The Eloquence of the Dead

by Conor Brady

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  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  Acknowledgements

  After learning of Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow’s investigations in A June of Ordinary Murders, innumerable friends and readers came forward with ideas about how a policeman’s conflicted role in 1880s Dublin might be further developed. Indeed, there were suggestions as to how he might secure his coveted promotion. There was even advice about his love life.

  Some of this has made its way into The Eloquence of the Dead. I am very thankful. And I am thankful to everyone who has found Swallow’s adventures and vicissitudes sufficiently engaging to have come back to read more.

  I am grateful again to Eoin Purcell and the team at New Island Books for their encouragement and enthusiasm. Justin Corfield has been a challenging and meticulous editor. Who else would have known that from 1884, the London Underground Station at Tower Hill wasn’t actually called Tower Hill? Gráinne Killeen did tremendous work on publicity for A June of Ordinary Murders and I know she has similar plans for Joe Swallow’s second flight.

  I would also like to acknowledge the many wonderful organisers and enthusiasts behind the arts and literary events that now so enrich life around Ireland. I was flattered and delighted to have been invited to so many of these over the past 18 months to read or to talk about Joe Swallow and the murky nineteenth-century world of Dublin Castle’s G-Division.

  Finally, I would like as ever to acknowledge the love and forbearance of my family while I have been time-travelling back to Victorian Dublin. Their patience and support have been untiring, and I am both fortunate and thankful.

  Conor Brady

  Dublin

  September 2013

  Prologue

  In the morning, she knew, the officials and the clerks would come. They would arrive at the house, perched on their rattling traps and half-bred horses. In her mind’s eye she could see them, advancing past the now abandoned gate lodge and along the avenue.

  They would gather in typical disorder around the sweep of the granite steps outside. The bolder ones would stare insolently through the windows. Some of them would already show the signs of drink.

  There would be rain. She had known since girlhood how to interpret every combination of cloud and wind and light that came across the mountains from the west to Mount Gessel.

  She could sense it with the softening of the air, a faint tang of salt and oil and dampness. It would be the penetrating, grey rain that could roll in off the Atlantic in any season and settle on the Galway countryside like a blanket.

  They would mill about the forecourt, stoat-like, strutting their little authority. They would affect politeness, deference. They would nod obsequiously, as they had to generations of Gessels. They would call her ‘Yer Ladyship,’ or ‘Lady Margaret,’ as in the past, but now in a tone that conveyed their new confidence and their contempt.

  Some of the tenants, impatient to be masters of their acres, would probably come too, muttering in their Gaelic, cursing her and her kind. And it would be made legal. She would be gone. The deeds of transfer were drawn up. The last boundary maps were signed off. The cheque was in the solicitor’s office in the town.

  It was her late husband’s cousin, Richard Gessel, who had finally persuaded her to get out. Sir Richard was a rising star, she had been told, in Prime Minister Salisbury’s staff, and he had the inside track on things.

  ‘Lord Salisbury’s government are agreed that the way to pacify Ireland is to give it back to the Irish, field by field, farm by farm,’ he had told her when he visited Mount Gessel in the springtime.

  ‘If you sign up early you’ll very likely get the best price. And if we’re put out of government, a new administration might not be as generous to the Irish landlords,’ he warned.

  She would step out the front door at 10 o’clock, and she would surrender the key to the solicitor’s clerk. At precisely the same hour, in the town, another clerk would cross the street from the lawyer’s office and deposit the government cheque with the local agent of the Bank of Ireland. In two days, the money would be safely in her account in London.

  Christ, she would be glad to be out of it.

  If the early generations of Gessels lived well out of the place, she had seen little of it. After her husband’s death, all she could remember was misery, bills, pressure from creditors and battles with rot and damp to keep the house from falling down.

  Nobody could say that she had not done her bit. Or that the Gessels had been bad landlords. Forty years ago, when the Great Famine, as they were now calling it in the newspapers, devastated the countryside, did they not do their best for the people? A great cauldron of soup was made ready every day in the yard. She had helped prepare it herself, and taken charge of its distribution to the starving, silent wretches who staggered in from the fields and the roadways to have its nourishment.

  They had dropped some rents in the bad years when others had refused to do so. In Mayo and Roscommon, she knew, some landlords had actually raised them. In the end, of course, when there were no rents coming in, there had to be evictions. Most of the families had gone to America, as far as she knew. No doubt, they were better off there.

  It would be a relief to have money; to be able to pay her way; to meet old friends without worrying about the cost of lunch; to be able to travel, perhaps to Switzerland, for sun or to take the mountain air; to end her time, perhaps in a good hotel on the Sussex Coast or even in the south of France.

  She walked through the rooms for what would be the last time. Some of the best furniture had been sold to stave off creditors, but there were still a few good paintings in the gallery. Most of the silver, marked with the Gessel family arms, was still in the dining-room. There were the display cases of ancient coins brought back from Italy and Greece by her late husband’s grand uncle. Now these would go too, to be auctioned or sold by the government agent before the house was boarded up or torn down.

  Margaret Gessel was beyond caring.

  Six months ago, the Land Leaguers or some of their friends had burned the stables. The screaming of the horses as they perished in their stalls had pierced the granite walls of the house. The following night, the constables on protection duty outside had shot and wounded two locals – would-be incendiaries, they said – at the back of the house.

  The District Inspector implored her to go to Galway to stay at a hotel for a while in order to let things settle. He had instructions from his superiors, who had in turn been contacted by Sir Richard at the Prime Minister’s office in London, to afford her maximum protection. But, he explained, there was only so much he could do with the limited manpower at his disposal.

  When a fellow landowner told her in the hotel dining-room that he was going to take up the scheme put forward by Lord Salisbury’s government, she decided it was time to follow Richard’s advice. The next day, she ordered her solicitor to negotiate a deal for the sale of Mount Gessel under the new tenant-purchase programm
e.

  She went into the empty ballroom. One of the few happy memories she had of the house was of parties here. Now there were only ghosts. The chandeliers were long gone; the mirrors carried off to be auctioned. The fire mantle of polished Carrara marble was blocked with timber against the winter draughts.

  She crossed to one of the bay windows and drew down the steel bar from the heavy wooden shutters. The first of the rain was falling, light drops against the glass, but there was sufficient moonlight to see the sweep of the estate across the fields.

  Out there on the open sward, Gessel ancestors had drilled their militiamen before leading them off to fight Bonaparte, in Spain and at Waterloo. In happier times, the East Galway hunt would meet on the forecourt between the house and the meadow. For a moment, she believed she could still hear the jingle of harness, laughter, the yelping of the hounds as they moved out along the avenue.

  She could make out the dim sheen of the lake, where generations of Gessel children had skated on the winter ice or swum in the heat of summer. She followed the curve of the avenue along which her husband had brought her as a young bride to become the new – and the last – mistress of the house. He had died young, a long time ago. Nobody around the district seemed to remember him any more. Sometimes now she even had difficulty in trying to recall his face.

  It was more than 20 years since their son, the only child of their union, had driven away down the same avenue. She could see the boy still, turning to wave as he left for India, travelling to a forgotten war from which he never returned.

  Beyond the boundary wall, towards the village, she could see the faint outline of the parish church that the Gessel family had endowed after they were granted the land by William and Mary almost two centuries ago.

  She could still hear the drone of successive preachers as she sat, bored, in the front pew, reading and rereading the memorial plaques on the walls, proclaiming the gallantry of long dead Gessel soldiers and the virtues of their mothers, wives and sisters.

  The ground over there by the churchyard was latticed with Gessel bones; fathers, mothers, soldiers, farmers, maiden aunts and strange uncles, babies that failed to thrive, grandparents who lived to ripe old age, children who fell victim to mishap or disease, young wives who died in childbirth.

  To hell with them all, she thought bitterly. They all had their time, and they were better times than hers. She was leaving them to a country gone to savagery and disorder, where property could neither be maintained nor made safe, where demagogues and agitators ruled public life, encouraged by a subversive press and tolerated by a spineless government.

  Now the rain was spattering on the window, obscuring any view. To hell with them, to hell with the crumbling house, the interminably demanding land, the devious, brutal people, the whole cursed place. She had held on at Mount Gessel for longer than anyone could have reasonably demanded. Everyone of substance, everyone she knew, from the Shannon to the sea, was cutting their losses and getting out.

  To hell with Ireland.

  THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 29TH, 1887

  ONE

  News of the murder of Ambrose Pollock at his pawn shop on Lamb Alley travelled swiftly through the Liberties.

  His killing especially alarmed the shopkeepers and dealers. But there was nobody in Dublin of whom it could be said that they mourned him. And if ever he had a friend or anyone to speak warmly of him, nobody could remember who that might have been.

  It was the brutal and mysterious circumstances in which he died that impacted mostly on the public consciousness, causing fear and anxiety to spread abroad in the city over the dry, shortening days of late September.

  The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir David Harrel, did not attempt to deny that the murder of the pawnbroker and furniture dealer should have come to light sooner.

  When the Assistant Under-Secretary for Security at the Castle, Howard Smith Berry, sought an explanation for the delay, the head of the detective office at Exchange Court, John Mallon, insisted that there had been nothing in the intelligence reports to suggest the imminence of any unusual criminal activity.

  But Smith Berry’s personal security advisor, Major Nigel Kelly, was not persuaded. The word around the Castle was that the irascible ex-soldier from Belfast had given warnings about the laxity of the police in general, and the detective branch in particular.

  Earlier, when the city Medical Examiner, Dr Harry Lafeyre, was called up to examine the body, its state of decomposition told him that the man had been dead for many days.

  That the crime of murder could remain so long undetected on the flank of the Liberties, a stone’s throw from gates of Dublin Castle itself, was a serious failure of policing at a time when the administration desperately needed to show that it had the upper hand against crime and disorder.

  The significance of various recent occurrences at Pollock’s only became apparent after Sergeant Stephen Doolan from Kevin Street police station had forced the back door of the shop earlier that morning.

  The pawn shop and furniture dealer’s frontage faced across Cornmarket to the two churches, located side by side, both named in honour of St Audoen.

  Dubliners were untroubled by this oddity of double nomenclature. One was Roman Catholic. The other, the older, was Church of Ireland. It was only fair, citizens argued reasonably, for both religious traditions to keep a partial claim on the peripatetic little Norman saint who had protected the city’s walls since the reign of King John.

  Neighbours and customers reckoned that Ambrose Pollock was probably 60. His sister Phoebe with whom he operated the business was younger, perhaps 40. One side of the premises was occupied by a warehouse in which were stored the furniture that Ambrose bought and sold. In the trade, it was said that anything good that came into Pollock’s was sold on to the more lucrative London markets.

  Brother and sister lived on two floors above the pawn shop. The greater volume of Pollock’s pawn business was drawn from the maze of poor streets, courts and alleys that stretched away towards The Coombe and the great, sprawling workhouse known as the South Dublin Union. But with the reputation of never refusing to make an offer on goods, however little that offer might be, it drew trade from across most of the poor, miserable areas of the city.

  Phoebe dealt with customers in the pawn shop from behind a brass grille, while Ambrose monitored transactions though a half-frosted window from the back office. If he thought that she required direction on the price of any item brought in for pawn, he would rap sharply on the glass, then she would leave the counter and retreat to the back office to have his decision. It was Ambrose who determined charges, values and prices.

  A grimy window with three pawnbroker’s spheres suspended overhead advertised Pollock’s to those with business on the main thoroughfare. But the entrance to the shop was around the corner on Lamb Alley.

  Thus, while the pawn shop had a high visibility on the bustling commercial street, the entrance on the laneway enabled customers to come and go discreetly.

  This was supposed to place a particular obligation upon patrolling constables of the A-Division. Officers walking the beats that touched on Cornmarket or High Street were to proceed through Lamb Alley to satisfy themselves that the premises of the pawnbrokers was secure. They were to note any unusual persons that might be encountered in the vicinity and to record anything that was irregular.

  It was to emerge in the aftermath of Ambrose Pollock’s murder that these requirements had been allowed to fall into desuetude. Careless beat men no longer diverted into the alley, preferring to shorten their tour by continuing directly through Cornmarket. In reality, the premises were rarely checked. No intelligence was gathered on persons coming to it or going from it. Had it been otherwise, it is likely that the pawnbroker’s brutal murder would have been discovered more quickly.

  A few days earlier, a young constable had just ascended the Forty Steps from the Liffey embankment to the curtilage wall of the older St Audoen’s. As he reached the str
eet, he saw a closed car turning into Lamb Alley. It bore the trade livery of Findlater’s, Dublin’s most select grocers and wine merchants.

  The policeman’s curiosity was aroused. None of the residents of Lamb Alley or its environs would be in the way of ordering their provisions from Findlater’s.

  He crossed High Street, and turned into the alley. The deliveryman had drawn his vehicle to a halt outside the pawn shop entrance. The constable saw the driver’s helper open the doors of the car and drag an open basket to the tailboard. He balanced it briefly to adjust his grip and then hauled it through Pollock’s door.

  The constable stepped across the alley and grinned up at the driver.

  ‘Things must be bad when the gentry are poppin’ their groceries into the pawn shop.’

  The man laughed.

  ‘Ah, you’ve the wrong end of it. It’s an order from the woman of the house. Mind you, she must be plannin’ a good dinner and a fair sup of refreshment too.’

  He winked, and raised his hand to his mouth, mimicking a drinking gesture.

  The helper exited the shop and resumed his seat on the car. The deliveryman flicked the reins and moved off.

  The policeman knew that Phoebe Pollock was not a woman who would send for expensive food and drink to be delivered to her door. Perhaps it was stolen property. Perhaps he had let the Findlater’s car depart too quickly. He pushed Pollock’s door and stepped into the shop.

  Phoebe sat behind the counter as usual.

  ‘Is everythin’ all right, Ma’am?’

  Phoebe Pollock smiled. The constable thought that when she smiled he could see the remnants of a once attractive woman. Behind her, in the back office, he could see her brother’s head and shoulders outlined through the frosted glass.

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be, Constable?’

  ‘I saw some unusual deliveries just comin’ in the door. You were expectin’ them?’