving you out of things, Terry.”

“That’s all right. Not much I can contribute to the conversation, given that I wasn’t even born yet. I’ll have to be content to listen and learn.”

“We had tea somewhere. That, I recall,” said Brennan. “And was Grandda there? No, that must have been another occasion.”

“Same occasion. You had let fly with some language that would have burned the ears off the monks had they still been present. Then you ran away. You headed down into the town centre. And knowing you, you probably got fascinated by all the sights and the buildings and embarked on a little tour of your own. Meanwhile we were at the abbey, Mam pregnant with Terry, and Francis fussing, and Patrick wanting to climb the ruined walls, and it took us a while to get sorted and go looking for you.”

“Right. It’s coming back to me now. I slowed down after a bit and began wandering through the winding streets down to the quays and up again. Then I remember seeing the monument to ’98, the Pikeman statue. I must have covered the entire town before yez caught me.”

“You did. And that’s how Grandfather Christy’s plan to slip in and out of Wexford unnoticed came apart. Little Brennan spots Christy’s old beater of a car parked in a side street. You would have noticed our grandfather’s car wherever he’d parked it in town, because of the bullet holes in the boot and the back window! The way we heard it, you saw the car and no doubt got all excited, and you tried to wrench the driver’s door open, but it was locked. You were spotted from inside the Cape Bar, which is right across from the Pikeman statue. One of the fellas meeting with Christy looked out and saw you banging on the car door. So Christy had little choice then but to exclaim, “Jaysus, isn’t that my grandson! My boy Declan’s little lad. The family came along to see the town.” He went out to get you and bring you into the pub. Da had been planning to meet Christy and the other men there once he had deposited the rest of us somewhere. I don’t know what all he had in mind for us while he attended this clandestine meeting but, whatever the plan was, it was off the rails by then, and we all ended up in the Cape Bar.”

“A clandestine meeting, was it? All I remember now is the crowd of us in the pub. Wasn’t Finn there as well?”

“He was. He came down with Christy. They were in town to talk to the boys of Wexford. After the crowd of us showed up, the men took themselves off to a separate table. The place was L-shaped, so around the corner they went. I couldn’t hear much of what they were saying, and what I did hear made no sense to my young ears. I heard something about a boat and Sasana. Which, as you know, means England. It was all a jumble. But I knew this much: they were having a row, and tempers were high. Christy at one point thumped the table and roared, ‘Never mind what year we’re in; the timing has to be right!’ There was silence after that, and they all drank their porter. The publican’s wife came out and offered us tea and sandwiches, which we gladly accepted.

“By that time, some more children had appeared, a couple of really little girls, and a boy around our age. Their name was Delaney, I think. Their parents must have been keeping them occupied in a back room. But once we made our noisy entrance, with Patrick gabbing and Francis howling, the other children wanted to join the party. I remember the boy had a game with him, checkers or something, and he kept looking at me as if he wanted to invite me to play. And I was stealing glances at him, because I wanted to play with him, too. But I stayed put and helped Mam with the baby.

“Anyway, the men were talking about a boat. Somebody’s boat or, more likely, the ferry from Rosslare to Wales. And England. Not hard to see a direct line there.”

“And the reference to the year?” Brennan said. “It was 1949.”

“Exactly three hundred years after Cromwell’s attacks on Wexford and Drogheda, in 1649. I could only hear snatches of the conversation between the kids whooping it up and Francis bawling. But it seemed that the fellows in Wexford wanted to conduct an operation against ‘revenge targets’ in England, and there was a tie-in with Cromwell. Do in England what he had done in Ireland. I pictured them taking a wrecking ball to churches and abbeys and city walls, the kinds of structures smashed to rubble by Cromwell. Hard to believe there was anything left for Cromwell to smash, after the destruction of so many monasteries by Henry the Eighth the century before. Anyway, that was the way my mind was working, after seeing Selskar Abbey and you, Brennan, being so upset. Whatever it was, Christy knew it would be a failure. It would be purely symbolic, and there would be severe retribution from the British in return for very little gain. It would be a distraction from the larger purpose, which was to get the Brits out of the Six Counties of the North, get the Six Counties out of the U.K. and unite them with the rest of Ireland. So Christy used his considerable powers of persuasion to convince them to desist. But then he owed them support for something else. I don’t know what actions they took, if any, between then and now. Couldn’t have been very effective if we never heard anything.”

She took a few moments to enjoy her pint, then said, “Here we are, forty years later. Could it be that the old plan had been revived, and Westminster Abbey was chosen as the big symbolic action? We’ll take out your greatest abbey in return for the ruination of so many of ours? I don’t know.”

“I’m not sure I want to know,” Brennan replied.

Molly turned to her youngest brother. “Sorry you missed it all, Terry!”

“Oh, don’t be so sure I’ve missed it all,” he said, smiling and taking a sip of Guinness.

“What are we to take from that?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing. I’m just a blathering bullshitter on a barstool enjoying a bit of porter. Pay me no mind.”

There was something in that; Terry Burke could often be heard spinning a jocular tale just before last call at the local shebeen.

Molly opened her mouth to respond, but a television broadcast intruded on the conversation. The TV was mounted on the wall across from the snug. Up to this point it had been only background noise. Now its volume increased; someone was following the news. Brennan did not turn to watch it, but he joined the others as they listened in.

“… condolences from police officers and organizations around the world. Mrs. Heath says she is overwhelmed with gratitude for the support shown to her and the detective’s colleagues after his death.

“Meanwhile, an Essex County woman says another murder victim is being ignored. Essex police confirm that there was another suspicious death around the same time Detective Sergeant Richard Heath was killed. The body of a man was found in Colchester, Essex County, on the morning of the twenty-sixth of April. Babs Mundle of Colchester came upon his body when she was out walking her dog. Mrs. Mundle said she shares the feeling of shock and horror at the murder of the policeman in London, and his family has her complete sympathy. But …”

A new voice, not as polished as that of the presenter, came on. “The other bloke died, too, didn’t he? I’m the one that found him. You don’t forget something like that, especially the condition he was in. He’d been roughed up, like. Plain to see. You wouldn’t treat an animal like that, would you? This was a fellow I’d seen about the place from time to time before I found him lying there. I’d be out walking my little dachshund, Frankie, and I’d see him. He always had a nice smile. Always had a camera round his neck. A tourist, I suppose. Lots to see round here, first Roman city and all that. No camera on him when I saw him on the ground. And the talk is that his wallet was missing, too. What’s wrong with the world today? Nice chap like that, probably never hurt a soul.”

“A police spokesman told this reporter that ‘every suspicious death gets the same meticulous investigation. Every person, every victim, is important.’ The police have not been able to identify the man yet, but they are checking missing persons reports from all over the country. They would not comment on the cause of death.”

Brennan spoke over the television. “Another murder around the same time as the police killing.”

“There’s no reason to think they’re connected, right?” said Terry. “Not when you think of how many murders there must be.”

“Last I heard,” Molly said, “the number was around six hundred.”

“Six hundred what?” Terry asked.

“Homicides.”

“Over what period of time?”

“One year, in England and Wales.”

“Six hundred a year?!” Terry exclaimed. “What’s the population?”

“England and Wales, around fifty million. Why?”

“Do you know what the numbers are in the United States?”

“Do we want to hear this?”

“I recently saw the figures for 1988, so last year there were something like twenty thousand six hundred homicides. Population is around two hundred forty-five million, so that means …”

Brennan did a quick calculation. “The U.S. has roughly five times the population and well over thirty times the number of homicides.” He thought for a few more seconds. “Thirty-four times more.”

“Somebody should tell the Americans the death penalty doesn’t discourage crime,” his sister remarked.

“Sets a bad example, I’d say, being murder in and of itself.” Brennan took a long, comforting sip of his whiskey.

“But back to Old Blighty,” Molly said. “Six hundred murders a year means fewer than two a day. So two killings the same day, or within a day of each other, is unusual.”

“But the other didn’t happen in London and, even if it had, this is a huge city,” Brennan said. “Where’s Essex?” East Saxons, the name meant, but how far east?

“Next county over, to the east or northeast. On the coast. A different world, I’m sure, from London. But then, what isn’t?”

“How long a drive is it?”

“For you in a 747, Terry? Couple of minutes, I suppose. For the rest of us, by car, about an hour.”

“So this place was a Roman city before London was?” Brennan asked.

“Apparently. But for present purposes, probably not relevant to our inquiries. The killing there sounds like a beating death, with wallet and camera stolen, and the victim here in London was a police officer shot in circumstances related to an IRA bomb plot.” She polished off the last of her pint and picked up her handbag. “Time, gentlemen?”

They paid their bar bill, thanked Seamus, and stepped out into the night. People were spilling out of other bars in the Kilburn High Road, and there was an amorous couple approaching from a place up the street. Brennan could hear them trying to negotiate whose flat they would go to and how they would get there. Bus? Tube? Cab? Walk? The man was nearly legless with drink; the woman was tottering along on a pair of spike-heeled shoes. They just managed to stop themselves from falling over the bonnet of a car that was parked with its engine off. Brennan saw two men inside the car and prepared himself for a scene between them and the drunken pair. But the men did not give the hapless lovers a glance. Both of them had their eyes trained on Molly Burke and her brothers.