A Hunt in Winter

by Conor Brady

  He pushed his way through the group with a measure of brandy and put it to her lips. She sipped a little of the spirit, coughing and hacking as it went down her gullet. He wiped the blood from her face with a damp towel.

  ‘Jesus, it’s young Debbie Dunne. I didn’t recognise her.’

  ‘You know her?’ one of the furnace men asked.

  ‘Sure, of course. She sells fish from Ringsend when the boats come in. Along the street outside. Like her mother and all the Dunne women before her.’

  ‘Well, it must be a bloody dangerous business, sellin’ fish,’ the furnace man countered. ‘She’s far from bein’ a well woman tonight.’

  There was a muttered chorus of agreement from the clientele. The barman put the brandy glass to her mouth again, but she refused it. They waited, trying awkward, soothing words around the girl, who groaned and cried for a full half-hour, until a clattering of hooves in the street outside told them that the ambulance had arrived.

  Saturday November 10th, 1888

  Chapter 19

  ‘Another one in London last night.’

  Pat Mossop waved the flimsy paper from the ABC telegraph. Every three hours the noisy machine spewed out crime intelligence that came in from the police forces across the United Kingdom and were collated in London at New Scotland Yard.

  ‘Mary Jane Kelly. The Yard says she’s the fifth. Found with her throat cut in Whitechapel. A lady of the night, like the others. Born in Limerick, would you believe . . . one of our own? About twenty-five years of age, it says here. Christ, it’s barbaric.’

  The Saturday-morning crime conference at Exchange Court was tense and despondent. London had the Ripper, but Dublin had its own problems.

  ‘A week on from the Flannery girl’s murder and we’re nowhere. Absolutely bloody nowhere,’ Mossop complained to no one in particular. ‘Now we’ve another young girl hammered to within an inch of her life on Misery Hill,’ he added. ‘We’re no better than the savages in the East End of London.’

  None of the G-men or uniformed officers at the crime conference could summon a word to counter Mossop’s pessimism on the Alice Flannery murder.

  ‘There’s nothing to say it’s anything more than coincidence,’ Mick Feore said. ‘It’s a big city with a lot of people.’

  ‘Of course,’ Swallow agreed. ‘But attacks like this on women are rare. We can just hope we haven’t got some lunatic trying to match what’s happening across the water.’

  Debbie Dunne, the young fish-woman attacked the night before, was sedated and reportedly stable at the Royal Hospital on Baggot Street. Sergeant Stephen Doolan and Detective Johnny Vizzard were by her bedside to hear what she would have to say when the laudanum the doctors had given her wore off.

  ‘Maybe if there’s a connection between the two attacks, this Dunne girl can give us something useful,’ Swallow ventured. ‘She might have a description at least. And she’s alive, thank God.’

  Any G-men who could be spared from political inquiries had been deployed across the city during the week, interviewing anyone who had knowledge of Alice Flannery’s life: school-friends, acquaintances, neighbours who had moved on from Blackberry Lane. Each of her fellow workers at the New Vienna restaurant had been questioned too, but no promising lines of inquiry had presented themselves.

  Each evening the G-men returned to Exchange Court to feed whatever scraps of information they had gleaned to Feore for inclusion in the murder book. Nothing of substance came in. The girl had no enemies. She was not involved in any relationship. G-men checked with the moneylenders on the south side of the city, but found only that she had never borrowed money and had no debts. By week’s end there was nothing that might be construed as a motive for her killing.

  On the positive side, Swallow reflected cynically to himself, the press was preoccupied elsewhere. The London murders and the terror induced by the so-called Ripper were a much juicier story. So too were the proceedings at the commission at Westminster, where government lawyers and witnesses continued desperately trying to find evidence to blacken Parnell and to link him to the outrages being committed in the land struggle.

  The newspapers paid little attention to the death of a young waitress from a poor cottage in Blackberry Lane. In the ordinary course of things they would have grave editorials about police incompetence and warnings to the citizenry about monsters prowling the streets.

  He reported daily to Mallon on the lack of progress. The chief of G-Division was patient, but wary.

  ‘I’ve had nothing more than a routine inquiry from the commissioner about the case,’ Mallon told him as they shared a midday drink on Friday at the Brazen Head on Bridge Street. ‘But,’ he grimaced, ‘I’ve heard bloody plenty about what happened when Major Kelly tried to execute a perfectly legal search warrant at the detective office. Sticking a shotgun into the face of a Crown officer isn’t very smart.’

  ‘I wasn’t there, chief.’

  Swallow knew it sounded lame. He was the senior operational member at Exchange Court.

  ‘That’s about the only argument I can use against the fury coming from the Upper Yard,’ Mallon replied. ‘My line is that a relatively junior officer overreacted. And I can hardly plead that the crime inspector was above at the art college, brushing away at an easel.’ He permitted himself a thin smile. ‘Still and all, I’d love to have seen it myself. Mossop with the loaded Remington stuck in Kelly’s snout.’

  Swallow grinned and ordered another round. His was the usual Tullamore. Mallon took his customary Bushmills.

  ‘I’ll argue with the commissioner that Kelly was out of order,’ Mallon mused. ‘If he’d asked politely, instead of turning up with a platoon of gunmen, we’d have had to accommodate him. And that’s what we’ll have to do the next time they come, you know. If they want to search, and they will, we’ll have to let them. And you can be sure they’ll be back. Commissioner Harrel has no love for Kelly, or what he’s at, but if the security fellows in the under-secretary’s office are coming down on him he doesn’t have much ground to stand on. He’d be dismissed as quick as a fart from a goose. That’s an Armagh expression, by the way,’ he added with mock seriousness.

  He sipped at his Bushmills.

  ‘The evidence coming out at the commission in London isn’t great from the government’s point of view though. They want anything they can get their hands on to tie Parnell in with the Fenians. Their strongest evidence is the letters The Times ran last year where he supposedly wrote an excuse for the Phoenix Park murders. But from what I hear from my contacts at New Scotland Yard, they’re fairly obvious fakes.’

  ‘He said so himself at the time, didn’t he?’ Swallow’s question was rhetorical.

  ‘He did. And most people believe him. But his word alone mightn’t be enough to persuade the commission to exonerate him. Those fellows are all government appointees. They know which way the wind is blowing in terms of their own future prospects, if you understand me. The senior barristers want to be law lords. The junior ones want to be seniors. It’s all to do with preferment and advancement. You know what I’m saying?’

  ‘I do, chief. But they must all be bone stupid.’ Swallow tossed back half of his Tullamore. ‘Jesus, the newest recruit in G-Division knows that Parnell had nothing to do with the Phoenix Park murders.’

  Mallon nodded.

  ‘I doubt that they fail to understand. Maybe they understand it only too well. Maybe they don’t really care about a few murders and arson attacks around Ireland. It might be a price they’re willing to pay if they can take down the man they see as a threat to the unity of the kingdom.’

  ‘That’s a fairly cynical interpretation, chief,’ Swallow said.

  ‘Maybe. But those boys across in Westminster have a big view of their world, and the mere Irish are only a very small part of it. If they can’t break Parnell at the commission then they’ll try something else. They’ve known about his relationship with Willie O’Shea’s wife all along, but they’ll need some plausibl
e proof if it’s going to be put out into public knowledge. They’ll want something better than a few forged letters. And that’s why they want our protection logs.’

  He sipped his Bushmills again.

  ‘That is, the ones you’re searching for night and day without success, unfortunately,’ he said flatly.

  Swallow stared straight ahead, trying not to think about Lafeyre’s room in the Lower Yard. He grinned.

  ‘Yes, chief. Night and bloody day, we’re searching.’

  Mallon ordered another round before Swallow went back to Exchange Court for the crime conference. He was about to call the meeting to order when Stephen Doolan arrived.

  ‘I’ve just left Debbie Dunne’s bedside at the hospital,’ he said. ‘She’s poorly, but she’s talking.’

  ‘So what do we know?’ Swallow asked.

  ‘She was making her way home, she says. A man came out of the alleyway off Cardiff Lane. Came up behind her. She didn’t see him, just heard heavy boots, she said. He hit her with something on the head and she started roaring. He hit her three, maybe four times. Bad lacerations to the head and a fractured nose. A broken right forearm and a few cracked ribs. She was kicked or stamped on the ground. Then he took off back down the alley. She caught a glimpse of him as he went. He was a big fellow, she said, wearing some sort of heavy coat. Not surprising given the temperature of the night.’

  ‘No robbery? No sex assault?’ Mossop commented. ‘Sounds very like a repeat of what happened at Blackberry Lane.’

  Doolan nodded.

  ‘No witnesses?’ Swallow asked.

  ‘None,’ Doolan grimaced. ‘In that bloody cold night nobody was outdoors that didn’t have to be.’

  ‘But she’ll be all right?’ Swallow asked. ‘She’s out of danger?’

  Doolan nodded.

  ‘She should be all right, but it’ll take time. She’s a tough young one.’

  ‘What’s your instinct, Stephen?’ Swallow asked. Doolan was a veteran of Dublin street crime. Almost a quarter of a century of pounding the beat and manning the front desk at the busy Kevin Street Station had given him what Swallow called ‘a nose’ for any situation.

  Doolan hesitated.

  ‘Did either of you ever hear tell of the Dollacher?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘The what?’ Swallow and Mossop responded in unison.

  ‘The Dollacher,’ Doolan repeated.

  ‘You have me there,’ Swallow shook his head.

  ‘When I joined twenty-five years ago there was an old bobby, retired and widowed, used to live in a little house in Blackpitts. I’d be on beat at night up there and he’d ask me in for a cup of tea and a chat. He did thirty years’ service in the A-Division. He told me about the Dollacher.’

  ‘Go on,’ Swallow said, ‘this had better be good.’

  ‘It was in the thirties, around ’32 or ’33 I think. There was a series of attacks on young women around the Liberties. Around Corn Exchange, Thomas Street. The pattern was the same. A man would come out of an alley or a doorway, batter the woman and flee. He never actually killed anyone, but some of the victims were badly injured. Mutilated. The women said he smelled heavily, like an animal. Some said like a dog; some said he smelled like a pig. One woman said she saw him clearly and described him as having a black pig’s head.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Mossop exclaimed. ‘Was he ever caught?’

  Doolan nodded. ‘According to this old polisman, what happened was that a fellow called Olocher was due to be hanged for murder and rape in the old prison on Corn Market. But he took his own life before the hangman got him. This “Dolocher”, as the locals called him, was supposed to be his ghost, prowling the streets.’

  ‘Come on, Stephen,’ Swallow laughed, ‘this is bullshit. What’s it got to do with what we’re dealing with now? Ghosts don’t batter people’s heads in with fencing posts or kick them half to death with hobnailed boots.’

  Doolan shrugged. ‘Well, it didn’t end there, Joe. On the night that Olocher took his own life, one of the soldiers on duty at the prison was found bloody and unconscious at his post. When he came around he said he’d been attacked by a monstrous black pig.’

  ‘So this was how “the Dolocher” story came about?’ Mossop said sceptically.

  ‘Hold on. It got more complicated,’ Doolan said.

  Swallow raised an eyebrow. ‘I can’t imagine how.’

  ‘Here’s how,’ Doolan resumed his narrative. ‘The attacks went on over a period of a year or so. Always the same. This fellow would emerge, attack a woman in a quiet location and beat her badly. But there was no sexual assault or robbery. Then he’d scarper.’

  ‘Doesn’t say much for the beat men,’ Mossop commented. ‘Sure in those days didn’t they have bobbies on every corner?’

  Doolan grinned. ‘And if my memory serves me right, a lot of them would be so addled with drink they wouldn’t see Ali Baba and the forty thieves going by. Here’s what happened. A miserable winter night like this. A young blacksmith has been drinking in a public house in Francis Street. It’s pissing rain and he has to walk home to Pimlico. He hasn’t a coat or a hat, so he spots a woman’s cloak hanging behind the door. He borrows it from the landlord’s wife and sets off. It’s got a hood on it, so he pulls that over his head and off he goes out into the rain. Somewhere near St Catherine’s, up on Thomas Street, he’s jumped on by this fella who must have thought he was a woman because of the cloak and hood. But he’s got his blacksmith’s hammer on his belt and he lashes out and knocks this fellow to the ground.’

  ‘Go on,’ Mossop said, engrossed by the narrative.

  ‘The blacksmith bends over his assailant. It’s a man, with the blackened, hollowed-out head of a pig over his skull and face. He’s knocked him out. A constable comes along and he’s taken to Kevin Street. The attacker turns out to be the sentry on duty in the prison the night Olocher committed suicide and who claimed he’d been attacked by a black pig. They tried him, found him insane and that was the end of it.’

  Swallow was thoughtful for a moment. Stephen Doolan was the most practical man he knew. He was not advancing a folk legend of half a century ago as a casual commentary.

  ‘You have a theory, Stephen?’

  ‘More speculation than anything else. There’s this Ripper loose in London. Maybe some lunatic here in Dublin has decided to emulate him, drawing on this Dolocher stuff. These two assaults sound almost like a repeat from the thirties.’

  Mossop shook his head. ‘I doubt it, Stephen. Nobody remembers this “Olocher”, or whatever you call him. I’ve never heard of him. You’re stretching the idea.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ Doolan said. ‘You’re a Belfast man, not a Dubliner. There’s still some old fellas around the city who remember their mothers warning them as kids that if they were bad the Dolocher would come and get them.’

  The G-men could almost hear each other thinking. No successful policeman could ever afford to have a closed mind. Stranger things might happen. Imitative criminal behaviour was well-recognised and documented elsewhere, in Britain, France, Germany, and in the United States. There was even speculation that there was more than one hand behind the current Ripper murders in London’s East End. Why not in Dublin too?

  Swallow shrugged and made for the door.

  ‘Who knows? It makes as much sense as anything else. You fellows can figure it out among yourselves for a bit. But once this conference is out of the way, I’ve got to be elsewhere. I’m getting married in two hours.’

  Chapter 20

  The community chapel at the Merchants’ Quay friary was smaller and more intimate than the public church that fronted onto the river. Over a century of Franciscan occupation, the monastery on the sloping ground below Christ Church had become imbued with an aura of peace and seclusion. It was a sacred place, a refuge, for many Dubliners from all strata of society.

  Friar Lawrence had arranged with the Friar Superior that once the community had completed the afternoon office of None, t
he chapel would be swiftly prepared for the wedding. A young novice rolled out a red carpet along the short aisle. Two branched candelabras were brought to either side of the altar. They would blaze with dozens of white candles for the ceremony. Green holly boughs and winter palms were brought from the friary garden to decorate the Communion rails.

  It would be a small wedding, Swallow had reckoned. But when they put the numbers together, listing the immediate relatives on both sides, it was not such a small affair after all. Both of Maria’s parents were deceased, but her father’s brother, her Uncle Paddy, would give her away.

  Waiting for his bride to arrive, Swallow, out of professional habit, counted the numbers present. He made it twenty. Two of his uncles flanked his elderly mother, who had travelled from Kildare. John Mallon and his wife sat side by side with Pat Mossop and his wife. Mick Feore and Mrs Feore sat behind, accompanied by ‘Duck’ Boyle and Mrs Boyle. Maria’s two immediate business neighbours from Thomas Street, Tom Fallon the butcher and George White the cabinetmaker, were there with their wives. Tom Dunne, Maria’s head barman, sat with Mrs Dunne. Carrie, Maria’s housekeeper and cook, was widowed, but her son, Jack, who worked as a gauger in Power’s distillery on John’s Lane, escorted his mother.

  Father Lawrence, as the celebrant, stood at the centre of the altar, taking quiet pleasure in his precedence, for once, over the Friar Superior, who hovered behind him. Another novice who would act as Lawrence’s altar attendant knelt beside him. As the bride-to-be started along the red carpet, the organist played the opening notes of the ‘Halleluiah Chorus’ from Handel’s Messiah.

  ‘It’s quite profane, of course,’ Lawrence later told Swallow. ‘Nothing sacred about it. But it’s beautiful, and sure isn’t it nearly Christmas?’

  When Maria arrived on her Uncle Paddy’s arm she looked nervous, Swallow thought. But her wedding attire made her more beautiful than he had ever seen her. As befitted her widowed status she had eschewed the white lace dress that had been popularised by the young queen, Victoria, in her marriage to Prince Albert in 1840. Instead she had chosen a sculpted gown in cream silk, stitched with pearls. The same pearls decorated a short veil in matching lace, and she carried a small bouquet of flowering cyclamen. Her blonde hair was styled in perfect ringlets that framed her face and graceful neck.