In the Dark River

by Conor Brady

  ‘You are Mr Roland Ponsonby, of course.’ The young man clapped him on the shoulder and smiled broadly.‘I’ve been waiting for you. Welcome to Madrid. I’m sure it will be a very successful visit for your business.’

  Pigott disliked him instantly.

  ‘And what business am I supposed to be in … exactly?’

  ‘Oh, that’s a matter for yourself, Roland.’

  The grin broadened.

  ‘I’d say you’d easily pass as a buyer. A merchant. Let’s say you’re here to find suppliers for good wine. You’d know a bit about that, wouldn’t you?’

  He winked knowingly.

  ‘Who are you? Who do you work for?’ Pigott asked testily. He found himself greatly irritated by the young man’s tone of familiarity.

  ‘Oh, call me Brown or Black or White or Grey, perhaps. Any one of them will do. And I work for the same people you do. Or did, in London, until the other day. We … ah … solve problems for Her Majesty’s government, as you’ve gathered. And just now, Roland, you’re a problem.’

  He led Pigott to a waiting cab.

  ‘The hotel we’ve got for you is comfortable enough. It’s not the very best. But we don’t want you running into anyone who might recognise you. Just keep out of sight until we know it’s safe to show yourself. They’ve issued a warrant in London for your arrest and they’re very serious about finding you. With any luck, they think you’re still in Paris.’

  ‘I want to get back to Dublin as soon as I can,’ Pigott said quietly. ‘I’ve two young boys who need their father. And I have business interests …’

  The young man’s grin had vanished. His expression was tense.

  ‘Look, I’m only a small cog in a very big wheel, Mr … ah … Ponsonby. But I think you’d better understand the trouble you’re in. As I read the wires, you led the government to believe you had evidence that would fix this fellow Parnell. They want him dealt with. You took their money, even though they’ll always deny that, of course. They looked after you, and then it turns out that what you’ve sold them is a pathetic forgery. So, they’re going to throw you to the wolves. They have to. They can’t be seen to be complicit in perjury. So your goose is cooked, Roland. And if you go back to Ireland they’ll nab you in an instant. That wouldn’t suit you and it wouldn’t suit my bosses either.’

  He opened the cab door.

  Pigott stepped up to the footplate and took his seat. The man did not attempt to join him but leaned through the lowered window.

  ‘Now, we know that the last thing my bosses want is for you to be brought back in handcuffs to give evidence that would embarrass them. So, my job, along with my colleagues, is to keep you out of reach. You’d be best to accept that you won’t see Dublin for a long time. And if you do, it’ll be through the bars of a prison van. Now, we’ll get you settled into your hotel. The driver knows where you’re going. We’ll take care of the charges for your room and your meals and here’s some pesetas to allow you to have a little drink or whatever you like.’

  He handed Pigott an envelope through the window.

  ‘Good day, Mr Ponsonby. Enjoy your visit.’

  The Hotel Los Embajadores was a parody of its pretentious name. The tiny room he was allocated on the third floor was dingy and dark with an odour of decay. The fare in the dining room was plentiful but consisted mainly of stewed vegetables and pork, with cured fish as an occasional alternative. The wine was dry and vinegary. None of the staff and none of his fellow guests who seemed to be, in the main, commercial travellers, could speak any English. Since the only thing to do was to drink in one or other of the bars or cafes nearby, his funds had run low very quickly.

  He was too drowsy from the brandy to notice the two men sitting in the lobby when he got back to the hotel that afternoon. They stood, hats in hand, as he came towards them.

  ‘Señor … Pon … son … bee? A word with you please, if we may.’

  The man’s English was heavily accented and each syllable was articulated slowly and deliberately.

  Pigott’s fuddled brain told him this was not good news.

  ‘Yes … that is my name … Ponsonby … of course.’

  His companion dug in his pocket and produced a folded sheet of off-white paper. He dangled it in front of Pigott’s face. He could see a crown embossed at the top of the page.

  The first man cleared his throat.

  ‘Señor Pon … son … bee, I am Subteniente Vargo of the Guardia Civil,’ he said slowly, as if remembering lines he had rehearsed very carefully. ‘I am to ask that you will accompany us to our headquarters.’

  ‘May I … may I inquire why?’

  ‘I am not at liberty, Señor, to discuss this. All I can tell you is that my superiors are acting on a request from the Embassy of Great Britain here in Madrid. Can you please now step outside? We have a carriage in the street.’

  Suddenly the fog of alcohol was gone and Pigott understood with immediate clarity. The unhappy freedom that he had travelled so far to secure was threatened. This was not what his protectors at the Special Irish office in Scotland Yard had promised him. If the British Embassy was involved it meant that a decision had been taken at the highest levels to bring him back to punish him in public. It was decision time.

  ‘Very well,’ he told Vargo. ‘But I would like to shave and put on a fresh shirt. May I have a few minutes?’

  The policeman nodded.

  ‘Of course. We shall wait here.’

  He climbed the stairs to his room to where he knew the Webley lay in the drawer by the bedside. There was no need to check it. He had kept it loaded since leaving London.

  He sat on the side of the bed. He had the gun. He had just a little money. It was decision time. His mind went to Dublin. To his two sons. To the better days and the nights of good food and drink with roistering friends. He could probably find a way out through the back of the hotel. But what then? Where would he go? How could he survive without money or friends to rely on?

  A floorboard squeaked noisily outside his door. He heard men speaking softly but urgently in the corridor. One voice was English. Maybe two. He thought he could hear a key being slipped into the door lock.

  The clerk on duty downstairs at the reception had served as a non-commissioned officer in the Spanish infantry. Conditioned to observe and take note, he was aware that there were men in the lobby waiting for one of the guests. They had been there since mid-morning. It was not his business to know who they were or why they were waiting for Mr Ponsonby, but he had little doubt that they were men of authority rather than Mr Ponsonby’s friends. Earlier, when one of them had yawned and stretched his arms in boredom, he had caught sight of a pistol under the man’s coat. And because he had been a military man himself, when he heard a sharp, reverberating retort from the floor above, the clerk knew that somebody had fired a shot.

  Chapter 1

  Dublin, Tuesday, June 4th, 1889

  Swallow liked June. It was the best-behaved month of the year, he reckoned. Summer in Dublin was generally a travesty of its own name. In more than three decades living in the city he could only remember one summer that had lived up to expectations of blue skies and sunny days. That was two years previously when the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria’s coronation was marked by her loyal Irish subjects, a cohort that by no means extended to the entire population. June 1887 was so hot that the tram tracks buckled outside the Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen’s Green. But mostly his memories of July and August in Dublin were of hanging grey clouds over the Castle’s Lower Yard or, in the days when he was a young constable in uniform, of rain streaming from the rim of his helmet, on to his blue cape.

  The morning was proof that June was the best of it. Maria was still sleeping in their bedroom above Grant’s public house when he left Thomas Street for the Castle just before eight o’clock. The streets were bathed in pale, lemon light, spilling over the rooftops as the sun gained height out on the bay. Unlike other Victorian cities, Dublin had little manufacturi
ng industry, so the air was pure and fresh apart from the faintest tang of hops from the Guinness brewery at St James’s Gate. The various bells in the cathedrals and churches began tolling the hour as he passed the Augustinian Friary at John’s Lane. He could tell them individually and in their sequence. The deep, sonorous peals of Christ Church, the tinny ring of the two St Audoen’s, the metallic thump of St Nicholas’, the flat tone of St Catherine’s, the melodious harmony of St Patrick’s. Christ Church started a moment before the others as if to assert its senior cathedral status. St Patrick’s always seemed to be a chime or two behind. Or was it perhaps that it took the sound a little time to travel up the rising ground?

  The city streets were quiet. No Dublin shop opened its doors before nine o’clock. Business houses and professional offices rarely started their day before ten, while the judges and lawyers across the river in the Four Courts only got down to business at eleven. But since his promotion to detective inspector the previous year, Swallow had adopted a strict regime that would always have him at his desk in the detective office at Exchange Court by half eight. The morning shifts across Dublin’s six uniformed divisions, from the crowded A, around the Liberties, to the comfortable, affluent F, along the southern side of the bay, started at six o’clock. So the sergeants’ reports from the night before would be on his desk. By nine o’clock, when John Mallon, the chief of the detective force, G-division, would arrive, Swallow could fully brief his boss on the state of crime and subversion in the second city of the Empire.

  Although the wealthy south city suburbs of Ballsbridge, Donnybrook, Rathmines and Rathgar had been experiencing an unusual wave of aggravated burglaries and housebreakings over the previous twelve months or so, there was rarely much serious crime. The streets were well supervised by the 1,800 uniformed members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, meticulously patrolling their beats in eight-hour shifts. But there was always plenty of political subversion. The bulk of G-division’s work was taken up with surveillance, gathering intelligence and countering the activities of Fenians, dynamiters, land agitators and radicals, as well as protecting important persons and buildings. The uniformed DMP men went about their patrolling unarmed apart from a short wooden baton. Each of the eighty or so members of G-division however, carried a standard .44 Bulldog Webley revolver at all times.

  He crossed Cornmarket and High Street into Lord Edward Street. After the City Hall, the seat of Dublin Corporation, he turned out of Dame Street into the gloomy alleyway that was Exchange Court. Huddled in against the northern flank of Dublin Castle, the sun never touched its black cobbles or its dull redbrick walls. It was probably the coldest and dampest building in Dublin with an extraordinarily high frequency of respiratory complaints and illnesses among its occupants.

  Pat Mossop, the duty sergeant for the previous night, was sifting a sheaf of papers on the wooden countertop in the public office.

  ‘Morning, Pat. Anything strange or dramatic?’

  Mossop looked tired. The Belfast man had taken a revolver bullet in the chest two years previously while making an arrest on Ormond Quay. Only the speedy action of his colleagues, Swallow among them, in getting him to the nearby Jervis Infirmary had saved his life. His recovery was slow and something less than complete although the police surgeon at the Kevin Street Depot had eventually declared him fit for duty. Swallow’s plan now was to find him a quiet desk job with regular hours to make life easier. But so far, no opportunity had come up. As a fall-back position, he tried to have him rostered as frequently as possible for indoor duty in the public office.

  ‘There’s another aggravated burglary at a big house out in the countryside beyond Rathgar,’ Mossop told him. ‘A place called Templeogue Hill. It’s just in the city area, apparently. Another hundred yards and it wouldn’t be our problem.’

  The boundaries of the Metropolitan policing area had been expanded in the past year as the city suburbs grew. The E-division, headquartered at Rathmines, had been given responsibility for several townlands that had heretofore been policed by the Royal Irish Constabulary, the armed body which formed the model for most of the police forces of the Empire.

  ‘The lads are out there now,’ Mossop said. ‘I’ve only got a preliminary report so far. The house of a Mr and Mrs McCartan. He’s a lawyer and I think he’s involved in various businesses as well. The wife is some sort of an invalid, I gather. According to the sergeant from Rathmines, there were three, maybe four in the job. At least one had a gun. Some sort of revolver, “a big gun,” the maid says. But then again, nobody ever seems to see a small gun.’

  He glanced at his notes.

  ‘They got in the back door around ten o’clock and the intruders roughed them up. The man seems to be fairly badly injured. They kicked the housemaid around but she’s only bruised. They hit the man a few wallops on the head with some sort of a metal bar. He’s not in any danger but the doctor sent him down to Baggot Street Hospital for stitching. There’s a safe in the house and these fellows seemed to be able to pick it or break it easily enough. The lads are trying to get a fix on what was taken but it seems there was a fair bit of cash and jewellery. The householders are fairly shocked, according to the sergeant, not too coherent. The man of the house seems to be in a spitting rage about the local bobbies falling down on their duty and so on. Hard to blame them, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s the tenth one of these jobs now in a year,’ Swallow mused. ‘And the second in, what, three weeks? Second appearance of a gun too.’

  ‘Not even three weeks. More like two and a half since the one down on Anglesea Road.’

  G-division still had no success in identifying a group of three men who had broken into the home of John Healy, an elderly, retired and almost blind businessman in Ballsbridge, threatened him with a gun and knives before making off with cash, silver plate and jewellery.

  ‘Who went out to the scene?’ Swallow asked.

  ‘Shanahan and Keogh. They knocked off duty at ten o’clock but they were having a pint or two in The Brazen Head. They were less than happy to be pulled out and put back to work after a full day shift. But I made it clear I wasn’t asking. I was telling them.’

  It was an all-too-familiar story in G-division. In spite of personnel numbers being increased since the savage murders of the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Undersecretary in the Phoenix Park seven years previously, G-men were frequently obliged to work extra shifts. Rising political tension demanded extra surveillance and protection duty.

  ‘Have they any leads?’

  Mossop shrugged.

  ‘It’s too early, Boss. You know we’ve been watching the gangs closely since these jobs started. The Vanucchis, the Cussens and the Downses mainly. We’ve put a hell of a lot of hours into surveillance and a fair bit of money has gone out to informers, but none of them seem to be involved.’

  Swallow nodded. The Vanucchi gang, headed by Charlie Vanucchi, operated from The Liberties area and were involved in crime that ranged from selling illegal whiskey to organised, large-scale theft on and around the Dublin docks. Vanucchi had inherited most of the criminal empire once controlled by Cecilia Downes, better known as ‘Pisspot Cess,’ who had been the queen of crime in the city for more than twenty years until her death two years previously. She had acquired her unflattering soubriquet due to the fact that as a young girl she had battered the skull of her employer, who had caught her stealing, with a metal chamber pot. A smaller number of her followers had refused to accept Charlie Vanucchi as their boss after her death, so they had reorganised at the western end of The Liberties, under the leadership of Vinnie Cussen, a criminal with a long record for violence. They operated around the Coombe area and had a presence across the river in the red-light district, centred on Montgomery Street. A smaller gang, including two nephews of Cess Downes, had established themselves around the Stoneybatter area.

  ‘I think some of the lads have even put a few bob of their own out to the snouts,’ Mossop added. ‘But they’re hearing nothing on
the street. And none of the old lags have been much on the move. Besides, none of the usual clients carry guns and mostly they aren’t the kind to go lashing out with iron bars unless they had to. Could be there’s some new operators in town, maybe coming in every few weeks from God knows where.’

  Dublin criminals rarely had access to firearms, even though Fenians and other agitators had guns aplenty and usually had no qualms about using them, even against fellow-Irishmen, if they happened to be in the police, the military or the magistracy. By and large the criminal gangs in the inner city tried to avoid the use of violence in their activities. The new suburbs however, now rapidly developing outside the city’s canals, offered tempting targets for housebreakers and burglars. With the City Corporation now firmly in the control of Catholic merchants and tradesmen, affluent Protestants, all strong Loyalists, many of them bankers, businessmen and wealthy professionals, preferred to move out to Rathmines, Ballsbridge, Clontarf, Glasnevin or Drumcondra. They could more happily reside in the new suburbs under town councils that were more likely to be influenced if not wholly controlled by like-minded men.

  ‘Have we any description of these fellows?’ Swallow asked. ‘Height, age, dress, accents?’

  ‘Not yet, Boss. Like I said, the man and the woman are badly shocked. And the maid says they wore masks. But when they’ve recovered a bit and if they think they can remember anything, I’ll arrange for photographs from DCR and we’ll get them to have a look.’

  DCR – the Dublin Criminal Registry – was a showpiece of modern policing methods for the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Housed at Ship Street, behind the Castle, it contained upwards of ten thousand records of persons convicted or suspected of crime. Organised using the new Dewey Decimal system along the lines of a modern library, the staff could locate and retrieve the file of a named suspect in half a minute. Almost all the files opened since 1883 contained photographic images of suspects as well. In the aftermath of the Phoenix Park murders, the DMP and the Royal Irish Constabulary had been among the first police forces in the United Kingdom to be supplied with photographic equipment and with trained staff to operate it.