The City of Shadows

by Michael Russell

  ‘She was a while writing the note. I didn’t read it,’ grinned Dessie.

  ‘If we want to get to this body alive you’d be better looking where you’re going,’ snapped Stefan. As Dessie drove on, whistling quietly in amusement, he unfolded the note that was tucked into one of the books.

  Just back from Mr Field’s. The only thing that struck me were Susan’s books, well, she never read much when we were at school. Most of them were for her UCD course. But look at what’s written at the front of these.

  He registered the title of the first book as he opened it, The Dawn of Modern Thought: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz; on the flyleaf was a name, a place, and a date, ‘Francis Byrne, Pontifical University, Maynooth, 1932’. The other book was The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France. Inside, on the flyleaf, in the same handwriting was written, ‘Read it and give it a chance, your good friend Francis’. He didn’t think either book would impress Father Anthony Carey very much. He looked back at Hannah Rosen’s note.

  I called in at the UCD office in Earlsfort Terrace this morning, asking about courses. I mentioned Francis Byrne. He turns out to be Father Francis Byrne, a lecturer in medieval philosophy last year. He left UCD about six months ago. The woman said she thought he’d gone abroad somewhere.

  Stefan was both pleased and irritated. Hannah couldn’t walk around Dublin questioning people as if she was still barging into Hugo Keller’s clinic. But she had found something, a new place to start. The priest was that place.

  All night the rain had poured down the wooded slopes of Kilmashogue, already sodden with weeks of wet weather. On a bend in the steep road up into the Dublin Mountains, where the embankment had been weakened by the felling of trees, it had collapsed part of the hillside and thick, sticky mud was blocking the track. The body had been found by a dog belonging to one of the workmen who had come up in a tractor to clear the road. The soil that had covered the shallow grave had been washed away in the landslide and the body with it. Now there was only a cold drizzle. They were standing in the low cloud that covered the mountain. On a fine day you saw the whole of Dublin laid out below and the sea beyond, stretching away to meet the sky. Today there was only the wet mist and the pile of earth across the road and, just above it, something almost indistinguishable from the black earth that Wayland-Smith was scraping at as he knelt in the mud. Detective Sergeant Gillespie and Garda MacMahon stood over him. A little way off two gardaí were smoking with the workmen who had discovered the body. The dog, tied to the tractor now, whined and barked intermittently, his only thought how to get back to the bones that had been so rudely dragged away from him. Wayland-Smith was scraping at a skull now, the eye sockets packed with soil. Other bones were visible just below it. Three ribs stood out – they were the colour of the wet earth, brown and yellow and black.

  ‘It’s hard to say how old. There’s a lot of peat, which would keep things fresh for longer. It’s quite well preserved in parts. There’s even some skin coverage in places. And there’s some hair on the skull.’ He leant forward, using a trowel to prise what looked like more mud from the body. ‘As well as several pieces of clothing that haven’t really broken down yet.’

  ‘So not that long?’

  ‘Two to five years. No longer than seven. Male I think.’

  ‘Any idea of his age?’

  ‘Adult clearly, but not old, twenty or thirty from the teeth.’

  ‘He’s a mess.’

  ‘Quite an unusual one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The bones didn’t get like that lying here. It looks as if someone took a sledgehammer to them. So the question is, was that before or after he died?’

  Three wet hours at Kilmashogue produced nothing more. The bones were scraped and dug out of the hillside, wrapped in sacking and loaded on to the workman’s trailer to be brought to the morgue. Dessie drove the Austin back into town, while Stefan went with Wayland-Smith in his shooting brake. There was little to say about the body. There was no obvious means of identification yet, though the discovery of a wallet where a trouser pocket had once been offered some hope. There was also a small round hole in the skull, close to the temple, which suggested a bullet.

  It was what they might have expected. Nobody looked for bodies in the mountains, but they were there, from the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed. IRA men executed by the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s G Division; informers executed by the IRA; victims of the Black and Tans; landowners shot for being too English and farm workers shot for being too Irish; anti-Treaty IRA men dragged into the night by pro-Treaty IRA men and pro-Treaty IRA men killed by old comrades; and in the midst of all that self-righteous, brutal murder not a few who were on the wrong end of old scores dressed up as something to sing about in years to come. These were the bodies most people preferred to forget about, bodies no one in the Irish Free State really wanted to find, let alone the Garda Síochána.

  If the body at Kilmashogue looked like one of those there would be a slim file and no further investigation. They would know when Wayland-Smith had finished the post-mortem, but that wasn’t why Stefan was sitting in the estate that always smelt of fish. It was the doctor’s role as a lecturer in the medical faculty at University College Dublin that interested him. The doctor’s reputation as a pathologist was exceeded only by his reputation as a man who knew everybody who was anybody, especially in the academic world. He was a snob, but that made him a walking Who’s Who of Ireland.

  ‘I’m looking for a priest,’ said Stefan quietly.

  ‘Are they hard to find on our isle of saints and scholars?’

  ‘As it happens it’s the scholarly element I’m interested in.’

  ‘I wouldn’t leap to any metaphysical conclusions about our body.’

  ‘I’m looking for a priest who’s teaching at UCD.’

  ‘You won’t find many in my faculty. Medicine’s not a strong point.’

  ‘But you know who’s who.’

  ‘Do I want to know why you’re asking me this, Sergeant?’

  ‘How often would students encounter priests in the university?’

  ‘Where do you want to start? We’ve got a selection of bishops and monsignors on the senate, some admirable, some excruciating. There are various senior figures in the faculties; and the chaplains of course.’

  ‘He’d be lecturing in philosophy,’ continued Stefan.

  ‘Metaphysics without God, mumbo without jumbo.’

  ‘Thirties or forties. Not older.’

  ‘The fact that a priest might be lecturing doesn’t mean he’s on the staff. He could be coming in from Maynooth, or a seminary, especially if it’s the kind of philosophy that counts the number of angels on an Irish pinhead.’

  ‘I think he might be interested in something more modern.’

  ‘Ah, he’s been teaching banned philosophers and you’re on to him!’

  ‘This relates to our friend Herr Keller and his abortion clinic.’

  Wayland-Smith stopped smiling.

  ‘I thought that was dead in the water.’

  ‘This is about a missing woman, not Keller. But there’s a link between him and the woman, possibly a link between both of them and the priest.’

  ‘On the face of it that would be extremely unlikely I’d have thought, Sergeant.’ His voice was flat. He didn’t like the conversation’s direction.

  ‘Father Francis Byrne.’

  The State Pathologist said nothing, but Stefan could see the name meant something to him. Wayland-Smith knew who Father Byrne was.

  ‘You know him then?’

  ‘I know of him.’

  ‘You sound like you don’t like him.’

  ‘I’m not too keen on the company he keeps.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The State Pathologist hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Whatever this is about, it sounds unpleasant, very unpleasant. Father Byrne has powerful friends; I think you should know that. One very powerful friend in particul
ar. I’d be careful asking questions that associate him with an abortionist, unless you’re sure of your ground. Even then –’

  ‘I just want to talk to him. Apparently he’s out of the country now.’

  ‘Do you know who Monsignor Robert Fitzpatrick is?’

  ‘The Association of Catholic Strength?’

  ‘Your man Byrne is a protégé of his. A clever fellow from what I know, which isn’t much, and very personable. I’ve met him once or twice. Fitzpatrick was trying to get him on the General Board of Studies last year.’

  ‘This isn’t about university politics.’

  ‘Nor is Monsignor Fitzpatrick. He’s about politics and influence in a much bigger arena. And the kind of politics he’s about aren’t very palatable, to some of us at least, though they’re becoming rather more so to others.’

  ‘I’m looking for a woman who was a student of Father Byrne’s.’

  ‘Who else knows about this, Gillespie?’

  ‘Dessie.’ Stefan gave a half smile. ‘I’m not spreading it about.’

  ‘You haven’t mentioned it to Inspector Donaldson?’

  ‘I’m sure I will do.’

  ‘He’d be a man who thinks quite a lot of Monsignor Fitzpatrick.’

  ‘I’d say he would.’

  ‘So he won’t like it. And he won’t be the only one.’

  ‘I imagine Monsignor Fitzpatrick would know where Father Byrne is, wouldn’t you? That’s all I want to find out. Hardly a contentious question.’

  ‘A priest, a woman, an abortion clinic! That’s your starting point?’

  Stefan Gillespie shrugged. ‘I didn’t choose where to start.’

  *

  Monsignor Robert Fitzpatrick had a large house at the Stephen’s Green end of Earlsfort Terrace, between the Alexandra College for the Higher Education of Ladies and a small, private nursing home. The other side of the road was taken up by the long stone facade and the vaguely classical, pillared entrance to University College Dublin. A crowd of students, noisy even from where Stefan was standing, was flooding down the steps. He watched them from across the road; mostly they were men, but there were several women, much the same age as Susan Field would have been.

  Two brass plaques, on either side of the front door of the house, announced the monsignor himself and the Association of Catholic Strength, of which he was the president and prime mover. As Stefan walked up the steps the front door was open. He entered a hallway that was lined with posters. He recognised one of them immediately; it decorated the wall of Inspector Donaldson’s office. A man in a military uniform stood with an upraised sword in his hand. ‘Soldiers Are We!’ Next to it, on another poster, a farmer stood in a ploughed field, deep in thought; on one side of him was a hammer and sickle, on the other a cross. ‘Workers of Ireland: Which Way?’ A staircase stretched up ahead. To the left, another open door looked into a room lined with books and religious pictures; it was a shop. To the right, there were double doors, one of them open. A man was speaking, loudly and passionately. Stefan went in. He saw that it was a meeting room, lined with rows of chairs and, if not packed to overflowing, full enough for a quiet afternoon. A piece of paper was thrust into his hand by a middle-aged woman who smiled enthusiastically and whispered a cheerful welcome. ‘Please, do take a seat.’ He sat down on the chair nearest the door.

  The walls were decorated with the posters he’d seen in the hall. At the front of the room a man in his early fifties stood at a table speaking. On either side of him sat men and women who looked as if they had been born to sit on committees and were fulfilling their destiny. He knew the speaker must be Monsignor Fitzpatrick himself, in a clerical collar and a black suit noticeably more well-cut than the usual threadbare priestly uniform. If he had any doubts the look of rapture on the faces of several of the elderly women in the room would have been enough to confirm it. But the audience was by no means all elderly or middle-aged; there were students from across the road as well, all listening intently. And as Stefan took in the words he began to understand the discomfort Wayland-Smith had shown earlier, about exactly what it was that Monsignor Robert Fitzpatrick represented.

  ‘There is war going on, a war that no one sees. And we are here because we understand, because we do see, because we must take the side of Christ’s Church in this war that puts the very existence of His Church in peril. Has not the veil of the temple already been rent in Russia, where blood and darkness fill the land, where the hounds of atheism are in full cry, supplanting the True Messiah with the false messiahs of communism and capitalism? And who are the leaders of this diabolical army, all-powerful through their control of the world’s finance and industry? You don’t know? Even your Church does not tell you? Yet their plans are in plain sight, for the destruction of all belief in God and dominance over His creation: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion!’ He held up a book, brandishing it before his audience. He crossed himself and many of his listeners did the same.

  ‘The armies of Judeo-Masonic communism have invaded every corner of human life, proclaiming a doctrine of illusory freedom and equality that puts atheistic man in revolt against God, as Satan once rebelled. The pity of it all is that once God offered the Jews a glorious role as the harbingers of spiritual grace. They refused that gift and down the centuries they have devised a scheme of destruction that is coming to fruition in our century. Didn’t Jewish financiers and Freemasons start the world war? Wasn’t every leader of the hideous revolution in Russia a Jew? Aren’t Jewish bankers plunging the world into economic chaos? The clock stands at one minute to midnight and still, even in the Vatican, the chimes of midnight are unheard. But in Germany Herr Hitler has heard. God has given Germany a great leader in a time of peril. There is no hope in democracy! It has had its day. Some in the Church see Herr Hitler as our enemy. They are wrong! Shut out that siren song. Lash yourselves to the mast of faith. Steer towards the light!’

  The priest sat down, mopping his brow with a gesture that told the audience how much had been drained out of him. Applause erupted and soon the whole room was on its feet. Stefan stood too, dragged up by the movement of those around him. As Monsignor Fitzpatrick rose again there was a reverential silence. Heads were bowed in prayer and as the prayer ended, the audience filed out, some clearly moved to silence, others talking enthusiastically. Stefan waited as people left. At the front of the room the committee members talked to the monsignor for a few moments longer, and then they too filed out. The middle-aged woman who had pointed Stefan to his seat was collecting up the leaflets and papers left behind on the chairs.

  ‘We’re finished for today.’ She smiled warmly as she approached him. ‘But you will let me know if there’s any information you want.’

  ‘I was hoping to have a word with the monsignor.’

  ‘He gets very tired after these meetings. Inspiration takes its toll.’

  ‘I won’t keep him long.’

  She smiled a motherly smile. He liked her. She made him feel as if he was at a cake sale to raise money for new kneelers for church pews. She moved down to the table where the priest was gathering his papers into a black leather briefcase. As she spoke to him he looked round and smiled at Stefan. Then she came back, still clutching her bundle of creased leaflets, and headed for the door. Stefan walked towards Fitzpatrick and stopped.

  ‘We haven’t seen you before, have we?’ said the priest.

  The smile didn’t survive Stefan’s explanation of who he was.

  ‘And why exactly would you have questions to ask me, Sergeant?’

  ‘It’s a colleague of yours I wanted to talk to, Father Francis Byrne.’

  Monsignor Fitzpatrick’s brow furrowed.

  ‘I gather he’s not in the country now,’ continued Stefan.

  ‘I understand that to be the case.’

  ‘I need to contact him.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘It has to do with his teaching at UCD.’

  ‘I was Father Byrne’s immediate superior the
re. He has worked with me for a long time. I’m also a member of the university senate. I can’t imagine Father Byrne’s path crossing yours. But if there is anything you have a good reason to know about, I’ll do what I can to help you.’

  ‘I’d like to know where I can contact him. The university doesn’t have a forwarding address, other than yours. Am I right that he’s in Germany?’

  There was no answer; the shutters were up.

  ‘As for any questions, they’re of a personal nature.’

  ‘And why would the Gardaí have personal questions to ask of a priest who was in my pastoral care until very recently, Sergeant Gillespie?’

  ‘All I need is an address, Monsignor.’

  ‘Are you suggesting Father Byrne has done something wrong?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything.’

  ‘Then I think you need to make yourself plainer.’

  ‘You do have an address for him.’

  ‘I can contact him if I feel it’s necessary.’

  ‘Can I ask when he left Ireland?’

  ‘It was some time in the summer. August, I think.’

  ‘When are you expecting him back?’

  ‘I don’t know that I am expecting him back.’

  ‘Can I ask why he left?’

  ‘Why he left is the business of the Church.’

  ‘He isn’t working for you now?’ Stefan persisted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was living here when he left Ireland though?’

  ‘This is none of your business, but since you are determined to be intrusive, I will tell you that before Father Byrne left for Germany, he and I had not been on the best of terms for some time. He lived here and he worked for me. It was my influence that got him the post as a lecturer that he seemed – eventually – to find more important than his duties as a priest. As his obligations to me became a burden to him, it was inappropriate that he should remain here. I suggested he went back to the seminary at Maynooth. However, Father Byrne took the unusual course of taking a flat somewhere.’

  Stefan had to hold back a smile at how much venom the man in black had squeezed into the word ‘flat’; it was the Fall of Man and Sodom and Gomorrah in a single, apocalyptic syllable.