A Hunt in Winter

by Conor Brady

  ‘Initially, yes, I’m afraid,’ Lafeyre said cautiously. ‘I know this is a difficult thing to accept, Joe, but pain is often helpful in these situations. It enables the doctors to identify and locate the problem. And they eased it for her with laudanum as soon as they could.’

  Mossop pushed Swallow’s mug of tea an inch closer.

  ‘Will you not take a drop of scald there, boss? It’ll do you good,’ he said softly.

  Swallow took the mug and raised it mechanically to his mouth. He sipped the hot brew without tasting it.

  ‘Could they do . . . nothing?’ he asked Lafeyre.

  ‘You have to understand, Joe, at that early stage of pregnancy the baby is very fragile. A lot of women lose their babies in the early weeks and months. A lot can go wrong, even where there isn’t an accident. . . .’

  ‘This wasn’t an accident!’ Swallow said coldly. ‘This was a killing. They murdered my child, Maria’s child. The bloody cowards. The bloody cowards came into our home while I was away and there was nobody there to stop them.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ Lafeyre said quietly. ‘I’m truly sorry . . . for you and for Maria.’

  He drank from his own mug.

  ‘In a situation like that, where the foetus suffers a trauma, even an indirect one, it’s really . . . dislocated . . . and there isn’t any way of putting it right again. The emphasis has to be on saving the mother, and that’s what they did. They did it very successfully, praise the Lord. The baby is gone, unhappily, but Maria is fine.’

  All three men were silent. The sounds of the harbour came faintly through the windows. Voices on the wharf. The rattle of cartwheels on granite paving. Gulls calling.

  Swallow started to feel a strange ease, very gently at first. It did not displace his sorrow or his anger, but he could sense the strength and the support and the friendship of the two men sitting with him as they narrated the tragedy. His tragedy and Maria’s tragedy and their lost child’s tragedy. Nothing could be done to change what had happened. He could not alter the past. Not a whit of it could be changed. What was important now was what would happen next. And he could influence that.

  Mossop broke the silence.

  ‘You’ll remember now, boss, what I told you about Mr Mallon’s orders. You’re to do nothing . . . nothing at all. You’re to talk to him straight away after you’ve been to visit your missus.’

  Swallow did not answer.

  He stood.

  ‘I think I should go to see Maria now. Will you take me to her please?’

  Chapter 37

  There was a sense of unreality about the short train journey from Kingstown Harbour into the city. It was impossible, Swallow told himself, that only a few days previously he had travelled outward along this railway line, past these same houses and villages, full of joy and celebration with Maria and their guests, making for their wedding celebration at the Royal Marine Hotel. The waters of the bay were a dark foreboding grey this morning, with the tops of the waves flecked white by the wind. The city itself seemed threatening.

  At the Westland Row terminus they took a cab to the Dublin Lying-In Hospital, the Rotunda, above Sackville Street, and forming the southern side of Rutland Square.

  Maria was in a quiet ward of twelve beds, close to the hospital chapel. In contrast with the noisy wards on the ground floor, filled with the squalling sounds of new life, there were no babies here. The patients here were women whose babies had been stillborn or whose pregnancies had been lost. Swallow could sense the atmosphere of emptiness, sadness almost, once he walked through the door with Harry Lafeyre.

  Lafeyre spoke to the nurse on duty and led Swallow to the end of the ward.

  Maria was half-asleep, half-awake. The first thing that struck Swallow was the paleness of her complexion. Even in the morning light he could see that her face was waxen white, her eyes sunken into dark sockets under her forehead.

  ‘She’s been asking for you all the time, Joe,’ Lafeyre had told him as they travelled. ‘She’s been very agitated, so don’t be surprised if she becomes upset. It’s not because she doesn’t want to see you. Quite the opposite.’

  Her eyes opened wide when he touched her hand. Lafeyre stepped back to afford them privacy.

  ‘Maria, dearest. It’s me. Joe,’ he told her quietly. ‘I’m here and you’re safe now. All is well.’

  She said nothing at first. Her eyes searched his face as if disbelieving his presence.

  ‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ she whispered then. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Oh, hush now, my love,’ he told her. ‘It’s fine. All is well. And there isn’t any need to be sorry. I’m here. I’m with you and I’ll take care of you.’

  ‘Dr Morrow says . . . he says . . . he thinks it will be all right. That I can . . . have other children . . . he says there’s no reason. . . .’

  Swallow realised that he had not even addressed that question in his own head. It had not seemed to be in any way important when set against the immediate circumstances.

  ‘You mustn’t worry about that either,’ he told her. ‘If that happens, it will be fine. If it doesn’t, it will be fine too. We have each other, Maria.’

  She closed her eyes and smiled for the first time.

  ‘We have each other,’ she said. ‘We have each other.’

  Lafeyre came forward and touched Swallow’s shoulder.

  ‘I think we should leave Maria to sleep for a while. She’ll rest a lot more peacefully now that she knows you’re here. Sleep and rest are what she needs now in order to build her strength back up.’

  They stepped into the corridor outside.

  ‘How is she?’ Swallow asked. ‘She looks very pale and she seems very weak.’

  ‘She’ll be fine, Joe,’ Lafeyre told him. ‘She’s weak and she’s tired. That’s very much to be expected. She’s a strong woman, but there’s also the emotional shock of what’s happened. Losing a pregnancy can have all sorts of mental effects on a woman, so what she needs is reassurance, calm and certainty. And of course affection. So that’s your first duty now over the next little while.’

  Swallow nodded.

  ‘I understand, Harry. Thank you for all your care and support. You’re a true friend.’

  Lafeyre smiled.

  ‘You’re not a bad fellow yourself, you know. And you mustn’t start blaming yourself for any of this. It could have happened whether or not you were here or in Berlin or wherever. What’s important now is that you take care of Maria. And that you take care of yourself. If anything happens to you it will hurt Maria and slow her recovery.’

  ‘How long will she have to stay in hospital?’ Swallow asked.

  ‘A few more days, maybe a week,’ Lafeyre said. ‘I’d advise that. She’s well looked after here, but when she goes home she’ll have to rest for a long time. She can’t go back to the business straight away. You’ll have to stand firm on that, Joe.’

  ‘Of course,’ Swallow nodded. ‘Will she need nursing care when she’s home? I could make arrangements.’

  ‘I doubt it. Dr Morrow can see her there, and she has Carrie and Tess. Lily can spend time with her too. But we can see how it works out. After a few days’ rest she should be up and about. That would be best from a medical point of view. She needs to get her body back to doing usual, normal things. And her mind too.’

  Swallow felt a small twinge of comfort in Lafeyre’s words. Things would be as they were. He and Maria could resume their lives in their home above M & M Grant’s.

  But now there was police business to be done. He realised that he had no idea what progress if any had been made in the murder inquiries while had been away. They had not entered his head since he had received word in Berlin about Maria. Had Charlie Vanucchi come back to Pat Mossop with any information on the identity of Ellen Byrne’s killer? Had any suspects emerged for the assault on Debbie Dunne, the young fish-seller? Had anything turned up on the murder of Alice Flannery?

  He needed to get to Exchange Court. And he
needed to talk to John Mallon.

  Chapter 38

  It was a coincidence of the clock that just around the time that Swallow was stepping off the Holyhead steam packet at Kingstown, a party of policemen, comprising plain-clothes G-Division officers and uniformed constables, was moving into position around a house at Mount Pleasant, just beyond the Grand Canal bridge at Portobello.

  And it was fortuitous for Superintendent ‘Duck’ Boyle that the operation to arrest the chief suspect in the murder of the young prostitute Helena Moyles, alias Ellen Byrne, alias Nellie Sweet, was taking place within his area of jurisdiction, the E-Division. The division stretched from the canal to Rathmines in one direction and to the southern shore of Dublin Bay in the other. It was, after all, Boyle’s unnamed informant who had first intimated that Nellie’s killer might be an associate of criminal boss Charlie Vanucchi. Yet, in the event, it turned out that the information was unsound.

  When Vanucchi had sent a message on the previous day asking to meet Detective Sergeant Mossop, Mossop anticipated that he was going to be told the name of that associate. He had been sceptical at first when Swallow told him to expect Vanucchi to give him a name. Why would Charlie want to inform on one of his own?

  ‘You’ve heard the expression “there’s no honour among thieves”, Pat,’ Swallow had grinned. ‘Well, it’s not quite true. There are rules even among Dublin criminals. There’s live and let live. And if some thief has broken the rules and raised the stakes by murdering a working girl up in Monto, the rest of the tribe aren’t going to shelter him.’

  And moreover, Swallow had continued, if Vanucchi didn’t deliver, he was going to face more trouble and grief than he could handle, including a long spell behind bars. He explained the ultimatum he had delivered to the crime boss at their meeting in Hanrahan’s of Stoneybatter. But when Mossop had met Vanucchi later in the evening at the Long Hall public house on South Great George’s Street, what the criminal told him was not what he had expected to hear.

  ‘Your boss, Mr Swallow, and that fat super out in Rathmines, Boyle, got it wrong this time, Pat,’ Vanucchi told him as their drinks came up in the snug. ‘Nellie wasn’t killed by any of my lads. I didn’t think she was, and I told Mr Swallow that. But he said he had good information. Well, it wasn’t so good.’

  Mossop still doubted. In all likelihood Vanucchi simply wasn’t prepared to squeal on one of his own men. He was trying to pin it on somebody else. But what the crime boss told him next shook him out of any such belief.

  ‘The story about Nellie having money left to her by Ces Downes is true enough,’ Vanucchi told him. ‘And it’s true that she had it in a post office book. But there was a lot more money in Nellie’s account than Ces ever left to her. And it wasn’t any of my boys who went after it.’

  ‘So who was it then?’ Mossop asked, downing a double gulp of his porter.

  ‘You know that she was involved with some of the dynamite crowd, the patriots, the Fenians?’

  ‘Sure, but she wasn’t active in anything.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure about that. Your young G-men working down in Monto didn’t ask all the right questions of the other girls in Gloucester Street. There’s one of them, and I won’t say who, was a close friend of Nellie’s. She told our lads when we talked to her that the Fenian crowd were using her post office account to pay off people for guns and dynamite.’

  Mossop did his best not to appear taken aback. If what Vanucchi was saying was true, it was a serious lapse in G-Division intelligence. But, he acknowledged silently to himself, the young G-men assigned to monitor the red-light district were novices, still learning their trade. With their more senior colleagues stretched on security duties, they had little mentoring or guidance from more experienced officers. They could easily miss the obvious.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘That stuff isn’t cheap. They get it bit by bit from soldiers and quarrymen and sailors, and even from the odd peeler.’

  ‘So,’ Mossop said cautiously, ‘how did this work?’

  ‘Simple enough. The Americans gather dollars, convert them into pounds and send them over here. The Fenians are all known to the police, and they know that your fellows have agents watching transactions in all the banks. It’s too risky for them to shift any money about. So the money gets lodged into Nellie’s post office account and she draws it out to pay these fellows who come to her pretending to be clients. Well, maybe some of them are clients for all we know. But basically, Nellie was passing on money to pay for guns and dynamite for the Fenians. She was a sort of banker.’

  Mossop tried not to sound impressed.

  ‘All right, that’s not especially significant information, Charlie. But I’ll see that you get looked after with a nice few quid if it turns out to be solid. It still doesn’t tell me what I came to find out, and that’s who killed Nellie?’

  ‘Ah, but there’s more, Mr Mossop. A lot more. Nellie told her friend that she believed she’d been rumbled by some of your friends in the Castle. This English officer, she said, seemed to have twigged the thing, and he was seeing a lot of her, pumping her for details of the transactions. He told her he loved her. He’d take her away to England and all that. Of course, she didn’t believe him. But she liked to hear him say it.’

  Vanucchi sipped at his whiskey.

  ‘Now, on the night Nellie was killed her friend saw that English officer visiting her. And she knows his name.’

  ‘You’ll give me that name, I suppose, Charlie.’

  ‘I will, Mr Mossop.’ Vanucchi tapped his whiskey glass. ‘But first, you’ll need to buy me another.’

  Chapter 39

  ‘I want an interview with Smith Berry,’ Swallow said. ‘I’ll have it. After that I want to talk to the chief secretary. If it comes to it I’ll go to the lord lieutenant, or I’ll go to London to the bloody prime minister.’

  ‘Will you please sit down and stop pacing up and down like a wild animal above in the Zoological Gardens?’ Mallon said firmly. ‘I’ll ask Smith Berry for a meeting, but he may not want to agree to it. I’ve already asked him to see me and he’s put me off twice so far.’

  ‘He’ll see me if I have to knock down the blasted door,’ Swallow snarled. ‘I want Kelly’s head. I want him out of his job, out of the Castle, out of bloody Ireland. They can send him to Africa or China. With any luck he’ll get skewered by the natives or boiled alive in a pot.’

  ‘I understand how you feel,’ Mallon said. ‘If it was me I’d feel just the same. I’m really very sorry for you and Maria. It’s a shocking thing to have happened. Every man in G-Division is outraged about it. There might be other ways of dealing with Major Kelly though. I’m going to tell you something important in a little while.’

  ‘With respect, chief, that’s not nearly good enough. My wife is lying above in the Rotunda hospital. Our dead child will never see the light of day. Maria might have died herself if it wasn’t for getting good medical care so quickly. Somebody’s going to pay for it all, one way or another.’

  Mallon groaned.

  ‘I can only say again how sorry I am. And Elizabeth too. She’s asked me to express her particular sympathy to you both. It’s a hard thing to lose an unborn child.’

  ‘We didn’t “lose” the child, chief,’ Swallow snapped. ‘A gang of blackguards broke into our home and killed it. This was murder, except we can’t charge anybody for it.’

  ‘I’ll put in another request to see Smith Berry,’ Mallon said. ‘But if he agrees to it we’ll go together. You’ve got to control yourself on this. We’ll need to agree on what you say and what you want from him. And you’ve got to be prepared for a very hard response. He’ll stand behind his people.’

  ‘Then he’d better know that I’ll stand for myself and my wife and our lost child. Either he deals with Kelly or they can have my resignation. And I won’t go quietly. I’ve got my own contacts in the newspapers too, and I’ll use them. These bloody people count on us to hold the country for them. We do a bloody g
ood job of it, and this is the thanks we get. I’ll want every policeman and their families the length and breadth of Ireland to know how they’ll be treated if it suits the Smith Berrys and his like.’

  Mallon raised a restraining hand.

  ‘Enough, Joe. You’ll say things you could regret. If you decided to hand in your papers, nobody could blame you, and I certainly wouldn’t. But if that’s your plan, stay quiet about it. They’ll find some way of sacking you instead. You’ll be out. No pension, and your name blackened. If you’ll be patient, as I said, there’s very likely to be another way of dealing with it.’

  ‘The hell with their pension,’ Swallow answered. ‘I don’t need their pension. There’s a business to be run in Thomas Street. The truth is I should have pulled out of this bloody job long ago like Maria asked me to.’

  ‘Look,’ Mallon said, ‘I feel a degree of responsibility for this. Now, I’m picking my words carefully here. I was the one who asked you to . . . shall we say . . . “locate” the protection logs. If I hadn’t done that there never would have been any search at your home.’ He paused. ‘You’re exhausted and you’re angry. If you could see the cut of yourself, you’d believe me. You need to go home, get them to fill a hot bath for you, take a few hours’ sleep and then come down to my house later. We’ll have a drink and you’ll eat supper with us. You’ll feel a lot better.’

  Under his anger, Swallow knew that Mallon was right. He had not slept properly for three nights. His mind was racing to cope with too many issues. He needed rest in order to restore his judgement.

  ‘I’ll do that, chief,’ he said more calmly. ‘And I hear what you’re saying about the protection logs. There’s no fault on your part in any of what happened. You couldn’t have known they’d break into my home or threaten my wife. Civilised Englishmen aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing to senior officers of their own police force.’

  Mallon nodded.

  ‘Thank you. I appreciate what you say.’