In the Dark River

by Conor Brady

  ‘Anything else happening?’ Swallow asked.

  ‘Apart from that, just a few drunks from a Dutch ship down on the North Wall got into a row with the locals at McDonagh’s up on Gloucester Street. A few black eyes and broken noses but no worse than that. The head man at McDonagh’s saw it brewing and sent the cellar lad running down to Store Street. The bobbies were up there in force fairly quickly and got things under control. The four Dutchmen and three of the local heroes will be in the Bridewell court later. And a bit of traffic from around the country. I was just going to put the routes on your desk.’

  The printed ‘routes’ came through the ABC police telegraph that connected the DMP’s twenty-five stations. It was the most modern communications technology, another beneficial by-product of the Phoenix Park murders.

  The assassins had been under surveillance by G-division earlier in the week of the murders, but information on their plans and their movements had not been circulated through the wider police network. No expense had been spared in strengthening or resourcing the Dublin police in the aftermath of the murders. Extra men were appointed to G-division. More money was made available to recruit informers. The best of equipment, including the ABC system, field cameras and typewriting machines had been provided.

  ‘Anything happening in security or intelligence?’ Swallow asked.

  ‘There is, actually,’ Mossop tapped a file on his desk. ‘Two of the intelligence fellows from the Upper Yard took Dunlop of The Irish Times for dinner at the Burlington last night to pump him for what he knew about Mr Parnell and Mrs O’Shea. He conveniently stopped in and briefed me afterwards.’

  Any mention of the security section that operated from within the office of the Permanent Under-Secretary in the Castle’s Upper Yard, set Swallow’s alarm bells ringing. It had been gradually built up over the past two years as a special agency, separate from the police and G-division, working directly for Charles Smith-Berry, the Assistant Under-Secretary for Security, a man with experience in locations as diverse as Egypt, Mesopotamia and Palestine.

  The English-born Smith-Berry did not conceal his disdain and his distrust of G-division in general and its chief, John Mallon, in particular. He was blunt in his frequent clashes with Mallon, the most celebrated detective in Dublin. He believed that the G-men’s loyalties, as Irishmen on the Crown payroll, were divided. And he believed it was necessary to have a separate cadre of intelligence officers, English, Scottish or perhaps Ulster loyalist, and preferably with a military background, operating as a counterweight to G-division and reporting directly to his office.

  In reality, Mallon acknowledged privately to his senior confidantes, including Swallow, that Smith-Berry was right. The security service saw itself as the instrument of the government’s will. G-division, or at least its senior members, had a different perspective.

  It was the objective of the Westminster government to destroy Parnell and to kill off the campaign to establish Home Rule for Ireland. If Ireland got its own parliament, the logic went, it would split the United Kingdom. And if the United Kingdom split, it would be the beginning of the end for the Empire. Great Britain was the richest nation on the earth because of the profits it made from that empire. From the royal family down to the working men in the industrial cities, its people enjoyed the highest standards of living of any people anywhere on the planet. Smith-Berry’s department in the Upper Yard of Dublin Castle was committed to achieving the aims of its political masters.

  Mallon, on the other hand, took the view that if Parnell were to fall, Ireland would descend into unprecedented violence. As long as the people could be persuaded to believe in political action, the great majority would not want to take up the message of the gunmen and the bombers. But if Parnell’s steadying influence were to be removed, the way would be open for the men of violence to take centre stage. It was a scenario that no committed police officer could countenance. Both as an Irishman and as a policeman, Mallon cared less for the Empire than for the peace and welfare of his own countrymen. And that put G-division and the security department in the Upper Yard at loggerheads.

  The men of G-division were reciprocally disdainful and mistrustful of Smith-Berry’s agents. Mallon ensured that his informants around the city were well rewarded for information about them. Who they were. Where they were billeted. Where they ate and drank. Who they endeavoured to cultivate as their contacts and habitués. Some of them lived in rooms in the Upper Yard. Others stayed in hotels or boarding houses around the Castle. They were tough men, hard drinkers for the most part, keeping to themselves. When they made contacts among the population, they appeared to have access to almost limitless funds to recruit informants. But their understanding of Irish politics and of Irish ways was abysmal. Swallow knew most of them by sight and by the names they used.

  ‘Which of them was it?’ he asked Mossop.

  ‘Reggie Polson and a fellow called McKitterick.’

  Smith-Berry’s men habitually adopted false names. Swallow knew the two agents calling themselves Polson and McKitterick from earlier, terse encounters in joint operations with G-division. Reggie Polson, as he called himself, was ex-army, Swallow could tell. He had an ear for accents. He placed Polson’s origins somewhere in the Home Counties, possibly Berkshire or Buckinghamshire. He guessed him to be about his own age, surmising that he was probably a replacement for the senior agent who called himself Captain Kelly before he was moved out of the security department the previous year. He reckoned that McKitterick was a junior member of the department, probably a former non-commissioned officer.

  Mossop pushed the file across the desk.

  ‘I’ve written it up for you, Boss. It’s all in there, at least as much as I was told earlier.’

  Swallow took the papers and climbed the stairs to the second floor. His rank gave him the privilege of a modest office with a twelve-paned window that afforded a view across the roofs of South Great George’s Street. Apart from the robbery at Templeogue Hill, the crime reports were routine, as Mossop had indicated. But the intelligence of the meeting between Andrew Dunlop of The Irish Times and two security agents from the Upper Yard was disquieting.

  Swallow had collaborated with Dunlop a number of times, as policemen and journalists often did but seldom acknowledged. Even though he worked for the pro-unionist Irish Times, Dunlop’s sympathies lay with the cause of Irish Home Rule and with the man who was leading the struggle to secure it, Charles Stewart Parnell. He was a highly respected journalist, on intimate terms, it was said, with the highest officials of the administration, right up to the Marquess of Londonderry, whom as the Lord Lieutenant, was the Monarch’s representative in Ireland. It was a measure of the naivety of the English intelligence agents working for the Assistant Under-Secretary that they assumed Dunlop had to espouse the same political values as his employers.

  Dunlop had first voiced his political opinions to Swallow at the time of the Maamstrasna murders, the bloody mass-killing of a family named Joyce in Connemara at the height of the Land War. Reporter and policeman had been drinking in a shebeen near Leenaun after the funerals of the five murder victims. The investigation of crime outside of Dublin was the responsibility of the Royal Irish Constabulary. But experienced Dublin crime detectives often travelled to give support to their less-experienced rural colleagues.

  ‘Neither the people who pay you nor those who pay me seem to grasp the reality that if it wasn’t for Parnell there’d be scenes like this every second week in every county across Ireland,’ Dunlop told him, as they drank the rough, illicit whiskey or poitin that was the house’s staple. ‘Politics is a dirty game, but it’s infinitely preferable to the sort of savagery that’s happened here.’

  Dunlop was a Scot, with inherited family memories of the Highland Clearances. He had come to The Irish Times after a successful career in Scottish journalism and then in Fleet Street. He understood the land-hunger that could drive men and women to terrible deeds. And he had grown weary, over many years as a journ
alist, of reporting on the blunders and failures of the authorities in trying to pacify rural Ireland. He was happy to share information with Swallow if he thought it helped G-division to stay a step ahead of the Castle’s intelligence department.

  Swallow opened the intelligence file to read Mossop’s note. Every contact or agent had a code name, so Dunlop’s identity would not appear in the written record. Mossop had, not very imaginatively, allocated Dunlop the name ‘Horseman’ for his long-jawed features.

  Swallow spread the flimsy sheet on the desk.

  To: D/Insp Swallow

  Report from informant ‘Horseman.’ Note taken at Exchange Court, 11.30pm Tuesday, June 4th 1889.

  Informant states he was invited to dine at Burlington Hotel, Trinity Street, this evening by two gentlemen whom he knows to be attached to the security section at the office of the Assistant Under-Secretary at the Upper Yard. They use the names Reggie Polson and Jack McKitterick but H believes these to be aliases. He believes them to be military rather than police. Both speak with English accents.

  They expressed frustration at the difficulties of securing publication of damaging information against Mr Parnell since the suicide of Richard Pigott and his exposure as a perjurer and forger at the Westminster commission last year.

  They invited H to give his views on Mr Parnell’s private life and in particular his relationship with Katharine O’Shea, the wife of Captain O’Shea, formerly Member of Parliament for Clare. The man calling himself Reggie Polson said he was angry at seeing a brother officer humiliated by his wife’s open adultery with Mr Parnell. When H said he had no knowledge of such matters, they offered to furnish him with information that might be published in his newspaper. H said he would be interested to receive such information but he doubted if his editor would allow it to be published on grounds of propriety and that it was not the policy of his newspaper to promulgate scandal.

  Polson said that was all the more reason they wanted this information published in his newspaper. It had a high reputation and what it printed would not be lightly dismissed as a fiction or an invention.

  H asked if they were certain that it would be in the authorities’ best interests to see Mr Parnell destroyed in his reputation. They said it remained the firm conviction of their superiors that if Mr Parnell succeeds in securing Home Rule for Ireland this would be the first break in the structure of the British Empire and that it must be prevented at all costs.

  Polson said it was believed that Captain O’Shea was thinking about breaking his silence on this scandal which had endured for many years. He had told friends that he could not indefinitely tolerate Mr Parnell’s behaviour or his wife’s infidelity. Polson said that if the newspapers were to indicate a wider public knowledge of the scandal, this might encourage Captain O’Shea to act decisively and to seek a divorce through the courts.

  Informant agreed to meet these gentlemen again next week.

  Informant departed Exchange Court at 11.55pm.

  The above for your information.

  Respectfully,

  Patrick Mossop D/Sgt

  Swallow initialled the sheet to indicate that he had read it and returned it to the file folder. When his boss, John Mallon, read it later in the morning he would want to discuss it. Mallon would be unhappy with this development, he knew. The chief of G-division knew very well of the illicit relationship between Parnell and Mrs O’Shea. He knew that when in London or attending Westminster, they lived as man and wife at Eltham, in Kent. That they had three children together and that Katharine’s husband had grudgingly but silently accepted the situation for years, content to hold his seat in parliament, first for County Clare and later for Galway Borough.

  Mallon strongly disapproved of Parnell’s relationship with Mrs O’Shea. As a devout Catholic, he told Swallow more than once, he could not do otherwise. But he also understood that it was the influence of the haughty, Wicklow land-owner that kept violence and outrage in check across the country.

  ‘Murder and adultery are both grave sins,’ Mallon had told Swallow solemnly. ‘Our job is to prevent the first one. It’s down to the bishops and the priests to deal with the other. But they support us in what we do. So they’re entitled to expect our support in what they do.’

  Swallow chose diplomatically not to argue. He too was Catholic, but he was not particularly concerned at Parnell’s domestic arrangements. Or anybody else’s for that matter. He had been quite relaxed about living intimately for three years with his landlady, the young widow Maria Walsh, above her public house on Thomas Street, in contravention of church teaching as well as police regulations. Mallon turned a blind eye to the breach of regulation but he had been palpably pleased when the union was regularised with their marriage a year previously, after Maria had become pregnant.

  Mallon would be disquieted, Swallow knew, to learn that Captain O’Shea was restive. The newspapers knew about Parnell’s relationship with Katharine O’Shea, of course. So did almost everybody in public life both in Dublin and London. But for as long as O’Shea chose not to make an issue of his wife’s infidelity there was no public scandal and the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was safe. If O’Shea were to come out publicly, however, it might be a very different matter. The churches would have to condemn Parnell and urge their flocks to shun him. Respectable society would repudiate him. His power base would collapse and with it the campaign to give Ireland political independence. Nobody could fully envisage what would follow, but Swallow shared Mallon’s conviction that it would be bloody and uncontrollable.

  The immediate task of the morning however was to chair the crime conference in the day room at Exchange Court, allocating jobs and responsibilities. Pat Mossop was already there ahead of him, with a jobs roster spread out on the desk.

  The twenty or so detectives rostered for duty had arrived in generally cheerful mood. The robbery at Templeogue Hill, near Rathgar, had not been reported in time for any account to appear in the morning newspapers so that even those who had already picked up their Freeman’s Journal or Irish Times were anticipating nothing too challenging in their working day. It would mostly be outdoors duty, under a pleasant, warm sun. Some might be on plainclothes watch around the fashionable thoroughfares, Grafton Street, Wicklow Street, Dawson Street, on the alert for pickpockets and shoplifters. Others would be on surveillance or protection, including a detail of three men who would have the pleasure of attending a cricket match at Clontarf, discreetly guarding the Viceroy, Marquess of Londonderry. Two or three even luckier ones would be assigned to monitor passenger traffic at the Mail Boat Pier at Kingstown. A lazy day, taking the air by the sea would include a substantial mid-day dinner, compliments of the harbour company, in the restaurant it provided for its clerical staff.

  Swallow’s summary of the previous night’s attack and his instructions for follow-up dissolved the prospect of a lazy summer’s day.

  ‘Housebreaking is bad enough. And we’re having too many of them. But this sort of brutality is another. And there’s a gun, maybe more than one, somewhere out there in the wrong hands. There’s probably something or somebody new in this picture,’ he told the rapidly-sobering assembly of G-men.

  ‘This is the second aggravated burglary we’ve had now in three weeks in the E-division. They’ve both been in the hours of darkness. The victims in both cases have been threatened and put in fear of their lives. The man attacked last night was treated in hospital. His wife is invalided and is in a state of shock. Next time this happens we could be talking about a murder.’

  A murmur of acknowledgment went around the day room. Men’s expressions began to change. The atmosphere became business-like.

  ‘We’re going to put everything we can into these cases. So we’re not doing any street patrols or surveillance today. I’m suspending the mail boat detail and I’m bringing the Lord Lieutenant’s detail down to two men. I want everyone working the informants list. We’ve heard nothing from any of them, even though we’ve had four big
jobs now in three weeks. Either some of our own clients have decided to change the rules of the game or we’ve got some new operators on the scene.’

  Heads nodded in agreement across the room.

  ‘If there are new players, they must be staying somewhere, eating somewhere, drinking somewhere, whoring somewhere. They could be English or Scottish or even from Belfast or Cork. So I want all the boarding houses and the doss houses checked. There’s three, maybe four in this gang. Later today, we’ll have more detailed descriptions.’

  ‘Is there any hard evidence these two cases are linked, Sir?’ It was Detective Johnny Vizzard, lately promoted from uniform duties to G-division. ‘Maybe there’s more than one gang at work here.’

  ‘It could be,’ Swallow shrugged. ‘But there are similarities.’

  ‘There could be some inside knowledge involved here,’ Vizzard suggested eagerly. ‘No criminal just picks houses like Anglesea Road or Templeogue Hill at random. Besides, those two areas are covered by the beat-men out of Rathmines and Donnybrook. Have we checked out the servants in those houses?’

  ‘I think that was being done in the attack on old Healy by some of the local beat-men,’ Mossop intervened. ‘They’ve got more local knowledge. But we’ll double check.’

  ‘There’s another strange thing about this job last night, Sir.’

  An older, uniformed sergeant from Rathmines stood up. Swallow brought his name out of the recesses of his memory from some long-forgotten investigation.

  ‘What’s that, Ned?’

  ‘I was beat-sergeant up there in that area a couple of years back. There was always a couple of big dogs at the McCartan house. I mean really big fellas. Irish wolfhounds, I believe they were. I’d have thought they’d have been great guard-dogs. But I’m not hearing anything about them.’