In the Dark River

by Conor Brady

  He had counted just fifty steps when the Bullseye caught a white gleam to his right, perhaps half his own height above the surface of the water. A few shuffling, cautious steps through the flowing water and the light picked out the skull and jumbled bones.

  He heard Doolan behind him.

  ‘Jesus!’

  Doolan’s hand dropped from his shoulder as he moved forward, joining his lantern with Swallow’s to illuminate the macabre presentation on the rocky shelf. Swallow could see the long leg bones, crazily askew beneath the pelvis. The bones of the right arm were thrown across the rib-cage almost in a defensive pose. The skull lolled to the right as if the skeleton was exhausted, positioning itself in repose. The light clearly picked out the length of rope around the neck.

  ‘Dirty work, alright,’ Doolan said softly. ‘I wonder who this poor creature might have been.’

  ‘And who decided he or she would end up like this,’ Swallow added.

  ‘It could have come from anywhere,’ Doolan said. ‘The river goes out into Dublin county.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Swallow said. ‘But the skeleton looks pretty well intact and complete. All the big bones are present. If it travelled far in the current I’d have thought there’d be bones broken away all along the course of the river. I’d say he – or she – was put in somewhere not too far away from where we are.’

  Doolan laughed mirthlessly.

  ‘I forget you’re a medical man, Joe. More or less. But I daresay I’ve taken more bodies out of rivers in my career than you have. Water is a funny element. It’s very hard to learn much that can be relied on. Can you see anything else that might tell us a bit more?’

  ‘You can see that ligature around the neck?’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘How would you describe it?’

  ‘About the width of a bootlace. Knotted tight. A thin rope. Could be used for something like a washing line.’

  ‘I agree,’ Swallow said.

  He moved a few steps through the swirling water, past the jumble of bones and played the beam of his lantern on the rocky outcrops beyond the skeleton.

  The light caught the outline of what might have been a length of mud-caked rope snagged on an outcrop of black shale just above the waterline. He reached to touch it and followed it with his right hand into a fissure in the shale. Where it ended, his fingers closed on something hard and cold with sharp edges. He realised that he was touching a bunch of keys, held in a ring at the end of some sort of lanyard or belt.

  ‘Look at this, Stephen,’ he called to Doolan.

  Doolan peered into the cleft.

  ‘God leave you your eyesight, Joe. I don’t know that I’d have spotted that.’

  Swallow drew it slowly from the rocky fissure and held it up in the beam of his lantern. Then he placed it carefully in the haversack on his chest.

  Chapter 5

  It was past four o’clock by the time Doolan’s constables had retrieved the remains from the Poddle. With the dark water swirling around their knees, they had dislodged the bones carefully from the rocky ledge, placing them in a makeshift sling fashioned from army canvas, before raising them slowly to the street through the sewer trap and onto the back of a covered police car.

  Swallow, rid of his stinking waders and oilskins and relieved to be back in his own clothes, stepped forward to lift up the canvas cover. He nodded to Tim Hogan who had been waiting patiently beside his photographic equipment.

  ‘You can take your pictures now, Tim. Just make sure you get everything into the frame.’

  ‘I’ve done this before, you know,’ Hogan replied testily, as he trundled the camera and tripod into position.

  Swallow knew that the instruction was unnecessary. Hogan was a professional. There would be pictures from every angle and of every bony part, this was just part of the standard banter between them.

  ‘Did you remember to put a plate in the camera, Tim?’ he jibed.

  Hogan affected a thick rural accent.

  ‘Jaysus, thanks for remindin’ me, Joe. Sure, I’d be lost without you. And me, just a slow ould bobby up here outta the plains o’ Kildare.’

  ‘You see the ligature around the neck?’ he queried Hogan.

  ‘I’m not blind.’ Hogan’s tone was serious now. ‘And you don’t need to tell me you want it close up.’

  It was down to business now.

  ‘Good man, Tim. There are some traces of clothing there, around the rib cage. Can you make sure you get those?’

  Hogan grimaced an affirmation.

  ‘Sure. They’re very small but I’ll get up close with a magnifying lens. You’ll be able to see every strand.’

  When Swallow and Doolan had regained the surface, they found that the group assembled around the trap had been augmented by a couple of important-looking officials from the Dublin Corporation as well as a uniformed inspector and a superintendent.

  Swallow’s heart sank as he recognised the corpulent superintendent, bulging in his braided tunic, as Maurice Boyle, his former boss at G-division. Universally known as ‘Duck,’ from his distinctive waddling gait, Boyle had gone on promotion a year previously to E-division, covering the affluent southern suburbs of Rathmines, Rathgar and Ballsbridge. He had recently been appointed to take charge of the even more prestigious B-division, covering the south city centre. Lord Edward Street was just within the boundaries of the B, in the Duck’s area of jurisdiction. His advancement was a mystery to his colleagues who knew that he had little skill as a detective. Swallow had a strong hunch it had something to do with the Freemasons and with Boyle’s brother, a canon of the Church of Ireland who was reportedly spoken of in church circles as a future bishop.

  ‘Jaysus, Swalla’, yer not smellin’ like a bunch o’ roses.’

  Boyle’s porcine nose wrinkled over his drooping moustache. He bulged in his uniform, perspiring in the heat of the day.

  ‘What’s goin’ on down there?’

  He wagged his ebony cane towards the trap.

  Swallow resisted an urge to tell him to jump in and find out for himself. It was, after all, his division. Any criminal business would ultimately be his responsibility as divisional officer.

  ‘Nothing good, anyway,’ Swallow answered. ‘There’s a body, or what’s left of one after the fish and the rats have done their work.’

  ‘Ah, sure it’s probably some oul’ fella who fell in after a feed o’ drink.’

  Swallow pulled off his oilskin jacket. It felt good to breathe fresh air and have the cleansing sun on his face.

  ‘I wouldn’t think so. It’s foul play.’

  ‘Ah, there ye go, Swalla’, always makin’ things worse than they are. Yer a fierce pessimist. Why are ye sayin’ that?’

  ‘There’s a rope looped around the neck. That might be a clue.’

  If Boyle picked up the sarcasm, he pretended otherwise. He gestured with his cane towards the side of the street. Swallow could see that the crowd gathered on the pavement, straining to see what was going on behind the police screens, had grown in numbers. It was the nearest thing that poor people were likely to get to entertainment on a midsummer afternoon.

  ‘Well, in that case I’d better address myself to the gentlemen of the press beyond on the footpath,’ Boyle announced. ‘I’ll have t’ advise them that I’m in charge of th’ investigation of a possible case o’ murder.’

  Swallow was relieved to see him waddle across the street to where a group of three or four reporters from the Dublin newspapers stood, smoking and laughing. Swallow recognised most of them and knew them by name. Geary from The Freeman’s Journal, Hall from The Mercury and Carberry from The Irish Times. Another dead body was just another story in the working day to the hard-bitten gentlemen of the press. But Duck Boyle was always drawn to the journalists, as a moth to a candle.

  Doolan’s constables, kitted out in waders and oilskins were lowered into the cavern, looped in pairs with lines and buckles and connected to the surface by long ropes, knotted every thr
ee feet to measure distance. Two pairs moved upstream towards where the Poddle flowed under the Castle itself. Two others followed the flow downstream towards where it entered the Liffey. One man in each pair held a lantern while his fellow probed the water and the riverbed with a short steel-tipped pike. Doolan’s instructions were to search a hundred feet in either direction and to retrieve anything of possible evidential interest. Each man had strapped on a canvas haversack as he and Swallow had done earlier.

  ‘You’re looking for clothing, boots, shoes, and anything that might be a possible weapon,’ he told them. ‘Anything you find, put it in the haversack. If it’s too big, note the location on the rope and we’ll try to find a way of getting it out. If you do locate anything, Detective Sergeant Mossop here has to log it in the book.’

  Pat Mossop was the best Bookman in G-division. The Bookman was the keeper of details and records, the careful note-taker, the repository of knowledge in any criminal investigation. He activated the required processes, in accordance with the dictates of the Police Manual and ensured that all physical evidence was tagged and secured. Every member of the investigation team had to report progress to the Bookman when each job, however insignificant, was completed. Without having to be told, Mossop had assumed the familiar role from the moment he had reached the scene, even before Swallow had been summoned from his dinner-table.

  ‘I notified Dr Lafeyre,’ he told Swallow. ‘He wants the remains sent to the city morgue at Marlborough Street and I’m to send a man to advise him when that’s in hand. He’s at his rooms in Harcourt Street but he can be down there later.’

  ‘Good work, Pat. Anything else?’

  Mossop gestured to his notebook.

  ‘I’ve got everything that can be known at this stage. Time of discovery, names and addresses of the workmen, all the usual stuff. There’s a few big-wigs from the Corporation here too so I’ve got their details in case we need more information about the engineering and that kind of thing. And I sent down to Merchant’s Quay to get a priest to give last rites to this poor unfortunate.’

  Swallow nodded. Mossop was a Belfast Protestant but the gesture of sending for the priest was characteristically conscientious. If there were more Pat Mossops and fewer Duck Boyles in the job, he frequently told himself, the ratepayers of Dublin would get better value for the money they put into the city’s policing service.

  He drew his half-hunter to check the hour. Harry Lafeyre’s post as city medical examiner was a part-time one. As events might demand, he would either work at the new, well-equipped morgue in Marlborough Street or, if requested by the authorities, at locations where persons might be found deceased in suspicious circumstances. Otherwise, he conducted a private medical practice from rooms at his house on Harcourt Street. Ordinarily, he would see his last private patient at around five o’clock.

  ‘Send a message to Lafeyre to say we’ll be at Marlborough Street by six o’clock, so. But before you do that, I want you to have a look at this, tell me what you think it is and put a description in the book.’

  He reached into the haversack, drew out what he had found and laid it on the running board of the photographic technician’s open car.

  In the sunlight he saw that what he had thought to be some sort of rope in the dark of the cavern was a broad, leather belt, perhaps three feet long, swollen and distorted by immersion in the water. At two or three places, where the swelling had burst, he could see that it comprised two strips of leather, laid back to back and closely stitched. The stitching at the end which would have held the buckle had rotted away. But midway along, caught between two swellings in the leather was a bunch of keys, held on a ring with a diameter that Swallow estimated at about three inches.

  ‘Was that with the body?’ Mossop asked.

  ‘Close enough. You couldn’t say for certain that there’s any connection. But there might be.’

  Swallow gingerly probed the bunch of keys with the blade of his pen-knife, scraping away mud and slime and spreading them out fan-like in a three-quarter circle. There were twenty-five in all, of varying sizes, some big enough to fit a heavy door lock, others likely to fit smaller locks, perhaps on cupboards or cabinets.

  ‘The metal isn’t heavily corroded,’ Mossop observed. ‘How long would you think they’re in the water?’

  ‘Impossible to say, but they’re not there for years. They were caught on a ledge maybe four or five feet from the body. Let’s assume they belonged to whoever the body is, or was, what would that tell us?’

  Swallow knew that Mossop’s answer would be the right one.

  ‘That we need a locksmith to tell us where they might have come from.’

  Chapter 6

  The Dublin Castle authorities had spared no expense in the construction and equipping of the Marlborough Street morgue.

  Harry Lafeyre was proud of his ‘Palace of the Dead,’ as he sometimes referred to it in black humour. It boasted new electric lights. It had an insulated ice house in the basement. There were four dissecting tables, manufactured in stainless steel. There was running water throughout, connected to the Vartry Supply. There was even running hot water in the dissecting area, with pipes connecting to a furnace at the back of the building.

  Swallow worked confidently and easily with Lafeyre. They were, in a sense, complementary opposites. Lafeyre had worked as a field surgeon with the Natal Mounted Police in southern Africa. He had shared the hardships and dangers of police work in the veld, learning the use of the Winchester saddle carbine and the long-barrelled Colt .45 revolver. Although Swallow’s time at the Catholic Medical School in Cecilia Street had been cut short by alcohol before he could qualify as a doctor, he still remembered enough from his anatomy lectures to follow Lafeyre’s commentaries with ease. And there was the happy coincidence that Maria’s sister, Lily, was Lafeyre’s fiancée.

  Doolan’s men were still at work underground at Essex Street when Swallow and Mossop left to walk the mile or so across the city to Marlborough Street. Swallow was glad to be able to get away from the putrescence of the air that permeated the space around the trap leading down to the stinking Poddle.

  The evening sun shed an ebbing warmth over the city as it moved behind the tower of Christ Church, getting ready to sink away to the west. They walked down Parliament Street and crossed the Liffey at Grattan Bridge. Swallow drew the fresh, salty air, coming up the river from the bay, deep into his lungs. He could feel it cleansing his innards, dissipating the cloying stink that had seemed to form an outer skin around his hands and face since he had gone underground.

  The shops on Capel Street were preparing to shut at the end of the business day. Young counter assistants were rolling in the blinds that had been dropped down to protect the merchandise in the windows against the sun. At Greenberg’s, the art dealers and jewellers, a dark-haired woman in a long, pleated dress was taking trays of rings from the front window, carefully passing them to a helper who was invisible from the street but whose hands could be seen rising to receive the precious jewellery that would be lodged for the night in the strong Milner safe behind the shop.

  The woman raised her eyes from her task and smiled as the detectives walked by. Swallow smiled back at Katherine Greenberg. She had taken over most of the running of the family business since her father’s ill-health had begun to get the better of him. Just months previously, Swallow had fortuitously come on the scene at Greenberg’s as two London-based criminals attempted a robbery. Her father, Old Ephram, had been injured, however Swallow had captured one of the robbers while the other was subsequently apprehended in London.

  Like most business families on Capel Street, the Greenbergs lived over the shop. Capel Street had lost much of its lustre. In years gone by, before fashion dictated that smart shops and wealthy people should locate themselves south of the river, it had been a premier street for business and for residence. Its buildings were tall and spacious, with fine craftsmanship in their walls, ceilings and woodwork.

  Swallow had be
en a welcome and frequent visitor to the Greenberg house since his days as a young constable on the beat along Capel Street. He was entitled to thirty minutes rest half way through an eight-hour tour of duty. So he would climb the side stairs to the Greenbergs’ living quarters over the shop. Katherine would bring honeyed almonds and speck as he sat drinking coffee, or sometimes a strong Lebanese wine from the Bekaa Valley, with her father, his Roman-style police helmet on the table between them. Although he was fifteen years her senior, he knew she had always carried something of a flame for him. Now she was past the age at which a Jewish girl should have been married. After her mother’s death a decade earlier she had devoted her energies to looking after Ephram and becoming more involved in the business. Swallow’s visits to the Greenberg house were rare enough now since he no longer pounded the beat on Capel Street, although he met Katherine regularly at the painting class they both attended on Thursday afternoons at the Municipal School of Art on Thomas Street.

  The evening air became sweet with the scent of fruit as they turned into Lower Abbey Street. The stalls at the nearby Smithfield Fruit Market, behind Mary’s Abbey, were shutting too and tired fruit-mongers were loading their unsold produce into barrows. He realised he had not eaten since breakfast time, having left his dinner untouched on Maria’s table to attend at the scene in Essex Street. Now the scents of apples, pears and soft fruits set off pangs of hunger.

  He stopped a thin-faced lad pushing his barrow along the pavement and dug into his pocket for a penny. He held it out to the boy.

  ‘Will you give me two apples there, Son?’

  ‘They’re three a penny, Sir.’

  ‘Two will do.’

  He pressed the coin in an eagerly outstretched palm and then bit into the crisp flesh of the Pearmain Pippin. Its taste in his mouth after breathing the foul air of the underground river was delicious, nutty and aromatic. He handed the second apple to Mossop.

  ‘Here, Pat. Keep your strength up.’

  They crossed Sackville Street, now busy with clanging trams, boarding the thousands of workers coming from the offices and shops. The flower sellers at Nelson’s Pillar were packing up for the evening too, filling their baskets with the blooms they had been unable to sell during the day. A couple of young men seemed to be haggling with them over last-minute purchases. Prices were always reduced at the end of the day and there were bargains to be had for blooms that would certainly be unsaleable tomorrow.