In the Dark River

by Conor Brady

  Pat Mossop gestured helplessly to the file on the desk.

  ‘There’s no mention of any dogs in this report, Ned. Maybe they got rid of them?’

  The sergeant shrugged.

  ‘I dunno. I just thought to mention it.’

  His voice trailed off.

  There were no further interventions from the floor. Mossop ticked off each G-man’s detail for the day. They would start working through the inner city divisions, A, B, C and D, calling on informants at their usual haunts and checking the guests in the boarding houses and less salubrious establishments. If the men who had attacked the McCartans were lodging somewhere in the city, G-division would find them. Swallow left him to the task and set off down the Castle Yard to report to Mallon.

  Mallon’s main office was in the Lower Yard, rather than at Exchange Court itself. So vital was his role in the eyes of the Castle authorities that it was considered necessary to have him located immediately at hand to the Commissioner’s headquarters. The allocation to the chief of G-division of a fine, three storey house, also in the Lower Yard, close to the Palace Street gate, was further confirmation of his importance. Having breakfasted with his family there, he would invariably cross the Yard, under the shadow of the Chapel Royal, in time to be at his desk by nine o’clock sharp.

  Mallon glared at him before he had an opportunity to open his mouth about the aggravated burglary.

  ‘This isn’t good news, Swallow.’

  Mallon stabbed at Mossop’s one-sheet report of his conversation with Andrew Dunlop on his table.

  ‘No Sir.’

  Swallow knew his boss’s temperament too well. There were no pleasantries about the fine June morning or the balmy air. Mallon’s mouth made sharp grimaces between staccato sentences, delivered in his sharp, South Armagh accent.

  ‘First, they try to destroy the man with forged letters, to tar him as an instigator of violence around the country. Then they try to use us to blacken his character. Now they’re going to traduce him in the newspapers. Villains.’

  Swallow winced at the recollection of repeated confront-ations during the previous year between G-men and security agents employed in the Under-Secretary’s department. In one incident, security agents had raided his own home, searching for files that might give them evidence to compromise Parnell. Swallow had been in Germany pursuing investigations into the murder of Alice Flannery near Rathmines. Maria had confronted the agents and in the ensuing melee, had lost the baby she was carrying. She and Swallow were still dealing with a heavy loss.

  ‘You know that you don’t have to persuade me about their villainy, Sir. My wife and I are still mourning the unborn child they snatched away from us.’

  Mallon nodded sympathetically.

  ‘I know, Swallow. I’m conscious of that. I’d have thought by now they’d have given up though. I’ve come across this fellow Reggie Polson at a meeting up at the Under-Secretary’s office a couple of weeks back. A nasty, condescending piece of work. Smith-Berry wanted me to be impressed. He told me this ‘Mr Polson’ had done great work for Her Majesty’s government in all sorts of exotic places. So, I asked him had he seen much of Ireland. He told me he hadn’t stirred out of Dublin. Can you imagine? The great security hero who’s never gone out to have a look at what’s going on around this country. They’re a bloody menace. As thick as planks.’

  Swallow had made it his business to get to know most of the security agents by sight. When he knew where they drank and dined he would discreetly pass through the bar or the dining room, noting details of height, clothing, appearance and so on.

  ‘I think I know him. What does he look like, Chief?’

  ‘Tall. Over six feet. Athletic build. Fair haired. Thin moustache. Carries himself well. I’d bet he’s military and fairly senior at that. There’s a scar on his left cheek. Quite a deep cut, three or four inches long. Probably found himself on the wrong side of a sabre or a bayonet.’

  Swallow placed him immediately. He had seen him drinking at the bar with some of his colleagues in the Burlington Hotel on Dame Street a week previously. The Burlington was favoured by bankers and financiers as well as senior military and high-ranking civil servants. There had been something about the man that put Swallow on guard. There was a disquieting restlessness about the way he paced around among his fellow-drinkers, whiskey in one hand, cigar in the other, while his eyes roved the bar and its customers.

  ‘It’s probably just as well they’re so badly informed, Chief.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If they were smarter they’d know that Andrew Dunlop is sympathetic to Mr Parnell and they’d have brought their business to a journalist with different loyalties. There’s a lot of that type around. If they’d done that, we wouldn’t know about this scheme.’

  Mallon nodded again.

  ‘Or maybe they’d have gone to a journalist with an eye for ready cash, like Pigott.’

  ‘Fair enough, Chief. Though we were doubly blest in Pigott. He was greedy for money and he was stupid as well.’

  Mallon permitted himself a smile.

  Richard Pigott had been bribed by the Castle authorities more times than Mallon could remember. Whether it was a question of planting an alarming report in his newspaper or spreading a helpful rumour among the city’s pressmen, Pigott was always for sale. But when a commission had been established at Westminster to examine alleged links between Parnell and Fenian extremists, Pigott’s supposed documentary evidence was shown to be forged by his own hand. There was a noticeable lull in anti-Parnell propaganda in the newspapers in the months after his death in Madrid, where he had fled after his forgery had been exposed.

  ‘You’re right, Swallow. But of course, when these fellows find that Dunlop won’t publish what they want they’ll try elsewhere. It’s only a matter of time until they find some hack in some printing house willing to do their dirty work.’

  ‘That’s very likely,’ Swallow agreed. ‘Although if Dunlop is willing to … ah … co-operate, maybe we could put them on the wrong track. Gain some time if nothing else.’

  Mallon looked glum.

  ‘It’s probably inevitable that the scandal will come out anyway. Does the name Mrs Benjamin Wood mean anything to you?’

  ‘No Chief.’

  ‘A very wealthy but recently deceased lady in Kent. She was Mrs O’Shea’s aunt and from what I gather she’s been the main source of the family income for many years. She’s also funded Captain O’Shea’s high-living, to a considerable degree. Those who know him say the only reason he has kept up appearances with his wife is to ensure that money keeps coming in. But ‘Aunt Ben,’ as it appears she was known, is no more, and apparently, she’s left her estate in trust for the children. There’s a lot of money involved but now it seems Willie won’t get his hands on a bob. So he’s telling friends he’s being short-changed for his forbearance and he hasn’t a reason any longer to keep up the appearances of marriage. If he enters a petition for divorce, that’s going to be a matter of public record. They won’t even need the newspapers to blow the story.’

  That put a new and worrying slant on the situation, Swallow realised. Money could be a great means of getting information. But it could also be used to buy silence as it had with Captain Willie O’Shea up to now. Equally, the realisation that one’s expectations and hopes, financial or otherwise, are not going to be met could be a grievous provocation. He felt a slight twinge of sympathy for O’Shea, despite himself, even though he had never met the man.

  Mallon stood from the desk and looked down into the now sun-filled Lower Yard. A platoon of young constables, recruits from the training depot at Kevin Street on a familiarisation march, were standing to attention, listening attentively to their sergeant-instructor, as he pointed out the important offices of state from which the government of Ireland operated and whose dictates they would enforce. Even from a distance, he could see them starting to perspire in their heavy, buttoned-up tunics.

  ‘I’ve got
to do some preparation for a meeting up the Yard with Smith-Berry and some of his acolytes,’ Mallon said. ‘Let’s put this aside for the moment and come back to it later. If you think you have a way to even delay what these fellows have in mind, I’d be glad to hear it.’

  Swallow realised he had not had the opportunity to report on the attack at Templeogue Hill. It was probably better to let it pass, at this stage, he reckoned. John Mallon’s mind was on bigger things than an aggravated burglary, even when it involved the use of guns.

  Mallon waved towards the door, indicating to Swallow that he should go. Then he turned back to the window.

  ‘You know, Swallow, I’d say it’s going to be a hot sort of a summer.’

  Chapter 2

  At first, the men working on the tunnel thought the bones were probably those of an animal. It was common enough, deep down in the caves and fissures through which the underground River Poddle flowed, to come across the remains of dogs or cats or larger creatures that had drowned in the current that flowed into the River Liffey from under the Castle. Sometimes there might be farm animals, goats or sheep, that found their way into the water where it rose to open ground in the countryside between Cookstown, near Tallaght, and the city itself. There might even be human babies from time to time, sometimes not fully formed, sometimes newly-born, consigned to the dark waters of the Poddle for whatever reason, unwanted or unable to survive in the world.

  There were three men in the working party today. They had chiselled and dug their way through the black clay and the rock below Lord Edward Street and Essex Street for over three months to connect the new sewer from the Upper Castle Yard to the river below. Latterly, they had opened a trap, removing a few square yards of cobble, in Essex Street, outside the Dolphin Hotel, facilitating access to their task.

  The Castle’s inhabitants had used the Poddle to carry away human waste and other detritus since King John fortified the site of Dubh Linn, the ‘black pool’ on the Liffey in the 13th century. In the Irish language it was called the Saileach, or Saile, meaning dirty. But the development of the piped water supply from the Vartry Reservoir in the Wicklow Hills over the previous two decades had enabled the installation of modern sanitary facilities in much of the city centre that could flush everything away underground and thence to the sea.

  Sometimes men working on the new sewers or on foundations under the Castle found bones that were not those of animals. The Normans often buried their dead within the curtilage of the Castle, especially at times of conflict with the native Irish when it was particularly dangerous to venture outside the wall. The Vikings had burial sites around the ‘black pool’ where they anchored their long-ships. Even so, a man who wanted to keep his job at a shilling a day did not raise an issue that could bring down a foreman’s wrath by delaying the work. Bones and skulls might be given a cursory examination but then swiftly knocked aside and deftly buried with a few, swift shovelfuls of damp earth. Of course, there was always the hope of finding something valuable, even an old sword or a helmet, although it was rare enough.

  This time, the jumbled fragments that caught the light from the carbide lamp seemed to be trapped in a crevice where the watercourse turned downward for its final fall into the Liffey. The long bones might have belonged to a smaller farm animal, a calf or a sheep perhaps, but the skull was unmistakably human. Some fragments of what might be a thin cloth, each one some inches long, were trapped in the ribcage.

  The front man raised the hissing Carbide gas lamp and called over his shoulder to the foreman.

  ‘What are we goin’ to do about this so?’

  The foreman pushed forward, taking the lamp and bringing it over the tangled skeleton.

  ‘Ah, Christ. Sure, we’ll be here for a week.’

  It would be an easy thing to dislodge the remains from the shallow crevice and topple them into the stream.

  ‘Give us the crow-bar there.’

  The third member of the work-party stepped forward, boots sloshing against the flow. He handed the foreman the heavy bar, clawed at both ends.

  The foreman had wedged one end under the spine and was about to press down on the other to prize out the tangled assemblage when he saw the dark, matted hair at the back of the skull and the rope twisted around the neck.

  ‘Christ.’

  He stepped back alarmed, almost losing his balance in the stony bed of the stream underfoot.

  ‘There’s dirty work here.’

  He brought the lamp down to the skull. Even to an untrained eye this was no Viking or Norman. The two rows of teeth in the jaw were complete and perfect, still in their sockets. This was a young person, no relict from medieval times but someone whose life had been much more recently, and probably violently, brought to its end.

  ‘D’ye see that?’

  He gestured to the back of the skull.

  The others peered forward, straining to take in the detail under the faint glow of the burning carbide.

  ‘What are we goin’ to do, so?’ one of them finally asked.

  ‘We’ll do what we have to,’ the foreman answered slowly. ‘We’ll go back up and tell them who needs tellin’ about this. That’s our Christian duty to this poor soul.’

  Chapter 3

  The first time that Swallow crossed to England, he was working on the murder of Ambrose Pollock, the Lamb Alley pawnbroker, with the Special Irish Branch at Scotland Yard. He learned on that visit that a great city like London was differentiated from a smaller one like Dublin by its dinner arrangements.

  In Dublin, men other than lowly labourers and porters, generally went home in the middle of the day to eat their dinner. Business houses usually afforded employees an hour and a half. Professional men might allow themselves two hours.

  The various tram services were regular, reliable and inexpensive. A man could be at his house in Rathmines or Phibsborough, fifteen minutes after leaving his place of employment. He could linger over the table with his wife, enjoying his soup, mutton chops and perhaps a custard pudding and still be back at work within the stipulated time.

  But London was on a different scale. People took their mid-day meal at or near their workplace. Many business houses operated canteens. Scotland Yard had its own mess, or rather, three messes, serving good food (and inexpensive alcohol) to different ranks. Swallow observed that there were many more teashops on the business streets in London than in Dublin. And some public houses and taverns offered basic foods like bread, cheese or sausage. They all seemed to do good trade in the middle of the day, but he learned that men usually took their main meal of the day at home in the evenings.

  Before he had married, Swallow dined, if that was the word, perhaps twice a day at the police canteen in the Lower Yard at the Castle. It was simple, nutritious fare, yet it was predictable and repetitive. Vegetables were invariably boiled to mush. Meat tended to be burned. The one positive constant was good bread, freshly delivered every morning from Johnston’s bakery in Ringsend. However, since he and Maria had become man and wife, he felt he should get home to Thomas Street for mid-day dinner if he could. The early weeks of her pregnancy had been trying physically and emotionally and by late morning, having set the staff to their tasks, putting order on the two bars on the ground floor, she needed to go upstairs to rest. By one o’clock, Carrie, the cook, would have dinner ready to be served in the dining room looking down over Thomas Street. Even on days when he was unable to leave the Castle, or when he was engaged in police duty elsewhere, the table would always be set for two.

  But so far, the day had proven amenable to his domestic commitments. By midday he had completed the necessary paperwork around the divisional crime reports. Dunlop’s account of his meeting with the agents from the Security Secretary’s office was disquieting, as was Mallon’s corroborative intelligence concerning Willie O’Shea’s intention to petition for divorce from his wife. He would try to arrange a meeting with Dunlop later to see if it might be possible somehow to throw the security men off the scent.
Newspapermen worked late and were rarely to be encountered around the city in the earlier part of the day. There was nothing he could do immediately. So, there was no reason that he should not go home to Maria for an hour.

  It was a fifteen-minute walk from the Castle to M&M Grant’s licensed premises on Thomas Street. Swallow often reflected that the short journey perfectly encapsulated the spirit of the city, with numerous buildings dedicated either to religion or alcohol.

  After Christ Church there were the two St Audoen’s, one for the Protestants, the other for the Roman Catholics. Then St Augustine’s, with its enclosed community, and St John the Baptist, maintained by the Franciscan friars. Then St James’s, on the corner of Echlin Street, from where, since medieval days, pilgrims had begun their long journey to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Somewhere under Meath Street, he knew, were the buried foundations of the once-powerful abbey dedicated to St Thomas Becket, so expansive that its buildings reportedly stretched all the way down to present-day Pimlico. Finally, almost directly opposite from Grant’s, St Catherine’s, outside of which the patriot Robert Emmet was executed in 1803 after his failed insurrection against English rule.

  There were two busy distilleries. John Power’s was located behind the Franciscan church, on John’s Lane. Henry Roe’s was on Thomas Street itself. Grant’s stood almost in the shadow of Arthur Guinness’s great brewery at St James’s Gate, and the public houses along his route could be numbered in dozens, ranging from scabrous taverns to salubrious select bars. Grant’s was firmly in the latter category. Swallow’s family had operated their own public house near the Curragh of Kildare for three generations, so he understood the licensed trade. He reckoned that Grant’s was one of the finest premises in Dublin and certainly the leading house in and around the Liberties area.