by Jacqui Rose
His father had died a hero, but life had to continue; there was a farm. Grief would be softened as the years went by, but not rage. Rage had to be nurtured; there was a time to use it. It was a secret strength. But down the years of growing up in the farm behind Pallas Strand, he saw his father’s face whenever he heard the screaming of hungry gulls; he saw the black tears of blood on the wet cheeks. And though he had been told a thousand times that his father was already dead when the Free State soldiers buried him there, as a reprisal for the dead Free State sergeant at Derrylough, and as a brutal warning, he would still wake at night in terror, from dreams in which he couldn’t move his body, his legs, his arms, and he felt himself gazing helplessly at the waves moving towards him across Pallas Strand, where no one could hear his screams over the wind roaring in the darkness.
2. HERBERT PLACE
Dublin, March 1939
‘Blood.’
As Detective Sergeant Dessie MacMahon started to climb the stairs he pointed at the fifth tread, without stopping. Sergeant Stefan Gillespie did, bending down to look at the dark, densely patterned stair carpet; red, black, yellow, thistle-like flowers endlessly repeated. Only the chalk marks showed him where to look; a small brown stain stood out against yellow and red.
‘Blood.’
Dessie pointed at two of the uprights on the grey-painted banister. It was a long time since it had been painted. Again only traces of chalk made a smear of brown that could have been almost anything immediately visible.
‘Blood.’
As he carried on Dessie’s left hand gestured at a chalk circle beside two crooked picture frames. They had been recently knocked askew; an oval, ebonised frame enclosing a sepia photograph of a heavily bearded man in a frock coat; a chipped, gilt square of plasterwork surrounding a sampler that was a map of Ireland with the counties outlined in green thread. Between them another streak of something brown marked the muddy swirls of the embossed wallpaper. Where the frames had moved they revealed that once the indeterminate colour of the wallpaper had once been a startling emerald green. There was little wallpaper to be seen, however. The staircase wall, like the walls of the hall and the landing above it were lined with pictures, maps, photographs. Paintings of dogs and horses; faded prints of flowers; maps of Ireland, Britain, India, the Mediterranean. Most of it had been there a long time; the map of Africa had almost nothing marked in its interior between Timbuctoo and Cape Town. The Victorian men and women who gazed out of heavy frames, with a mixture of confidence and disapproval, looked old whatever age they were; several small oil paintings showed even older family members, though the canvases were so black that they had become barely distinguishable from the backgrounds of their pictures or the wallpaper that surrounded them. It was all heavy, dark, as if the images and colours that lined the walls had faded into a uniform smog.
Dessie stopped as the staircase turned to the right, on to the landing, where the repeated pattern of the carpet stretched left and right along the corridor, between the gloomy, embossed walls and the grey-painted doors. It was lighter here though. A window gave on to Herbert Place below. Dessie was slightly breathless. A larger elliptical chalk circle spread out on to the landing from the top stair; the bloodstains were clearer here. ‘She was carried out the bedroom. But the body was put down here a moment. There’s more blood on the walls up there, and on some of the pictures.’ He gestured to the left, along the corridor, where several more prints and photographs hung at odd angles. ‘Either he put her down or he dropped her.’ Stefan nodded. Dessie walked on past two closed doors. Stefan registered the disturbed pictures and photographs. The third door was open. Through it was a bedroom. It was a big room, but it was as cluttered and claustrophobic as the hall and the landing; too many pictures, too many ornaments, too much furniture. There were clear signs of a struggle: smashed ornaments, pictures knocked off the walls, a broken chair, a table on its side, sheets and blankets pulled across the big bed on to the floor. But where the smell in the hallway and on the landing was of polish and dust and years of airlessness, the smell here was of smoke and burnt wood; not strong but acrid and sharp. Dessie took out a packet of Sweet Afton and lit a cigarette. Stefan walked into the centre of the room. There were two small rugs, though it was obvious the rest of the floor had been covered. The floorboards were grimy with age but they had only been varnished at the edges of the room. A carpet had covered the area in front of the bed; it wasn’t there now. Close to the bottom of the bed the floorboards were blacker than elsewhere, charred. Stefan looked at the black patch and bent down. He rubbed some charcoal on to his fingers.
‘You got to this just in time?’
Dessie nodded. ‘When the maid came in there was an electric fire on. It must have been going full pelt for a couple of days. The boards were starting to burn underneath. If she hadn’t come back when she did the place would have gone up. She threw a bucket of water over it.’ He laughed and drew in some smoke. ‘She fused the whole house, but it did the trick’
‘So do you think it was deliberate? Starting a fire.’
‘I’d say not,’ replied Dessie. ‘There’d have to be a better way to do that. No, this was where she was killed. There’s still blood, but the floor’s been washed. When you get further away there’s soap. The story is he put the fire on to dry the floor, and then left it. Lucky the place didn’t go up.’
‘What happened to the carpet?’
‘There was a lot of blood. The State Pathologist took some rugs and most of the bedclothes, but the carpet had gone already. It would have been soaked through. Maybe your man brought it with him. Maybe he wrapped the body in it. That could be why there was so much blood in her car.’
‘So with all this blood – do you think she was stabbed?’
‘There was an axe in the garage, pushed under a pile of turf. It’s had a good wash too, but there’s still plenty of blood on it. He’d used hot water.’
‘That wasn’t so clever!’
Dessie shrugged, drawing on the last of his Sweet Afton.
‘No, he’d have been a lot better with cold.’
‘So where is she?’ said Stefan.
‘We’ve got a bet going at the Castle. My money’s on Scotland.’
*
Four hours earlier, as Stefan Gillespie was walking down the stairs in the farmhouse below Kilranelagh, the telephone had started to ring. It sat on a shelf by the front door, still looking very new, its black bakelite shining; it had been there for a year now and it was polished more than it was used. It rang rarely enough that when it did Stefan’s mother would emerge from the kitchen and look at it for a few seconds, with an air of mild trepidation that she had not yet quite shaken off, before picking it up and speaking into it, slowly, carefully and loudly. She was coming out of the kitchen now, drying her hands on a tea towel. She smiled as her son arrived at the phone at the same time she did and turned to go back to the breakfast she was cooking; she’d rather he did it. Tom Gillespie, Stefan’s nine-year-old son had got up from the breakfast table and was peering out. ‘Who is it, Oma?’ His grandmother shrugged. ‘It’ll be for your father. It always is.’ And it was. Superintendent Riordan was calling from the Garda barracks in Baltinglass.
‘You’re to go up to Dublin, Sergeant. They want you at headquarters as soon as you can get there. There’s no point coming in here. You’ll need to shift if you’re going to catch the train.’ Riordan was oddly formal. He would normally have called his station sergeant by his name, but since the message he had just received came from the Commissioner, this was a standing-up sort of phone call. There was also a hint of irritation in his voice; he didn’t like passing on a message from the Garda Commissioner to one of his officers when no one had had the courtesy to tell him what it was all about.
‘What’s all this about?’
‘If you don’t know, I’m sure I don’t.’
‘Well, I haven’t got the faintest idea, sir.’ Stefan smiled; he heard the irritation now; the ‘sir’
might help. ‘I’d better put a clean shirt on so.’
‘The Commissioner wants to see you at eleven, so don’t piss about.’
And that was it. The phone went down at the other end before Stefan could ask any more questions. Superintendent Riordan didn’t want his ignorance displayed any further. He walked into the kitchen, pulling on his uniform jacket, puzzled. Tom was eating his bacon and egg slowly, peering across the plate at the book he was reading, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Once he had grasped that the telephone call was what most calls were at Kilranelagh, just another message, summons, query, instruction from the Garda station, he had lost interest. Helena was about to put another plate of bacon and egg on the table. Stefan reached out and picked up the bacon with his fingers and put it in his mouth. That would have to do for breakfast.
‘Sorry, Ma, I haven’t got time.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve got to get to Dublin. I’ll only just get the train.’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know, but it must be important. They didn’t tell Gerry Riordan what it was about. I could see the expression on his face coming down the phone line at me!’ He laughed, grabbing an apple from the bowl on the sideboard, and heading to the front door. ‘I’ll see you later then. Bye, Tom. Have a good day!’ The door slammed shut and Stefan was gone.
In the farmyard David Gillespie was driving a cow and a calf into the loose box next to the barn. The calf was only a few days old, still wobbling on uncertain limbs. Stefan crouched down to push on his bicycle clips, then took the bicycle that was leaning against the wall by the front door and got on it. He cycled out round his father and the cow and calf; the cow stopped, eyeing him suspiciously, lowing deeply, and nudging the calf forward.
‘I don’t know what time I’ll be back, Pa. I’ve to go to Dublin.’
His father nodded and tapped the cow’s backside.
‘Ned Broy wants to see me. And pronto!’
‘What for?’
‘He’ll be worried about the sheep stealing down here, I’d say.’
Stefan rode out of the farmyard, down to the road. His father watched him for a while, not particularly wondering why the Garda Commissioner wanted to see a station sergeant from West Wicklow, but remembering the years that had passed since his son was last called to Garda Headquarters. At the end of that his son had left his job as a detective in Dublin, and had come back to Baltinglass to work as a uniformed sergeant in a small country town. It had been Stefan’s choice, driven as much as anything else by the responsibility he felt to his son. Tom was only five then, living with his grandparents on the farm, seeing his father once a week, sometimes less. The four years that had passed since then had been happy ones for the most part, but in a family where emotions were sometimes as deeply hidden as they were deeply felt, David knew that what Stefan gave came at a price. It wasn’t a price he begrudged, but it was still a price. His life had been on hold. There were things that weren’t easy; there were places where the comfortable contentment Stefan Gillespie showed his West Wicklow neighbours was less than comfortable. He lived in a place he loved, with the people he loved. It was what he felt he had needed to do, but it was not all he was. For Stefan’s mother it was simple enough; all that was missing was a woman, not to take the place of her son’s now six-years-dead wife, Maeve, but to fill the empty places. David Gillespie knew it went deeper than that. A long time ago he had put his own life on hold, for very different reasons, and he had come back to the farm above Baltinglass to give himself the space to breathe. He had never left. He breathed the air that came down from the mountains very deeply, and like his son he loved it, but it was a narrower life than he had wanted, with all its gifts. He had found a way to calm what was restless and dissatisfied; perhaps he had had nowhere else to go. But he recognised the same restlessness in his son. He looked round the farmyard for a moment, then up at the hills that surrounded it, Keadeen, Kilranelagh, Baltinglass Hill. It was a great deal, but it would not be enough, even if Stefan had persuaded himself it would be. He smiled, and turned back to the cow and the calf, driving them across the yard and into the loose box.
Inevitably some of the same thoughts came into Stefan Gillespie’s head as he cycled through Baltinglass’s Main Street and along Edward Street to the station, but it was easier to think about the present than the past. He still couldn’t find any reason to explain the urgent summons to meet the Garda Commissioner; even the business of promotion, or a transfer he didn’t want anyway, would scarcely be a matter of urgency, let alone involve the Commissioner. As for what he’d been doing in recent weeks, sheep stealing really was about as serious as it got. Nothing could possibly interest anyone at Garda Headquarters in the Phoenix Park. The introduction of the Dance Hall Act, which required all dances to be licensed in light of the moral dangers the Church felt were inherent in dancing, had resulted in a spate of unpopular raids that took Stefan into the courthouse in Baltinglass on a weekly basis at the moment. Yesterday it had been to give evidence against the Secretary of the Dunlavin Bicycling Association and the Rathvilly Association Football Club. Admittedly, that was causing considerable anger among the unmarried guards in Baltinglass who, when they weren’t raiding the dances, were dancing at them. He was pursuing a pen of prize ewes that had disappeared from Paddy Kelly’s farm below Spynans Hill in February. Christy Hannity had bought them from Paddy at a farm sale, and insisted the old man had let them back on to the mountain they’d come from while he was in the pub. All Paddy had to say was that mountain sheep had their own ways and Christy was too drunk to remember what he’d done with them. Of course it wasn’t the first time Paddy Kelly had played this trick and got away with it. Apart from that Stefan had wasted two days questioning James MacDonald, accused of assaulting the Water Bailiff, Cathal Patterson, after refusing to give up a salmon found in his possession on the banks the River Slaney. He claimed the salmon was actually a trout, which he had since eaten; there was no evidence therefore. As for the Water Bailiff’s nose, Jimmy said he’d broken it tripping over a dead cat when he was drunk.
It was hard to push the past out of the way altogether as Stefan walked from Kingsbridge Station through the Phoenix Park to the long, low stone building that always made him think of an eighteenth century army barracks combined with a country house, which, since Irish country houses had often had to take into account defence as well as style, was not so far from the truth. He was less inclined than his father to see this unexpected visit to Ned Broy’s office as a time to reflect on the last four years of his life, but there was still something uncomfortable about it. Nothing very much had happened in the last four years; most of what had had happened to his son. He had no problem with that; it was why he went home; but the thought had never struck quite so starkly before as it did for the few moments he waited outside the Garda Commissioner’s office. And when he sat in Ned Broy’s office again he felt a certain uncomfortableness, at least awkwardness, in the Commissioner too; even the polite preliminaries felt like something was being skirted. Whatever was urgent, Broy’s opening words weren’t.
‘So, how’s West Wicklow?’
‘Quiet enough, sir.’
‘You’re keeping Gerry Riordan in check, I hope.’
‘Well, mostly he does what he’s told.’
The Commissioner smiled. There was a moment’s silence.
‘You’ve been there a long time.’
‘Four years doesn’t seem so long. Time goes fast enough.’
‘Bollocks, you’re not old enough to say that yet.’
Stefan smiled. They were only words, but the Commissioner was looking at him quizzically now. He probably hadn’t thought about Sergeant Gillespie more than a couple of times in the last four years, and once the issues that had last brought them together had faded away, as everyone fully intended they should, he almost certainly hadn’t thought about him at all.
‘Your father’s well? And your lad?’
‘We’re all goo
d.’
‘And you’re happy down the country?’
‘Happy enough, sir.’ Stefan was aware that the polite remarks, whatever was about to follow, meant nothing to Ned Broy, but it was the first time anyone had asked him such a direct question about his job, and by extension his life. The answer he gave was the answer any Irishman would give to such a question; an answer that could mean anything from despair to exultation, and everything in between. He was aware that he was avoiding a direct answer, not for the Garda Commissioner’s sake, but for his own.
‘A woman is missing.’ Broy suddenly stood up and moved slowly towards the window that looked out on to the Phoenix Park. The trees were still bare. Spring wasn’t far away, but it still felt like winter. ‘There is every reason to believe she’s dead, and that she was killed.’ He turned back from the window. ‘The fact that she’s missing is the only thing that’s been in the newspapers. We can keep it like that for a little longer, and it’s important that we do. She is a Mrs Leticia Harris. She has a house in Herbert Place.’
‘I read something about it, sir.’
‘The evidence from the house, along with Mrs Harris’s car, indicates that she was the object of a very brutal attack in her home. The car, however, was found in the grounds of a house close to Shankill, right by the sea in Corbawn Lane. It’s clear she had been in the car. The assumption is that she was killed at the house, or at least she was dead by the time she reached Corbawn Lane, where the body was taken from the car and thrown into the sea. What the tides have done with body is anybody’s guess at this point.’