by Conor Brady
Maria had inherited the business in the female line. Its two bars faced the street with spacious living quarters spanning the two upper storeys. When she had accepted a proposal of marriage from a charming merchant seaman, Jack Walsh, she had made it clear that although she would be Mrs Walsh, the Grant name would stay over the door. When her husband’s vessel went down with all hands in a violent storm off the Welsh coast three years later, she dealt with her grief, at least partially, by throwing herself into a programme of steady improvements in the business. She was a progressive landlady in charge of an already successful house and she eagerly embraced new ideas. She invested carefully in M&M Grant’s, bringing running water to the two bars, as well as flushing toilets and purpose-built urinals at the back. The windows that opened on to Thomas Street were widened, bringing more light into the interior. In the public bar, plain forms had been replaced with solid, oak benches. Rickety high-stools that had served in the select bar were gone. In their place, she had installed high-backed swivel seats, upholstered in heavy, brown leather. One of the first improvements she had undertaken was to have the house connected to the city’s expanding gas supply, enabling the smoky oil lamps that had hung on the bar walls for generations to be taken down and replaced with mantles that shed a soft, warm light with a gentle hissing sound. Being a prudent woman, however, she had not immediately extended the gas supply to the living quarters which still depended on oil lamps and candles for illumination.
After she had the three good bedrooms on the second floor refurbished and redecorated, she advertised in The Evening Mail for a lodger who might occupy one of them. She had been doubtful at first when she learned that the Mr Swallow who had replied to the advertisement, was a detective sergeant in G-division at Dublin Castle. It would be against police regulations, she knew, for an officer to lodge on licensed premises. But that was his problem, she reasoned. There could be advantages in having a G-man around the place. It could offer security and reassurance in a house where a woman lived alone and conducted a business. Besides, she thought, even if he was perhaps ten years her senior, he was rather handsome.
Swallow was also accustomed to dealing with some of the less pleasant aspects of the bar business. One night when Grant’s was unusually busy he came downstairs to deal with some noisy and unruly customers. There was an exchange of words after which one of the troublemakers, a strong cooper from the brewery, threw a punch at him. Swallow avoided it easily and retaliated with a swift right hook that sent the man flying backward across a table to collapse on the floor. Swallow lifted him by the collar and propelled him through the door into Thomas Street.
Thereafter, when he would come off duty, he would sometimes saunter through the bars, exchanging a greeting here and there with customers that he had come to know. It was a way of sending a message to would-be troublemakers and of reassuring the regulars who wanted to enjoy a well-ordered venue. After closing-time he and Maria might take a drink together and talk about the day’s business and about his police work in the first-floor parlour. He liked a mellow Tullamore whiskey. She enjoyed a fortified sherry or sometimes a port.
Gradually, the conversations moved from business to more personal matters. She spoke of the loneliness she had learned to cope with by immersing herself in the business. He told her how his medical studies at the Catholic University in Cecilia Street had foundered on the rock of his drinking, leaving him with the choice of emigration or joining the police. He expressed his frustration and resentment to her. In spite of his successes in police work in general and in crime detection in particular, his Roman Catholic background multiplied the odds against his getting promotion in a force dominated by Protestants and Freemasons.
Without either of them consciously working towards it, the relationship between landlady and lodger quickly moved to affection and then to intimacy, although for appearances’ sake, ‘Mr Swallow’s Room’ was meticulously maintained by Maria’s housemaid. There was fresh water and clean towels on the washstand each night and his shirts and collars were set out on the bed. The sheets, although unused, would be changed regularly and the pillow cases would be re-arranged each morning.
Things might have remained so for a long time were it not for Maria’s discovery in December that she was pregnant. They were married the next Saturday, at the Franciscan friary of Adam and Eve, on Merchant’s Quay, with the ceremony performed by their old friend, Friar Lawrence. Afterwards, there was a fine reception for their friends and families and some of Swallow’s colleagues at Mr Gresham’s Royal Marine Hotel in Kingstown. A magnificent meal and lively entertainment had been marred only by the need for John Mallon and his wife to return urgently to Dublin Castle in response to the discovery of a young woman’s dead body near Montgomery Street. The celebrations continued nonetheless and the following day Swallow and Maria returned to Thomas Street as man and wife.
He had never known such happiness since his childhood, he realised, in those short months before catastrophe struck. That he could ever be a husband and a father, engaged in establishing a family home, had simply not been within the compass of his thinking. But now its imminence was exhilarating. The conversations after closing-time in the first-floor parlour became less about her business and his police work and more about future dreams and questions. Would the baby be a boy or a girl? Who would it be like? What names could they choose?
Maria would not be a very young mother, no more than Swallow was going to be a young father. Her future brother-in-law, Harry Lafeyre, who served as the Dublin City Medical Examiner, had referred her to an eminent consultant at the Rotunda Lying-In Hospital. He had pronounced her strong and well, and said he could anticipate no difficulties in the delivery when it came.
Everything had changed however, since the miscarriage. It had been brought on by a violent fall when she had angrily confronted security agents who had raided their home, searching for G-division surveillance files they believed Swallow had secreted at the house. It had taken only a few weeks for Maria to recover her physical strength after losing the baby, but her emotional state remained fragile. She preferred to stay in the first-floor parlour much of the time, rather than busying herself downstairs, supervising the staff or conversing with the regular customers as had been her habit.
The easy conversations that had been a feature of their relationship became more infrequent and strained. Maria never directly blamed him or his work for the baby’s loss. She did not have to. Had he and Mallon not defied the demands of their political masters by refusing to hand over the surveillance files on Mr Parnell, the security agents from the Under-Secretary’s department would never have come to search for them. There would never have been the confrontation with the odious Major Kelly, who had led the raiding party, swearing that he would see Swallow in jail for treason. There would have been no fall on the stairs, no miscarriage, no shattering of the happy world that had been in the making.
It might have been easier, Swallow reckoned, had Maria come out directly to blame him. The sorrowful silence and the avoidance of the subject were harder to bear. She had asked him repeatedly to take a reduced pension, to leave the police and to come into the business with her as a full partner. But he had been unwilling, whether because he feared losing his freedom or because he actually liked the work he did, he was unsure himself. Now she was silent on the idea of retirement. He wondered if he should raise it himself.
He sought Harry Lafeyre’s advice.
‘As a doctor, I’d say leave well enough alone,’ Lafeyre had told him. ‘Maria’s not the first woman in Dublin to lose a baby. She’s had the best of medical care and she’ll recover in time. But as a friend to both of you, I’d also say be very caring of her for the next few weeks and months. The emotional effects of a violent miscarriage can be very powerful.’
He followed Lafeyre’s advice as best he could, spending as much time as possible at Thomas Street, sometimes when he should have been at work with an important investigation in hand. Mallon unders
tood what was happening and quietly allocated some of the detective office workload to junior officers in Swallow’s place.
‘It’s good experience for young lads,’ he had replied gruffly when Swallow queried some of the job-sheets. But he knew that arrangements were being made to help him and Maria through difficult circumstances.
He tried to avail of the long evenings and the balmy summer weather to get Maria out of the house and into the open air, especially on Sundays, when she normally absented herself from the business. They would cross the river at Kingsbridge to the Phoenix Park and walk the length of Chesterfield Avenue to the Castleknock Gate, sometimes stopping to watch the deer cropping the summer grass. One clear August evening they took the tram to Howth at the far extremity of the bay. It took them all the way to the summit of Howth Hill from where they could gaze back at the city and across the blue water to where the mountains ringed the bay. But their conversation on these occasions became increasingly spare. As he looked past her to where the sun was preparing to set that evening, he saw a tear course silently down her face.
When he reached Grant’s, Maria had already gone upstairs to the dining room, leaving Dan Daly, the senior barman to tend to the few customers in the two bars below. He thought she looked rested and well as she sat to table. The sash windows looking on to Thomas Street were raised a little, allowing a gentle current of warm June air into the room.
‘It’s a beautiful day out there,’ he told her cheerily as he took his chair. ‘You should get out for an hour or two in the sunshine. Maybe take the tram out to Sandymount and take some sea air.’
She frowned.
‘Thanks, Joe. But I’d prefer to rest.’
She remained silent as Tess, the maid, came in with a soup tureen from the kitchen downstairs.
When Tess had served the light chicken consommé and left the room, he tried again.
‘It would do you good. You might even call on Lily, take the train and have afternoon tea at the Salthill Hotel or the Royal Marine?’ Maria’s sister Lily, engaged to be married to Harry Lafeyre, was her closest confidante. He always sensed that her spirits recovered somewhat when they spent time together.
He knew what her likely answer would be. It was almost always the same sort of response now.
‘I might be needed here,’ she said without apparent conviction.
‘Ah, no you wouldn’t. The day is slow and Dan’s well able to manage on his own. Maybe you might call by Harriet’s lodgings either? She’s finished school now and she’s busy marking end-of-term examination papers. She’d probably relish a break from that. And it’s only a short distance away.’
Swallow’s sister, Harriet, taught at a primary school on South Circular Road and stayed in lodgings nearby.
She shook her head silently and stared down at her soup.
‘I don’t think I’d like to interrupt Harriet. And, anyway, Lily is still at work.’
Lily was an art teacher at Alexandra College on Earlsfort Terrace. Swallow knew that the school term had ended and that without classes to be taught she would be mistress of her own time. He was about to press the point when Tess knocked and put her head around the door.
‘Pardon me Ma’m … but there’s a young polisman below at the side door, lookin’ to talk to th’ inspector. He says ’tis important … very important altogether.’
He felt silently guilty, realising that he was relieved to have an excuse to be taken away from the table.
Chapter 4
‘There’s no way I’m going down there into the shit with this machine. If it falls over or gets wet, it’ll be ruined. It’ll cost a fortune to have it replaced and I’ll get disciplined for damaging official property. Anyway, there’s no light down there, all I’d get would be a blur.’
Swallow knew that Tim Hogan, the photographic technician was right. Getting a man in and out of the narrow trap from the cobbled surface of Essex Street to the river below would be a challenge. Trying to manoeuvre the bulky camera with its tripod through the opening would be next to impossible. Besides, from what the agitated foreman told him they had seen twenty feet under the ground, there would probably be little of evidential value in photographs.
The young constable sent to fetch Swallow from his dinner at Grant’s knew only that something – or somebody – had been found in the underground river. When the workmen had regained the surface, they hurried to tell the constable on duty at the gate of the Castle’s Upper Yard. He called out his sergeant and the sergeant, in turn, had sent a fit young constable with a Bullseye lantern back to the scene to climb down through the trap to verify what the workmen claimed to have seen. When he came back to the top, his uniform wet and smeared with mud, he confirmed that there were what seemed to be human remains below. The sergeant then notified the duty officer at the Detective Office in Exchange Court.
Pat Mossop was at the scene before him. So too was Stephen Doolan, a veteran, uniformed sergeant from Kevin Street with four constables. Hogan was standing patiently by the open police car that had brought him with his equipment from the Royal Irish Constabulary Depot in the Phoenix Park.
‘No point going down, Tim,’ Swallow agreed. He had worked on many occasions with Hogan. The photographer knew his craft well, understanding both its capabilities and its limitations. Like Swallow himself, he was a Kildare man so they had an affinity that sometimes extended into sinking a few pints or whiskies together at one or other of the public houses that Depot personnel frequented on Parkgate Street. ‘But stand by until we get this body up. I’ll need you to take your pictures then.’
He beckoned to the foreman.
‘How far in is it? What’s the depth and the direction down there.’
‘The water’s about twenty foot under the ground. It’s not too deep, maybe a foot and a half though there’s probably pools that’d be deeper. A man would want to be careful. The body’s downstream of the trap. I’d say it’s about thirty foot along. Caught on a rock ledge to the right as you’d move towards the river.’
He would make a good witness, Swallow thought to himself.
‘We’ll need to get some sort of a sack or a bag to get it to the surface,’ Doolan said. ‘An ordinary stretcher wouldn’t work. Then we’ll go down with the lads and do a search, maybe a hundred feet in each direction for a start.’
Doolan was reliable, one of the most experienced officers in the force in conducting scene searches.
Swallow nodded.
‘I’ll go down myself first, Stephen. I’d like to see whatever there is before it’s moved.’
Two constables were sent to the Barrack-Master’s stores at Kevin Street to get pairs of waterproof waders and oilskins along with Bullseye lanterns, ropes and field haversacks.
‘Get a couple of lengths of tent canvas too,’ Swallow told them. ‘We can make a hoist to get this poor devil up. And bring half a dozen screens and poles to give us a bit of privacy.’
A small crowd of curious pedestrians and passers-by had already formed on the pavement watching the knot of policemen and workers gathered around the manhole in the cobbled street. Half a dozen diners had emerged from the nearby Dolphin Hotel to see what was going on, one portly gentleman with a white linen napkin still conspicuously stuffed in his waistband. He thought that he got the aroma of roasting beef from the hotel kitchens. When he looked up at the hotel’s higher windows he saw guests and staff peering down at the street scene below. There was nothing like a bit of street drama to get the attention of Dubliners, he told himself.
When the constables came back from Kevin Street, pushing the equipment in a handcart, the workmen helped them to erect the canvas screens, shutting off the view. Swallow stripped off his suit and boots and donned a set of oilskins and waders. Doolan did the same, before each man took a haversack, attaching its straps behind his shoulders so that it fell on his chest. Pat Mossop looped two ropes around their torsos and checked that the Bullseye lanterns were working properly.
‘I’ll go
down first Stephen,’ Swallow said. ‘Give me about ten feet before you follow and then stay within arm’s reach when we’re below.’
He lowered himself over the edge of the trap with two of the constables and a workman taking the strain on the rope. The cold air below the surface of the street, contrasting with the warmth of the summer day above, caught his breath at first. Behind the chill he could smell the dirt and waste of the sewage that the underground flow carried to the Liffey. Then the men above started to pay out the rope and the sunlight faded as he went down towards the flowing water below. His eyes adjusted to the darkness as the lantern’s beam seemed to strengthen. He sensed his feet touching ground and the water rushing against his waders.
When he looked up he could see Stephen Doolan’s bulk descending after him, his lantern playing small, yellow shapes on the walls.
The cavern itself was surprisingly wide, with brown-yellow brick forming an arched tunnel. Swallow knew the Poddle ran under the Castle, but always imagined it as a narrow stream. Here, however, the flow was shallow, wide and sluggish. Even as he raised his lantern to throw a thin light downstream he could make out quantities of bodily waste, whether animal or human, bobbing along the surface.
‘Keep your hand on my shoulder,’ he told Doolan. ‘Let’s get this done and be out of here.’
There was movement to his left just at the waterline. In the corner of his eye the light picked up three or four sleek, scurrying creatures, squealing with alarm.
He started to inch forward, holding the lantern out in front, cautiously feeling the uneven rock and silt under his waders, counting the small steps. If the foreman’s estimate was accurate they should find what they were looking for fairly quickly. With Doolan’s hand on his shoulder, he could feel the other man’s breath on his neck and hear the sloshing of his waders in the filthy water. The air was putrid, stinking of decay and animal waste. With every cautious breath he felt that his mouth, throat and lungs were being coated in filth.
