A Hunt in Winter

by Conor Brady

  When the train arrived at the Westland Row terminus they had taken a cab that dropped Swallow at the Castle before bringing Maria home to Thomas Street. The city was quiet with few pedestrians other than those going to or coming from Sunday morning religious services. The bells of Christ Church started to toll the hour of ten o’clock as the cab halted outside Exchange Court.

  ‘You’re rightly in time for the conference,’ the duty man at the public office told him. ‘Commissioner Harrel and Chief Mallon are just gone in.’

  Swallow tried to remember when last he had seen the commissioner attend a crime conference at Exchange Court.

  The parade room was full. Every seat was occupied. G-men sat on desks and in window alcoves while uniformed constables lined the walls. The air was heavy with the smell of sweat and tobacco and tired men. Mallon took the rostrum at the end of the room, flanked by Commissioner Harrel in full uniform. The chief’s face showed strain and tension. And Harrel seemed impatient, tapping his right hand repeatedly on his knee. The divisional superintendents, A to F, sat in the front row before the rostrum. ‘Duck’ Boyle, red-eyed and bleary from the night before, looked as if he might slip from his chair.

  Mallon saw Swallow enter the parade room and gestured to him to come forward to the front. Harrel moved to the rostrum. The room fell silent. Swallow let his gaze rove across the rows of faces. There were veteran sergeants and young beat men, hardened crime detectives and buckshee volunteers—uniformed men willing to work in plain clothes on lower pay in the hope of promotion to permanent detective duties.

  ‘Good morning, men,’ Harrel began. ‘I’m not here to direct this investigation. I’m not a detective. You have officers much more skilled than I in this kind of thing. Like Chief Superintendent Mallon here.’

  The commissioner was an accomplished speaker, pitching his words so they could be heard even at the back of the room.

  ‘I do not need to tell you that we are now faced with a situation of the utmost gravity, and that the Dublin Metropolitan Police now faces a considerable challenge. Two women are dead, brutally murdered. A third has escaped with her life but has suffered severe injuries. My message to you comes from the chief secretary himself. No effort is to be spared to keep the streets of the city safe. And the pursuit of the person or persons responsible for these outrages will not abate until they are made amenable.’

  A murmur of agreement rippled across the room.

  ‘I am afraid that this will require very considerable sacrifices from members of the force at all levels,’ Harrel continued. ‘With immediate effect, all leave is cancelled other than compassionate leave for the death or grave illness of an immediate family member. Patrols are to be increased in the hours of darkness. I am instructing all superintendents to release members from clerical and other duties in order to get the greatest numbers out on the streets. Officers on duty will exercise stop and search powers under the Dublin Police Act to the maximum. I will personally make random checks on selected patrol books to ensure that this instruction is being complied with. If there are those who believe they can prowl the streets with impunity, wreaking violence on the population, we will make them think otherwise.’ He paused. ‘I shall now ask Detective Chief Superintendent Mallon to bring you up to date on the latest developments and to outline further steps to be taken in these investigations.’

  Mallon’s voice was heavy with exhaustion. Swallow guessed that he had no sleep after leaving the wedding celebration.

  ‘Men, a lot of you are tired, like myself, after a long night. You’ve heard what the commissioner has said. I’d like to stress that this job is going to be based on the fullest co-operation between uniformed and detective branches. We need every man in uniform we can get on the streets at night until we crack this case. And we need every detective working flat out, following every clue we have. As to those clues, we have a few. Constable C35 Pat Cummins encountered a tall, well-built man hurriedly leaving Chapel Court at around the time we believe that Ellen Byrne was beaten to death. He endeavoured to restrain him but was unable to keep up with him in the fog. We don’t know if we’re dealing here with one assailant or with a number, or if there’s any connection between the three attacks on women in the past week. But for what it’s worth, Debbie Dunne also describes her attacker as a big man. Now I know that’s not very precise, but it does narrow the field somewhat.

  ‘So,’ he gestured to a file on the rostrum, ‘we’ve got a list of every known violent offender against women in the city, compiled during the week by G-Division. We’re going to take each and every one of these characters and we’re going to bring them in for questioning as to their whereabouts on the three dates and times of the attacks. We’ll allocate the jobs as soon as this conference is ended. Now, are there any questions?’

  A young, red-haired constable, his back to the parade room wall, raised a hand.

  ‘Sir, if you please. 22C, Constable Edwards, Store Street. The word is that Cummins says there was somethin’ very unusual about the man he encountered. Is that for public knowledge?’

  Mallon shook his head.

  ‘No. I know what you’re talking about, but for the moment we’re keeping that confidential. I don’t want it going to the press.’

  He glared across the room.

  ‘And that goes for everyone here. Whatever you may have heard about whatever Constable Cummins saw, or thought he saw, it’s not to pass your lips. If it appears in any newspaper, believe me, I know every editor and reporter in this city and I’ll find out who’s been talking. He’ll be out on his ear before nightfall, I promise you.’

  One of Mallon’s clerks started to allocate the jobs from the file of frequent offenders. Mallon nodded to Swallow.

  ‘We’ll use your room. Bring Mossop, Feore and Doolan.’

  ‘What’s all that about, chief?’ Swallow asked when they had climbed the stairway to the first-floor quiet of the crime inspector’s office.

  Mallon threw himself wearily into a chair.

  ‘Lafeyre will be here in a while to fill us in. He’s had Nellie Byrne down to the morgue for a post-mortem. The room was like a wreck. Apart from the blood on the floor, on the walls, on the inside of the door, everywhere, it was clear the place had been tossed. Whoever killed Ellen Byrne seems to have been searching for something in particular. I’d have said she put up a mighty struggle around the room.’

  ‘What was the young bobby from Store Street saying back there?’ Swallow asked.

  Mallon gestured to Stephen Doolan.

  ‘You tell Inspector Swallow about it. You seem to know the story.’

  Doolan sighed.

  Swallow nodded a silent good morning to Harry Lafeyre as he entered the room.

  ‘35C Pat Cummins isn’t the fittest man in the force,’ Doolan went on. ‘He’s within an ace of retirement, overweight, drinks and eats too much, and he’s as slow as Findlater’s clock.’

  ‘I talked to him at the scene,’ Lafeyre said. ‘I think he’s probably suffering from diabetes. He shouldn’t be on outdoor duties at all in my view.’

  ‘Whatever the case,’ Doolan went on, ‘he says he tried to catch up with this individual but he lost him in the fog. Didn’t get much sight of him for most of the way, but he got one good look at him under the street lamp at the Gloucester Diamond.’

  Mallon shrugged.

  ‘Tell Inspector Swallow what Cummins 35C says about this fellow.’

  Doolan looked momentarily embarrassed.

  ‘He said he thought he’d seen him before. He couldn’t say where or when. But he’s got a notion that he might be a policeman.’

  Monday November 12th, 1888

  Chapter 22

  The superintendents of the DMP’s six uniformed divisions worked their men hard in the weeks that followed the murder of Ellen Byrne, alias Nellie Sweet, in her room at Chapel Court.

  Hundreds of individuals were stopped, searched and questioned in the hours of darkness under the provisions of the Dublin
Police Act in the winter hunt across the city. Most of them were known to the constables and the sergeants as petty criminals, vagrants, beggars or layabouts. All were questioned closely. Some, who were unable to give a full account of themselves, or who aroused suspicion for some other reason, were arrested and handed over to G-Division detectives for further interrogation. But the interviews yielded nothing more than a few tip-offs about stolen property and petty crimes in the planning.

  The policemen worked double shifts, putting in four hours of day duty before or after the eight-hour night shift. Then the workload started to take its toll in the bitter weather. Older men went down first, with chills and chest colds. Then some of the less robust younger men started to succumb. Two cases of frostbite were reported from the C-district, where the freezing east wind whipped across the streets from the bay. The depot hospital at Kevin Street quickly filled with the sick and the exhausted.

  There were some gains. Larcenies and housebreaking were reduced with the extra policing presence on the streets. Criminals stayed at home at night or drank in the public houses, unwilling to risk being grabbed none-too-gently out of the darkness by ill-tempered DMP men, only too glad to have an excuse to return with a prisoner to the warmth of their station.

  Teams of G-men and buckshees interviewed all of Ellen Byrne’s known associates and clients. None of the working girls on Gloucester Street had seen anyone who might match the description given by Constable 35C of a tall man, much less one who looked like a policeman. None of her regular clients could be placed anywhere near her address on the night she died.

  Pat Cummins, the C-Division constable who had encountered the man fleeing from the scene of Ellen Byrne’s murder, had been admitted to the hospital at the Kevin Street depot on Lafeyre’s recommendation. Swallow and Mossop went to interview him in his hospital bed.

  ‘So you think the man you saw was a policeman?’ Swallow said. ‘But you didn’t recognise him.’

  Cummins’s face twisted in anguish.

  ‘I know I’ve seen him before. I just can’t say where or when. Just for some reason I thought to myself, he’s a “polisman.” But don’t ask me for a name.’

  ‘Describe him, then,’ Mossop prompted him.

  ‘He was big, athletic. Maybe thirty, maybe thirty-five years. Very agile.’

  ‘Clean-shaven?’ Swallow asked. ‘Or bearded?’

  ‘Hard to say in the darkness. It was more an impression.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Swallow said doubtfully. ‘Look, when you’re rested and feeling better we’ll ask you to visit the various divisions around the city. It might be that you’ll spot your man.’

  Swallow and Mossop were present for Ellen Byrne’s funeral Mass on the Tuesday at St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral on Marlborough Street. It was well attended by working girls from the brothels around Montgomery Street and Gloucester Street, perhaps a score in all. There was no sign of any family. The other girls told detectives that her parents were dead, but that she sometimes spoke about a sister who lived in Wicklow.

  Later in the day, after that information had been passed to the RIC, who policed the countryside out of Dublin, the sergeant at Roundwood, a small village in rural County Wicklow, made the connection, identifying the sister. A constable had been despatched to the smallholding in the Wicklow Mountains, where she lived with her sheep-farmer husband and a string of children. When the constable stated his business and disclosed his grim news she told him that she did not want to know about her sister and showed him the door.

  The funeral Mass was swift and without trimmings. The elderly celebrant mumbled his way through the Latin prayers. There was no distribution of Communion and no homily. Swallow surmised that the decision not to distribute Communion was dictated by the assumption that many among the congregation, and certainly all of the working girls, were sinners and not in the state of grace. At the end of the Mass the priest descended from the altar, hurriedly sprinkled the coffin with holy water and retreated to the sacristy.

  The only funeral attendee of professional interest to Swallow was Charlie Vanucchi, the acknowledged leader of the Dublin criminal fraternity since the death of Ces ‘Pisspot’ Downes, who had run her crime ring from her house on Francis Street. She had earned the unflattering soubriquet from her lethal use of a chamber pot on her mistress’s skull when the lady discovered her stealing silverware from her fine house on Merrion Square.

  In the custom of policemen who need to see and note any significant attendees, the G-men took a vantage point from where they could survey the entire church. Vanucchi nodded agreeably as he passed their pew. The unmistakably Neapolitan features of the young man by his side marked him as being another family member. He wore the same fine woollen coat as the older man. Swallow noted that they wore similar, finely crafted shoes.

  ‘The youngest of the brood,’ Mossop whispered unnecessarily in Swallow’s ear. ‘Tony’s supposed to be the best pickpocket west of Liverpool.’

  The working girls from around Montgomery Street and Gloucester Street had collected enough money to give Nellie a decent burial at Mount Prospect cemetery at Glasnevin, sparing her the indignity of a pauper’s grave. The day was cold but dry. After the elderly priest had concluded the graveside obsequies, which were as perfunctory as the requiem Mass earlier, Charlie Vanucchi and his son walked across to where Swallow and Mossop stood on the gravel pathway. There were no unnecessary introductions.

  ‘What brings you here, Charlie?’ Swallow asked. ‘I didn’t know you were connected.’

  ‘I’m not, Mr Swallow. Nellie was good to Ces.’

  ‘Nellie? Good to Ces?’

  Vanucchi shrugged.

  ‘She stayed with her over in Francis Street when she was close to the end. Ces couldn’t have had better care if she was her own daughter. I’d have set her up, looked after her, like. But she was too proud. So . . . here’s where she ended. I’m just here out of respect to Ces.’

  ‘This girl didn’t work for Ces in Francis Street using the name Nellie Byrne,’ Mossop said knowledgeably. ‘We knew everyone in that house. No Byrnes.’

  Vanucchi grinned.

  ‘Very thorough on the detail as usual, Mr Mossop. You’re right. She was Helena Moyles when she came into the city from Wicklow. She started callin’ herself Mrs Byrne after she took up with a soldier of that name out of the Royal Barracks. They weren’t married, and he cleared off to India leavin’ her in the family way. The child died anyway.’

  Swallow nodded. He could fit scores of young women’s names to the same story.

  ‘Helena Moyles,’ Mossop said thoughtfully. ‘I remember that name all right. She must have been the only person ever in that house without a criminal record. Any word out on the streets who might have done it?’

  Vanucchi shrugged again.

  ‘Some disgruntled client. A maniac. Maybe some fellow who’s imitatin’ this Jack the Ripper character across the water.’

  ‘You making any inquiries, Charlie?’ Swallow asked. Not infrequently in his experience, the city’s criminal network was ahead of the police intelligence system.

  ‘Sure. First thing I did when I heard. But it’s got nothin’ to do with any o’ my lads. She was just a poor girl makin’ a livin’.’

  ‘If you hear anything, you’ll let us know.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Swallow. Apart from likin’ the girl, it’s a terrible thing for Dublin to have this sort of thing happen. God knows, there’s enough trouble down on this poor country as it is.’

  Vanucchi was an occasional informant for Swallow. His criminal motivation being purely financial, he viewed all Fenians, Land Leaguers, Home Rulers, Gaelic revivalists and the like with something between bafflement and contempt. When information came his way, as it frequently did, on their activities, he considered it a commodity readily tradable for favours from G-Division. A blind eye turned here. A charge overlooked there. Charlie Vanucchi’s runners and bagmen sometimes wondered how he seemed to be able to get them out of difficulties
with the police, at least on occasion, and generally on less serious charges.

  ‘You’re absolutely right, Charlie,’ Swallow agreed. ‘We have enough troubles as it is.’

  Chapter 23

  The investigation into the murder of Alice Flannery had ground to a halt. Geoffrey Bradley, the teacher from Synge Street School named by Dan Flannery as the witness who had met him on Huband Bridge, was questioned by Mossop and Vizzard. He confirmed Flannery’s claim that he was a mile away from the murder scene shortly before midnight.

  It was not impossible that he might have managed to be back at Blackberry Lane at the time his sister was attacked, but he would have had to sprint or take a cab. Every driver who had been working that night was questioned. None remembered picking up a fare around Huband Bridge. Residents of the houses that fronted the canal between Portobello and Huband Bridge were visited. Nobody recalled seeing a running man.

  Father Cavendish’s sick-call alibi was persuasive, if not watertight. But a second thundering letter to Commissioner Harrel from Archbishop Walsh ruled out further questioning of the young curate without first securing new evidence and clearing it through the commissioner’s office. The affront to one of God’s anointed would be raised in the Dublin City Council and at Westminster by Catholic representatives, Walsh threatened.

  Swallow, Mossop and Feore re-interviewed the male employees of the New Vienna restaurant. Apart from Werner, the head chef, the sommelier and the professional waiters, they were either recent arrivals from the continent or casual workers doing menial jobs in the still-room or the wash-up. Those who knew Alice Flannery described her as quiet, private and keeping to herself. It seemed she had no friends among them, but no enemies either. None of them knew anything of her personal life. If she had a beau, or any relationship, they never heard it mentioned.