The Eloquence of the Dead

by Conor Brady

  ‘She genuinely doesn’t seem to know the details,’ Swallow said. ‘Or who else was involved.’

  ‘Inspector Boyle, anything else in from the searches at the bank and the Land Office?’

  ‘Nothin’ great that I know of, Sir. We checked through all the sales and transactions around the Gessel estate. The level of co-operation was good,’ he said obsequiously. ‘I s’pose that was because it was yerself that authorised th’operation and, of course, in the light of his Lordship’s order.’

  ‘You can pass on the warmth of the reception, Inspector,’ Mallon said impatiently. ‘Tell us what you learned.’

  Boyle smoothed out his papers in front of him. ‘We secured the documents relevant to the sale of the lands. There was a powerful lot o’ paperwork, I don’t mind tellin’ ye.’

  He tapped a pudgy finger to the file.

  ‘Accordin’ to the documents provided by the solicitors, Messrs Keogh, Sheridan and James, Mount Gessel estate comprised lands that totalled 1,280 acres, 60 square roods and 22 square perches. This was valued at £88 on average of per acre, makin’ a total purchase price of £10,240, 10 shillings and 6 pence.’

  ‘Now,’ he licked his lips, ‘this acreage was divided between 72 families, all former tenants of the estate, into an average farm size of 17 and seven tenths of an acre, with the largest holdin’ at 38 acres and the smallest at just two and a half acres.…’

  Mallon raised a hand.

  ‘We don’t need to know the mathematics of who got every patch of grass. What we need to know is do the figures tally. Is there any sign of anything irregular?’

  Boyle’s shoulders slumped apologetically.

  ‘Indeed, there’s ne’er a sign of any irregularity, Sir. The acreage certified be the solicitor an’ confirmed be the Land Office are the same. The value put on the land and th’ amount drawn down be the Land Office from the Treasury all tally.’

  ‘What about the files at the bank?’ Mallon asked Feore.

  ‘The bank figures match those on the property files, Sir,’ Feore indicated to his notes.

  ‘The bank paid over the sum of £10,240, 10 shillings and 6 pence to Lady Margaret Gessel on the fourteenth of August of last year. The draft is drawn on the government’s Land Office account. Two days later, on August the sixteenth, the cheque was cleared and the sum was paid into her account at Barclay’s Bank, Great Portland Street, in London.’

  ‘That’s disappointing,’ Mallon looked crestfallen. ‘Arthur Clinton and Ambrose Pollock were thieves and fences. But we’re no closer to finding any conspiracy to defraud the Exchequer.’

  ‘No proof, Sir,’ Swallow said. ‘But there’s more to this than a law clerk with a gambling habit lifting a silver table service and a few Greek coins. We can’t see the connection yet, but I’m sure it’s there.’

  ‘I agree. But we’re still working on supposition and instinct, not evidence.’

  ‘Where do ye want us to go from here, Sir?’ ‘Duck’ Boyle asked glumly.

  ‘Since we haven’t found anything irregular in the handling of the sale, the next step might be to trawl through the other estates that Clinton handled,’ Mallon said wearily. ‘But that’d involve going back for more court orders. We mightn’t get them, and it would take time.’

  Swallow tried to strike an optimistic note.

  ‘We’ve still got a couple of boxes of deeds to go through at Keogh, Sheridan and James. I’d like to finish the job anyway for the sake of completeness.’

  Mallon stood.

  ‘Very well, but we’ll have to finish tonight. I’ll report to the Commissioner and the Under-Secretary shortly and try to buy a bit more time. They’ll not be overjoyed that we haven’t found something conclusive.’

  ‘It might be said we’re at an impasse, Sir,’ Boyle volunteered. ‘It’s a legal term, Sir. Impasse. From the French, I believe.’

  Mallon glared at him. ‘I’m most grateful for that, Inspector. It’s very helpful.’

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  John Leonard Barry recognised only one of the three G-men who came through the door. It was the small Belfast detective called Mossop. But he had no doubts as to the professions of the other two, in particular the jowly fellow with the waddling gait who seemed to be in charge.

  ‘Mr Barry?’

  ‘Of course, what I can do for?’

  ‘Duck’ Boyle was the soul of discretion. ‘Detective Inspector Boyle, G-Division. Have ye a quiet room we kin use for a chat?’

  Barry took them into his office. Boyle drew the arrest warrant from his pocket.

  ‘John Leonard Barry, I am arresting you on suspicion that you murdered one Phoebe Pollock on September 29th last, contrary to Common Law, at the Northern Hotel, North Wall, such premises being situated within the Dublin Metropolitan Police Area.’

  Barry saw that one of the G-man had moved to block the door.

  ‘Bloody ridiculous,’ he said emphatically.

  ‘You were there,’ he told Mossop, ‘you saw what happened.’

  ‘You’re not obliged to say annythin’ unless you wish to do so,’ Boyle droned on. ‘But annythin’ you do say will be written down and may be used in evidence. D’ye understand?’

  ‘Ah Jesus, this is a joke,’ Barry blustered. ‘I’m sending for a solicitor.’

  ‘Duck’ Boyle raised a hand.

  ‘Furthermore, Mr Barry, there’s a warrant to search your accommodation. I’ll have the keys, if ye please.’

  He looked around the office. ‘Take yer overcoat wid ye now and come quietly, like a sensible man. Me instructions are that yer not be handcuffed unless that’s necessary. An’ I trust ye won’t make it so.’

  Now, Barry sat in the Inspectors’ Office at Exchange Court, with ‘Duck’ Boyle opposite. Pat Mossop sat to one side, a bound notebook on his knee, a pen in hand and an open ink-well on the table beside him. The G-men had been decent enough. They had brought him a mug of tea from the police canteen. But that was two hours ago, and the questioning by Boyle and Mossop showed no sign of relenting.

  ‘Ye killed her,’ Boyle said. ‘Mebbe strangled her.’

  ‘Killed? Strangled?’ Barry echoed. ‘Strangled? Like I told you, I never saw the woman.’

  ‘There are witnesses who’ll swear you were seen with her on a number of occasions in licensed premises,’ Boyle stabbed at his notebook. ‘Reliable witnesses.’

  Most of them, he thought to himself, you wouldn’t trust with the Lord’s Prayer.

  ‘They’re mistaken, I tell you. It must have been someone else. Definitely not me.’

  At some point in the mid-afternoon there was a knock on the door, and the other detective who had come to the hotel stuck his head in. Boyle left to speak with him. When he came back into the room five minutes later, his face was like thunder.

  ‘Now, Mr Barry,’ he threw his flabby weight back into the chair. ‘It’s time the gloves kem off here. I’ve been patient in th’ extreme. But I’m goin’ to be very blunt with ye now. If you stick to what you’re sayin’ you’re goin’ to end up swingin’ off a rope above in Mountjoy. On t’other hand, if there were mitigatin’ circumstances of some kind, a judge might be inclined to be merciful. Needless to say, th’ attitude of the police would be important in that decision. Am I makin’ meself perfectly clear?’

  Barry sensed a rising panic. Was this bluff or was it time to come clean? He had played his fair share of poker during his time, but he found it impossible to get the measure this overweight fool.

  When ‘Duck’ Boyle dropped the gold watch on the table, Barry knew it was time to start dealing.

  ‘Ye’ll recognise this item, I suppose,’ Boyle intoned. ‘And ye’ll know, o’ course, that me officers had to lift the floorboards in yer quarters to find it, along wid a variety of other trinkets ye had stashed away for safe keepin’ no doubt.’

  He lifted the watch and looked at it approvingly. ‘A very nice timepiece, Mr Barry. Twenty-four carat gold case. Made in Switzerland, no less. That’d fetch
a fair few pounds, I’ll warrant.’

  He turned it around.

  ‘An’ a very touchin’ inscription here on the back. ‘With Deep Affection from Phoebe to Leonard. An’ a date as well. June 1st 1887.’

  He had not for a moment contemplated that they would discover his cache under the floorboards in his bedroom. He had burrowed out the space himself under the joists, taking away timber and plaster lath to hide the black metal box. Even if the boards themselves were lifted, it would not be visible from above.

  ‘The lads is very good at that kind o’ work, Mr Barry,’ ‘Duck’ Boyle said, reading his unspoken thoughts. ‘Years o’ huntin’ for Fenian guns and American dollars in the most unlikely places. Ye develop an instinct o’ sorts, I suppose.’

  ‘Duck’ Boyle looked out of the window and started to whistle. Pat Mossop examined his fingernails.

  Then John Leonard Barry decided to tell his story.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  He had met Phoebe Pollock a year ago when he went to Lamb Alley to pawn a string of pearls and a gold pendant.

  ‘You have to understand,’ he told the G-men, ‘sometimes guests at the hotel might … mislay or … forget small, personal items. The salary as general manager isn’t generous, so you could say that these … well … stray items could be regarded as a bit of a windfall. I’d make every effort, of course, to return them to their rightful owners. But if it proved impossible to trace them, what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Boyle’s tone was sarcastic.

  But, Barry explained, he felt it was prudent to use pawnbroker shops in parts of the city that were some distance from the hotel.

  ‘Phoebe just took a shine to me. That was good. I had to use a false name.’

  That made sense, the G-men had to acknowledge. Otherwise the police, checking the books in due course, would figure out what was happening.

  On his second visit, he told them, he charmed her, inviting her to the tearooms at the Imperial Hotel on Sackville Street.

  She blushed and stammered, but said that her brother did not approve of such things. On his next visit he invited her to walk out with him in the Phoenix Park. She declined this invitation also, but she slipped a small square of folded paper into his hand, glancing nervously at the window, through which he could see her brother at work in his office.

  It was an invitation to meet at 10 o’clock that evening. The designated spot was outside St Werburgh’s Church, two minutes from Lamb Alley. When they met, she linked his arm and insisted that they must walk together. They walked for an hour along Lord Edward Street, Parliament Street, across Essex Bridge and along the quays as far as the Four Courts. Then they crossed the river again at Church Street.

  ‘They were bats, herself and the brother. He wouldn’t let her spend a farthing. I think they were starving in that bloody house. The only clothes she had was what she could pick out of the pawn herself. He wouldn’t let her leave the house. So she’d wait until he was gone to bed and then she’d slip out. On that first night she stopped outside the Brazen Head and said “Take me in there and buy me a drink.” Jesus, I can tell you she lapped it up. Large gins, port wine, whiskey, she’d manage them all, no bother.’

  ‘That’s what we heard.’ Boyle interjected.

  ‘She was demented, you know? One minute she’d be telling me that she had conversations with God and his Blessed Mother. She was convinced her brother was tied up with some criminal gang, and she could hear them sometimes with him in his office.’

  ‘Was your relationship … intimate?’ Boyle asked.

  ‘Ah come on, Inspector. Give me some credit.’ He gave a little smirk. ‘Besides, I’d have no shortage of offers elsewhere, if you know what I mean.’

  Mossop’s pen flew across the pages, dipping furiously in and out of the ink-well as he sought to keep pace with the narrative.

  ‘You’re not goin’ to tell me that this went on for a year?’ Boyle said. ‘Wanderin’ the streets be nights and then goin’ drinkin.’ What was in it fer yerself, apart from havin’ a convenient place to drop off what I’ll charitably call “lost property” from the hotel?’

  ‘Well, that goes to the heart of the matter,’ Barry said. ‘She said she had money put away. I won’t deny that I saw an opportunity. I thought I might end up as owning a small hotel some place. Maybe in Cork, that’s my native place.’

  ‘So you planned to take her money?’

  ‘Ah, I’d have done the decent thing, Inspector. She’d have been Mrs John Leonard Barry.’

  ‘Jesus, she’d have been fuckin’ made up, wouldn’t she?’ Boyle sneered.

  ‘It would have been a fair bargain,’ Barry’s voice rose in indignation. ‘She’d have escaped from that madhouse. I’d have had to put up with her, mad and all. It wouldn’t have been a picnic for me.’

  ‘So,’ Boyle lowered his tone. ‘What happened at the hotel last Thursday?’

  ‘Bloody unfortunate. She turned up there. She took a room and collared me on the stairs. She said she had taken all the money from the shop and she had it in the two cases.’

  ‘Did she tell you what had happened?’ Mossop asked.

  ‘She was raving that her brother was murdered a week ago by someone and that she’d be blamed. She wanted me to go on the evening boat to Liverpool, but I couldn’t just drop everything and go like that. I had wages to collect. Valuables to put together.’

  ‘Did you think she’d killed the brother?’ Boyle asked.

  Barry shook his head.

  ‘I don’t think so. She said she’d been afraid to tell anyone or to go to the police. She was in a frightful state, I can tell you, when she got here. I don’t think she was capable of telling anything but the truth.’

  ‘Are you saying she stayed in the house with her dead brother over all those days?’

  ‘It seems so, yes. Christ knows, it must have been dreadful. But her whole life was so bloody awful that she probably just wasn’t able to deal with it.’

  ‘Go on,’ Boyle said.

  ‘Then she brought out the poison and opened the bottle. She said she’d do for herself if I didn’t leave with her. I got her to put the cork back on it, and I tried to reason with her. But she started to rave.’

  For a few moments, the only sound was the scratching of the nib of Mossop’s pen. Boyle pushed his face up to Barry’s until they were only inches apart.

  ‘So that’s when you killed her?’

  ‘Killed her? Of course I didn’t kill her. She wrecked the room. But I calmed her down. I took her out the back way to the Amiens Street railway terminus and put her on the train for Belfast with her suitcase full of money. But I’m damned if I know where she is now.’

  ‘She left another case behind.

  ‘I persuaded her I needed some cash. The plan was I’d follow her to Belfast in a day or two, but by the time I got back the police had arrived. I didn’t have an opportunity to get into the room to retrieve the second bag.’

  ‘Or the money?’

  ‘That too,’ Barry said bitterly.

  ‘Duck’ Boyle was stumped. Barry’s story had the ring of truth.

  ‘I’d like you to sign a statement t’all this, Mr Barry,’ he said wearily. ‘Officer Mossop will type it. It’ll take about half an hour.’

  ‘And what happens to me? I’ve told the truth now. I’m not a saint. But for God’s sake, you know I’m not a murderer.’

  ‘You’re not a saint and I’m not God, Mr Barry. The nearest thing to God I’ve ever come across is a judge. But for the present I think ye’ve avoided the prospect o’ meetin wan o’ them lads.’

  He hauled himself from the chair.

  ‘If ye’d be good enough to sign the statement, ye’ll be free to go.’

  THURSDAY OCTOBER 13TH, 1887

  SIXTY-NINE

  Harriet was working on a bundle of school copybooks in the parlour when Swallow got home.

  ‘How did you get on with Pat Mossop?’ he inquired.

  �
�There were three members of the society, apart from myself. I’m afraid I can’t claim to have vision, but each of the others does, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘So what did those with vision tell you?’ he asked wearily. ‘Where is this woman and what will she have for breakfast tomorrow?’

  She flung a copybook onto the table.

  ‘You are absolutely infuriating … don’t be so sarcastic. As it happens, they got very strong sensations in that house, especially in the upstairs rooms. But what a horrible, dirty place it is. How anybody could have lived there, I don’t know.’

  ‘I could have told you that.’

  ‘Well, first, all of the members felt that the woman is alive and still in this world. She is in fear but she is alive.’

  ‘That’s good. Now where is she in this world? I don’t suppose they got an address, did they?’

  ‘I asked you not be sarcastic. In fact, one of the members visioned her very clearly. What she said is that she had travelled north, “… as far as the end of the land,” she said. She saw her in a city, busy streets, “… with a hill looking down on it and a great harbour opening to the sea.”’

  ‘Jesus,’ Swallow said. ‘She’s in bloody Belfast. Barry is telling the truth.’

  ‘Barry?’

  ‘He’s the fellow we had as a suspect for her murder. He says she went to Belfast.’

  Harriet gave a smug smile.

  ‘Now, maybe you won’t be so dismissive of what I tell you in the future. And you won’t be so disrespectful to people like Willie Yeats.’

  Swallow shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘He could go far, that fellow, I agree.’

  SEVENTY

  The manager of the Shelbourne Hotel was in the foyer to greet John Mallon.

  ‘It’s hotel policy, of course, to co-operate fully with the authorities, Mr Mallon,’ he fussed. ‘But I would hope that any police business can be conducted unobtrusively. I wouldn’t want our guests to be put out in any way, as you might imagine.’