The City of Shadows

by Michael Russell

  That was where it ended.

  Monsignor Fitzpatrick spent several more pages of his own letter eulogising Father Francis Byrne’s almost saintly integrity. He went on to express his indignation that the Gardaí would presume to ask questions based on the fantasies of a woman who was evidently disturbed. He didn’t quite say Susan Field had brought it all upon herself, but he didn’t need to.

  It was as pointless as Inspector Donaldson could have wished. But what Stefan saw clearly was that Francis Byrne had too little to say about the woman he’d had a passionate love affair with, and Robert Fitzpatrick had too much to say about the man he’d felt such aversion to so very recently.

  ‘Jesus, Stevie.’ Dessie McMahon sighed, watching as Stefan re-read the letter.

  ‘I know,’ replied Stefan. ‘Don’t start again.’ He didn’t want to talk about what Dessie was trying to talk about. He didn’t want to think about it.

  ‘I mean what the feck?’

  ‘What the feck indeed,’ he shrugged. Dessie wasn’t going to stop.

  ‘Would he ever just forget about it?’

  ‘Father Carey’s not a turning-the-other-cheek kind of priest.’

  ‘Did you ever meet one that was?’

  The telephone rang. Dessie MacMahon picked it up.

  ‘It’s Inspector Donaldson. He wants you in there, now.’

  When Stefan Gillespie walked into Inspector Donaldson’s office, the first person he saw was Detective Sergeant Lynch. It wasn’t the Jimmy Lynch he’d last met turning over his room. This one had had a bath and was wearing a suit that nearly fitted him and a white shirt that was even ironed.

  ‘We need to sort these bodies out.’ It was Inspector Donaldson who spoke. ‘Sit down, Gillespie. You know Detective Sergeant Lynch of course.’

  The two sergeants nodded. Stefan already sensed something was wrong. There was no smirk or smile on Lynch’s face. He looked serious, alert, attentive; you could almost have mistaken him for a real detective.

  ‘The woman first,’ announced the inspector. ‘We know she was pregnant. Sadly you’ve seen the evidence of that yourself. Sergeant Lynch has established that she probably did procure a miscarriage from Keller.’

  ‘Was that before or after I established it, sir?’

  Donaldson ignored him. ‘As is the way with these things, there were complications. And it seems very likely that she died at Merrion Square.’

  Lynch looked grim, as saddened by the awful events as the inspector.

  ‘And how did Sergeant Lynch establish that?’ enquired Stefan.

  ‘Sheila Hogan,’ said the inspector. ‘Keller told her what happened.’

  ‘She was at it with your man, you know that.’ Lynch offered up this additional information as if it provided a complete explanation in itself.

  ‘With a dead woman in his clinic, he had to do something,’ continued Inspector Donaldson. ‘The assumption is he put the body in his car and took it out to the mountains and buried her. Unfortunately, I don’t imagine it’s the first time that sort of thing has happened with these backstreet abortionists.’

  ‘Is that what Sheila Hogan said too? It’s not what she said to me.’ Stefan’s words were addressed to Donaldson, but he was looking at Lynch.

  ‘She didn’t know the details, Stevie,’ said the Special Branch detective grimly. ‘I’m filling in the gaps, but I got what I could out of her.’

  ‘I know. That’s why she was in the Mater Hospital.’

  ‘That will do!’ snapped the inspector.

  ‘Is there some reason you’ve decided to help us with this now, Jimmy?’

  Lynch said nothing to Stefan; he didn’t need to give explanations.

  ‘I think we’ll concentrate on the case please, Gillespie.’ Donaldson glared at his sergeant. ‘I haven’t been idle on this myself. Mr Keller has questions to answer. We didn’t know that before, neither did Sergeant Lynch. If we had he wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the country of course. We have good reason to believe he is somewhere in Germany.’

  ‘Since he was driven to the mail boat by our local Nazi chief, Herr Mahr, after Detective Sergeant Lynch dropped him at the Shelbourne for a Weihnachtsfest do, I’d say it’s not a bad guess. Are we all agreed on that?’

  ‘Let me make something clear, Sergeant. There are a number of reasons why this case is being handed over to Special Branch –’

  Lynch just watched, smiling confidently.

  ‘Like hell it is!’

  ‘Shut up, Gillespie!’

  James Donaldson’s fist thumped on the desk.

  ‘Enquiries about Hugo Keller’s whereabouts will obviously have to be directed to the German police. That’s not a job for us. It isn’t our business to ask exactly why Mr Keller had a relationship with Special Branch in the first place, but we have to accept that in their area of activity, which is the security of the state after all, they encounter their own share of unsavoury informants, in the same way you do as a detective. That doesn’t alter the fact that this man Keller is responsible for the death of a young woman and, naturally, every effort will be made to find him and bring him to justice.’

  ‘My arse!’ proclaimed Stefan.

  Jimmy Lynch laughed. Inspector Donaldson didn’t.

  ‘Enough! You’ll hand any information you have to Sergeant Lynch.’

  ‘That’s one down, sir. What about Vincent Walsh?’

  ‘Don’t waste your time, Stevie.’ Lynch stretched back in his chair.

  ‘Is that a Special Branch case too, Jimmy?’

  ‘No, I’m just saying the boy had been up there a long time.’

  ‘You knew him then?’

  ‘Poofs aren’t my speciality.’

  ‘No?’

  Stefan looked at the Special Branch man for a long moment. There was no point arguing with Inspector Donaldson now. There was no point even starting on the way the inspector had pushed aside the need to question Francis Byrne. And there was no point letting Detective Sergeant Lynch know what Billy Donnelly had told him about Vincent Walsh’s letters. If Lynch thought it was all done and dusted, it was better to let him think it. Stefan needed to know what it meant; then he might have something to use.

  ‘The discovery of these two bodies so close to each other seems to be a coincidence. There’s nothing to connect them.’ Inspector Donaldson put his hands together on his desk; he had dealt with it. However much he disliked Special Branch, Lynch would take it away. That would be that.

  But Stefan wasn’t done.

  ‘Except that they were both shot in the head by a captive bolt pistol.’

  James Donaldson nodded complacently; he wasn’t unprepared.

  ‘It’s an imaginative theory on Doctor Wayland-Smith’s part. I know he likes to play the detective, but I understand that what’s actually there is simply damage to the skulls, along with all sorts of damage to other bones, all exacerbated by the landslip. I think he’s rather cooled off on the idea.’

  As Stefan walked back to his office, Jimmy Lynch caught up with him.

  ‘I’ve never liked you much, Stevie, but you’ve surprised me.’

  ‘What’s the matter now?’

  ‘I tell you, I’ve a list of priests I’d like to knock the crap out of, that’s as long as your arm. I never quite had the balls. Could you do a few for me?’

  ‘Good news travels fast.’

  ‘Donald Duck doesn’t know yet?’

  ‘No, but I’m sure he will.’

  ‘Me too, Stevie, me too.’

  Lynch carried on downstairs, whistling cheerfully. Stefan watched the swagger as he went. If he was really looking at a murderer he was looking at one who was being paid by An Garda Síochána to cover up his own crimes.

  Stefan walked slowly back into the detectives’ office to find Dessie MacMahon looking more forlorn than when he’d left him half an hour ago.

  ‘You’re wanted at Garda HQ. It’s the Commissioner.’

  They turned to see a slightly wild-eyed Insp
ector Donaldson standing in the doorway. Only minutes ago, Stefan had left him congratulating himself on getting rid of an uncomfortable case and bringing his detectives under control. The call from the Garda Commissioner had come only seconds later. The news about Stefan’s Christmas had reached him at last.

  ‘You ignorant, fucking, Protestant bollocks, Gillespie!’

  *

  Through the windows of the Garda Commissioner’s office Stefan could see the bare winter trees of the Phoenix Park. Across the desk in front of him sat the Commissioner, Ned Broy, turning the pages of a slim file of letters. His round face was deceptively benign; the severely cropped hair and the small, piercing eyes told more. They didn’t really know each other. Broy had been head of the Detective Branch when Stefan joined in 1932. Not long afterwards he had moved into the top job when the new president, Éamon de Valera, had sacked General Eoin O’Duffy, the hostile commissioner he had inherited from the previous government. In response O’Duffy put his Blueshirts on the streets and threatened to march on Dublin. No one was quite sure what the Gardaí would do if it came to a coup. Ned Broy’s answer was to draft scores of ex-IRA men into Special Branch. They were immediately dubbed the Broy Harriers after a pack of Wicklow foxhounds. Their job was to take on the Blueshirts if they had to, but no one had any doubt they would take on their new comrades in the Garda Síochána if it came to the crunch. It didn’t. That was history now, but in Ireland history never quite goes away. Stefan was reflecting on the conversation at Pearse Street. Jimmy Lynch was one of the Broy Harriers. He was Ned Broy’s man.

  There was a knock on the door. An elderly priest came in. Father Michael McCauley was the Garda chaplain. Broy gestured to him to sit.

  ‘You’ll know Father McCauley, Sergeant?’

  ‘Not really, sir.’

  ‘I’m here to pray for you, Sergeant.’ The priest gave a wry smile.

  ‘You know you broke this curate’s nose?’ said the Commissioner.

  ‘I didn’t know, sir.’

  ‘I have that from his bishop. I have quite a lot from his bishop.’

  ‘I’ve got no excuse, sir.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. I got your father into the station at Baltinglass this morning. I spoke to him on the telephone. I knew him in the DMP.’

  Stefan looked at Broy with considerable surprise. He was unaware of any past connection between his father and the Commissioner, but when his father left the Dublin Metropolitan Police, before the War of Independence, Ned Broy had been both a detective and an IRA spy. David Gillespie had always said he resigned because he wouldn’t take sides. But it was true that he had never elaborated on his choice; maybe it hadn’t been a choice at all. It had never occurred to Stefan that it might have been because of what he knew.

  ‘It was a long time ago, but I have reason to remember him.’ The past hung over them for a moment. It was all the Commissioner was going to say. ‘The point is I know what it was about.’

  ‘Does that help, sir?’

  ‘No. It still means it was the stupidest thing you could have done.’

  ‘He was goading me. I think he almost wanted me to do it.’

  ‘That wouldn’t surprise me. And you gave him what he wanted.’

  Stefan nodded; he knew that all too well himself.

  Broy turned to the chaplain. ‘Do you know this Father Carey?’

  ‘I’ve never met him, but I’ve asked around now. He has a history of this kind of thing. In his last parish there were complaints about him refusing to sanction mixed marriages, even when dispensation had been given, and there was some insulting behaviour towards the Church of Ireland minister. There was also a child taken away from her father in similar circumstances to Sergeant Gillespie’s. In the end the man converted to keep his daughter. It caused such bad feeling that Carey was moved on. But even though I’ve never met the man, he has written to me, about you, Sergeant Gillespie.’

  ‘What for?’ Stefan was puzzled.

  ‘He wanted my opinion on your suitability as a father, in the light of your wife’s death, and bearing in mind that you weren’t a Catholic. I told him it wasn’t my business to have any opinion on your abilities as a father, but that the Garda Síochána had a very high opinion of you as a policeman. He wrote again asking me to put what he called “professional pressure” on you to convert to Catholicism. I have to say I didn’t bother to reply to that.’

  ‘You’ve made a pig’s ear of it, Sergeant,’ interrupted Broy.

  Stefan didn’t need telling.

  ‘Look, sir, when I was married I agreed our children would be brought up as Catholics. I took it seriously and I’ve stuck to it – so have my parents. There’s hardly a Sunday Tom misses Mass. And it’s not even what my wife would have wanted. I persuaded her we should marry in a Catholic church. I knew what it would do to her family if we didn’t. Now, whatever I do it’s never enough. It’s not like I’m ramming anything down Tom’s throat, I don’t even believe –’ He stopped, feeling he was making things worse.

  ‘There you go again, Sergeant. If you’re going to be an atheist you need to be a Catholic atheist, not a Protestant one!’ The chaplain smiled.

  ‘There’s a pile of shite here any self-respecting bishop would have thrown back at the man.’ Ned Broy gestured at the file on his desk. ‘You can feel the spit coming off the page. Jesus, you’d think you were running the Hellfire Club down in Baltinglass. He’s got lists of books in your father’s sitting room we should all be out there burning. There’s even the year you spent at Trinity to show what an evil-thinking bollocks you are. God only knows what kind of low-life Protestant bastards you were associating with! It goes on. I don’t know how many nights you’ve had a few too many in Sheridan’s in Baltinglass with Sergeant Kavanagh. It can’t be that many. You don’t live there! But you’re a drunk as well. I know Kavanagh as it happens. Now he is a drunk! This gobshite’s got it in for you and he’s got his bishop behind him now. But what was this jaunt to the fecking synagogue?’

  ‘It was ten minutes, that’s all. I was just following up on some information in a case.’ He stopped, unsure. It wasn’t exactly the truth. ‘It was a stupid thing to do. I should have left it. I wasn’t thinking …’

  ‘You picked the wrong curate,’ said Father McCauley, shaking his head. ‘I can’t say your boy standing in the Adelaide Road synagogue would keep me awake. I know Rabbi Herz. I wouldn’t be sorry to see some more priests who knew the Old Testament like he does. But Father Carey belongs to a different school; the nest of Christ-killers and communists school; the Monsignor Fitzpatrick crowd. Do you know who I’m talking about?’

  Stefan knew all too well. He was slightly uncomfortable. The Commissioner was looking through the file on the desk again. This was a personal matter, but that didn’t mean Ned Broy hadn’t had something to do with putting the lid on his investigation. There was the way any serious questioning of Father Byrne had been pushed aside, and the way everything was now in the hands of Special Branch. Broy continued reading. Father McCauley spoke again.

  ‘Where do they want your son to go? It’s Tom, isn’t it?’

  ‘My brother-in-law’s, in Portlaoise.’

  ‘That’s not so far.’

  ‘He’s not even five. I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘If it came to a court case, I’m not sure what the consequences would be,’ replied the chaplain. ‘There are a lot of people in the Church who don’t like this sort of thing, I assure you, but there are risks in taking a bishop on. And it’s not as if you’re with the boy all the time. You’re working in Dublin. Is it really so different, seeing him in Laois and seeing him in Wicklow?’

  ‘It’s not his home. It would be different to him.’

  ‘To him or to you?’

  ‘I know my son.’

  ‘You need to think hard, Sergeant, very hard. It’s not easy advice –’

  ‘I don’t need to think at all, Father.’

  ‘I wish you would. I will do what I can
on your behalf. I know the bishop. But they are serious about this, that’s all I can say, very serious.’

  ‘Thanks, Derek.’ The Commissioner closed the file.

  The chaplain got up. He smiled at Stefan and then left.

  ‘It’s good advice, Gillespie,’ said Broy. ‘Perhaps it’s the only advice. I can’t help you with that side of things. I wish I could. I’ve got enough on my plate with your assault on the fecking curate. I can’t ignore it, can I?’

  Stefan said nothing.

  ‘The bishop’s full of threats about a prosecution for assault. It’s bollocks. I can probably sit on that one. But he wants me to kick you out.’

  Stefan nodded. Why would he have expected anything else?

  ‘There are a variety of disciplinary charges involved. I don’t know where we’d end up if we went down that road. So we won’t bother. I’m going for the chaplain’s approach. That means I won’t fight everything.’

  ‘So I’m out?’

  ‘No, we go along with it, but only so far. I have the power to suspend you, without any recourse to formal disciplinary procedures. I don’t need to ask anyone or explain it to anyone. I’ll write to the bishop and express my horror at what you’ve done, and say I’m suspending you forthwith. I can make that sound as near to a dismissal as makes no difference. You go away. We all shut up and forget about it. And in six months’ time I reinstate you.’

  ‘When would my suspension –’

  ‘For now, just make Inspector Donaldson a happy man. Go home.’

  ‘I’m in the middle of a case.’

  ‘Not any more. You know what forthwith means. Fuck off, now!’

  As Stefan Gillespie walked through the Phoenix Park it was colder. There was ice in the air. Uppermost in his mind was what waited for him in Baltinglass. The threat that was hanging over the house and over Tom was a real one. He had pushed it aside because he couldn’t believe it, but the chaplain’s words were in his head now. Other people did believe it. Tom couldn’t know, whatever else happened. His parents would have to share the burden though. So far he’d only told them of another row with the curate, but they already knew it was more serious than anything that had happened before. Now his father had spoken to the Commissioner too. He still had his job after a fashion; if he shut up and kept his head down. That was the real message from the Commissioner and the Garda Chaplain. But how far was Ned Broy really sticking his neck out? They were telling him to do what the Church wanted and pretend it was a way out. People always said the Irish had three curses: the English, the drink and the Church. The English had faded away; the drink was your own choice in the end; but the priests were always there. And once he took the first step, once he accepted that they could decide what happened to his son, there’d be no turning back. He couldn’t do it, not to Tom, not to himself, not to Maeve. If losing his son was the price for keeping his job, then the job wasn’t worth having.