The Eloquence of the Dead

by Conor Brady

  ‘That was just some groceries I needed.’ She gestured airily at the shelves and display cabinets around her. ‘Everything here is grand, as you can see for yourself.’

  The policeman returned to his beat. Why should he worry if people decided to spend their money in shops that charged double the prices they might pay in their own neighbourhood?

  Later, at the station canteen, he joked about the incident. But he did not report it in the occurrence book. It was a negligence that was to cost him a reprimand and a deduction from pay.

  On the following Wednesday, just before midnight, another more experienced beat officer had an unusual encounter a short distance from the pawn shop.

  Some policemen disliked the beat section past the gates of old St Audeon’s. It was said that the place was haunted by a long-dead vicar whose malevolent ghost disliked human company. It was also a favourite dumping spot for nightsoil from the nearby tenements, where a dry privy might be shared by up to 100 people. The shit stank in the summer, and oozed across the pavement in the wet of winter.

  So the constable had crossed High Street to take up an observation point in a shop door.

  A slight, respectably dressed woman was crossing the street, picking her way over the cobbles. Even allowing for the uneven surface, her step seemed unsteady.

  When she reached the pavement, he recognised Phoebe Pollock. She seemed to sway slightly on her feet as he approached.

  ‘Good night, Miss Pollock.’

  In the street light, he could see that she was focusing with difficulty. She made a little shuffling step and put one hand out to the lamppost for support. The constable realised that Phoebe Pollock was drunk.

  ‘The footpath there is terrible broken and uneven,’ he said tactfully. ‘You’ll be makin’ for home, Miss. Sure, I’ll walk down that way with you.’

  She reeked of alcohol, but she produced a key from her bag and after some fumbling managed to find the keyhole. She muttered a thank you and made her way inside. The policeman retreated to the corner of Lamb Alley, and watched the house until he saw a faint glow illuminate one of the upper rooms.

  Later, he entered the incident in the occurrence book, noting Phoebe Pollock’s name and address and the time of their encounter.

  Sergeant Stephen Doolan saw the entry the following morning when he went through the night patrol reports in the sergeants’ office. He crossed the corridor to the day room, where the morning shift of constables was preparing to parade.

  ‘Who’s on the first beat through High Street and Cornmarket?’

  ‘That’s me, Skipper,’ a constable put his hand up. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Get along up to Pollock’s. As soon as they open the door, go in and have a word to make sure everything is all right. One of the lads on the night shift found Phoebe Pollock the worse for wear out on the street at midnight.’

  Every policeman knew the Pollock’s reputation as eccentrics who kept to themselves, but some older people in the district recalled when Phoebe was a pretty young woman, full of life, with many friends in the neighbouring houses and streets of Dublin’s Liberties.

  There were chuckles and hoots across the parade room.

  ‘Jesus, she must have robbed the shop to be out spendin’ money on drink.’

  ‘Ould Ambrose wouldn’t approve. That fella has his first communion money – if he ever made a first communion.’

  ‘Sure them two is as tight as a frog’s hole. And that’s watertight.’

  Later, the constable positioned himself at the junction of Lamb Alley and Cornmarket. Ordinarily, he knew, the shop would open between 9 o’clock and 9.30. But the hour came and went. At 10 o’clock, when the officer tried the door, he found it still locked. He walked back to peer through the window facing Cornmarket, but he could see no movement inside. At 10.30, when there was still no sign of life, he decided it was time to report to Kevin Street.

  Twenty minutes later, Doolan took two men in from their beats and borrowed a ladder and a crowbar from the hardware shop on High Street. One of the beat men leaned the ladder against the back wall of Pollock’s. With an agility that belied his bulk, the bearded sergeant climbed over and dropped down into the small yard. The constable followed.

  When the back door resisted the impact of their combined weight, Doolan jemmied the crowbar between the lock and the receiver, then he pulled hard on the metal bar. The wood splintered above and below the lock. They shouldered their way through.

  They were hit by the unmistakable, cloying smell of death. Doolan drew a handkerchief from his pocket and clamped it across his mouth and nose.

  It was only a few paces to the shop floor. There was no sign of Phoebe Pollock, but Doolan noticed that the high stool on which she was usually perched was now lying sideways on the floor.

  His square of flannel did nothing to alleviate the smell. As he crossed to the counter with its brass railing, he could see Ambrose Pollock’s outline through the half-frosted glass window, seated as usual in the back office. The pawnbroker was in his customary chair with his back to the door, his head inclined at a slight angle towards the desk with its ledgers and account books.

  But Ambrose Pollock was not at work. The back of his head was a dark mess. Shards of broken skull protruded through matted grey hair. When Doolan walked around the desk, he saw that the face and hands were a mottled black. A pool of crusted bodily fluid, agitated by the wriggling and heaving of white maggots, gathered where the dead man’s feet rested on the boards.

  Doolan retreated across the shop to where the door exited to Lamb Alley and flung it open. He half-gagged, drawing the clean, fresh air from the street deep into his lungs.

  The startled constable waiting in the alley placed a concerned hand on the senior man’s heaving shoulder.

  ‘Are y’all right, Sergeant? What’s after happenin’?’

  ‘Go down to Exchange Court and tell them to have the G-men up here fast. And get them to send for Doctor Lafeyre. There’s been murder done.’

  TWO

  Joe Swallow deeply resented the fact that he had to wheel and deal over the duty rosters to get the free time for his painting class.

  Regulations stipulated that leave was ‘subject to the exigencies of the service.’ With the G-Division fully stretched in surveillance and protection duties since Queen Victoria’s jubilee in the summer, there was little or no flexibility in the application of the rules.

  The jubilee had passed off without serious incident, in spite of rumours and threats. It had been all that the authorities had wished it to be. A celebration of Britain’s might and majesty, of industry and progress, of military power and civic enlightement. A full one quarter of the globe was marked out in red, ruled over now for half a century by this small, rather plump little woman as Queen and Empress.

  Ireland, however, remained the troublesome child of the worldwide British family. Even though the government had pumped money into schools, infirmaries, harbours and roads in the aftermath of the famine, the Irish were not content. The tenants on the farms, led by the one-armed agitator, Michael Davitt, were making impossible demands. Reduced rents, security of tenure and now outright ownership of the land. Each night brought reports of burnings, shootings and attacks from over the country. Meanwhile, the charismatic Charles Stewart Parnell was driving the campaign for Irish Home Rule, effectively aiming to separate Ireland from the Kingdom.

  The police had intelligence about dynamiters and assassins, poised to strike as the actual jubilee celebrations took place in June. But a combination of harassment and skilful use of the Coercion Act by the police forces ensured that Dublin remained a relatively safe enclave in a country racked by agitation.

  The plainclothes elite of the Dublin Metropolitan Police were housed at Exchange Court, huddled in against the dark, northern flank of Dublin Castle. The G-men dealt with both ‘special’ or political crime and ‘ordinary’ crime. They provided armed protection for the key officials in the Castle administratio
n, the Chief Secretary, the Under-Secretary and their senior aides. They were also the administration’s eyes and ears, watching over the activities of the myriad groups and individuals across the city that might constitute a threat to security.

  ‘A half day to go to a feckin’ paintin’ class? Are ye serious, Swalla’?’

  Detective Inspector Maurice ‘Duck’ Boyle was master of the Exchange Court rosters. Every week he contrived to skive a full day off police work proper, retreating to the warmth of the inspectors’ office to labour over the production of a duty timetable for the G-Division.

  He threw his pencil on the desk in exasperation.

  ‘The city’s plagued be Fenians, land grabbers and dynamiters. There’s so-called intellectuals and fellas talkin’ t’each other in feckin’ Gaelic so we won’t understand them. There’s a new crowd of throublemakers now settin’ up some sort o’ spiritual debatin’ club.’

  He leaned back in his chair and joined his hands across his corpulent belly.

  ‘Apart from that there’s the fuckin’ criminals. Scuts, gougers, knackers. The Vanucchi gang is out robbin’ houses in Donnybrook. And you want time to go to a paintin’ class. Jesus, how am I supposed to cover that?’

  ‘I don’t want you to cover anything,’ Swallow answered testily. ‘Just give me the bloody Thursday half day and put me down for the night shifts. It’s a fair bargain.’

  It was more than fair, he knew. Every night G-Division was stretched, watching meetings and gatherings across the city. There was any number of extremists out to break with England. There were land leaguers trying to mobilise action against the big estates. Demagogues harangued crowds at street corners and in halls. American–Irish veterans from the Civil War delivered inflammatory orations at public meetings, promising dollars and guns.

  ‘You need all the men you can get for the night shifts,’ he told Boyle. ‘I’ll do more than my share if you fix me up for the half day like I’m asking.’

  He ended up taking on five consecutive nights on the escort and protection detail.

  Senior Castle officials were under twenty-four-hour guard since the assassination five years previously in the Phoenix Park of the Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish and the Under-Secretary, Henry Burke, by the Invincibles.

  Swallow had been part of the investigating team that tracked down five of the extremists. He watched them hang at Kilmainham for their crime.

  On a human level and as fellow Irishmen he felt pity for them, pathetic, misused pawns, sacrificed by men who were clever enough to keep their distance when there was killing to be done.

  He understood their convoluted motivation too, after long nights of conversation with the condemned men in their cells at Kilmainham jail. There was no love of England in his childhood home in County Kildare. His own grandfather had joined the pikemen in the rising of ’98. But violence was futile, he believed. More had been achieved for Ireland by the pacifist emancipator, Daniel O’Connell, he reckoned, than by all the hotheads who had led others to their doom in half-cracked plots and rebellions.

  The threat level against the senior figures in the administration was as high as ever. The Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had earned the soubriquet of ‘Bloody Balfour’ for his strong law-and-order policies. The new Under-Secretary, Joseph West Ridgeway, lately arrived from military command in Afghanistan, was equally deemed a hate figure by the extremists.

  G-men were also assigned to provide protection for the Irish parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. Swallow disliked the detail, but it was a means to an end.

  The early hours with Parnell usually passed quickly. The acclaimed leader of Irish nationalism would be on the move each evening, attending official functions and public events. But once he returned to his house at Fitzwilliam Square, the night was tedious. Swallow and the other armed detective on the detail kept watch through the long hours from the shadow of the park’s overhanging trees.

  Officially, the G-men were on protection duty. But it was well understood that the detail was simultaneously a surveillance.

  The G-men had learned to interpret the movements of the household, noting and recording arrivals and departures. Parnell’s political lieutenants often stayed late, and were sometimes accommodated in the house. So too, the G-men noted, did Mrs Katharine O’Shea, the wife of Captain Willie O’Shea, formerly Member of Parliament for Clare. The fact that Parnell and Mrs O’Shea had been lovers for several years was common knowledge among the G-men.

  At the end of the shift, the details recorded in the G-men’s notebooks would be copied into the intelligence register at Exchange Court. Swallow was uncomfortable with the espionage. As an Irishman, he recognised Parnell as the greatest leader of his country since Daniel O’Connell, but it added to his tally of hours worked just the same.

  It had been Lily Grant’s idea that he should enrol in the water-colours class that she ran at the Metropolitan School of Art on Thursdays when her teaching schedule at Alexandra College left her free.

  Her suggestion had been floated in happier days; before Swallow’s relationship with her older sister, Maria Walsh, had cooled. He had since vacated his lodgings above Maria’s public house on Thomas Street where his romance with his one-time landlady had developed.

  If anyone had asked him if he loved Maria he would have said yes. But even that surprised him still. Until he knew her, love had never really flowered in his badly ordered life, defined initially by excess of alcohol and later by job ambition. She had helped him to find self-respect, to accept that he was valued not just as an efficient police officer but as a man. But in spite of that, when the time had come to make a full commitment, he had baulked.

  Yes, he could say he loved Maria. With equal certainty he could say that he disliked her sister.

  The two sisters were as unalike in character as chalk and cheese. Grant’s public house had come down for three generations through the female line. As the elder daughter, it was natural that Maria would take over the business. But it also suited her sociable, outgoing temperament. Lily was born to thrive in the starchy, formal atmosphere of a college for young ladies.

  ‘You have a natural talent with the brush. But you’re still lost in some basic techniques, an amateur really,’ she had told him haughtily.

  But her distain and his dislike for her did not deter him from enrolling in her class. At forty, he had been a late starter, even though he had been a constant sketcher in his childhood in rural Kildare. He had discovered pleasure and satisfaction in his new pastime while growing more disillusioned in his job.

  He acknowledged grudgingly that she was right about his techniques. He was clumsy in mixing primary pigments, and he invariably saturated the paper when he tried to apply a wash.

  The unhappy parting with Maria put further strain on relations between teacher and student. There was the added complication that Lily Grant was engaged to Swallow’s friend, Harry Lafeyre, the Dublin City Medical Examiner. He did not envy Harry Lafeyre the prospect of a life with Lily Grant.

  With typical brashness, she had addressed the issues head-on.

  ‘The fact that you and Maria have gone your separate ways is no reason why you shouldn’t persevere with your painting,’ she told him. ‘If you enrol for my course, we’ll just have to rise above any unpleasantness that may persist.’

  Shortly after Stephen Doolan had broken through the back door of the pawn shop on Lamb Alley to discover the body of Ambrose Pollock, Swallow was in Lily’s class, dipping his brush in and out of his palette to finish a Dublin Bay seascape

  Katherine Greenberg had been painting beside him since the start of the class. The young Jewish woman was probably the most talented member of the group, Swallow reckoned. Now the class was finishing. She rose from her easel, moved behind him and looked over his shoulder.

  ‘You have a lovely view of Howth Head there, Mr Swallow. And you have the cloud cap in a wonderfully deep blue.’

  He was unwilling to admit that the
nimbo stratus he had created over Dublin bay was the random outcome of mixing too much indigo with insufficient water.

  ‘That’s what I like about the sea,’ he answered. ‘It changes all the time. So you can paint it in any colour you want.’

  He hoped he sounded convincing.

  He glanced at Katherine’s easel. She had completed her still life; red and green fruit in a silver bowl with a fluted decanter standing beside it. She had depicted the two vessels on a brocaded cloth, falling in heavy folds from a tabletop. The backdrop showed a furnished room with a high mantle in black marble.

  ‘That’s very good. Is it from the imagination or did you set up the scene?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t rely on my imagination,’ she laughed. ‘It wouldn’t retain the detail. So I set up the model at home. I borrowed the bowl and the jug from the shop and I stole the fruit from the housekeeper.’

  Ephram Greenberg’s shop on Capel Street was one of the city’s best known dealerships in antique silver and gold. The Greenbergs had traded there in precious metals, rare coins, fine paintings and classical statuary for decades.

  ‘You’d be best not to tell me about any crimes you’ve committed, Miss Greenberg’ he said cryptically. ‘I’d be in trouble with your father if it turned out that I hadn’t taken appropriate action against a thief.’

  ‘I think I can get away with a couple of apples,’ she laughed again. ‘He relies on me a lot to run the business now. He never really got his strength or his spirit back after my mother died.’

  Swallow knew the Greenbergs since his days as a young beat constable at the Bridewell.

  Katherine had her mother’s dark features and hair, deep brown eyes and a slight tendency to weight. Unusually for a Jewish girl in the Dublin community, Swallow knew, she had not married. Swallow reckoned that she was probably around thirty by now.

  ‘Yes, I know they were a very united couple.’

  ‘Mind you, he wouldn’t take it well if I forgot to put the silver back where I found it. They’re both George III, you know, Irish, very rare,’ she said jokingly.