A Hunt in Winter

by Conor Brady

  Three G-men were engaged in watching the movements of two Irish-American gentlemen staying at the Imperial Hotel. The word from a helpful porter was that they were former Union Army officers with guns to sell. So far their principal focus appeared to be on drinking whiskey and making passes at the barmaids, but they had left word with the porter that they were expecting visitors. G-men would be required to take shifts sitting in the hotel bar, watching for someone to make a rendezvous.

  Swallow also needed two men to operate the public office and the cells at Exchange Court. That should leave him with a paltry strength of three or four to cope with whatever the crime reports might bring in.

  The moment he stepped into Exchange Court he knew from the face of the young G-man at the public counter that things were not good.

  ‘Bad story out in the E, sir.’ He jerked his head towards the stairs. ‘Sergeant Mossop’s above. He’s just ahead of you.’ Pat Mossop had been duty sergeant for the night shift that had just ended. Swallow took the stairs to the crime office two at a time.

  Mossop, recently promoted to detective sergeant, was hunched at his desk. Detective Johnny Vizzard, newly arrived in G-Division on promotion from uniform, was perched beside him, his fingers poised over the typewriter. Mossop looked tired, as he always did now. A year ago the diminutive Belfast man had taken a bullet in the upper torso as G-men closed on an armed suspect on Ormond Quay. Strictly speaking, Pat Mossop should have been dead. Had his colleagues not got him swiftly to the infirmary on Jervis Street, he would have been.

  ‘Something big, Pat?’

  ‘Big enough, boss. E-district. Rathmines Road. A bad assault. Could be more than that. I thought I’d have the report done before you came in.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’m just back with the lads from the Baggot Street Hospital. A young girl was attacked in Blackberry Lane off the Rathmines Road some time towards midnight. She’s in a bad state. The doctor says she mightn’t come through it.’

  ‘How much do we know?’

  ‘A fair bit. But there’s no idea yet who might have done it or why.’ He flipped his official notebook open. ‘Aged eighteen, name of Alice Flannery, lives with her mother and a gaggle of brothers and sisters in a cottage at the end of the laneway. The mother’s widowed, makes a few bob as a cleaner at the big church on the Rathmines Road. Seems Alice helps her on the cleaning job, but mostly she works as a waitress at the New Vienna restaurant down in South Great George’s Street.’

  Swallow knew the New Vienna. It was a short walk from the Castle.

  ‘What do we know of her movements last night?’

  ‘She left the New Vienna to walk home around quarter past eleven after they’d cleaned up and shut for the night. Sometime before midnight a couple of cavalrymen tried to use the lane to slip into the barracks after lights. They heard a commotion and literally stumbled across her.’

  ‘Robbery? She’d have likely been paid her wages, finishing up on Friday?’

  ‘Maybe. She had no money on her when she was got to the hospital. No bag or anything. But it was so damned dark her things could be anywhere around the laneway.’

  ‘What’re the injuries?’

  ‘No sexual attack, though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the motive. Her skull is badly fractured on the right side. Nose broken. Cheek-bone broken on the other side. Doctor reckons about six teeth splintered. Mouth and lips lacerated. There’s what looks like a bad rope burn or something such on the neck. Lots of scratches and cuts. It looks as if she got away into the brambles and then crawled out again. The doctor says she was beaten with a blunt weapon, maybe a heavy bar or a club of some kind. She’s lost a lot of blood.’

  ‘Is she conscious? Could she tell you anything?’

  ‘Not a lot that’s coherent. They put her under with a good dose of laudanum. The doctor was afraid that her heart would fail. Johnny took a note of what little she did say.’

  Vizzard shrugged. ‘She just said “dark”, “noise” and then “the pain, the pain”. Then she said, “Me uniform’s ruined.” But she won’t be going waitressing again for a long time.’

  Swallow drew up a chair.

  ‘She might have been doing a bit of amateur whoring on the side? Maybe the two soldiers were doing business in the laneway with her? What did they have they to say?’

  Mossop grimaced.

  ‘That was my first thought too. But I don’t think so. They were well soused after a night in McCabe’s tavern. One of them ran out onto the Rathmines Road, roaring for a bobby. There was a beat man, Jack Caviston, at Leinster Road. He judged that the young fella was hysterical. If they’d done it, they wouldn’t have come running for a polisman.’

  Swallow knew Caviston. A senior man. Reliable. He silently acknowledged Mossop’s logic.

  ‘I interviewed them separately,’ Mossop continued. ‘Two young fellas from Yorkshire. They tell the same story: drinking late in the town, they decided to try to slip back to barracks over the back wall. It’s just fifty yards across the field from the end of Blackberry Lane. But I’ve had them jugged in separate cells by their CO in the barracks. Drunkenness, indiscipline, absent without leave. He can hold them as long as we need.’

  ‘Did they see anyone in the lane?’

  ‘It was so damned foggy they could hardly see each other. They say they heard the girl scream two or three times, and they say they heard someone running. But they saw nothing. Like I said, one of them literally stumbled over the poor girl.’

  ‘Who got her to hospital?’

  ‘Caviston sent one of the young lads to hail a cab at Portobello,’ Mossop resumed. ‘They had no idea who she was until two in the morning, when a young brother turned up at Rathmines Station to say his sister hadn’t come home. They sent him down to Baggot Street and he identified her to Jack Caviston. The mother came down too. We’ve got a couple of G-men there with her.’

  ‘And Caviston?’

  ‘He finished his shift at six.’

  Swallow knew that with Pat Mossop he didn’t have to ask the next question, but he asked it anyway.

  ‘The scene’s preserved?’

  ‘Laneway’s closed off. They put up a barrier with two bobbies. It was too dark for a full search of the ground. The station sergeant at Rathmines says he’ll turn out half a dozen men when we want to start.’

  In the day room below, Swallow could hear voices and movement as the day shift assembled. The Lower Castle Yard below the windows was filling with a thin morning light.

  ‘Good work,’ he nodded. ‘I’ll take the conference below and get out to Blackberry Lane myself for the search. Just sit in with me and brief the shift, then go on home and get some sleep. Come back when you’re rested.’

  The crime conference was short. Mossop rehearsed what was known about the attack at Blackberry Lane. The rest of the night’s business was routine. Two housebreakings in Kingstown. Some broken windows along Dorset Street. An assault on a publican in Ringsend. Details of each incident would be transmitted after the conference to all DMP stations through the ABC telegraph system. Uniformed men across the city would be on the alert for anything they might encounter that could be related to any of the reported incidents.

  ‘I’m going out to direct the search at Blackberry Lane,’ Swallow announced when Mossop had finished. I want Mick Feore with me as book man and Martin Shanahan as assistant. Send to Kevin Street for Sergeant Doolan to join us out there. We’ll do a conference here at four o’clock.’

  Mick Feore was an experienced crime detective who had worked with Swallow as far back as the Phoenix Park murders in 1882. Martin Shanahan had been transferred from uniform duties to assist them. They were part of the team assembled by the legendary Inspector John Mallon that brought five members of the ‘Invincibles’ to the gallows after the assassinations of Britain’s two most senior civil servants.

  The role of book man was key in any serious crime investigation. He had to be meticulous in recording every scrap of infor
mation. He had to cherish every detail. And he had to have the gift of being able to make connections between what could seem to be unrelated facts or events. Mick Feore was the best book man in G-Division after Pat Mossop, Swallow reckoned. Shanahan was without ambition, but worked conscientiously and loyally under direction.

  Stephen Doolan was a veteran of twenty years in service, and the best search organiser Swallow knew in the force. He was in A-Division, based at Kevin Street, but what the G-Division detectives at Exchange Court wanted by way of resources they invariably got.

  There was noisy talk as the G-men started to disperse. Swallow noticed a middle-aged constable at the door of the room. He recognised Jack Caviston, the Rathmines beat man who had been called by the young soldiers when Alice Flannery had been found. Swallow surmised that he had slipped into the day room while the conference was in progress.

  Caviston saluted. ‘Mornin’, sir.’

  ‘Bad business you had earlier,’ Swallow said. He could see that the man was exhausted. ‘I thought you’d finished your shift.’

  ‘I did, sir,’ Caviston seemed uneasy. ‘I was on my way home when I remembered somethin’ strange from the scene. In all that was goin’ on I didn’t say it to Sergeant Mossop or Johnny Vizzard.’ He hesitated. ‘So I thought I’d come back in, knowin’ you’d be doin’ the conference.’

  ‘Go on,’ Swallow said.

  ‘It mightn’t be anythin’ at all, but it was somethin’ I think the girl said when I got up to the laneway. The two young lads were strikin’ lucifers to give a bit o’ light, so I could see she was in a terrible state, covered in blood. I asked her what her name was, but she didn’t answer. I said “Who done this, love?” Then she started to shake and a couple of words came out.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said, “I didn’t.” She repeated it. “I didn’t.” That’s what she said, sir.’

  Chapter 2

  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.’