The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

  “We’ll talk to you again, Peter Rice,” he says. “Don’t imagine this is the last of it.”

  “I’ll be back at the tannery, if you ever need me,” he says. “It’s in Gibraltar, just by the boneworks. You can ask anyone thereabouts. They all know who I am.”

  Fazackerley calls the constable in and tells him to take the prisoner back down to the cells and bring up Michael Sullivan in his stead. They wait in silence until the two men’s footsteps die away, then Maybury unspools a string of violent curses.

  Sullivan is pale and disheveled. One side of his face is badly bruised, and the left arm of his jacket is ripped and gaping. He still smells faintly of the Rochdale Canal. Maybury offers him a chair, and he sits down on it slowly, then yawns and rubs his eyes like a child waking up from a nap. They ask him how he is feeling and if he needs to see a doctor and he shrugs and says he will manage. Maybury sends the constable down for a pot of tea, then picks up his fountain pen.

  “Will you tell us all that happened, Michael?” he says. “How did you learn about the plan to kill the mayor?”

  Sullivan describes his conversation with Jack Riley at the alehouse. He explains that he was on his way to George Street to look for O’Connor when he slipped and fell into the canal.

  “Knocked myself out cold on the lock gate,” he says, pointing to his damaged face. “If there hadn’t been a copper nearby to hear the commotion, I’d probably be drowned.”

  Maybury asks him why he didn’t tell the officers at Knott Mill Station about the planned attack as soon as he arrived there, and Sullivan says he was too confused and in no condition to talk or even think right.

  “When I woke up the next day, I remembered all about it, though,” he says. “That’s when I asked them to send the note to Jimmy. They wouldn’t do it at first. They thought I was talking nonsense, but I told them they’d all be in trouble if the mayor was killed just because they wouldn’t send a note to the Town Hall and that changed their minds.”

  “If that note had reached me when it was sent, we could have set a trap,” O’Connor says. “We would have been waiting for them when they arrived.”

  “It wasn’t marked as urgent,” Fazackerley says. “That was the mistake they made. Easily done.”

  Maybury grimaces. He asks Sullivan how many others knew about the Milk Street plan apart from Jack Riley.

  “I don’t know for sure. He acted like it was a great secret, so maybe just the fellows at the top: Peter Rice, Willy Devine, Costello, McArdle.”

  “Charlie McArdle was there too?”

  Sullivan nods.

  “They all were, except for Doyle, of course, and Neary and Skelly. Them three were nowhere to be seen.”

  “If Jack Riley told you about Doyle’s plan, that shows he trusts you,” Maybury says. “After you leave here, you must talk to him again as soon as you can. You must find out if he knows who else was involved and where they’re hiding. We don’t have much time.”

  Sullivan shakes his head.

  “Oh no,” he says. “No. I’m finished with the spying now, Mr. Maybury. I’ve done all that you asked of me. I told you about the Fenian plan, and if you didn’t catch Stephen Doyle red-handed like you should have, it wasn’t my fault.”

  Maybury looks at him a moment.

  “You’ve done well for us so far, Michael,” he says. “But this job’s not finished yet.”

  “It is for me. It’s too dangerous to go on longer. Those men are all killers. I sat with them in the alehouse that night and you could see it in their eyes.”

  “What about the hundred pounds? Did you forget about that already? The money’s yours, but I can’t give it to you until we find Stephen Doyle.”

  “I didn’t forget, but I can’t spend the money if I’m lying dead.”

  Maybury turns to O’Connor.

  “You talk to him,” he says. “Make him see sense. There’s Frank Malone dying in the hospital. This is not the right time to be backing out.”

  O’Connor looks at Sullivan sitting there, arms crossed tight over his chest, and his face and body tensed and belligerent. He remembers him on Ash Street, clinging onto his brother’s back as they played, laughing and screaming like two devils.

  “Michael’s right, sir,” O’Connor says. “The work’s too dangerous and he’s too young for it. He’s survived by luck so far, as much as anything, but his luck can’t last forever. If he wants to stop now, then I believe we should let him.”

  “Is there another informer inside the Manchester circle that I’m not aware of?” Maybury asks. “Someone else who’ll be able to tell us what they’re planning to do next?”

  O’Connor shakes his head.

  “No, sir.”

  “No one at all?”

  “No one.”

  “Then how can we possibly allow him to stop? There are murderers on the loose, the town is in an uproar, and Sullivan here is the only one who might be able to tell us what the enemy is thinking. This is when we need him the most.”

  “You can’t make me keep on with it,” Sullivan says. “I’ve had enough.”

  “We have no power over him, sir,” O’Connor says. “He’s free to do as he wishes.”

  Maybury waits a moment, rubs his jaw, then opens up a cardboard file on the table in front of him and removes a slip of paper. He looks at it for a moment, to be sure it is the right one, then holds it out.

  “He’s not so free as you think, O’Connor. That’s a telegram from the New York Police Department dated last week. It confirms that your nephew Michael Sullivan is wanted for embezzling the sum of one thousand dollars from Elling Brothers Bank, where he worked as an assistant teller. They thought he might have fled to Dublin, but it hadn’t occurred to them that he was over here instead. They were pleased to get my message.”

  O’Connor takes the telegram and reads it through. He feels shame more than anger, as if it’s him, not Michael Sullivan, who has been exposed, whose stupid lies have just been revealed for what they are. When he has finished reading, he hands the paper to Fazackerley.

  Sullivan stares down at his feet, then looks up at the ceiling.

  “What did you do with that thousand dollars?” O’Connor asks him. “How did you spend it?”

  “On the horses mainly. Some on cards. I had a run of bad fortune like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Fazackerley puts the telegram back on the desk, and Maybury thanks him and returns it to the cardboard file.

  “The fellows in New York want me to send you back over there to stand trial,” Maybury says. “That’s what they’re asking for. When this telegram reached me, I replied straightaway explaining that you were involved in important work for us here and couldn’t be spared, but if you won’t continue with that work, if you’re determined to give it up, as you say you are, then there is no longer any good reason to refuse their request.”

  “You’ve got me trapped,” Sullivan says sullenly. “Over a barrel. I can see it.”

  “We need to know where Stephen Doyle is hiding. You need to find that out for us. If you do it and we arrest him, I’ll not only give you the hundred pounds, I’ll also write to the fellows over in New York to see if the embezzlement charges might be dropped. If you give us what we need, it’s possible you could go back there and live as you did before. Although I can’t make any promises, of course. What do you say, Michael?”

  Sullivan looks over to O’Connor. His expression is helpless, bewildered. He’s nothing but a child, O’Connor thinks, a vain and greedy boy who imagines the world is created for his pleasure and convenience alone and is amazed to discover, too late, that it isn’t.

  “What should I do now, Jimmy?” he asks. “Should I carry on with it?”

  “I warned you before. I told you it was too dangerous.”

  “I know you did.”

&nbs
p; “I can’t help you anymore, Michael,” he says. “You must choose for yourself.”

  * * *

  —

  Later, as he walks back down Tib Street toward the infirmary, past barrows piled with turnips, onions, and salted fish, O’Connor’s head aches and he feels a slow, rebarbative burning in his throat and stomach. When he first joined the Dublin police, he thought it was a chance to escape the darkness and disorder of the past, to wash away the memory of his father’s crime and all its consequences and start afresh, but he wonders now if the darkness and disorder are inside him, if what he was trying to escape from is who he really is. He tells himself this isn’t true, it can’t be, but even the possibility of it fills him with a dreadful gloom.

  When he gets back to the ward, Malone is already dead. The narrow cot is empty, and the nurse tells him that the body has been taken down to the mortuary in the basement. He waits in the corridor for a while, stiff and raw with regrets, wondering what to do next. Then a thickset man appears, wearing laboring clothes, and says his name is Alfred Patterson and he is Malone’s brother-in-law just come across from Ashton on the train. They shake hands and O’Connor explains what has happened. Patterson, who looks surprised more than saddened at the news, says he will need to see Frank’s body for himself, with his own two eyes, or his wife will likely not believe him when he gets back home. They ask a porter for directions, then make their way downstairs to the mortuary. The large, white room is cold and windowless; there are deep wooden shelves attached to every wall where the bodies are stacked four and five deep. It takes them several minutes to locate Malone. He is lying on a bottom shelf, below a thin, gray-haired woman with yellow-tinged flesh and bruises on her face. Patterson crouches down just to be sure, then rubs his chin and stands up again.

  “Him and me were never pals,” he says. “I didn’t like him overmuch, too big for his britches I always thought, but the wife will take it hard.”

  “The shooting was a mistake. He should never have been where he was.”

  Patterson shrugs.

  “Such things happen as they will,” he says. “A man can’t choose his end no more than he can choose his beginning, I say.”

  Patterson is a carpenter by trade. He spends his days sawing and hammering, laying floorboards and hanging windows and doors. While they wait in a side room for the death certificate to be written out and signed, he talks about spindles and hinges, sashes and casements, the differing properties of oak and pine. O’Connor hears the words but doesn’t listen. The coldness of the mortuary has sunk deep into his bones, and the sight of Malone’s abandoned body, stiff and lifeless as a waxwork, has left him feeling queasy and adrift. The hours and days ahead of him now seem unending and impossible, like a task he can’t abandon but will never complete.

  Once the papers are all in order, they walk back to London Road Station, up the hill, past the long line of hansom cabs. Dark clouds shuttle across the sky and the raw wind pokes and pushes them. The departure board shows half an hour before the next train to Ashton, so they find a corner table in the Albion Refreshment Rooms and sit down together. It is crowded and noisy inside and the air smells of wet overcoats. O’Connor orders a bottle of stout and a ham sandwich for Patterson and a ginger beer for himself. The sandwich, when it arrives, looks meager and ancient, but Patterson declares it delicious nevertheless. Despite the somberness of his mission, he appears to O’Connor to be in a holiday mood now, glad of the excuse to lay down his tools for the day, and pleased to have someone new to tell his stories to.

  “I know some Irish fellows over in Ashton,” Patterson says. “Bricklayers mainly. Now what are the names?” He frowns awhile in thought. “Patrick Devlin? Joseph O’Toole?”

  O’Connor shakes his head.

  “John McDonell?”

  “No,” he says.

  Patterson looks surprised.

  “They all talk like you do,” he says. “Just the same.”

  O’Connor checks the clock and asks Patterson if he’ll take another drink before he leaves.

  “I’ll get these ones myself,” he says, standing up. “It’s my treat.”

  He walks over to the bar and comes back holding two glasses of cheap brandy. He sits back down, puts one of the glasses on the table in front of O’Connor, and lifts up the other for a toast.

  “To poor Frank Malone,” he says. “May he rest in peace and may the good Lord forgive his many sins.”

  “Thank you,” O’Connor says. “But I don’t.”

  Patterson shrugs and smiles.

  “Come on,” he says. “It’s for Frank, and it’s only small.”

  O’Connor looks down at the glass in front of him: the brown disc of brandy against the darker blankness of the tabletop. He pauses, then lifts it up and smells. The scent is like a wide door swinging open in front of him. How long has it been? he thinks. How long, and for what?

  “To Frank,” he says.

  He takes a first quick sip, then drinks the rest straight down without thinking. His mouth burns, and the world becomes louder and brighter around him.

  CHAPTER 17

  The room is cold and filthy, and there is a smell of cured meat and offal rising up through the floorboards from O’Shaughnessy’s butcher shop below. Riley is there already, seated by the ash-filled fireplace puffing on his pipe like nothing much has happened lately. There’s a copy of that morning’s Manchester Times lying on the table unread. Rice takes off his hat, steps to the window, and shifts the muslin curtain an inch to one side. He forgets for a moment who he is looking for; then he remembers.

  “Where have the others got to?” he says.

  “There are a dozen or so still locked up in the cells at Swan Street. The rest are back home or out looking for Doyle.”

  “Any sign of Neary or the hansom?”

  “Nothing.”

  Rice shakes his head.

  “So if they’re still in Manchester, they’re hiding from us.”

  “More likely they’re long gone, if you ask me,” Riley says.

  Rice lets go of the curtain and steps back into the center of the room. His face is set hard in a frown.

  “I don’t believe he’d come for you anyways,” Riley says. “He can’t be so cracked as to give credence to what that Jimmy O’Connor tells him without even an ounce of fucken proof.”

  Rice looks at the empty chair but doesn’t sit down.

  “Doyle thinks Manchester is riddled with spies,” he says. “That’s the very first thing he asked me about on the day he arrived here from New York: Where are the spies? Why haven’t you killed them all yet? You remember?”

  “Those Yanks think they know our business better than we know it ourselves,” Riley says. “Why else would they send a fellow like Stephen Doyle over here to show us what to do?”

  “He set out his stall all right with Tommy Flanagan and the others, I’ll give him that, but now he’s overreached hisself with the mayor and he’s raging with fury and wants to find an easy place to put the blame. I know just how that works.”

  “You can’t go killing the fucken mayor and get away with it. It can’t be done. I could have told him that for nothing. Not that he ever thought to ask.”

  “You remember how he was when we met him in the Blacksmith’s? Just last week it was. Looking down on us like we were more or less nothing. He thought he knew better, but he didn’t, and now another copper’s lying dead in the infirmary, and we’re the ones that’ll take the blame for it. There’ll be a noose around some poor bastard’s neck afore this is over, I swear, and so long as he’s Irish they won’t care too much who it is.”

  “You should go up to Glasgow,” Riley suggests. “Talk to Murphy about it. Let him sort it out. He’s the Head Center now, that’s his job.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  The two men fall silent for a moment. A d
og barks twice in the street outside, and there are muffled voices from the shop below. Rice picks up the Times from the table and looks at the front page. According to the report of the murder, which extends across the first two columns, Detective Francis Malone of E Division encountered Stephen Doyle by chance on Milk Street near midnight, recognized him as the notorious and wanted Fenian, and was fatally shot in the stomach while courageously attempting to make an arrest. There is no mention of O’Connor or the mayor or the mayor’s whore. The incident is described as the latest in a series of horrifying outrages committed by the Irish traitors in the pursuit of their foolish and unrealizable goals.

  “Wherever he may be, if we find him before the coppers do, we might talk some small sense into him,” Riley says.

  “He won’t be found if he don’t want to be. A man like that.”

  “He’s clever enough, it’s true. And violent too when he needs to be.”

  “I’ll sleep in my own bed tonight,” Rice says after a pause, “in my own house. I’m not hiding away from anyone.”

  “Nor should you. God knows you’re better than any of us, and you’ve got no reason to stand accused of any crime.”

  Rice nods at this, and sits himself down at last. He takes out his pipe and taps the bowl on the table.

  “Is there no chance of a decent blaze in here,” he says, looking about, “or a cup of tea?”

  “I’ll go talk to O’Shaughnessy now,” Riley says, standing up. “He’s usually quicker than this.”

  He goes downstairs and comes back up five minutes later with a coal scuttle and a handful of kindling.

  “There’ll be a pot coming in a little while,” he says. “The boy’s just stepped out for some milk.”

  Rice watches on as Riley lays the fire and lights it. There are curlicues of gray-blue smoke peeping from the gaps between the coals, then small, flickering tongues of orange flame that give off no heat. He rubs his thighs and leans backward in the chair. It creaks beneath him, and the kindling cracks and hisses in the grate.