by Ian McGuire
When she arrives, Rose looks at him impatiently and asks again what it is he needs to talk about that couldn’t wait until her work is over for the day.
“I’m giving up the police,” he says. “Resigning my post. It’s not right for me anymore, and I’m not right for it. I wanted to tell you first.”
“I hope it’s not because of what happened with our Tommy. I told you before, it wasn’t your fault and you shouldn’t blame yourself.”
“It’s not that, no.”
She looks at him more carefully. She sees there is something different about him now, in his eyes and the way he moves his hands, something softer and less certain.
“You’re just tired of it all, then. Is that it? Had enough.”
“Did you hear that another policeman was killed the night before last, a man named Frank Malone? He was shot on Milk Street.”
“Of course. It’s all over the newspapers.”
“I was there when it happened, standing not ten feet away.” He points to the bloodstains on the arm of his coat and Rose stares and looks amazed.
“If you were there, you could have been shot yourself then,” she says. “Isn’t that right?”
“I believed I would be. The man held his gun up to my head, but he didn’t pull the trigger. I’m here by blind luck, more than anything.”
When he stirs his tea, she sees his hand is shaking. She can smell the drink coming off him and guesses what it must mean. She is touched to see him like this—reduced and made vulnerable—when before he has always tried so hard to be stern and sure.
“You’re wondering why I took you away from your work to tell you all this, I suppose,” he says. “Asking yourself what difference it makes.”
“You’ve seen a terrible thing,” she says. “A man killed right in front of your eyes.”
“When we talked before, I had the feeling you were someone I could trust. You’ve lost your brother, and I’ve lost my wife. It’s not the same thing, I know that, of course. Not the same thing at all, but perhaps not so very different either.”
She shrugs and offers him a guarded smile.
“It can’t be changed. None of it can be changed. It must be suffered, that’s all. That’s what my mother tells me every day, and she’s right.”
“But better not to suffer it alone. If possible. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Of course,” she says. “A trouble shared.”
They look at each other for a moment across the table, then O’Connor looks away. It’s raining outside, and the light coming through the window is murky and spare.
“What will you do now?” she asks him. “If you’ve given up your post with the police. Where will you go to?”
He shakes his head as if she has asked him the wrong question.
“I wish I could have helped you with that money,” he says. “That fifty pounds you needed. I wish I could’ve done more.”
“That doesn’t matter now,” she says. “We’ll manage somehow, I’m sure.”
He nods, then sighs and rubs his face.
“I can still help you, Rose,” he says. “If you’ll let me. There are other ways. Better ways. We can help each other if we want to. Don’t you see?”
He reaches for her hand across the table, grips it for a moment, then lets it go again.
Rose looks down at the bland surface of her half-drunk cup of tea. Twin dots of crimson appear on her cheekbones. She shakes her head, then looks back at him but doesn’t answer.
He wonders if he has made a mistake already, misunderstood something vital. He has never been clever when it comes to women, except for Catherine. And even with Catherine, he made blunders, was forgetful, took things the wrong way as often as not.
“It’s marriage that I mean,” he says.
“I know what you mean.”
There is a pause as O’Connor looks at Rose, and Rose looks across the room. She wonders why she is so surprised by his offer, why she didn’t see it coming and prepare herself better.
“What do you think of me?” he asks.
She takes a moment to gather herself before answering.
“That’s no kind of question,” she says.
“Tell me.”
“I think you’re a kind man and clever and quite handsome, but sad as well. And I think you’re very upset about that terrible murder you saw, and you’ve been up all night, and you’ve taken a drink, and now you don’t even understand what you’re saying to me.”
“I do understand what I’m saying.”
“How would we live if we were married? Where would we go?”
“Wherever you wanted to go.”
“I can smell the drink coming off you, Jimmy.”
“That’s nothing,” he says. “Really. Just something to steady my nerves.”
She shakes her head.
“I have to get back to my work now, or they’ll get angry and dock me the time.”
As they stand up together, the teacups rattle in their saucers, and the chair legs scrape against the floor. O’Connor looks confused, upset, and Rose feels sorry for him despite his clumsiness.
“Will you think on it, at least?” he asks.
“Come to see me next Sunday after mass,” she says. “Come to the house. My mother sleeps in the afternoon, so we can talk then without being disturbed.”
“If you don’t want it, I understand. I won’t blame you.”
“Come on Sunday, please,” she says. “That’ll give me time to think.”
* * *
—
In the afternoon, he goes back to the detective office and returns Barton’s pistol to the gun safe. A little later, while he is sitting at a table in the recreation room writing out his letter of resignation, Fazackerley sees him there and walks briskly across. He waits for O’Connor to look up before he begins to speak.
“What time did Peter Rice leave the room above O’Shaughnessy’s shop?” he says. “And where did he go to afterward? Wherever it was, I’m assuming you must have followed him there.”
“I don’t know where he went or when he left. I wasn’t watching.”
“You took over from Barton. He just told me all about it. He says you told him I’d sent you. You also took his gun away from him.”
“I only stayed in the chemist’s until nine o’clock, then I went to the Old Fleece for a drink. I was intending to go back to the chemist’s, but I never did.”
“So there was no one watching all the rest of the night? Stephen Doyle could have appeared and done a jig in the street outside and we’d be none the wiser?”
“You might ask the chemist fellow what he saw.”
“Where were you, Jimmy?”
“It doesn’t matter where I was. I’m resigning from my post now, so that’ll be the end of it.”
He shows him the letter and Fazackerley reads it and swears and gives it back. His face is red with rage.
“If that bastard Doyle gets away from us, it’s on your conscience now,” he says.
“There’s a good deal on there already. I’m not sure you’ll find much extra room.”
He can hear Fazackerley breathing hard beside him, but he doesn’t look up. He finishes the letter and signs and folds it.
“Will you give this to Maybury for me?” he says. “I’ll write another one to Dublin Castle later.”
Fazackerley turns the letter over in his hands.
“You don’t need to do this, Jimmy,” he says. “You made a bad mistake all right, but we can find some way around it. If you write a report to say you were there watching all night, I’ll sign it, and we’ll forget about the rest.”
O’Connor shakes his head.
“I asked Rose Flanagan to marry me this morning. She said she’d think on it and give me an answer next week. If she
says yes, we’ll go back to Dublin together. I’ll find another job there.”
Fazackerley stares at him, then closes his eyes and draws his hands slowly down his cheeks as if applying an unguent.
“Rose Flanagan?” he says quietly. “Tommy Flanagan’s sister?”
“It’ll be two years come April since Catherine died,” O’Connor explains. “Two years is long enough. I have to start again now.”
CHAPTER 22
Glasgow. The Clyde.
As the ship moves away from the quayside, the crowded underdecks are filled with the cries of tightly swaddled infants and the smells of saltfish, sweat, and sauerkraut. Stephen Doyle stands alone among the ragged swell of wide-eyed transients—Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Poles—and remembers himself, a boy of barely thirteen, leaving Ireland for the first time with the houses and the harbor wall of Kingstown shrinking behind him and the empty gray sea ahead getting bigger and bigger every moment. His parents and three brothers were all dead from the typhus and he was filled up to the brim with grief and fear, yet he knew enough not to let it show. If you keep your weaknesses hidden, give them neither light nor air, then soon enough that childish part of you dies and all you are left with is strength. That was the lesson he learned in his youth—that you must murder the softness in yourself, smother it in its cradle, because if you don’t, then you will pay the price later on.
* * *
—
He should have killed James O’Connor on Milk Street when he had the chance. He knows that now. So what stopped him? Was it a misjudgment, or something else? That was a clever lie O’Connor told about Peter Rice, and it took some nerve to tell it with a gun pressed against his forehead. He could have killed him afterward, he should have. There was no reason not to, but, when the moment came, he held back. Something in the man’s eyes, he thinks now, or in his face perhaps, some shade or sadness that gave him pause. Hard to believe. Strange to think of it. How many men has he killed before in his life, pleading sometimes, praying, weeping, begging him on their knees for mercy, without even a second’s hesitation? Next time he will know better, though. If their two paths ever cross again, if the opportunity repeats, he won’t make the same mistake.
CHAPTER 23
Next morning close to noon, as O’Connor dozes on his bed on George Street, with a volume from the lending library lying open on his chest, there is a hard knocking on the front door and Mrs. Walker, grumbling, shuffles along the hallway to see who it could be. When O’Connor hears the familiar voice, he puts his jacket on and goes downstairs. Fazackerley, standing in the doorway, nods at him but doesn’t smile. Whatever friendship they had is in abeyance now.
“They need you over at the Town Hall,” he says. “Maybury was dismissed from his post yesterday and Palin’s resigned this morning. There’s a new fellow just come up from London and he wants to pick your brains.”
A cab is waiting for them at the corner. The driver is bundled against the cold and steam is rising from the horse’s back and flanks. On the drive to the Town Hall, Fazackerley explains that the men come up from London are arrogant and secretive, and no one knows what they want or what they’re thinking.
“What did you tell them about me?” O’Connor asks.
“I told them you’d handed in your resignation yesterday afternoon, and you were no longer a serving detective so there was no cause to bring you in, but they insisted anyway.”
“That’s all?”
“They know about the fight with Sanders. And they talked to Walter Barton already, I believe.”
“You think they’re looking around for a scapegoat?”
“They might be. If they can’t find Stephen Doyle, they’ll need something else for sure. If I were you, I’d stick to the bare facts. Keep your famous opinions to yourself.”
O’Connor nods, then takes a flask from his pocket and drains it.
They sit in silence after that. Through the fogged windows the world outside comes and goes like slides in a magic lantern show. They are nearly at King Street when O’Connor speaks again.
“Do the new fellows from London know about Michael Sullivan?”
“I told them about Michael, but what’ll happen to him now that Maybury’s gone, I couldn’t say.”
“They should honor Maybury’s bargain, that’s only right.”
“That’s what they should do, but whether they will or not, who knows?”
O’Connor shakes his head. He remembers Michael sleeping those two nights on the bedroom floor. The grainy, fermented smell of him and the steady rasp of his breathing. Of all the sins on his head, colluding with Maybury to turn that boy into a spy might yet be the worst of them.
“You’ll need to be the one who talks to him now, instead of me. Do you remember the sign we use for a meeting?”
“A chalk mark by the lamppost on Long Millgate. I remember it.”
“You tell him to be careful when you see him. Not to take any more chances.”
“I might say the very same to you.”
* * *
—
The man from London is short and heavyset with sloping shoulders and a thick, bullish neck. His dark hair is oiled sideways, and his newly razored jowls are pink and damp as sausage meat. His name, he says, is Inspector Robert Thompson and he reports direct to Colonel Percy Feilding, head of the Special Investigative Unit.
“You’ll know Colonel Feilding’s reputation as a Fenian hunter from your time in Dublin, I suppose.”
O’Connor nods. He remembers the name.
“The colonel will remain down in London, but I’m here in his place. I’ll be in charge of the Detective Division until they find a more permanent replacement for Superintendent Maybury.”
They are seated in Maybury’s old office. The room is warm and smells of cigar smoke and old sweat. There are boxes and papers piled up on every available surface.
“I resigned my post yesterday,” O’Connor says. “I believe Sergeant Fazackerley explained.”
“And if you hadn’t resigned so promptly, you would almost certainly have been dismissed,” Thompson says. “That’s what he told me.”
He picks up a sheet of paper from the pile in front of him and reads from it.
“Drunk on duty, assaulting a fellow officer, disobeying a direct order, taking a firearm without permission.”
He puts the paper down and looks at O’Connor.
“That makes it sound like something bigger than it was,” O’Connor says.
“Is that so?”
O’Connor nods. It is best to say as little as possible, he thinks. The more he says, the longer they will keep him here.
“Tell me what happened when Frank Malone was killed.”
“You can read it all in my report. It’s somewhere among those papers, I’m sure.”
“What did Stephen Doyle say to you exactly?”
“He asked me who the traitor was and I told him it was Peter Rice.”
“You think he believed you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But he didn’t shoot you.”
“No. If he’d have shot me, I expect I’d be dead.”
“So he must have believed you?”
“Perhaps.”
“He could have shot you anyway, of course. Even if he did believe you. That would have been safer all around. No witnesses.”
“He’s not that kind of man.”
“Not that kind of man?” Thompson looks surprised. He puts his pen down and leans forward a little. “Then what kind of a man is he? In your opinion, I mean?”
O’Connor hesitates.
“I couldn’t really say.”
“You spoke to him face-to-face. What was that like?”
“I thought I was going to be killed. I was sure of it.”
Thompson nods and makes a c
areful note, as if the answer interests him.
“He held that gun up to your head, but he didn’t kill you, so whatever you said to him, it must have been the right thing to say.”
“I already told you what I said.”
“The man’s a murderer, a pitiless assassin. Yet when he has you at his mercy, he lets you go.”
“He was there to kill the mayor, not me.”
“Is it because you’re both Irish? Is that it? Did he hear the brogue and change his mind?”
O’Connor smiles at the idea.
Thompson’s face darkens. He looks suddenly enraged.
“A man’s dead and you sit there smiling,” he says.
“I know what happened. That’s not why I’m smiling.”
Thompson gazes back at him without answering, as if challenging him to speak again, but O’Connor stays quiet.
“A policeman is dead,” Thompson continues eventually, “and the man who murdered him appears to have escaped scot free. I’m new to the city, so perhaps there’s something I’ve missed. But I’m wondering how that could have happened exactly. I’m wondering who helped him get away.”
“It would be easy enough to escape from Manchester if they had any kind of plan in place. We can’t check every road and railway station. It’s impossible.”