The City in Darkness

by Michael Russell

  ‘Still, where a man drinks and who he drinks with is his own affair.’

  The superintendent sipped his whiskey, looking at the pianist.

  ‘I remember coming in with my father, thirty years ago. I’d say that pianist’s the same feller. You’d think he’d have got better. But if he had he wouldn’t still be playing here for drinks. Some people do the same thing all their lives, badly. Most people. I swear it’s the same fucking tunes. Another couple and he’ll give us “The Croppy Boy”. But who cares? Who’s listening?’

  Stefan shrugged. It was a prelude to something.

  ‘Two more of the same, Mina!’ Gregory called to the barmaid. ‘I did read your report from Laragh. I passed it to the commissioner, but Ned Broy’s happy enough with what Halloran’s doing now. The papers want a body. That’s what it’s all about. If there was a fecking body they’d all move on.’

  ‘I’d have my doubts they’ll be getting one, sir.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re hard fellers in Wicklow. A few too many on Christmas Eve and you’re beaten to death in the pub and dumped on the cold hillside!’

  ‘You know what I think about the pub. I’m not sure he died there.’

  ‘I’m impressed with how you rattled Laurel and Hardy. I take my hat off. Pat Halloran has a handle on how your Missing Postman went missing and you give him three more murders besides. If you had any evidence for it he’d be in those mountains so long he’d be the one to be searching for.’

  ‘Halloran doesn’t think there’s anything in it either.’

  ‘I didn’t say there wasn’t anything in it, did I?’

  Terry Gregory’s real reasons for being in the Ormond Hotel were pushed aside for now. What he had read in Stefan’s report had stuck in his mind. Putting unlikely things together was what he did; it interested him.

  The barmaid put the drinks on the table.

  ‘So have you got any more, since your report?’

  ‘I’d be stretching it if I said I had, sir.’

  ‘I’ve never been a great man for coincidences. If a feller’s on to three killings no one knows about, and he’s trying to squeeze money out of another feller to keep it quiet, and then he disappears, presumed murdered, well, you’d want to look very hard before you decided he died after a lad knocked him over in a bar. But the word is “if”. If it happened, if anyone knows about it, if any bastard in the Valley of the Squinting Windows is going to tell you anything. Not a big word “if” but there are a lot of them.’

  ‘There has to be a way in,’ said Stefan quietly.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. But tell me, how is Commandant de Paor?’

  The diversion was over.

  ‘He’s well enough, sir.’

  ‘It was seasonal of you to drop into McKee Barracks to see him.’

  ‘I had a reason.’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘A way in. You’ve seen the report. Billy Byrne was in Spain with O’Duffy’s crew. I think it’s where he found out about the first murder – Charlotte Moore. Somehow that’s how he knew your man Neale wasn’t the killer and someone else was, someone who was still in Glendalough. It’s where it started. He was writing to your man Collins in Spain last year. I don’t know if he met him in Salamanca or where that comes in, but it’s the point of contact now. It’s where he tried to reach him again.’

  ‘And what’s that got to do with Geróid de Paor?’

  ‘G2 have got information about who was in Spain with O’Duffy.’

  ‘And before Christmas? You weren’t asking him about Spain then.’

  ‘We were working together after the arms’ raid. It was a drink.’

  ‘Good,’ smiled Gregory, ‘simple answers are best, and simple lies. You’re an honest man, Stefan. There’s room for at least one in Special Branch. It’s why I’m reluctant to see you go. There may even be room for an honest man in Military Intelligence, but don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s Geróid. I doubt there’s much that goes on in G2 that doesn’t find its way into British Intelligence . . . sooner or later. Be careful with de Paor.’

  ‘I doubt British Intelligence will want what’s in Glendalough.’

  ‘A privilege of rank, Gillespie, is that I do the jokes. What someone like Geróid de Paor might call “droit de seigneur”. As a man of your education knows it’s French for “fuck me about and you will be fucked”.’

  He got up without another word and left. Stefan drained his glass. As he walked out the barmaid smiled goodnight to him, idly singing as the pianist played, barely aware she was doing it, in a tuneless, cracked voice.

  We hold this house for our Lord and King,

  And Amen say I, may all traitors swing.

  The following evening, Stefan Gillespie drove in fading light back from the Garda Barracks in Laragh to the Seven Churches. Another fruitless day. The rope Chief Inspector Halloran had given him was just long enough for him to trip himself up on and he knew that Halloran’s men were waiting for him to do it. If Pat Halloran had started out feeling that what Stefan was doing was useful in some way, to cover his back, he was now tempted to feel it might be much more satisfying if a Special Branch man made an arse of himself.

  There had been a message for Stefan at the barracks. Someone had phoned for him. The sergeant filling in for Chisholm had taken the call.

  ‘Feller by the name of Neale, a Mr Neale. He said you’d know.’

  ‘Is there anyone called Neale here now? Do you know the name?’

  ‘You’d have to ask George. But he wasn’t local. He was calling from Rathdrum. He said he was on a tour. He’d been abroad. He said it was years since he’d seen the Round Tower and he was heading there now, and he’d wait a bit before he went back to Dublin, so if you had the time to talk . . .’

  The only Neale Stefan knew was the man who had been wanted for the murder of Charlotte Moore, twenty years ago. He didn’t for a moment believe Albert Neale was in Glendalough waiting to talk to him, but someone wanted to talk, someone who knew why he was asking questions, someone who knew enough to use Neale’s name. It wasn’t a secret, of course; he had asked a lot of people about Neale now, as well as about Marian Gort and even about Maeve. Chief Inspector Halloran knew the questions; other detectives knew them too. If it wasn’t common knowledge it was at least known that he was trying to find evidence that the postman’s disappearance had another explanation than a drunken row in Whelan’s.

  The light was dimming as he pulled into the car park by the Lower Lake. There were no other vehicles. It didn’t seem such a good idea to be here on his own suddenly.

  He hadn’t been thinking as he left the Garda station. He assumed someone might have information and was using Neale’s name to prove his credentials. It even occurred to him that some of Halloran’s detectives could be having a joke at his expense. The possibility that this was the man Billy Byrne had been blackmailing only entered his mind as he reached Glendalough. It seemed far-fetched now, but it couldn’t be ignored.

  He leant across to the glove compartment and took out the Webley. He had the gun in his pocket as he walked through the neat, clipped lawns that led to what had been one of Ireland’s great monastic centres. The English had little use for Glendalough’s bloody-mindedly Irish variety of Christianity and eventually they destroyed it. What remained were the ruins of several small churches, little more than heaps of stones, and the grassed humps that marked the monks’ cells and the communal buildings. Stefan walked through the arched gateway and looked out at the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, with its bare, roofless walls, and at the distinctive, needle-like Round Tower, echoed by similar buildings all over Ireland. All around there were gravestones, ancient, old, new; in the 500 years since the end of St Kevin’s monastery, it had become a place that was only populated by the dead.

  He walked to the Round Tower and paced slowly past. He lit a cigarette and sat on the wall behind. There was still enough light to see, but there was no one there. He sat for half an hour. He
knew nobody was coming. He had known as soon as he arrived. It was a game. But nothing told him what the game was. The weight of the revolver in his pocket made him feel foolish. It was still possible the joke was on him, that Halloran’s men were behind it. Making a fool of a Special Branch man would go down well, and if that was true, he’d soon find out.

  Stefan drove away from the Round Tower and the Seven Churches, back through Glendalough and out of Laragh, on to the Military Road across the mountains to Rathdangan and Kilranelagh. The car wound up the slopes of Derrybawn, over Cullentragh and Carriglinneen, where the road dropped down to Glenmalure at Drumgoff. There was a slight drizzle. It was cold and the road was starting to freeze as he climbed.

  He was conscious he was pumping the brake pedal ascending Carriglinneen, but barely. It was a slow ascent with little need to brake, even on the hairpins; the gears did the work. As he crested the highest point on the road and began the steep descent towards Drumgoff his mind was elsewhere, still trying to see if he could make any sense of what had just happened or whether to dismiss it.

  He was going fast now but he would meet nothing on the road that didn’t show its headlights in the darkness half a mile away. Then he hit a bend faster than he should have done. He was further down into Glenmalure than he realized.

  His foot slammed the brake, but he had no brake. He wrenched the wheel. The car cleared the bend with a squeal of tyres but it was still picking up speed. He couldn’t slow it.

  He pumped the pedal harder; nothing happened. He wasn’t sure where he was in the darkness. The wall of the mountain was hard against the road on one side; trees on the other. If he was where he thought, there was a tighter bend ahead. And then he was on it.

  He crashed the gears down to slow the car, but as the engine roared he was right into the hairpin with a wall of rock in front of him. He spun the wheel and pulled up the handbrake. The car started to slide, skidding on the thin film of ice that was sheeting the road now. He had lost control completely.

  The passenger-side wing hit a boulder as the car came off the road. He was thrown forward across the wheel. His head smashed into the windscreen. The car plunged into a ditch and then rolled over on its side.

  The headlights still blazed into the darkness, into the rain; it was sleet now. The engine roared and raced. Stefan Gillespie lay very still, slumped against the car door. The only movement was a slow line of blood trickling down his face.

  PART TWO

  IBERIA

  A resolution urging widespread public support for the efforts of the Irish Government to secure the release of Frank Ryan, now in prison in Spain, was passed at a large meeting held at Middle Abbey Street, Dublin. The resolution states that ‘being mindful of the sterling and unselfish services rendered by Frank Ryan to the national movement for Irish independence over a long period, this meeting views with misgivings his continued detention by the Spanish Government now that the war has ended’. Madame Maud Gonne MacBride said that Spain, a chivalrous country, had released most of the foreign prisoners. Why, she asked, did they still hold on to Frank Ryan? The Irish people had long memories and a deep tradition which made them inclined to love Spain – a Catholic nation like themselves – and it would be a pity if old affection should be weakened by the unjust detention of an Irishman they all knew and loved.

  Irish Times

  15

  Wicklow Town

  It was two months since the car crash on the Military Road when Dessie MacMahon drove into the farmyard at Kilranelagh to pick up Stefan and take him to the courthouse in Wicklow, where the defendants in William Byrne’s murder would have the case against them heard for the first time.

  In those months, Stefan had hardly left the farm. He had not forgotten why he was on the Military Road that night but the activity in the Vale of Glendalough had left him behind. The body of the Missing Postman had not been found; the search, though never officially ended, had scaled down to nothing. Chief Inspector Halloran had built on the evidence of his one dissenting witness to events on Christmas Eve in Whelan’s Bar, and if he had not broken the alibis and accounts of the other customers he had put together enough to give substance to Paul Dearing’s statement. Much of it was circumstantial hearsay, but next to Dearing’s story, alongside the lies that had come from the Garda Barracks in Laragh, it carried real weight. Pat Halloran was happy that once it all came into court the job would be done.

  Stefan had been left with plenty of time to brood on what had happened and no opportunity to do anything about it. His investigation, such as it was, was over as far as both Halloran and Terry Gregory were concerned. There was no need to look for murders that were either forgotten or had never happened. Halloran’s need to cover his back had gone. Ned Broy, the Garda commissioner, no longer required a spy in the Bray CID camp. The press too had lost interest in the Missing Postman; even if his body was still out there the mystery had become pettier and more squalid than suited the word ‘mystery’ as good copy. The course Stefan was pursuing interested no one now. Chief Inspector Halloran could see the finish, but he was not so confident that he wanted a defence lawyer asking if there were other lines of inquiry and finding out there were. Stefan pestered him by phone in the weeks after the crash; he pestered Gregory when the chief inspector told him his leads led nowhere. Gregory’s message was the same: forget it.

  There was, of course, the issue of that night on the Military Road. The car had been found by a farmer cycling home from the Glenmalure Inn. Stefan had been lucky; skidding sideways, the Austin 10 missed the wall of rock it was heading for. If it had hit it head-on and he had gone through the windscreen the outcome might have been different. In the end, the damage was a fractured tibia and broken ribs. He was home in days, but the process of healing meant he was stuck at the farm. Now he was ready to go back to work. He couldn’t forget, however, what everyone else had dismissed. And he was still convinced that the brakes of the car had been tampered with.

  It was the only explanation for the summons to the Round Tower and the subsequent no-show. The car was out of sight and unattended for half an hour while he waited. He had pushed for the Austin to be examined when it went back into the Garda garage. There was no doubt a brake pipe had come away from the master cylinder and the fluid had drained away. But nothing suggested this hadn’t happened accidentally, even if it was unusual in a well-maintained Garda vehicle. There was no sign of any deliberate break or cut, yet with little knowledge anyone could have detached the pipe in minutes. The idea that someone wanted to kill him or at least frighten him off impressed no one. In fact, it was enough to persuade Terry Gregory that he had tolerated his inspector’s obsession for long enough.

  At Kilranelagh Stefan continued to live with what was inside him and to put on the face he needed to show to his family and Kate. For them, it had to be an accident, and an accident he tried to minimize. Tom, however concerned, moved like any child in a kind of perpetual present. After the shock he was glad his father was at home for so long. For David and Helena too, the present soon put off their greater sense that this had been a near thing. It was the same with Kate, but she was the one who couldn’t quite get rid of a feeling that something else was wrong. When she came down from Dublin, Stefan worked hard to keep her from seeing there was a distance between them that could not quite be bridged, yet she felt it.

  In two months the only additional information Stefan had about the Missing Postman was a letter from Geróid de Paor. He had it as Dessie MacMahon drove him to Wicklow for the court case. He had used his last credit with Terry Gregory to batter him into sending him to the hearing.

  Despite everything, somewhere in the back of Superintendent Gregory’s mind he was intrigued by the loose ends Stefan had brought back from Glendalough. In Special Branch, loose ends mattered; if you pulled them, things you hadn’t seen unravelled. But despite all that he felt Detective Inspector Gillespie had been out of circulation long enough. It was time to remind him he was a policeman, time he wa
s back at Dublin Castle. But on the assumption that it would draw a line under the Missing Postman, he had dispatched Sergeant MacMahon to drive Stefan to the courthouse in Wicklow.

  As they drove through Tinahely towards Aughavannagh, the outliers of the Wicklow Mountains were on Stefan’s side of the car. The last time he had been on this road was the night he dropped Dessie at Rathdrum for the train, after the first day in Glendalough. If he didn’t know what to do now it didn’t mean things had changed. What surrounded Maeve’s death could not be wished away. It had been there, unmoving in his head, all along.

  ‘I heard from Geróid de Paor,’ he said.

  Dessie didn’t need to ask what it was about.

  ‘He did find out some more about Billy Byrne and Spain.’

  Dessie shrugged. He knew he was the only sounding board Stefan had. Somewhere his own instincts told him there was something in it, but he had a realistic sense of what could and couldn’t be done. He knew when you had to stop beating yourself over the head.

  Stefan began to read.

  I hear you’re confined to barracks with broken bones. Bad luck and mend soon! I have asked about this man Byrne and the O’Duffy mob. Not much to tell that you don’t know. He was with the third contingent of Irish Brigade men that sailed from Dublin on 27th of November ’36, Liverpool to Lisbon, on the S.S. Aguila. 80 men, one of the others was Michael Hagan. From Lisbon they went to O’Duffy’s base at Cáceres, over the Spanish border. The Brigade moved up to fight along the Jarama River in February ’37, but they got in a fire fight with other Nationalist troops and lost several men. Byrne wasn’t there. Injured during training. I can’t confirm the brothel but from what came back here it sounds par for the course!

  Michael Hagan was wounded in the friendly fire incident and he did convalesce at the Irish College in Salamanca. I do know someone who spent time at the college then. There were half a dozen of O’Duffy’s men there; Hagan and Byrne didn’t go back to the Bandera at all. I don’t know if it is possible to ‘desert’ from an outfit like that, but I doubt anyone cared. Your information is that he is still at the college. Once O’Duffy’s crowd disbanded we had no more interest.