by Conor Brady
Harry Lafeyre’s brougham carriage was drawn into the stable lane at Marlborough Street. There was no sign of his surly coachman, Scollan, who doubled as his general assistant and his porter at the morgue. That told Swallow that the city medical examiner was already at work inside for some time.
‘Gentlemen,’ Lafeyre greeted them cheerily as they came into the examination room. It smelled, as it always did, of disinfectant and rubber.
‘Your timing is good. I’ve had a look at what’s left of this poor woman, which isn’t much, I’m afraid. So I’m ready to tell you what I know – which actually isn’t a whole lot either.’
The jumble of bones that had been loaded onto the police open car earlier at Essex Street had been assembled in what Swallow could see was their correct order on one of the examination room’s steel tables.
‘Well, that’s a start,’ Swallow said, drawing a tall stool under himself beside the examination table. ‘You’ve determined the sex?’
Lafeyre pulled off his heavy rubber gloves and apron and took another stool. He waited until Pat Mossop had positioned his pencil above his notebook.
‘Yes, the pelvis tells me it’s a mature female, maybe thirty-five to forty years. She was five feet tall, average build, I’d say. No signs of any ill-health. She seems to have been well-developed and well-nourished. The pelvic structure suggests she might have borne a child or children.’
‘Cause of death, Doctor?’ Mossop asked.
Lafeyre shrugged.
‘There’s nothing clinical to help us there. Almost all of the flesh is gone. There’s no internal organs left. I assume you’ve drawn some conclusions from the rope around the neck?’
Swallow grimaced.
‘Tentatively. She wasn’t wearing it as a piece of jewellery.’
‘Agreed,’ Lafeyre nodded. ‘Then asphyxia would be the likely cause. But we’ll never get an answer from what’s there on the table.’
He gestured to the skeletal remains, gleaming under the examination room’s strong lights.
‘There’s a few other things. There’s a little portion of the scalp with a few strands of hair still attaching. I took it off and Scollan’s putting it in formaldehyde to preserve it. The hair is dark but it could be dyed so I’ve taken a small amount to test it. I should be able to tell you what colour it was originally.’
Mossop busily worked his pencil across the page.
‘There were some fragments of cloth along the left rib cage,’ Lafeyre went on. ‘I saved them and I have them on slides. I couldn’t guess what the material is. But I’ll put them under the microscope when they’re dried out. The teeth are good. She has two small fillings in gold in the maxillary molars. The fillings are well done, so she had enough money to get professional attention.’
Swallow nodded.
‘She wasn’t the poorest of the poor,’ Mossop said sympathetically.
‘Probably not,’ Swallow said. ‘But she wasn’t the most fortunate either, was she?’
‘Any thoughts about the ligature?’ He directed the question to Lafeyre.
‘You can see that it’s been tied in a slip knot. I’ll open the knot later and see what I can learn about it, if anything, under the microscope.’
‘Is there any way you can tell how long ago she died, or how long she was in the water?’ Mossop asked hopefully.
Lafeyre shook his head.
‘More than days. Weeks anyway. Maybe even months. But not too many months. There are so many variables. All the soft tissue is gone except for that small area on the scalp. Even that wouldn’t be left if she was down there for a year, let’s say. And the skeleton was pretty well intact. Apart from a couple of ribs all of the bones are there. And there’s none of the big bones missing.’
He glanced at the wall clock.
‘I’ve a dinner engagement at my club, so I’m going to leave it at that for the present. I’ll follow up on the hair and on the rope tomorrow. We’ll put the remains in the ice-room even though there isn’t much need. I assume you’ll notify the coroner?’
‘I’ll take care of that,’ Mossop said.
‘There’s one other thing I’d like you to have a look at when you’re setting up the microscope,’ Swallow said.
He reached into the haversack and drew out the leather belt with the bunch of keys that he had recovered from the river.
‘We found these not far from the remains. They may or may not be connected, but I’d like you to see what can be learned from them, if anything.’
Lafeyre took the leather strip with a small, steel tongs and spread it along the steel table.
‘It’s reasonably intact, isn’t it? If it did belong to the deceased it would suggest she’s been down there a few weeks, not much more, not less. Leather is fairly resilient for a while but once the outer surface is broken it can start to deteriorate quite quickly.’
He reached for a cardboard evidence box on the work-shelf.
‘We’ll store it and I’ll examine it tomorrow.’
‘So,’ Lafeyre inquired, ‘on the basis of what we know, are you calling this a murder inquiry?’
Swallow hesitated. The evidence was strong but it was less than absolutely conclusive. A full-blown murder inquiry would put considerable extra demands on an already stretched G-division. He could report the case to John Mallon in terms that would leave it an open matter. A file could be opened and quietly closed without too much effort going into it. It was tempting. He would need a lot of thinking space and time to deal with the threat to Parnell from Willie O’Shea’s planned divorce petition and the plan by the security service to leak it to the newspapers. But there was something compelling about the sad bundle of bones on the steel table behind Lafeyre. Once, he knew, this had been somebody’s daughter, or sister, or mother, or wife, who deserved better than being flung underground, to rot in the dark, dirty waters of the Poddle.
‘It’s a murder inquiry,’ he said after a moment. ‘We can’t ignore that length of rope around the neck. ‘We’ll have the case conference at Exchange Court in the morning.’
Chapter 7
Hall’s Palace Bar in Fleet Street was a favourite with the reporters and editors from The Irish Times. They shared its fine mahogany counters and polished leather seating with clerks from the Bank of Ireland and other financial institutions on Dame Street and College Green, as well as some senior policemen from the headquarters of the B-division at nearby College Street Station.
Swallow ordered a Tullamore and installed himself in one of the booths near the door. The whiskey was mellow and smooth and curiously cooling after the heat of the day. The bar was quiet. The bankers who came for a couple of drinks after work had departed. The reporters across on Westmoreland Street were at their busiest at this hour. The police shifts at College Street would not change until ten o’clock. It was slow business at the Palace with just one barman on duty.
Mossop had walked with him to Westmoreland Street after they had finished at the morgue. They parted outside The Irish Times and Mossop continued to Exchange Court to send notification to the coroner and to put a report out on the ABC telegraph to all stations. Then he would hand-deliver a copy of the report to John Mallon’s house in the Lower Yard. The provision of official lodgings for the head of G-division and his family within the Castle represented a significant saving on the Mallon household budget, while the Castle authorities had the comforting knowledge that their chief of detectives was always available around the clock.
Swallow turned into the newspaper’s front office. He could smell newsprint and ink from the printing press, located at the back of the public office. A couple of clerks were still at work, taking in the classified advertisements which constituted a significant part of the newspaper’s income and for which it had something of a reputation. He knew them both by sight.
‘Do you know if Mr Dunlop is in the building?’ he asked the more senior-looking of the two.
The clerk recognised him too.
‘I bel
ieve so, Mr Swallow. I saw him walk up the stairs an hour ago.’
‘Would you ask him to join me across at the Palace if it’s not inconvenient?’
The clerk knew that even the busiest journalist, working against a deadline, would find time to share a drink with a senior G-man who wanted to talk.
He nodded towards a young copy-boy, lounging on a cane chair behind the counter.
‘I’ll send the message up straight away. You go ahead. If there’s any problem, I’ll send the lad across to you with word.’
He did not have long to wait in the booth. He had taken a second sip of Tullamore when Andrew Dunlop came through the door. He moved into the booth, pulling a chair behind him.
‘Swallow,’ he nodded, signalling to the barman, ‘an unexpected pleasure.’
Swallow smiled.
‘Thanks for taking the time, Mr Dunlop. Is it a busy evening?’
Police guidelines recommended the use of code-names when in contact with informants. But it would have been a nonsense. They had known each other for years before Dunlop had agreed to act as an agent for G-division, using the soubriquet ‘Horseman’. Besides, if anyone saw detective and journalist meeting or overheard their conversation, the use of coded language would simply raise suspicions.
‘Nah. Nothing dramatic going on at all. Westminster is having a dull day. There’s very little happening in the courts. It’s good to get out of the place.’
The barman placed a Bushmills on the table in front of him. Dunlop shared John Mallon’s taste for the Ulster whiskey that was darker than Swallow’s pale Tullamore, and more pungent.
‘That’s very disturbing news you picked up about Captain O’Shea and his wife,’ Swallow said.
Dunlop nodded.
‘These two fellows from the security service are pretty well out of their depth politically. But they know that if they can get the knowledge of Parnell’s relationship with Mrs O’Shea into the public domain, it’s going to damage his political support very severely.’
They clinked glasses.
‘Sláinte.’
‘Good luck.’
Dunlop put back half his Bushmills in a gulp.
‘Had you met these two, Polson and McKitterick, before they took you to dinner at the Burlington?’ Swallow asked.
‘I’d never met McKitterick, but I knew about Polson from Madrid. Of course, he wasn’t calling himself Polson. He was John Smith.’
‘What was he doing in Madrid? What were you doing there, for that matter?’
‘The newspaper sent me out there, along with our best foreign correspondent, Cornelius Clarke, in March when Richard Pigott fled after he’d been exposed by the Westminster commission. He was holed up in a hotel but we didn’t know its name. They wanted us to see if he would tell us who had put him up to the forgeries. He didn’t do it just for the fun of it. He had to have been bribed and put up to it by some person or persons in or close to the authorities. But he was dead by the time we located him. Clarke is a stringer for The Daily Telegraph in London and they’ve got first-rate contacts with the British intelligence services. Some contact there enabled him to identify Pigott’s hotel. But Polson was there, when Clarke arrived. He found him searching through Pigott’s belongings with the man’s body still warm on the floor. There were some Spanish detectives there and they seemed to be operating under Polson’s direction. It turned out then that Clarke recognised him from an earlier encounter in Cairo.’
‘Cairo?’
‘Yes, the British secret service maintains a big operation there, covering all of the Middle-East and bits of North Africa. That whole region is crucially important to the security of the Empire. Keeping trade routes open, all that sort of stuff. He had agreed to meet Clarke in Madrid a couple of times, trying to pass himself off as a diplomat. But everyone apparently knew he was secret service. Diplomats don’t usually carry revolvers as he did. He was a hard drinker too, shot out the chandeliers one night in the Gran Hotel Ingles.’
Swallow nodded. G-division’s knowledge of the Upper Yard’s secret service personnel rarely extended to having the detail of their previous assignments.
‘You didn’t meet him yourself?’
‘No. My job would have been to interview Pigott. But with him dead, the newspaper wasn’t going to add to its costs by keeping me on the continent any longer than was necessary. I was on the next train to Paris and then across the Channel to England and then home to Dublin. Clarke stayed on to do a series of articles about Spanish politics, why the country is losing its overseas possessions, all that kind of thing. They’re just a few decades ahead of us, you know. It’s all fallen apart. The politicians can’t agree on anything. And there’ll probably be war with America over what’s left of the once-mighty Spanish Empire. The Americans want to get hold of Cuba, the Philippines and a few more places. They need military and naval bases. And they see money-making opportunities.’
‘John Smith wasn’t a very imaginative alias,’ he grinned. ‘Did you know he’d been transferred to Dublin?’
‘No. The last I heard of him, he was briefing the local press in Madrid and pouring drink into them, explaining why Pigott had shot himself. They believed him, it seems.’
‘So how did he make contact with you here?’
‘He just called to the newspaper, asked for me by name and when I came downstairs he introduced himself. He told me he’d been transferred to Dublin to the Under-Secretary’s security office and they’d appreciate it if I’d join him and a colleague for dinner that evening at the Burlington. I didn’t know him from Adam.’
‘So you thought you’d have a decent dinner at Her Majesty’s expense?’
Dunlop grinned.
‘Quite. But as it happened, Cornelius Clarke was in the Burlington when I arrived. He’d had a long and late lunch with some visiting French correspondents. I was a bit early so we went for a drink. He was just leaving the bar when he saw Polson and McKitterick coming in. He recognised Polson from Madrid of course, and the next morning at the office he told me about their previous encounter. They hadn’t seen him so Polson, or Smith, or whoever he is didn’t know he’d been recognised. He still doesn’t, I’m sure.’
‘That could be very fortuitous,’ Swallow said.
‘I told your sergeant at Exchange Court they had identified themselves as Reggie Polson and Jack McKitterick, but names mean nothing because they work under aliases. John Smith is as good as Reggie Polson or any other name he chooses to give himself,’ Dunlop added.
Swallow nodded his understanding. The security agent who had brutalised Maria in the raid on their home identified himself as Major Nigel Kelly. But Swallow could find no Major Nigel Kelly in the Army List. He had never been able to ascertain his true identity. It was probably just as well, he told himself. If he knew who he was and where he could be found, he would almost certainly seek him out and kill him.
‘Did he tell you what his role is here at the security office?’
‘No. But he didn’t have to. Every government has fellows like him. They’ve usually got a made-up title and they’re on the payroll of some department or office that nobody has ever heard of. But they’re spies and agents provocateurs really. Mostly they’ve got military service behind them. Any half-competent journalist can spot them a mile off.’
‘So how did the conversation go?’ Swallow asked. ‘There doesn’t seem to have been much subtlety.’
‘No, there wasn’t. Polson is evidently the more senior of the two. He actually talked briefly about his time in Madrid, not knowing I’d been there with Clarke at the time of Pigott’s death. I led him on, probing him a bit. I said I’d known Pigott, which I had, and that I was interested in the details of what happened to him. He said he arranged for Pigott to get a decent burial and got his few belongings back to Ireland. Pigott was widowed and he left two young sons, it appears. He told me that arrangements had been made for their welfare, whatever that means. He said he had left no money or estate and that some c
harity in Kingstown had stepped up to assist the young fellows.’
‘Tell me what he had to say about Captain O’Shea.’
‘He asked me first if I knew him. I said I only knew him as any political journalist would know any Irish member of the Westminster parliament. I wasn’t socially acquainted with him.’
‘Did he tell you how he knew O’Shea was planning to petition for divorce?’
‘Not specifically. But he says he served for a while with O’Shea as an officer in the Hussars, said he’d kept in touch with him after they had resigned their commissions and that they remained friends. He said he knew that a good journalist never turned away from an important story so he wanted me to know that O’Shea was thinking about filing for divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery with Parnell. He said they could give me a lot of detail that would enable The Irish Times to publish the facts ahead of anyone else.’
‘They seem to think that O’Shea is dithering though?’
‘Yes, it might be that he’s hopeful even yet of getting a share of his wife’s inheritance from her aunt. The old lady put everything in trust for Mrs O’Shea’s children. But they think they can use The Irish Times to force his hand. I should add they told me there’d be a hundred pounds in it for me if their material gets published.’
Swallow raised an eyebrow.
‘That’s a great deal of money. Would you not be tempted?’
Dunlop smiled and sipped at his Bushmills.
‘It is three months’ salary, but no, not all journalists are like the late Mr Pigott. And you know my politics, Swallow, just as I know yours. If O’Shea files for divorce, citing Parnell as the respondent, it’ll cut the ground out from under the Home Rule campaign. That’ll probably be the end of Parnell, as we know.’
