Swallow did not spend much time thinking about the mysteries of religion. But as a Roman Catholic policeman in a force where his co-religionists rarely made it to senior rank, he thought a lot about its influence. Had he been born into the Protestant faith, he reckoned, he would have enrolled in the Trinity College medical school rather than that of the Catholic University on Cecilia Street. Cecilia Street was his undoing. It all seemed a long time ago now, before he had joined the police.
Trinity medicals were no saints. Their exploits in taverns across the city and in particular in the red-light district around Montgomery Street—‘Monto’, to knowledgeable Dubliners—were notorious. But perhaps, he reasoned, had he enrolled to study among those of a different religious background he might have been more concerned to put up a show of better behaviour. He might have been careful, more cautious.
He might not so readily have succumbed to the delights of the alehouses, as he did, within days of enrolment in Cecilia Street. His fellow students there were not angels either, but most of them seemed to know when to stop carousing and start putting in the bookwork that was necessary to pass their examinations.
Swallow’s inability to identify that point had cost him his hoped-for medical career. And his three years of roistering dissipated the hard-earned money his parents had put aside for it. If blasting away their savings was bad, then shattering their hopes and ambitions was infinitely worse. When his father succumbed to a brain haemorrhage while working in the family bar at Suncroft in rural Kildare on an August evening, Swallow knew that his child’s betrayal, as he saw it, had played some part in it.
It had taken years for his mother to forgive him. She had been if anything more ambitious than her husband for her only son. An uneasy peace had eventually been brokered by his younger sister, Harriet, but the bond between mother and son was never the same again. Had he offered to return to Suncroft to help her run the business it might have laid the foundations for a fuller reconciliation, but it was not something that either of them wanted.
He saw himself with three choices after repeatedly failing his examinations: America, Australia or the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Somewhat to his surprise, he managed to control his drinking in order to complete the police educational examination. And he succeeded in masking his drinking habits from the examining surgeon at the Kevin Street depot. His drinking was long in check. He could take alcohol, often quite a lot of it, but it did not control him as before. He took drink—and he liked having it, mellow Tullamore whiskey, porter from Guinness’s, good red wine from France—but drink did not take him.
Yet he was under no illusions about his prospects. The bulk of the DMP’s rank and file were Roman Catholics. They were country lads, sons of farmers, tradesmen or, as in his own case, small publicans or shopkeepers. Almost all of the top ranks of the force were preserved for Protestants and Freemasons. In the uniformed ranks, he might get to be a sergeant or inspector at best. When he transferred to G-Division he knew his chances of advancement were reduced further, although paradoxically the chief superintendent of G-Division, John Mallon, was a Roman Catholic. But Mallon, the son of a small Catholic farmer from near Crossmaglen in County Armagh, with an outstandingly successful record in the service of the Crown, was the exception that proved the rule. One or two Catholics had gone through to superintendent rank in the aftermath of the 1867 Fenian rising when the authorities came to a greater appreciation of the loyalty of the Irish police forces. But the majority of those in command of the divisions were members of the Church of Ireland.
Sometimes Swallow thought he had been born too soon. The late Cardinal Cullen, Catholic Primate of All Ireland, had denounced the new ‘Queen’s Colleges’, established in 1850, as ‘Godless institutions’, so the Englishman John Henry Cardinal Newman established the new ‘Catholic University’ in Dublin. It had proven itself an effective vehicle for the social and economic advancement of young men whose faith or political inclinations were incompatible with the Protestant ethos at Trinity College. Catholics were beginning to make it to the higher levels in business and in the professions. There were even a few Catholic judges now. And the Catholic hierarchy was finding new ways of demonstrating its growing power, even with the country gripped in political turmoil and violence.
Little more than a generation after Daniel O’Connell had secured emancipation, and with the Great Famine within living memory, the Catholic bishops were putting up cathedral-scale buildings, right in the faces of the Protestant classes that still led commerce, business and the administration.
He had spent some time in the summer trying to do a panoramic sketch of the city skyline, using the Castle’s Bedford Tower as a viewing point. It had been a not-very-successful project for the course he attended weekly at the Municipal School of Art. It dawned on him that outside the immediate city centre all the significant landmarks on both sides of the river were new Roman Catholic domes and spires. The great copper dome of the Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, dominated the Rathmines Road. Its Corinthian columns and high pediment, studded with golden lettering and topped with statues of Mary, St Patrick and St Laurence O’Toole, loomed out onto the thoroughfare. It embodied the new confidence and wealth of middle-class, Catholic Ireland.
The magnificence of the church contrasted sharply with the living conditions of its parishioners in Blackberry Lane, just 100 paces away from its gates, facing onto the Rathmines Road. As the police side-car came to the scene, Swallow tried to visualise the widow Flannery and her young daughter cleaning and polishing the altar rails and the pews under the magnificent dome. When he and Mick Feore descended from the side-car, the morning light had strengthened to show the open sewer running down the middle of the lane and the rotten green of the cottages’ thatched roofs. Somewhere on the air he got the scent of animal waste. Not the customary smell of horse droppings on city streets. More pungent. Pigs, he guessed. He was grateful for the coldness of the morning. In any warmth the stench would be unbearable.
A second open car clattered up behind them, the horse snorting and steaming from its exertions. It was the police photographic technician with his assistant. The two men climbed down from the car and started to lift the cumbersome camera equipment to the ground.
The uniformed sergeant guarding the crime scene saluted and led him into the laneway. Swallow’s first thought was to reprimand him. G-men were never saluted in public as a precaution against identification. But he let it pass. The man had probably been there all night.
‘Just a few steps up here, sir.’
He gestured to the ground. The bloodstains were dark brown, almost dry in the morning air. The muddy ground showed a jigsaw of footprints. Three, maybe four men’s boots or shoes, and the distinctive smaller imprints probably made by the victim. To his right Swallow could see an indentation in the brambles. A little farther on, he saw the gate leading to the meadow. The metal bolt was undone. Beyond the gate the grass was white with hoar frost.
‘Mornin’, Joe. Mornin’, Mick.’
Sergeant Stephen Doolan came up the lane followed by half a dozen E-Division constables from Rathmines. Each man was equipped with a long, wooden-shafted pike. Swallow surmised the implements were army issue from the cavalry barracks.
He nodded.
‘You know the story here, Stephen?’
Doolan nodded. ‘Yes, I caught up with it on the routes before I left Kevin Street.’
The ‘routes’, or ‘routines’, were the crime reports that circulated to all city police stations on the ABC telegraph from DMP headquarters in the Castle’s Lower Yard.
‘That’s where he waited.’ Swallow pointed to the gate. ‘Probably got away through the field when the two soldier-boys arrived. So when you’ve done the laneway you’ll have to search the field too, end to end. There’s no winter growth so the grass is short. If he’s left anything to be found it won’t be difficult.’
Doolan deployed his men on both sides of the laneway, starting from the intersection with the main roadway. They moved slowly along the poor thoroughfare, eyes scanning the grass and mud, probing the brambles with their long pikes. Within less than a minute a searcher had located a small handbag off the track beside the gate. The cheap imitation velvet was damp, but the metal clasp was secure. When Doolan opened it he counted five shilling coins—a waitress’s Friday pay.
‘Have a look at this, skipper.’
A constable by the gate tapped with his foot at a heavy wooden stake lying in the grass. Measuring perhaps four feet and sharpened at one end, it might have come from a farm fence or enclosure. Half of its length was spattered with darkened blood.
‘Don’t touch it until the photographic technician has taken pictures,’ Doolan ordered. ‘We’ll want pictures of the lane itself, the gateway and those footprints too.’
He turned to Feore.
‘Get the plaster kit from the car. I want casts of all the footmarks once the photographs are taken.’
The scene was telling Swallow little so far. The assailant might have known the gateway to the meadow as a place of concealment. Or he might have just come upon it. The bloodied stake might have been brought to the scene as a weapon, or it might simply have been a convenience. The fact that the girl’s bag and her wages were still at the scene suggested that the motive was not robbery. But equally it was possible that the attacker had been unable to locate them in the dark.
The photographer had got his tripod up and was busy at his work when a third open car drew to a halt at the end of the laneway. The constable-driver came down from his seat to assist the uniformed passenger to the ground. It was ‘Duck’ Boyle, Swallow’s former superior at Exchange Court, lately promoted to superintendent and placed in command of the E-Division. ‘Duck’ Boyle’s generously cut uniform with its silver braid was moderately effective in disguising its wearer’s advanced corpulence, but it could not remedy the distinctive waddle that had earned him his nickname among his former colleagues at G-Division.
Regulations required that the divisional superintendent should attend personally at the scenes of serious crimes. Swallow was not surprised by Boyle’s arrival, but he knew from the expression on the fat superintendent’s face that this was more than a routine compliance with regulation.
‘Good mornin’, Inspector Swalla’.’ Boyle greeted him formally for the benefit of the constables and sergeants gathered around. He took Swallow conspiratorially by the arm and walked him a few paces to the edge of the lane. ‘I’m afraid that things have taken a turn for the worse,’ Boyle intoned solemnly. ‘The victim o’ this outrage, Miss Alice Flannery, died at the Baggot Street Hospital at 9.15 this mornin’. Ye’re dealin’ now with a murder.’