The next morning Stefan Gillespie took the train to Carlow Town. It was a journey to a familiar place; the nearest big town to Baltinglass. Until Naas, the railway followed the route he took going home, but where the line branched away towards the Wicklow Mountains, he carried on now to Kildare Town and the flat plain of the Curragh and down into the neat pastureland of County Carlow. He fixed his mind on the day’s work, but it wasn’t easy. It was one thing to tell himself he expected nothing from Hannah after the night they’d spent together; it was another to believe it.
Her mood had been very different that morning. The questions about Susan’s murder had come faster than his answers. Why was he holding things back? Why was he trawling the streets of Dublin when he should be on the boat to England by now, across the Channel, and on a train to Danzig? Wasn’t it the priest he needed to question about Susan above everything else? And he knew it was. He also knew why nobody, from the Garda Commissioner down, would be rushing to buy his train ticket. He was investigating the deaths of a woman and a man that a lot of people, his superiors among them, would rather had lain undiscovered on the mountainside at Kilmashogue. Then, quite abruptly, the questions had stopped. She had to go. She walked across to him and kissed him. She rested her head on his shoulder. It was an expression of support, and something more, of tenderness. And then the room was very empty. She was gone.
As Stefan looked out from the train at the green fields of Carlow, Hannah Rosen was making tea in Brian Field’s kitchen, steeling herself for a long day talking to all the people who would come through his door. But in her head there was another conversation going on. Lying in Stefan’s bed that morning, before he woke up, listening to the sounds of Dublin outside, she knew how much this was still her city. The ease she felt with Stefan, even in the face of her best friend’s death, went deeper than she wanted to admit. She could never tell Benny what she was feeling, and not only because of what had happened between her and Stefan. He would be hurt by that, but he would understand. What he wouldn’t understand were her thoughts as she listened to Dublin, rattling and clattering and cursing beyond the window of the scruffy room in Nassau Street. The creation of Israel drove Benny Jacobson with a relentless passion that left no space for sentimental attachments to the past. And she was full of those attachments now. That was the betrayal he wouldn’t forgive. This was still where she belonged. Her head had made a decision about what her life should be; her heart had not.
Stefan went straight from Carlow Station to the Garda barracks in Tullow Street to pay his respects to Superintendent Flynn, who wanted to be remembered to his father and seemed in quite the mood to settle down for a chat about country policing and metropolitan crime. That is until he got the whiff of unnatural practices in his nostrils and found his presence elsewhere was more urgently required than anticipated. Stefan would want to talk to the parents, of course. Wouldn’t it be best if he got on with it? He knew the town like the back of his hand – there was no need for the superintendent’s officers to get involved, was there? Stefan just smiled. No, there wasn’t.
He walked the length of Tullow Street and turned into Dublin Street at the bottom. The tobacconist’s was on the left. He remembered it, but when he walked inside the memory was much stronger. The smell of the place, a comfortable smell of sweetness and smoke reminded him of his grandfather. He had bought Christmas presents for him there, a half ounce of tobacco, some pipe cleaners. But the moment Mr Walsh showed him through the shop into the living room behind it, the warmth was gone. There was only empty space, somehow not quite filled by the table and the two wooden chairs, the two-seater settee and the armchair, and the heavy mahogany sideboard that was too big for the room. It was a dark room and although the day was cold, there was no fire in the grate. There was a photograph of a wedding on the mantelpiece – Mr and Mrs Walsh’s – and on either side of it were oval framed photographs of two couples who must have been Vincent’s grandparents. Above the fireplace too was a black-framed picture of the Sacred Heart. ‘Blessed be the home in which my heart is exposed.’
Somehow it felt less like a home than the shop had. That was where they spoke to people. Stefan could feel that when Mr and Mrs Walsh walked back through the door from the tobacconist’s there weren’t many words. No one ever said much in this room. He learned that Vincent had been their only child, yet there was no photograph; when he asked for one they looked at each other uncertainly, as if they weren’t sure where to find such a thing. Mrs Walsh made no move. A slight nod of her head gave her husband permission to act.
He went to the sideboard and opened a door, with the key that was in the lock. The lock was stiff; the door was rarely opened. He took out a biscuit tin with a picture of the Rock of Cashel on the lid. He opened it carefully and looked through the contents, hunched over the sideboard. He produced a small cardboard frame with a photograph in it; R & F Beard, Photographers, Tullow Street, Carlow. It was a picture of a young man of sixteen or seventeen. He wore a dark suit jacket, a white collar that was too big for him, and a striped tie. He wasn’t smiling. There was a similar photograph of Stefan on the wall in the kitchen at Kilranelagh. He had gone to the photographer’s shop in Tullow Street the summer before he started at Trinity College; his mother wanted a photograph of him in the dark suit that looked so much like Vincent Walsh’s. He had sat in the same chair, in front of the same stained sheet in Mr Beard’s studio. Mr Beard would have said the same things and made the same jokes. Stefan promised he would return the photograph as soon as he could. Mr and Mrs Walsh didn’t reply.
His questions were answered with as few words as were needed. They had not seen their son for over three years. He had left home to work in Dublin in the summer of 1930. He had come home twice. The last time had been Christmas, 1931. He went back to Dublin that Stephen’s Day and it was the last contact they’d had with him. There was nothing to find out here. They could have understood nothing of their son’s life. They knew just enough to ensure it was never spoken about. Stefan could almost feel, through the years between, the long silence that final Christmas must have been for all three of them. As he walked from the shop out into the street, it was as if the ghost of that Stephen’s Day past, when Vincent Walsh had left his home for the last time, still hovered in the tobacconist’s doorway. Whatever the shop had meant to Vincent then, once it must have held the sounds and scents and images of a childhood that wasn’t always silent and empty and cold.
They hadn’t asked about his body. Stefan didn’t have to explain that there was nothing for them to see or identify, nothing he would want a mother and father to look at. He told them they would be able to make funeral arrangements before long, perhaps in January. They nodded. They would do what they needed to do. There would be no wake. There would be no line of customers and friends and neighbours and family to follow the coffin the few hundred yards along Dublin Street, past the pillared court house into College Street, past the seminary; or to sit with it in the Cathedral of the Assumption overnight. The Mass for the Dead would be spoken to a handful of people. Vincent Walsh would be buried with as much shame as sorrow. Afterwards, his mother and father would sit in the room behind the shop and say nothing. They had mourned for their son long before his death.
*
Dessie MacMahon was a lot more comfortable in Carolan’s Bar than he had been at the Gate Theatre. Apart from the fact that Billy Donnelly didn’t need to be asked to put two hot whiskeys in front of him and Sergeant Gillespie, you knew who was who in here, and more to the point, who was what. Any man you found drinking in Carolan’s was queer and that kind of clarity seemed to Dessie to be only proper. Besides which, you could treat them like queers. A bit of craic was fine. Didn’t some of them have a way of making you split your sides sometimes? But up at the Gate you needed to watch yourself. You couldn’t know who was queer and who wasn’t and nobody seemed the least bit bothered about it. That couldn’t be right. However, as Stefan questioned Billy Donnelly, the publican was less forthcoming about Vincent Walsh than he was with the drinks. He took the news that Vincent’s body had been found with hardly a change in his sour expression. Maybe his eyes closed for just a moment, but it was hard not to feel that this didn’t come as news at all.
‘He was living here?’ said Stefan.
‘He worked for me. He’d a room upstairs.’
‘How long?’
‘Maybe a year.’
‘You knew him well then.’
Billy looked across the bar at the last of his departing customers. It was barely one o’clock and the pub never did do much daytime trade, but the presence of two detectives was enough to frighten off what there was.
‘You’re costing me money. Are you stopping long?’
‘Tell me about the night of the Eucharistic Mass,’ continued Stefan. It was not a question Billy expected, and if the news of Vincent’s death hadn’t seemed to surprise him very much, those words clearly did. He frowned.
‘You’d quite a night of it, I hear.’
‘I’m not with you, Sergeant.’
‘There was a gang of Blueshirts here, beating the shite out of you.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Was there a reason for that?’
‘Sure, why would they need a reason?’ It was the kind of answer Billy Donnelly would have given at any other time, and at any other time he would have laughed. He smiled, but his voice spoke wariness and caution.
‘It was just you and Vincent Walsh, Billy?’
‘If you say so, Mr Gillespie. It’s a long time ago.’
‘Vincent got away from them?’
Billy didn’t reply. He’d picked up a glass and a towel earlier and had been drying the same glass for some time, unaware that he was doing it.
‘Did he?’ insisted Stefan.
‘If I’d had the legs on me I’d have done the same.’
‘So when did he come back?’
The publican stopped drying the glass.
Stefan could see he was trying to work out an answer.
‘He was worried about you. That’s what I’m told. He was on his way back here by two in the morning.’
‘I didn’t see him.’
‘You didn’t see him come in?’
‘He never came in. I didn’t see him again.’
‘What about his things?’
‘He’d a few clothes, a few books.’
‘You’ve still got those?’
‘What do you think this is, the left-luggage office? I kept hold of his things for a while, but when I saw he wasn’t coming back I got rid of it all.’
‘Did you get the letter he sent you?’ Stefan was watching him closely.
‘What letter?’
The response was quick, controlled; perhaps he was anticipating the questions now. But neither Stefan nor Dessie had any doubt that Billy Donnelly knew all about the letter, and that it had arrived. However, they could get nothing more out him now. There was no letter. He knew nothing about any letter. Yet the letter mattered and Stefan knew it. Vincent Walsh’s words still rang in his head. ‘They won’t look in the same place twice.’ If Vincent had died that night they were some of the last words he ever spoke. They couldn’t be explained, but they certainly couldn’t be cast aside.
As the two detectives left, Billy Donnelly could feel the sweat, cold on his back where it had been hot only seconds before. As he went to pour himself a drink, Dessie MacMahon reappeared at the door. He had remembered something.
‘Weren’t you in the Joy for a stretch last year?’
‘Six fucking months.’
‘What for?’
‘What’s it to you?’
Dessie grinned. He had a memory for these small things. ‘Attempting to procure an act of gross indecency at a urinal in Upper Hatch Street, but as it happened the feller was a guard, wasn’t that the story, Billy?’
Two fingers ushered Dessie out. Billy stood in the empty bar. He hadn’t forgotten Vincent. He never would. The drink was the first of many.
*
Inspector Donaldson had been reading Stefan Gillespie’s report for almost ten minutes. It wasn’t a long report. It deliberately avoided any facts that could be avoided and it made no attempt at theories or opinions. It described the discovery of the two bodies and the bare details of Wayland-Smith’s examination. Vincent Walsh and Susan Field had been identified, and although the circumstances of their deaths could not be determined, there could be no question but that the deaths were indeed suspicious. Something like two years separated the two events. Nothing linked them except the place of burial and the State Pathologist’s opinion that damage to both skulls could have been caused by a captive bolt pistol. Donaldson had already pencilled in the word ‘speculative’ above the word ‘opinion’. There was considerable information about the probable movements of both Vincent Walsh and Susan Field close to the time of their disappearance. The inspector had crossed out the word ‘probable’ and replaced it with ‘possible’. He turned the pages of the report over several times more, not because there was anything else to read, but because he didn’t want to have the conversation he knew had to come next. Nothing was going to make this trouble go away.
‘The man Walsh,’ he said, finally looking up. ‘How reliable do you think these people are? Purcell, I mean, and the publican, Donnelly?’
‘I’d say Purcell is telling the truth. Billy Donnelly knows more.’
‘I know Donnelly. The other one’s a queer too, I presume?’
‘Purcell doesn’t have any reason to lie.’ Stefan knew exactly what Inspector Donaldson meant. You couldn’t believe anything a queer said.
‘Lying is a way of life with these people. At any event there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to go. The man disappeared. He hasn’t seen him since. Or are you suggesting Donnelly was involved in the death somehow?’
‘Like I say, I think he’s got more to tell us.’
‘And if he hasn’t?’
‘Sir, four men attacked the pub the night Walsh disappeared.’
‘Oh, yes, the Blueshirts.’ Donaldson smiled. He didn’t believe it.
‘I’ve no reason to doubt that,’ Stefan continued. ‘Your man Purcell could see Vincent Walsh had been beaten up. And what the hell has Billy Donnelly got to gain from a story like that, two years down the road?’
The inspector sniffed. The Blueshirts, under the leadership of Eoin O’Duffy, the first Garda Commissioner and almost the first man President de Valera sacked on taking office in 1932, had been banned a year ago. They had threatened to march on Dublin in the same way Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome. After the ban the sale of blue shirts had declined rapidly, and the movement had faded away. But there were plenty of Gardaí whose sympathies lay with O’Duffy and the march that never was, and James Donaldson had been one of them, however quiet he kept about that now.
‘Cat fights are common enough in the queer fraternity I’d say. The man wouldn’t want to be pointing his finger at friends, even after all this time.’
‘I think I need to take the Blueshirts seriously, sir.’
‘I don’t know where you’ll find any Blueshirts now, but you might want to remember that the majority of them were ex-soldiers who served this country well, whatever the views of the current regime. I would be careful about stirring up the past, and on the back of what’s probably a pack of lies.’
‘Susan Field.’ Stefan wouldn’t let Donaldson avoid this any longer.
‘We’ve been here already, Sergeant. I’m well aware that it comes back to Keller.’
‘I can’t question Keller. I don’t know where he is. I did speak to Sheila Hogan, his nurse. But that was after Jimmy Lynch had had a go and put her in the Mater.’
Donaldson ignored the last remark.
‘Didn’t she say she’d never seen the woman?’
‘That doesn’t mean a bloody thing. There was a foetus.’
‘I know that Gillespie. Obviously you’ve established the woman was pregnant.’
‘She wrote a letter that said she was having an abortion!’
‘Yes, there are questions to ask, Sergeant, I do accept that. And I will pass a request up the line for the German police to try to locate Herr Keller.’
Stefan looked at his tight-lipped superior and shook his head.
‘He was driven to Dún Laoghaire by the head of the Nazi Party here. With friends like that, not to mention our own Special Branch, I don’t think we’ll hear much back. That leaves us with one witness – Father Byrne.’
Inspector Donaldson might sideline the references to Adolf Mahr and Special Branch, but Byrne was another matter. However much he wanted to ignore it he knew he couldn’t. And so he had already tackled the problem.
‘I understand that and I have spoken to Monsignor Fitzpatrick.’
Stefan was surprised. The smile on Donaldson’s face was troubling.
‘You should have asked me before speaking to him yourself.’
‘I wanted to find out where Byrne was. It was the shortest route.’
‘That wasn’t a decision for you to make, Gillespie.’
‘It was a simple question, sir.’
‘It was a series of scandalous allegations against a priest!’
‘I have good reason to believe Francis Byrne was the man Susan Field was having an affair with, that he was the father of her child and, according to her letters, that he was the man who arranged for her abortion with Hugo Keller. He also paid for it. That makes him one of the last people to see Miss Field alive. And he left the country within a few days of her disappearing.’
It was more troubling that the inspector seemed untroubled by this.
‘As I said, I have spoken to Monsignor Fitzpatrick.’
‘So when do I get to question your man Byrne?’
‘Everything you’ve said about Father Byrne is speculation.’
‘I don’t think so, sir.’
James Donaldson frowned. It was there again, ‘sir’, as a kind of insult.
‘The woman never even mentions his name in these letters.’
‘Come on, how many priests did she know at UCD?’
Donaldson’s tight lips grew even tighter.
‘She was pregnant, Sergeant. Sadly we know that was true. As for the rest, a woman in that sort of trouble might come up with any kind of story. Shame does strange things, particularly to women. She may not even have known who the father of the child was. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman has fantasised about a good man being the father of an illegitimate child. Monsignor Fitzpatrick has no doubt about Father Byrne’s integrity. He is a fine man and a fine priest. He knows him. The man lived in his house!’
Stefan stared at the inspector. He had already heard this. Hadn’t another policeman said the same thing to Susan’s father? But he doubted it could have been said with such conviction. He struggled to keep the word ‘bollocks’ in his mouth, but there wasn’t another word that would do.
‘I didn’t pick the questions, sir. I just need to ask them. And the man I need to ask is Father Byrne, sir. He’s the only witness there is now.’
‘I understand. That’s exactly what I’ve said to the monsignor.’
‘Does than mean Father Byrne is coming back to Ireland?’
‘Not in the foreseeable future.’
‘Then shouldn’t I be going to him in Danzig?’
‘I hardly think we’ll be sending you to the Baltic, Sergeant Gillespie.’ Donaldson laughed. Reluctant as he had been to enter into this, it was done. It hadn’t been so hard after all. Detective sergeants could be controlled.
‘Monsignor Fitzpatrick will speak to Father Byrne. He can telephone him if necessary. I suggest you draw up a list of questions and we can send them straight off. If the letter is sent via London the air mail system will have it in Danzig in less than twenty-four hours. Let’s deal with this speculation head on, Sergeant. Let’s get it out of the way and clear the air.’
It was not often that real determination showed in Inspector Donaldson’s face, but Stefan recognised it when he saw it. There would be no argument. If the inspector had, even for a second, wondered about the relationship between Father Francis Byrne and Susan Field, Monsignor Fitzpatrick had demonstrated, with infectious infallibility, that there really was nothing to wonder about. The list of written questions was an empty gesture. It meant that the investigation had already reached a dead end.
There was a mug of tea waiting on Stefan’s desk when he returned. Dessie MacMahon didn’t have to be in Donaldson’s office to work out what was happening. The inspector knew there was a priest in it now all right; he was as agitated as hell. Hadn’t he been to Mass twice that day already? But it wasn’t the first thing Dessie said when Stefan returned.
‘She was in to see you.’
Stefan ignored the smile that went with it; Dessie didn’t miss a thing.
‘When?’
‘An hour ago maybe. She waited a bit, then she had to go.’
For once Stefan was glad Hannah hadn’t stayed. Everything she might have anticipated about the way Francis Byrne was going to be treated had just happened. If anything it was worse. Not only had Donaldson decided that Susan Field never did have an affair with the priest, the man would be questioned by post. Stefan had two bodies, two murders, and nowhere to go. He reached across the desk for a file. It wasn’t there. He had been looking at it when the summons from Inspector Donaldson came. He looked round, puzzled, then saw some sheets of paper on the floor. He bent and picked them up. As he put them back he peered at the desk again. Things were not where he had left them. His desk was the exact opposite of the tip that was Dessie’s. He knew where everything was; except now it wasn’t, not quite.
‘Here’s an odd thing, Sarge.’ Dessie leant back. ‘Billy Donnelly.’
‘What about him?’
‘Six months for getting his cock out in a jacks.’
‘You said. That’s not so odd, is it?’
Stefan was still looking down, frowning.
‘Have you been looking for something over here, Dessie?’
‘You think I don’t know better than that?’
‘Why are these papers all over the floor? Everything’s in the wrong –’ He smiled; it was simple enough. ‘Did you leave Hannah here on her own?’
‘I’ve got the report on Billy.’ Dessie got up, ignoring Stefan’s question. ‘Here. “The defendant approached the detective and said, isn’t that a fine big one. It’ll give you the horn.” Jesus wept!’ He was laughing.
‘She’s gone through everything.’
‘You know who it was, Sarge?’ Dessie still wasn’t listening.
‘Who what was?’
‘The detective in the jacks.’
‘What do I care who was in the bloody jacks?’
‘It was Jimmy Lynch, keeping the Free State’s toilets safe.’
It was about as far from Special Branch work as you could get.
Billy Donnelly wasn’t feeling great. He could take his drink but he’d drunk himself senseless through most of that afternoon. He couldn’t remember what he’d said to his barman when they opened the pub, but Derek Blaney had walked out and said he wasn’t coming back. He would, but he’d leave it a couple of days to make his point. The dreary, familiar campery in the bar that night had made Billy want to take the lot of them by the scruff of the neck and kick the shite out of them till they said something, anything different. He felt he’d been listening to the same empty conversations all his life and what lay ahead was just the same thing, over and over, night after night after night. And he was right. But he had drunk himself into a stupor and out the other side now. He was sober and wished he wasn’t. The knock on the door was the last thing he needed, but he had no anger left to hurl at the unwanted visitor. He opened the door. Stefan Gillespie stood there.
Billy didn’t bother to protest. He hadn’t got the energy. He walked back to the bar and sat down. He left Stefan to close the door as he came in.
‘I thought we were done.’
‘I didn’t.’ Stefan sat down opposite him.
‘Tell me about the letter.’
‘There wasn’t a letter.’
‘Tell me about Jimmy Lynch then.’
‘He’s a gobshite, the same kind of gobshite you are.’
‘He put you inside.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Eighteen months hard labour. You were out in six.’
‘I was lucky.’
‘No one’s that lucky. Jimmy put you in there and Jimmy got you out.’
‘That what he said?’
‘What did he want?’
‘I thought he was just doing his job, locking up queers.’
‘Then maybe I should take a leaf out of Jimmy’s book. I’ll put in a report that you approached me in a public urinal. I’ll have Dessie MacMahon back me up on it. It’ll be the usual thing, gross indecency. It’ll be your third time.’
Billy didn’t answer. He was remembering those six months.
‘Three years at least, maybe more with the wrong judge.’
Stefan waited for it to sink in.
‘That’s hard labour too. You’re not getting any younger.’
‘You’re not Jimmy Lynch, Mr Gillespie.’
‘I won’t break your arms first if that’s what you mean. But I will put you away if I have to.’
‘What the hell does it matter to you? Vincent’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘What was in the letter Vincent sent you?’
There was nowhere for Billy Donnelly to go; he had to talk now.
He sat back, remembering that night.
‘All right the Blueshirts didn’t just turn up. They wanted Vincent.’
‘I’d worked that out.’
‘There was a feller he’d been with. He’d written Vincent some letters. The sort of things people write and wish to God they never had. Vincent was mad about him. From up the arse to true fucking love! Jesus! He wasn’t just anybody, this feller, either. I don’t know what happened but he wanted the letters back. The Blueshirts came to get them. All Vincent had to do was hand them over, but he couldn’t see it was your man who sent the bastards in the first place. He thought he was protecting the feller, hiding his fecking billiedoos. So he ran. He stuck the letters in a bloody envelope and sent them to me! They wouldn’t look in the same place twice! That’s what he wrote.’
‘So did he come back here that night?’
‘No. The letters came, a couple of days later, but he never did.’
‘Where are they now?’
Billy Donnelly still didn’t want to say it.
‘You know, don’t you, Billy?’
‘I gave them to Sergeant Lynch. I don’t know how he found out they were here, but he did. I’d kept them. I did think Vincent would come back. I should have just put them on the fire, but I couldn’t. They didn’t mean a thing to the man who wrote them but they meant everything to him. Jimmy Lynch turned up about a year later, asking about Vincent, about the letters. It didn’t matter what I said; he knew. So he put me away. I took six months of it. For what? Vincent was dead all that time. But then, I still thought he –’
‘Was Jimmy Lynch there that night, with the Blueshirts?’
‘No, he was fucking IRA before he was a Broy Harrier, wasn’t he? I don’t know who they were.’
‘What about the man who wrote the letters?’
‘There wasn’t a name. All I know is what Vincent told me. He was some sort of teacher, not a school teacher … it was the university. And the bastard was a priest.’