A Hunt in Winter

by Conor Brady

  Swallow would have liked to have a new suit for the occasion, but with the inquiries into Alice Flannery’s murder there was no time for a fitting at any tailor’s during the week. His best option had been for Carrie to sponge, steam and press the dark-blue three-piece he wore for court appearances. Harry Lafeyre, taking his duties as best man seriously, had volunteered to collect a new silk shirt and bow tie for him. Swallow reckoned he was passable.

  Maria, naturally, had nominated her sister, Lily, to be her bridesmaid. But she had also asked Harriet to act as a second bridesmaid. They took their places in the front pew as Maria detached from her uncle to take Swallow’s arm, stepping forward to kneel in front of the altar. She glanced at Swallow and smiled.

  He thought the ceremony was the most moving and most joyful experience of his life. Lawrence celebrated the nuptial Mass with the Friar Superior and the acolyte echoing the Latin prayers. After the consecration of the bread and wine, Lawrence distributed the white Communion hosts to the congregation, save for Lafeyre, Pat Mossop and his wife, who were Protestant. The friar-organist played Bach’s ‘Jesu, joy of Man’s Desiring’ and Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D’.

  Then they pledged themselves to each other. After Catherine Greenberg’s dramatic exit from Lily’s painting class, Swallow had prudently decided against visiting her family business in Capel Street to procure a ring. Instead he had gone to Weir’s, the recently opened jeweller’s off Grafton Street. He and Maria had agreed that the ring from her first marriage would be transferred to her right hand before the ceremony. Now he placed a new gold band, inset with three small diamonds, on her left hand. He drew the equivalent of two months’ salary from his savings to pay for it.

  Lawrence’s homily was brief. He recalled the marriage at Cana when Jesus changed the water into wine at the request of his Blessed Mother. Jesus approved of marriage, he told them. Nothing could be clearer. Otherwise he would not have performed the miracle. He wanted the couple’s day to be perfect and not ruined by a shortage of wine.

  ‘Jesus is always to hand for married couples,’ he told Swallow and Maria. ‘As he will always be to hand for you in your lives together. All you have to do is reach out to him.’

  When the religious ceremonies were concluded, they withdrew to the sacristy to sign the register, witnessed by Lafeyre and Lily. Lawrence carefully countersigned the registry sheet, adding the letters ‘OSF’ for Order of Saint Francis after his name in ostentatious capitals.

  ‘I’ve little time for the work of government,’ he told them by way of explanation. ‘When I sign the official register I’m an agent of the Crown, whether I like it or not. So that’s my way of letting them know that I’m still not one of them. I belong to my order and to God, not to Dublin Castle.’

  The day outside was darkening when they emerged onto Merchants’ Quay. There were handshakes, congratulations and kisses. Swallow’s mother was not given to shows of emotion. Her relations with her son had been distant, cold almost, over the years since the death of her husband. But she threw her arms first around her son and then around Maria.

  ‘I couldn’t be happier for you both. May you have many, many years of good life together. May God bless you in his goodness.’

  Maria had arranged the wedding breakfast, as it was euphemistically termed, for seven o’clock that evening at Mr Gresham’s Royal Marine Hotel in Kingstown, eight miles out from the city, along the southern shore of Dublin Bay. And Lafeyre had arranged a fleet of six closed cabs to bring the wedding party and their guests to Westland Row, where they would take the six o’clock train for the journey to Kingstown. From there a further fleet of cabs would take them the short distance from the railway station to the hotel.

  It was fully dark by the time they disembarked from the train at Kingstown, and there were flecks of snow in the freezing air coming off the sea. They were glad to reach the warmth of the hotel and the private reception room on the first floor, where sherry, port and, for those who wanted it, warming tea were to be served in the interval before the start of the meal.

  The room buzzed with conversation as they sat to table. Wasn’t Maria beautiful beyond words? Didn’t Swallow look happier than anyone had seen him before? Weren’t the bridesmaids a delight? Father Lawrence’s ceremony and short homily had been so uplifting, had they not?

  Maria had chosen her menu with care, and Mr Gresham’s hotel staff delivered superbly on their responsibilities to their guests. There was consommé de poulet, fortified with Madeira. Next came steamed cod with white sauce, garnished with Dublin Bay prawns. Then the chef presented his pièce de résistance, platters of grilled black Dover sole with a macédoine of fresh vegetables and creamed potatoes. After that came a sirloin of beef, carved in front of the diners according to their preference and served with fresh vegetables and brown roasted potatoes. Then there was strong blue cheese. Swallow did not particularly like it. The last course was a sponge pudding with fruit, soaked in brandy and covered with meringue and ice-cream, a specialty apparently of one of the hotel’s Parisian sous-chefs, who named his creation ‘diplomat pudding’.

  ‘You have done us a great deal of damage, Mrs Swallow,’ the Father Superior said, raising a half-emptied glass of sweet Hungarian Tokay wine after he had finished the sponge pudding. ‘To say that we poor friars are unaccustomed to this kind of fare is an understatement. This will take months of penance.’

  ‘Then I suggest you take the gains with the losses, Father,’ Maria laughed. ‘If you’re going to be doing the penance, enjoy the food and the wine.’

  There had been Gewürztraminer with the soup and the fish, and an excellent Burgundy with the beef. Then, when the last of the ‘diplomat pudding’ was done, the head waiter rolled out a three-tiered wedding cake on a trolley. Meanwhile, his acolytes were serving champagne around the room.

  John Mallon stepped forward and wielded, as if from nowhere, a magnificent silver sabre. He called for silence, and then repeated the call. It took perhaps a minute for the conversations and laughter to be fully hushed.

  ‘Now, dear friends,’ he told the guests. ‘The new Mr and Mrs Swallow will cut their wedding cake with the silver sword, presented to the first chief commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police on the date of its inception fifty years ago. Commissioner Harrel insisted that it should be used on this occasion, and he sends his personal congratulations and warm best wishes for the occasion.’

  There was cheering and clapping around the room. Swallow and Maria stepped forwards, and with hands joined across the hilt of the sword began to carve through the white icing into the rich, dark cake below.

  When every guest was supplied with wedding cake, Harry Lafeyre rose to his feet and tapped his glass with a fork for silence.

  ‘Dear friends, it is my pleasant duty as best man here to propose the toast of the bride and groom. There are no words that I can use to express my happiness and the happiness of my own future wife, Lily, Maria’s sister, at being witnesses to this wonderful event.’

  He raised his glass.

  ‘Joe and Maria are to be together as one. It is their happy destiny. And everyone here wishes them long and happy lives together. I give you the toast of the bride and groom.’

  The room rose as one and clinked glasses in a chorus.

  ‘To the bride and groom. To Maria and Joe.’

  Maria’s Uncle Paddy, already struggling to maintain equilibrium after imbibing the wines, managed a few stammering sentences, proposing the toast of the guests. Then Swallow stood.

  ‘I have a few things to say, as you might expect.’

  There was clapping and cheering from around the room.

  ‘First, I would like to thank you all for being here with Maria and myself on this very special day. I would like to thank Father Lawrence and the Franciscan community for doing the ceremony so wonderfully earlier today. I would like to thank Harry and Lily for being our witnesses. And I would like to thank the staff of this very fine hotel for putting on such a great
banquet here for us.’

  There was more clapping and calls of ‘hear, hear.’

  ‘And it is my pleasurable duty, of course, to propose the toast of the bridesmaids. To Maria’s lovely sister, Lily, and to my own beautiful sister, Harriet, who have so assiduously attended my bride here today. They have added grace and beauty to the occasion.’

  Lily and Harriet blushed, smiled and nodded to acknowledge the compliment. There were whistles and more clapping as the glasses were raised yet again around the room.

  ‘But a thousand times more than anything else, I want to thank Maria for agreeing to be my wife. She is, as you all know, a wonderful woman, and I freely admit I’m not the best catch in the world. I’m well past the first flush of boyhood, and I haven’t exactly trodden a straight pathway through life.’

  ‘A classic understatement,’ Lafeyre interjected, grinning.

  ‘But that, as you will have expected, will now change,’ Swallow responded humorously to Lafeyre’s quip. ‘With Maria and myself united today, our lives are set together for the future. It is my pledge that I will strive with all of my energies and all of my resources to make her future and our future together a happy one. Now,’ he gestured to the doorway, ‘in the adjoining room we can relax, enjoy a drink to help our digestion and have a little entertainment.’

  The anteroom had a blazing turf fire with plenty of soft chairs and settees and a baby grand piano. Maria was insistent that there would be no requirement for the ladies to withdraw to allow the gentlemen to smoke, and the entire party moved as one from the dining room.

  Harry Lafeyre was straight away at the piano as the waiters proffered drinks. There was whiskey, cognac and port wine. A waiter deposited a tray of porter and ale, ready drawn from the barrel, onto a table beside the wall.

  As soon as Lafeyre tinkled the opening notes of Moore’s ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, Pat Mossop was on his feet, singing out the lyrics in a fine baritone voice that belied his fragile frame.

  Next up was Father Lawrence with a rousing rendition of ‘The Minstrel Boy’. Then Maria’s housekeeper, Carrie, recited six couplets from Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’. Elizabeth Mallon proved to have a surprisingly sweet voice as she rendered Mabel’s ‘Poor Wand’ring One’ from The Pirates of Penzance.

  The waiters moved around the happy party, replenishing their drinks. The turf fire blazed in the grate as the northern winter wind, funnelling up from Kingstown Harbour, blew hard against the windows.

  Few of the revellers noticed the G-man who had been assigned to the hotel for John Mallon’s protection slip through the door and cross the end of the room to whisper something urgently into the chief superintendent’s ear as he handed him a sheet of paper. But from where he sat with Maria in the centre of the room, Swallow saw it, and he knew from his boss’s expression that what it told him was not good news.

  Sunday November 11th, 1888

  Chapter 21

  It had been a short honeymoon, Swallow told himself ruefully as he boarded the nine o’clock morning train that would carry him and Maria back to the city.

  It was freezing after the warmth of the hotel, with an icy coating on the carriage windows. As they boarded at Kingstown Station he could see a hoar frost on the granite piers of the great asylum harbour. Behind him, a white dusting of snow topped the peaks that ringed the city to the south, Sugar Loaf, Three Rock, Two Rock, Djouce.

  Swallow’s immediate instinct, when he saw the G-man bring Mallon the dispatch, had been to leave Maria’s side and cross the room to get details of what it might contain. But Mallon glared at him and made a sign to stay where he was. His responsibilities as groom superseded his duties as a policeman this evening.

  The party had wound down with a sense of anticlimax. The G-man’s message, Swallow gathered as the news filtered out through the room, brought details of yet another attack on a woman in the city. He heard Mossop mention Gloucester Street. That was in the red-light district, just north of the river. This time, it seemed, the victim had not been as lucky as Debbie Dunne. Dr Lafeyre would be needed to examine the body of the city’s second murder victim in a week.

  Mallon, Mossop and Feore had abandoned the celebrations and travelled to the scene as swiftly as their cab could make it along the unlit and partly paved road that led along the coast, through Blackrock, Booterstown and Merrion, back into the city.

  Lafeyre and Lily followed shortly. Lafeyre’s intention was to leave Lily to her rooms at Alexandra College and then to visit the murder scene himself. ‘Duck’ Boyle took the view, not wholly unreasonably, that since the case did not concern his E-Division, he would stay on at the Royal Marine for a few more drinks, the cost of which could be added to the wedding party account.

  Rooms had been reserved for the bride and groom and some of the elderly guests, including the friars, Maria’s uncle, Swallow’s mother and her brothers.

  ‘You and Maria should take the night here in the hotel,’ Mallon had told Swallow. ‘Whatever needs to be done, we can do it. We’ll see you at Exchange Court in the morning.’

  ‘What details do we have, chief?’ Swallow asked. He had temporarily detached himself from his bride to accompany Mallon and the others down the staircase to the waiting cab at the hotel door.

  Mallon glanced at the flimsy sheet, torn from the ABC telegraph machine at Kingstown DMP Station a few minutes earlier.

  ‘This isn’t your business tonight, Joe,’ Mallon said firmly. ‘But if you must know, the victim is one Ellen Byrne, twenty-two years old, plying her trade as a lady of the night under the name Nellie Sweet, battered in a kip in Monto. Gloucester Street, to be precise. There’s an inspector from Store Street at the scene, and Shanahan and Collins are gone over from the Castle.’

  Swallow knew the dead woman’s name from the files. Like many of the girls working in the brothels around Montgomery Street she would have adopted a working name that disguised her true identity. Many of them were occasional informants for G-Division, passing on snippets of information picked up from clients. Someone had a gun. Somebody else seemed to have unexplained money. A known criminal had changed his habits. It all fed into the G-Division intelligence machine.

  Ellen or Nellie Byrne was a country girl, Swallow recalled. From County Wicklow, as well as his memory served him. And unusually among working girls in Monto, she was connected with various subversive groups operating in the city. As well as he could recollect she had never been connected to any incident or outrage, but she had come to his notice on a number of occasions as keeping company with men known to be involved in political violence.

  ‘Any witnesses?’ Swallow asked as Mallon stepped into the cab.

  ‘There might be. A beat man says he was nearly knocked down by a fellow flying out of the house. We’ll know a bit more as soon as we get into Exchange Court.’

  Whatever G-Division knew as he and Maria stepped into the train, the morning newspapers appeared to have a good amount of detail. Swallow took a Sunday Sketch and an Express from the newsboy at the station entrance.

  The Sketch had the story across four columns of its main news page.

  ‘Another Dublin Murder’

  ‘Victim a Woman of the Unfortunate Class’

  ‘Constable’s Valiant Efforts in Vain’

  There is consternation in the city with the death of yet another young woman in violent circumstances last night. The victim is Ellen Byrne, aged about 22 years and understood to be a native of County Wicklow.

  The unfortunate woman had lodgings at Chapel Court, Gloucester Street. Her head had received severe lacerations. It was discovered by a neighbour shortly after eleven o’clock last night.

  Police Constable C35 who was on duty in Gloucester Street saw a tall man who is suspected as the assailant leave Chapel Court. The constable sought to restrain him but was incapacitated by a blow to the body and the attacker made good his escape. There was fog in the streets at the hour.

  Police from Store Street attended at
the scene, as did officers from Exchange Court at Dublin Castle. The city Medical Examiner, Dr Henry Lafeyre, visited the scene, as did a police photographic expert.

  The Express had less detail about the murder, but, probably to compensate for dearth of knowledge, Swallow reckoned, reminded its readers in the first paragraph that this was the third assault on women in the city in little more than a week.

  It will be recalled that on Friday night November 2nd last, Miss Alice Flannery, a waitress, was attacked near her home at Blackberry Lane, Rathmines, and sustained injuries which claimed her life some hours later.

  On Friday night, Miss Deborah Dunne, a fishmonger, was attacked near Cardiff Lane on Misery Hill. Although she was badly injured and remains gravely ill in hospital it does not appear that her life is in danger.

  These outrages confirm that the streets of Dublin are no safer than those of London where the so-called ‘Jack the Ripper’ cases, the latest also on Friday, have spread widespread terror among the populace.

  It does not appear that the Dublin Metropolitan Police is any more effective in keeping the streets of the Hibernian capital safe than are their counterparts in London. Nor is the G-Division at Exchange Court, Dublin Castle, any more successful in detecting the perpetrator or perpetrators of these outrages than their vaunted detective colleagues at New Scotland Yard.

  There would be a lot more of the same in the newspapers over coming days, Swallow knew. One murder in Dublin was a news story. Two and an attempted third within a week were sensational, particularly with the East End of London in terror over the Whitechapel murders.